Er, is the Daily Telegraph really planning to consciously slow down the appearance of its online content? A posting on the Guardian‘s website seems to suggest so.
The Daily Telegraph website is to put its online content up later in the day in a bid to encourage more of its online readers to buy the printed newspaper. “We hope that a new content management system will allow us to time content to go up online, at the moment our system doesn’t allow us to do that automatically,” said Telegraph Media Group new media director Annelies van den Belt. Ms van den Belt said it was planned that individual section editors would decide what time content from the paper was posted online. Later posting could increase newsprint sales, “as long as we give them added value and relevance online and in the paper.”
I bet it won’t. This won’t give me any added incentive to buy the newspaper. In fact, it makes me more likely to go somewhere else entirely. How can you possibly have a news website which doesn’t deliver the most up-to-date content? Even if it’s only the feature material, rather than hard news stuff, you won’t get away from a perception that the Telegraph site isn’t interested in fast updates.
I look forward to seeing what the team’s Upload blog has to say about this. You are going to say something chaps, aren’t you?
Responses
[…] As if to underline the point I made yesterday about the insanity of the Telegraph’s new ’slow news’ policy… the Guardian announces its plan to do precisely the opposite. The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a “web first” service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper. The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for “once-a-day” publishing. […]
[…] Better late than never, I suppose, the Telegraph team has responded to last week’s Guardian story suggesting they were planning to hold stories back from their website, in the interests of boosting sales of the print edition. At the time, I was a bit dubious… and, apparently, rightly so. […]