Guardian | Wadds' PR Blog

May 3rd, 2011 by Wadds

International not local is future of viable free-to-view media

The March ABC data shows incredible monthly and yearly rises online for The Guardian and Daily Mail. Guardian Online grew 10.67% per cent in March to 49.2 million compared to a 16.50% rise for Mail Online to 65.9 million.

Both publications are chasing large audiences to make their ad funded models viable. They have each cracked the domestic UK market and as PaidContent reported last week both have the US market in their sights.

If free-to-view digital media is to have a future it’s a numbers game and the US market is the obvious market opportunity. The early indication from today’s ABC numbers is that it’s a strategy that is working for now.

One strategy that hasn’t unfortunately worked has been The Guardian’s UK hyper local web sites which The Guardian has said it is winding down. The sites in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds run by professional journalists generated loyal followings but not revenues.

I’ve long been a fan of hyper local media but without a viable income model its future isn’t looking good.

Posted in Media
Tags: ABC, Guardian, Mail Online
1 Comment »

March 18th, 2010 by Wadds

Media industry urged to stop worrying about Murdoch

: Image via Wikipedia

Newser-founder and media entrepreneur Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) said that the media industry spends too much time worrying about Rupert Murdoch and that News International is no longer in a position to materially impact the future of the newspaper industry.

Wolff should know. He recently wrote The man who owns the news, a biography of Murdoch.

Speaking at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit today, Wolff said, “Murdoch has always been the defiler of the newspaper industry yet now he’s its last defender. It’s incredibly painful for him but he might not make it to retirement [in the newspaper business] or whatever he wants to do next”.

“He wants to be the saviour of the industry but no one else in News International thinks like this – no one is challenging him. Up until a year ago he’d only been on the internet accompanied,” he said.

In a closing prediction to his keynote Wolff said that we will have stopped worrying about Murdoch in five years time.

Posted in Business, Media
Tags: #cms2010, Guardian, Media, Michael Wolff, News International, Newser, Newspaper, Rupert Murdoch
1 Comment »

March 18th, 2010 by Wadds

Newser founder Michael Wolff on the future of media – “smaller less profitable news organisations”

Speaking at an event in 2005 Newser-founder Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is famously quoted as saying that the traditional media can’t hold an audience because its content is shit, although he denied it today when he was interviewed during a keynote session by Emily Bell, director of digital content at the Guardian, at its Changing Media Summit.

But nonetheless Wolff’s prognosis for the future of the traditional media industry was brutal.

“It can’t go on without radical transformation […]. Very few people in the [traditional] media today will have a future in the media. There’s a line where technology meets [the editorial process] and people aren’t going to get over it. Its industrial transformation […] accelerated by the recession,” said Wolff.

He said that every big city newspaper in the US is either in bankruptcy or will be within the next 12 months. New media companies will combine technology and editorial skills to deliver a product at much lower cost he said. And that’s crucial because consumers will pay considerable less.

Wolff cited Politco as an example of a six-person start-up that has successfully taken on the Washington Post as the main source of political reporting in Washington.

“The Washington Post is a $1.4 billion organisation whereas Politico is $15 million. The future is smaller less profitable news organisations,” said Wolff.

Posted in Business, Media
Tags: #cms2010, Guardian, Michael Wolff, Newser, Newspaper, Technology
1 Comment »

March 18th, 2010 by Wadds

10 tips from Brightcove for promoting online video

Brightcove’s Eric Elia (@ericelia) led a lunchtime session on monetising video content at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit today in which he shared ten tips for promoting online video content.

1. SEO – ensure that your meta data accurately describes your video content as it will drive a high search potency
2. Homepage – be proud of your video content and promote it on your site don’t stick it away in a corner
3. Analytics – move beyond clicks to engagement metrics such as dwell time
4. Good automatic and managed editorial – signpost people to related, recent and most popular content
5. Social media – extensions on your video content should make it easy for viewers to share with their networks
6. Contextual promotion – embed video around related text in your site to drive engagment
7. Smart video distribution – Brightcove customers report that 50% of video traffic is generated by SEO. Make sure its in places people can find it
8. New platforms and devices – last year it was the iPhone this year it will likely be the iPad. Make sure your content works on viewer’s devices
9 A little YouTube – it’s the number two search engine (not just for video). Use it as a platform to pull in an audience
10. Localisation – make your content local for the markets that you’re targeting

There’s further information in a post on Eric’s blog.

Posted in Media, PR, Social media
Tags: #cms2010, Brightcove, Eric Elia, Guardian, Social media, youtube
2 Comments »

October 19th, 2009 by Wadds

Free speech doesn’t exist on the Internet in the UK

We like to think that the Internet is re-writing the rules of business and the media. And it is, but not as fast as you might think.

Clay Shirky first showed us how crowds can be mobilised online for positive effect. But Ged Carroll sounds a note of caution:

“The door that we have walked through to allow justice and freedom-of-speech through the wisdom of crowds can also easily succumb to the wisdom of mobs. Society hasn’t really thought through how to deal with all the ramifications.”

And so social media watchers got very excited last week when huge number of conversations on Twitter about the Trafigura injunction against The Guardian seemingly forced its lawyers Carter-Ruck to back down.

I thought we’d observed a game changing moment. Not a chance. There are currently more than 300 so-called super injunctions holding tight in the UK according to Joshua Rozenberg on Sky News on Saturday morning (via @rfenwick).

Was the Trafigura incident a one off? I doubt it. But don’t let the Trafigura case fool you. Legal process is alive and well on the Internet.

Posted in Media, PR
Tags: #Trafigura, Carter-Ruck, Clay Shirky, Freedom of speech, Guardian, Social media, Social network, twitter
No Comments »

October 13th, 2009 by Wadds

#Trafigura trending is a spectacular example of the Streisand effect

The #Trafigura trending topic on Twitter this morning is an example of the Streisand effect, an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor a story backfires and generates widespread coverage across the internet.

The conversation around #Trafigura resulted from an attempt to stop The Guardian from reporting on a question about Trafigua in the UK Parliament.

The Streisand effect entered Internet parlance after Techdirt founder Mike Masnick used it to describe the widespread Internet coverage that resulted from Barbra Streisand’s attempts to suppress photos of her Californian home in 2003.

For more examples visit the web site dedicated to The Streisand Effect.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: #Trafigura, Barbra Streisand, Guardian, Mike Masnick, Techdirt
2 Comments »

July 10th, 2009 by Wadds

Dustbin eye view of journalism

As a journalist Steve Earl did his fair share of doorstepping and dustbin scavenging during the early 90s. Sometimes the role of a journalist investigating a big story skirts close to the tolerance of the law.

Details of how the mobile phones of people in the public eye were allegedly “hacked” by journalists at News of the World as reported by the Guardian today remain undisclosed. But one of the questions any ongoing investigation will no doubt ask include whether what is claimed to have happened was hacking per se, and whether it broke any laws.

Without making any inference whatsoever on the allegations currently facing individuals at the News of the World, here are some possible ways that an individual could conceivably, if they were so minded, get information from mobile phone services:

Bug on the handset – unlikely that anyone would go this far and difficult to implement en masse anyway
An intercept during the conversation – difficult and expensive, requiring military-level expertise
Phone company insider – paid to listen-in or record calls, or provide access to voice packets or voicemail files
Voicemail hacking – each network has a default voicemail pin. If you don’t change your pin, your messages could be hacked anytime your phone is switched off or you miss a call. You could call this hacking, but it could be viewed as the equivalent to leaving a window open

Two things surprise me about this case: how quick other publishers have been to turn on News International, publisher of The News of the World, The Sun and The Times, and that journalists at the News of the World would risk using such a tactic after seeing a colleague and private investigator jailed for a separate but phone-related incident in 2007.