#AOPsummit: Reuters to launch news planner app for media customers

Reuters is preparing to roll out a news planner app for the iPad to improve engagement with its media customers, its global editor announced today.

Speaking on a panel at the  AOP Digital Publishing Summit called 'Show Me the Money' Greg Beitchman outlined a number of new products being developed by the news agency which aim to add value to content for users.

The news planning app will aim to improve communication between Reuters editors and journalists and the agency's syndication customers, he told the summit.

"Page views have done well but we're not sure that's all we should be doing," he said.

"We have a syndication business which is about distributing video, text and pictures and some data as well to media customers. For a long time we've been trying to improve engagement with those customers because we feel like for years we've just been spitting out content and do with it what you will," he told Journalism.co.uk.

"If you wanted to speak to a Reuters journalist it's always been very difficult. We're going to be putting together on the iPad ... an app that lets them look at our content in a slightly different way.

"They can send a question back to one of our editors about content. I think it's quite a useful thing. The idea is they will bring it into a news planning meeting and say look Reuters have this story, what do you think? Let's ask what time it will be ready. We think that will be quite useful inside an actual news planning meeting."

The app will be rolled out by Reuters in beta for testing in the next two weeks and Beitchman said he expects it to be ready for launch early next year.

"It's new, we haven't rolled it out yet. We are in the process of changing our whole syndication business. We'd like to be bringing in a lot more third-party content because our customers are saying 'we can't do everything ourselves, we need Reuters, we need other sources of content. It's a pain to manage all that so could you help us, from a technology point of view ... and a billing point of view".

"The news planner application is an attempt to display our content well and really engage with our customers better. We're really not happy with the level of engagement, it's just not satisfactory. We want much more data ... about what customers want and need and we want to make it really easy to communicate with us."

Also speaking on the panel was the Times' digital director, Gurtej Sandhu, who refused to share the statistics on its biggest development this year, the introduction of its paywall. He said all he could say was that he is "happy" with the early results.

"I would like to share early stats but I'm not allowed."

Following the launch of the Times paywall, parent company News International removed the newspaper and its sister title the Sun from the ABC Electronic auditing, so no traffic figures are available to measure the performance of the paywall.

"Once you go behind a paywall you're going to have less audience ... the whole point of putting a subscription model in place was to effectively ensure the consumer paid for the true value of journalism," he added.

"We get a very focused audience who are highly more engaged than in a free site ... the advertising yields are quite interesting ... I can't go through numbers ... but we're quite confident of our relationship with advertisers.

"It's a blended model, we're relatively early, we were the first national newspaper, general interest newspaper, to go behind a paywall ... Do we believe there's an advertising model in this? Yes. Do we believe there's a subscription model in this? Yes. It's a blended model."

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