National Times To Launch Monday

For an online-only entity, the promotion online for The National Times has been all but non-existent, less than one week out from its official launch.

Google News, for example, has only one current story about the National Times (at the time of this posting). Just the one. And it isn't even from the Fairfax media, it's from Mumbrella :



The announcement released today by Fairfax for to start some hype for The National Times is snoreful :

“Fairfax Media is set to unveil the anticipated online version of its revered National Times masthead next Monday, September 14. Carrying on the National Times legacy, the site will bring together the best opinions, commentary and analysis from leading Fairfax columnists and opinion leaders from around the world on the biggest issues in Australia.

“Watch out for more information, including the announcement of high-profile contributors later this week.”

They probably mean Mike Carlton and whoever the goanna is :


The launch of The National Times, twelve weeks after the launch of Murdoch's The Punch, completes Australia's Old Media absorption of New Media formats like blogging, embedded video and reader-generated content via comments and Twitter feeds.

The National Times has at least 45 opinionists weighing in on a rainbow of subjects and issues. Combined with The Punch, there will, by the end of next week, be more than 70 professional "opinion makers" (were they tempted to use "opinion shapers"?) trying to draw in the massive online audiences already enjoyed by the Sydney Morninng Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the Northern Territory News (crocodile attacks are always popular). A few million online daily readers at least.

I don't think it's a question of whether The National Times and The Punch can both find large audiences. Whether that audience hangs around in healthy numbers when they have to pay to read Mike Carlton or, err, Peter Costello, is something we'll learn next year.

Going by the below ad from Fairfax for the National Times....




.....they're aiming for the Digital Baby Boomers, a massive market in the next few decades, as the millions-strong generation that was going to change the world, but invented ultra-consuming instead, crams into Ruddnet-enabled nursing homes, set adrift into thousands of days of retirement with little to do but mournfully play old Doors albums and get online to agree with everyone else at the National Times that getting old is shitty and the Alex Hawke-led Liberal-Greens coalition government of the 2020s is Still Not Doing Enough for elderly boomers.

The Harsh Online Reality For The Corporate Media Is That There Simply Isn't Enough Commenters To Go Round

By Darryl Mason

As I've said here before, probably a bit too rudely, this blog doesn't exist for the sake of comments. It doesn't matter to me whether there's 0 comments or 26, the posts will still be written and published.

But what if your online media business model, your basic plan for profitability, relied deathly on having dozens or hundreds of commenters spilling their thoughts and opinions on every story or opinion piece posted on your website?

The Murdoch Online Experience has already launched The Punch, and now, as Mumbrella reports, Fairfax are going to have their shot at creating an online aggregator site for its stable of digital newspapers, with a steady stream of commenters being seen as essential to push those daily hits into the five and six digit page view counts that advertisers like to see.

Unlike The Punch, however, who've made the effort to recruit writers who aren't already writing for other Murdoch media, The National Times is expected to fill itself out with opinion pieces already published elsewhere in Fairfax's digital newspapers.

As usual, I found it easier to put my thoughts together on this while commenting at another blog. So here's the comment I left at Mumbrella :

The Punch has had some interesting columns so far, but nothing that has set fire to the comments boards. It seems overall quite safe and pedestrian. For now at least. Nothing controversial, nothing that you don't already see in mainstream newspaper columns and op-eds. If the aim is too have a "national conversation", the convo has been damn quite with most posts in the past week pulling 0 to 6 but rarely 10 or more comments.If people who visit can't be arsed to comment, why will they want to eventually pay for it?

A huge turnover in comments, in the hundreds for each or most posts, is what The Punch needs to ramp up the hits, obviously. But how are they going to do that? Where is that hardcore crowd of a few hundred who will burn up the boards like they do at Piers Akerman's or Andrew Bolt's blog going to come from? .

The problem, as Fairfax will soon find out, is that there are a limited number of Australians who bother to comment on any story or column or blog post anywhere online, particularly when the content is centred around politics or culture or news events.

Even if you do like to comment on what you're reading, there are so many places to do so elsewhere, from Facebook to YouTube to Twitter to ten thousand more fun to read and riotous blogs elsewhere in the world.

The Punch has discovered that regular commenters for blogs and news sites that aren't stirring up racism and xenophobia and general hate, or raging about Israel and Palestinians, are pretty thin on the ground in Australia.

There might even be as few as three or four thousand in Australia who will write comments on local political/cultural blogs and news sites most days, as a habitt, not including those who are paid to professionally comment by PR companies and political parties.

There's no shortage of places to Have Your Say on Australian blogs and news sites now, but there is most definitely a shortage of normal everyday Australian commenters. The Punch now knows this, the National Times will most likely learn that too, very soon.

There are a few good free ways for corporate media sites like The Punch and National Times to pull quality and volume-high comments to their sites, but why give away good ideas like that?