Lance Wiggs

Fairfax Digital Australia and youth publisher LifeLounge have launched a new site: Thevine.com.au, “aimed at 18-29 year olds”.

Now like everyone I’d hate to be in a “target market” and I suspect, like “young adult literature”, the real target is somewhat younger, although the design of the site is pretty placid:

The surefire killer sign of a young audience is the Top Stories section, which I take to be auto-selected by popularity. I’d go on, but, well - just look at the titles to the top articles:

Nice, Tight, revealing, Miranda Kerr, Sex Marathon, hedgehog. Yup - that sounds like teenage minds hard at work - and teenage boys at that. Let’s take a sneak peak at that second story ” new revealing figures“

case closed….

now - did Fairfax and LifeLounge really mean to do that? Well - I’ll leave that to FD MD Pippa Leary:

Asked if Fairfax’s editorial staff was too old for the target market, Ms Leary said “yes”.

The housing crash is cascading around the world, and the dire predictions are coming true. Here’s the latest chart from The Economist - check out Ireland on the bottom. That’s a crash, not a “balanced slump”.

Meanwhile Trade Me just surpassed 70,000 property listings, on the back of signing up one of the last few major real estate agents holdouts.

Things to look out for in the next few months are:

Trade Me listings volumes to peak as the remaining real estate companies sign up, and then settle as the market slows

Increasing time to sell and lower average prices (duh), especially at the top end

A drop in the newspaper pages dedicated to housing advertisements and articles, lowering the income for the likes of APN and Fairfax

Real estate agents switching careers as they have less commission to share around the industry

and a fair few had luck stories from speculators that got in at the peak and/or didn’t get out in time

a general downturn in optimism & perhaps the internal economy

That sense of déjà vu is the ghost of 1987 creeping back.

Separated at birth? or just related. We find out a ittle more about who is behind that mask:

Juha/Bach is blogging over at Stuff…

Not bad - strong profit growth of 40% versus last year, with Trade Me and Digital leading the way.

Trade Me showed $32m in EBIT, which is for the 6 month period to December 2007. That, apparently, puts them at tracking to hit the $60m required to complete the $50m earn out to March 2008. (That from the Dom Post - but if they really know then they have inside info., which they can’t, so they are guessing)

Actually it could be tight, and it all depends on how well Trade Me did in the 3 months to June 2007, and how well they do in the three months to March 2008. Basically revenue and profit in a rapid growth company move up month by month, and, while a mid year snap shot showed the right run rate, it isn’t over.

If the April-June 2007 period was not so good, then the Jan-March 2008 period needs to be extra good to compensate so that the whole year meets target. (It’s so much easier to predict things in the Nickel game)

Now January is a slack month downunder, but then things pick up - so it will be an interesting run to the end for Trade Me folk.

Arcgk. I really cannot comment any more, though I’ve sadly been out of it for a while. Good luck guys.

So msn and APN have linked up. But to tell the impact you have to dig a little. The msn.co.nz page is unchanged:

The msn news page has better news than before:

But the links give it away - here’s the one beneath the main news picture:

Indeed that news page is the NZHerald news page with a differnt brand.  It’s a simple as shoving msn.co.nz at the top of the nzherald page. Here are the two politics pages

  c

So - NZHerald gets more traffic, pure and simple. MSN gets some real news on their rather sparse website. Stuff is still ahead in UB’s, (498k vs 456k last week) but NZHerald with this move has a Page View lead. For now.

It seems to be a great deal by APN.

For a start they increased their saleable page views. Secondly they help msn get revenue (details unknown) by selling ads on a site that otherwise struggles - the front page of msn has sister company Seek ads only right now. Finally they have taken out a potential  (though not so strong) competitor in the news space. Well done chaps.

MEDIA RELEASE

6 December 2007

FAIRFAX MEDIA APPOINTS NEW DIGITAL HEAD

Fairfax Media has appointed Stephen Smith to the position of Group Head of Digital.

Prior to accepting the Fairfax Media position, Stephen headed Vodafone’s media and entertainment operations.

Stephen will be responsible for Fairfax Media’s Online division, which includes stuff.co.nz, rugbyheaven.co.nz, and the online sites of the company’s newspapers and magazines.

He will also liaise closely with Trade Me and Fairfax Digital in Australia.

Mr Smith is a high profile media executive, and was for eight months Acting Chief Executive of Television New Zealand. He spent 16 years with TVNZ in a variety of positions including Assistant Chief Executive and Head of Programmes, Head of Online Operations and General Manager of TV2.

He will report to Fairfax Media’s Chief Executive Joan Withers.

Ms Withers said Fairfax Media’s Online division had enjoyed rapid growth and development over the last two years, and was already the most significant in the country.

“Stephen has a wealth of experience and expertise in online operations, and senior leadership roles and brings to Fairfax the skills to make our business even more successful,” she said.

“He will play a significant role as our newspaper, magazine and online platforms provide even greater integrated news, information and entertainment services to New Zealand audiences, and provide cost effective ways for advertisers to reach those audiences.”  He will also be a key participant in the senior management team.

Mr Smith said “I am looking forward to joining a great company with a proud record of innovation and an appetite for embracing the future of the digital media.”

Over the months I’ve occasionally said one or two negative things about a few companies.

Did I say occasionally? Sorry - I meant constantly.

Their range of responses has been interesting, and piqued the interest of Bullet PR’s Nicholas O’Flaherty, who used the BNZ series of rants, along with Mauricio’s Slingshot posts as examples, in a speech, of how not to manage online reputation.

Nicholas asked me a few questions for an upcoming article, so I thought I’d cross post the rather long  answer to one of them here:

As a blogger do you have any advice for PR practitioners?

Encourage and facilitate clients and their staff to follow, respond to, and join the online conversation.

Follow
Someone needs to continuously scan the internet, and put blog posts that matter into those daily press clippings for the top management team to see. The traditional media no longer has a monopoly on sound opinion and commentary, and that unsound stuff can also trip you up. A basic first step is to set up a simple Google news/blog search with their company name, while a few people should be following the major blogs along with other media.

Respond
Secondly, respond as quickly as possible to both positive and negative blog posts from reputable or popular blogs. Respond rationally, honestly and credibly. Ferrit (of all companies) responded to several of my negative posts about their troubled times, and the credible  person responding  was the head of Marketing, Peter Wogan. He joined the conversation, and the result was better for everyone. An exemplary example recently was in Perth where an employee of ISP iiNet responded to my complementary post within an hour or two of the original post - that’s proactive, and they’ll have a loyal customer now.  Can we even imagine  Telecom or Vodaphone  doing this?

Join
Thirdly, join the conversation by blogging, but only do so if you can do it right. Doing it right means the voices are genuine and unrestricted. Genuine voices are those of senior and interesting staff. Unrestricted means that they do the writing themselves with no editing before release. Give guidelines, coach in the right tone for blogging, keep it simple and focused and unleash the talent. The blogoshere’s BS detector is stunningly efficient - so tell the truth and tell it often and well. Xero and Google do this well.

Starting a blog is technically easy, but it does require work on the part of the writer along with continuous reinvention. I encourage individuals and companies to give it a go - experience is the best teacher.

Additionally set client staff free - allow staff to blog about their experiences at their work and about anything that isn’t illegal or unethical to disclose. Trade Me and Fairfax have shown huge tolerance for several bloggers, but we see very little from any of the other major companies online or offline in NZ. Let staff’s negative as well as positive comments come out - and think of it as a continuous survey of staff morale. We do care if staff are unhappy don’t we?

Finally, have fun and be human. Blogging is an engaging medium, and while there are serious and light blogs they all have a conversational and personal tone.  But remember -  the blogosphere is increasingly influential and read, and what goes up there stays up there forever.

Fantastic news - AFR.com.au has redone it’s moronic pricing scheme,  which charged readers (whoever they are) anywhere from $25 to a staggering $150 a MONTH.

Rest assurred - they have now come back to reality and are charging just $109 for non subscribers, and $45 for subscribers.

That compares favorably with the WSJ.com site, which charges me $99 as a non subscriber.

But wait….

The new AFR.com.au figure is still PER MONTH, while that WSJ.com figure is per YEAR.

So for the dubious privilege of using AFR’s unusable flash-based service, I’d have to pay, well, basically 12 times what I pay for the Wall Street Journal.

And as the article in fellow Fairfax publication smh states:

Keeping subscriptions contrasts with a move by The New York Times, which in September decided to scrap its TimesSelect subscription service, which was two years old, in favour of increasing advertising sales. The chairman of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, has indicated he will make access to The Wall Street Journal’s website free

Meanwhile the obvious is happening:

A former AFR editor, Alan Kohler, launched a free finance site, BusinessSpectator, last week.

Actually that Business Spectator site is pretty good. It was the first place that I saw the news about $113 billion giant BHPB (who I am consulting to a tiny part of) bidding for $70 billion rival Rio Tinto. They also already have advertisements.

The headlines, it’s all about the headlines:

Balkans have the world’s best bums (+video)

Stuff finally has more domestic browsers than NZHerald - it’s been a long chase, and kudos to the editorial and development teams at Fairfax for the result.

Both sites are winners here however - the number of people reading their news online has steadily risen over the years, and the competition has made for better products for everyone.

A couple opf folk sent me a link to a post on Louis Gray’s blog,  link, which shows the relative decline in Alexa ranking of the news websites.

Sites that used to be among the top visited sites in all the Web have plummeted, as fickle Web visitors have turned their attention away from the brands they once relied on to new brands that have taken their place, including, unsurprisingly, Facebook, YouTube, and major blogs, like TechCrunch and Engadget. 

I know that my own viewing habits have changed - engadget is far more engaging than, say, Wired, and ThinkProgress more readable than the NYTimes.

I don’t see Facebook and the other social networking sites as competitors for the news content based sites, so to me the decline in fortune is really about the increasing power of the super-sized blogs versus old media.

But old media is striking back.

Wired has a few good blogs, and has really changed its format, while the venerable NYTimes of course just opened itself up, and the economist blog Free Exchange is becoming essential reading.

While new media is great at getting better formats, old media does have three critical advantages:

1: Massively strong brands. The NYTimes and The Economist will command respect for many years to come.

2: Highly skilled writers, sub editors and opinion writers. These institutions attract the best talent, and the people of talent like to work together. They also have very strong editorial standards , forged through years of providing us what we like to read.

3: Lawyers. Yes - old media has been dealing with Libel laws for years, and tends to be a bit slow in adopting faster new media partially for this reason. However, newer faster forms of media may find themselves in the libel firing line as they generally do not exercise strong control over editorial and comments. Did you know for example, that you can be sued in New Zealand for writing something in Australia, on a blog hosted in the USA? As long as it is ‘published’ in NZ (i.e. available on the internet) you can have your month in court.

Bernard Hickey is resigning from the end of December as Head of Fairfax Digital NZ to spend time with his family. It’s no doubt been a really tough decision to have to make, but the right one for his family.

Hopefully you’ll find time to keep blogging Bernard.

It’s one thing to complain about anther country. It’s quite another to call it by the wrong name.

The United Nations accepted name for the country between Thailand, Laos, China, India and Bangladesh is Myanmar. Not Burma. Even Wikipedia gets it right - it appears that Myanmar is the formal name, used since the 13th century.

The BBC has a great article on the issue, which helpfully points to Iran (Persia),  Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) and Cambodia (Kampuchea) as other countries that have had a relatively recent name change. And yes - expat Iranians like to refer to their country as Persia, which has fascinating rings of antiquity, but is clearly not the right name for publication in serious media.

Fight the right battle, and stay away from these despicable Republican tactics.

Credit David Kirk for pushing the side of reason - especially while doing his other job as Rugby correspondent and blogger.

..afr.com, will be relaunched for the second time this year in “a matter of weeks” with more content likely to be made freely available after months of criticism

The decision by Fairfax chief David Kirk puts him at odds with the head of the group’s business division, Fairfax Business Media chief Michael Gill, who was quoted on Thursday as saying their approach to the much maligned internet site “would not change a jot”

Here’s that Micheal Gill quote, courtesy of The Age:

Mr Gill hinted the “news and simple stuff” on the relaunched website would no longer use Flash — “it will behave like a website” — but reiterated he had no intention of following The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and scrapping the paid subscriber model for online. “We’re very certain that our business is a subscription business,” he said 

mmmm. No flash, but either ’subscription business’ or ‘more content freely available’.

It is a late decision, but no doubt helped along by the NYTimes going free, and the persistent rumours about the WSJ going free next. I’d love to see the NYTimes traffic stats for the last week or so - the archives are proving great fodder for the blogosphere.

Although David Kirk said:

We got it wrong at the outset, we are going to get it right, so stick with us,”… …..We are going to make afr.com more accessible for users..

he also said:

- but let’s go back to the beginning.
There are four dimensions at work here: news and information; archives; investment and financial tools; and a digital rights management system.

Right.

No wrong. I see little need any more for the digital rights management system as those WSJ rights are worthless soon, and any DRM gets in the way of usability. That may mean some contract renegotiations, but they should start with the premise that information should be free.
The investment and financial tools are available for free elsewhere, even in a spreadsheet. Moreover, people that can pay for those investment tools should really have them on their desktop already - and would probably prefer a straight data download.

Archives - well the recent ones should be open, else why would the live articles ever get linked to, and the historical ones should be open, as they create a wonderful long tail of content. A blog search for New York Times archives retrieves 60,000 results - pretty impressive for a week.

So - we shall wait to grok the fullness.

The New York Times has realised that internet advertising will generate more revenue than subscriptions, and abandoned the TimesSelect subscription service.

TimesSelect held archives, their highly rated columnists and other material.  Apparently TimesSelect made $10m per year, but I would think the NYTime columnists alone should be able to generate that value in increased ads from the increased traffic to their columns and the site.

Vivian L Schiller, SVP and GM of NYTimes.com said:

..our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising 

That is, making people pay for the product was reducing readership growth, and you make more money out of advertising to many than getting subscriptions from few. Media companies take note.

Now that, after two years, the site is free again, bloggers and other readers will once again show the importance of Krugman, Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and the other columnists,  who no doubt were very frustrated at their limited readership and loss of relevance.
Where the NYTimes messed up was in the growth of ‘long tail’ traffic - potential readers that came to random articles via Google, Yahoo and bloggers. Those readers were frustrated by the pay and subscription wall, and so turned away.

I’ve often said that only two or three news sites  have had the ability to charge for content - The Economist, WSJ and NYTimes.  They are the papers of record. Now that two of them have stopped, and rumors have it that News Corp will set the WSJ free,  perhaps it is time for the terrible AFR.com.au to throw out their strategy, subscriptions and flash based website and start again.

Related posts:

The Australian on AFR.com.au 

MISAustralia.com - lousy launch

AFR.com.au

NYTimes rules