Out With A Bang

Having been round one or two of these blocks before, it’s always been interesting to see which of the large provincial newspaper groups would be the first to ‘break ranks…’ and quietly forget the gentlemen’s agreements upon which their industrial fortunes were based…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=257

And today, there’s a little sign that Northcliffe/DMGT are starting to get itchy feet.

http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/534339.php

The fact that they, like TrinityMirror and Newsquest before them, are starting to turn their thoughts towards hyper-local is nothing new.

In fairness to TrinityMirror, they caught the bug early on with the postcode-based sites they first launched on Teesside… the trouble, as always when you live your life in a silo, is having done something very well in TS10, how do your replicate that model in, say, NR14 which is Archant-land…

Or, indeed, in BS10 which is in Northcliffe’s…

It was something we touched on on the back of my scribblings at last year’s JEECamp; to where we return tomorrow, by coincidence – poorer in one, obvious sense and richer in another for the 14-odd months that have passed in between.

But at JEECamp was the good lady from Trinity who had started to break the mould with TS10; the question was, of course, more about when she was going to break the silo, not the mould, and make a proper network out of Trinity’s hyper-local thinking as opposed to bolting it on underneath any one of their existing local newspaper ‘patches’…

http://outwithabang.wordpress.com/tag/itv-local/

Without stepping out of that silo, to my mind, they could never hope to get the kind of elegance and efficiency you can secure from running a network.

Now, here comes Northcliffe. And in amidst that story is one line that leaps out a mile…

“Where we’ve got Northcliffe content, we’ll share it. But Northcliffe only touches around 12 per cent of the population. It’s more interesting to see if this will work outside Northcliffe areas,” he [Seamus McCauley] said.

“In every town, sooner or later a big issue comes up and local people will try and knock up a website very quickly. We want to set up these sites so that when an issue arises, they’re already there…’

Mmm.

So whilst the launch plan is limited to their own backyard in Bristol and the South-West, the implication is clear. They’re building a network that takes them out of their current, 12% silo and on into someone else’s patch.

So, given it is my old manor, what happens when Northcliffe start to head west out of Bristol and – just in case a ‘big issue’ comes up – they set themselves up with a town blog template for a Chippenham, a Malmesbury or a Calne? Just in case…

All of whom are in Newsquest land?

And what happens if there’s a ‘big issue’ with Hobart High School here in Loddon; does that mean that there’ll be a Northcliffe model for NR14 to which we can all turn for content and comment in our hour of hyper-local news need? As opposed, of course, to turning to an Archant site?

Or, best of all, what happens if something ‘big’ kicks off in downtown Redcar? Under Plan Seamus will Trinity’s own TS10 platform now find itself with a competitor?

Spin that story and that speech whichever way you want, but it seems to me pretty clear that Northcliffe are taking the gloves off and are coming to any small or medium-sized market town near you.

And not out of the ‘ThisIs…’ brand either.

For ‘ThisIs…’ limited them to your Nottinghams, your Bristols, etc…

Dump the ‘ThisIs…’ ties to a specific geographical silo and Northcliffe can start to trample all over the neighbour’s back lawn with their new hyper-local, small town template model.

And because they’re looking at the content being UGC/Facebook-esque kind of led, they don’t even have to worry about putting a full-time reporter in place under someone else’s nose… some part-time curator can do the job as they whip eyeballs and, in theory, local advertising out from beneath the feet of their long-time provincial rivals.

They’re building a network; not a silo.

And once one person starts to leave that gentlemen’s agreement on a shelf somewhere, so they all will.

In the race for survival, the gloves always needed to come off… particularly if HM Government weren’t wholly buying into the idea or relaxing cross-media ownership rules; or rather if they were, it was unlikely to trouble the statute book until the other side of a General Election.

And as the man from Northcliffe muttered at that recent Local Media Summit in Whitehall, time is not on their side. You either get to build tighter, stronger silos – or you start ripping up that age-old rule book and go treading on eachothers’ toes by building the kind of fledgling networks that Northcliffe are now proposing.

One pops up within sight of the walls of Fort Dunlop and it will be interesting…