Lance Wiggs and Bernard Hickey, among others, have written useful posts this week in response to the NBR’s decision to start charging for around 20 per cent of its online content.
There’s a lot in both posts, which make a point by point response to the reasons given by Barry Colman, the NBR’s publisher, for the new subscription system.
Those responses in a nutshell include: keep your costs low, sort out the expensive legacy publishing systems that are slowing you down, and learn how to work with Google, bloggers and the link economy.
Lance and Bernard go into considerably more detail – giving a pile of free feedback and advice to the NBR – and I’ll leave you to read their posts in full.
But I wanted to include here a couple of nice take-outs.
This is how Lance finished his piece:
Here is my take on what the media players could do – it’s unconsidered free advice
Fairfax and APN: Hire Chris Keall and any other top flight journalists, create longer more analytical business articles, published in HOS, The Business Herald, SST, The Independent and on NZHerald/Stuff.
Interest.co.nz: Extend into NBR’s space – grabbing 2 or 3 top journalists from NBR
NBR: Reduce production (not journalism) costs sharply, make the website free again and ramp up advertising sales efforts. Consider dropping the cover price of the newspaper and definitely offer crisper deals for subscribers. Oh – and hire Chris Keall properly.
Readers: Don’t subscribe to the NBR’s newspaper (too expensive) and definately do not subscribe to NBR’s website. Keep reading blogs though.
Bernard finished with 10 golden rules the interest.co.nz crew are following to make it in the online news arena. I’m summarising; it’s worth reading the rest.
1. Keep your costs brutally low
We use the free open source software WordPress to publish. We never pay for advertising, even google adwords. We use free multi-media publishing platforms whenever we can, including Youtube,scribd, slideshare and twitter.
Our videos are made with gear costing no more than NZ$3,000 in total. We take budget flights to Wellington for Reserve Bank press conferences and the budget. We hold our meetings with customers and partners in cafes. We drink instant coffee. We celebrate saving money. We hate spending money with a passion.
2. Treat Google as god
We worship and fear Google in equal measure. It is the major source of traffic to our site and to most sites. We obsess about our Pagerank and how to raise it. We work like dogs to get sensible links into our site from highly ranked sites elsewhere.
Almost the first question we ask before anything we do is: how can we boost our Google juice. Just like any decent deity, Google can take life and give it. Often Google’s giving and the taking of life appears not to have any logic. It is the mystery of the faith, but we never lose the faith.
3. Worship your community, which is the holy spirit
Our community is everything. I love eliciting comment and insight from our readers. Often they know a lot more than us about a subject and can say it much better. They tip us off to stuff all the time.
4. Share the link love and ye shall receive
The bloggers’ ethos is all about link love. Whenever you source a document or another media report you must hyperlink to it. This is not just to be polite, although that is part of the ethos. This is all about driving traffic to each others’ sites and being open and transparent.
5. Donate the news and sell the data
This is at the core of how we make a profit. We collect an awful lot of data about interest rates, the housing market, the economy, financial markets and commodity prices. We display these in charts and tables for free and use them in free news and commentary on our website.
A major source of traffic to our site is to our rates comparison pages (mortgages,term deposits under one year, term deposits over one year, and credit cards) and that’s where many advertisers want to be for obvious reasons.
We then collect and store the data for these pages and sell that in various concentrated forms and formats to banks, regulators and other media. We mine these data sets constantly for story ideas and new ways to profit from them.
6. Be generous, open and tolerant
Open up comments on all stories and allow unmoderated comments from all. Moderate after publication and only ban or block comments when they are clearly defamatory or abusive.
Invite dissent and debate. Give credit to other sites and competitors. It’s the internet. That’s how it works.
7. Spread the gospel through all media
I appear regularly on television (TV3, TVNZ, Prime andTVNZ7), radio (Radio Live, NewstalkZB and Radio New Zealand National) and in print (Herald on Sunday). Some of this is paid for and some of it is free. I even blog on NZHerald.co.nz (Don’t tell anyone but it has a very high Pagerank…). All of this multi-media odd jobbing helps spread our brand and our content to a wider group of people. This means people think of interest.co.nz when they think about anything to do with interest rates, house prices and the economy.
8. Open your source and be happy
Open source everything. It’s much cheaper and it’s the ‘internet way’. Never pay a licence fee for anything. Again, this is partly about keeping your costs brutally low, but it’s also about being more engaged, more community-minded and ‘bloggy’.
Open up your articles to challenge by linking to every document our raw source. Invite comment and correct openly and immediately when it’s clear you’re wrong.
9. Be the best and link to the rest
If we don’t have it first, we simply link to the website that has it. If we can’t find a fresh angle or a way to explain it better to our audience, then we simply don’t cover it or we link to someone else. We know we’re not the only website people look at. Being best for us means being first, fast, accurate, useful and incisive. If we aren’t at least one or two of those things, we don’t waste our time (and our readers’ time) doing the story.
10. Focus on a lucrative niche and nail it
We are focusing on those 2 million New Zealanders who have term deposits, mortgages, credit cards and car loans. They make decisions on about NZ$170 billion of mortgages and NZ$90 billion of term deposits every 6 to 18 months. They want accurate and useful information to help them decide whether to fix or to float, how long to fix for, and which bank or non bank they want to use.
There are at least 10 very large and profitable companies advertising to these New Zealanders. We aim to help them reach that audience.
The rest of Bernard’s post is here.
All Evolving Newsroom
NBR gets a pile of free feedback and advice
Lance Wiggs and Bernard Hickey, among others, have written useful posts this week in response to the NBR’s decision to start charging for around 20 per cent of its online content.
There’s a lot in both posts, which make a point by point response to the reasons given by Barry Colman, the NBR’s publisher, for the new subscription system.
Those responses in a nutshell include: keep your costs low, sort out the expensive legacy publishing systems that are slowing you down, and learn how to work with Google, bloggers and the link economy.
Lance and Bernard go into considerably more detail – giving a pile of free feedback and advice to the NBR – and I’ll leave you to read their posts in full.
But I wanted to include here a couple of nice take-outs.
This is how Lance finished his piece:
Bernard finished with 10 golden rules the interest.co.nz crew are following to make it in the online news arena. I’m summarising; it’s worth reading the rest.
The rest of Bernard’s post is here.