The Evolving Newsroom

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few newspapers to keep some of its content behind a paywall online (meaning you have to subscribe to read some of the stories).

This policy bucks the trend of recent years to offer everything free online for fear that your readers will just go elsewhere if you don't. A fair policy given that daily news outlets have relatively few points of difference from one another and there's no scarcity of news online.

The WSJ has rather more points of difference, however, and it seems to be doing just fine. According to a report posted by Editor& Publisher, in the last year the WSJ has nearly doubled its user-base, with a 94% increase since June 2007. The site now reaches 16.2 million users.

"The site offers a mix of free and paid content. The Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance, opinion and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements are all available free.

"Even with a fee - print subscribers pay $49 a year for a web subscription - WSJ Online attracts more than one million subscribers and 10 million monthly unique visitors.

"In 2007, WSJ.com generated about $60 million in subscription revenue. To put this in perspective, making up that revenue in ad sales would require WSJ.com to increase traffic by more than 20 million unique monthly visitors."

The online consumption of newspapers has risen by 20% in the last year and by 100% over the last three years, according to research released at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference. Journalism.co.uk has the story:

The World Digital Media Trends report - collected by 71 research companies and covering 232 countries – also suggested a 13.77% rise in the number of newspaper websites in the world bringing the total to 4,500.

52% of readers who view newspaper websites spend the same amount of time reading newspapers, according to the stats; while 35% say the time they spend with either print or online newspapers has increased.

Figures presented for print circulation worldwide presented an equally positive picture.

The circulation of paid for print dailies rose by 2.98% last year with the total number of titles increasing by 27.22%.

573,235,00 paid and free newspapers are distributed every day and 1.75 billion people read a print edition a day.

Print circulation in China, India and Latin America also showed growth.

Roy Greenslade does a piece on research that confirms what we already know: fewer people are buying newspapers. But it also shows that fewer people are consuming news full stop.

Yes, a lot of people turning off the TV and ditching the paper are going online. But an awful lot are just getting on with their lives without being too bothered about catching a daily news package. The headlines are enough.

This is something I want to come back to a lot this year. I think it's the elephant in the conference room: People aren't interested in news. Is there anything we can do about that? Is it because of too much information so people are switching off, because people are tired of beatups and headlines that fail to deliver in the story below, too much personality and fluff and repetition and flashiness? Or is it something more than that?

In the same vein as Roy's blog post is this heartfelt piece in the Washington Post by veteran reporter David Simon.

He asks: "Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium - isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?"

Good question.

Foreign users outnumber domestic readers on UK news websites, according to research from comScore.

Media Bulletin reports that the Daily Mail has the highest proportion of overseas users, at 69%, while many others attract 50%-60% of their readers from abroad.

"Around 59% of the BBC's audience was international, with 27m of its 46m users residing outside the UK.

"The Telegraph drew 57% of its...users from outside the UK; Guardian Unlimited attracted an international audience of 56%; and Times Online had an overseas audience of 55%.

"The Independent had an equal split of domestic and international visitors among its 1.8m users, but The Sun's website was more popular with UK visitors, who account for 55% of its 6m user base.

"British Sky Broadcasting and ITV have a much lower international profile. Just 20% of BSkyB's 9.6m users were from outside the UK, as were 23% of ITV's 7.7m online audience.

Global appeal should be reassuring, although I gather sales execs balk at trying to convince local advertisers of its merits. I don't have figures to hand for NZ, but anecdotally I understand them to be similar. Can anyone point me to recent user figures for NZ news websites?