1. Should Online mirror Newsprint?
I wanted to just quickly set the scene with the latest audience figures for digital news sources in Australia.
Three quarters of Australians are now regular visitors (at least monthly) to domestic news websites according to Nielsen
That’s up from half of Australians 18 months ago.
Online news in Australia has a similar penetration to the US, which suggests that the US circ slides are not the result of putting it all up for free online because that would have caused similarly dramatic falls here...
If you extrapolate from that, the promised broadband rollout won’t provoke a sudden circ collapse in Australia... The US circ slides are more to do with what we heard about yesterday from Juan Senor and Brian Tierney yesterday.
So mirroring your newspaper online shouldn’t necessarily cause a decline in newsprint sales, particularly when you consider the growth in daily online news readership in Australia... now about 8 per cent of Australian read a local online news site every day, up from about 5 per cent 18 months ago.
The question shouldn’t be should your website mirror your newspaper, it really should be should your digital strategy mirror your newsprint strategy.
Not least of all because you need to be taking your mobile phone strategy seriously if you’re not already.
I don’t have figures for how many Australians are news on their mobiles, but I can share with you some pretty amazing numbers from NEWS.com.au.
NEWS.com.au doesn’t have a newsprint edition so in fact the question for us as we were building our first mobile and iPhone sites over the past year was “should our mobile site mirror our website”.

2. Should Mobile mirror Web?
July
August
m.NEWS.com.au
96,759
101,451
iPhone.news.com.au
23,640
52,641
TOTAL
120,399
154,092 .
I don’t have figures for how many Australians are news on their mobiles, but I can share with you some pretty amazing numbers from NEWS.com.au.
NEWS.com.au doesn’t have a newsprint edition so in fact the question for us as we were building our first mobile and iPhone sites over the past year was “should our mobile site mirror our website”.
Growth of five per cent in standard mobiles
Growth of more than 100 per cent in iphones accessing our iphone optimised site
iPhone has gone from nothing to a third of our mobile traffic in six weeks...
More interestingly, the peak time for accessing from mobile phones is between 7am and 9am – so these are commuters...
So shd your mobile strategy mirror yr Web? I think what Juan woudl say the answer is no– you need to capture your audeince on the mobile whie commuting, onthe computer while at work and maybe with a lifestyle-oriented news magazine product in the evening.

3. Should Online mirror Newsprint?
TWO – Should you pursue the same positioning/tone/image/audience online?
SMH has sustained criticism mainly from journalists and media commentators... in my experience there were very few complaints from the public while I was there.
Never any strategy at the Herald to run a racier website.. it’s just that the online news editor – like all online editors –has the advantage of real-time data telling him what stories are rating and what aren’t, and he responds accordingly ...
I think newsprint editors know the same thing instinctively but when you’re sitting in front of a computer watching people click or not click on a story it’s a lot harder to let a dull-but-worthy yarn sit at the top of the home page.
I think , if anything, the SMH.com.au’s racier style has enabled it to talk to an audience who otherwise wouldn;t pick up the paper.. It’s the number one newspaper site ....and ... From what I can see, advertisers still regard the SMH online and off as the best place to go after Abs.
Given the opportunity to use a new technology to expand into new markets, why wouldn’t a newspaper publisher want to do that?
There are plenty of examples of companies using the same brand to tap different segments...
The Holden Barina co-exists with the Holden Commodore
Hahn Light sells next to Hahn Premium
2020 and one-dayers are on the same schedule as test matches
Judge it on a case by case basis... The Australian owned the top end of town in newsprint and it was an easy decision to use its brand to attract that market online...
But if you’re a newspaper that traditionally served a blue collar market, how are you going to connect with an audience that’s behind a cash register or on a building site or driving round town in a van?
So if you’re the Telegraph you might realise you have to suddenly go for a white collar market online and in fact that Tele has been very clever – going for bored office workers with an exciting, colourful site.