Ahead of Hong Kongvia WikipediaThe strategy of the South China Morning Post to hide itself behind a financial firewall has not only become obsolete, the number of papers doing so is diminishing fast. The SFN-blog points at the Irish Times who skipped its firewall today in an effort to become the island's leading news website. Here is the statement of the Irish Times.
The Irish Times started as one of the first newspapers an online operation in 1999, then called Ireland.com, claiming before it got a financial firewall to have in 2002, 2.5 million unique users. No information was given on the effect the financial firewall had on the number of visitors.
Now editor Geraldine Kennedy writes:
In a new world where trust and accuracy are often the casualties of speed, www.irishtimes.com is designed to co-ordinate Irish Times content in print and online; to capitalise on our reputation for accuracy, authority, independent analysis and comment; to appeal to web-based readers who are growing in numbers; and, to restore The Irish Times title to the web.Of course, we might all think now what the current editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post (do they have one?) will think: should we do the same? The answer of course is, yes, and you should have done this already five years ago. It might not be too late, but a sense of urgency would be welcome.
3 comments:
I've said this before - the 'patriotic' owners of the SCMP have been told by Beijing to keep the SCMP a low key, local paper for HK only, so that China Daily can become the flagship news source for greater China. If the SCMP had developed like most other newspaper websites (Guardian, NYT etc) it would now be the major source of independent news about China. Beijing did not want that, and still doesn't.
They don't go free because they like making money. In the case of Hong Kong, it's not proven that the money can be recouped via ads from the greater traffic that comes with a free site.
View from inside is...this paper is going nowhere. No-one up high has the vision to see what the SCMP could be if it opened up online, and they continue to follow the red herring that it's about print distribution on the mainland. That's ridiculous, as a) it'll never happen, and b) it'll be a financial loser even if it does because newspaper readership is relatively miniscule compared to online.
SCMP by now should have a trilingual news website - English, Putonghua and Cantonese...but it doesn't and it this rate, never will. Such a shame.
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