What’s in print newspapers is not always on the web.
Monday, October 1, 2012 at 15:31 
A study carried out by the NLA has found that the majority of content on regional newspaper websites is unique to the web and not a copy of print. Any business monitoring the newspaper media may miss vital mentions of their brand if they focus on only one medium.
The study focused on seven titles including The Economist, Belfast Telegraph, and Birmingham Post. The NLA searched the eClips Web database and eClips print (via ClipShare) over a two week period to find any articles matching 12 keywords including ‘Barclays’, ‘Manchester United’ , ‘G4S’, ‘Samsung’ and ‘BMW’. This created a random sample of 1093 articles from the combined sources which was then matched by headline, and/or body text where articles looked similar.
Surprisingly, 89% of content was found to be unique to either the print newspaper or website. Clearly with only 11% of articles found in both print and online, newspapers do not simply publish a copy of the printed content on their websites. In fact, 64% of the articles were unique to the website and not found in print.
Here is what the numbers look like for each title:
| print only | web only | shared | % unique to either | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economist | 5 | 4 | 13 | 41 |
| Belfast Telegraph | 75 | 226 | 43 | 88 |
| The Argus | 51 | 140 | 4 | 98 |
| Northern Echo | 44 | 143 | 30 | 86 |
| Press and Journal | 85 | 4 | 8 | 91 |
| Birmingham Post | 11 | 163 | 12 | 94 |
| Evening Express | 22 | 0 | 10 | 68 |
All of the articles unique to the website fell in to one of four categories:
1. Articles from a wire service such as Press Association. These usually appear in the ‘National News’ sections, plus ‘Sport’ and occasionally ‘Entertainment’.
2. Articles from a blog, or opinion column. Examples are the Schumpeter blog on The Economist, and Mark Steel’s column on Belfast Telegraph.
3. Articles from a breaking news section. Examples include the ‘Offbeat’ section of The Belfast Telegraph.
4. Articles appearing on a subscription portal. For example, paywall content on the Press and Journal Energy website.
The NLA plans to carry out further analysis of entire regional publisher portfolios, in addition to the nationals - so watch this space to find out if these trends are repeated for all titles and publishers.
About eClips Web
eClips Web is a database of publisher controlled website content, based on direct feeds from the newspaper web CMS (Content Management Systems).
eClips Web feeds supplied by the NLA are used by media monitoring companies and their end user clients as an alternative to scraping. Businesses can track what is being written about their company brand, products or services on multiple newspaper websites simultaneously and in near to real-time, from a fully managed and licensed web feed.
eClips Web allows monitoring of sites such as The Times and The Sun which cannot be scraped due to licence restrictions, login or paywalls.
Carie Lowther
Business Development Manager, NLA