Nation Media Group (NMG)-Uganda will tomorrow launch a new and refreshed website for its flagship Uganda title, the Daily Monitor newspaper, as the first of many steps in the company’s digital transformation journey.
The website, which will go live at midnight tonight, will incorporate content types from across the group’s media platforms, feature aspects of the online newspaper as well as podcasts and radio livestream, among others.
In Uganda, NMG owns Daily Monitor, Nation Television (NTV), Spark TV, KFM, Dembe FM, The East African and Nation Courier.
Speaking ahead of the website launch, Mr Tony Glencross, the NMG-Uganda managing director, described the group’s initiative as a process of digital enhancement with the aim of gaining customer insights.
“We are enhancing our existing platform and focusing on user registration for a minimum of three months. We are starting to interact with our users to understand what they like or don’t like and develop those insights to give us better intelligence even to develop our existing products,” he said.
The Daily Monitor website, www.monitor.co.ug, attracts at least five million users every month.
Readers, after accessing a certain number of articles or other content on the revamped website, and as a first step, will be required to register for more of the exclusives and unique offering including long-form reads, incisive investigative stories, cartoons and cross-word puzzles, podcasts, and historical pieces.
According to Mr Emmanuel Waiswa, the NMG-Uganda head of digital, the new website will feature a mobile-friendly website design with dynamic collections that are easy to navigate.
“We shall make deliberate efforts to package content with multimedia elements. The site will include podcasts and video features specially packaged for online audiences,” he said.
In an exclusive move, the Daily Monitor website is introducing online puzzles and other interactive games to keep readers engaged on our platforms longer. The different content categories will be grouped by colour themes and different fonts to aid faster and better navigation.
While the revamped website remains free to access, in coming months, readers will be required to register after reading a certain number of stories, or reaching the threshold access for other forms of content.
“This will help us understand who our customers are and understand their content preferences. Customer data is an investment that will aid us to make sound business decisions and to also personalise audience preferences aimed at improving customer experience and continuously developing more desirable content and formats,” Mr Waiswa said, stressing that the highest level of care will be taken to protect individual customer information.
