UK Site Changes Point to Divergent Strategies
Important Details: Sky News’ beta website recently launched, showing how the UK’s leading operator of digital pay TV and a major news/sports/entertainment broadcaster is fully embracing the next generation web experience. The new website is graphic rich, devoting much of the top of the page to “Latest News”, with five rolling top stories, each offered with a large photo and headline. “Latest News in Pictures” and “Latest News in Video” offer parallel visual approaches to story selection. As London deals with teenage violence, the “Editor’s Pick” is a Google-map fronted feature.
Beyond the visual presence, the site has gone into deeper territory — and territory usually trod by print companies. It has announced a partnership with US-based DayLife. DayLife produces context-heavy topics pages for major stories on the site. On Wednesday, the day of the shootings outside the US consulate in Istanbul, the DayLife-for-SkyNews “Turkey in Depth” treatment included Wikipedia-supplied background, wire-service supplied photo gallery, outside-link-based, non-Sky stories, a map and other context. Sky, owned by News Corporation, also announced its partnership with US-based Pluck, using its SiteLife suite to power reader commenting, blogs and photo/video submissions.
A comparison to the SkyNews’ current site shows the striking difference, as the new visual-heavy approach replaces a more newspaper-like look. “We aim to capitalise on Sky News online’s key strengths, from strong video content to quality journalism, an innovative use of graphics to a loyal online community,” said Steve Bennedik, editor of Sky News networked media. “The features we are introducing to personalise the site are just the start of a process aimed at allowing our users to tailor sky.com/news to suit all their online needs.”
Also announced last week was the departure of Andy Hart, the head of Associated Northcliffe Digital, DMGT‘s digital arm. Hart had led the digital efforts of the company, the largest newspaper group in UK, for six years. The abrupt departure follows a reorganization of the digital business last fall, which decentralized it, giving more power back to individual publishers. In addition, the company has announced a greater focus on the three top performing listings categories — recruitment, real estate and automobiles — as the UK economy has started to turn down quickly, putting those traditional print-based revenues at greater risk.
“As AND prepares itself for the next phase of growth, focusing on jobs, property and cars including further expansion into international markets, the company will be making some organisational changes, as a result of which Andy and Associated have mutually agreed to part company,” the company said in a statement. “Andy will therefore be leaving with immediate effect.”
Implications: As print-based companies continue to struggle with their structures and try defensively to hold onto to fading classified revenues, TV-based companies are waking up from their semi-slumber and fully embracing the wonder of Web 2.0. Outsell believes that TV-centric companies are becoming major new competition for newspaper players that have long been ahead of them online. At this point, for instance, Sky claims about three-quarters of the audience of DMGT, but that gap can be made up quickly online.
TV companies are using the power of pictures, their strength, and the innovative ones are moving to quickly partner with companies like Pluck and DayLife to add social networking and deeper context to their sites quickly and with relatively small staff investment. That’s a warning to print-based companies that they’ve got to embrace similar thinking. Web users are increasingly heavy consumers of video and of interactivity in many forms.
It’s notable that Telegraph.co.uk recently topped the UK’s listings of top news sites. It has been one of the most aggressive in combining print and digital production and in ramping up news video through “Telegraph TV”, as noted in a recent Outsell report (Playing the News Video Revolution, Feb. 15, 2008). Some newspaper sites — the Telegraph, the Washington Post, Chron.com (in Houston) and others are getting it. All need to continue to ramp up their embrace the tools of today before new competition takes away their prime growth business.