Whether you’re a fan or not, you’ll find it increasingly difficult to avoid the ever-growing volume of Olympics coverage in the papers as the summer approaches. (As a sports-loving Londoner who failed to secure a ticket, but who’ll nonetheless get to enjoy the record numbers of tourists come July, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.)
From a news editor’s perspective, the Olympics presents a rich opportunity to fill empty pages with colourful Games-related content that they know will go down well with readers. As with the Royal Wedding last year, nationwide events such as the Olympics offer a great way for papers to boost their circulation figures. The question is: can they hold onto these gains after the last athlete has peeled themselves out of their Lycra?
The audience-inflating potential of London 2012 hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Daily Telegraph, for example, aims to use its Olympics coverage to drive readership growth. As this recent article in Marketing Week notes, the paper’s management is hoping this won’t be a short-lived rise, or one that’s necessarily limited to a local audience. They see the potential for the Games to raise the Telegraph’s profile with international readers who might not currently be familiar with its output. After all, why shouldn’t the media benefit from the world’s greatest promotional opportunity?
The timing of the London 2012 Games coincides with a critical point in the future of news production. The move from print to online and digital formats continues unabated, and one of the benefits that has become apparent to publishers is the prospect of boosting readership figures with the addition of non-local readers to whom their content is now available. The Guardian offers a good example of how papers are responding: it now offers extensive US-focused reporting in a dedicated section of its website. Much of this will be of interest to a UK audience, but the real targets are the 300 million potential readers across the Atlantic.
The PR community has much to gain from this internationalising of the UK news scene, beyond the obvious benefit of the greater impact that comes with more readers. With a global audience, what would previously have been a local campaign has the potential to resonate internationally, with additional backing from the borderless nature of social media.
A further consideration will be whether this leads to changes in the types of story newspapers run. A key part of a reporter’s training involves getting to grips with the specifics of the audience they are writing for (are they married? what sort of job do they do? do they have a family? do they own a car? and a house? what are their political leanings?), and tailoring the focus of their writing accordingly.
Will a newly ‘global’ paper be receptive to the kind of general issues-based story the PR industry does well at? Or will the lack of an audience that can be easily defined within regional boundaries spell the end for survey-led stories that seek to reveal the habits and peccadillos of the nation?