Page overload

The row over whether journalists work in print or online has mostly been resolved as rolling news from a joint team keeps web and print editions full of the latest content. This has helped online audiences to grow. The Guardian is the top online title, with 21.1m unique readers in August, according to ABCE. The Daily Telegraph and Times have grown 126% and 92% respectively.

But to keep audiences growing, words and pictures are no longer enough. Video, RSS feeds, blogs and comments need to be added to web pages, and publishers have to get to grips with mobile. While they welcome the opportunity to publish content across three channels, it's not without its issues as the people who publish the information grapple with presenting content in different formats.

Top of the pain points for modern publishers is the need for a common content management system (CMS). Cian O'Donovan, new media operations manager at Setanta, says this would make adding video to a page much easier. "We've come a really long way from having separate databases for text, SMS, WAP, video and so on. We're now down to two: video and just about everything else," he says. "But it would make life a lot easier to have all our content on one CMS so it was in one place and production staff could get it all on the same web page. We could then have live streaming of an event at the top of the page, with news and blog entries being refreshed around it."

James Montgomery, editor of FT.com, believes that while most newsrooms have overcome the integration issues of the past, such as siloed web and print teams, there's still some way to go until they can say they've done the same with content. "We've got over the past issue and now we have a one-company, one-product stance," he says. "There are only two real concerns for me. One is that we have a great platform for speeding up workflow for the web and mobile but we have video and audio on one system and text on another. Then again, we also have blogs on Word Press, so combining everything together takes quite a bit of skill."

For Montgomery, this means the second issue, of resources, never goes away. "It's great to have a unified team serving the paper, web and mobile, but it makes the working day longer because the web and mobile never sleep. They need constantly feeding with stories, but you have only a finite amount of resources."

Video is proving a big challenge because it usually sits on a different server and is controlled by a different CMS. The problem is very much at the top of the BBC's agenda for improving the look and feel of its news and sports operations. Pete Clifton, head of editorial development of multimedia journalism, says that video remains an area where the Corporation could improve.

"We have a standard template for the web, mobile and Ceefax which breaks stories into four paragraphs. It's a very good exercise for journalists to know they have to get the story down in four paragraphs," he says. "The thing we haven't quite cracked is combining the rest of our content. We have the news team in the same office now, but we still sometimes have a silo mentality where one department will only use their resources rather than look around at all of the BBC's material. So we have a lot to do to make audio, video, text, pictures, blogs and so on available on one database so journalists and production teams have a range of material to combine on the page."

This will be helped by a recent move to embedded videos. "Embedded video just looks fantastic, it's so much better than being sent off to a clunky, separate player to watch a load of buffering before you get your content," says Clifton. "It does, however, bring up the problem of what text, audio and blog links we give, because we don't want to tell the same story twice. We need to go into our silos of content and get complementary multimedia stories up, where the elements of the page work together rather than repeat one another."

This notion of giving the reader all an organisation has on a topic is the top challenge for publishers, according to Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN. "You have to train journalists and production staff to realise that every page is the home page," he says. "You can't see pages as standalone stories, they have to entice a reader to find out more about the subject and explore the site further, because they may have come straight to that story from another site rather than through the home page. The biggest challenge is making all your assets available to journalists and making sure they use them."

On a practical note, Pete Picton, online editor of The Sun, says that while everyone is correct in pointing out that combining multimedia from separate databases can be tricky, what's really needed is a better editing interface. "If you want to change a page you need to call it up, put the content in the right places and edit the text until it's how you want it," he says. "The trouble is, you don't get to see what that looks like as you're doing it. You have to save the page and then preview it, which takes time. If the page doesn't look how you want, you have to start the whole process again. What we could do with is live on-page editing. We had it in publishing with QuarkXPress, where you could edit on the page and see the effect of what you were doing. Basically we need a Quark for the web."

While Picton believes a single CMS for all stored media and all channels would be a step in the right direction, he cautions it could be misused. Andrew Bagguley, head of mobile strategy at News International agrees, claiming the next big consideration for publishers is how they handle the subtle differences inherent in mobile.

"We're very cautious about the potential to publish everywhere with the touch of a button, because would you want to publish on mobile that easily?" he asks. "Just publishing the same content wouldn't get the most out of mobile and take advantage of its immediacy for voice or location services. Publishers are going to have to guard against not seeing mobile as distinctive as it truly is."

While these issues concern editorial staff at the best-known publishing companies, up-and-coming blogging businesses have more immediate concerns, such as how to staff up and roll out video content without breaking the bank. One of the key issues for blog publisher Pocket-lint is people. As multimedia publishing becomes the norm for blogs as well as mainstream publishers, founder Stuart Miles, a former Times journalist, has found it increasingly hard to find staff capable of producing multimedia content.

"We can find good journalists, good photographers and people who can shoot and edit a video. But it's very rare for someone to be able to do all of those things," he says. "It makes getting the right staff so much harder than when the web was purely text."

Similarly, at blog publisher Shiny Media, co-founder and former journalist Chris Price says video production is one of the toughest challenges of converged publishing. "The cost of video bandwidth is coming down but is still pretty high," he says. "Video production obviously isn't cheap either, but the problem is that advertisers don't seem to have quite caught up with where the viewers are."

While the established names in publishing are calling for a single CMS to make handling video simpler, blogging companies are hoping the widespread use of multimedia will boost talent levels. At every level, the industry needs journalists and editors who can produce more than text as the cost of serving multimedia content comes down. PThis week at the seventh annual AOP Digital Publishing Summit, publishers gathered to debate the challenges facing their industry. We asked speakers at the event and other leading voices in the field to give their opinions about how consumers' attitudes towards content are changing, and the opportunities for greater targeting, social media and publishing for mobile platforms

Measuring mobile

Measuring mobile audiences is problematic for several reasons. The most fundamental issue comes when publishers choose to go on-portal with a mobile network provider to make their content more discoverable and reassure customers they won't be eating into data allowances.

Cian O'Donovan, new media operations manager at Setanta, hints that more mobile activity will soon be announced. But his deal with Orange creates a problem. "It's tough to measure our customers there because they don't belong to us, they belong to Orange," he says. "We have exactly the same issue with Vodafone, our partner in Ireland."

Even those publishers that go for the direct route and run their own standalone WAP or .mobi sites have problems, as Pete Picton, online editor of The Sun, points out. "For mobile we have internal figures but don't have anything we can publicly benchmark them against," he says.

Bango, whose analytics offering is on trial with News International, has developed fingerprint technology that can tell whether someone viewing mobile content is a returning or new user. But Andrew Bagguley, head of mobile strategy at News International, says more work is needed. "We've been looking at this with mobile trade body the GSMA because it's clear we need to be able to measure audiences to agreed standards. This would help each publisher and it would obviously help advertisers."

Earlier this year the GSMA pledged that it would develop a set of audience measures and by April had agreed a deal with independent auditor ABCE (nma 17 April). The first round of audits are expected before the end of the year.