First edition

BY Tim Burrowes

February 26, 2024 10:33

Welcome to a Tuesday update from Unmade. Today: The verdict on the first edition of The Nightly. And IVE Group delivers solid financial results, but still sees a dip on the Unmade Index

Today’s full post is for Unmade’s paying members only. Beneath the paywall is a coupon code for members-only pricing for HumAIn, Unmade’s exploration of how AI is changing the world of marketing, which takes place in May.

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Staying in for The Nightly

Last night, Australia got a new daily newspaper. For anyone who likes media, that’s a good thing.

Another voice, even one aligned to an ASX-listed company such Seven West Media, adds to media plurality.

It’s also an unlikely thing in the challenged media environment of 2024.

The Nightly cleared its first hurdle. It’s not a bad product.

But that’s the smaller part of the battle. We now move from execution to strategy. The real question is whether the market wants The Nightly.

As somebody who spent one of the most exciting parts of my career working on an evening newspaper, I’d love to see one succeed 30 years later. But will it?

We’ll start with the business model. In this case “the market” means a least two things. First, the advertisers, and second the readers. For a free publication, the two constituencies come in that order.

When I say newspaper, there’s no paper involved, of course. It’s digital only. Although there’s a website, the central product comes from a newspaper heritage. The Nightly is laid out and navigated like a newspaper. Just as many consumers now read facsimile editions of The Australian Financial Review and The Australian, with the selling point of “read it like it was printed”, the same goes for The Nightly.

Although there is a mobile app, The Nightly is yet to launch a tablet version, which is curious, given that would beits best format.

The chief attraction of reading newspaper editions, as opposed to via a home page is the curation. Editors use their judgment, skills and understanding of the reader to prioritise and present the most interesting content of the day.

Edition-first is a big strategic move, by the way. Whether website, facsimile edition, or email, a news brand is built around a single focal point. Readers quickly come to see the brand through that primary lens.

In order for advertisers to support the publication, The Nightly will need to find either a solid audience, or an influential one.

Influence, by the way, is the secret sauce, alongside advertiser and audience. Owning a national newspaper potentially delivers greater influence to proprietor Kerry Stokes, who is arguably the most powerful individual in Western Australia, thanks to his proprietorship of The West. With Seven not as significant as it once was, influence may be the unquantifiable element in the business case for the newspaper.

Another element behind the move, may simply be the need for Seven West Media to diversify. With the free to air TV business model under the most pressure in its history, even something as old school as newspaper publishing provides a little diversification.

Time zones come into play in several ways. First, as an evening paper, The Nightly is seeking a little clear air. Mind you, there’s a little less air now that (the paywalled) Capital Brief has launched.

Then there’s the team’s location. Spun out from The West, it’s produced in Perth. By the time the day’s edition goes to press for the east coast audience, it’s only lunchtime in WA.

However, one of the secrets of evening papers was always that the back half had been produced the day before. For workers in the Perth time zone, that element then becomes an advantage, as they’ll have been at their desks three hours later that their east coast audience the night before.

Then the idea is that in the front half, readers will get all that breaking news of the day, 12 hours before the AFR and The Oz get their editions out of the door.

So what of the product itself?

The choice of front page lead for last night’s first edition was a curious one. “Cup cake smash” was a preview of today’s release of gender pay gap data. But being the night before, it contained none of the data.

The story shared the front page with a teaser for the first big piece from former The Australian journo Christopher Dore. There was nothing topical about his analysis – a piece on how Anthony Albanese came to lose the referendum on The Voice.

The layout is deliberately of the midmarket. Compact sized, but avoiding tabloid treatments. Unlike its sibling The West, the paper doesn’t borrow from a News Corp design template.

Instead the font choices are relatively weedy, a thin, serif font for most headlines, alternating with a capitalised serif font elsewhere. It reminds me a little ofn the now defunct British paper Today.

Indeed, once you get to the International pages, taken from The New York Times, the design starts to feel a little like an explosion in a font factory.

The support of Gina Rinehart’s Hancock prospecting is prominent in the first edition, with an ad along the bottom of the front page, and a full page ad on page two.

Indeed, just about all the advertising comes out of the WA-based resource sector. BHP, Woodside Energy, and Mineral Resources are present too. Otherwise, the publication is supplemented with house ads for SWM’s Streamer service.

The signs are also there from the beginning that the paper will pursue Stokes’ interests. It takes a swipe at Andrew Forrest, with whom Stokes has been feuding for more than a year.

A thin story about oyster waste is beaten up into “a dumpster fire”.

Twiggy gets an early tune up from The Nightly

You might as well start as you mean to go on.

Another quirk of the edition is that newspapers traditionally have the odd numbered pages on the right. Not so for this edition. the navigation is somewhat random. Sometimes pages are viewable as single pages, otherwise as spreads. But double pages designed as spreads don’t always appear that way. I presume that’s a technical glitch.

There’s also another hint at a potential direction for the publication. There are no real estate ads, but the bylined real estate coverage appears to come from the staff of Australian Community Media. SWM is an investor in ACM’s proprietor Antony Catalano’s View Media real estate play.

There’s also some recycling from The West. For instance, the back page sports column from Mitchell Johnson, first appeared in The West at the weekend.

Will some people read The Nightly? Sure. But, how many? There will be some readers who miss the newspaper experience, but don’t want to pay for it. And there will be an even smaller subset who have the time and inclination to sit down for a long, curated read in the evening.

Somebody once described this type of publishing as digital publishing for people who don’t get digital publishing. I’m not sure they were wrong.

Unmade Index back above 600

The Unmade Index performed strongly for a second day running on Monday, and has now recovered almost all of the ground it lost on Thursday after Nine’s downbeat outlook depressed the market. The Index rose 1.96%, taking it back up through the 600-point ceiling to 601.5.

Yesterday’s biggest mover at the top end of town was Nine, up by 3.75%, which was not quite enough to see it return to a $3bn market capitalisation.

Meanwhile, printing and marketing group IVE slipped slightly, by 0.92%, despite releasing a relatively positive set of half year numbers.

IVE Group revenue for the half was up fractionally to $506m, while EBITDA profits were also up, by 1.3% to $65.8m.

During the investor call, analysts were told that the integration of rival print house Ovato – bought out of administration – had been wrapped up ahead of time, and the company’s digital discounts and catalogues arm Lasoo is getting closer to profitability, although not for at least another year.