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When Communicate caught up with Mark Finney, The Guardian’s head of client sales last month (see “Revolutionary read,” page 63, Communicate, May 2010), his top tips for a successful news website were: build communities, encourage interaction, experiment, invest in journalism, and be flexible enough to redesign your website around the way people are consuming your content. That’s sound advice, especially coming from a Guardian insider; Guardian.co.uk counts 36 million readers internationally, making it the second biggest English newspaper in the world, after the New York Times. That’s not too shabby for a paper with a falling print circulation of 400,000. The death of print has been a hot topic for a few years now, and while print hasn’t died yet, it is undeniably losing the vitality it once possessed. Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, CEO of Dubai-based digital agency Flip Media, says newspapers in the UAE have to figure out “this Internet thing”. “The Internet is going to kill your business, but at the same time it can save your business,” says Tuqan.
When Gulf News and Khaleej Times redesigned their websites earlier this year, they were met with varied reactions, from “love it” to “hate it”. But the relaunches signaled the newspapers’ desire to be relevant online, and to catch up with more advanced news websites. Abu Dhabi newspaper The National is currently revamping its offering too.
Brian Buchanan, portal editor at Gulf News, joined the paper’s publisher, Al Nisr Publishing, after the website redesign, and says today’s site is a “huge jump” from what it used to be. “It’s a far better presentation, as the older one was all boxed in,” says Buchanan. “Now there are plenty of different ways to encourage people to get into the site, and it’s a lot easier to navigate. It’s a challenge to encourage people to get into the site and stick around, but we’ve found that the stickiness stats have improved.”

SAME BUT DIFFERENT. One of the tricks to get readers to “stick” to a news website is to display the content in a way that reflects the newspaper but doesn’t mimic the format exactly, says Ben Davies, assistant editor for online at The National. “The new website will reflect the clean design of the newspaper, but where it’s altering is that I don’t feel the need to be totally faithful to each individual section of the newspaper,” he explains. “At the moment, we have sections of the paper that don’t necessarily have relevance with an audience that reads us online.” Davies also believes The National’s current website is not as user friendly as it should be, and that one of the goals his team hopes to achieve with the revamp is to create a community around the news site.
“We want The National website to become a one-stop shop for people who are interested in coming to the UAE,” says Davies. “They can come to the website, find business or tourist information, or cultural happenings; it’s important to see our website and newspaper as a portal into the region. We also want people who have read about the country before moving here to continue using our website as an information and news resource, so we’re developing online listings. We’ll have information on how you can engage with the different governmental departments here, and we’ll have a more sustained blogging effort. We’re expanding, investing, and training staff, and we’ll have a more consistent and quality multimedia effort.”
Multimedia has become the hottest commodity for newspapers looking to integrate their print content with their online offering. The National’s website, which already offers multimedia in the form of videos, blogs, and photo galleries, plans to capitalize on its experience so far. “You’ll see documentaries, news reports, analysis, podcasts, and quick-response commentary,” says Davies. “We’ll bring a lot of added value that builds on the fantastic content we have in the newspaper and online.”

MULTIMEDIA MAKEOVER. At Gulf News, the recent redesign also involved a heavier multimedia offering, steering away from the copy-paste format of content pulled straight from the newspaper to the website. “The website is very much meant to provide a digital media experience, whether it’s through video, picture galleries, Google maps, or anything that is going to help tell the story; it is going to be used,” says Buchanan. “It is part of the Gulf News family, but the site is meant to be its own entity and do what it should be doing on the Web: offering a broad multimedia experience. Video is becoming extremely important to us, as we saw with two key stories: the Hamas assassination, where we published extended video of the CCTV footage on the website, and the Dubai Mall aquarium leak, for which we got a film clip of the crack [in the tank]. Both videos told the story effectively by themselves, and to us that’s a vital component of what we do.”
Including readers in its online offering is crucial to a news website’s success says Tuqan, and the rise of citizen journalism through the likes of smart phones and social networks has made engagement much easier. “Readers helping to contribute to news stories is a growing phenomenon,” says Tuqan. “I don’t think kids with iPhones will ever really take the place of journalists, but it’s important for content producers to tap into the power of citizen journalism. This represents an opportunity for content owners, and encourages deeper engagement with readers and more on-site time.”
As for The National’s own journalists, Davies says that many are trained to produce a variety of media, making it easier to push multimedia content. News organizations need to be responsive to consumers’ expectations of news delivered round the clock, “but you’ll find that there’s a debate within news organizations as to who should get the story first: the website, the newspaper, the television channel,” says Davies. “The test of maturity of a news organization is when it’s gone past those debates; the important thing is to get the information out there. It seems to me that if you build your brand across different platforms, you’ll have much more impact and more people will read you, so you’ll become a reference for information. It seems foolish to me that if we get a story and we know it’s exclusive, we don’t put it up on the most relevant platform as fast as possible.”
WHO’S IN CHARGE? This integration of content on news websites poses an interesting question, says Tuqan. “Who’s in charge? IT? Editorial? The Web team?” he asks. “It can be tricky to figure out who is really affecting change within the publication. But it’s all about how to get the maximum value out of the content newspapers produce.” Tuqan says reader engagement is “incredibly important,” because the more time people spend on a news website, the more the relationship between the news organization and the reader will deepen, fostering loyalty. Readers will also be exposed to more advertising, but websites should re-think their advertising models. “It’s not just new media that’s required, it’s new thinking,” he says. ”You can’t just stick banner advertising on a website.”
Ricky Ghai, executive director of digital media at the Abu Dhabi Media Company, the government-owned company that owns The National, says that with the revamp of The National’s website will come more opportunities to experiment with online advertising. “We’ll have the ability to experiment with the standard use of MPUs and banners,” says Ghai. “We’re working very closely with The National to see how we can experiment with these models in innovative and creative ways, to entice advertisers to support their brands on our websites. The National has a premium perception and, two years on, that premium has become very established in the physical newspaper (see “Can posh be profitable?” page 10, Communicate, May 2010). So you won’t see a radical change in opening up our advertising inventory, but you will see a far more flexible and creative approach to how we challenge our business model.”
Tuqan says the region has been increasingly resistant to change when it comes to what he believes is the inevitable death of print. “But the reality is that it’s coming soon,” says Tuqan. “So magazines and newspapers have to embrace new media channels in order to succeed.” Following the advice of The Guardian’s Finney, it seems there is no better time for news websites to experiment. And experiment again. The region may have been resistant to change for a while, but the redesign of the UAE’s top three English-language newspaper websites signals that the Middle East is indeed experimenting.

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