From the Press Gazette today: ”Website must come secondโ says Independent’s Kelner’:
Speaking to an audience of senior media industry figures at a Press Gazette Breakfast With The Editor event on Wednesday… Kelner said: “If you have an exclusive story at five o’clock to go in the following day’s newspaper, the idea that you would put it on the website for nothing strikes me as complete madness. Our relationship with our own website is one where the paper is first and foremost, and the website comes second. Until there is a model for making money out of a newspaper website, we’re not going to plough millions of pounds into it.
So was the Guardian’s chief exec lying when she announced a ยฃ1m profit for the Guardian Unlimited websites?
It comes as absolutely no surprise that the Independent’s editor doesn’t think much of the web. You only need to spend a few moments tackling his own paper’s website. Or, as Roy Greenslade notes, looking at his circulation numbers.
Web-first may not be the solution to the dilemma of newspaper economics. But web-second isn’t cutting it either.
Thanks to the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond for pointing to this.