End of the offline?

Abstract

Ten years ago I remember slogging along to the Science Museum, notebook in hand, to a Daily Telegraph presentation of the management's vision of the future. The online version of the Telegraph (was it for a while really called the e-Telegraph?) was a beast of a thing; it looked like the newspaper, it read like the newspaper -but if you clicked on that Ford ad in the corner, it sprang to life, giving you a 30-second commercial. The assembled business, media and technology hacks were grudgingly impressed, but I don't think a single one of us seriously thought at the time that we would ever contemplate the online newspaper as anything other than a gimmick -certainly that whizzy TV commercial was going to take an awfully long time to wheeze and groan through clunky dial-up modems.A couple of years later, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, wrote that it would not particularly surprise him if by 2010 the "dead tree" paper was a thing of the past and that we would all be logging on to online newspapers. As he was not my editor at the time, I felt at liberty to wonder if he had temporarily taken leave of his senses. As it stands now, the timescale for the prediction might need elongating a little, but it has turned out to be chillingly prescient for the newspaper industry (and I am not saying that just because he is now my editor).Like all technological revolutions, it hasn't happened quite as we imagined it would -but it has happened. Online readerships now outpace and outstrip offline newspapers and are growing all the time. While many papers have remained either frozen in terror at this shift or uncertain about giving away their content for nothing, the market has decided there is a vigorous future for online publishers -if only we can keep pace with the technological and user-developments which challenge us from the grass roots and from the mega corporations.Offline newspapers are in yet another phase of feverish re-invention. The shift to a tabloid -sorry, compact -format for The Times and The Independent, a

Paid Content Strategies for News Websites

“…While the printed newspaper is more This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the journal Journalism Practice © 2007 copyright Taylor & Francis; Journalism Practice is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1751-2794&volume=1&issue=2&spage=208 portable, tactile and flexible, the website offers searchability, immediacy, and "permanence" of older content (Bell, 2005). Alistair Brown (2006), general manager of Scotsman.com, sees potential for online editions "to reach the parts that newspapers don't".…”

“…Advertising is the primary source of revenue for the overwhelming majority of online newspapers (Mensing & Rejfek, 2005;Peng et al, 1999), and this is widely expected to continue (Chyi & Sylvie, 2000;Bell, 2005). In this way, online newspapers have differed from their print counterparts, most of who generate a significant portion of their revenue from charging readers.…”