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Introduction
Every news organisation must have a strong core editorial proposition (CEP). It defines what you offer that nobody else offers, or the way you offer material that is different from others. It involves knowing the existing audience and identifying the target audience.
News organisations need to focus on their strengths and aim to cut any clutter that drains resources and distracts from the main objective. The following module examines how a news organisation would redefine its editorial proposition in order to go online and build a news website. However, the process is worth going through whether you are going online or not, because it will strengthen your news organisation and help it achieve sustainability. Most major news organisations already have news websites. Some are deep repositories of rich news data, others are little more than brochureware. Some clearly have vast resources allocated to them, others are run on a shoestring (and sometimes it shows). However, building an authoritative and compelling news website does not always require large-scale staffing and resource costs. There are ways of creating a strong and credible news offering without draining the budget. Developing an online strategy Whatever strategy you follow for your media company, you need to be clear about your reasons for going online. You need to identify the core strengths of your news operation. You need to know your existing audience and its needs, and you need to be aware of new audiences you might be able to reach. A commercial news operation needs to be on the lookout for fresh business opportunities through advertising and sponsorship, aimed at the target audience. All this needs to be pulled together in a clear editorial proposition and content strategy. To achieve this it is best to gather your news organisation's key stakeholders together. More about that process later. The process will deal with a five main elements. - Editorial proposition
- Core content
- Audiences
- Opportunities
- Site structure
Core Editorial proposition Your core editorial proposition sets out what your news organisation offers. It is about what you say that nobody else says. It helps clarify the standards of presentation and subject matter the users can expect to find on your site. In marketing terms, it can be an important process in defining your news brand. Defining your editorial proposition also helps you decide what to include and what to leave out. It can give you a clear navigational structure for your website, and avoid confusion and mess later on. It will offer the users clarity and comfort as they begin to get to know their way around and eventually start to feel at home on your site. A well thought out editorial proposition can take as little as an hour to figure out, jot down, and begin to implement. This process will be stronger if you include the key stakeholders, such as the heads of editorial, business, marketing, human resources, and technology in the task. By including the stakeholders you will find that you will emerge with a much wider and clearer picture than if you struggle through this exercise alone. You need to define why your news organisation is different from others. Is your business news stronger than the competitors? Are you better at covering sport, politics, or technology? Do your users turn to you for the best coverage of politics and international news? The next question to ask is whether someone else is already delivering an online offering similar to the one you are proposing to set up. Competition is healthy, but it is probably not worth creating something that duplicates what already exists, unless there is distinctiveness in your offering that adds value and choice as well as enhancing understanding. Is your news distinctive? If so, in what way? Could you be more distinctive? If so, how? It might be best to examine what stories you cover that nobody else does, or concentrate on your unique way of treating news. You will need something to differentiate you from the other news outlets. If there are similarities with other news provider, it is not a bad strategy to think of how your online news offering can complement rather than compete with an existing offering. You will probably find that valuable differences exist in your mix of stories and the way you explain them. It might be in your choice of contributors or your ability to focus on certain aspects of the issue being covered. It could be the amount of interactivity you offer, the use of graphics, or even the extra effort you put into explaining certain stories. Whatever it is, consider building on this strength and making it a feature and selling point for your site. Identifying the audience
Next you need to work out what your audience is and how it can be expanded. If you are a public service broadcaster with a general remit to serve the whole community, you might have a different target audience than a site aimed at a business community. Your content will be different, the frequency of updates might be different, the scope of story coverage will be different, and the audience expectation of the types of stories covered will be different. If you are working in a country with a low internet usage, you might find that your key audience is not made up of the people who can also read your newspaper on the streets, or see and hear your output in their homes, but it might be made up of those living overseas, the Diaspora audience. You need to think through who is online and who is likely to go online. You need to be aware of who is not online and what facilities exist so that those people can also benefit from your news website. Is your site going to serve the entire online community, or only a small group within that community? Is it going to cover the stories of interest to a limited few? Neither of these strategies are recommended. It could lead to a narrow editorial focus that alienates parts of the audience you should be reaching. This will be largely determined by your existing editorial strategy. However, going online does offer the possibility of reaching a new audience and you need to think through who this audience is and what your news site will offer them. Is any part of the community going to be left out of your editorial proposition and if so, why? How broad will your news agenda be? How will you justify any limitations to it? Where will you draw the line about what you will and will not cover? If you plan to serve only part of the community you need to think through why you are taking that stance. If you are building an online news offering in a post-conflict or transition state, covering the whole community might prove a challenge. Some news operations in transition states have found it a hard to move from a position of opposition to one of becoming a truly impartial, fair, balanced, and trusted news source. This must be the goal, otherwise you will never be able to provide balanced, fair and impartial coverage. Opportunities It is easy to fail to spot opportunities because you are so close to a news operation. It is also easy to limit your audience to only those able to receive the print run, or tune into the TV or radio output. With the Internet it is different. Your content can be accessed anywhere in the world, and at any time of day. This could offer a news operation a host of opportunities. Some of these opportunities could be economic; some could be in terms of influence. All need to be harnessed to boost the brand. Keep it simple Keep your site simple. The aim is to help the user find your content in the most efficient, effective, and elegant manner. You are designing a storage system for news data, not an obstacle course. Some site navigation can appear daunting, but it can be quite straightforward if you give it enough thought in advance. This will become clear as you run a content strategy session with your key stakeholders. You will probably only have a few basic page designs. A front page, a page for each section and an article page where the information you write for each subject is stored. The main page is the front door to the site. This is where links to all the other pages exist. This is sometimes called the index page, front page, or home page. Each section below the front page will have its own main page, and all the stories will sit on story pages. A designer will be needed to recommend the best way of doing this, but make it clear that all the decisions regarding site design, layout, and navigation have to enforce your editorial proposition. Do not get sucked into using any gimmicks that do not support that editorial proposition. You will need a page for your editorial guidelines, your site’s privacy policy, and for the copyright and disclaimer details. The wording for these pages will become clearer once the editorial proposition is clarified. Stakeholder buy-in The following is a step-by-step guide for running a content strategy session. You will need to gather your key stakeholders together and ask them a number of searching questions to help you assess whether you have a healthy content strategy or not. Set aside half a day, ideally a full day. Make them realise the session is going to be totally interactive and they need to turn up full of ideas. A briefing note setting the scene and sent to them in advance is crucial. They need to arrive ready for some hard work. Have many breaks, but keep them short. Have a good facilitator to capture comments, take notes, and bring the joint thinking together in what will be the first draft of the company’s editorial proposition. Be sure to get internal ownership for this project before you start. Perhaps it is someone from the marketing department, someone from IT, perhaps one of the brightest and best managers. Whoever it is, choose someone who will be open-minded, can-do, and who will deliver whatever is decided at the end of the day. If you can afford to have someone type the bullet points as the session continues you can use this at the end in an impressive and helpful five minutes summing up. If you already have a website, start by asking the group whether it reflects the news organisation’s core news strengths and lives up to the mission statement. Go straight to an interactive exercise by asking them what sort of message the current site gives out. Ask them to jot down, on separate sticky cards, all the phrases they can think of that best describe the current site. You will want about six from each person. Give them five minutes to do this. Keep it moving, you need to keep their attention. Now stick the cards on the wall and, with their help, group them looking for commonalities, but never ignore the one-offs – they could be key. It is always best if the facilitator is good at making observations as s/he does this, it makes the session bounce along. Circle the resulting groups and create a hierarchy. You will soon see a pattern emerging. Then ask the group whether the current site is getting your news organisation’s message across properly. Now, do it again, but this time ask them what sort of message the site should give out. Again, stick these comments on the wall, group them and, with the group’s help, look for any consensus. Remember not to ignore the loan comment that falls outside any groups – this is often the inspiration you are looking for. This is the part of the process you will begin with if you don’t already have a news website. Now ask them who they want to reach through the site? You might find some interesting categories and possible opportunities emerging from this session. Be sure to capture the card groupings again. Then you need to rattle through some general questions such as whether the site looks boring, does it download fast, is it user-friendly, can people find what they want. There will be many more, but that is a taster. Save half an hour at the end for summing up at the end of the session. If possible run a presentation with the basic bullet points – if not scribble the bullets on sheets. At this stage you should: - Know whether your key stakeholders think the current site reflects the news organisation's core strengths.
- Know who your target audience is and who it could be.
- Have a better understanding of the depth of content and see how it might be possible to exploit that better online.
- Have the outline for an editorial proposition and some idea for how a content strategy for displaying this online might work.
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