Results matching “us former new y”

The 100-year old Pulitzer prize winning Christian Science Monitor has bravely announced that it is ending its daily print format and going fully digital: it will now only print a weekly "magazine" edition. The Editors Weblog caught up with the Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Science Monitor, John Yemma, and we discussed the thinking behind this move and how on earth a nationally distributed newspaper completely restructures itself for a digital future.

This story has been broken down into two parts. Part 1 focuses on why the CSM took this step and its initial steps down this path. Part 2 looks at the nuts and bolts: restructuring the newsroom, retraining, and managing staff through change.

The CSM's decision has sparked the inevitable debate about whether this is the beginning of the end for daily printed newspapers, a debate which will run and run in the years to come. However, the peculiar nature of the CSM's subsidised business model, its relatively small print distribution run and international readership base, make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions on industry trends from this move. Nevertheless, many in the industry will be watching closely to see how the CSM manages this move and whether it proves successful or not. If the CSM is successful, then this may lead to other newspapers pursuing this business model, but these papers will have to have a distinctive and loyal readership like the CSM if they have any hope of being successful.

Why the move away from print?

Yemma (left) states that there are two main reasons behind the CSM's controversial decision to move away from the daily print model. Firstly, the CSM's publishers, "saw the writing on the wall, they knew that the Internet user patterns and reader preferences and so forth were changing the business model of print. Print was becoming increasingly untenable, especially for the Monitor, which has an international audience. We just don't have enough reach with our print product, but we have great reach with our web product. That's not uncommon in the world of publishing right now to come to that conclusion, but for the Monitor we were able to make the change a little faster, because the Christian Science church wanted to move away from subsidising the Monitor within about three to five years."

The CSM is subsidised by the Christian Science church, with the church contributing approximately 50% ($13 million) of the newspapers revenue.  The newspaper itself makes about $12.5 million in terms of print advertising, circulation, web revenue and syndication. Therefore, the publishers of the CSM felt that, secondly, this level of subsidisation could not continue forever, so the team decided to look at the newspapers various options.

How the move to digital began - where to begin?

Two years ago the CSM convened a task force to look at the possibility of dropping its daily print edition. The newspaper worked at it from all angles; from prototyping to financial analysis, and working with a consultant (newspaper consultant Chris Urban), marketing group (Kadence Associates - who organised focus groups and surveys), and a PR company (Shift Communications - who handled assisted the company in communicating this move). A former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, John Hughes, and newspaper consultant, Chris Urban, headed up this task force.

Surveying the core readership base - will they buy it?

Given the nature of the CSM and its relatively small daily print run, international appeal as a Christian newspaper and its worldwide reputation, the reasoning behind this move - no matter the financial calculations and industry trends - is sound. However, if the core CSM readership did not largely support the change, then all bets would be off. The CSM surveyed its core loyal readership base, taking sample groups to sound out their response. Yemma states that the CSM was most concerned with converting this core group as quickly as possible to reading the newspaper in a new way. Its focus groups revealed that 50% welcomed the idea of decreasing the frequency of the CSM and that of the 50% who were "on the fence" only half of these wanted to preserve it as it is now.

Once the decision to drop the daily print edition was announced, the CSM had a customer service team field all calls and emails about the decision from readers, which Yemma receives a daily report on. The accumulative report of this over the past few weeks is consistently running at just 14% negative. 35% are asking questions about this new model will work, such as price and so forth, with the rest being positive. Yemma feels the CSM has got a, "pretty good response. We expected worse."

Yemma is clear that the most important thing for them to find out is how many people will convert from buying the daily newspaper to the weekly magazine. This will not be known until the new format is marketed in the spring, and they begin selling the weekly in April. The CSM's marketing estimate is that they can covert about 80% of the people currently buying the daily to take up the weekly model. On this, Yemma says, "that is the best we can do at the moment without having perfect knowledge of the future."

Communicating with your reader

On the CSM website currently there is a web cast featuring John Yemma and the Managing Publishing, John Wells. Here they talk over the various changes and why they have come about for their reader. The site also has an in depth editorial on the changes ahead for the venerated newspaper.

"The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium, it is a totally new way of telling stories"

The move to a web focused future will, "unshackle the newsroom from print."  Yemma says "We will get to see what we can do online in a way that we have never been able to do before. I really believe that journalism in is the infancy of story telling online and that online story telling is about interactivity. I expect us to look more at intelligently moderated user generated content, crowd sourcing, and expanding the reach of CSM journalism.  We can look more at speaking to our readers, and asking them to send us their images and stories of the events hitting the headlines, and thus expand our eyes and ears. There is a non-linear way of telling stories on the web that I think has to be developed by journalists who want their stories to be told in the most appropriate way for the medium."

Yemma goes on to say, "The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium: it is a totally new way of telling stories. We can really start using the web for what it is really all about, which is this three dimensional medium getting information and providing it at whatever level you can convey it."

Part 2 - In our next article on the CSM, the Weblog talks to Yemma about reorganising the team and the newsroom for a weekly magazine and web future, retraining, and staff cuts.

National Public Radio has ended its eight-month search for a full-time CEO with Vivian Schiller, the current senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com.

Beginning January 5, Schiller will succeed Dennis L. Haarsager, interim CEO, to work with NPR's independently operated member stations.

Calling NPR "among the nation's most vital and trusted news organizations, unique in its original programming and distinctive voice," Schiller continues what has been an extensive career.

Former senior vice president and general manager of the Discovery Times Channel, and former senior vice president of CNN Productions, Schiller, 47, began her career as a Russian interpreter and produced documentaries for Turner Broadcasting.

Source:  Editor and Publisher

Cissy Baker will now "preside over a combined Tribune bureau," including such papers as The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun, and The Los Angeles Times.

As the new vice president of the Washington News Bureau for Tribune Company, Baker will now oversee "all newsgathering operations in the nation's capital for the company's publishing, broadcasting and interactive divisions." 

An "invitation-only, closed-door summit conference" to find ways to "revive the newspaper business" will be held November 13 by the American Press Institute.

50 CEO-level executives, led by James B. Shein, will take the one-day conference at API's Reston, Va. headquarters as an opportunity for a "facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit, and shareholder value."  

The conference will not be open to the "working press," however, API said it "will publish a full report on the conference."

"There are concrete steps organizations can take to halt and even reverse" the financial "crisis curve" the newspaper industry has seen, Shein, former "turnaround CEO" and now professor at Northwestern University, said Thursday.

The goal of this conference is to "lay out the steps (organizations) will need to take to begin the renewal process" financially, Shein said.

Source:  Editor and Publisher

According to a recent article published in the Washington Post, the Associated Press has acquired a new "boldness" that may be threatening its standing as "a neutral arbiter of the news" in addition to "challenging its relationship with its owners."

The article presents a series of headlines from this year:

"Is Edwards Real or a Phony?"
"Mitt Romney's victory in Michigan was a defeat for authenticity in politics."
"John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement."

French newspapers are struggling under a system that is no longer working.  Le Figaro and Le Monde have recently made cuts to their staff, while two other papers, Les Echoes and La Tribune were recently sold.  Most others are struggling to make money.

Problems in the French newspaper industry have been largely attributed to distribution issues.  For example, French newspaper vendors have no choice over their selection under a law created in 1947. Loi Bichet was created to ensure freedom of expression after the heavy distribution of Nazi propaganda during World War II.  The problem with the law today is that vendors are unable to adapt their stock to market demand.  

Michael Wolff, the founder of Newser, had a lot to say about his Website, the future of news, Google, The Daily Beast and more...

In case you haven't (already) heard of Newser...

Yet again, an old media man is trying to reinvent his craft with new media thinking. Wolff, who has been covering the media for quite a while as a contributor to Vanity Fair came up with the idea for Newser as a response to what he calls a "revolution in how people get their news."  Newser is a news aggregation website that launched one year ago and is based on the concept of more news in less time, by adding human intelligence to machine-driven aggregation.  According to Wolff, the idea is that Newser "searches the web, reads the stories and delivers concise and sharp summaries - along with links to the full text."

The Starting Point

Wolff is sure that newspapers and traditional broadcast media will fall to an imminent death.  So as a means feed the enormous demand for news he created the online news aggregation site.

Even though there are huge advantages to using technology in the media industry, Wolff argues that "nobody has really developed the user-friendly way for getting news," that is, until he created Newser. The idea behind Newser was to create something that could be fun, entertaining, interesting and all the while make sense - something that was essentially, user-friendly. With this in mind, combined with what he calls "an absolute place in the market" - he designed and launched the news platform, giving editors and writers the opportunity to use the technological tools at hand to produce news that would be both efficient and entertaining.

The News According to Newser: Its Visual, and General

The news aggregation system is set up in a visual grid format so that readers can see the day's happenings pass before their eyes.  He describes it as a real-time visual for the day's events, a "kind of narrative through which you can literally watch the day go by."

When asked if visuals take away from the content  -  Wolff was quick to state his position: visuals are essentially the life force of news.  "I think the visual presentation of news is the business we are in. Newspapers are visual media; obviously television is visual media. News is visual, if news is not visual (i.e., Google, or YahooNews) it's a lesser form."  Wolff believes that if you can't visualize (or have it visualized for you), then you are missing out on the world.  To him, Newser is a "window to an incredible experience of the moment...", and he believes this is part of what people want.  The other part that people want is drama.

If there exists a trend towards more niche news, as many media pundits postulate, Wolff feels that the trend is backward. In his opinion, general news, news that embraces everyone, is in demand.  As a result, Newser does not target a certain age group or demographic. In Wolff's words, "We are one of the few sites that target general interest news audiences. We are not serving up left wing news. We are not serving up right wing news. We're not serving up special interest news." He views it as an "old fashioned idea," something that works because, essentially, the audience wants "the news that everyone else wants -it doesn't want it to be specialized - they want that sort of pure view into the world."

The Newser System

Newser's system is somewhere between human and Googlebot. An algorithm searches sources for the news, then the editors and writers make the final decisions as to what to summarize and publish, summarizing being the site's primary purpose. Wolff sees Newser as a way to bring an "enormous amount of information" to readers, "which is significantly more consumable because we are the ones who are preparing, digesting it, summarizing it, condensing it."

Newser has 20 editors working rotating shifts so that hands are on deck 24/7. Outside of the main offices in Chicago and New York City, Wolff employs people throughout the world to keep up the pace. News has to be instantaneous, so his staff policy is, "if you are out of bed, we use you."  

Wolff also describes Newser as being in the business of sources; "If we are an expert on anything; its on sources."   Although many traditional publisher esteem that news aggregation sites are "stealing" content, Wolff does not view it that way.  He points out that Newser is sending readers back to the original source and "the world depends on directories and aggregators to locate and point original content...to present a literal infinity of information in a manageable form."  He sees Newser as doing a "more valuable act, or at least as valuable as the creators themselves."

Wolff"s categorizes sites that post purely original content as "relics of the past" because "nobody wants news from just one source." But he also doesn't see the point in purely automated aggregators that just produce headlines (such as Google or Yahoo) - he views them as "lesser forms."

Not Such a Beast After All

When asked how he compared Newser to other sites such as the Huffington Post, Drudge, or Tina Brown's recently launched The Daily Beast, Wolff highlighted the fact that his site is "pure news aggregation, we are not producing other content." In addition, Newser remains "agnostic to orientation" in order to present the news in "everybody's point of view."

When asked about his thoughts on The Daily Beast, he was quick to offer his apocalyptic view of yet another "relic"; "The Daily Beast...which I think is a complete error and hash and mismatch - is just trying to produce an old idea of a magazine, Tina Brown's old idea of a magazine online. So it's not even a new idea of a magazine - its Tina Brown's old idea, and in my view has no chance of success at all."  Wolff continued, opining that both the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are spending more money that they can ever make back; "Someone is going to end up eating that," he said.

News Today Gone Tomorrow

As for hindsight, he is pleased with the outcome of Newser - but stated that as with any business dealing with the development of technology - there are always things that could have been done differently, but described it as a learning experience - with technology sometimes you don't know what the outcome will be of certain efforts. It's trial and error. He cites one of the "main management challenges (as) deciding where to focus and allocate brain resources."

Obviously he wants Newser's audience to grow and for them to become "a significant and possibly dominant news brand online." He has no plans to develop a print version of aggregated news and leaves it for the most part up to users' demands.  

Wolff imagines the future news landscape as being purely electronic-centric and sees the main challenge as figuring out what works. Opposed to those traditionalists that laud the power of traditional media, he believes that consumer behavior does change - people have always sought their news in the most efficient way possible.

As for print: "The advice is probably not to get up for work today, sleep in and, you know, hope your retirement account will take care of you."

In a recent speech, former of the editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, gave his opinions about the newspaper industry.  Gawenda believes that changes taking place in the news industry are causing more problems and they are failing to "produce newspapers that attract the sort of fierce and life-long loyalty they once attracted."

Gawenda believes that "it is a failure of imagination and commitment, a result of a lack of experience and knowledge and love of newspapers" that is causing content, readership and revenue to decline.  

He went on to stress the importance of change in the industry, "but for real change, courage is needed, and vision and risk-taking and, above all, a commitment to newspapers and journalism that, frankly, I do not see at the moment."

France's newspaper industry is in crises and President Nicholas Sarkozy is launching talks to look into alleviating the situation. There will be a two month industry consultation period led by a one of Sarkozy's former Elysee advisers.

However, unions are reportedly concerned Sarkozy could loosen ownership laws, allowing his television baron friends to buy into the national press. Sarkozy, is known as the "télé-président" due to his media fixation and his close relationship with key figures within the media.

The French press is one of the least profitable in Europe, the daily circulation of all French national papers is just 8 million, which is half that of the UK and one third of Germany. French newspapers' combined turnover fell from €1.145bn (£905 million) in 2000 to €848 million last year.

It also costs more to print a national newspaper in France than in most of its European neighbours due to the Union Le Livre's importance in this sector, it insists on strict working hours and conditions for its members. It is also difficult to buy a newspaper in France because Labyrinthine state controls newspaper kiosks. The press already receive €1.5bn in direct and indirect state each year

Le Monde's editor, Eric Fottorino, has called for Sarkozy to make it easier for the public to buy a copy of a newspaper.

Sarkozy reportedly favours loosening French laws to allow media organisation to own a TV station, a major radio network and a major daily newspaper.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Indonesian media, property, infrastructure and banking tycoon James Riady is to shortly launch a new daily newspaper in Indonesia, the Jakarta Globe. The new newspape for Indonesia  was reported on back in August, but it has emerged that it will hit the market soon.

News Corporation executive Lachlan Murdoch - son of Rupert Murdoch - is also reportedly taking an interest and looking at other media investments in Indonesia with Riady.

The 48-page, full-colour English-language broadsheet newspaper will initially just be distributed in large Indonesian cities and Singapore, with a print run of "over 50,000", according to launch editor David Plott. Plott is a former editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review.

Plott says, "Indonesia's a little like India, in the sense that it's a market where print publications are still quite profitable and there's still quite a lot of growth potential; in terms of advertising it's a $US3 billion a year market."

The competition for the new player in the market will be the Jakarta Post, an English-language daily with circulation of 18,000 copies. It will also have an online version; however, issues surround the name jakartaglobe.com, as a local news aggregator already operates under the name.

There have been significant challenges for the newspaper with retraining staff, as "Newspapers aren't what they used to be. You can't survive by just reporting what happened, particularly in Indonesia, where things aren't always what they appear to be, and what's actually going on behind events is not clear to anyone except insiders."

Source: The Australian via IFRA Executive News Service

"You'll see, in the next 12 to 18 months, a wave of electronic-newspaper devices," says Russell Wilcox, chief executive of E Ink, the MIT spinoff whose technology powers the Kindle, Sony's Reader and other competitors.

Roger Fidler, a former newspaper executive who now researches and consults on e-readers at the University of Missouri, believes tthere are three key requirements for the device to catch on: larger screens, colour screens (a must for advertisers) and lower prices.

Colour will not happen for a few years yet, but several companies will soon launch e-readers with screens the size of an 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper. Furthermore, the next generation will have flexible, plastic screens that do not crack, unlike the current generation of glass-screened devices.

The industry is gaining confidence in the belief that the price of e-readers can be brought down, as print-newspaper subscriptions can be expensive - one can pay over $1,300 a year to get home delivery of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.

The biggest concern remains whether consumers who currently read newspaper on the Web for free can be persuaded to pay $10 or more a month for an e-newspaper subscription.

Source: Newsweek via IFRA Executive News Service

See also:

Plastic Logic enters the E-Newspaper market

New version of Kindle to be launched next year "at the earliest"

Sony Reader muscles into Kindle territory

A UK Government counter-terrorism unit is using news websites including the BBC to channel messages and plant volunteers in internet forums in an attempt to "taint the al-Qaida brand".

The Guardian newspaper broke the story after seeing a secret Home Office paper. The Guardian reports that government unit is deliberately targeting the BBC and other media organisations as part of a global propaganda push.

The operation is being conducted by the research, information and communication unit (RICU), which was set up last year by the previous home secretary John Reid.

The Guardian quoted directly from the secret paper, entitled 'Challenging violent extremist ideology through communications'. It said: "We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg, a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters. And a restricted working group will communicate niche messages through media and non-media."

The unit has been set up due to the government's belief that al-Qaida's popularity is waning worldwide and is vulnerable.

The paper also reveals that the propaganda is aimed at "overseas communicators" in embassies and consulates around the world, people that work with influencers and opinion formers.

This unit's existence and actions raises serious questions question about editorial control and freedom in light of this government attempt to manage the media.

Source: Brand Republic and The Guardian