I’ve been interested in online news sites’ relationships with their international audience for some time. Over the years attitudes seem to have seesawed from inclusion to exclusion and back again.
Taking the London Times website as an example.
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Back in 1999, in contrast to their print edition, ‘World’ and ‘Home’ headlines had equal prominence.
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Then in May 2002 things changed, not only did they stop foregrounding foreign news but they also introduced subscription charges for overseas readers.
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Then in October 2004 the pendulum swung back again and subscription charges were lifted.
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I wanted to find out what was going on; not just at The Times but at a range of news websites. In conversations with the editors of publications like the Times Online and through analyzing quantitative reader data I’ve begun to find out.
The idea of globalisation is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the web and gives publishers the ability to serve audiences beyond the traditional physical and economic limits of distribution.
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Over the years there has been much discussion in the literature about this so-called “death-of-distance”, much of it predicting revolutionary changes:
Audiences are rapidly shifting from almost exclusively local to communities of interest that transcent geographic and political boundaries. Pavlik (1999)
Distance disappears. Geography ceases to be a factor, except for language and culture. Crosbie (1998)
The Web offers unique opportunities to create a new form of interactive communication within the global community. McKinley 2001
So I wanted to find out to what extent the distribution and consumption of news online was going global and I chose as my focus: the US audience for British news websites.
To what extent and for what reasons do regional and national news publications appeal, on the web, to the global audience the Internet allows? And is the presence of international readers changing the commercial and editorial practices of news organizations?
Most news websites do not publish details of their international readers. Of the sites I studied in the UK only two BBC News and The Guardian publish limited geographical breakdowns of their readers’ locations.
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The unwillingness to disclose geographical demographics is likely to be because sites believe that to do so could jeopardise their relationship with their existing advertisers. The editor of the UK’s Telegraph.co.uk explained:
A lot of the blue-chip clients that we deal with are very focused on where their demographics are I don’t think it is going to go down well if we tell them we’ve got two million people reading us everyday from Washington. Burton (2004)
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In order to get the data that the sites themselves wouldn’t provide I turned to Nielsen//Netratings, one of the two major commercial research companies that provide Internet audience measurement. Nielsen//Netratings operate user panels in eighteen countries:
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So what did the Nielsen data show? It revealed that some British news websites are attracting larger audiences than their American competitors in US regional and national markets. For example the BBC News website is able to attract more American users on a monthly basis than the sites of US national domestic brands like USA Today and also large regional brands like The LA Times.
But the BBC is something of a special case having a budget of around $30 million dollars a year and ring fenced funding direct from the British governments’ Foreign Office to pay for an editorial team dedicated to serving overseas readers.
Although none of its UK rivals can match the BBC in reach, they still do surprisingly well in the US market. The Guardian has more American readers than the Wall Street Journal and the Houston Chronicle, The Times more US users than the Miami Herald.
Even a British regional newpaper, the Evening Standard (which serves London), has more American visitors than a large number of US-based local and regional titles including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
For online news publications interested in international markets, knowing how well their sites do relative to domestic titles overseas is only part of the picture. The proportion of international to home readers is important, informing decisions about subscription, advertising and content.
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Previous research on US regional newspapers found that, online, the “long distance” market accounted for about 34 percent of readers (Chyi and Sylvie 2001).
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For the national British news sites in this study the “long-distance” market is international and in some cases considerably more significant as a proportion of the whole. Eight of the ten sites received between 28-42 percent of their visitors from the US and the average for all sites was 36 percent.
Despite being regional UK newspapers, The Evening Standard and The Scotsman both receive more than a third of their readers from the US. They do this, in part, because of their high visibility on manually-aggregated news portals like The Drudge Report and automatically-generated news indexes such as Google News.
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The Nielsen//Netratings data shows that The Drudge Report refers 25% of the US visitors to the 10 British news Web sites studied. That’s more than twice as much as Google’s main search engine, and nearly four times as much as Google News.
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It is perhaps surprising that the Drudge Report, whose founder and editor Matt Drudge call his own politics “libertarian” and has been described as having a “dedicated right-of-centre following”, was seen by the left-of-centre Independent.co.uk as “matching our image”. Whatever their philosophical differences, for the moment the Independent values the traffic Drudge brings:
if [Drudge] ever said ‘we are only linking to newspapers that give us RSS feeds’, long term that could be a bit of a pain for us to be excluded. King 2004
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Alongside manually-aggregated news portals, Google and Google News are the biggest referrers of US readers to UK news sites.
As a source of visitors from both home and overseas, Google News presents an interesting journalistic paradox. There is an indirect link between success on Google News and a practice most journalists view, at best, as a stopgap measure—the use of text straight from wire services. The Scotsman.com in common with ThisisLondon.co.uk and Dailymail.co.uk, runs a Press Association feed on their site. The speed with which the PA feed allows stories to be published helps contribute to the Scotsman’s remarkable success on Google News.
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On 12 December 2004 (and this is typical of most days) The Scotsman had 17% of the total number of outbound links on Google’s UK’s page, compared to 9% for BBC News website. The BBC’s site has a readership at least ten times the size of Scotsman.com’s.
So why do they do so well? One characteristic of the Google news’ algorithm is that it puts a very heavy reliance on the latest news story. The creator of Google News, Krishna Bharat, calls this attribute “freshness”:
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In the Google News service . . . if a story is fresh and has caused considerable original reporting to be generated it is considered important. (Bharat, 2003: 9)
Sites like the Scotsman that use automated feeds from news agencies such as PA or Reuters who are often first to market with a given story, are favoured.
As a result some of the news executives I spoke to criticized the relevance of Google News’ story selection and presention:
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You sometimes get very strange things where the Kansas Evening Gazette will give you an update on the Northern Ireland peace process today simply because it published three minutes ago. Deverell
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This is such an example from Google News’UK edition in April 2005, where the second most prominent link to a story about an Anglican Bishop’s comments about Prince Charles’ partner is from a regional Indian newspaper, the New Kerala.
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Although in cases such as this news editors criticize Google News’ algorithm for prioritizing speed of publication over proximity to the story, Google News’ defends the diversity of sources it presents:
"You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide." Krishna Bharat:
Whatever the reason they do well, for publications such as ThisisLondon and Scotsman.com getting lots of readers from Google News it not always welcome—and this is where we move onto the commercial implications
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Some British editors felt it was difficult to monetize the overseas reader is because of their promiscuous reading habits. The editorial director of Associated New Media said she would “much rather have a 100% UK audience”.
But others are more interested. The Times for one.
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Even with subscription charges for overseas readers the Times continued to attract over 200,000 US readers in some months. Since they lifted subscription charges for their overseas readers have flooded back – tripling in number. In November 2004 they had “more overseas readers than UK readers”. They believe that their advertisers would like to have “the chance to reach audiences outside the UK more effectively”.
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The Scotsman.com’s editor is of the same mind, “whiskey brands are trying to push very hard in the States at the moment and it doesn’t exactly hurt us that we have a very, very strong Scottish identity”.
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In the long term some editors believed that we would see the emergenceof a number of multimedia global newsbrands, blurring the boundaries between newspapers, news agencies and broadcasters:
the emergence over the next 5-10 years of a number of brands – many British--. . .on a global stage. They will be media neutral [and include] video, text, pictures, user generated content etc. Some of those brands might have previously been British newspapers, some of them might be new agencies, some of them might be broadcasters. I believe the Guardian might be one of those brands.
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Surprisingly, perhaps, the Sun – not known for being the most internationalist of papers, this infamous 1990 headline concerns the French president of the European commission -- is looking forward to when it might be possible to talk about the Sun as “a world newspaper”, saying that “maybe that is the next step for us, to think in those terms”.”
It is my view that you should expand the brand globally
The Times and The Guardian are launching US editions, and I think that’s a very sensible thing to do, and I think we should be looking at this.
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The Sun’s editor even suggested to me that its news values might be changing.
“our breaking news it seems to have recently developed slightly more of a global feel. I don’t think it is intentional it is just that we are not afraid to look at stories from abroad because we know the readership is there whereas the paper is probably thinking more of the UK”