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| Kent Messenger reaches out
There are 556 villages, towns and communities in the UK county of Kent. They each have their own pages within the Kent Messenger Group website. Managing Editor Mike Whiting explains that the group is “producing as local a service as possible.”
Top print media journalist, Laurel Brunner, finds out how the newspaper uses Picdar know-how to make the most of its market.
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Kent Messenger Group
The newspaper industry has come under heavy fire ever since the Internet was supposed to have signalled its demise. Wasn’t it Bill Gates who reckoned that by 2000 the last nail would be in the newspaper industry’s coffin? As we discovered during our Digital Newsprint for Roaming Readers project (see web addressX) last year, newspapers are far from facing the end of the line. Many of them struggle to compete in a changing world, and many have failed, but plenty have recognised survival depends on making the right technology investments. We recently visited the Kent Messenger Group, one of the UK’s largest independent newspaper publishers and got a refreshingly optimistic glimpse of how technology can help reinvigorate a market.
The Set-up
The Kent Messenger Group publishes 30 weekly titles and a number of niche publications from 20 offices across the county of Kent in south eastern England. This 200 year old family owned business whose oldest paper dates back to 1717, has a simple publishing model: keep it local, keep it relevant. A combination of shrewd IT deployment and data management tools has produced a content production and management system to enhance KMG’s market presence and provide a digital shop window for its services. Six geographically defined print editions of the weekly Kent Messenger, an array of local titles plus a hoard of local web sites keep KMG close to its market. Underlying everything is an SQL server and KMG’s custom-made database.
KMG’s content management system mixes KMG innovations with Picdar’s Media Mogul and is designed to support cross media production management. KMG journalists use a customised version of Word with macros to add quick win category codes to each story, so that they are correct for the database. Media Systems Adora handles ad booking, PCS Pulse handles adverts and PCS Linker products handle planning. QPS builds pages and Picdar’s Media Mogul technology manages content and story routing to and from the archive, supporting automatic web site building as well as archiving. Data flows are strictly managed using KMG’s workflow management system so nothing is published without having passed through the appropriate legal, editorial and production checkpoints.
A single system manages community news for both print and web editions, flowing tagged text into QPS and automatically populating 556 local village web pages within the www.kentonline.co.uk site. The site delivers over 700,000 page impressions per month, from around 138,000 monthly site visits. The group prints 1900 tabloid pages weekly plus some 200 edition changes, including the majority of the newspapers’ colour pages – some 1500 pages per week. In 1999 colour pages averaged just 350 per week. The current three line film system (Autologic Sierra 4850 Turbos) installed nine years ago, produces film for some 9000 plates per week, with an average of 600 page pairs. The company is looking at replacing conventional film with two CTP lines early in 2004. KMG invested in six Goss Colourliner 4 high towers and with its three folders has multiple pagination options. The press is currently producing 3.5 million copies per week.
According to Managing Editor Mike Whiting (pictured, right) “we heavily editionise our newspapers and that is a guiding principal on the website too. One of the challenges we had was to make it relevant and local down to the village level”. There are 556 villages, towns and communities in Kent and each has their own pages within the KMG site. Mike explains that the group is “Producing as local a service as possible. Print stories are archived with metadata – location to which a story is relevant, type/category of story and a copyright field. The web sites then can pull the material they need [from the database].”
KMG export editorial content from their QPS editorial system to Media Mogul to create an archive and to drive the web site and its 556 subsidiary sites. Media Mogul handles all images and text in native file formats, and as paged PDFs, indexing content, building links and adding legal and fee warnings to text and images. Picdar/Quark extensions can also create a job ticket to communicate editorial preferences for images that will be used on page.
Content sales
All content carries associated metadata including publication history and royalty information and Picdar has recreated KMG’s complex edition structure in the archive. It is very easy to produce new editions because “each page is stored once, but Media Mogul recreates the edition which can be a mixture of edition pages”. This has interesting revenue possibillities for new and special editions.
Apart from special editions, the archive is used to offer readers selections of images to buy. According to Mike “it’s been a huge bonus, as a research tool it is very useful and we can sell these pictures to the public, previously done by sending contact sheets to the relevant office for people to order” “because the front counter staff have access to the library via an intranet browser when people come in and want a picture counter staff can call it up to screen and sell them other photos related to the event. This has helped our photo sales”. KMG is not yet offering photos for sale via Internet but is considering it.
The Web marketplace
The web site is clearly key to the KMG business model. It supports local villages with news and local advertising, and is also the basis for KMG’s community news gathering system. Village correspondents and field journalists feed stories into Quickwire via a text window on the web site. Completed pages are archived as PDFs with images downsized to 72 dpi. Once in the Media Mogul archive, stories are fed back to the local village sites using sophisticated filtering and routing according to story metadata. Only printed stories make it to the archive. Any additional web based content is treated as highly perishable and is not integrated with Media Mogul. KMG use their own technology to get content coming in via the various web sites into QPS, and Picdar handles automatic routing of content from archive to village web sites. Thus all content and editorial management is database sourced rather than coming from the editorial system. Mike Whiting says the “auto feed to 556 villages with news and sport wasn’t something we could really do without Media Mogul we couldn’t strip stories out of the page automatically without it”.
New Business Opportunities
For many regional newspapers the web can make a positive contribution to revenues, at the very least raising awareness for a strengthened relationship with local readers which can have a positive effect on ad revenues. The web provides regional newspapers with the means for highly focused editions, serving even the tiniest of communities. Even a village with only a pub, a shop and another pub has potential advertisers, from people offering bed and breakfast, to the local piano teacher. In addition to generating new advertising revenues, a strong web presence can help develop overseas subscriptions and in combination with a distributed print model and digital newsprint, this has interesting business opportunities.
Conclusions
Should we call KMG an example of “cross media publishing” and “convergence”? Let’s not. Such clichés are so very tired and don’t come close to expressing what is really happening in the newspaper publishing industry. Clichés are like chocolate, a quick fix to convince us that we understand, that it will all be alright in the end. But like chocolate trendy buzz words are merely a temporary distraction to keep us from the point, or for hiding behind. Newspaper growth isn’t about technology, it’s about applications and business development at local level. This is where the Internet has its greatest power, influencing buying habits and nurturing communities of interest. The Kent Messenger Group’s production model mixes the best attributes of traditional newspaper deliverables, and the Internet’s nontraditional ones. The group is well placed to develop some sort of cross media response system and its web presence gives it a natural means of extending its franchise.
Author: Laurel Brunner, 2003.
© Digital Dots Limited This article originally appeared in Vol.1 Issue 4 of Spindrift
(www.digitaldots.org),
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