Service please! Why publishing is more than creating content

What kind of service do you provide your readers?

It's a question all publishers should ask themselves often in a digital age. With a renewed enthusiasm for paid content models in some quarters - in response to the bursting of digital advertising's early growth bubble - websites attached to traditional legacy businesses are looking for ways to relieve readers of their cash in return for access to content.

But what counts here is not the stories you write or the sites you publish, but the relationship between reader and publisher - and between publisher and advertiser. News stories matter, blogging (or my preferred term, real-time digital publishing) matters, scoops matter, multimedia matters - and that's both in a consumer and B2B setting. But they mean very little unless the commercial and editorial teams understand how they fit into a wider strategy of giving people something unique that will help them somehow.

In short, the weekly B2B mag or local newspaper that has a boring story on its front page, not much advertising (online or in print) and a lacklustre or non-existant events strategy, does not have long left in this mortal life. As UBM CEO David Levin told me recently, any title with "News" or "Week" in its title is "structurally challenged" and there's not a lot anyone can do about it. Doubters on the consumer side should look to Tina Brown's Daily Beast, which averages 4.6 million unique visitors per month and has gained 43 new ad campaigns since January.

Service charge

Since the digital revolution took hold of news publishing and didn't let go, there has been a forlorn admission from some that "you'll never make money online compared to print". But in essence, journalism has never been a profitable activity. Journalists won't like to hear it, but it's not scoops that make money. They obviously help, by bringing in readers and greater circulation/ad revenue. But when you can get so much stuff for free - and there is so much other cool stuff to do these days that doesn't involve reading your content at all - what makes people keep coming back? What other ways are there to get cash for content?

News is only one part of the jigsaw: in a B2B setting, events are content just in a different form. And compared to dead tree products they're doing well. UBM made £220 million from events in the first nine months of 2010 and future bookings for its top 20 events (n.b. this is money already in the bank) are up 16.2 percent year on year. Though depressed, there is still a sizeable market for research reports of different kinds, exhibitions, tradeshows, conferences, training. In the consumer world, look at how brands like the Guardian is focusing on partnerships with Glastonbury and the Hay literary festival; the Daily Mail has had a largely profitable relationship with the Ideal Home Show for the best part of a century.

More questions than answers

One technique that leads to a very clear and obvious revenue relationship is asking readers to get their digital wallets out. But it's a minefield out there: the intelligence report on paywalls published by my website TheMediaBriefing and written by Peter Kirwan, shows that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to paywall conundrum. The open web is expanding and digital advertising is predicted by all onlookers to grow exponentially as connected mobile platforms become the norm and print continues to slide. But we don't know if new forms of advertising will replace the money lost to print's decline - or if readers' loyalty can be counted on.

So charging isn't such a bad idea. Paid content fans like theTimes.co.uk and FT.com are hoping that the relationship they build with customers will be more valuable than the Google search-based millions that browse their way through Guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk. But the question we should all be asking is not "will people pay for news?" but "do we have enough services and products that someone out there will pay for, and are they good enough?"

Patrick Smith is editor and chief analyst of TheMediaBriefing, a new website that mixes original journalism and analysis on the media industry with intelligent aggregation and links to the best coverage across the web.

Rory Brown, co-founder of TheMediaBriefing, will be speaking in the Branding and Entrepreneurialism session at our upcoming digital journalism conference, news:rewired - beyond the story. See the full agenda here and buy tickets here.

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