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Torry Pedersen came up through the paper's ranks before moving to VG Nett. Today he's managing director for all of Verdens Gang, but he doesn't get sentimental about the smell of ink. As far as Pedersen is concerned, VG Nett got to where it is by ignoring the verities of newspapering and inventing a new set of rules. For starters, Pedersen and his editors try to identify the day's sexiest story — anything from Israeli air strikes on Gaza to Britney Spears; "we don't care how important it is in typical newspaper terms." He then throws waves of reporters at it, updating the story continuously with material that he'll take from anybody and everybody. "The Net has broken the newspapers' monopoly on production and distribution," says Pedersen. "You always find that the first photos after a big event come from ordinary people." The site discovered that after the Asian tsunami of 2004, when photos uploaded from the cell phones of survivors gave VG Nett its most striking images. Those photos helped drive the website's readership to an all-time high. Pedersen now has a dedicated phone line — 22 00, if you see anything interesting — to transfer photos automatically from any cell phone directly into VG's system. "Most newspapers view the Internet as a new distribution outlet. VG looks at it as a new way of reading," says Bharat Anand, a professor of corporate strategy at Harvard Business School who used Schibsted as the subject of an admiring case study in 2007.
Anand's case study compared VG.no's 6 million monthly readers (it has since grown to 8 million) to NYTimes.com, which at the time had 14 million. VG got 11 page views per session and almost 10 sessions per visitor a month — both figures almost twice those at the Times when the study was done. That boosts ad rates considerably. "If VG had the Times' numbers, revenue would fall by three to four times, and the site would be a loss-making entity," says Anand.
One of the debates raging in the newspaper world is whether yesterday's ink-stained wretches can be reprogrammed for a digital future. Pedersen says no, and he's not kidding. VG Nett is a separate company from the print Verdens Gang; it takes only 5% of its material from the newspaper, and hires young, inexperienced reporters. When the paper cut editorial staff, Pedersen didn't offer a single one of the old boys a job. "Just tell me the last time the same person won the 100-meter dash and the marathon," he says.
A Fresh Angle
Alan Rusbridger, editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper, takes a different view. Like VG in Norway, the Guardian was among the first British papers to recognize the Internet as the only portal in the storm that was buffeting traditional newspapers. Its own title wasn't spared. The Guardian's circulation was 516,000 in 1986; last year, it was down to around 351,000 copies. Unlike VG, however, the Guardian has bet its building that the future lies in so-called media integration — the same single staff for newsprint, Internet and the video and audio reportage that are increasingly turning Internet news into a multimedia circus. The Guardian's new headquarters in the King's Cross area of London — it moved in December — houses enough video studios and fancy hardware to allow the Guardian to compete not just with other newspaper sites, but with CNN and the BBC.
The move has also triggered a massive reorganization of the Guardian's editors, reporters and photographers, designed to bust all barriers between the paper's different delivery platforms and end the balkanization of its often hostile tribes. As Rusbridger put it in a column shortly after the move, "There was not enough communication between papers and website, nor coordination of resources across seven days and four or five different media." But the blender approach can also leave an editor with a list of new tricks and a bunch of old dogs. Concedes Rusbridger: "It does sometimes dull the edge of coverage."