NEWS ANALYSIS: From deadline to online journalism
Internet brings more real-time competition to news business
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By Jouni Tervo
Late-edition tabloids, the yellow canaries of news dissemination, are again the first to sniff the change in the media. After showing the way in making the media more personality- and entertainment-oriented, they have now started testing their survival skills in the Internet.
In the autumn, the market leader, Ilta-Sanomat, declared victory, but in reality, the top position alternates between it and its rival Iltalehti.
The competition is so fierce that one of the architects of the Iltalehti online edition, managing editor Reijo Ruokanen, was recruited by Ilta-Sanomat in the autumn to the position of second editor-in-chief.
At the end of the year the on-line edition of IS was putting increasing amounts of free material onto the Internet at an accelerating pace.
Statistics of TSN-Gallup, which keeps tabs on website hits, reveal that the afternoon tabloids have succeeded in their risky strategy. More than a million readers visit their pages each week - over 150,000 a day. This is almost as many as the number of printed papers they sell.
However, the competition on the web is for the souls, but not for the money of the readers. Both papers already offer most of their content for free on the Internet.
For instance, Ilta-Sanomat offered more than 100 foreign news items in the midst of the flurry of the Iowa caucuses in the United States last Friday, in addition to all of the domestic, entertainment, and sports news, alongside other online material.
A heavy presence on the Internet cuts into sales of the print version. During the holidays at the end of the year, both papers sold for 50 cents a copy - a 40 per cent discount. Only the papers themselves know what the official sales figures are, but the discounts suggest growing circulation problems.
The equation is difficult for the media houses: in addition to losing paying readers, they lose advertising revenue on the Internet; although Internet advertising is increasing, the revenue that it generates is still in its infancy. Advertising space on the Internet costs only a fraction of that is in the printed paper.
In the hurly-burly of the Internet, the tabloids are trying to win over the interest of the public in any way that they can. If the online version attracts readers, it is hoped that the advertisers will follow. Nobody knows when, how, and at what price this will happen.
The rest of the media is following in the tabloids' wake.
Of the domestic media giants, only the commercial television network MTV3 comes out slightly ahead of the afternoon newspapers, but for instance, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) and Helsingin Sanomat have to make do with less than a million hits a week.
YLE is investing more and more in its Internet service, which is making competitors nervous.
Financed by licence fee revenues it could manage to build a formidable portal with the help of its overwhelming archive resources.
Few newspapers have found their online audience.
The financial newspapers Taloussanomat and Kauppalehti get about 200,000 hits. Taloussanomat of the Sanoma Corporation is a real test laboratory of the new media.
The loss-making print newspaper was closed down, and now it is trying to make a profit online. After some voluntary staff reductions, no fewer than 40 employees stayed with Taloussanomat - more than at any other online publication.
If the big media are scrambling to make it on the Internet, the small ones are completely lost.
Only a few provincial papers have exceeded the 100,000 threshold.
Topping the list are two quality newspapers, the Oulu-based Kaleva and Tampere newspaper Aamulehti.
Magazines have it especially rough. Only the computer-oriented specialist magazine Mikrobitti seems to be of any interest to online readers.
For instance, few of the older readers of the weekly news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti have found their way to the magazine's website.
While the magazine boasts a circulation of 100,000 or so, Suomen Kuvalehti gets a mere 10,000 hits a week on its online version.
The Internet is still such virgin territory that the only way to succeed there is to have a familiar brand.
The former print newspaper Uusi Suomi which was resurrected online on Aleksis Kivi Day, has not been a part of commensurate calculations, but according to its own announcement, it is followed by 70,000 readers a week.
If the figure is true, Uusi Suomi is easily among the ten most popular online papers in Finland.
Uusi Suomi has had a rocky start. There were high expectations that the old brand would yield something new, but the result was mainly something old.
The website is reminiscent of the dead and buried printed paper both in terms of outward appearance and its content.
The balance between the printed and electronic word was jolted in the autumn when the Jokela school shooting brought the news-hungry onto the Internet.
During the week that things were happening, all websites putting out news broke their previous readership records. Topping them all was Ilta-Sanomat with more than 1.5 million hits.
The need for information about Jokela woke the media houses to a new reality.
For the first time, all media outlets - regardless of how they appear and how often - met in the same arena.
Tabloid newspapers competed with television, radio, magazines and newspapers in reaction speed on the Internet.
The editor-in-chief of the most intensely followed medium in the online competition, Tapio Sadeoja of Ilta-Sanomat, crystallised the new state of affairs in a seminar that was held after the Jokela event.
He said that Jokela changed deadline-based journalism to online news reporting that is constantly updated.
In the new situation, news reporting is speeded up, the time for consideration grows shorter, material that is on offer becomes more homogenised, and journalism becomes more one-sided. The old merits are no longer decisive.
When everyone is on the same starting line, space can emerge for new arrivals as well as the old faces.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.1.2008
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 8.1.2008 - THIS WEEK |
 NEWS ANALYSIS: From deadline to online journalism |
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