Peter Coleman talks to Peter Green about the contribution of world-renowned integration and technology at the UK’s Telegraph Media Group
Famous for one of the first integrated multimedia newsrooms in the world, the UK’s Telegraph Media Group nonetheless has its roots firmly planted in print.
“While newspapers have a digital future, it’s not clear what form that will take,” chief production officer Peter Green says. And he’s experimenting with formats and technologies which will continue to link online and print editions.
“We have 30 million unique users at telegraph.co.uk, but that doesn’t bring the revenue it should,” Green says.
The site – voted the country’s ‘best digital publisher’ in a consumer awards category last May – is one of the best-known among its newspaper peers. But the most-profitable content is the crossword and a ‘fantasy football’ game in which punters pick players for their favourite teams. The game offers prizes of up to £100,000 (A$165,000) from revenue of more than £1 million.
On proposals to charge for access to online content, Green says, “the question remains whether you could allow users to fall to say, a million and make more money”.
The jury’s still out on that, and for the time being, attention is turned to technology which may leverage the strengths of both media. One is ‘enhanced reality’ – a system which fires up a three-dimensional computer image from an illustration in the printed edition. “This provides a link between digital and the newspaper, and we hope to build an application to work with it,” Green says.
“Call me old school if you like, but I still believe there’s a lot of life in print yet.” He admits “life is moving very quickly” in this area at the moment, and not all new ideas and technologies will be successful.
TMG is also strongly focussed on providing cross-media solutions to advertisers and the agencies which handle a majority of their business. In some cases it will be possible to leverage the cost of a technology across a number of newspapers. “We’re flexible enough as a business to chase new ideas... and to react quickly if they don’t work,” he says. “Newspapers here have always competed on cost and quality, so we like to think we’re pretty nimble.”
Nimble would be a fair description of the radially-designed newsroom introduced when the group moved from Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands to its present offices in a low-key site next to the Victoria rail terminus (with the Metropolitan Police as a neighbour) in 2007. The huge pillarless room has a ‘news hub’ at its centre, with nine section heads with their editorial and production teams – plus an additional news production ‘spoke’ – radiating from it. These are (clockwise from the ‘12 o’clock’ position): features; sport; business; international news; news/politics; news production; pictures; design; and digital. The digital ‘spoke’ is primarily focussed on technical production of the online site, with content mainly generated in the different sections.
Green says an online operation which delivers text, images and video via internet, mobile, podcasts and vodcasts has been an integral part of the ‘Telegraph’ for the past five years. Early efforts made a loss, but the operation had been profitable before being taken in as “part of the business”, contributing £12-14 million a year.
Although the ‘Telegraph’ was early into online publishing, Green attributes the website’s success not so much to what has been spent on it, as to how the business has been organised around it.
Technology is based on DTI’s ContentPublisher, web publishing and advertising solutions and centred on a high-performance Caché object-oriented database. This was an evolution from the integrated editorial and advertising technology already in use, leading to the single ‘total content management’ system which integrates into the newsroom.
Green is enthusiastic about the conditions, which he says, are still pretty much at the forefront of technology.
Large projection screens show what’s happening around the world ... and also, what items on the telegraph.co.uk website are attracting the most attention.
Everyone has two screens on their desk, enabling them to watch TV, listen to radio and monitor output while they work; there’s IP telephony, and outside this ‘protected’ area, additional internet-connected computers in a lobby area allow journalists to run other software and ‘mix it’ with the less safe elements of the World Wide Web. All of this has helped the group bring young staff with news ideas, enthusiasm and a willingness to “take risks” to the team.
“You do need enablers – perhaps a few mavericks – so long as they are balanced by people who are more risk-averse,” says Green, who joined TMG seven years ago from a role as operations director at the at the ‘International Herald-Tribune’.
One of his first tasks was to oversee the introduction of the original DTI system combining editorial, advertising and newspaper planning functions, one of the first to do so within a single suite. “We were the first in the UK to have all three elements, and this brought huge benefits from a business perspective,” he says.
Workflows were customised to suit UK operation, online integrated with the move to Victoria, and Green says the next upgrade is likely to make the interaction between advertising and editorial easier, when funds are available. (TMG is estimated to have spent £20 million ($A33 million) on its IT technology in the last four years.)
Operating in a highly-competitive environment, the broadsheet ‘Daily Telegraph’ is still the most successful of Britain’s quality national dailies. Competitors include the News International-owned ‘The Times’ (now a tabloid) and the ‘Guardian’, which claims circulation gains as a result of its move to the Berliner short-broadsheet format.
All three are extremely active online, and Green says the telegraph.co.uk brand links what is in effect a set of interconnected sites covering news and advertising. There also areas which leverage the brand in marketing insurance, holidays and ‘shop’ items.
Commercials, as well as vodcasts and podcasts are produced inhouse, and the newsroom is flanked by audio and video studios, including one from which ‘Telegraph’ commentators do live links to free-to-air TV news programmes. There is also a mixing suite based on directly-sourced systems and software, where the four staff moved from print-based picture processing roles to learn camera, lighting, editing, writing and storyboarding for video.
Green admits with hindsight he might now make some changes, but says the system works well and is cost-effective. Having cut their teeth on editorial presentations, the team have now moved into the commercial area, and a first TV commercial – a 30-second ad promoting holidays in India – has just been produced.
“These things don’t happen overnight, but we have produced more than 60 video ads for internet screening. The idea has been to make it easier for advertisers,” says Green, adding that it is an area in which TMG can easily compete. Advertisers including Toyota have come back for more, so he says, “we must be doing something right”.
Online statistics put the news website in the UK’s top 30 and suggest one in 300 of all the internet users in the world visit it (*source alexa.com) – up 27 per cent on three months ago – while the 801,782 (ABC September) net sale of its weekday print edition is more than holding its own in a depressed market.
All of which indicates that while TMG shares the concerns of almost every other global newspaper publisher over print profits and online monetisation, its advanced newsroom integration and technology is delivering results.
Mobile Insights... and a chance to see inside
Insights into the Telegraph's mobile strategy were offered to delegates by Maani Safa, head of mobile, at WAN-Ifra's World Digital Publishing Conference in Barcelona last November.“Every year someone says this is the year of the mobile and somehow it never is, but I’m going to say now that this is the Telegraph Media Group year of the mobile... At least none of you can argue with that”.
Safa began with a cheeky grin, but his presentation about the Telegraph’s mobile achievements gave weight to his assertion. In a short journey through time, he revisited the mobile news application of two years ago, demonstrating the number of clicks it took to arrive at what was ultimately a very limited amount of content.
Then he jumped to the current application where there is full (personalised) content, device detection, better navigation, and perhaps most importantly there are banner adverts, pre-roll video ads, and tracking of level of engagement and time spent.
Safa told of lessons learnt on the way. Of the fact, for example, that sponsors competed to brand the application but often didn’t capitalise on it, for example, with a logo that was clickable but didn’t go to a mobile-specific page. “They said there’s no need for a microsite because it’s a brand campaign and nobody is going to click on the logo. There was a 29 per cent clickthrough rate and it went to a Flash banner on their home page which showed up as nothing on the phone – a waste of time.”
The response was to shift to three levels of sponsorship (bronze, silver, gold) with the Telegraph creating microsites and content behind sponsors’ logos. One year and 250,000 downloads later, the application was well into break-even and has been followed by a Formula 1 application and a version 2.0 of the app. According to Safa, the biggest single change for that will be that “next week I expect the iPhone experience to be better than that on the desktop.”
Report Steve Shipside for WAN-Ifra
Want to see inside? WAN-Ifra’s Newsroom Summit in London in April is being preceded by a visit to Telegraph Media. Publishing on smartphones, paid content on digital, multi-title newsrooms, social media and audience engagement, and building new print audiences are among the topics being tackled at the 9th International Newsroom Summit from April 21-22. Details are at www.ifra.com/newsroomsummit
The visit to the Telegraph is part of a one-day workshop on editorial management and reorganisation.