twopointouch

Mark Glaser offers a great summary of a new report about the online offerings of America’s top 100 newspapers produced by the Bivings Group, a Washington PR company. The full report is available for download here (PDF file) and offers an insight into the ways the papers have, and haven’t, embraced Web 2.0 technologies.

Rather than mimic Mark’s excellent digest, I thought I’d just comment on one part of the report, since it happens to be something I’m doing other work on at the moment, video and podcasts.

While newspaper websites have often been treated as an easy cut-and-paste job from the daily print paper in the past, times are changing as publishers switch on to the idea that a large part of their readership and ad revenue comes from the internet. Embellishing their stock-in-trade, words, with other media has become the norm. The majority of the top newspapers offer video clips alongside stories:

On the other hand, podcasting remains a minority activity, with the top-selling papers far more likely to offer an audio download than the lower half of the table:

Source: The Use of the Internet By America’s Newspapers, The Bivings Group, August 1 2006

What’s all this about? Podcasts are considerably easier to produce than videos, and take a fraction of the time. What’s more, they cost next-to-nothing to make. So why are the newspapers so much less interested in the audio format?

I’d offer four explanations.

(a) Newspapers are not broadcasters. While they offer video clips, they don’t produce these themselves: they buy them in from local TV stations and syndication agencies. Let’s assume that syndicated video content costs much the same as audio content. Of course, they’re going to go for video.

(b) Newspaper journalists are not (typically) broadcasters. They haven’t been trained in public speaking or working with a camera. If they do podcasts, then they’ll have to speak to the readership. They won’t be comfortable doing that, in a lot of cases. Perhaps, in many cases, they won’t be any good at it. That won’t be good for the paper.

(c) Video clips keep readers on the page. The newspapers’ revenue model is display advertising. If you produce a podcast of the days’ headlines, then readers don’t even have to visit the site to download it, which won’t do their revenues much good. The key advantage of podcasts is that you can listen where and when you please, but this doesn’t fit the business of newspaper websites. Monetising internet audio remains an industry-wide issue, with most major podcasts plumping for a sponsorship model.

(d) It’s sometimes hard to remember, but podcasting is still a very new activity. The word only gained any currency in 2004. Mainstream audiences (e.g. the audience of a newspaper website) will be considerably less likely to be interested, or to own a portable MP3 player, than the audiences of technology websites. On the other hand, anyone can click the play button under a video window.