First edition
Our verdict on The Nightly, Australia's newest (non print) newspaper: A solid start and a beat up for one of Stokes' enemies
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.
Upgrade today
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?