British Newspapers Target The US As Fertile Ground To Gain Millions of New Online Readers

The Guardian currently has some 12.9 million unique global users to its web site and about five million of those come from North America, even though there was no marketing to get them. The print edition has a circulation of 381,188 almost all in the UK. The Times has seen its online audience increase from 1.5 million to more than 8 million unique users within the past two years, with near to three million of them in the US. It’s print circulation is 663,543.

And both now figure if they could pull those US numbers without marketing, just imagine the readership they could get if their brands became better known. So both have embarked on similar campaigns to get themselves known.

First off the block was The Times that now publishes some 10,000 copies daily of an US edition using the presses of the New York Post – a sister newspaper also owned by News Corp. Those newspapers are for distribution in New York and New Jersey and their aim is to familiarize readers with the brand and the web site.

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Not to be outdone The Guardian has announced plans to print a US edition on small-scale digital presses in six US cities, but the distribution will only be a few thousand for each. Again the goal is to get the web site known.

But The Guardian, in a surprise announcement, has named Michael Kinsley as its US editor at large, a position he will take up in September. Kinsley, perhaps best known as the founding editor of Slate that just celebrated its 10-year anniversary, is a well-known name in American journalistic circles and he does lend much prominence to the Guardian’s efforts.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told his newspaper the fact Kinsley took the position “is a signal of the paper’s growing stateside influence.”

Because both newspapers recognized that to gain US readers you need to get news onto the web site very quickly, both within a week of one another announced they are starting a “web first”: policy of filing their news copy. While US newspapers long ago filed their stories as they became available to their web sites, in the UK that is not the norm. Web sites had their own staffs – the Guardian web site has more than 100 journalists -- and they file stories as they became available, but copy written by print journalists were held from the Internet until midnight on the eve of publishing the morning newspaper.

At the Guardian the change first affects foreign news. Foreign correspondents will still get their marching orders from the editors back home but now they will be able to write fuller stories – not constrained by print lack of space but they will also have to come to grips with the “deadline every minute” philosophy rather than having the luxury of having all day to write and nurse a story. On the up side, they will see their stories appearing on the web site much faster.

Business news will be next to follow. The goal is that within two years some 95% of the content written for the print newspaper will end up being filed first to the web site.

A week after the Guardian made that announcement The Times followed suit. In the case of the Times, foreign correspondents are being told to file 600-word stories that will get posted immediately to the web site, and editors for the print edition will use the web site to select the stories to run in the print edition. The Times had just used news agencies on its web site for breaking foreign news.

The Guardian has also announced it will double its US reporting team from 6 reporters to 12.

Both newspapers believe their current US popularity is because they have commentary that is very different to US media and that the style of British journalism is different to that of the US.

The Times signaled a few months ago when it placed a business editor in India for its web site, that the Internet had become its priority and the world was its intended audience, not just the UK.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the BBC is celebrating finally getting its BBC World 24-hour news station onto the New York cable system, its first success in the US. Cable systems have always said that Americans are not interested in foreign news ans there would be little audience for an international news channel but the BBC, teaming up with the Discovery Channel, finally made its breakthrough in New York.

If it took the BBC the years it has to get onto its first US cable network – and the BBC has an outstanding brand name – then it can hardly come as a surprise that the new English language Al-Jazeera is being continually turned away from US cable channels even though it has signed names known in the US such as David Frost.

BBC comedies and dramas have long had a niche audience across the US – usually from co-productions with A&E and PBS and from their play on the BBC America cable channel. Now Americans will get a chance to see how an international TV news channel does things differently to domestic CNN and Fox.

The first thing those viewers will notice is that important events actually do occur daily outside the US!