Tuesday 13th July: Your digital products suck.

July 13, 2021

Happy Tuesday! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

That's not a headline you want to be reading at the start of the week! Frederic Filloux outlines a number of common 'bad features' on publisher websites that he believes could be easily fixed. Whether it's improving login and identification practices or sorting out search systems, and internal recommendation engines, there are many areas that fall short on websites that he spends a combined $1500 a year subscribing to.

Filloux emphasises that although these flaws may be dismissed as trivial, user expectations for digital interfaces are higher than ever and are being set by the Amazons and Ubers of the world. "Paying customers demand nothing less than the best services they use on a daily basis," he says.

I've worked at publishers where everyone knows the website search is rubbish, and poorly implemented ads result in janky reading experiences. But we can't dismiss these 'small' issues any longer as subscriptions grow in importance. Add 'fix website' to your to-do list this week!

News media executives often comfort themselves that the digital world is moving so fast that “you can’t predict what’s going to happen next year, let alone in five years’ time”. Ex Times leaders Nick Petrie and Alan Hunter think that’s nonsense, and set out what they think will be the main concerns of the news media in 2026.

Switching to a subscription model in the middle of a pandemic was not an easy decision for the publisher. But El País made it work. They credit their registration wall as the primary driver, as 80% of their subscribers are from previously registered users. "The propensity from registration to subscription is very high," observed Managing Editor Borja Echevarría.

Lord Rothermere is considering taking the Daily Mail private in a deal that could value the newspaper group at £810m, a move that would end a 90-year run as a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange. If DMGT is taken private, it will leave Reach plc as the only major UK newspaper group remaining as a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange.

This week's episode:

This week we hear from Marcela Kunova, Editor at Journalism.co.uk. We talked about what she’s hoping to achieve with her new newsroom innovation mentorship programme, how she translated Newsrewired to a virtual event, and why it’s so important for the site to support freelancers.

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