Results matching “suffer more than they”

The Guardian's Peter Wilby asks the question:  just how many journalists do you need to publish a newspaper?  In today's failing economy, circulation declines, dried up advertising revenue and the transition to new media, can a newspaper staff maintain its numbers?  Is "small," he asks, inevitable?

The Guardian recently spoke with John Wintherow. In his first interview in nine years, the Sunday Times editor discusses the "tactile" joy of the Sunday paper, reading every word of the paper (and other nostalgia) and impersonates the competition. Below follows an edited transcript of what appears on the Guardian's website:

Over the past year, speculation about the future of the longest-serving editor in Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has mounted as his paper's sales have declined... Highly successful and very low-profile, Witherow is in some ways like his newspaper - admired and respected, but without much fanfare.
 
Declining print sales and online competition have led several newspaper groups to merge the daily and Sunday staff with their online counterparts. News International has ruled out such integration. "We will remain separate entities with separate staff" says Witherow, adding that Sunday titles suffer from integration. There will be no editorial job cuts despite an efficiency drive conducted by the Murdoch-appointed Boston Consulting Group. He is talking to his daily counterpart, James Harding, about how the Sunday can be better "represented" online - the weekly drives a third of timesonline's traffic. Witherow is boyishly enthusiastic about the "tactile" joy of a Sunday read and wonders jokily whether the environmental damage of reading his newspaper online is greater than printing all that paper. "Newsprint still has the same elemental excitement about it - don't you think that?"

He still receives a weekly call from Rupert Murdoch, typically on Saturday evenings. "It's always been the same," he says. Unlike his counterpart at the Sun, Rebekah Wade, Witherow wasn't called to give evidence in the recent House of Lords inquiry about the influence of the media titan on his titles but he has always been "open" about it, he says. Does Murdoch suggest what the paper should be covering? "No ... he just likes to know what's going on. The conversation is invariably about world economics."

...One of the biggest criticisms of recent years is that the paper breaks fewer stories than it did. Even the first two issues of the relaunched paper failed to deliver a knockout scoop. "Ideally we would have liked something bigger but you can't always organise it that way," Witherow concedes. The conservative paper has instead landed big interviews with the former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and French first lady Carla Bruni.

A former foreign and home news reporter, Witherow sounds a little nostalgic for the fiercer competition of the 1980s and accepts that "generally Sundays on the news front are not as strong as they were" then. Staff and former colleagues suggest that he is far from complacent. One calls him "absolutely relentless", regularly berating editors if he felt their sections could improve. And Witherow does admit that there's something in a rival newspaper every Sunday that he wishes he'd had.

He denies that the Sunday Times is going downmarket in a bid to beat the Associated titles or the top-selling Saturday Telegraph and instead suggests there must be something for everyone in the paper. "He knows the Sunday Times reader better than anyone else and, annoyingly, he is always right," says Will Lewis, who spent three years as Witherow's business editor before going on to edit the Telegraph.

Despite a reputation as a tough perfectionist, Witherow is relaxed, thoughtful and funny during our interview - even doing impressions of rival newspaper executives. His public image seems largely derived from his failure to grant many interviews - "are they a useful thing to do with your time?" - and from the contrast with his predecessor Andrew Neil. "Both he and Dacre are in the same mould," says Hinton. "They're old school in that way and don't hang around on TV ... You can't get him to go out for lunch after Wednesday. He is a very, very involved editor."

Witherow used to read every word of the enormous newspaper before it went to print. "I tried to do it for a few years and went cross-eyed," he laughs. "It drove me bonkers, not because of the content but just demands of time." Now he signs off every front cover and reads three main news sections before publication.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Investing money in a system change does not always turn out a success. Pieter Sijpersma, Editor in Chief, Dagblad van het Noorden talked at the 15th Worl Editors Forum about how introduing CCI Newsgate actually slowed the workflow down.

When Dagblad van het Noorden decided to integrate their newsroom and getting a new content managing system they made a list of demands. They wanted a system that was robust, that was truly a multimedia system, user friendlyand flexible. After looking at the options, considering things as the cost och reliability of the supplier the choice was made to invest in CCI Newsgate.

This was nine months ago and what they're dealing with now at the Dagblad van het Noorden is a newsroom under duress. The experience sudden stops and restarts, bugs popping up that are killed but still keep reappearing. They've made no profit in efficiency and even suffer from loss of reporting capacity.

So what went wrong? Well, even though Pieter Sijpersma consider CCI Newsgate to be a trulu slick system there is a possibility that it was launched too early. At the paper they suddenly felt that everything was sluggishing. You made just a simple click and suddenly found yourself sitting and staring at an egg watch for several minutes. It could also have been the staff that really wasn't ready even though they had thoroughly discussed the upcoming change.

Pieter Sijpersma said that maybe they

With pressure from the economy and competition, newspapers are slimming down, but Forbes' journalist Louis Hau does not believe that this development is necessarily negative.

Some fear that editorial quality may suffer, and some reporters may believe that a story is more important if it's longer, says Alan Jacobson, President of Brass Tacks Design, a newspaper design firm, but he assures that readers want shorter articles on subjects they care about. 

Last week, The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) said that print advertising at U.S. newspapers sank 9.4% in 2007 to $42.2 billion, "the sharpest annual decline since the association began tallying industry ad revenue in 1950." This means fewer pages, and even narrower pages, as papers like The NY Times and Wall Street Journal have adopted to save printing costs.

Cathey Finlon, Chief Executive of McClain Finlon Advertising, notes that advertising is "becoming more niche-like and more localized for certain kinds of companies." She cites weekly business journals and small community weeklies as those who have benefited from this targeted advertising.

Hau writes that daily newspapers should figure what readers want, then "[boil] stories down to their essential core" which "can ultimately pay rich dividends--if they do it right."

"The real challenge that it creates for a news team is to make sure that what you have in your paper is extremely relevant to your audience," says John Kimball, the NAA's Chief Marketing Officer. "If you're in the market and you're the local news provider, you sure as hell better make sure you're doing well in local news coverage. If you give that up or you don't pay attention to it, or you don't know the demographics or the market conditions, then yeah, I think you're vulnerable."

Source: Forbes


 

The size of the UK press advertising market could go down £1.61 billion by 2019, according to a report by the Advertising Association and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC), whereas the overall ad market is projected to grow between 16% and 38%.

Metro Bostad, the Stockholm-based real-estate edition of the free newpaper giant Metro International is to suspend its door-to-door distribution.

During the month of October the national tabloid newspaper market in London suffered with bad sales. The Daily Mirror dropped 3.74% from the month before and is close to dropping below the 1.5m circulation mark, according to ABC figures.

About a year ago, the Editors Weblog predicted that NYTimes.com would suffer from its move to restrict access to op-ed columnists through TimesSelect. A non-scientific look at the situation, a few days after TimesSelect was pulled down shows that this is the case.

There have been recent talks about freeing WSJ.com, just as The New York Times is also deciding whether to drop its TimesSelect service. But would this be a worthwhile business strategy for the world’s largest paid-for subscription service?

Recently, the Arab Press Network interviewed Hanna Hajjar, one of the few women cartoonists in the Arab world about her formation, her job as a cartoonist for the English-speaking Arab News daily, and the messages she sends through her artwork. 

In a recent interview between wired.com and Craig Newmark, founder of craislist.org, keys to the success of the site, Newmark’s thoughts on journalism, and a customer service philosophy were discussed, offering potential advice to the newspaper industry. 

Richard Riordan, mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001, has criticized the LA Times’ day-to-day presentation and content.

Excelsior is celebrating its 90th anniversary. The paper is commissioning a series of reportages that cover global issues from a personal point of view, in partnership with major newspapers from around the world.

The World Association of Newspapers and a coalition of the world's leading news agencies today protested against severe restrictions placed on press coverage of this year's Rugby World Cup in France, and said the restrictions imposed by the International Rugby Board "are a serious breach of freedom of the press."

As many newspapers struggle with declining print revenues, they try to boost their online editions. It just seems the Schibsted-owned Norwegian daily Verdens Gang (VG) – Norway’s best-selling tabloid – has found a 'magic' recipe: here’s how VG online is crushing its competition.

These are the latest ABC audit numbers on UK’s press for the month of December 2006. They give a slumping but sturdy image of the industry, and underline one noteworthy marketing mistake.

According to Alan Mutter, a veteran and self-professed newsosoar blogger, shares of publicly held publishing stocks lost about 20.5% of their value in the last two years – about $13.5 billion. The real problem isn’t only the newspaper industry though.

According to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, author, analyst, founder and CEO of Mojo Supreme, this year’s final media showdown – in terms of financial success – opposed Walt Disney to News Corp. The runner-ups included CBS, Viacom and Time Warner.

Newspaper advertising in the US, according to the Financial Times, is supposed to be one of the categories to suffer most in 2007 from the advertisers’ global switch to online.