News Works NZ revamped its newspaper ad of the year awards programme last year, and it’s continued to innovate with the arrival of the Agency League, a points-based scoring system for the newspaper ad of the month award that aims to tap into the competitive nature of creative agencies.
Further cost reductions and efficiency measures could see APN New Zealand outsource up to 24 jobs overseas, and has resulted in the sale of four of its Capital Community Newspapers.
There have been plenty of changes at APN NZ of late, with the relaunch of the Herald last year and restructures of both the editorial and sales and marketing teams. And now the Herald on Sunday, the country’s best performing newspaper, is getting its turn with what editor Bryce Johns calls “a complete revamp of the paper’s look and feel, and improved content mix”.
As news of APN NZ’s decision to sell off a few of its regional assets surfaced yesterday, news also surfaced about changes at News Works New Zealand, the umbrella organisation responsible for profiling the industry’s print and digital brands, which has restructured to “better serve the changing needs of the newspaper industry as it gears up for 2013” and create a more commercial focus to better promote its 30 national and regional news brands across the country.
Anyone got Warren Buffett’s number? APN New Zealand Media has announced it has made a strategic decision to put three regional publishing businesses—The Star in Canterbury, the Oamaru Mail and the Capital Community Newspaper group in Wellington—on the market.
New Zealand’s largest national newspaper, The Sunday Star Times, has had a pretty rough time of it recently, with some fairly concerning readership and circulation results. But an editorial rejig is in process to, as Fairfax chief executive Allen Williams says, improve the newspaper and make it more appealing and authoritative, and it’s also launched a new campaign with its new agency .99 that aims to draw attention to the great content it provides.
The various ‘Look At These People Having More Fun Than You at Fancy Events’ sections in the nation’s magazines and newspapers have a powerful pull on the often judgemental, fame seeking human animal. So, in a continuation of Lindauer’s ‘Don’t Worry Boys’—and in a continuation of its vow to never show the target market in the campaign—it hijacked The Sunday Star Times’ ‘About Town’ (or in this case ‘Around Town’) social pages to show real partners despondently left at home on National Girls’ Night out last week.
While the magazine sector recorded its third consecutive overall readership increase in the latest Nielsen CMI figures, the newspapers haven’t fared quite so well, with an overall decline in total readership for all dailies and metropolitan titles that has been deemed significant by Nielsen and almost universal declines in paid circulation. But there are a couple of diamonds in the rough—particularly The Herald on Sunday and The Waikato Times—and, for the optimists, the numbers are still holding up much better than they are in comparison to many other markets.
The Australian version of the Newspaper Awards, the Caxtons, took place over the weekend, and the Kiwis more than held their own, with Special Group repeating last year’s effort and coming out on top with four, and DDB, Colenso and Tourism New Zealand’s Australian arm picking up two apiece.
APN went to plenty of trouble to promote the recent changes to the New Zealand Herald and nzherald.co.nz, with a fancy TVC, a host of print and digital advertising and a microsite dedicated to keeping readers and advertisers informed. All up, the campaign had a ratecard value of $4 million (although it used its own media channels extensively). And, in what could either be seen as an example of how far newspaper marketing has progressed, or an example of how the newspaper industry didn’t need to do jack to maintain its readers and advertisers back in the day, it was slightly more advanced than the campaign the Herald ran to preview its last major format change in 1960.
Despite the fact the paper was smaller, the launch of the compact New Zealand Herald and its redesigned website was pretty hard to miss yesterday (and not surprisingly, given the ratecard value of the campaign was around $4 million). So how has it gone down with punters, staff and media agencies?
One of the major themes of the presentations given by Finlay Macdonald, Peter Thomson and Tim Pankhurst at the Newspaper Advertising Awards on Tuesday night was the power of journalism and the ability newspapers have to see stories through. Of course, there were some huge stories to tell in New Zealand last year, and to show how important and relevant newspapers still are, News Works NZ’s agency Special Group compiled a couple of clips using content from the country’s news organisations, one showing the carnage and courage in Christchurch and the other telling the tale of the Rugby World Cup from the French perspective.
There is no question the media landscape is changing and the pace of technological advancements means that change is happening more rapidly than ever. This is changing the way people live their lives and the way that they consume media. At APN we spend a lot of time listening to consumers and understanding the affect these changes have on their relationships with our news and entertainment brands. There is no denying that more and more people are reading, watching and listening to our content across print, digital and mobile platforms. But rather than seeing that as a negative trend, we believe this is a strong signal for a positive future.
The newspaper industry is certainly not without its naysayers, but in spite of dwindling numbers and organisational shake ups, it’s also full of people that will gladly proclaim the ongoing vitality of the medium. In fact you can expect newspapers to emerge stronger from their current circulation woes and enter 2020 as a leaner, more valued and trusted medium than at any time in the past 50 years, according to Peter Thomson, founder and former chief executive of M2M International. And you can find out for yourself why he’s so sure when he arrives to our shores in September as a keynote speaker at the revamped News Works NZ Advertising Awards.
Over the past few months, discussions around the future of the media have come to a head, thanks in part to a couple of big announcements from the other side of the Tasman and a big one here in New Zealand too. This has brought about loads of discussion within the New Zealand industry about the role of media in society and changing trends in how consumers select and consume news. Worryingly, lots of commentators have been all too willing to eulogise New Zealand’s robust newspaper market. So I’m putting my hand up to remind you all that newspapers and magazines are alive and well in New Zealand.
With the massive changes currently taking place in the Australian publishing scene at the moment and the steady move of readers from print to digital around the world, the newspaper business is at a crossroads. So what is the rationale behind the Herald’s change to tabloid? Will New Zealand readers soon be paying for online content? And how is APN preparing for the future? We chat with APN’s chief executive Martin Simons.
Newspapers, according to the latest readership and circulation figures, are still holding on and, in some rare cases, adding readers. So why, when the commonly held view is that newspapers are dead—or at least dying—does New Zealand appear to be bucking an international trend?
The latest numbers for newspapers have just been released and, according to Nielsen, readership levels for all dailies via print decreased ‘significantly’, as they did for the country’s biggest newspaper, The New Zealand Herald. But there were plenty of positives, with some readership increases, circulation remaining fairly static for most papers and massive rises in the online and mobile realms taking up some of print’s slack.
After a six-year stint heading the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, general manager Robert Munro is set to depart in December.
A positive new campaign from the Newspaper Publishers’ Association will be launched this Friday as a refreshingly generous DM hits the desks of advertising agency executives. The generosity involves a return trip for two to London for the advertising agency executive that gets most of his/her friends overseas to enter a competition for Kiwis living in London.
When Nielsen launched its pimped out Consumer & Media Insights (CMI) research tool back in April, publishers’ mouths started watering at the prospect of being able to prove New Zealanders who read magazines and newspapers actually spent more, thereby showing print was a good place for brands to be seen. And while the first instalment of the new readership offering had a few teething problems, its new fused data approach has revealed there is “a strong connection between high household expenditure and print media readership”.
The stock imagery on the release might show people laughing with magazines, but there probably aren’t too many smiles in the print industry after several unexpected fieldwork issues affected the quality of readership data for Nielsen’s newly pimped out Consumer and Media Insights readership survey.
If you were reading the papers over the weekend, you may have noticed a few column inches were devoted to illustrating how well the publication in front of you had done in the latest Nielsen Readership Survey. Whether the readership changes were statistically significant or not doesn’t seem to matter, because every quarter you can guarantee the big players will be focusing on the silver linings in the print media cloud.
You know it was a bad year when an industry organisation comes out and says it’s fairly happy with a significant core revenue decline. But that’s exactly what the papers have done after the release of the Advertising Standards Authority’s New Zealand Advertising Turnover scorecard. Online, however, is sitting pretty as the only sector to notch up an increase.
If you believe the hype, print is an anachronistic curmudgeon unsuccessfully fighting against an online onslaught of Twits, Tweets and Twats.
But if you believe the latest readership numbers, print – in New Zealand, at least – appears to be in fine(ish) fettle.
American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863 –1951) once said these wise words, which appeared on a National Lampoon cover in 1977.
Brilliant.
Honest words, even though Hearst was known to indulge in yellow journalism that “routinely invented sensational stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real events”, according …
Big hair, bigger scalp
The bitterly divided Fairfax board has generated another casualty: the chairman.
Ron Walker was expected to stand for reelection at the forthcoming AGM. But in response to internal disputes which culminated in stinging public criticism from the John B Fairfax faction, Walker yesterday told the Sydney …
NZ rags did good at the 2009 Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association Awards (PANPA) held in Sydney last week.
Fairfax Media is licking its chops after the choice morsels it received. The Timaru Herald won the display advertising and the classified categories for newspapers with a circulation up to 25 …