Telum Talks To... Simon King, Network Home Editor, nine.com.au

It’s been about two years since ninemsn ceased and nine.com.au became a standalone side. Will you and the team be marking the occasion?

That was before my time; we won’t be formally marking the occasion, but we certainly noticed it at the time, especially the loss of traffic we saw. Now we have to earn our own traffic, and it forced us to have a re-think of how we run our site and keep our audience engaged. You shouldn’t be taking an audience for granted in this day and age. In the last six months we’ve seen nine.com.au increase its audience, and continue to earn the trust of readers, and show them there’s a different way of doing news in the digital space.

Thinking of how nine.com.au fits into the wider Nine family, what is the vision for the site?

The vision is to produce a website which celebrates all of the assets of Nine. We want to create the number one website in Australia. We’ll do that by breaking and reporting the news well. We’ve taken a newspaper approach and applied that sort of almost old-school editorial rigor to breaking national and international news. And we’ve married that with a lifestyle product [9Honey] which is second to none in the Australian market. Then you throw in brands like 9News, Wide World of Sports and Nine Now, and I think you’ve got a really strong and healthy product that will give the digital landscape a shake.

You and the team have halted (and reversed) a five-year decline in audience numbers recently, and are now the second most viewed news and current affairs site in Australia. What have you done to achieve that result?

A massive part of those falling numbers was the severing of ties with MSN. I think the key in the free online editorial arena is that you create your own voice. When I first came over to digital a year ago [from The Australian], in many ways the free sites were an echo chamber of insecurity: everyone just looking over each other’s shoulder and copying what they were doing. We have deliberately stepped aside from that and added a layer of exclusive content. And the result has been phenomenal. We put original content up there and the website just lights up like it’s Christmas.

We’ve also celebrated everything that is Nine. We’ve built a relationship with the lifestyle brands, we rethought our second screen experience with 9Now for shows like Married at First Sight, we’ve integrated more with 9News and now we’re rethinking video and social. It’s very exciting.

It’s a quality game. It’s about making the right editorial decisions and knowing your audience and the news well enough to put the right stories at the top, at the right times. We want to have a newspaper-quality website. You offer that sort of quality in the news, and then you add the lifestyle and everything else that Nine can offer, and this is a pretty strong proposition.

Can you take us through the different verticals that make up nine.com.au?

nine.com.au sits across the whole network, and we take the best of 9News, Wide World of Sports and the best of Finance and 9Honey and 9TheFIX. And my team makes sure we miss nothing and adds to that mix a layer of original stories.

Any future plans you can let us in on, without giving away state secrets?

There are some exciting things happening at the network. We’re about to see the launch of Future Women, a totally new play in the online women’s space and a subscription model. We’re also rethinking video. We’ve just brought in Tom Compagnoni to head up our creative division. So, you’re going to see us doing more unusual, more unexpected and a lot more original content there. An example of this is a recent video we did on cyberbullying, which has got 4.5 million views already.

We’re also about to make a play in the podcast market. I don’t want to give too much away, but we’ve been working on it for almost a year. It’s about a highly controversial subject. It’s intriguing; we’re really excited about that.

How does nine.com.au work with Nine News?

We have an integrated approach. We liaise with all the verticals all the time, every day. 9News has an ability and the network to tell news like very few people in Australia can. We take the best of what they do and we add a layer of original content to that. The result is a really solid news product.

How have you found the move from newspapers to digital?

I’ve found it absolutely fascinating. I’ll be honest, I had barely heard about nine.com.au before I made the move, but that’s what made it an interesting proposition. I won’t lie, the week before I left The Australian there was a moment where I thought, “What am I doing? How is this happening? I’m going to digital…”.

But actually, having arrived the most reassuring thing I’ve found is that what was a big story in newspaper-land is a good story online. The problem is what has been presented to people online for so long is so poor that people aren’t looking for it there. This is part of a culture shift we have to make as online news suppliers, and that’s what we intend to do. The plan is to drive growth through the journalism, and we have seen that journalism bring back the readers. And that’s exciting.

The other exciting thing is the quality of the journalists I’m working with over here. If you look at the work of Emily McPherson for instance it’s up there with anything anyone in Australia is doing. It’s a pleasure to come to work, and it’s a pleasure to point them in the right direction. And now it’s getting to the point where they are pointing me in the right direction and that's just fantastic.

And yes, for the first time ever I will be entering nine.com.au in the Walkley’s.

Most memorable story you’ve been involved with?

Emily McPherson’s story about the tragic suicide of a young Victorian girl who was bullied and raped by kids at her school. It was an amazing story and an amazing piece of journalism to work with Emily on. It was a real moment of editorial pride to see her win the Kennedy for online news and then Mumbrella Journalist of the Year.

If you could have a super power, what would it be?

While invisibility and flight would be pretty jazzy, I’d take time-travel. Imagine the conversations you could have and what you could sort out once and for all!