Jonny Harrison is sailing to Australia from the UK via the Panama Canal before he starts work in Sydney on a secondment at his firm PricewaterhouseCoopers »
Andrew Hebden is Assistant Editor (Business) of The Journal »
Katie Pringle has started her own business, Rock, Paper, Scissors »
Andrew Mernin is the Digital Journalist for nebusiness »
Matthew Rippon is an IP lawyer for BHP Law »
Formerly editor of a national business lifestyle magazine, Jez Davison is a business writer for the Evening Gazette in Teesside »
Ross Smith, Head of Policy and Research at the North-East Chamber of Commerce »
Julian Christopher from Footprint Public Relations, on media and marketing »
Norma Foster from the North East Regional Portal writes about e-business »
Ian Brown, Northumberland farmer and businessman writes about the agricultural industry »
Accessibilty Champion Steve Wilkinson on the importance of inclusion »
Andrea Wilkinson of Shared Interest is visiting Swaziland to deliver business training »
Jonathan Wheatley from Stokesley-based MC Ware writes about IT matters »
Mark Lisgo is a Northeasterner who works for law firm Eversheds in Abu Dhabi, UAE »
Paul Williamson from Deloitte »The late, lamented Spike Milligan once very perceptively wrote that 88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Pausing briefly to consider the acres of ‘interesting’ PR-led survey stories that grace our newspapers at this time of the year (of which I’ve been just as guilty as the next man over the years), I’d like to offer another, slightly more accurate one that I noted recently.
More than a quarter of all the material picked up and recycled across London every day is a discarded free newspaper – and a recent trip to the capital city showed me just how this situation has arisen.
Walking between Piccadilly Circus and Waterloo Station, which is no more than a mile and a half at most, we must have had free copies of London Lite and The London Paper thrust at us by at least 20 different, but equally enthusiastic distributors, all of whom were dressed in day-glo coloured uniforms that don’t normally get worn outside the headquarters of CBeebies.
Add in the more established Metro newspaper, and the fact that these papers are actually designed to be left behind on tubes, buses and park benches for subsequent readers to pick up, and you quickly see how this mountain of newsprint rises up every day.
There’s a real battle going on in London which is expected to see at least one of these free titles go to the wall in the relatively short-term, as the battle for continually-shrinking advertising budgets reaches a crescendo, and it’s one that, in time, will be replicated in cyberspace.
The national daily and Sunday newspapers have all invested very heavily in their online presence, with even Associated Press, which had resisted taking a serious look into cyberspace until very recently, now having instigated an all-singing, all-dancing website for the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday.
With online advertising now receiving the biggest proportion of companies’ marketing budgets, it makes a great deal of sense for newspapers to be doing this and they are all trying to get the maximum number of users to log on.
But to quote another well-known maxim, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ – and in my opinion, the free access that we currently enjoy to almost all these sites will eventually evolve into subscriber-only admission to all but the most superficial levels.
With its more specialised readership, the Financial Times has already successfully gone down this route with the admittedly-excellent ft.com, and many specialist trade publications’ websites are already all but closed to non-subscribers.
And with the drive towards offering everything possible via your PC now seemingly unstoppable, we’re going to have little choice but to sign up if we want to keep reading our preferred publications, just as anyone wanting to watch live Premiership football is tied into a loving relationship with BSkyB or, more recently, Setanta.
I suspect that we will eventually look back on the early years of this century as the ‘golden age’ of free online content – and as we do, I’m sure there’ll a PR person there writing a survey-based press release about how much better 68.3% people think things were in the old days…..
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