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Locally sourced community news is increasingly becoming more popular, but AOL owned Patch has announced plans to take hyperlocal reporting one step further by creating a national brand. 

A year ago, the Ann Arbor News stopped printing and AnnArbor.com took over. Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first American city to lose its only local daily, and at the time it was anticipated that it would be the first of many. A year later this does not seem to have been the case. Senior AnnArbor.com staff, Poynter and the Chicago Tribune took a look at AnnArbor.com's first year.

Going online only in Ann Arbor made sense to parent company Advance Publications because its residents have very high levels of broadband Internet access, as a university town. The site it launched was supposed to look different to other news sites, with a more 'social media' feel.

American consumers are more satisfied with the The New York Times and USA Today websites than with Facebook, according to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released today, The Washington Post reported.

In the ACSI, which is conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and is based on interviews with 70,000 customers, Facebook scored a 64 out of 100 while The New York Times received a 76 and USA Today a 77, PC Magazine revealed.

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Zero Hora, a southern Brazilian newspaper covering the Porto Alegre region, has a proactive online strategy aiming to foster an innovative, interactive website while protecting its print edition, the circulation of which grew 2% in 2009. According to data from the World Bank World Development Indicators, about 37.5% of Brazilians are Internet users, and the number is rising fast, constantly creating new challenges for the country's newspapers. The Editors Weblog spoke to Zero Hora's editor-in-chief Altair Nobre to find out more about the paper's strategy, which has resulted in unusually high penetration among young people.

There are 210 journalists at Zero Hora, working in newsroom that has been integrated since the end of 2007. Although there are specific teams allocated to print and online, these teams are fluid and journalists are expected to understand the work of others and be flexible in what they do. Print is still very important to the paper, and the company invested $50million in a new printing plant in June 2009. A lot of energy is dedicated to the design and layout of the paper.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way that Zero Hora puts its paper together, Nobre said. People now look for news online, so what they want from a newspaper is context and analysis to accompany the straight news stories. This means, said Nobre, that a greater investment in editing is required "to translate the storm of information that the Internet put up the day before." As a result of the Internet, he said, newspapers constantly have to strive to be more original and creative, working harder to convince people to read the paper.

Online, the paper focuses on breaking news and multimedia, but saves many of its exclusive stories to publish fully in print first. When Zero Hora is planning to break a big story in the following day's paper, "to create tension and increase anticipation we put a hint or a teaser online," Nobre explained, adding that "we tell readers that to find out more they should see tomorrow's paper." The following day the story will also go online, but not until it has been published in print. "The Internet provides a way of sending an alert and it helps to get attention for the paper," he said.

"We believe that it is foolish to hide content from the web because you affect the impact that the information could have." Nobre believes that many of the same readers use both platforms to consume news, and that linking the two makes a lot of sense. He gave the example of one reporter who works on a series of 'stories with no ending,' publishing one each Saturday. He started to make videos each Friday for the web in which he discusses the story that will appear the following day, and the series is now a success both in the print edition and on the web.

High levels of interactivity online

Zero Hora aims to make its online version very interactive. The Porto Alegre region has a rather unstable climate, Nobre explained, and so Zero Hora editors invite readers to send in pictures and short reports when there are storms. These are put on the web and the best pictures will often be put in the print paper the following day. Readers are not paid for their contributions but having their content in the paper is motivation enough, said Nobre.

This effort to promote reader interaction extends to the very young: children are invited to send in photos of them with their friends at various events, and there are story-writing contests for children and adolescents, with a published story or a trip to the printing plant as a prize.

A young attitude = more readers

The newspaper has very high penetration among younger people: a 78 percent penetration rate among 20- to 29-year olds in its market, and a 71 percent penetration rate among those aged 15 to 19. Voted 2009 Young Reader Newspaper of the Year, Zero Hora has looked innovatively at ways to encourage young people to take an interest in the paper. As well as having specific sections of the paper aimed at children - supplements, series about children's lives and games and contests, for example - the feeling at Zero Hora is that a young attitude in general is the way forward, believing that older generations are unlikely to be alienated by the issues in which younger people are interested. Sports news, for example, steers away from golf and racing and towards surfing and more extreme sports. One third of the newsroom is under 30 years old and 25 journalism students work in the newsroom in support functions, so the paper is not out of touch touch with the younger generation.

Nobre believes that a main motivation for young adults to read the paper is its potential to help them with their careers. "In Brazil, the young people read the paper to get a job or to get a better job: to get training or to improve their career," he said. Zero Hora has supplements about university entrance exams, a large amount of information about post graduate studies and employment sections with career tips.

Using social networks with care

Zero Hora journalists use social networks such as Twitter to alert people about their stories and to keep track of what people are talking about, but Nobre stressed that his staff are careful to use information from social networks wisely. "They can be a good source of news, but also a trap," Nobre said. The paper has many different Twitter accounts, and journalists are told to be careful that what they write on social networks, even when they are not at work, could not damage their credibility as journalists.

Focusing on younger readers while putting considerable effort into both print and online initiatives, while keeping the two relatively separate, does seem to be working for Zero Hora. Although operating in a very different market, are there lessons that American and European newspapers can learn from Zero Hora's success?

 

The BBC launched its new news website yesterday: the biggest redesign of the site since 2003. As well as navigational and layout changes, improved video and sharing capabilities, the BBC has created a new North American edition of the site, BBC.com (as opposed to BBC.co.uk.)

A new dedicated website team based in the BBC's Washington DC office will be "making sure that a new, North America edition front page reflects the stories, themes and issues which matter most to our users in the US and Canada," according to an article by the news website editor Steve Herrmann and the editor of the North America edition Matt Davis. 

Separate op-eds have been published, in The Globe and Mail and on the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), addressing what the authors perceive as the watering-down of press credentials and its impact on the recent G20 protests.  In a Globe article entitled Self-anointed G20 'journalists' should get real, Christie Blatchford writes that "just as you are not a physician or a lawyer merely because you say you are, much as you may want to believe it so, neither are you a journalist because you and your friends say you are or because your "writings" appear on a website."

Politifact Texas recently asserted that statements that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst made about kidnapping in Phoenix were "FALSE" (their capitalization). In reaction to politifact's assessment, Dewhurst said: "This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group. It shouldn't be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven's sake." Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize winning project created by Bill Adair of the Saint Petersburg Times, devotes itself to exposing lies and half-truths told by politicians.

The BBC is about to redesign its news website, according to the site's editor Steve Herrmann in a blog post. "We have focused on design and navigation, looking to see how we can make all the existing content we produce each day easier for you to find, use and share," he wrote. It is the biggest redesign of the site since 2003.

The BBC asked users about how they use the site and decided on areas to improve, such as indicating which are the newest stories on the homepage by flagging them with a 'New' badge. There will also be more space for the main stories of the day On story pages, it will be more clearly indicated what other latest top news there is. Local UK news will be easier to find, and video features will be more accessible with a bigger video player and better quality video, placed at the top of the front page. It will also be easier to quickly share stories on Facebook and Twitter. 

The Economist is in hot water over the cover of their June 19th issue, reports the New York Times. The cover, which features a despondent-looking President Obama standing alone on a beach, was meant to communicate the politically difficult times the President faces in light of the BP oil spill near the Gulf coast. However, the New York Times report shows that the original picture featured two other people standing next to the President that The Economist edited out for dramatic effect.

As the news publishing industry continues to try and figure out a viable economic model to replace print revenues, the Journal Register Company believes the future of journalism and the print industry lies in community crowdsourcing and the usage of free publishing tools available on the Internet.

To prove it, the American media company produced on Sunday the print editions of its 18 dailies and their website content using only free web-based sofwares such as Picasa, Gimp and Scribus, Editor & Publisher reported.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

A recent poll has shown that Americans are not as optimistic about the future of newspapers as they once were, reports Yahoo News. The poll showed that 64 percent of Americans believe that printed newspapers will cease to exist by 2050. The poll, which was conducted by phone and polled some 1,546 adults, showed a general decrease in optimism with significant percentages of people predicting future crises, wars, and nuclear terrorist attacks.

A new Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 84% of Americans oppose a three percent (3%) tax on monthly cellular telephone bills to help newspapers and traditional journalism.  Similarly, 76% oppose a proposed five percent tax on the purchase of consumer electronic items such as computers, iPads and Kindles to help support newspapers and traditional journalism. Seventy-four percent (74%) oppose the proposal to tax web sites like the Huffington Post to help the newspapers from which they draw their headlines.

According to an article published today in The Independent, some are speculating an unexpected source of future journalism: public relation agencies. Such speculation has been sparked by Edelman, an American PR firm, which recently appointed Richard Sambrook, the former head of BBC News, to the position of Chief Content Officer. More speculation has been caused by the company's hiring of Stefan Stern of the Financial Times as its new head of strategy. While the worlds of PR and journalism frequently overlap, Edelman's hiring of Sambrook and Stern could indicate a new strategy by PR firms. Sambrook, who claims that "every company has to be a media company in their own right," suggests that companies should bypass traditional news sources and go directly to the consumer. While Sambrook maintains that the company is "not moving into the news business," he does assert that the changing landscape of journalism presents valuable opportunities for PR to expand.