The first edition of the newly-designed
Newsweek hit the newsstands this week,
following the launch of its new website on Friday. Following its first revenue losses in recent memory last year, the weekly news magazine is aiming to become a niche rather than a general interest publication, in an attempt to charge a higher price to subscribers and attract more targeted advertising. Will it work? Could going niche be a viable solution for suffering newspapers?
One of Newsweek's major changes is to resist giving in to the compulsion to report on every major story of the week. Rather, journalists have been told to only to write an article when they can present a new and interesting angle to add some value to the basic news, to avoid merely repeating the same story that has already been published multiple times. Newsweek is now a magazine aimed at people who are already interested in news, people who will already know the latest headlines, and are looking for something more.
Obviously there are differences between a newspaper and a magazine in terms of the role they play in a reader's life: but maybe to an extent, a print newspaper could adopt a similar tactic. The Internet has started a trend which has led to news becoming somewhat of a commodity, a tendency which has certainly affected daily newspapers as well as weekly magazines. As more and more people get news online via aggregators, the raison d'etre of a newspaper is changing: people do not always look to newspapers to simply tell them the latest news, but to provide a researched, informed commentary or analysis that they can trust. Perhaps, for example, they hope that a journalist will bring to light an alternative angle, or explain a particularly complex issue. Or indeed bring up an issue that has not been widely covered elsewhere.
Numerous commentators have claimed that Newsweek's recent redesign is an attempt to emulate the
Economist.
Some have been sceptical, and it is unlikely that Newsweek will be able poach too many of the publications' loyal readers in the near future. But it does make sense to look to the British news weekly to see what lessons can be learnt from its success. In an industry where profits are falling, the Economist stands out as a beacon of success, with circulation and the amount of advertising continuing to rise. The Economist has found its niche in intelligent news: focussing on opinionated articles on the top stories of the week, and more descriptive pieces on lesser known developments, often in developing countries. It seeks to inform its readers above and beyond that which they will have already learnt from the daily news. Its authoritative voice, enhanced by the fact that individual journalists do not have bylines, is respected by many.
Given newspapers' financial difficulties and decreased budgets, niche also makes sense in terms of time and resources: if newspapers are no longer able to cover everything thoroughly, they may as well concentrate on comprehensively covering what they do best - preferably better than anyone else - rather than presenting a more superficial view on a wider range of subjects. One of the ostensible benefits of niche news from a financial standpoint is the ability of niche sites to attract suitably targeted advertising. Even with fewer viewers, targeted advertising can be extremely profitable as each view is significantly more valuable to the advertiser.
Providing not just news, but also important background information to put the piece in context seems, as Newsweek is doing with its
Newsweekopedia pages, seems a good move to make. Newspapers frequently offer links to other stories on similar subjects, and the
BBC, for example, successfully provides topic pages, but maybe it is something that more newspapers could consider. The
AP has spoken of its plans to create search landing pages which will be topic based, to give users more authoritative sources and background when they search for different subjects in the news.
A niche news area that is doing well, and even manage to charge for their content online as well as in print, are those that focus on financial news, such as the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. Their targeting of a niche market is successful for several reasons. Good financial journalists must be extremely knowledgeable and have the necessary understanding of key concepts so that they can report on them to a target market that knows its stuff. This means that it is immediately an area in which there is less competition, and business news has the added benefit of helping readers actually make money, and therefore is seen as a worthy investment.
But is it something that can be replicated in other areas? Local papers have an obvious niche: providing communities with the sort of news that directly affects their lives, and the relevant local advertising that goes along with it. It is arguably one which papers have been slow to dominate, and the hyperlocal market has been frequently tackled by online start-ups in recent months,
such as Everyblock or
Patch.com. Technology-specific sites such as
TechCrunch.com are also doing well, as are
Gawker's selection of specifically targeted sites.
A option which many papers may see as a less drastic alternative to cutting out large chunks of their coverage in order to go niche is to create multiple niche sections within a paper or website. The
Guardian, which has been less affected by the financial crisis due to funding from a trust, has being increasing its areas of specialisation. Its
Media Guardian section, for example, has essentially become a niche product, attracting readers who may well not be interested in the rest of the paper. And Guardian Media Group chief executive
Carolyn McCall pointed out Media Guardian as an example of the kind of specialist area that the paper might consider charging for online in the future. Clearly, people are likely to be far more willing to pay for news that they cannot find elsewhere.
Evidently, Newsweek's place in the news landscape is very different from that of a daily newspaper, but arguably less so than it used to be, in this age of 24-hour ubiquitous news. Like Newsweek, newspapers do not have to try to be a reader's sole source of news any more. Obviously there are still people who do not read news online, but this group will only get smaller. Clearly, a daily newspaper produces a far larger output than a weekly magazine and consequently will not have the resources to dedicate to each article in the way that the Economist does. But it does have the brand, and the journalistic experience to experiment with more specialist areas of coverage. It will be interesting to see if Newsweek's experiment succeeds and the company's profits can be boosted back up, and if other publications decide to follow suit.
UNESCO has collaborated with the Thomson Foundation and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a training manual concerning the use of the internet for journalistic purposes called 'A practical guide to the internet for journalists in developing countries'. 
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2008/04/norway_journalists_win_investigative_pri.php&bodytext=<form contenteditable="false" mt:asset-id="383" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/VG_online_project.jpg"><img alt="VG_online_project.jpg" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/VG_online_project-thumb-250x148.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="148" width="250" /></a></form>Last week, journalists <b>Anne Stine Saether</b> and <b>Anders Sooth Knutsen</b> from Norway's <b>VG's</b> online arm were awarded with the <b>Skup-diploma</b>, an investigative prize, for developing the newspaper's biggest multimedia project ever.<br /><br />The idea for the online project about domestic killings in Norway was born in mid-2007 after a murder case that had been buried in the back pages of the paper. It took six months to complete, but on, Nov. 12 the front page of VG's print edition featured portraits of women killed by their men. The story was planned and executed on all platforms simultaneously, and included online blogs, articles, chats, and video interviews with some of the murderers, next of kin, psychologists, and others.<br /><br />For the project, VG took on the task of extensively researching anonymous homicide statistics, using all the archives and registers they could access for the multi-media project.<br /><br />"The idea for the project came as a result of my own anger and feeling of impotence half a year ago. Yet another woman had been murdered and the story was buried far back in the newspaper, I thought, dammit, this happens all the time, which lead to the idea to spray the front page with the faces of women who'd suffered such a fate," said <b>Kjersti Sortland</b>, the managing editor of the award-winning journalists.<br /><br />The project took half-a-year to finish, but the completed coverage was "groundbreaking" and "led to a change in how murders are reported in Norway," according to <b>Online Journalism Scandinavia's Kristine Lowe</b>.<br /><br />The Norwegian government plans to map domestic murders, and starting in 2007, the Norwegian police had began to register the relationship between the murderer and victim in their reports.<br /><br />"In contrast to other countries, we did not know how many women were killed by their husbands, partners and boyfriends in Norway," said the jury who awarded the prize.<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2008/04/18/online-journalism-scandinavia-vg-online-awarded-investigative-prize-for-biggest-ever-multimedia-project/">Journalism.co.uk</a> (photo)<br /><br /> &title=Norway: Journalists win investigative prize for <b>VG's</b> biggest multimedia project ever){kind=link}
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/2006/01/unesco_guide_to_internet_for_j.php&bodytext=<p><img width="100" vspace="3" hspace="3" height="160" border="1" align="right" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/885efcd20121cc6819774ab909b9e925news_240106.jpg" alt="UNESCO Internet Handbook Cartoon" title="UNESCO Internet Handbook Cartoon" />UNESCO has collaborated with the Thomson Foundation and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a training manual concerning the use of the internet for journalistic purposes called 'A practical guide to the internet for journalists in developing countries'. <br /> </p>&title=UNESCO: guide to internet for journalists in developing countries){kind=link}