Fairfax hops onto the web comment bandwagon with National Times
Just a fortnight after News Ltd launched opinion site The Punch, Fairfax has revealed it is to aggregate its opinion content under its long defunct National Times masthead.
However, while The Punch has been attempting to find new voices as well as News Ltd old stagers, it appears that the National Times – due to launch in August – will be mainly using comment created by other Fairfax titles.
Announcing what Fairfax described as “a significant expansion of journalism by the company,” CEO Brian McCarthy said: “The best of our opinion writing, commentary and analysis will be aggregated on the site and I believe it will be a beacon for all those people with an interest in politics, policy and current affairs.”
The National Times was a weekly Fairfax title from 1971 to 1986.
However, it is unclear whether the National Times will be a genuine standalone site or a rebranded section within the Farifax Digital Media network. The company announcement said: ” The nationaltimes.com.au will be published on Fairfax’s leading news sites smh.com.au, theage.com.au, brisbanetimes.com.au and watoday.com.au.”
The launch of the National Times marks the latest of a rush into the Australian comment sphere. For at least a couple of years ABC Unleashed was virtually the only wide ranging, large audience discussion site.
Last month Crikey – known mainly for its daily subscription-based email – upgraded its website, offering aggreagation of its own and external content. Then at the beginning of this month The Punch joined the fray.
Early data suggests that The Punch is already gaining ground on Crikey, although after an initial surge in interest, users appear to have fallen away somewhat.
Meanwhile, Fairfax’s motivations have already drawn cynicism, with blogger Young and Grumpy suggesting:
“I wonder how well they will be able to pick up the ball after The Punch has a well established brand. And given their choice of opinion columns to date in the SMH and The Age, it remains to be seen if this will be a serious website, or one that will pander to specific political interests. My money’s on The Punch.”
Newspapers’ need to still feel that they were newspapers means that their washing machine activity hasn’t really kept up to current practices. A modern washing machine generates a vast number of pageviews and more importantly linklove for newspaper headlines.
As always with News and Fairfax, it’s a defensive strategy to stop anyone else bulding a significant audience.
The design is slowing evolving and may end up looking like Huffington
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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 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?
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we must have newspapers even if just to wrap the fish and chips and what will the wife do for her crosswords etc
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