Results matching “younger readers”

"What's happening?" asks Twitter. "What's on your mind?" asks Facebook. A question that's fast becoming more important to smartphone users, though, is simple: "Where are you?" And that's exactly what a new social network, Foursquare, aims to answer.

Foursquare might be relatively new on the scene, having launched just under a year ago, but it has recently made deals with a long list of major media companies. The New York Times and the Canadian freesheet Metro are on board, as well as HBO, Warner Brothers, the History Channel, Bravo, Lucky Magazine and restaurant guide Zagat.

The Amaury group, responsible for both Le Parisien and L'Equipe, has given its publications a face life this week, with all 48 pages of the former appearing in colour for the first time on Tuesday, and divided into five new sections: Fact of the day, News, Local News, Sports and Leisure.

L'Equipe is set to integrate three new pages into its design, the first appearing today, the second in Thursday's edition and the third in Friday's, as a response to reader surveys. From March the publication will introduce a motoring section, which will appear every Monday- intended to deal with the production of cars as opposed to buying and selling.

New media skills are becoming key for journalists, as social media such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly used for sourcing information and distributing articles. So in the future, will all journalists need to know how to write code as well, The Guardian's Digital Content Blog asks?

One on level, coding appears lucrative, with former Daily Mail journalist Greg Hadfield founding football news website Soccernet and then selling it for $40 million.

The buzz keeps growing and growing around tablets - electronic devices with a touch-screen interface, e-reader capabilities, as well as web browsing among others.

Rumors about Apple's tablet, or the iSlate, as it is now being called, have been gaining momentum as the elusive and innovative device that is supposed to look like a bigger version of Apple's iPhone, prepares to launch early this year.

Several other big high-tech players have also lined up to present their own versions of the slate. Just this last Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled the Hewlett-Packard yet to be named tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The German publisher, M.DuMont Schauberg, which owns the daily newspaper Berliner Kurier, has announced its intentions to launch a news supplement aimed directly at a younger audience later this year. The exact date of publication is not yet known.

The move comes after news magazine Spiegel successfully launched Dein Spiegel last year, a separate publication from its news magazine and aimed at young readers between the ages of nine and twelve. Since its debut in September, with the first edition focusing on the then hot topic of Germany's general election, the publication has enjoyed considerable success and now lines the shelves of newsstands across the country. 

Oliwia Serdeczny, director for international partnerships at Niiu, presented her company's product: an individualized newspaper that readers can personalize using articles from many local, national and international newspapers. 

Frédéric Filloux, editor for Schibsted and co-author of the weekly media newsletter Monday Note, has criticised the way the French government is subsidising the newspaper industry, at a time when the new body representing online news publishers, Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante en Ligne, is currently debating whether or not to accept subsidies.

Filloux suggests that much unnecessary expenditure - travel, or expensive technology upgrades, for example - is justified by the fact that it is state money, and points out that a total of €1.2bn of aid was given to the press in 2008, which amounts to 12% of the sector's revenue. The value of French subsidies rose by 71% between 2003 and 2007, compared to 21% in Sweden, while Swedish readership is three times higher than in France.

The Reader's Digest Association is looking to overhaul its international online activities, in an effort to shrug off its image of attracting a purely elderly audience and draw in a younger readership, the Financial Times reported.  According to Jonathan Hills, the websites' general manager, the aim of the revamp is to freshen up the overall look and "steer us away from the preconceptions about the Reader's Digest brand."

Reader's Digest, as the original aggregator, or the "Google News of the 1920s" as Hills likes to put it, has undoubtedly suffered at the hands of modern online aggregators; last year finishing 18.4 per cent down on the previous year's revenue, and finally forcing the US arm to seek bankruptcy protection last month. Unlike many other publications seeking to generate revenue on the web however, Reader's Digest is not planning to charge for its online content - instead the updated design will rely on a business model combining higher-quality advertising units and sales of books, CDs and other products.

The Taiwanese electronics company Asus is set to launch its very own e-reader before the end of this year, according to its president Jerry Shen, as reported in the Times.

Asus states that not only will the new devices be more intelligent and versatile than current competition, but cheaper too. Although there is little information concerning the exact details of the finished product, Shen hinted at the availability of a budget as well as a premium version.

Competition in the e-reader market continues to increase as Sony announced its latest model. Offering wireless connectivity, the $399 7-inch touch screen Reader Daily Edition will be available in the US in December, Sony executives announced yesterday at the New York Public Library. Select newspapers and magazines will be available on the device.

Sony produced its first e-reader in 2006 and now offers two other versions: the 5-inch Reader Pocket Edition for $199 and the 6-inch Reader Touch Edition for $299. Neither, however, offer wireless connectivity, which Amazon's two versions of the Kindle provide, and the Reader Daily Edition hence seems to be the model in closest competition with the Amazon product. Wireless connectivity allows users to download products on the go (in Sony's case via AT&T), which is a significant advantage. 

Starting this fall, the Huffington Post will roll out new sections in books, technology and sports as the site continues to evolve from its origins as a political news aggregator. "More than half of our traffic comes from people who are not interested in politics," founder Arianna Huffington told The Wrap.

In the past couple of years, HuffPo has become more well-rounded by adding portals for such topics as entertainment and style. The "Internet newspaper" has also gone niche with the launch of city-specific sites for New York and Chicago, with Denver and LA to follow shortly.

The latest Morgan Stanley report on the media has caused somewhat of a sensation: it is a document on how teenagers consume media, written by a 15-year-old boy. Matthew Robson was interning at the bank for two weeks when he was asked to compile some thoughts on teenagers' media habits, and his boss was so impressed by the report that he decided to publish it.

Much of what the teenager said was not particularly ground-breaking, but his youthful frankness and the seriousness with which Morgan Stanley took the report seems to have made people think. Head of the banks team of European media analysts, Edward Hill-Wood, told the Financial Times that the report had generated five or six times more feedback than usual. The document was reportedly discussed at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference in Idaho.

With the imminent start of the Indian Newspaper Congress 2009, it is a fitting time to assess the future challenges of the nation's printed press. Pradyuman Maheshwari has discussed the realities of an apparently healthy  printed press and warns against complacency with regards to the irresistible rise of online alternatives.

Analysed with the general state of the world's printed media as a benchmark, the Indian press is for all intents and purposes buoyant. Ostensibly, the established papers are coping well with, what is considered to be a temporary, slump in advertising revenue, to the extent that their future existence is not under question. The humbler daily publications are undergoing commercial restructuring to cope with the global slump- many are either awaiting valuation or are being purchased by larger groups. Other publications subsist thanks to their  political influence and/or revenue from retail initiatives.  

Adding credence to the notion that more than ever people are relying on the Internet as their primary source of news, the latest poll by Zogby International shows a majority of Americans view the web as the best source of information. When presented with a scenario in which they had to choose only one source of news, 56% of adults picked the Internet.

Where Americans are getting their news on the web is striking. Nearly half said the web sites of national newspapers are important and 43% said the same for national TV sites. Internet-only operations fared much worse. Less than 30% stated that blogs that shared their political views were important, and just 14% said the same for blogs with the opposite political view. And social networking sites? Forget it. Ten percent of adults named Facebook as an important source of news, and a mere 4% said the same of Twitter.

One of the most striking themes to come from the second day of the Power of Print Conference was the importance of newspapers knowing their audience. South Africa's Daily Sun, for example, grew rapidly to become the country's largest newspaper off the back of in depth market research.

Fergus Sampson, of the Daily Sun's owner Media 24 described how they discovered an audience of working class young black citizens who had come of age at the time of freedom, but who didn't have a newspaper, and set out fill the gap. "It does not try to be all things to all people. It does not include anything that wouldn't interest its people. The formula is dictated by the market and the needs of the market," said Sampson.

Advertising Age, an online resource of the news on media and marketing, has concluded that "Print is not aging well. Or, rather, its readers are aging rapidly."  The statement is based on the latest research on the newspaper and magazine industries, conducted by Mediamark Research for Spring 2009.

The research focused on ascertaining the average age of the readership of papers and magazines.  The findings, given the large amount of attention paid to the inexorable rise of digital sources of information- generally thought of as catering to a younger user base, are hardly surprising: readers of the print are getting older.

After three weeks of personal experimentation with a Kindle e-reader, a Poynter writer has seen it fit to hail the gadget as a component of the "hybrid future of the news".  Bill Mitchell concluded that the Kindle would function as a third platform in his personal reading of the news, alongside printed and online forms, "I see the Kindle (and other e-readers) more as a supplement to print and online as opposed to a substitute for either."

Indeed, Mitchell's relatively positive testimony of the product, whilst not an explicit endorsement, is an interesting contribution to the current hot debate surrounding the relationship of devices such as the Kindle with the beleaguered print industry and online news sites, the latter being currently embroiled in the pay for viewing controversy.

Reports recently out say that the Telegraph online attracts an impressive 8% of its traffic from
news aggregators and social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

The 8% figure is equivalent to a staggering 75,000 unique visitors daily. So, how does the Telegraph do it?

Poynter's Romenesko blog has published a memo from MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton and president Jody Lodovic to the group's employees which explains that the company is planning to charge for online content, to revamp its websites and to build new local information sites. The memo, originally sent on May 8, is the result of a recent executive meeting on the company's interactive strategy.

The interactive summit was meant to address "three daunting challenges" that the company is facing. The first is that "we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free." As well as reducing print circulation, this "devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis." The second is that "our interactive revenue growth has slowed because it has been too closely tied to our print classified business, which has suffered with the advent of Craigslist" and others. Thirdly, "we are not significantly extending the reach of our audience, as our online products too closely resemble the newspaper, and thus fail to meaningfully read the next generation of readers."

In the space of one week, three of Belgium's "quality" newspapers will have undergone a total design overhaul. On Tuesday, Le Soir (published by Rossel) unveiled its new look, followed on Wednesday by La Libre Belgique, part of the IPM portfolio. Saturday will see the anticipated launch of L'Echo, the country's business newspaper, whose most noticeable change will come in the choice of its new choice of colour, salmon pink, bearing a striking resemblance to the UK's Financial Times.

Le Soir, for instance, has decided to give more prominence to its analysis articles. "It is by no means a coincidence that the [country's] three "quality" newspapers have decided to act," said Daniel Van Wylick, director general of the Soir, adding that their efforts "demonstrated the dynamism of the Francophone press in Belgium."

Even niche and humor media are suffering with the current crisis as we see The Onion has been forced to close its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions. The free weekly daily saw a circulation of 60,000 and 50,000 in each city respectively.

Ever since news got out regarding Amazon's intention to launch a new and bigger e-reader, eyebrows have been raised across the news business. Many have claimed that the new Kindle, Amazon's e-reader, could save newspapers: analysts are suspicious of these claims.

Brian Caulfield is especially adamant about it when he compares the Kindle to the iPhone. Admitting it is kind of like comparing apples to oranges, he says the Kindle is still too focused on old media, while the iPhone provides access to information across all kinds of mediums.

Yesterday, the Australian reported that following a period of sustained economic growth peaking at the end of 2008, India's newspapers are beginning to show signs of economic retreat, with advertising revenue falling by unprecedented amounts.

With economic retardation sweeping the world, emerging markets are also beginning to suffer as foreign investment dries up but printing costs continue rising. "Newspaper sizes are coming down, staff are being retrenched, marginal titles closed and expansion plans put on hold," reports the Australian.