Last week the Boston Globe officially instituted some major changes to their online properties. Following in the footsteps of The Wall Street Journal and their parent company, The New York Times, the Boston Globe launched a subscription-only site, BostonGlobe.com, which will be available in addition to the already existing and free, Boston.com.
BostonGlobe.com was officially launched in September, but the subscription fee is taking affect this month. To access the content on BostonGlobe.com moving forward, readers must pay $3.99 per week. However, people that already subscribe to the print edition will receive access to BostonGlobe.com without any additional cost.
As you can guess, BostonGlobe.com is designed to mirror the print edition, and according to the press release, it will be the only site to provide access to the full range and depth of the Boston Globe’s journalism, while also offering video, photo galleries and breaking news throughout the day. Another bonus and big selling point for subscribers is that it will also be optimized for reading on a tablet, smartphone and PC.
So what are the differences between Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com? Boston Globe spokesperson Bob Powers explained this in an email to RaceTalk: “We are separating the brands to appeal to different audiences and so the two sites will have major distinctions in content and layout. There will, however, be some shared content. For instance the sports site on Boston.com will contain most of the sports content from BostonGlobe.com. Boston.com will also have five stories per day from the Globe. Boston.com will accent interaction and things to do, but will also be a general news site.”
For the loyal Boston Globe readers that have received the print edition on their doorstep for decades, BostonGlobe.com should convince them the move to digital isn’t bad. With the latest content throughout the day, rich multimedia and sharing options, this site could be reason alone to buy a tablet.
A big question we had following this news is what these change means for Boston Globe employees, who in the summer of 2009 made major concessions to avoid being shutdown by the New York Times Co. (see our interview with Boston Globe reporter Sean P. Murphy). According to Powers, the same newsroom will create the content for both BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com. However, each site will have a separate editor, and the reporters will report to the appropriate editor for each particular story.
Powers also added that there will be separate Twitter handles and Facebook pages for each site, which tells us that the Boston Globe will continue to hold social media in high importance.
What do you think of the Boston Globe’s new subscription-only site? Will you subscribe to BostonGlobe.com?
Everyone knows that the media industry has experienced widespread changes during the past few years. As a result of these changes (particularly the creation of a 24/7 real-time news cycle) many media outlets have changed the way they work with businesses and PR companies.
There have been a few outlets that have been the driving forces of these changes, most notably TechCrunch, which has done its best to make the embargo extinct. Unfortunately, TechCrunch often takes on the role of the the schoolyard bully, blasting theentirePRindustry. That is why I want to take a moment to call your attention to Wade Roush, the chief corespondent at Xconomy.
I’ve worked with Wade many times in the past when he was located in the Boston area (he’s now in San Francisco) and each time he was an absolute pleasure to work with (I also did a Q&A with him for RaceTalk, which you can view here). After (what I believe to be) years of frustration around broken embargoes, Wade faced the music on May 6 and declared the embargo dead (for him). As TechCrunch did, Wade wrote a story about why he’s no longer going to work with embargoes. However, instead of attacking an entire industry while making this announcement, Wade provided reasoning, explanations and advice.
On July 29 Wade wrote another story related to PR, this time focused on how he decides which stories to write about. In this three page article, Wade explains the various ways that he finds story ideas, the types of articles that he wants to write and the best ways to approach him in order to maximize everyone’s time. Once again, the article was informative and respectful, and it was clear that Wade spent a great deal of time trying to educate and help the PR people that he currently works with and may work with in the future.
The purpose of this post is not only to share Wade’s tips and advice, so PR people can work well with him and other reporters and bloggers. I also want to take a moment and point out how Wade is a shining example of a great media person to work with. He is thoughtful, respectful, considerate, and most importantly, a great journalist.
Apparently, the advertising department at the Miami Herald is in denial.
This morning, underneath an article about the Miami Heat loss and elimination from the NBA playoffs, the Miami Herald ran a half page advertisement for Miami Heat championship gear. “CONGRATULATIONS MIAMI,” shouts the ad in bold capital letters.
Not only did the heat lose last night – but even if they won Sunday night’s game, they would have to win a game 7 as well in order to be crowned the champs. Ops!
Late last night, much of the digitally connected and cable-wired world learned of the death of Osama Bin Laden. The nation learned through Facebook, Twitter, text messages, CNN, NBC, and pretty much any medium that required some form of electricity. Many of us were engaged on multiple platforms simultaneously, tweeting the President’s remarks as we tuned in to our news stations of choice.
In addition to retweets, emotional reactions and smart-alecky remarks, I noticed another sentiment in my feeds: “I wonder how many editors are ripping up the front pages of tomorrow’s paper at this very moment.” I admit, I was among the curious. However, I figured that the death of the mastermind behind 9/11 was newsworthy enough for those in journalism to pull a frenzied all-nighter.
Either my qualifications for what constitutes “Stop the presses!” are way off-base, or sometimes even the most breaking of news is no match for print media deadlines. While some publications such as The New York Times managed to keep up with the news, others, including USA Today and METRO, did not. Still others, namely The Wall Street Journal, decided not to waste trees, and printed copies with and without the headline news.
It’s not uncommon for me to read about news in Monday morning’s paper that I’d already heard about on Twitter Sunday afternoon, but this will be the first instance where my Tuesday morning paper will likely be featuring Sunday evening’s news. I’m curious to see if and how the editors will address the lag in news time.
Today the New York Times announced a new subscription model that will put a pay wall in front of a lot of its content. This is a big move for the newspaper industry, which has suffered as more and more people began canceling their newspaper subscriptions and getting their news online.
The New York Times will offer readers three different subscription. They all comes with access to NYTimes.com, and each option caters towards either smartphone users, tablet users, or people that use both devices. Additionally, people with print subscriptions will have access to all online and digital content. Details on the various subscription offerings can be found here.
This new model is great for the New York Times and should bring in a lot of additional revenue. It also seems like a fair system for readers, who can cancel their subscription at any time. However, other newspapers may not be able to follow the same road.
The New York Times is unique, because it is at the front of its industry in terms of content and coverage, Smaller newspapers that don’t have the same level or quantity of coverage likely won’t be able to entice readers to pay additional money to access their content online.
What do you think about this new model? Will you pay for additional access to the new York Times?
The Daily is not just Rupert Murdoch’s pet project – it’s going to be taken seriously. Jesse Angelo, editor-in-chief of The Daily, made this clear when sent around the following memo to his staff this week, clearly stating his expectations for the publication. He’s not going to let The Daily become another news organization that re-publicizes the same content as everyone else. His goal is to make The Daily different and unique, not substitutable. How refreshing!
Subject: The News
Folks, Egypt is over – time for us to get focused on covering America.
We need to get out there and start finding more compelling stories from around the country – not just scraping the web and the wires, but getting out on the ground and reporting. Find me an amazing human story at a trial the rest of the media is missing. Find me a school district where the battle over reform is being fought and tell the human tales. Find a town that is going to be unincorporated because it’s broke. Find me a story of corruption and malfeasance in a state capitol that no one has found. Find me something new, different, exclusive and awesome. Find me the oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota. Force the new White House press secretary to download The Daily for the first time because everyone at the gaggle is asking about a story we broke. Get in front of a story and make it ours – force the rest of the media to follow us.
It’s good stories that will keep people coming back to The Daily – we’ve assembled a crack news team, so let’s show the world what we can do.
The following excerpt is from Simon Hilliard in Racepoint’s UK office. You can follow Simon on Twitter at @simonhill.
There has a been a heck of a lot of discussion, analysis and comment since Monday when News Corporation announced official subscriber figures for the, relatively new, Times and Sunday Times websites.
A quick history: News Corps’ ever enigmatic head honcho Rupert Murdoch and associates got rather fed up with the freebie nature of providing news content online that has followed the rise of this here Internet. To deal with this, a paywall was erected around The Times and Sunday Times websites that halted Google and the like from crawling content and indexing it for any and all to find, and also required anyone wishing to view news online to pay for it – by either buying a day pass or subscribing.
Until now, the success of this has been something of a mystery for those in the media, advertising and PR lands. It was acknowledged from the off that the paywall would significantly reduce the number of visitors to the newspaper sites, but the trade off would be the quality of reader (and some cash). Since the walls went up in June we’ve waited, literally in the middle of our seats, to see what’s what. And now we know.
According to figures released by News Corp this week, the paper has “more than 105,000 customer sales to date”. That’s around 0.5 per cent of the 20 million unique monthly visits they had before the paywall. Or 0.25 per cent if you chop out all those paying for a day pass rather than a regular subscription…or 5 per cent of the 5 per cent paying vs free subscribers you generally need to make a ‘freemium’ model business work (not that they’re shooting for freemium). You know what, don’t get bogged down in the numbers.
The point is, there’s way less people clapping eyes on Times editorial than there used to be. But those that do are, one would assume, more engaged, dedicated readers. Times editor James Harding thinks so anyway, as he’s stated “We haven’t been cut off from the conversation, because the media works as a huge echo chamber and readers are commenting on our stories in a more engaging way.”
So what does this all mean for PRs? Let’s have a look:
This paid site will not take affect until the second half of 2011, but it could provide a solution for Boston’s largest newspaper. Globe reporter Robert Gavin had details on this news:
The Boston Globe next year will split its digital news brands into two distinct websites, keeping Boston.com free while establishing a subscription-only pay site, BostonGlobe.com, which will feature all the content produced by the newspaper’s journalists, publisher Christopher M. Mayer said today.
The change, scheduled to take place during the second half of 2011, is aimed at building an audience of paid subscribers online, a strategy that newspapers across the country increasingly are moving towards. With this approach, the company also aims to maintain high traffic to Boston.com, one of the nation’s largest regional news sites and a site that generates revenue from advertising.
While the Globe explained that Boston.com would remain similar to how it is now, BostonGlobe.com will feature content from the newspaper, and people subscribing to the newspaper will automatically have access to the paid site.
The Globe isn’t the first paper to try out this revenue model. The New Bedford Standard Time and Worcester Telegram & Gazette also have this model, and the New York Times has hinted at a paid site as well, Gavin reported. The key for these papers is to capitalize on advertising revenue from the paid sites. While subscription fees will help bring in some revenue, a successful advertising model is crucial for their long-term survival.
It will also be interesting to see who exactly subscribes to BostonGlobe.com are. The younger workforce has become very used to getting content online for free, and there are a lot of blogs and websites that supply plenty of interesting content and information. Will recent college grads be willing to pay for access to local news and journalism? My guess is no, and that BostonGlobe.com subscribers will be an older generation that is used to reading a physical newspaper.
Last night Racepoint Group hosted an event about social media and its return on investment (ROI). As social media continues to become a larger focal point in public relations and marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand how to articulate it’s value to clients.
Last night’s event centered around a panel discussion with three social media experts: Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Group, Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing for HubSpot.
After Larry Weber’s opening remarks, Qualman shared how he first dipped his toe into the digital space by sending a company-wide email instead of the standard hard copy memo. View his story here:
Volpe was up next and shared with the group the origins of his marketing career and the way tracking and reporting on ROI is evolving. Watch him provide tips here:
The evening was full of tremendous ideas and recommendations. The five big takeaways from the panel were:
1) Social media is not about technology. It’s about human interaction. It’s about sharing information and making connections. People who are intimidated by the technology aspect of engaging in social media should not view the applications as a hurdle. It’s simply the current mechanism to maintain relationships and reach out to new people.
2) When it comes to tracking social media, its important to focus not only on the quantitative (number of followers, number of re-postings) but also the qualitative. We need to take into account engagement and tone. Qualman said, “If social media is so trackable, we should just have robots running things. The human element is necessary here.”
3) Everyone and anyone can be a content creator, a publisher, a media property. As we shift away from traditional print and broadcast media, both we and our clients have the opportunity to get innovative and create and distribute our own content. Additionally, content creation should not be isolated to the PR and marketing staff. Volpe shared that, “50% of HubSpot employees have written posts for the HubSpot blog.”
4) Although much of PR and marketing is based in the written word, we need to start thinking more visually. We need to tell stories through pictures and videos. We need to make our content more authentic and dynamic.
5) On a personal level, Volpe stated, “The new resume is what comes up in Google when I type in your name.” As digital and social media continue to play an increasingly vital role in our PR and marketing efforts, we too have a digital and social persona, and that is now what employers are most interested in.
Thank you to Erik Qualman and Mike Volpe for joining us at Racepoint Group last night and providing such pragmatic, realistic, useful and inspiring guidance on the social media ROI frontier. Be sure to follow @equalman and @mvolpe on Twitter for real time updates on their social media adventures. You can also view all the live commentary during the event with the #smroi hashtag here.
On June 1, Brad Stone of the New York Times wrote an almost glowing review of the Pulse news reader on the iPad. A week later his parent company forced Apple to take the application off of iTunes because it allowed users to view New York Times Co. content (nytimes.com and boston.com) within the application. And with that, we have the first debate around monetizing content in the tablet-era.
In essence the New York Times Co. is objecting to Pulse creators (two Stanford graduate students) using the company’s RSS feed on the iPad. Something that has been done for years on all sorts of devices (i.e. Google Reader). The problem it seems in this case is the creators had been so successful with that app that it had risen to number one on the paid, iPad application store for some time and they’ve made more than $40,000 in doing so. Steve Jobs even praised the innovation of the application at Apple’s WWDC, before he received a letter from the Times Co. With their own FREE, iPad app, the Times Co. wants a piece of the pie.
However, while the Times Co. sticks with its current position, Kara Swisher, who sat down with the two creators of the app in the video above, notes in an update that they resubmitted Pulse yesterday without the Times’ RSS feed included and it is now on-sale again on the iTunes store. For the time being, anyways.
