> WORD FROM THE WISE
We’re feeling very buoyant about the way the digital economy is still a great deal more shift of advertising money out of traditional
ly commanding presence online, and that sowed the seeds for the incredible online strengths that we enjoy today.” When delivering presentations, Brooks says he often shows a slide with the sales ledger for the paper from January 1956 with sales by town. “The number of copies sold outside the UK in 1956 on an aver- age day was smaller than the number of copies sold in Colwyn Bay [seaside town in North Wales]. That number was 600-and-something a day. Yesterday’s traffic on the site would have been two million indi- viduals, more than half of whom would have come from outside the UK. So we’ve gone from 600 to over a million people and that’s been an extraordinary journey for us. “What’s particularly extraordinary about that journey digitally is that
we increasingly realise that we’re only at the beginning. The digital world is changing so rapidly, and the ways in which people consume information on digital media are proliferating so dramatically, that we think there are still huge developments ahead of us, which makes life very interesting.”
Digital driving change Brooks firmly believes that the digital world is changing his organisa- tion’s journalism for the better. One recent example, he says, was when Liverpool Football Club was in the High Court when its owners were trying to block its sale. One of The Guardian’s journalists, Steve Busfield, decided to do a live blog on what was happening. “As it turned out, it was in and out of court all week. Astonishingly, that blog was read by two and a half million people. That’s more than the pop- ulation of Liverpool.”
Another example involved an exclusive story around the death on a passenger plane of Jimmy Mubenga while he was being deported from the UK to Angola. “Our investigative journalist, Paul Lewis, put word out on Twitter asking if anyone was on the flight. Within 24 hours five individuals who’d been on the flight were able to give Paul their eyewitness accounts of what happened and, in one instance, a mobile phone recording of this gentleman’s last minutes. That led to an exclusive front page story for us and has now triggered a Metropolitan Police investigation of the security firm that was carrying out the deportation.” Brooks has been impressed by how some media businesses are transitioning to digital. “I think what Sky are doing now on mobile, for example, is pretty admirable. They’re clear that they have to move
20 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 4 2010
from just being consumed in the living room to being consumed in different places. They’re making the transition very well and much better than some of the broadcast incumbents like ITV. “Closer to our business, you have to admire what the Mail have done online. A lot of people assumed that they would just follow News International and go behind a paywall. In fact they’ve very vig- orously done the same as us and said, no, we’re very happy to be free and open and we’re building a business that works in its own right online. They’re an interesting example because just as
Guardian.co.uk isn’t simply a replica of The Guardian newspaper, the same is true of MailOnline. It’s got its own identity. And they’ve got a huge audience now, bigger than ours.” He says he welcomes News International’s experimentation with a paywall. “They take the pain of that and we all benefit from the learn- ing.
“We have absolutely no intention of putting
Guardian.co.uk behind a paywall. For most businesses in the news business, journalism is a means to an end and the end is profit for the shareholders. For us that’s not true, because the Trust is not seeking to make a profit. It’s seeking to keep The Guardian a strong journalistic force. Therefore, what would be the point of us cutting off more than 90pc of the peo- ple who read The Guardian currently?
“That said, we do believe in selling our newspaper, and we don’t for a second think that we should be giving our newspaper away. We also launched the first ever paid-for news app on the iPhone. I would argue that there are certain environments where consumers expect to pay: the newsagent is an obvious one and the App Store on iTunes is also one. There are lots of free apps, but there are also lots of paid apps and consumers are quite comfortable with the idea that you pay to take stuff out of the iTunes store. “In places where people will pay, we will charge. But, we absolute-
ly don’t believe that the open web is a place that people are going to feel comfortable paying.” Brooks also makes the point that while The Times has seen its online advertising shrink over the last six months because of the drop in audience,
Guardian.co.uk’s advertising has increased by over 50pc compared with the same period in 2009. “We’re feeling very buoyant about the way the digital economy is performing at the moment, and believe there is still a great deal more shift of advertising money out of traditional media and into digital
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