According to the SCMP’s director of marketing and communications Michael McComb, the newspaper aims to decentralise its interactive duties, which will become the responsibility of all remaining editorial staff, and further looks to produce more marketable videos to garner sponsorship from advertisers.
According to an internal communication obtained by Media, the SCMP officially disbanded its four-person department yesterday. A source with knowledge of the event said that multimedia editor Michael Logan and multimedia producers Edwin Lee and Richard Pyne are set to leave the company. James Moore, senior multimedia producer, is understood to remain.
“We had an editorial restructuring, and that was trying to reorganise the way news was produced to be more effective. The SCMP will continue to produce multimedia content and it’s the editorial team that will produce and distribute that content to two different audiences – the news audience and advertiser audience,” McComb said. “We’re trying to engage in advertisers to produce more marketing activities for and with them, not passively taking an advertising order but taking into consideration the marketing objectives to deliver integrated marketing multimedia content on our video platform.”
While the SCMP says that the standard of its editorial multimedia offerings will be maintained, a source close to the multimedia department suggests that the team has had minimal support from the publication on a whole, and the paper will more acutely focus on producing advertorials in the future.
"What you may be getting is a reflection of the changing nature of the media industry and the marketing community and the needs of the marketing consumers," said McComb. "Media owners are happy to react to that.”
The move comes three weeks after the SCMP laid off 30 editorial staff as part of an internal restructure, mirroring a struggle experienced by newspapers worldwide that must react to advertising cutbacks.
The SCMP has additionally encountered recent hurdles in its interactive and marketing departments. In November, the company’s director of digital business Ross Settles and McComb both submitted their resignations, leaving the publication's marketing and online divisions in flux. Today is McComb's last day in the office.
Regional reports from December cited the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Reginald Chua as saying that some of the SCMP’s remaining editorial staff would extend their duties to oversee new online and print products over time.
According to the document seen by Media, revenue associated with multimedia exceded expectations by 54 per cent in 2009. Other achievements by the department include gaining 800,000 viewers per month as of August 2009, “compared with just 200,000 per month in January 2009 and 44,000 per month in January 2008”; and winning a SOPA award in the digital journalism category last year, the first year an award had been given in that category.
“You're probably struggling to understand the underlying thinking behind the decision to close the multimedia desk,” it continued. “It has been decided that we will cease all production of editorial videos and focus solely on content that is paid for by advertising clients (ie advertorial video).”
