Bottom line and audience
Newspapers have
long had editorial staff whose role is to service commercial interests. Titles
ranging from ‘commercial editor’ to ‘special projects editor’ and the more
straightforward ‘advertising writer’, but now there is an expectation that the
traditional editorial leader will take a much more significant stance in the
commercial wellbeing of the title and business.
“Editors do need
to be more commercially savvy,” says Ian Carter, Editorial Director of Iliffe Media. He recalled
a meeting he had with a group of editors:
“I
was saying to them that they have to be aware that now more so than ever that
increasing your web audience has a direct impact on the bottom line. I was saying to them if you increase your
digital audience three-fold, which is quite easy from where they are now, that
means £400,000 to the bottom line, just through increased revenue. They have to
understand that and they can’t operate in isolation.”
Editors have
always been commercial, maintains Joy Yates, Editorial Director of JPIMedia in the North East who
says they understand private sector businesses and the need to make the bottom
line. However, to attract the commercial revenues “more and more we’re finding
that it’s the editorial route into some of these big players that really works,
so it’s all about collaboration”. And that ‘collaboration’ can take different
forms, as she explains:
“It’s
not every customer that is suited to a 15 x 4 [a quarter page display
advertisement] but they might be suited to an online piece of content which a
reader is not thinking is an advert. It’s just more interesting …so its
constantly going back to content being key and that’s one of the drivers that
we find. So, it’s working closer with our commercial friends but understanding
our place in it.”
Jeremy Clifford, Editor-in-Chief of JPIMedia, acknowledges
there is pressure to create content that’s going to attract advertising but
maintains it can be done in a positive way, explaining:
“If
you write a story which attracts a page view for you then that’s got a
commercial pressure with it, because then you’re going to be directed to say
‘right I want more of that content over there’ because I’m going to get more
page views which generate more revenue as a result of that. So that’s one of
the financial pressures which is a good pressure because you listen to your
audience and you monetise it that way.”
Marc Reeves, Marketplace publisher, Midlands &
Wales for Reach plc. says that the ultimate direct lever pulled
to influence the commercial success of the business is the scale of the
audience generated. Instant, contemporaneous metrics are available showing
audience engagement online and Reeves admits: “I’m held to account on those
numbers every single day, so that’s a new thing.” He further reflects:
“You
could say ‘well, that just replaces the old focus on circulation’. It does,
it’s really the same thing in a different guise with different economics
beneath it and I think on the journey to those editor/publisher roles, I think
a more sophisticated understanding of the commercial levers that everyone pulls
is probably more necessary.”
.
The rise of native advertising
Clifford agrees there is commercial pressure in terms of sponsored content and
invokes the ‘church and state’ concept too. “I think we’ve got to be really
careful and aware of those pressures and we need to still be cognisant of the
church and state so that we write content which is there because of
journalistic reasons. That said, I do
think there is relationship with commercial organisations that you have as long
as you clearly label it, I think that’s also okay as well,” he says.
Reeves thinks it’s important that journalists understand how the economics
work. “For too long we had that church and state where editorial just wrote the
stories and was quite antipathetic to the commercial side of things, which sort
of worked when we were a monopoly and the money was being delivered in lorries
every day,” he says.
There is an acknowledgment from Carter that they are quite far into the world
of native advertising which brings all kind of commercial awareness and
sensitivities. “They [editors] need to wear two hats, they need to be able to
wear a commercial hat but also know when to put those Chinese walls up and say,
just because my website is carrying a piece of promoted content about your
double glazing company we’re still going to be covering you when a house that
you’re working on burns down.”
But he denies the accusation ‘why are you doing disguised adverts
editorially?’. “We’re not. We have run editorials about local chip shop week
since the dawn of time and it’s just a new twist on that really.”
Yates recalls
that when she first started in the industry 30 years ago “it was commercial and
editorial and never the twain meet. That just can’t happen any more”.
Into the future
Helen Dalby, Audience & Content Director for
Reach in the North East thinks the commercial collaboration undertaken by
newsroom leaders will develop further in future. She says that it will become
increasingly important strategically that the focus as editors is on growing
and developing audiences in the ways that they can control. Expanding in her
theme, she said:
“We
need to use loyalty services such as apps and email newsletters and via a total
commitment to a good user experience online and to driving up engagement. The
rigours of search engine optimisation have meant that we’ve had to become very
disciplined at managing detailed seasonal publishing and republishing. Our
increasing commercial collaboration also means it’s important that we as a
newsroom are well planned, as good planning and communication gives our
colleagues in advertising departments the time they need to monetise the
audience opportunities we’re delivering.”
Reeves reflects
on the changes of the scale of the newspaper business, where numbers have
shrunk from 500 people in an organisation. “We are now down to a newsroom out
there with 50 people in it and that includes some commercial people so you
can’t have that demarcation anymore. Therefore, the better informed and
equipped people are to them make those decisions around the whole of the
business the better decisions those will be.”
There is also a
concern about the proliferation of primarily internet-based competition. Yates describes
the advent of the ‘bedroom journalist’:
“Everybody
can create content; everybody can pick up a smartphone and take video and post
it on any channels they want to or and anybody is a bedroom journalist. We can
all post every day on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. By doing that
you’re creating content so competition is really, really everywhere.”
One of the direct consequences of the drive
to become more commercially aware has been the transformation of
straightforward ‘editor’ roles into ‘creative content director’, ‘brand
editor’ and ‘audience editor’. Whether the world outside the media business has
any appreciation of the subtleties of these naming conventions is debateable,
but the biggest impact is the message sent to journalists that their vision and
scope has to be extended to appreciate that they work for a business that needs
to demonstrate it is receptive to commercial concerns.
The multiple
channels of the delivery, as outlined by Yates above, also make it important
that editorial leaders have a working knowledge of how these applications
operate and the advantages they bring to their business as well as the
beneficial impact for rival competitors.
Conclusion
Editorial leaders
tend, almost by definition, to be a confident breed. The individuals in this
study are no exception and by the very nature of their survival in tough times
have shown themselves to be astute and commercially aware, although Carter is
grateful for what he calls ‘the great stock in editorial freedom’ placed by his
company. “I suspect that may not be the case at some other companies where we
have seen very good, probably difficult, truculent editors leaving and
possibly, and I’m making big assumptions here, slightly more malleable people
are in key positions in some companies,” he said.
There is no
suggestion that editorial leaders today need to be ‘malleable’ but they do need
to be probably more commercially aware than their predecessors.
