Indian media houses told to go digital before fall in readership

Newsroom Summit on the second day of WAN-IFRA Conference

At the Newsroom Summit on the second day of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers- IFRA Conference here on Wednesday, the focus was on audience-centric news organisations.

“We don't have to change our journalism [when going digital], we just have to add elements to the way we do things,” said Raju Narisetti, managing editor, Washington Post . Tracing the path that the Post took to establish a strong presence online, he said a digital package must have various elements and good display in order to be picked by readers.

The trick is also to find multiple hooks in every story that could be exploited for the Web, and links provided to these stories. A good print article could become a really boring Web story, Mr. Narisetti said. Efforts have to be put in to make all stories ‘ready for the Web' and engage the reader.

The

Post also explored open source tools to enhance daily stories, increased its social outreach to spark engagement with the readers, and conversation on the site, embraced Facebook and Twitter, and put out more and more news alerts and breaking news.

This seemed to work. The number of readers and visits grew at a record pace from 2007; however, people were not necessarily staying for long. With extensive changes, this trend could be reversed, and readers not only kept coming back, but metrics showed that they were spending more time on the site.

His suggestion to Indian media houses was to initiate the process of going digital even when they had a comfortable circulation base, even before they were forced to bring in changes by falling print readership.

Lin Neumann, from Jakarta Globe , outlined the young newspaper's social media strategy to woo readers and maximise their reach. The paper decided to exploit the fact that Indonesia is currently the number two nation in the world for Facebook, with over 35 million users, and the sixth-largest country using Twitter. Also, there was a high penetration of mobile devices in the country.

Initially, however, the basic website was set up and the Facebook page added as an afterthought. The Web editor started tweeting stories, mainly as a way to get some interactivity while they waited to set up a better web experience, Mr. Neumann said. This was followed up by some hard campaigning among the youth. This resulted in huge numbers, with over 1.5 lakh fans on the Facebook page, and over 58,000 followers on Twitter. Santhosh Jacob George, senior online content co-ordinator, Malayala Manorama, explained the group's attempt to go hyper local, and the various components of the award-winning ‘Ente Naadu' project.