Biography:
Wolfgang is the Editor-in-Chief of Zeit Online, the sister publication of Germany’s newspaper Die Zeit. From 1999 to 2007, he worked in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco and Washington D.C. as a freelance reporter for Germany’s broadcaster ZDF, the German newspaper Die Welt and the radio news syndicator BLR-Radiodienst. In the three years since Wolfgang joined Zeit Online, the website has been repositioned and its unique visitors have grown by more than 270 percent. In 2011, ZEIT ONLINE won Germany’s Grimme Online Award, two Lead Awards in Gold and became the first German newsroom ever to win the Online Journalism Award of the American Online News Association, ONA.ng
Speaker Summary:
German online editor Wolfgang Blau spent the majority of his time considering how to construct a financially viable and journalistically widespread business model.
He said two things — maximizing site traffic and advertising revenues — made this much easier.
However, with that being said, a site’s goal should not be capitalizing on the audience numerically, but rather, capitalizing in terms of devotion. Blau’s company, Zeit Online tried to find a “niche audience” in order to charge higher advertisement rates.
“Our goal is not to be the biggest news producers, but to do the best journalism,” he said. “If (we) can let go of that goal, success is much more likely.”
Chronology:
Keys to Success for Zeit Online in Germany
Wolfgang Blau, editor-in-chief of Zeit Online in Germany, spoke after Mironyuk.
“I shouldn’t even be part of this panel because our newsroom is not shrinking,” Blau said to open his presentation. Zeit has a very small newsroom, he said.
“Now that our success shows, I’m being asked what those success factors are,” he said. He first discussed the business model. He said that Zeit is trying to maximize traffic and advertising revenues.
Zeit tried to find a niche audience in order to charge higher advertisement rates. They tried to generate quality information for said audience.
Secondly, the staff learned about positioning, Blau said. The attempt to cover everything simply distracts them from producing quality work for their audience.
“We don’t even cover TV,” he said.
Zeit also spends a lot of time looking for good staff members. They only look for established journalists who dream of being online journalists, Blau said.
“Innovation, we learned the hard way, is a project in itself,” Blau said. “We learned that innovation pays off even if there are no investors and sponsors behind it.”
He said newsrooms are prone to adapting to inefficient workflows, so Zeit has spent time to come up with effective workflows.
Too many newsrooms spend too much time thinking of and discussing app strategies, he said. Zeit dropped its app service, and they have made a HTML5 project online instead.
“And by freeing ourselves from that, we learned we can actually have better business opportunities,” Blau said.
User-generated content is another way they lost a lot of time because it’s not as cheap as they originally believed it would be.
Sales were another issue for Zeit. They wanted to clear up ad space on their website to quiet it down, so they made one big banner at the top of their site, which has seemed to work so far, Blau said.
Another thing that Zeit deems important is the spirit of staff members. It’s exhausting for a journalist, no matter how professional they are, to solely cover huge event after huge event, Blau said.
To keep the staff upbeat, Zeit tries to generate hopeful pieces with optimistic views.