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The Future Of The Press

The Future Of The Press

Stuart Taylor As commercial director at Guardian Newspapers Ltd, Stuart Taylor is responsible for ensuring the success in the advertising community of future format changes for the Guardian and the Observer. Here, ahead of MediaTel Group’s National Newspaper Seminar, he discusses how GNL is keeping up with the ever-evolving press…

Strong newspaper brands will exploit the opportunities emerging with new technology and changing social behaviour, and Guardian Newspapers Ltd is a prime example of a constantly changing media business at the forefront of innovation and product development. At the heart of our success are high quality editorial products and successful brands, which we are developing in a variety of ways.

Last year we took the unprecedented step of launching the first full-colour national newspaper in the Berliner format, marking a significant long-term investment in both the Guardian and the Observer, printing quality newspapers to the very highest standards, offering readers and advertisers better designed, better edited and better produced papers. The response has been phenomenal, with both papers winning numerous awards for journalism, design, and photography.

Sales increased immediately and now nine months later the Guardian is showing an increase of 5% or almost 20,000 copies year on year. While the Observer sales have increased by almost 30,000 copies – the highest percentage increase in the entire newspaper market, daily or Sunday.

GNL was quick to spot the potential of online and launched Guardian Unlimited in 1999. The site was recently voted the ‘Best Newspaper on the Web in the World’ for the second year running at the 2006 Webby Awards, and in June saw traffic leap nearly 30% year on year to 137 million page impressions and more than 12 million users.

The web has been a massively liberating force for newspapers as millions access their content in new and engaging ways, allowing some papers to consider themselves global brands.

GNL recognises that the needs of readers and advertisers are changing. The boundaries between platforms, channels, content and communication are blurring and this is being driven by connectivity. Users want to consume our content and interact with us in different ways, from suggesting travel tips on the ‘Been There’ section of the travel site to contributing to the Guardian Blog, ‘Comment is Free’, to offering an opinion on our recent World Cup performance.

High quality, trusted content brands are perfectly positioned to work with advertisers on engagement strategies, and a diverse portfolio of channels like mobile, web, print, SMS, events and retail allow a deeper level of communication, which is more effective than straight ads.

GNL continues to invest in new ways for our users to access our content in ways that suit their changing needs. Recently we announced our ‘webfirst’ initiative – the first time that a British national newspaper has taken main elements of its news output, in this case foreign and city news, and put them on the web first.

This gives writers greater scope to write more often and at greater length and allows foreign journalists who are working in different time zones to break news as it happens. It widens and deepens our online coverage and our desire to provide news to our rapidly expanding global readership while still retaining our commitment to quality journalism.

These benefits reflect on the Guardian brand as a whole. Increasing our reputation for breaking stories and staying ahead of the competition, and helping us to draw readers and advertisers to our products.

Our ambition is to ensure that the Guardian‘s distinctive, independent content is available in a variety of formats throughout the day, meeting the changing needs of our online users and readers.

This is characterised by the impending launch of G24, a new, free, ‘print and read’ service featuring Guardian Unlimited news content updated every 15 minutes. Users can download an 8-12 page A4 PDF featuring the latest news, selecting from any or all of five news-streams: top stories, international, economics, sport and media.

G24 is part of our commitment to building new platforms for our quality journalism and we anticipate it will appeal to a lunchtime and evening commuter market wanting a live print-based update.

So I believe newspapers are well placed to take advantage of new technology and changing social behaviour and will soon be seen as multi-play brands. Trusted content brands will thrive and this is good for both users and advertisers.

NewsLine will have full coverage of MediaTel Group’s latest seminar from Thursday afternoon…

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