Results matching “ibm predictions”

The latest issue of Courrier International to hit French newsstands gathers translated newspaper articles themed on the uncertain future of the press. From Washington, in a lengthy set of extracts from the New Republic, Paul Starr makes three strong cases for why democracy will be endangered without a newspaper. He hints that American democracy may already have been slighted seeing that national, regional and local newspapers are dwindling in terms of content they can run since printing costs have caused them to scale back on the numbers of pages they print.

He opens his debate by lamenting the fact that Americans have taken [American] journalism (in the form of a printed newspaper) for granted as newspapers have been such an ''integral part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are.''

The launch of a cross-party select committee's investigation into the future of newspapers in the UK today was overshadowed by the ominous prediction that half of the nation's local and regional papers will be lost within the next five years.

The predictions are based on research conducted by the media analysts, Enders Media.  Its founder, Claire Enders, voiced her concerns in front of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning:  

"We are expecting that up to half of all the 1,300 titles will close in the next five years."  

The latest word on the web suggests that Google is planning to launch its own micro-blog search service.  According to the unofficial Google Operating Systems, the venture will index and rank content from micro-blogging websites, such as Twitter.  If successful, the project will reaffirm Google's dominant position in the search market, adjusting to the rapid fire pace of the micro-blogging world.  Micro-blogs tend to be shorter, posted quickly or at the 'real-time' of events.


The Google micro-blogging application will be development of its existing Google Blog Search.  It will be incorporated into the search engine and work on the basis that key words recurring in recent searches will initiate a micro-blog search. 

According to an investigation conducted by Princeton economists Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, print journalists can bask in the knowledge that their work is sill important, the American Journalism Review maintains.  

The spring report, "Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post" found that "even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed - can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life."  The researchers qualify that the results are "statistically imprecise", but conclude that local newspapers have an important role in the civic life of a community.

Newspapers really aren't doing as badly as media commentators would have us think, says Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers and CEO of Independent News and Media. He did not deny that the newspaper industry has difficulties, but said that these are shared by many other industries in a period of economic crisis.

Speaking at the WAN Power of Print Conference in Barcelona, he explained, "this is not to deflect the seriousness of the situation, and it is very serious, but it remains a fact - all major media are suffering alongside our colleagues in other major business sectors."

Writing for Editor and Publisher, Steve Outing has declared that publishers need to pay more attention to their older readers and help them make the leap from print to digital news. Outing is determinedly pro-digital, writing that he has "long predicted that the day will come when print would begin to die out as consumers adopted online and mobile as their preferred method of news consumption". He believes that the closures of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are the beginnings of his predictions.

Given his stance on print, Outing sees it as essential to convert the older generation of news readers to the merits of digital. He writes that "gray-haired folks" are concerned over the decline in quality of their daily newspaper, and whilst they may seek other news sources it is unlikely to be the Internet or other digital media - he also points out that given the average age of a newspaper reader is mid 50s, it is a demographic that publishers should be giving special attention to.

In an article published on US news magazine site Time.com, Douglas A. McIntyre partner of 24/7 Wall St industry analysts, lists the next ten major American newspapers likely to collapse, or at the very least, end its print operations.

In a sombre analysis of the nation's struggling papers, McIntyre names 24/7 Wall St's predictions for the next ten papers likely to shut down, each one affecting a major city. Included in this list is the San Francisco Chronicle, whose threats by parent Hearst Corporation to close the paper have been carefully monitored by the Editors Weblog. The Philadelphia Daily News and Minneapolis Star Tribune were also among those featured.

Despite his grim predictions last year that display-ad revenues would plummet this cycle, Gawker Media head Nick Denton reports increases in the company's ad revenues and blog traffic for February 2009. In a memo to his staff posted on Poynter Online by Jim Romanesko, Denton reveals that the sites' traffic has improved by 34% over last February, ad revenues are up a fifth over last year so far, and reader comments have multiplied and improved.

Denton calls the news a "chink of light" in a somewhat gloomy media climate and attributes the Gawker Media's success to the popularity of its new big ad units and to the concentration of web traffic to fewer and larger sites. The company has cut costs by selling properties Gridskipper, Idolator, Wonkette and Consumerist last year, consolidating Gawker Media brands under Gawker.com, and laying off staff.

It is generally agreed that 2008 was not a good year for newspapers.  Media pundits have been watching the demise of the printed press and whether with glee or dismay, often accepting it with an air of inevitability.  Governments and writers have been conjuring up ways to boost print readership and make papers profitable.  Many newspapers have suffered staff redundancies and budget cuts.

But recent figures show that it really isn't all bad.  Surprising though it may seem, there is still light at the end of the tunnel for the newspaper industry.

Adrian Pratt of the Centre Daily Times is fighting back for newspapers.  Current doomsday predictions are questioning whether the printed press can survive when the Internet apparently has all the answers.  Yes, answers Pratt, who doesn't see why the issue is an either/or question.

It is not just the morbid predictions that Pratt has a problem with; neither does he agree with the implication that nobody needs newspapers anymore.  If newspapers were to die, Pratt believes that we would lose all objectivity - on the Internet, he says 'it seems that reality can be created and spun'.  'Hysterical' predictions about print's imminent demise to him signal the exact reason that we need it to stay, to present facts as facts and for the 'check and balance that news organisations strive to provide'.

The Wall Street Journal has launched a three-part video on its website entitled "The End of Wall Street," Media Bistro reports.  This is the WSJ.com's first long-form video series.  

The video explains "how the housing bubble inflated and burst, the rippling effects across the economy and look at what's ahead for the global economy."

Forecasts for 2009 are, unsurprisingly, relatively pessimistic for traditional media and more positive for new media developments. But not all commentators were as determined as Jeff Nolan that "if 2008 was bad for newspapers, 2009 will be devastating," and many saw hope in the possibility of changes in content and format.  

Champion Media Group has announced that it will launch a new weekly newspaper in Merseyside.  The publisher believes that "local papers should continue to invest and not turn tail and run," according to Press Gazette.  The first edition will be launched on January 14th with an initial circulation of around 16,000.  

It surprises many to see newspapers being launched under such strenuous economic times.  The Guardian's Roy Greenslade believes that with rising print costs and the Internet, 2009 will be a tough year for newspapers including the closure of a number of freesheets, journalists loosing their jobs and publishers being forced to shut down.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

Only 12 percent of European web users paid for online content last year.  That number is expected to reach 19 percent by 2013.  Paid content "could pull in €5 billion in 2013, from €1.4 billion" in 2007 if the predictions are correct.

"As overall online audiences for all content categories continue to grow, so the number of European users willing to pay for content online will grow at an even faster rate," a Jupiterreasearch report says, although free content will "continue to dominate" online consumption.

The online model for news is "already set--pay-for news is the preserve of business readers and digital edition afficiondos."  Only 1.1 percent of the total online market will be paid-for news content.

The music industry will set the tone, which the news industry may want to take into account.  Although music made up "only 29 percent of all Europe's paid content revenues last year, by 2013, a majority of paid content income (51 percent) will come from music." 

European "efforts to drive consumers to legal downloads" is predicted to put users paying for content in the majority, 63.7 million to 55 million illegal downloaders by 2013.  Paid-for content is currently outnumbered by 53 million to 6.9 million users.

Source:  Paidcontent.co.uk

David Kirk, CEO of Fairfax Media (publisher of Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and The Age), recently gave a speech to the Sydney Institute about his views on the media industry and his predictions for the future.    

Kirk does not see the end of quality newspapers; not in their print forms, nor their online forms.  He believes that a free press is "essential to the operation of democracy" that helps people come to their own conclusions about what is going on in the world.  

He stressed the obligation of journalists to be accountable to their readers, public and shareholders for the quality of their journalism.

Hubdub, the online "news forecaster," announces a partnership with Reuters that will allow users to predict the outcome of ongoing Reuters stories. Hubdub founder Nigel Eccles says that this is only the first of similar ventures.

In an article published yesterday in The Huffington Post, Bob Guccione, Jr. presents an interesting series of predictions for the future of the media.  He predicts the endurance of print, the decline of Google, and that imagination will play a key role.

First, he believes that major city dailies will be transformed into free papers and that home delivery will require a paid subscription.  Also, the Sunday paper will continue to be sold, but will become a source of information for the weeks events.

Guccione also predicts that Google will loose significant market share because competitors will finally step up to the plate and create good or even better search engines.

His next prediction comes as somewhat of a surprise, "The Internet will not consume print, because it's not strong enough, it's not better, and it's too busy consuming itself."  Although, he does admit that print has a lot to worry about, but that their problems can be resolved.  

He s quick to highlight the fact that publishers need a new formula, what used to work is not working any longer.  "The Internet hit traditional publishing like the asteroid that struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs."  Publishers need to start getting creative.

Ultimately, Guccione theorizes that the future of media will come down to one thing, imagination. "So those in publishing should pick their collective chins up off the floor and realize that the future couldn't be brighter, as soon as we recognize that digital technology is the modern-day equivalent of color printing and faster presses, and that the thing that feeds the new machine is the same thing that fed the old one: imagination."

Sources:  Media Bistro, The Huffington Post

Newspaper editors have a new reason to emphasize their video offerings - a ten-figure reason.

 

The number of people who watch online video could rise to one billion within the next five years, according to a study released Tuesday by technology research group ABI Research.

 

This means that the study expects the number of online video viewers to quadruple by 2013.

 

"As my boss, Jim Kerstetter, points out, it's unwise to put too much faith in predictions like this, but this isn't too much of a stretch," writes CNET News blogger Greg Sandoval.

 

Source: CNET News through I Want Media

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Jonathan Landman, deputy Managing Editor of The New York Times in the US.

The list of upcoming interviews will be updated as they are published (click here to view all interviews in this series). Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

1 -      How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We're a news and information company, not just a newspaper or print company. We own newspapers, obviously, and they remain extremely important. But we also own Web sites, not only www.nytimes.com but also www.about.com and www.boston.com and others. The Web sites are growing smartly. They are also contributing a steadily increasing share of the company's revenue -- 11 percent at the end of 2007.

 2 -    At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

I doubt it. Big U.S. papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal still have a lot of loyal readers who like the feel and experience of a newspaper. I imagine newspapers will survive until the perfect electronic substitute comes along and combines the portability and readability of a newspaper with the connectivity and multimedia capabilities of the Web.
When will that happen? Place your bets.
 
3 -     In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

Both. Digital journalism combines brand-new things with time-tested old ones. The most pronounced change is in the realm of reader interaction -- technology has made it possible for journalists, outside experts and other readers to talk to each other, to collaborate on news-gathering and analysis, to fact-check and to distribute journalism in new ways. It has pulled the newspaper package apart, allowing people to acquire and consume their journalism one piece at a time or to customize it to fit their needs. It has altered the journalist's relationship with sources and introduced new visual forms like the interactive graphic. It has picked up the journalistic pace.

Those are big changes. Still, the things that haven't changed are just as important as the things that have. Good journalists must still know their subjects. Ambitious and resourceful reporting are as essential to good news video as they are to good news writing. News judgment -- shorthand for a complicated, unscientific and very human professional assessment of what's most important, interesting, surprising, funny, educational and otherwise worth knowing about -- retains its value.

4 -       Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

An opportunity. See above. For us, figuring out how to mobilize our sophisticated, curious and well-informed audience in constructive ways is both a challenge and a high priority.
 
5 -       Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

There's no doubt that financial pressures have driven many newspapers to cut back on investigative work. But that is distinctly not the case at The New York Times. Here are (also here, here, here and here) just a few important examples to illustrate the point.

The decline of investigative reporting at newspapers can't be a plus for democracy. On the other hand, the Internet has made public records and other documents much easier to find, expose and examine. It has made it easier for fine independent journalists like Joshua Micah Marshall to find an audience for excellent investigative work that would otherwise not gain wide public attention. And it has made it easier for whistleblowers and others to find and reinforce each other.
 
In those ways it has expanded opportunities for professional journalists to work with other people to expose wrongdoing and explore important issues. I'd say this form of collaborative investigative journalism is still young and has much potential.

6 -       Can journalism survive newspapers? (And maybe can newspapers survive journalism?)

Commentators and prognosticators have been predicting the imminent demise of newspapers for at least 15 years. A famous example: In 1993 in Wired Magazine, Michael Crichton wrote: "To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within 10 years. Vanished, without a trace." The New York Times, he said, will be the GM or IBM of the 1990's, "the next great American institution to find itself obsolete and outdated while obstinately refusing to change."

Nine years later, the media critic of Slate, Jack Shafer, noted that Crichton had been wrong and took a stab at explaining why. His concluding paragraphs:
"As the wise man once said, if you're going to make predictions, make a lot of them. Folks will forget your misses and remember your hits. In that spirit, Crichton writes, 'Sooner or later a lot of people are going to say, "You know what? An editor is worth the money. Because time is money, and my time is wasted combing through this junk. I'll pay someone to do it." And it'll happen.'

"To my ears, though, that still sounds like the New York Times."


Stay tuned for more in our interview series: the next installment will feature Financial Times' Managing Editor Dan Bogler.

Newspaper readers and editors agree on the basics of good journalism, but readers desire looser rules for online conversations, finds a study on online news credibility.  

Reader and editor responses diverged most sharply on the topic of anonymous remarks: approximately 70% of editors surveyed said "requiring commentators to disclose their identities would support good journalism," a sentiment shared by only 45% of readers, reports the Associated Press.    

Readers were more likely to favor an online news model in which journalists engage in conversation and give their opinions, with only 36% of the public seeing this as detrimental to journalism, compared with 58% of editors.  

In contrast, the study found a general agreement amongst readers and editors on basic practices such as the need to ensure accuracy, the importance of fairness in news coverage, and desirability of depth, meaning providing links to other related material so readers can gain a fuller understanding of a story.

The Online Journalism Credibility Study was released April 8th by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Click here for the complete report.

According to John Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., and chairman of the credibility committee for the AP managing editors group, sites that allow journalists to express personal views are perceived as more credible, a finding which runs contrary to journalism's traditional emphasis on maintaining complete objectivity.

Editors' reluctance to inject journalist commentary is understandable; it's a blurry line between expressing opinion and assuring fair news coverage (the study shows that readers want both).

So what to do to meet both demands? A possible solution can be found in the recently incarnated service Hubdub, which allows users to make predictions on the outcome of a given story (e.g. Barack Obama being elected president). Hubdub founder and CEO Nigel Eccles, who recently noted readers' desire for journalists to make predictions, said that Hubdub is now looking to distribute a continuously-updating widget that will display the state of the market ie. the percentage of users who believe that a certain outcome will come to pass (e.g. Obama will be elected).

By incorporating a Hubdub style widget in their news sites, editors could have their journalists rest neutral, while meeting readers' desire for opinion. The only difference: readers would get the opinion of thousands of other readers rather than that of single journalist.

Source: AP through IFRA Executive News Service

A month and half after the launch of Hubdub, we spoke with CEO Nigel Eccles about Hubdub so far, where it's going from here, and how the Hubdub concept might be a ticket to improved editorial quality.

Hubdub is part news, part e-Bay, letting would be news experts make predictions and wager Hubdub dollars about topics ranging from politics and sports, to entertainment and international affairs (see here for a full synopsis of Hubdub). Although the Hubdub team is UK based, the site questions have tended to be U.S.-centric, with politics and sports receiving the most attention. According to Eccles, Hubdub initially peaked with 40,000 unique monthly users, and has now leveled out at 20,000. Around 400 new questions and 2200 predictions are made per week. Popular questions are often ones that will be settled in the short term, with a clear-cut outcome; naturally questions of Spitzer's resignation date flooded Hubdub after the scandal broke.

Overall "the U.S. election has been huge." Case in the point: the current top question is "Will Obama drop out of the race by April 30th?" The presidential race is also a "more liquid and active market," with people tending to make higher wagers on outcomes, because "there's such a big news flow about it."

So who's your typical Hubdub user? As you'd expect, "there's certainly a group of a couple 100 hard core users." Beyond that, visitors to the site tend to split along two lines: "some people tend to focus on question creation... to get onto the [home] page," Eccles said. "Some are focused on the leader board."  Those who make more accurate predictions are ranked higher on the leader board.

As a service that puts citizen journalism in the expert seat, the accuracy rate is an interesting point of discussion. Hubdub doesn't yet have any succinct figures, but Hubdub betting rates are aligning with real life prediction rates. "Whenever we have a question that is one with real money bets, we are generally in line with those, so I would say accuracy should be quite good."

Moreover, Eccles has been impressed with the quality of the comments. "We've really moved to an era where a news organization can't produce a poor quality article and just expect people to accept it." Sometimes, "the quality of the comments is much better than the original article."

Eccles contends that the interest in Hubdub is indicative of readers' desire for someone to "come out and say what's going to happen." And therein rests a potential force to improve editorial quality.

"I've spoken to editors and journalists about this, and they saw this as an opportunity to put some discipline on journalists in terms of making predictions about what's going to happen," Eccles explained. "[The Hubdub model] is quite a good discipline mechanism" as well because it is then possible to see if a particular journalist is making successful suggestions on likely future events.

Indeed, the application of Hubdub's concept to newspapers may not be that far off.  According to Eccles, Hubdub has "very engaging functionality," with around 60 page impressions per unique user. "We would love to distribute that functionality," Eccles said. "[Users] are discussing news content, so we are aiming to take our functionality and let news organizations put it on their site."

This raises the question: is making predictions really the ultimate goal of a newspaper? Although readers may want to see journalists forecast outcomes, that type of outlook leans towards news becoming opinion, which is a concept at odds with the long standing journalism principle of striving for objectivity.

Newspapers still have time to debate; integrating Hubdub functionality within newspapers is still several months off. In the meanwhile, a more simple development will debut within weeks: a widget to place on a website "which shows where the market currently is."

Certainly such a move adds a social dimension to the news, in the same vein of the Twitter effect. Moreover, incorporating citizen journalist opinion can be an excellent way to give weight to a story.

However, there is a risk for a sort of tyranny of the majority. A blogger or journalist might choose to align his or her story with the mass opinion just for the sake of seeming authoritative: a kind of mob mentality for grown-up journalists. It's important to remember that users, while informed, are taking their cues from professional journalists; journalists can't be afraid to contradict majority opinion if that is where their research leads them.

Click here to visit Hubdub.

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Jaroslaw Kurski, first deputy editor-in-chief, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland.

The list of upcoming interviews will be updated as they are published (click here to view all interviews in this series). Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

1. How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We stopped being a newspaper-only company in 1993 when we launched our first internet discussion board. Today we have millions of boards. Our web portal website Gazeta.pl reaches now 6 million unique users per month. It is a magic figure, as it is also the total number of readers of the printed edition of Gazeta Wyborcza.

We started our company in 1989 with a newspaper, but today we are one of the leading multimedia companies in Central and Eastern Europe. We publish newspapers, magazines and books, we run networks of radio stations and an outdoor company.

And we strongly invest in digital media. Our board has an ambition that in three years time more than half of our revenues will come from other sources than print. Until now all our websites reach 44 per cent of internet users in Poland. This is an extraordinary outcome for a newspaper publisher like us.

2. At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Futurists like bold predictions, but as a journalist I prefer to look at facts.

Since 2003 there have been seven new national printed daily newspapers launched in Poland. So we faced a new competitor every single year. Is this rush any sign of weakness of the printed medium?

I believe that as long as we have something important to say and people here care to listen to us and talk with us, Gazeta Wyborcza will exist. The message is important, and the dialogue; and not the channel.

If print becomes irrelevant, we will spread our ideas in any other way. Newspapers will not die, they will change.

Last but not least: a Polish word for a newspaper - "gazeta" - does not have any "paper" in it. So even if futurists are right and print newspapers will disappear, Gazeta will remain.

3. In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

Journalism is about intelligible conveying of news and about telling stories of importance that move the community. I appreciate digital tools, they are great and helpful, but they are tools only. You still need a story, a teller and a community. So has anything really changed in journalism?

4. Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

This active role is more than welcome. Let me give you some recent examples from Gazeta Wyborcza.

Since 1996 we have been reviewing maternity wards in Polish hospitals; we wished to improve a quality of healthcare in our country. We could have sent there 100 journalists, but a single mother - who really gave birth in any hospital - can tell you more than reporters. So we asked young mothers for help. In 1996 we got 2000 (two thousand) letters by post. In 2006, thanks to the internet, we gathered 40 000 (forty thousand) personal reviews. We were able to review 423 or 96 % of all hospitals in Poland. We would not be able to do this without our readers.

When we recently reported a huge migration of Poles to the Western European countries after Poland joined the EU in 2004 - we asked readers for help. Hundreds joined our reporting effort.
When we called for saving Rospuda, a wild river in North-Eastern Poland that was sentenced to death by the government - we asked readers for support and thousands marched in the streets, hundreds protested on the spot.

When we discussed a crisis in pensions system - we asked readers for advice and published the best investing guides ever.

We see interaction with readers not as a column of letters on page number 86. It is about inviting readers to play a crucial part in the editorial process.

5. Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

Investigative journalism is a core of our editorial practice and as our world and lives become more complex, I see the need for this kind of public service rising.

We live in the world flooded with information, but it is served in bites, so many bites, that it is getting harder and harder to see the whole picture. We need wise journalists to solve this puzzle.
We live in the world of instant news, but it is often reaching only the surface of problems and challenges that we face. We need great journalits to show what was NOT on TV and the net. We need to understand what really happened.

We live in the world influenced more and more by professional public relations; it changes the way politics is done. We need clever journalists to see what's behind the curtain, to ask the hard questions, to watch hands of those in power.

We live in the world of global economy and large corporations that affect people's lifes and business. We need investigative journalists to provide us all with reliable information to make better decisions.

On Monday (March 10) we broke an exclusive news about a Catholic priest who reportedly sexually abused young boys and about three bishops who - although informed and alerted about the abuses - have been reluctant to investigate the case for 13 years! We publish Gazeta Wyborcza also to uncover stories like this.


Thanks to Kurski for sharing his views. And stay tuned for the next interviews in our series.

According to Ground Reports, 2008 will be the year citizen journalism evolves, after having cemented its establishment in 2007. Leaders such as Newsvine, NowPublic, Orato and Digital Journal offer many similar features: proprietary content submission tools, community ratings, and even some occasional revenue share. But it’s “how these players break out of the pack in the coming year (that) will determine everything.”

The article summarizes its key predictions on what to expect from citizen journalism in 2008:
 

Hubdub, a self-proclaimed “people-powered news aggregator”, launches its new website at DEMO 08, held in Palm Desert, California Jan 28-30.  The news forum features content chosen by users to be worthy of discussion. If indeed news is deemed worthy, a market is created around the topic or question of choice, at which point predictions can be made on possible outcomes.