Tag Archives: the long tail

Preston Returns: Day 2

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What a brill day!

I have learnt so much about marketing and, once again, had the chance to speak to some very intelligent people about the future of journalism. Many of those people are still downstairs in the Holiday Inn bar, so I will only be giving a quick summary and then will be down to join them!

The start of the day was going over some of the basics of marketing theory, which interestingly concluded that if our readers don’t trust us as a brand then we have no product. This, of course, rang true with me as I have been banging on about the trust lark for some time.

The afternoon was a talk to our group from Karen Swan, marketing head for Trinity Mirror Regionals. She introduced us to a whole host of interesting tools that can be used to gather stats about our audience – both online and in print. It has certainly convinced me I need to talk to our marketing department more.

Then we had the Journalism Leaders Forum with a panel that included Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. He was interesting but the other panellists that spoke after him… well I’ll leave it for you to decide as I streamed the whole thing on Bambuser.

I get annoyed when people suggest that the only people who can deliver news to the public are newspaper journalists. I believe that is an arrogance based upon fear.

So cross was I, I tweeted a link to a quote taken from the chair of the US southern newspapers association in 1933 on the rise of radio:

The newspapers of the country, through their own trained representatives and through the respective news organizations are the only ones equipped to do an honest and accurate job of news reporting.

This was then quoted to the panel by Markmedia who, it appears, was even more disgruntled with the discussion than I was!

Back to Preston…

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Preston Skyline

Well first of all, apologies. One thing that seems to happen when you launch a network of over 30 blogs (here, here and here, if you’re wondering) is that, at the end of the day, you are not overly keen on blogging for yourself.

That is, however, remiss of me as I have got so much from this blog and it is very unfair to turn my back on it when the going gets a little busier.

So today, the day I arrive for the latest installment of the Journalism Leaders Course in Preston, I thought I’d give this little corner of cyberspace a little bit of TLC.

So I am sitting in my hotel room admiring the now infamous view of the Preston bus station/car park. I will, however, refrain from taking another picture to avoid the indignance of one of my north-west colleagues. (I have, instead, posted a luverly pic of the Preston skyline. In’t it nice!)

This is the last time I will see most of fellow coursemates. Ben and I (the Birmingham contingent) joined the course mid-way through. I imagine (although I’m not sure) that we will have one more module to go through around September time. But for the others, this will be it. It’s a shame – the group is so bright and I’ve learnt so much from them.

This part of the course is going to be on marketing. I’m not sure exactly how it will progress but, from the online seminars that we’ve had so far, I’m assuming it will question how well journalists know their readers and whether our infamous misrust of the marketing department may actually be to the detriment of our newspapers.

On Tuesday we will also have the Journalism Leaders Forum which will ask why isn’t the explosion of digital media translating into increased revenues for mainstream media companies. I suspect the answer has something to do with not owning the platforms by which the media is distributed and dilution of the market. But I will be interested to hear what others think.

Speakers include Chris Anderson of ‘The Long Tail’, Anton Grutzmacher of Hitwise, Peter Kirwan of the Press Gazette’s Media Money and Rick Waghorn of www.myfootballwriter.com.

As always I will try (and probably fail) to blog about it all as I go along.