For those of you not in the media know, Northcliffe dominates our local print media. This giant of news is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT). Northcliffe papers are centre right leaning and follow a tried and tested formula. Paul Dacre, the Editor of the Daily Mail, has been extremely successful in gauging the mood of middle England and has a strong sense of the power of a human interest story. He is very skilled at taking a national trend or news story and looking at it from a Daily Mail reader's perspective. If M&S is doing well again, then a selection of Daily Mail readers will be in a feature wearing their latest fashions.

Much of the Northcliffe press do the same and human interest stories local to their readership are the mainstay of the Bristol Evening Post, for example.

The main competition for Northcliffe is the Trinty Mirror Group which also owns vast swathes of regional press in Wales, Midlands, North West, North East and the South. It is the largest provider of news in Wales with the Western Mail and South Wales Echo and the Trinity Mirror also holds the Birmingham Post and Mail and the Liverpool Echo & Daily Post - just a few of their 60 titles in the North West and North Wales.

Northcliffe on the other hand dominates the South West press, controlling the Bristol Evening Post, Bristol Observer, Western Daily Press, Venue, Gloucester Echo & Citizen, Bath Chronicle, Western Morning News, Exeter Express & Echo, Plymouth Herald, West Briton, The Cornishman and Western Gazette to name but a few. The largest regional that they control is the Leicester Mercury with a circulation of 73,634 (Newspaper Society 2006 ABC). Locally, the Bristol Evening Post is holding on to a respectable 53,826 readers, and this year won South West Daily Newspaper of the Year. More recently the Bath Chronicle announced plans to go to a weekly reflecting its struggle for readers with one of the smallest regional circualtion of only 12,363 will now switch to a weekly, in order to "focus on its online offering." The trend towards an online focus seems to be the case across the board and this is reflected in the fact the that Associated Newspapers' ThisIs network of regional newspaper sites has seen a 63% increase in page views year on year.

Northcliffe has beefed up their online offering with RSS newsfeeds, pod and vodcasts. They offer a rolling news video on national headlines and breaking news. Western Daily Press and Bristol Evening Post readers are even treated to a news summary video and overview by members of the Newsdesk, which include Cathy Ellis, the News Editor of the Western Daily Press.  So far, however, there has been a reluctance to produce an editor's blog in many of the Northcliffe newspapers.

I certainly believe that, just like the Editor's Comment in the Bristol Evening Post, this would be a perfect way for editors to re-engage with their readership and enhance online interest and therefore advertising opportunities.

One reason that they have not gone down this route is the bickering of Trinty Mirror editors on their in- house rival's blogs. They have been blogging for a few months now but many a "troll" (individual who causes mischief and argument on a blog) has turned out to be competing Trinity Group editor!

Author - Matt Anderson

 

 

 

After four years of troubled beta testing for the BBC iPlayer, the Beeb could be forgiven for thinking that the situation could not get any worse. It now has: the techies are grumbling at ever lengthening bug lists and the ISPs are wading in regarding the BBC iPlayer’s insatiable appetite for bandwidth. However, if the BBC keeps a clear head and focuses on content rather than whizzy forms of delivery, I am sure that quality content will keep the BBC iPlayer on everyone’s desktop.

The BBC iPlayer's latest controversy is with the main internet service providers regarding the huge web resources the player needs. The BBC iPlayer uses peer-to-peer technology, which allows bits of content to be downloaded from other users, at speeds of up to 300M-bytes of data per hour! My feeling is that this sort of bandwidth should be fine for a limited audience. Besides if we are already consuming a fair whack of bandwidth for YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, surely the ISPs can't blame the BBC iPlayer on its own, as the sole threat to bandwidth infrastructure?

If you stand back and think about the situation, this is not so much an IT oversight for yet another poorly executed public sector IT project, more of an extremely jumpy cable and internet service provider market, trying to protect their own online content. The cable and TV giants Virgin and Sky have their own "on demand" TV services that are competition. It seems that the big media giants are banging their chests to try and put off the BBC from entering web TV.

Yes, there have been teething problems, which I will leave the web designers and IT professionals to analyse, but I will reiterate that despite these issues 120,000 people have already downloaded the player and this is with a really small catalogue of content!

Now here comes the real threat from the BBC. To dominate online communications, as I always tell our clients, the popularity of blogs, podcasts and videocasts comes down to quality of content, pure and simple.

Compared to Sky and Virgin who have superior delivery infrastructure, i.e. they are also ISPs, the BBC is the 500lb gorilla in the room in comparison when competing on content for online TV. The Beeb’s back catalogue and quality of programming is second to none, worldwide.

Following a recent speech from Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, it seems that their long term strategy will be to incorporate the Open Archive project into the BBC iPlayer. The Open Archive Project is the BBC plan to make its archive of all audio-visual content available to the public for viewing and research purposes on a trial basis started in March 2007, with the aim of providing a full service from Spring 2008.

Imagine the response from Joe Public if you could download (using the BBC iPlayer) the entire series of Walking with Dinosaurs, East Enders or Casualty? Clearly even antique buffs will find every Antiques road show ever filmed, as a hugely valuable resource. The possibilities and appeal are endless. Especially if the BBC can sort out copyright issues and distribute the player to a worldwide audience, not just the UK that it is now! I am sure that the growing expert community would gladly pay for access to BBC content online!

Clearly the end game is looking strong for the Beeb, but as there are so many problems with the player this may take some time.... For the record the Montage team tried to get the player going and had so many various problems and snags regarding MS Media player upgrades, virus and firewall software settings that we gave up! The library interface looks great and there is loads of great content on there already, just a shame it’s a real pain to get to it....