Not to beat a dying horse, but the News of the World doesn’t have a digital strategy for 2010. As I said yesterday, sometimes I’m willing to be generous about News International’s paid content strategy. The Times had to do something. They were losing £240,000 a day last year, and by their own admission, those losses were unsustainable. However, when you hear things like this from News of the World’s Digital analogue editor Rachel Richardson:

The majority of our content will be published on a Sunday. We will update our exclusive stories as they develop through the week. We also offer a comprehensive sport service and update match reports etc frequently. A lot of our content is timeless. Fabulous [celebrity magazine] is a great example of this, so we’re confident our site will be appealing mid-week without constant updates.

You have to wonder what planet she is on. Seriously. Now, it would be interesting to unpack what she means by ‘constant updates’, but this seems like a strategy from another age. The type of gossip that News of the World peddles is a constant stream of whispers coursing through the internet. It’s not something that pauses politely for a print driven publishing cycle. Yes, the News of the World thinks it has exclusives, and too many people living in the silos of newspapers believe it’s not old until it’s told by them. In terms of exclusives, with a few notable exceptions (the Telegraph’s MP expenses reporting being one of them), an exclusive in the online era has a shelf-life shorter than a Z-list reality TV star, possibly shorter. I don’t read celebrity gossip, but I actually don’t feel the need to. It’s so utterly ubiquitous that I absorb it through osmosis. There are so many choices. It’s everywhere. Are they really going to be able to charge to catch up on Sunday’s shock headlines by Wednesday? They already will seem tired by 5pm Sunday night.

Reading excerpts from the transcript of an interview with Richardson what comes through is that this isn’t a business strategy, it’s a sense of entitlement. Yes, it costs you something to make the News of the World, and you think that it has a value that should cost a set price. If everyone was able to price their products at what they thought they should be paid for instead of what people are willing to pay for them, we’d have a much different world.

Bravo for having a launch partner, but their other ads are supplied by ad networks?!? If your content is as exclusive as you say it is, surely there has to be value in building up your own premium ad services. Of course, no one will know whether it is successful because we won’t know the traffic. Murdoch has pulled out of the ABCes, leaving others to speculate. News International isn’t even being forthcoming with their advertisers about their numbers, and their advertisers are punishing them. That’s not strategic. It’s arrogant, or fearful.

There are times when I wonder if News International’s digital strategy is actually designed to fail. I often wonder if Murdoch in a fit of pique will actually just shut down the digital offerings once they have failed to meet his targets. It seems outlandish, but no less so than some of the non-strategic nonsense coming out of News International wrapped in PR assertions as being bold visionary thinking.