Why local news is dying out: ad rates

Every day we see more depressing headlines about how local newspapers are dying out. More and more dailies are turning into weeklies, more and more weeklies are closing down, and more and more communities are being left without local news coverage.

Online news – my specialist topic since I started The West Londoner – is an easy market to tap into. Since the London riots, I’ve gained 10,000 social media followers and the website gets a modest 2,000 unique users a week. Nothing game-changing there. Fine, you might think, except to do what I do – reporting local news as impartially as possible – I need an income.

This isn’t working out at all. Not because I’m a pisspoor businessman, but simply because there just isn’t enough money for something like this to work.

Traditionally, online media has just two revenue streams; subscriptions and advertising. Although The Times is having a measure of success with its subscription paywall, there’s no way in hell that model would work for a local news site. Which takes us to the heart of my rant today, advertising.

Advertising is the traditional model for local newspapers in general. Pick up a copy of your local rag and out of (say) 50 pages, you’ll probably find 10 pages of content and 40 pages of advertisements.  However, online is a totally different story.

My main competitor for the West Londoner is Trinity Mirror Southern. Putting an advert on one of their titles’ websites will cost you the grand total of £45 per week. That also includes a print ad in five separate print products (two paid for, three freesheets). Good value for money, you say.

Yes – if you’re a local business looking for a cheap and cheerful way to attract custom.

Not so if you’re trying to make a profit and keep your business running, says I. After all, I’ve done the sums.

If I was to be competitive against Trinity Mirror Southern, let’s say I’m going to sell my ads at £35/week. For that I can only offer you exposure on a single website. I don’t have five newspapers to put your ad into for no extra charge, nor can I have that newspaper delivered to X thousand people. Even if I started my own weekly newspaper, I’d need thousands of pounds to print them every week. I’d need thousands more pounds to pay for it to be distributed around the local area. And I’d still face the problem of print readerships declining by 5% – 10% year on year.

No wonder I can’t attract advertising. I simply cannot compete with that offering.

Quite simply, from my point of view as a West London journalist, Trinity Mirror Southern have a very effective monopoly. Even fellow local news company Newsquest gave up offering printed local papers round here, leaving websites to be staffed by unpaid students.

Having done my sums based on beating Trinity Mirror’s offering, I reckon that even if I sold every single advertising slot physically available on The West Londoner, I would earn just shy of £500/month. Nobody can live off that sort of money. I’m not enough of a chav to live off benefits, and in any case (from what I understand of the benefits system) any money I earned from WL would be offset against any benefits income.

So, based on uncompetitive market conditions, I’m knocking it on the head with The West Londoner. It’s not viable and never will be while big media companies like Trinity Mirror keep their advertising rates at rock bottom.

The other big problem is rock bottom pricing of ads even at a national level. Taking out an online ad on the Daily Mail will cost you a whopping £150 per thousand page impressions. With national rates set at such ridiculously low levels (helped, no doubt, by the fact that the daily print edition of the Mail brings hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue into DMGT), no wonder local papers are going to the wall.

The great irony is that current market regulation by the Office of Fair Trading is contributing to killing off even unviable journalism, as Northcliffe (local arm of the Daily Mail & General Trust) discovered when it tried selling some of its titles to the Kent Media Group. As a direct result of intervention in the market, people lost their jobs, so I have no idea what the answer is.

Ah well. I’m sure I’ll make a good PR rep or whatever it is I end up doing next.

And another “what I’m up to now” post…

Things have changed a lot since last November.

Number 1: I got made redundant that month – an experience many journalists are sadly familiar with.

In brief, I was recruited for a title which the company – a legal publishing house – decided a short while afterwards not to continue on a regular basis. So I, and the two others recruited to work on it, got moved sideways to their flagship title’s newsdesk. This meant that the newsdesk was overmanned, as I spent entire working days producing two stories of about 3-400 words each.

Unfortunately it had been apparent that working there didn’t suit me at all (because I didn’t have a bloody clue what the hell I was writing about for the first two months) and so I received the Order of the Boot at 1715 on a Friday afternoon. In fairness my employer did offer me reasonably generous terms and promised a positive reference. This didn’t much mitigate the fact that I was now sans income.

Number 2: I’m still unemployed and looking for a job. Preferably one in journalism, but I’m almost ready to move on from that unattainable dream to something better suited to putting geld in my pocket and food in my gob.

Number 3: I set up my own news website, The West Londoner, building on the successful news liveblog I ran during the London riots last August. So far this has earned just enough revenue to cover its hosting costs, and not a penny more. There ain’t no money in online journalism!

Number 4: There are very, very few jobs out there at entry level. Despite generating hugely successful coverage of the London riots, which rivalled Sky News and the Daily Telegraph in its speed and accuracy, and retaining the 10,000 social media followers I got during that time, I’m still effectively at the bottom of the ladder. I’ve edited a print title, run a successful online operation and worked on a variety of newsdesks in different sectors, yet still nobody (it seems) will give me a second glance.

 

All this makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t sign up for a generic management trainee graduate scheme instead, and put my two degrees to some use.

What I’m doing these days

Been a long while since I posted anything new on here. As I’m not doing much productive during my Friday afternoon, I thought I might as well broadcast something new about myself.

As per one of my previous posts, I’m now a news reporter for a B2B website. It’s paywalled and not on any of the usual news aggregation sites so I can almost guarantee you will never see my byline anywhere public other than the West Londoner. There is no social media integration whatsoever here so you won’t see me doing much, if anything, on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn – all of which are blocked, incidentally. The company has no intention of using social media either as a reporting tool or as a means of publicising its content.

I turn out two articles daily on a relatively busy newsdesk. I know I have the spare capacity to do double that, if needed. During my days interning with The Foreigner I did up to six per day, although that was a bit silly! Nowadays my work is highly specialised and involve frequent contact with industry professionals for expert comment and analysis of whatever I’m writing about. There’s the usual amount of off-the-record background chats and a bit of travel/networking too. Because our target market is distributed worldwide I have spoken with people hailing from the depths of China to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and even the Philippines, amongst many others.

On top of the day job, I try and keep the West Londoner going. I haven’t had time to write many articles on there for two reasons; one, there’s just enough content from my co-writers to keep the news cycle ticking over, so I spend most of my time dedicated to WL in editing their stories prior to publication. The other reason is that I’m also building a professional website around a top-level domain, with the intention of launching it as a proper platform for West London news. Thus, time for researching and writing is limited – quite apart from the prohibition on freelancing in company time here, meaning that I cannot get hold of anyone during office hours Mon-Fri. Did I mention that most webmail is also blocked here?

Those are the two biggest things occupying my time. I do find it frustrating that I have effectively disappeared from the public web and that my audience now is limited to a very select group of specialists. Most modern (by “modern” I mean “post-2004″) methods of story-gathering are off limits to me here and I can already feel myself beginning to stagnate. I want – need – a fresh challenge. Perhaps I’ll go part-time with the day job, launch the West Londoner properly and see if I can’t make that into a going concern.

The one good thing about the West Londoner at the moment is that it hasn’t stagnated. Whenever I have managed to find enough time to resume my pre-employment posting quality/frequency on there, it’s taken off again. I think of WL like a Ferrari. Right now it’s ticking over quietly, with me occasionally blipping the throttle. If I got into the driving seat, put it into gear and lifted the clutch, it would hurtle off into the distance.

What I should have said!

I’ll start this post by apologising to City University’s journalism students, who turned up to a 6pm lecture expecting to find yours truly on a panel with 3 other experienced journalists talking about how to break into journalism.

Instead, I was stuck on the Circle Line thanks to a defective train somewhere between Baker Street and King’s Cross, or possibly beyond. I then proceeded to get so lost whilst walking from Angel Tube station to City University that I had to phone my girlfriend for Google maps directions. I was so madly out of the way that it took a good ten minutes for her to establish my location, never mind talk me onto my objective.

Anyway. I got to City an hour late, missed everything that the other panellists said, spoke for 3 minutes, totally failed to mention anything I wanted to mention, bored everyone, and then went home via the pub. This is what I actually meant to say…

Creating your own opportuniy in journalism in easier than ever. I built the West Londoner’s main website (http://thewestlondoner.wordpress.com) on WordPress as my CMS, with a Twitter account (@thewestlondoner) and a Facebook page (The West Londoner) slaved to it so they auto-posted updates from the main website. I used bit.ly to replace the built-in cross platform functionality of these services because the customisation options are far superior.

That said, anyone can work internet-based services to a basic degree. What I did was establish a personalised, human conversation with my readers. Any idiot can do NCTJ-style writing and pump out meaningless anodyne articles in the vague hope that someone might read them. What works better is actually asking your readers what they want to read about, and then giving it to them. I’m told this is called Market Research. I did a bit of it, and still have 10,000 followers to this day – sod conventional wisdom, I’ve found a formula that works and I’m damn well sticking to it. As I said in my 3 minutes at City – if you can’t find an opportunity, create your own.

Content is king. WL took off primarily because the content was fast, accurate and better than the rest. It helped massively that I’m passionate about reporting news (actual hard news, not celeb tittle-tattle or meaningless vox-pop laden guff) because when the going got hard, with the 14 hour days, I still had the motivation to keep on going. No matter what you write about, be passionate and let that passion shine through in your writing. If your passion happens to be unbiased and accurate local news, bingo, you’ve found a niche that nobody else will cover.

Money is also important. It’s all well and good writing, but if you can’t monetise what you do, you’re heading down a blind alley. I was lucky – after putting up a Paypal button and asking for donations to my post-riot beer fund, I ended up with £2,000. I need to talk to more people but I believe that the ad-supported model could work for a local news site/blog, but it’s something that needs more investigation. Certainly I don’t recommend relying purely on reader donations to keep operating, nice as it is!

Above all – keep your content fresh, relevant and decently targeted, use every means available to push that content out to potential readers, and make your readers aware that you are a human being, not just another keyboard monkey in an article factory somewhere.

What did all this achieve? I now have a big achivement on my CV and a few well placed contacts who, one day, might be able to offer me paid employment in return for generating large social media audiences for their own websites/concerns …… Give it a go yourself; you simply never know what headhunters at big media firms are looking for.

I would say more, but I’m dog tired and want to sleep. Tweet me @gazthejourno if you want to ask me stuff, or leave a comment here.

Being employed as a journalist

So, today was my first day on the job as a Trainee News Reporter on a b2b website. I won’t name my employer, on the basis that I want to keep the personal (like this blog) and the professional firmly separate. Suffice to say that they are a very niche company expanding into a very niche market, and they have very definite ideas about their business model.

The biggest culture shock came immediately, when I discovered that they don’t use Twitter. They have a completely paywalled website (a la The Times), and the theory goes that using Twitter to push content out would reveal key insights and enable competitors to pick up on our stories before they’re fully out. It might sound odd, but the core audience for this company isn’t the traditional demographic – put another way, they’re not expected to be using social media to find work-related news. Leastaways, so one of the directors explained it to me in my interview.

The second part of this particular culture shock is that Twitter is blocked on the company IT firewall. This means that my traditional modus operandi of searching Twitter for people I mention in my articles to get an insight into who they are is, literally, no longer an option. On a personal level, it also means I feel utterly cut off from the outside world!

Facebook’s also blocked, which is probably a good thing from the managerial point of view. The social networking block doesn’t apply to all of the company network (there are a couple of computers in the designated social/off duty area which have full net access), and I guess it’s intended to improve productivity. Perhaps it’s just the remnants of 4 years of student life where I was my own boss and dictated to myself where I was going and what I was doing, but again, I suddenly feel cut off from the world. Whilst running the West Londoner I depended on Facebook to communicate with my readers and find out what they wanted me to report on; as with Twitter, though, the core audience here aren’t thought to be using Facebook in that manner.

It’s a totally different approach from general news, and even specialist news (like you’d find in the business & finance sections of nationals) isn’t fully comparable to what I’m now doing. All I can really say is, it’s completely different from my NCTJ training (not that that was unexpected…) and practical experience to date. Culture shock? Pretty much.

On the more mundane, work-related side of things, it was a mild surprise to discover that I’m working 8.5 hour days (well, 7.5 hours if you take off the hour for lunch, but it’s all time away from home) instead of the 8 that I’d mentally geared myself for. There were a few bits of the contract relating to freelancing that I did wonder about, but a quick chat with HR put my mind to rest – so the West Londoner will continue, albeit slower and in evenings only. Well, as far as my own articles are concerned – there’s a few people who are willing to write for it and if they’re willing/able to write during the day then the old posting frequency might resume.

The last surprise was the 1 hour 20 minute commute to the office, and back, every day. I knew it’d be a long run; I chose to live right at the end of a Tube line, so I can’t really complain. At least I get a seat for the majority of the journey, as I’m one of the first to board the train…

Overall, I think it’s just culture shock. I’ve gone from literally working in my bed (this time last week I’d be ringing up the Met police press office and typing up a 200-word piece on a stabbing or something, before staying up for the next few hours and then rolling out of bed at 11am) to a formal office environment. It isn’t unpleasant, but it’s certainly different. Even to the Sunday Times, and I thought that was a stereotype-breaking bit of work experience as far as office culture goes.

I won’t lie, I’m not feeling very positive at the moment, but a job’s a job. It pays adequately, it’s the first step on the career ladder and it’s relevant to my masters degree, which is certainly more than I was expecting at this stage. So, I’ll put a brave face on it.

If you’re reading this and feel kindhearted, I’d appreciate it if you popped something funny into the comments. A link, a picture, something cheerful … help put a smile on a man’s face.

Why I’m on the cusp of quitting journalism

Gaz note: I wrote this just before The West Londoner hit the headlines for its riot coverage. I’ve tweaked it a little to take into account what’s happened since then, but the gist is more or less accurate at the mo.

Few entry-level job opportunities; very little money; an industry that relies on fulltime experience.

Those are the three biggest reasons I’m seriously considering abandoning my journalism career prospects and doing something vaguely achievable instead. Like joining the Royal Air Force, or getting a place on a graduate trainee scheme.

It does pain me to realise that I’ve wasted a year and more thousands of pounds than I’d care to admit to in studying this masters degree. I admit now; working on a local paper and filling poorly laid out pages with stories of little interest to anyone while job cuts abound everywhere just doesn’t appeal. The NCTJ pre-entry qualification (which forms the basis of my MA) is geared towards producing reporters who can do the basics of that. Knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t have bothered with the year-long MA at all.

I’d have found an intensive short course, passed the NCTJ qual and spent the rest of my time searching for work experience instead. I’m not going to boast about my work experience, because frankly I don’t have half as much as others out there. I know I’m damn good at what I do; I wouldn’t have been able to launch a newspaper from scratch, in a media-hostile environment, without that raw ability and self-belief. Neither could I have started a news website that gained 1m pageviews in 24 hours and still continues to reach 10,000 people today.

The problem I face is that there just aren’t any jobs out there at entry level. Almost every journalism job advert I look at specifies experience of some description; typically a year or more. The ones that don’t require experience are hugely oversubscribed – despite sending out 30 or 40 applications in the last six weeks I’ve only had one invite to an interview – not counting those industry people who picked up on me from The West Londoner, of course. I’m fairly sure the main reason for my lack of interviews is my crap cover letters – I tend to be better at doing things rather than selling them.

As much as I love WL, turning it into a revenue-earning opportunity is going to be uphill work. I’m a great believer in creating your own opportunities if none exist, but it’s a crowded old market for news out there.

Norman Scarth: WW2 veteran vs contempt of court laws

Norman Scarth is an 86-yr-old man who takes a keen interest in legal matters – to the point of taking the UK to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the practice of doing justice behind closed doors.

Whilst apparently trying to ‘uncover corruption’ in a case at Bradford Crown Court, Mr Scarth turned on the sound recorder on his mobile phone. He had had previous requests to record proceedings granted because he is hard of hearing.

From what his supporters say, he sat there quietly before the judge noticed that he had the sound recorder running. The judge ordered him to turn it off; he refused. This is a prima facie breach of Section 9 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, quite possibly one of my least favourite bits of legislation of all time.

What happened next was, quite frankly, appalling. Mr Scarth, a decorated veteran of the Russian convoys during WW2, was committed to jail for six months. Section 14 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 provides that a “superior court” (anything other than a magistrates’ court, seemingly) may commit a person to prison for up to two years for contempt of court.

The law does not, in this instance, provide for a trial. If you’re not horrified that a judge can literally lock someone up without the niceties of evidence, a jury, proving an offence has been committed beyond reasonable doubt and so on, then I politely suggest you are not human.

Rightly, Mr Scarth’s treatment has whipped up a frenzy. Hundreds of people have signed a petition calling for his release, whilst his supporters have moved a writ of habeas corpus against the prison governor. In plain English, they’ve managed to get another court to order the governor to explain what legal power he has to continue holding Mr Scarth.

It’ll be interesting to follow this one because of the civil liberties aspect. It will also draw public attention to the bloody silly Section 9(a) of the Contempt of Court Act, which desperately needs repealing. The other subsections make perfect sense; publishing (broadcasting) an audio record without permission should be the offence, not the making of it.

In the meantime, though, I urge you to sign the petition here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/free-wwii-veteran-norman-scarth-from-leeds-prison.html

A quick funny one!

http://www.dailytorygraph.com/

Someone buys a copy of the Daily Telegraph and goes at the top half of Page 1 with Tippex and ink. The results are surprisingly hilarious!

In other news, I’m still looking for a job. And working hard on my unpaid jobs. And sleeping ridiculous amounts. Hint, never try and work from bed late at night – you’ll only fall asleep halfway through.

The West Londoner

Very brief post. I am the editor of The West Londoner, the hit news site that had 1 million page views in one day. I’m shattered, but I’ve also updated the “Gaz elsewhere” page to include some of the coverage of our coverage, if that makes sense.

I’m still looking for a job! Managing editors, please have a look at the “Contact” page and drop me a line – I would be more than happy to work as an online journalist for your organisation and bring the hugely well-regarded standard of my coverage to you. I’m bursting with ideas to increase social media engagement with the news, and my track record so far speaks for itself!

How I write the news

Working for a news website based in a foreign country may sound like a horrendously difficult thing to do. But in reality, it’s pretty straightforward thanks to modern technology and the internet.

I don't use one of these, sadly! spikeyhelen, Flickr.

TheForeigner.no is an English language news website covering everything Norwegian. I write for them and I cover everything from the fortunes of Statoil, Norway’s state-owned oil company, to Norwegian foreign policy to domestic news.

How do I do it? Time, effort, and smart use of resources.

First things first, I need to understand what it is I’m reading. Enter stage left: Google Translate, the one thing I couldn’t do this job without.

The site’s unique selling point is that it takes Norwegian language news – which has a maximum audience of the 4-5 million people who speak Norwegian – and turns it into English. It’s quite similar to The Week and the Sunday Times’ News Review supplement.

Once I know what’s being said, where do I find it? Of course, I could just browse through the homepages of the Norwegian media looking for interesting headlines. Or, ‘cos I’m a smart journo who doesn’t like wasting time, I set up Google Alerts. I do also have a personalised RSS aggregator that runs via Yahoo Pipes too. The latter is only usable in English, unless I’ve the patience to run everything manually through Google Translate, but it is very helpful for keeping up to date on business and foreign news.

Keep a sharp lookout! Minnesota Historial Society, Flickr.

No good journo needs telling about Twitter. I use Tweetdeck as my preferred interface and I can’t recommend it enough. As well as the usual Twitter view you can set up easily-retrievable custom searches that update themselves live. I have a few set up for Norway-specific topics – especially in the aftermath of the Utoya killing spree – but the one drawback is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to pause the live updates, making popular hashtags difficult to curate.

Search is another massive help. I’m a fan of Google, because its results are simply more relevant for my needs than other services such as Microsoft’s Bing. I do make use of advanced search syntax quite a lot to help filter out irrelevant results or find related articles – if only there was one for date ranges!

And the rest? A good old-fashioned nose for news, and the essential writing skills of the good journalist.