A case of digital schizophrenia?
What on earth is Rupert Murdoch thinking about? Tilting at windmills in a hopeless quest to get the genie of free-news-online back into the bottle of paid-for-ink-on-newsprint, he is neglecting an elementary way of persuading website browsers to go out and actually buy his papers.
This morning’s copies of The Times carry an outstanding candidate for Magazine of the Year – its own science publication, Eureka, which is a masterly exercise in combining authoritative content which imaginative presentation. With only 12 pages of advertising to carry a 60-page issue, it is a bold and clearly very expensive venture.
The four-page centre-placed gatefold in the latest issue is a panoramic depiction of 70 million years of environmental upheavals which no computer screen is wide enough accommodate. It is a vivid piece of artwork worthy to grace every school and every child’s bedroom wall. This alone is well worth the £1 for the parent paper and, brought to the notice of literally millions of online strangers, could well have created a massive extra demand.
So what is The Times making of this enormous opportunity to put on sales? Well, people who actually buy the paper can’t miss the larger banner across the top of the front page, announcing the presence of Eureka inside.
But the many, many more who prefer a free visit to timesonline will hardly know of its existence. It’s not mentioned at all on the Home Page even though the second lead is a scientific story. That merely X-refs to two other related items on the website.
Clicking to the Science section, we find a small panel which baldly announces the existence of the magazine and nearby is a shot of the cover. Except this is last month’s cover!
Nowhere is there an exciting sell for this month’s contents, no traditional Fleet Street promotional blurb for something as special as that panoramic pull-out.
And even worse, beneath the out-of-date cover is the promise that if you don’t happen to have bought the printed Eureka the whole of the magazine will there to read online page by page as an e-zine
What kind of marketing strategy is this? Does timesonline actively want to discourage the newspaper’s efforts to hold up circulation by offering expensive free extras? Does the right hand really care what the left hand is doing?
I am afraid The Times is not alone in this case of digital schizophrenia.
Surveys by multi-media students of Bournemouth University of the relationship between national newspapers and their websites consistently show the papers competing with each other in the profusion of directions to all the extra delights to be found online while their websites loftily ignore such vulgar offerings as the wallcharts, pamphlets, CDs and DVDs on offer at the news-stands.
This is an issue that dwarfs talk of attempts to claw back pennies from browsers. It’s time the industry realised that instead of using the great reach of the web as a vast recruitment opportunity they are going to enormous trouble to persuade the readers they’ve got that there’s no longer any reason to put their money down for a newspaper.
Would Rupert Murdoch ever buy Harrods and then stick a notice on the front door saying “Shoplifters welcome”?
Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk
At last an article that helps to explain some of the demise of our newspaper industry. It seems that Rupert Murdoch’s empire can afford to squander money in the way you point out but what about the other poorer newspaper owners – are they also making such careless mistakes?