Tales from the Nordics

Michael Trenerry

Online Media Sales VS Quality Content & Readership…

Web 2.0 VS flat HTML…

Raise any thoughts out there?

Are there any online medias, in particular newspapers who are going to think outside of immediate sales & ROI! What about good old fashioned quality content & readership. Well, we know that to do this online, you need to take a few steps back and look at the overall infrastructure, information architecture & standards that exist online, but wouldn’t this impress your readers! Don’t you Media folk understand that you need short term and long term strategies?

Yes, it seems that the new heads of a few Medias out there in the Nordics believe that the first & only online strategy is to drive traffic to their sites! OK – We all know that this needs to happen to justify a profitable business but, what about the long-term strategy? This whole new framework built around web2.0 and beyond is not simply a fad – you hear about it everyday so do something…

I’d love to here about other strategic thoughts on this… more so, as to how we can break through the thick heads of some of these guys. I understand these guys are great in sales and media but please, please, also understand that if your going to go online, you need to think much more in advance than the next quarter! It’s no longer about flat HTML pages that are simply loaded with information, irrelevant of what the user wants… Why do we still have to scroll down pages and pages of information to find out about what we are interested in?

I set a task for you if you don’t believe me! Go to your own newspaper or 3 favourite newspapers online, and within 3 clicks find 10 pieces of information ranging from lottery results, long term weather forecast, archived information about Tony Blair, detailed statistics on recent voting polls for your local counsels & so on…. Don’t just think about 3 clicks but think about how the common user would think & how my mother who is retired, yet still reads the newspaper would be able to find the information!

If anybody does this please let me know…