A regional publisher’s digital boss has claimed local newspaper websites shouldn’t be restricted to just covering what’s happening on their patch.
David Higgerson, left, digital publishing director for Trinity Mirror Regionals, says using non-local content to attract visitors will enable journalists to continue working on “important, but less ‘hit’ grabbing” content.
David’s comments come after former Northern Echo editor Peter Barron, who left the newspaper earlier this month after 17 year in charge, warned the future of journalism cannot be built on ‘click-bait’.
Peter claimed he would be tempted to take a hammer to his computer if he saw “another ‘stomach-churning compilation of the best spot-squeezing videos’ on a ‘news’ website” again.
But, writing on his personal blog, David argued: “It’s easy to raise a fist to stories which the broadsheet journalist inside all of us feels doesn’t meet the exacting standards of the Journalistic Mission, but it’s very dangerous to start pigeon-holing local journalism as just ‘news.’
“Local newspapers have always been more than just news – and I don’t mean that they were also about opinion, sport and features too. Puzzles, cartoons, BMDs, classified, TV listings … none of these can be called ‘news’ but they sold papers, so we are treading on dangerous turf if we too tightly define local journalism online as news.
“But dismissing the idea of looking at audience analytics – the page views in this case, or hits as they are described above – as nothing more than writing more stories about squeezed spots, is to miss the opportunity to actually write more of what readers want.”
David said that at the Trinity Mirror titles he works with, close attention being paid to audience analytics had led to greater prominence being given to stories such as police missing appeals and burglraries.
He added: “We write more stories about when steam trains come to an area, or when new restaurants are opening, focus more on analysis from football matches, share more recent nostalgic memories with readers, provide more Q and As on important issues and seek out things which people are actively campaigning about on social media and get involved.
“Yet it remains essential to write the content which might not drive page views instantly, but which we know are important to the community, and what the brand stands for. As journalists, we can either be sniffy and declare it’s important come what may, or work harder to convince readers that what we say is important is actually important.
“And the best way to get the breathing space to make sure the important journalism which people claim falls by the wayside when you focus on what is at the top of the page view charts? Focus on what’s at the top of the charts.
“Just because you are a local newsroom, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t restrict your content to what’s going on locally. Or to just news.
“In other words, if you can quickly gain 10,000 page views from a story about a man squeezing spots, then you’ve probably done far more to ensure we can keep doing the important, but less ‘hit’ grabbing, content which makes local newsrooms so important to their communities, than any amount of lofty journalism snobbery will ever do.
“What should be most reassuring in all of this is that the editor’s judgement remains as crucial as ever, and journalistic integrity when creating stories as critical as it has ever been.”
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David presumably hasn’t read the Comments section of your average TM website then? Criticism everywhere about the levels of irrelevant, non-local news. Listen to your audience, dear David, not the Moonies you’ve surrounded yourself with.
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I can see David’s argument, but the question has to be that if the TM business model of news doesn’t fundamentally work in a way that it can stand on its own two feet then why spend so much effort trying to protect it? Why not leave news to those who think they can make it work and focus on the money makers that he outlines? You can’t be all things to all people – trying to means you lose the identity of being a local or regional title. Did someone brighter than I say that ‘building an audience is easy but building a community is more important’?
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I believe Dennis Skinner has a phrase for this kind of thing….
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On this logic, why not drop in a bit of porn at the top of the page? Fab page views and after Mrs Smith of Acacia Avenue has seen the X-rated stuff she can scroll down and check the meat bingo results?
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All well and good but digital is as much a part of the business as paper and I would ask what percentage of revenue the former contributes to TM compared to the latter. If my reading of the latest accounts is correct, print still dwarfs online by x10, despite a much-trumpeted 22% digital year-on-year rise to £42m (peanuts) in the latter. For all the debates about local/non-local content etc (important, yes) the bottom line, as ever, is money and a top-heavy, old-style corporation like TM just burns the stuff in far greater quantities than online local news will ever generate.
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Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do….
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I’ve a lot of time for David Higgerson, his weekly blog on FoI’s is a must for any local – and in many cases national – journalists wanting to look for good story ideas. And much of the rest of his content is pretty useful too.
But in encouraging the clickbait culture he is wrong.
Newspaper sites will increasingly need to find a USP if they are stand out against the plethora of “news” sites that can be set up by any one man operation and his dog. Local newspaper sites have that – their geography or the patch, if you will.
Rehashing clickbait found elsewhere on the web will only create weak clone sites that will, in the long term, result in ever decreasing returns. Yes, people still click on the “you’ll be amazed by what happens next…” content, but for how much longer? I suspect people are already getting bored of them
More importantly what’s in it for local advertisers? Getting someone in Aberdeen clicking on a video about a “cat in a hat” from Ontario put up on a website in Penzance is worth nothing to them.
There are some grounds to create a wider readership base in some areas…. culture and ents being one of them, tourism another. Sport even.
This however smacks of trying to chase the same advertising pound as everyone else. And at the moment that is only going to end in tears… and redundancies.
The newspaper industry as a whole, and local newspapers in particular, need to think of new ways to create value in their products. Evolving new ways of making money. At the moment we appear largely stuck in a 19th Century business model (write content/sell advertising) with a 21st Century method of delivery. It is not working.
The numbers game is of course tempting, if nothing else it sounds good but quoting x number of page views, x amount of dwell time and all the other analytical data that can conjured up at the click of a mouse.
But that’s not worth a damn if the advertisers don’t see a return for their money (and yes I am aware that online advertising pays only a fraction of that from print).
So, because I’m sure if you are reading this far you now screaming ok smarty pants what do you suggest? I’d say that locals need to look at the commercial successes on the internet, and see how they can replicate them with their trusted brands.
Where is the local newspaper version of Craig’s List, for example? Non-intrusive, relevant copy, perhaps in the form of sponsored features – and if you’ve worked on local papers you already know this is done.
Sorry for going on!
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“What should be most reassuring in all of this is that the editor’s judgement remains as crucial as ever…”
That would be the TM editors who are leaving the sinking ship faster than the lifeboats can be got away, would it?
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Regional dailies used to have their national sections. So I kind of see where our digital publishing director is coming from. At first.
Don’t get me wrong, this all kind of makes sense until you read phrases like ‘the Journalistic Mission’ while making quote marks in the air with your fingers. Then you realise where the company is blindly going.
Even more oddly, this comes from an organisation that recently tried to judge us by how many clicks our stories got. And why do they want us to receive more clicks? Because that’s where the money is in this digital age. No other reason, and certainly no ‘journalistic mission’.
Sadly, it doesn’t matter if those stories matter to the readers or not.
We used to be employed as journalists in order to uncover and deliver emerging news with our skill and guile. Now we’re just here to churn out any old dumbed-down garbage in the name of clickbait.
This is wrong, no matter which way you look at it.
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This on Wales Online today…
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/fun-stuff/19-things-english-people-learn-11153620
Top tale on the website? These are officially the best places in Wales to eat right now.
It’s not news, you idiots. It’s clickbait, pure and simple.
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Am I missing the point here – David Higgerson is saying not all ‘local news’ has to be ‘news’. But aren’t we heading towards ‘local’ news that doesn’t have to be ‘local’.
It’s not just TM, check out the story about the couple who demanded a new TV because theirs had been ruined by their own smoking, which pops up on most, if not all JP websites tucked into the Local News spot.
It has garnered comments from many readers – fags, benefits and couch potatoes are a heady mix. But some of the comments are from people mystified as to why their ‘local’ news site is carrying the story.
Sorry, did I forget to say the couple live in Sunderland – because that is the almost irrelevant information JP content editors (no doubt hard-pressed) up and down the land left out!
Next stop ‘local news’ that doesn’t have to be news, local or that is even literally or actually true!
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Must agree with Slate Grey, esp re the recently failed ‘clickbait equals pay rises’ concept from TM.
Also wish Higgerson had called in a retired proof-reader before sending the above to HTFP, as they would have removed such meaningless claptrap as ‘the Journalistic Mission’ and ‘lofty journalism snobbery’.
It’s one thing to embrace the ever-changing digital landscape, as we all do to varying degrees, but I always feel when reading Higgerson’s comments that he’s just as blinkered as the folk he criticises.
There’s no sense of debate, or even a willingness to listen.
As always, a ‘My way or the highway’ approach does not elicit empathy or support.
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Observer I’m sorry I shalln’t recommend your comment because that would only mean that other people will click on your link…. and I really don’t think nonsense like that should be encouraged.
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Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?
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Percy – I had to click on the link to get the URL.
I feel dirty.
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Interesting debate here, but worth getting some facts right here too.
On the ‘payment for clicks’ point, largely made by Ian Halstead, we never talked about ‘payment for clicks’ or rewarding people based on page views. We were talking about a range of metrics, which are now commonly used in newsrooms.
Nor did I send my comments to Hold the Front Page – I wrote something on the blog which HTFP chose to reproduce here.
Slate Grey, assuming s/he works in one of the TM newsrooms, will know that we are trying to strike a balance between content which is popular and trying to make content we feel is important more popular with our readers. That’s why we pay so much attention to analytics.
Basically, what I am trying to say in my blog post is that there is room for the more popular content (and if we can make it popular, why wouldn’t we do it?) alongside what many of us would consider our bread and butter – especially if the former helps support the latter. But I’m not, and never would, advocate only chasing the popular content at the expense of everything else.
Hopefully a constructive debate to be had here, without resorting to the sort of insults being thrown around by Sense Check at the top of this thread. I’m lucky to work with some of the smartest digital journalists around – all of whom have as much passion for local news and the titles they work for and with as any journalist I have ever worked with previously.
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I agree it’s wrong to accuse Dave Higgerson of dumbing down and sacrificing journalistic quality because that has always ridden on the back of business-generated revenue, and he and his colleagues are trying to find new ways of producing it. Many journalists seem slow to get this point; perhaps a legacy of the old times when the cash just poured in and you didn’t have to worry about, or even acknowledge those beastly folk in advertising. Percy Hoskins makes a salient point, though, when he says TM is a 19th century business model, prehistorically top-heavy with non-wealth generators, and trying, and failing, to adapt to a fast-evolving 21st century commercial environment. But it’s set up all wrong to do that because much of the reduced revenue stream is channelled into irrigating the lush pastures of non-productive senior executives’ wallets. If TM is to survive at all it has to look at dismantling the clumsy legacy structures of yesteryear and becoming as agile and responsive as Your Local Newspaper in King’s Lynn. Let Mr Higgerson loose in such an environment and by this time next year we’ll all be millionaires.
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Neatly avoiding my comment on audience comments with your hurt at my wounding words there Higgers….
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Can I be the first to refer to this policy as the ‘Muldoon’ approach to clickbait (man squeezing spots being Spotty Muldoon)?
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Bottom line is do the advertisers like the trivial content. Judging by low ad income of all companies compared to papers I think not.
Call me cynical, but the real reason a lot of this tosh goes on the web is that newspapers do not have enough staff to find something more grown up. Been there, seen it!
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When I read stuff like this I bless the day I took redundancy from an industry which in its desperation for digital survival has plainly lost the plot. It must be an insane workplace now.
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“Just because you are a local newsroom, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t restrict your content to what’s going on locally. Or to just news.”
Alan Partridge-esque
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Thanks David. Always enjoy the fact that you are prepared to come on here and fight your corner, unlike your peers.
However, I can’t agree. Clickbait is clickbait no matter which way you look at it. It never was, never is, and never will be journalism.
Slate (She, by the way).
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Clickbait is now in TM’s culture, which combines an excess of ambition with a deficient sense of proportion.
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@sensecheck sorry I missed the point you were trying to make. On comments, we don’t ignore them but we do put them in context alongside the number of readers an article attracts, how long they stay, how many share that article, how many of our loyal readers read that article. The critical ‘call this news’ type comments are a minority when you look at it like this.
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Isn’t that because of the nature of ‘clickbait’ though David? It is a click you get through a tempting/amusing headline – the viewer clicks on it out of interest, then in most cases immediately clicks away ? (or from most social media comments I read they click off in disgust as they can’t get off several adverts and a pop up survey?)
I’ve read very many comments on social media along the lines that people won’t visit certain websites again because of this very un-user friendly experience and they don’t seem to be a minority.
yes you register a lot of impressions on the article and on the adverts – but ultimately what value does this have if people become so disengaged because of aggresive advertising?
They are very likely not to be that bothered or engage on the post, those that do tend to be critical are the people that are invested in local news and if the balance of click bait is wrong in proportion to genuine local news it will put people off visiting the sites. People aren’t daft and they spot lazy fillers and nonsense a mile off. Its a delicate balance.
You might attract a high audience for the article – but in the end aren’t the local news sites becoming just like every other site on the web?
The Daily Mail nowadays may as well be a sub-reddit!
Are the audiences you are building through these techniques likely to be a stable and loyal community of web users that will generate the money to make up for print losses?
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The point which is missing here is that, in increasingly under-resource newsrooms, journalists’ time is being expended in the pursuit of content which has zero local relevance, zero significance, zero public interest and zero purpose apart from to garner pointless but profitable clicks. In the meantime, the real issues which readers are preoccupied by – the quality of their children’s schools, their health services, jobs, etc – are massively under-reported because those are issues which are complex and time-consuming to cover properly. It’s a brutally reductive approach which continuously erodes the regard & respect in which local newspapers are held by their communities. And it’s an ever decreasing circle which will result in only one outcome. David’s logic is positively gymnastic in its self-justifying contortions but let’s not be self-delusional here – TM’s editorial policy will have only one outcome: the death of quality local journalism as we know it.
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@Dave – I think you’ve summed up the challenge well. I’m not talking about only doing the stuff people term as clickbait, but using popular content to allow us to generate revenue to support other forms of journalism which may not be as instantly as popular, but which we have to do to remain relevant to readers locally. We also have to work hard to make sure readers understand the importance of those sorts of stories.
When the newsrooms I work with look at what has worked and what hasn’t, they don’t just look at unique browsers or page views, but how long someone spent on the article, and what % of visits to an article were single page visits – if that % is too high, we ask why.
You make good points about aggressive advertising, and trying to get the balance right between advertising/revenue and audience experience is something we review all the time. Do we always get it right all the time? No – but I also think as an industry we have to work harder to explain to readers why we need that advertising. We’ve had a lot of comments about surveys, but no drop off in reader numbers or a fall in the metrics we use to monitor engagement and reader satisfaction.
@hackflack – There are many ways to look at audience data. There’s the crude ‘lets just do the stuff in the top 10 of Chartbeat’ or there’s a more considered approach, looking at the stuff which local readers respond to, which engages people for the longest or which people who visit most frequently view. App users (who tend to be the most loyal readers) are a good indicator of what matters locally.
So many of the things you list, such as the NHS, standards of schools, job losses etc actually are areas which we pay more attention to because we see how people respond to them, and, for example, share them.
I wouldn’t support anything I thought would lead to the death of quality local journalism. The most important thing we need to do to sustain quality local journalism is to ensure that we are providing websites which make money – and the more light-hearted, viral type content helps us do that, in turn helping us to cover the sorts of issues you raise. If I had written a post which said ‘to hell with local journalism, lets all write about spots’ you’d have me bang to rights, but I didn’t.
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@DavidHiggerson at the risk of feeling left out here, you have totally ignored the points I was making about why this is the wrong path to take.
Do you actually have any other ideas to generate future revenues? Apart from, that is, playing the numbers game? And reducing staff to make the numbers game work? (Nationally, The Guardian won the numbers game but have failed to make that generate revenues because quality content requires resources).
Looking at the analytics are those readers from a certain geographic areas? Or are a significant number from off-patch? (how to the figures stack up?) Do these featurettes attract advertisers? Any other form if revenue?
The basic problem is the same with what happened in print: cheap, easy copy (and it has been going on for many many years – think of all those bloody awful charity coffee mornings that passed as news or in one particularly dire case a ‘Big Night Out’ spread of people out in pubs and clubs) is being used as a replacement for any semblance of quality copy. After initial interest, people stopped reading them and then stopped buying the papers.
One day you’ve find that people have seen their fill of hilarious mishaps caught on camera or “witty” (they so often are not) observational memes. And by then, you’ll have so degraded the core brand so much that people/readers/advertisers will have forgotten why you ever existed in the first place.
And in will step little collectives of (usually) unpaid volunteers who want to report real news for their community.
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The future:
Online advertising figures don’t improve.
All news is now taken from the web.
Someone in head office has bright idea that you no longer need any editors of news editors for anything.
Or indeed subs.
Or offices, at all.
Reporters told they should work from home/Starbucks etc…
Someone suggests regional reporting hubs, miles from the locality, for producing content videos/virals/memes etc.
Readership falls, so too advertising.
Someone in head office has bright idea that perhaps, just perhaps, it might be a good idea to, yunno, have more local reporters.
Hubs close, more jobs lost.
Repeat…
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Or, Percy Hoskins:
You produce a paper from an office in the High St (say King’s Lynn)
People can pop into the office if they like
You are local yokels and know a lot of people
You might also run a website and be fluent on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc
All of you are skilled in sales, accounts (though pt help may be needed here), HR issues, and, crucially, journalism (gasp of surprise)
There are five or six of you, with cover for busy times/hols
You are genuinely entrepreneurial not the desk-bound time-servers of previous centuries with “employee/employer” mindsets
No CE on £2.3m pa*
No Digital Transformation Director on £250K pa*
No institutional/City shareholders (take a look at TM’s)
You make a good fist of it
*These are actual figures.
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@percy hoskins – Sorry, missed your point on revenue. Scale through display advertising is critically important, but by no means the only source of revenue required. Crucial is being able to show a loyal, local audience, as well as scale, to ensure we appeal to as wide a variety of advertisers as possible.
As I said above, I’m not advocating ever abandoning local news, I’m advocating using our skills as newsrooms to attract audiences in a way which helps us sustain the journalism we all believe in.
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@David Higgerson forgive me, what you are suggesting is precisely that. Viral content is easy – the skills of writing/producing/generating memes can be replicated by anyone with a computer and the wit to put it up on line isn’t creating a (useful) USP.
And what happens when someone decides that all those “funny” memes are, in fact, an infringement of copyright?
Is this journalism? (it was certainly popular)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmtzQCSh6xk
And are you admitting that local advertising is no longer worth a damn? As the use of adblockers grows you’ll struggle. Local papers/websites shouldn’t be competing with nationals… you’ll lose. Sorry. I think you are producing a short term strategy… but, alas, in local newspaper groups wasn’t it ever thus?
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Mr Higgerson’s plaintive cry that we should appeal to the better natures of our online readers and teach them to put up with adverts they a) loathe and b) can now block in a matter of seconds, simply to prop up the revenues of an obscenely wealthy conglomerate, sounds just as laughably naïve as it was when Mr Fox declared war on the ad blockers a few weeks ago: a war in which (other than a volley of blanks on HTFP) a shot has yet to be fired, unless my old ears deceive me. Our online readers do not have better natures; they are used to getting something for nothing, thanks to the idiocy of the people who ran the national and local press 20 years ago when papers and broadcasters began a race to the bottom by giving all their content away, and if they can get the same gallery of 22 Gerbils Who Look Like Alan Carr somewhere with fewer pop-ups, then they will, and cut TM out of the loop entirely. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle, and I can’t help thinking Mr Higgerson is throwing an entire maternity ward out with the bathwater. All TM really has to sell is local news content. All the other tat is anyone’s for the taking. If TM can’t maintain itself in the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed on the revenue from people who actually want that local news content, then sound business sense dictates it should get out of local news/cat videos (delete as applicable) and get into selling something more remunerative, like Panini stickers, women’s shoes or artisanal sandwiches, markets to which its senior managers’ skills are equally well adapted, if not more so. Thus leaving the field clear for operators such as YLP who cut their coats according to their cloth and can make a respectable (in every sense of the word) living from a limited market, and (I imagine) be able to look themselves in the mirror every morning without wincing.
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Does anyone know why TM plaster ‘share this’ ‘RT this to help’ all over misper appeals?
I have some digital theories, but there might be some gurus with some stats around this comments section…
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Hi Percy, I suspect I’m not going to convince you on this one. But, no, I wasn’t dismissing the value of local advertisers – far from it. That’s why I said local audiences and local engagement were very important factors.
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“What should be most reassuring in all of this is that the editor’s judgement remains as crucial as ever…” – How can an editor’s judgement remain as crucial as ever when the majority of stories are posted on TM websites without any involvement from an editor? Reporters are encouraged to post stories as they break without consultation with anyone more senior. Everything is digital first with the copy simply forwarded on for use in print. Will we soon see analytics replace this so-say ‘crucial’ editor’s judgement? It would save a couple of quid….
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