Newspapers failing web 2.0 challenge

Newspapers need to find innovative ways to embrace web 2.0 - or accept certain doom, says CIO Ian Cohen.

Newspapers are facing the most fundamental period of change in their history. In many ways, until recently nothing much had changed in news delivery since the town crier wandered into the market square, rang his bell and shouted, 'Hear ye! Hear ye! - plague, death, taxation, fat-cat bankers and the worst recession in living memory… local vicar involved.'

In fact, there's a pretty compelling argument that all the publishing innovations to date have done little more than improve the way that so-called news owners disseminate their messages. Sure, more copies are distributed to more people in a more timely fashion but it's still fundamentally the same model with the news owner telling the humble reader what is news worthy.

Even the dawn of the commercial web in the late 1990s and early 2000s didn't really challenge the model - the web started out as just another way of distributing the news owner's perspective.

However web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, social networking and wikis are different - they are truly game-changing for publishing.

Web 2 .0 is all about connections, conversations and communities. These interactions can be 'one to one', 'one to many' and 'many to many' - and often grow exponentially. More importantly though, the technologies are simple and accessible - anyone can blog or use Facebook. The barriers to becoming a publisher are removed and, as a result, the readers or viewers are empowered - and now either report news faster than the news organisation or even create news themselves.

During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the earliest insights to what was happening on the ground came via Twitter. When a confused whale swam up the Thames in London, the first pictures on Sky News came from members of the public who captured the spectacle on their mobile phones. Interestingly, soon after that incident, Sky ran an advert that claimed their news channel had "millions of reporters bringing the news to your screens".

Today's young adults feel comfortable with web 2.0 tech and expect to get news from a variety of channels and sources. Moreover, they feel compelled to participate in news - commenting on it or reporting it themselves - and see traditional newspapers as increasingly irrelevant.

What's becoming clear is that the news is no longer just the content but also the community and connections that occur as a result.

At the recent Digital Britain summit in London, Sly Bailey, chief executive of Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror, said: "By creating gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by performing well on search engines like Google, we have eroded the value of news." She added that "by the absurd relentless chasing of unique user figures we are flag-waving our way out of business".

These comments make good sound bites but the response from most news organisations has been to just do more of the same. Most just build bigger and brasher websites and bend search engine optimisation (SEO) tools to get even more page views and monthly unique visitors.

Some will argue this is due, in part, to the ad agencies who are comfortable with old metrics, but it's also the responsibility of the publishers to signal the change.

If as a publisher your idea of engaging with your readers is a comments link at the end of a story, then you're missing the point.

Publishers need to actively stimulate new 'multi-way' conversations with and between readers based on content from a variety of sources - including users and even their competitors.

Great content will always be needed as the catalyst but now it can have a wider and deeper reach through web 2.0-enabled interactions. This becomes increasingly important with new devices such as the imminent large format version of Amazon's Kindle. They are creating a new digital reading experience that will further encourage reader interaction with content in ways never imagined back when we started putting ink on dead trees.

However, too many publishers still believe they can hold back the advancing tide. They are wrong and they have to change.

Ian Cohen is the managing director of The Simply Great Group and writer of The Accidental CIO blog. He is the former chief information officer of Associated Newspapers Ltd and has more than 25 years of IT and business experience in the media, financial services and technology sectors.