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This interview is part of the Future of Journalism interview series.
Interview with Nigel Eccles, co-founder and CEO of UK website hubdub.com
 What should U.S. newspapers start doing?
NE: That reminds me of the old Irish saying “I wouldn’t start from here if I wanted to get there”. The problem for U.S. newspapers is that they failed to invest and innovate during the good times. They remained hugely over-exposed to print revenues and missed a golden opportunity over the period 2003-06 to increase their exposure to digital. News Corp was the only one that managed to do this successfully through its acquisition of MySpace.
Today many U.S. newspapers need to primarily focus on surviving for the next 2-3 years. To do that, they need to make big cuts to their cost base. However, if they do just that, they will just continue on the road to extinction. To survive beyond 2-3 years they need to do more to leverage their brand and increase investment in digital. News is migrating on-line and newspapers in general are hitting below their weight in the online news market.
Do newspapers in the U.K. have a better shot at surviving and if so, why? Is the print situation there totally different than the U.S.?
NE: The major difference between the U.K. and U.S. newspaper markets is that in the U.K., every day there four national quality papers, two mid-market papers and two popular papers. That means it is a highly competitive market which has meant each paper has had to segment the market and compete hard for each reader. However, it also means that at the top end of the market, newspapers are largely unprofitable (even in the good times). Over the next five years, it is expected that at least one quality and one mid-market paper will go out of business.
Tell us about your hubdub.com site. Does it compete with newspapers or complement them, and is it successful?
NE: Hubdub is a prediction market where people trade predictions on the outcome of running news stories or future events. Effectively we take a static news story and turn it into an exciting contest where readers can compete with each other at armchair punditry. The impact of that is that our users are highly engaged with an average active user generating about 400 page impressions per month (compared with a typical unique on a news site generating about 10 page impressions per month).
This is technology very complementary to newspapers as we are working to allow partners to host markets on their sites, and thus increasing their sites' engagement. The competition for online news sites today isn’t other online news sites, it is other activities like social networking. We want to bring social networking like engagement to online news.
Any number of U.K. and former British Empire expats (Tina Brown, Rupert Murdoch) have come to America and made quite an impact on the print media here. Has there been a reverse effect? Aside from Gannett owning quite a few British papers, have any American journos traveled across the pond to make an impact with you?
NE: I don’t think the U.K. can claim credit (or otherwise) for Rupert Murdoch! (Editor's note: he's Australian.) To be honest I would struggle to think of a U.S. publisher that has had a major impact on the U.K. market. Conrad Black (who is Canadian) was a generally successful publisher of the U.K.’s Telegraph.
Are bloggers and citizen journalists much of a factor in Britain? What do you think of them?
NE: Blogging is not nearly as big in the U.K. as it is in the U.S. For example, there are only a handful of high quality political blogs compared with hundreds in the U.S. One of the reasons that blogging is so popular in the U.S. is that it is written in an informal and familiar style and tends towards sensationalism. The U.K. press is much closer to that style than the U.S. press (where every other article seems like it is written for the Pulitzer Prize committee).
I am a huge fan of blogs. Good blogs are written by people who are passionate about news (or some category of news) for an audience that is similarly passionate. Of course, blogging does not yet compete with newspapers for original reporting.
What advice do you have for young journalists hoping to make a career of it?
NE: Focus on your own skills and your personal brand. Become highly knowledgable of your chosen specialty. Build an audience out with your employer. To be completely honest, you should be prepared to be laid off at least once in the next 10 years. The industry is going through a fundamental transformation which is going to result in a lot of change. If you focus on your skills and you are prepared for it, then you can benefit from those changes rather than be a victim of them.
(To be brutally honest, if you are someone who doesn’t like uncertainty, then chose a different career.)
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