Wednesday 15 September, 2010

How can digital revenues for newspapers be increased?

Terry Maguire is more optimistic than Christof Reiss about the revenue that newspapers could get from the net. Especially if they can get their act together. In his presentation at the WAN-IFRA conference in Jaipur, he gave several examples of how disfunctional the Indian newspaper websites are when it comes to helping out a business visitor to Jaipur who might have an extra day to look around the city. He even had a hard time getting the weather forecast and gave another example of a news story about an American citizen who was accused of killing his mother in Rajasthan. He couldn't find a news follow up as to what happened in that case in court, and lamented the lack off attention to the continuing life of a story that newspapers and their web sites can provide. "Keep that story going," he said and suggested that more newspapers could follow the Wikepedia model of constant updatation.

Using the tagline,"First with the best, and the last with the most," Maguire essentially said that although newspapers could be quick and or comprehensive, they are, too often, missing the boat on the internet where they could be bringing together a host of information or be the entry point to stuff that people need to live their lives. Newspaper sites could easily include the connections that people need on a daily basis such as their food needs or even education in a far more dynamic way than they are presently doing.

WAN-IFRA Conference in Jaipur, India

The WAN-IFRA India conference began this morning in Jaipur in Rajasthan. The new CEO of WAN-IFRA Christoph Reiss made an interesting presentation on the The Future of Media Business. This was a refreshing presentation as far as this type of beginning of conference things go. Although there were the usual slides full of data, Reiss had used much of the data available about the Indian media industry particularly newspapers, to make his talk extremely relevant to the largely local news industry audience. Among the points that Reiss made two stand out: firstly that the Internet has been taking away ad revenue from print and not from television; and, secondly, that in India perhaps cellphones present a better window of opportunity than the Internet. He seemed to urge the audience that while Google continues to dominate the revenue from news on the net, the cellphone media is an opportunity that needs to be seized before the window closes for newspaper publishers.