Backchannelmedia

Scotsman, The

By Fergus Sheppard

THE newspaper industry is on the verge of revolutionising the way it counts its audiences as print companies reach ever expanding audiences through online publishing.

The development, being pioneered by the Newspaper Society, has been unveiled as scotsman.com, the new media arm of Scotsman Publications, unveiled one of its strongest set of results ever.

The website has now clocked up a record 3.8 million unique page users per month, according to industry auditors ABCe. That traffic is also being boosted by the increasing ability of readers to interact with scotsman.com by uploading their views on news stories: 78,000 comments were posted in January alone.

The Newspaper Society (NS) is developing a new system, which is designed to mesh the electronic audience of newspapers within their circulation area together with the number of print copies sold to produce a more accurate picture of newspaper "reach" in the community. The NS believes the update is required to reflect the multimedia nature of many newspaper groups - while the industry boasts 1,300 newspaper titles, it also includes 800 websites, 28 radio stations and two television stations, for example.

Lynne Anderson, communications director at the Newspaper Society, says she believed the industry would soon have a "robust and reliable system" to measure multimedia audiences. She says: "The regional press is harnessing a powerful combination of print and internet to layer its local markets, extend audience reach and deliver ever greater advertiser response. Working with agency and media research experts, the industry has firmly grasped the major challenge facing all media today."

The initiative has been welcomed by key figures in the advertising industry. Conor MacLoughlin, head of regional media at media buyer Carat, says: "Regional media owners need to ensure accountability in order to secure their share of advertising budgets. The NS audience research project will be vital in providing this accountability, and, as such, has our full support."

Les Middleton, associate director at planning and buying agency MediaCom, says he backed the new system due to the advertising industry's "ever-increasing usage of local cross-media schedules, online and digital".

Michael Johnston, the divisional managing director of Johnston Press Scotland, The Scotsman's owners, says the success of scotsman.com demonstrates the reach offered by online publishing: "Our advertiser base is growing all the time and we are seeing a particular increase in integrated print and online campaigns where the reach of scotsman.com is allied to the powerful audience and responsiveness delivered by our successful newspaper portfolio."

Scotsman.com, which was voted best daily newspaper website in the 2006 Newspaper Society Awards, has seen its page impressions rise by 7 per cent year-on-year to 22,289,152. Unique users have risen 35 per cent year-on-year to January's high of 3,824,146.

Stewart Kirkpatrick, the editor of scotsman.com, believes print titles and their online counterparts can serve different editorial needs.

"Many people now get immediate headline news from the radio, the TV and the web," he explains. "However, they do want context, analysis and exclusive material that can't be found elsewhere - I think we'll see newspapers focus on this area."

(c) 2007 Scotsman, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.