Apart from the reflected buzz emanating from hyperactivity of the Tamil and Malayalam newspapers in recent months, the WAN-IFRA conference was interesting. The newsroom summit discussed innovative concepts that can continue to leverage the content leadership of print, and there were many presentations that included case studies and examples from Asia and India.
This IFRA shifted from convergence to
engagement. Raju Narisetti illustrated the example of The Washington
Post, which a couple of years back had a website that was going
nowhere, like many other newspapers and magazines. The solutions were
to combine the print and web newsrooms which were earlier across the
river — away from each other — into a common web-first operation.
This meant a robust multimedia CMS or editorial system instead of the
three separate systems that were in place. It also meant a new set of
skills and as Narisetti said, “Traditional newsroom skills are not
sufficient in the digital space.” He emphasised the need to
populate the team with search, social and traffic experts.
As Narisetti illustrated, a print story
just pasted into the CMS generally cannot work on the web. The web
requires packaging and essential elements to make a story ready for
the web. The story is ready when it contains some or all the
following elements — hyperlinks, further reading, galleries,
photos, graphics, video, database and interaction. He gave examples
of how an interesting sidelight of a story highlighted by a blog or a
tweet can drive huge traffic and often even displace the main story.
It’s obvious that editors like
Narisetti are both intrepid and persistent. In his presentation about
the changes at The Washington Post he talked about creating a metrics
driven culture — the mere idea of which would have had him laughed
out of any newspaper a decade ago. And finally he said that even a
measurable increase in traffic is not enough. The goal is engagement
and this too is not rocket science. There are helpful open-source
tools that can enhance daily stories, and increased social outreach
can spark conversation on newspaper websites.
While Narisetti is of Indian origin and
now heading a leading daily in the United States, Lin Neumann is of
American origin with experience in several Asian newspapers. Neumann
is the chief editorial officer of an English language start-up in
Indonesia, The Jakarta Globe. His presentation at Chennai spoke about
using Facebook and Twitter to build up the new daily and its website.
Neumann hired a fresh college graduate to get young people to
register on Facebook and Twitter through the Globe’s website. His
single employee in turn went to schools, colleges and shopping malls
to promote the newspaper and its website with the help of college
students who wanted to be part of the new social networking media.
The eight most active helpers were rewarded with a Blackberry each.
Thus by enabling the social networking inclinations of the young
people of the city, the new Jakarta Globe quickly gained traffic and
importance in their lives. Neumann also concluded saying that now
that the traffic is there, the issue is engagement. How long can you
keep the reader on your site? How can you mobilise your readers as
news sources?
—Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in
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