Finalists for the 2018 Voyager Media Awards (formerly Canon Media Awards) have been announced and last year’s winners, New Zealand Herald, Weekend Herald and Stuff, are no doubt hoping for another successful night.
Architecture in the digital landscape doesn’t age quite as gracefully as that in the real world. And after ten years of the same site, the team at NZ Herald decided it was time for some renovations.
It’s been just over a year since NZME launched the NZ Herald Focus brand and now, it’s celebrating a win at the International News Media Association (INMA) World Congress in New York. With the award recognising how the new brand has tapped into a new audience for NZ Herald, we speak to managing editor Shayne Currie about how it’s managed to do that and why news video is so important.
Examining the state of education through one of the country’s most disadvantaged schools, the New Zealand Herald debuts its first foray into long-form documentary video.
Media boundaries are being pushed every minute of every day, in every country around the world. Whether it’s new entrants to market, the role traditional media plays, or how quickly media organisations can adapt to changing audience consumption patterns, sitting still is not an option. So where does that leave New Zealand media organisations like NZME? Transformation. Big word. Big job. Big change – and big difference.
There was nothing particularly fashionable about the New Zealand Herald’s old office in Albert St—until now. The faux marble bathrooms, cubicle desks and grim Eastern Bloc-style surrounds made the perfect backdrop for a Viva shoot featuring some of the latest New Zealand fashions.
Research from Nielsen shows that approximately 25 percent of unique online visitors to the Stuff website and 29 percent to the NZ Herald in the month of October came from readers located outside New Zealand. So are advertisers aware of the high proportion of international visitors and are they taking it into account when purchasing ads on these news sites? And also, how are publishers monetising their international audiences?
“Data journalism is absolutely critical to our future,” said NZME managing editor Shayne Currie when speaking to StopPress about the restructure of NZME’s news teams. As part of the shift to a more digital-centric publishing operation, Currie said NZME would be investing more into data journalism in the near future. And this seems to have now come to fruition with the launch of Insights, a website dedicated to the Herald’s data journalism.
NZME has brought on board Irene Chapple as the NZ Herald’s new digital editor, who is returning to the Herald after ten years in other roles, and several years overseas.
In a new series, StopPress talks to a range of newsmakers currently trying to shine lights into dark places while also keeping their own lights on and looks at whether commercial realities are leading to editorial compromise. Next up, Damien Venuto talks with NZME’s Dallas Gurney about his new role and how he sees branded content existing alongside journalism.
TVNZ has launched two new OnDemand short-form offerings, youth-led magazine show Yours TV and short documentary series Loading Docs which the broadcaster says is part of its focus to support up-and-coming New Zealand talent.
Industry happenings at Canon, Content Boutique, NZ Herald and oOh!media.
The entertainment and media industries have seen a huge shift in recent years. Content viewing has gradually shifted to the online world and therefore advertising follows closely in tow while traditional media’s growth rate is slumping. PwC provides some insights and predictions of the movements of these industries closer to home and further afield between 2015 and 2019.
Facebook has become a hugely important traffic source for many publishers. And last week Facebook announced the launch of a new feature called Instant Articles, which allows users to view articles from other websites (particularly enhancing mobile experience) without leaving the site. This is hoped to make for a faster loading time, more data about what users like to consume and therefore an enhanced overall user experience. And there are also benefits for the publishers. It’s very early days for the scheme, but we thought we’d find out a bit about the initiative and whether New Zealand’s main media outfits are keen on the idea.
Tim Murphy, the editor-in-chief of the NZ Herald has decided to step down after a 30 years with the publication. This announcement brings an end to Murphy’s three-year stint in the role that he took on after serving as an NZ Herald editor for ten years.
One of the major struggles for news publishers is that the rise in online audiences and revenue has struggled to make up for the loss of print advertising and subscription revenue. And a new feature on the Herald seems to give readers another reason not to pay for paper.
Fairfax is starting to challenge the Herald’s dominance in Auckland with a series of campaigns that aim to draw the Super City’s denizens to its publication. The most recent effort involved an activation at Art in the Dark, which saw event attendees queue in long lines to enter the Stuff tent to get a shot at literally creating art out of light. Once inside the tent, Kiwis would be given LED glowsticks and were then told to draw or write in the air. These actions were then captured using long-exposure photography, resulting in a host of creative images that were tagged with the Stuff brand.
Back when newspapers (and, to a lesser degree, magazines) were happily floating down their rivers of gold, the church and state of editorial and sales were kept very separate. But desperate times call for what some may see as desperate measures and as publishers search for new revenue streams, many of them are increasingly offering their skills to help tell the stories of businesses. Now APN has joined that club with the launch of Brand Insight.
The changes are coming thick and fast at APN NZ under new chief executive Jane Hastings, with a new exec team announced this week, a more integrated sales approach across its media portfolio and some clever new products like ShopViva. And now the Business Herald is getting in on the action, with more tools, more content and more interactivity added to the website in an effort to deliver “more relevant digital news to New Zealanders”.
On Monday, APN Media launched TrueCommercial, a digital hub dedicated to commercial property and ‘businesses for sale’ listings. For the most part, the initiative serves as an online extension of the Herald’s Commercial Property section, which has until now been published twice a week. The section, which according to Nielsen has a readership of approximately 138,000 Kiwis, will now also be rebranded TrueCommercial from 6 August to give the offering uniformity across the print and digital channels. But how does it differ from the services already offered by Trade Me and RealEstate.co.nz. Updated with additional comments from TrueCommercial brand manager Maria Zolezzi.
There are times when pop cultural knowledge comes in handy. And The Herald is no doubt wishing some of its staff had watched a bit more Jackass after an embarrassing blunder on the front page of today’s paper.
Continuing our ridiculous series on what the government could buy with the measly tax dollars it earns from tech multinationals, we decided to turn the barb toward Google, which was recently revealed to have paid only $227,000 in tax over the course of 2013. And while this is ten times more than the pittance paid by Facebook, it still didn’t quite measure up to what one would expect from an organisation that made US$15.42 billion of revenue globally in the quarter ended 31 March 2014. When the Herald reported on Google’s tax bill, it went for the optimistic headline ‘Google’s NZ tax bill on the up’. And since the team here at StopPress also tends to be optimistic about everything except for the livers of those working in the ad industry, we decided to compile a list of all things National could splash out on at its probable re-election party later this year.
Industry happenings at Trade Me, the Herald, MediaWorks, New Zealand Rugby, and BKA Interactive.
In the age of vines and five-second films, the 15 minutes of a YouTube-hosted documentary seems like a veritable viewing mountain. So, in an effort to keep the decreasing attention spans of its growing digital audience interested, APN’s online publishing team has penned a one-off partnership with filmmakers Loading Docs to host a series of ten three-minute documentaries on the NZ Herald website.
APN recently sent out a release pointing out that Nielsen had been undercounting audience to the Herald’s mobile site for about nine months—meaning that the battle for mobile eyes was inadvertently skewed in favour of Stuff. This error has now been corrected, so we decided to have a look at which publication is winning battle for mobile eyes.
While editorial and sales have long been uneasy bedfellows in the world of newspapers, they’ve been forced to get a bit cosier in recent years. That’s exactly what APN and Tourism Australia did for the ‘Explore Your Australian Passions’ campaign and the content-led initiative caught the eye of the judges at the International News Media Association Awards (INMA), winning first place in the ‘Best Marketing Solution for an Advertising Client’ category.
APN has replaced the Foodhub online brand with Bite, bringing the print liftout into alignment with the online presence. It’s also been working behind the scenes to make its recipe collections more searchable.
Two members of the FCB team will be heading to Rome in a couple of weeks to attend the 2014 Festival of Media Global as part of the agency’s prize for winning the Herald Advertising Challenge.
Vodafone has renewed its naming rights sponsorship deal with the Vodafone Warriors until 2018, taking the partnership, which started in 1999, to 20 years and making it the longest of its kind in New Zealand. And the Herald has also followed suit by renewing its deal with the team until 2016.
Nielsen and the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) have released 2013’s fourth quarter readership and circulation statistics for newspapers and magazines. And while the previous article on magazines held some good news, the numbers for newspapers are far bleaker. However, it must be remembered that Nielsen’s readership insights for newspapers are exclusively based on print. So while the statistics might not seem promising, they only offer a glimpse at one aspect of readership.