Link: Online to the future – National – www.theage.com.au.
A year later, the horror of the Bali bombing again tested that capacity. Traffic to the site took a quantum leap. Each time a big disaster occurs – the Boxing Day tsunami being the latest – the online news audience grows.
This has an impact on the print edition, but not nearly as dramatically as some might think. Circulation figures in 2005 remain close to those 10 years ago when theage.com.au was founded.
Yet up to 250,000 people now visit the site each day. Two-thirds of these are interstate and overseas.Most are either not typical newspaper readers, or are much younger than the average print reader.
They come for more than the reporting and feature writing republished from the print edition – breaking news, reader forums, video that has been produced for the site since 2000, and the interactive news graphics.Both The Age and SMH online are now self-supporting through advertising. How online news operations can go further and support an increasingly significant news gathering operation is a question being analysed in newsrooms around the world.
Yet the pace of technology continues to create new platforms for new audiences. Full-text news stories from The Age now appear on 3G handsets from Hutchison and Vodafone and Telstra’s new i-Mode service.The next 10 years is likely to be a decade of more dramatic change for newspapers. While printed newspapers are sure to remain robust and central to news organisations, news consumers will grow more accustomed to getting news where, when and how they want it.
One Comment
I’m one of the Age online’s regular readers. Being based in the UK I find it a great way to get my fix of Australian news. I look at lots of newspaper websites, but I always come back to the Age. As well as great content I love that it is so easy to navigate, the ads are kept to a minimum and the layout is simple/fuss-free. The reader interactivity is great too, especially the “melbourne gallery” where people can submit their own digital pictures. Whenever I’m feeling a tad homesick I look at those pictures and home doesn’t seem so far away.