'On Line Opinion' - the next iteration

In the meantime we are cutting costs. It’s what we have to do to handle the situation.

This means that Susan Prior, who has lovingly and enthusiastically nurtured and pruned contributors’ work for the last six years, will be standing down as editor. If you know of someone who needs a quality person with quality skills, then Susan is looking for full-time work.

She started as an intern while studying at USQ raising two daughters on her own and looking for a new career. She commuted 128kms from Toowoomba once a week to do it.

I will be stepping into the position of full-time editor, something that I haven’t done for maybe eight years. To make this work, because I have a wider range of responsibilities than just editing, we are going to revert to some earlier ideas. Ideas like using “volunteer editors”, who were editors who helped with some of the more difficult jobs, like adapting interesting speeches into op-ed articles.

This iteration we are looking towards an editorial panel which finds articles and interesting contributors as well as helping with some of the more difficult editing.

There are a number of reasons why we are taking these steps.

Before the GFC advertising looked like it could meet all of our modest needs. After the GFC our advertising revenue declined precipitately. On Line Opinion on its own serves around one million ads a month. We also have a network of blogs - those sites on The Domain - where we get a small share of the advertising revenue. There are generally around another 1.5 million ads served there.

Huge as this may sound, it is not enough to pay a full-time salary.

We were able to carry some of the loss because we were also building websites. But activity there tailed-off as well (although it appears to be coming back).

Another reason is competition from rivals. Our readership has declined slightly over the last two years as The Punch, The National Times and The Drum have grown their readerships.

They don’t exactly compete directly with us, but they do provide other platforms where people can discuss politics, and there are only so many hours in the day where you can do this.

What is the future for On Line Opinion?