Published in The Australian, July 25 2002

JUST a fortnight after joining forces to promote common web measurement standards, News Limited and Fairfax are back in a more familiar position: slugging it out over dominance of the online news market.

Figures released by web measurement agency Red Sheriff last week show that News' news.com.au has overtaken Fairfax's The Sydney Morning Herald site, smh.com.au, in popularity. The news.com.au site is attracting more than a million visitors a month.

Despite lagging in print circulation, the SMH site had topped Red Sheriff's news site category since its inception. However, a boost in resources for the news.com.au site, coinciding with cuts at Fairfax, saw the situation change this year, and news.com.au has headed the list since May. The latest rankings produced by Red Sheriff's main competitor, Jupiter Media Metrix, also put news.com.au in front, with an average 103,000 visitors a day compared with the SMH's 86,000.

"Internet users are turning to news.com.au because of the quality of its service," says News Limited CEO John Hartigan. "Over the past 12 months news.com.au has grown faster than any other top 25 website visited by Australians."

In a report on the figures, the Fairfax-owned The Australian Financial Review cited unnamed sources as suggesting the boost in visitors was due largely to deals with internet service providers such as iinet and iprimus to carry news.com.au headlines on their sites. That suggestion is rejected by News Interactive, which points out that Red Sheriff's own figures show that less than 1 per cent of traffic to news.com.au comes from those two ISPs. Further undermining the criticism, the SMH itself runs a similar program designed to encourage third-party sites to carry headlines from the paper.

Nick Leeder, chief operating officer for Fairfax's online arm F2, believes third-party links are a "contributing factor" to the results. However, Fairfax argues comparison between the two is inappropriate. "The proper comparison is not between News Interactive and its more than 30 sites, and smh.com.au, which is only one of our news sites, but between News Interactive and all of F2's news sites," says F2 CEO Nigel Dews. On that measure, Dews says F2 has 60 per cent more unique visitors than news.com.au.

Despite mounting that argument, Fairfax has no intention of asking for its titles to be measured as a single group. "The most important thing is how we're going from a user's perspective," says Leeder.

While the SMH and The Age websites offer a high percentage of the content of their print editions online, Fairfax in the past year has cut back on dedicated online journalists. Currently, the only ongoing unique content produced for the SMH site is the online reader forum Web Diary, moderated by Margo Kingston. "We're concentrating our efforts on areas which are valuable for users," says Leeder, pointing to the addition of new sections such as travel to the site.

Breaking news on the SMH site is sourced from AAP, although Leeder says sometimes print journalists write online copy to cover big stories. Fairfax was forced to upgrade its feed processing mechanism after a series of embarrassing gaffes, including publishing embargoed details of the Queen's Birthday honours list.

As well as using the AAP feed and material drawn from print titles, news.com.au employs a specific online team to ensure the content is processed accurately and to add extra elements. "We've got people producing content as well as the production side, and we've always got someone here," says news.com.au editor Chris Janz. "That's one of the reasons we've improved."

The news.com.au site can also draw on News Limited's nationwide network of titles, and add web-specific features such as audio or online polls. "Online is a different medium," says Janz. "We're really keen to play with the differences."