Results matching “international o”

Vendors shipped a record 54.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, 39% more than the 39.2 million shipped in the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC information on PC World.

Four of the top five smartphone sellers beat their shipments records for a single quarter, according to numbers released by the International Data Corporation (IDC). Following a 98% increase in smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, Apple has regained its spot as third largest smartphone vendor, behind longtime leaders Nokia and Research in Motion

The Press Association, the national news agency in the UK, will send its largest-ever Winter Olympics team to this month's games in Vancouver, Hold the Front Page reports.

PA Sport sent two reporters to the last winter Games in Turin in 2006, but will send 13 this time, including, for the first time, two video journalists.

The London Evening Standard's readership has gone from 556,000 in April to September to 1.37 million in the last three months of 2009, Stephen Brook from Guardian reports.

These positive readership figures follow the newspaper going free in October of last year and more than doubling its circulation to 600,000 copies in the process. The London Evening Standard was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebeveb in 2008, and his decision to drop the paper's 50p cover price was made in the hope that boosted circulation would increase advertising enough to make up for the lost revenue of having no cover price. His move towards the freesheet format prompted speculation that other London quality newspapers may drop their cover price as well.

Newspaper publisher News International has launched a review of its search, affiliate, social media and pay-per-click business for some of its online newspaper brands, Media Week reports.

The publisher is looking for a search and social media agency to handle online brands including online bingo for The Sun and News of the World, as well as its online fantasy football game Dream Team.

It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era intends to start using Journalism Online's payment system in the next few months, reported the New York Times. The software system will be called Press+ and GlobalPost and the Fayetteville Observer are also interested, said the NYT.

Journalism Online has also sent a memo to its affiliated publishers (reproduced by paidContent) in which it informs them that the company is "just weeks away" from having the technology ready for use, and that multiple publishers are currently integrating the software. 

Three leading British phone companies have confirmed that over 100 customer accounts were illegally accessed by a private investigator and journalist at the News of the World, claims Nick Davies of the Guardian in the latest development in the phone-hacking scandal that let to a parliamentary committee enquiry.

Scotland Yard supplied 02, Vodafone, and Orange with phone numbers used by News of the World's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, to access the private voicemails of customers like Prince William and Boris Johnson. Working backwards to trace customers whose voicemail had been dialed from those numbers, Vodafone and 02 each found that "about 40" voicemails had been compromised, while Orange found that 45 customer accounts had been hacked.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

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.

Mirror.co.uk has this week followed the lead of News International and blocked its content from online news aggregator NewsNow, paidContent reported. NewsNow is now the only site blocked from crawling the Mirror online.

"We're not big fans of their business model," Mirror.co.uk digital director Matt Kelly said.

The British international business newspaper the Financial Times (FT) has announced several appointments to its US staff, Editor and Publisher has reported.

The new staff are in the coverage areas of business, finance and markets, and will report to the US finance and business editor Francesco Guerrera.

As speculation mounts about the expected launch of the Apple tablet computer, The New York Times has announced that it will create a new business unit dedicated to electronic editions.

Yasmin Namini, currently the senior vice president of marketing and circulation, has been appointed head of the new Reader Applications division. This unit will be part of the Media Group, joining the newspaper, the website, the International Herald Tribune and News Services.

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

When The Times Direct Delivery Service launched back in 2008, delivering the company's publications directly to the doorsteps of its newspaper subscribers living within the parameters of the M25 for free, it seemed a pretty good deal - particularly in light of the fact that the Independent's also newly launched delivery service was paid for.

At the same time however, the Times also increased its cover price to match the Daily Telegraph, hovering around the £1 ever since.

Covering major sport events is becoming more and more complex: with more "media rights" being sold every day and for every event, the straightforward businesses of news-gathering, providing news services and running commercial programmes alongside news coverage can be difficult.

In response to this, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN) has set up a special Master Class to help news executives navigate complicated "media rights" issues and avoid legal red tape when providing coverage of the 2010 football World Cup and other events.

The Master Class will include the expertise of a sport news executive, Juan Ignacio Gallardo, Deputy Editor of the Spanish sports daily Marca, who can catalogue the numerous restrictions he and his team face on a daily basis in covering sports events, along with the contribution of Andrew Moger, Executive Director of the News Media Coalition, an expert in media rights with long-standing experience as a journalist, who will describe the current regulations and help participants deal with the current rules and issues

The IASN Master Class will be held on 5 February next at the state-of-the-art Olympic and Sport Museum in Barcelona, Spain. Full details can be found at http://www.press-iasn.org, or email Rosarita Cuccoli (rcuccoli@press-iasn.org).

Yesterday, following months of deliberation, the New York Times announced that it was to go forward with charging online, with a plan to implement a metre system in 2011. It is the biggest publisher yet to lay out paywall plans, and the move is undoubtedly highly significant for the newspaper industry as it struggles with a failing business model. Will this save the New York Times? Could it signal the end for free online content?

Similar to that used by the Financial Times, a metered payment system would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month, and then request payment for more: a flat fee for unlimited access. Print subscribers will continue to have free access, even those who subscribe to just the Sunday paper. An online subscription will also cover access via smartphones. The first click free from search engines, which is used by the Wall Street Journal, will also apply. More details such as pricing have been released yet, and the publisher's statement said that the next year will be used to build "a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms."

A metered system rather than a more fixed paywall has the advantage of not alienating the casual reader who can still visit the site free on occasion, and not angering journalists by blocking off specific articles (an issue with the Times' previous attempt at charging online, TimesSelect). "It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web," reads the Times memo sent to staff by executives Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, published by Poynter.

It does have potential flaws, however. Before the NYT's announcement, Reuters writer Felix Salmon criticized the way that the FT's flat fee system does not actually work like a metre: suggesting that instead the New York Times should implement a payment process under which readers are charged depending on how much content they consume. And presumably those who are determined not to pay will find ways around the paywall, using multiple accounts, for example.

The Financial Times welcomed the New York Times' decision, according to the Guardian, with CEO John Ridding saying "We welcome the New York Times' new online business model, which is similar to the FT's. We believe in the value of quality journalism and we are pleased that others feel the same way." The FT recently announced that for the first time, its content revenue was greater than its advertising revenue in 2009, after raised cover prices and more online subscribers signing on.

The FT now has 121,000 subscribers. Going by the pricing on the FT's website, it seems that they pay between €186 and €363 per year (depending on whether they choose a standard or premium subscription). Working on the assumption that about half of subscribers pay for each (and that the FT is not counting joint print-online subscribers in this figure), that would mean that the paper could be bringing in something in the region of €33 million from its paywall in direct revenue from readers. And the Wall Street Journal, which offers a different kind of paywall, has an estimated one million paying online subscribers.

This figure is encouragingly high, but how much encouragement can the NYT take from this? As a general interest paper with the most popular website out of all US papers, the Times has a far bigger pool of potential subscribers. But the FT's specialist financial content is something that more people might see as worth paying for. Indeed for some, it is news that is necessary for their business. And with the FT's main international rival the WSJ also charging, there is not an ubiquity of similar news free on the web.

The New York Times does seem to have a better shot at making charging for online content work than other US general interest newspapers. Its status as the number one national paper is largely unquestioned. It has always made a greater proportion of its revenue from content than most newspapers do, receiving 55-60% of its income from advertising compared to a typical figure of 80-85%. The current price for a print subscription is high, at between $550 and $770 a year, depending on location and offers, but many people are still prepared to pay this: more than 800,000 continue to renew their subscriptions, according to the NYT's David Carr.

Given the paper's financial situation, it is unsurprisingly that the paper is looking at changing its business model. Despite its reputation and high number of website visitors, financial constraints have pushed the New York Times into carrying out lay-offs and pay cuts. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim came to the publisher's aid last year with a $250 million loan, but if the paper is to continue to produce top-quality journalism, it needs a steady revenue stream.

Poynter writer Rick Edmonds maintains that the NYT's decision to charge "makes business sense." He believes that the Times will not "lose any meaningful number of unique visitors," and agrees with Ken Doctor that paying users represent a significant targeting advertising opportunity. The Times' memo sent to employees said that executives expect that "digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web."

Slate editor Jack Shafter is critical of the NYT's strategy, judging it "too easy for freeloaders to game their way around it" and "a waste of the gargantuan audience they've attracted." He suggests that looking into improving web advertising would be a better way to go forward. Jeff Jarvis argues on his blog BuzzMachine that the NYT's plan will end up charging "the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least," which he believes does not make sense. 

With the New York Times on board, efforts to charge online are likely to speed up. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp publications are expected to introduce paid online content in coming months, and there is an increasing sentiment that it just doesn't make sense to give away content that should be seen as valuable. Not everybody agrees, however, and over at the UK paper with the most popular website, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said that his publication will remain free online. Others will undoubtedly stick to a similar course and provide free alternatives, making it harder for those who do charge. Which business model will eventually prove more successful? 

On January 12 last year GlobalPost was launched, a new international news service focused on getting the context behind the headlines, hoping to combat diminishing foreign reporting in the US. Its number of foreign correspondents is second only to the Associated Press and they are expected to provide both text and visual reports.

A year on, and the news outlet has made considerable progress in terms of covering a wide range of international stories, establishing a significant audience, and implementing a successful business model. The Editors Weblog spoke to President, CEO and co-founder Philip Balboni about his first year at the helm of this project.

Balboni was clear that he considered GlobalPost's first year a success. "It has been an extraordinary year, it has exceeded any reasonable expectations that I could have had when I started out on this journey," he said.

"To a large degree, the stories on GlobalPost are ones that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere," said Balboni. As one of GlobalPost's aims was to fill the gaps in the reporting of traditional outlets, this must be satisfying.  The news outlet has also remained true to its original stipulations: its reporting has broad geographic diversity, and consists of a wide range of types of stories and topics.

And much of this reporting has had the potential for considerable impact. Balboni highlighted a recent story on how the Taliban have been taking a cut of funds supplied by the Indiana National Guard to local Afghan contractors for development projects in Afghanistan's Khost province. The issue of the Taliban skimming American aid in Afghanistan is one to which GlobalPost has dedicated much coverage over the past few months.

Such investigative pieces are accompanied by more entertaining reporting, such as an article from Paris about how the French are rediscovering the joy of wearing berets. Correspondents also write ample blog entries.

GlobalPost adopted a relatively unique correspondent model, hiring country-based, part-time reporters who could produce one article a week. The compensation level - a monthly salary plus shares - has proven "very successful" and working for GlobalPost seems to be a popular job: the news service now has correspondents in more than fifty countries and "we have far more people who would want to work for us than we could possibly hire."

The correspondents work with regional editors based in Boston and Balboni said that so far this system has been functioning "with a remarkable degree of smoothness."

Building an audience from scratch

Developing an audience is "really more important than anything else," said Balboni. "We could have the most spectacular content in the world but if you can't build an audience for it then you can't succeed, right?"

The news outlet's highest-traffic month this year was November, when more than 750,000 people visited the site. This exceeded Balboni's goal of 600,000, set before the launch. In addition, "we are retaining more than 50% of all the visitors," he said.

The target for 2010 is to top one million unique visitors, and Balboni mentioned the company's "very sophisticated marketing strategy" aimed at audience building.

Prize partnerships

Building a brand on the web with no support from legacy media has been a considerable challenge, and GlobalPost's partnerships with other high profile brands have been very helpful in doing this, and "particularly important in the validation of GlobalPost as a brand," Balboni said. Such partnerships have helped present the outlet's content as authoritative, and often "raising our visibility is more important than any compensation we might achieve." From the beginning, GlobalPost has sought to present itself as a complement rather than a competitor to newswires and newspapers.

The partnership formed with CBS in September, for example, is a syndication deal, with CBS paying GlobalPost for help with foreign reporting. But having a broadcast news partner was also something that Balboni and his team considered a high priority in terms of brand-boosting, and such a deal "certainly goes beyond" purely syndication. He sees the recent partnership with PBS NewsHour as a "significant achievement" and mentioned that GlobalPost has upped its video production so that it might have the chance to forge other broadcast partnership. 

Compensation is obviously an important consideration, however, and syndication is one of GlobalPost's major revenue streams, the other two being advertising and subscriptions. Currently, advertising comprises about 70% of GlobalPost's income, but Balboni hopes that over time this share will fall to around 50%, with syndication and membership rising to make up the other half.

Passport to premium services

The most unusual of these revenue streams is the subscription, or membership, scheme called Passport. For $99 a year (discounted to $50 for students, academics or seniors), readers can have access to conference calls with GlobalPost reporters, the chance to suggest stories, global and country briefs and newsletters. There is also the option to commission custom research projects, something Balboni said he was "very excited about." One client, for example, has ordered a series of ten reports for the coming year. "It takes careful shepherding but it's very interesting and I think it could scale up to be a meaningful part of our Passport financial strategy," he said.

"I am very bullish on the membership aspect," Balboni said, "I think it's the hardest one but if you want to point to one thing that could be a potential salvation for quality journalism then it's that." He always wanted to encourage a subscription or membership scheme, but explained that as a new little-known media brand it would have been foolish to put up a paywall immediately.
 
Passport does not offer pure paid online content, rather additional editorial services. "My hope and my expectation is that GlobalPost will remain free and open to all but we need to find more effective ways to get all of the people who are most engaged to help support our mission," he said, specifying that GlobalPost was likely to continue to ask for, rather than to require, reader contributions. He does think, however, that it would be "entirely fair" for a news organisation to demand payment.

So far, Passport has 450 - 500 members: "just not enough," according to Balboni. He hopes to increase this by making "a strategic shift in how we market our membership" and by using some new technology starting this spring that will help the membership base and subsequent revenue to grow. Currently, visitors to the GlobalPost site can read about Passport but there is no chance to test it out first and they have to "take a leap of faith" if they want to subscribe, Balboni said.

From a purely financial standpoint, 2009 was "a decent year," especially given the global economic recession. Balboni specified that the $1 million revenue figure that was reported in November was not accurate, but described the amount as "consequential." The company's original business plan projected profitability in 2012, and Balboni thinks this is still likely.

What's next?

GlobalPost seems to have demonstrated that there is an audience for more international news and has set up a structure to cover this that works. As Balboni explained, its challenges now are to build that audience into the millions and (like almost every other news organisation) to shift its business model so that it depends less substantially on advertising.  

Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger ruled out erecting paywalls around The Guardian's website, expressing optimism about the future of the newspaper, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Speaking as part of the Coventry Conversation series, run by the Coventry University journalism department, he said the newspaper had no plans to put up paywalls, as Rupert Murdoch has planned to do for News International titles. "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things," Rusbridger said. He did agree, though, that it was good that journalism was "trying different things".

After a natural disaster, some critical needs are evident, such as food, medicine and shelter. But it's easy to forget another vital need: that of information and communication. This helps aid workers to co-ordinate relief efforts, and keeps locals informed about where they can access such relief.

Some good news from Haiti this week, then, is that at least 12 radio stations broadcasting to the Port-au-Prince area and one national broadcaster are back on the air. A 300-watt transmitter that could broadcast almost 50 kilometres around Port-au-Prince is also expected to arrive soon. And the Digicel telecommunications network is also functioning again, and more and more users have been able to send and receive calls, text messages and email.

The international media development organisation Internews is deploying a team of specialists to the affected area. Its brief is to assess both media infrastructure damage and what is needed to help. Staff at Internews are attempting to contact the 41-member network of community radio stations, RAMAK, to assess the state of their infrastructure and broadcasting capabilities.

As the latest news from Tuesday's earthquake outside of Port-au-Price trickles in to the mainland, newspapers have faced many of the same logistical challenges as rescue crews as they struggle to cover the scale of destruction wreaked on this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation.

With only one foreign correspondent based in Haiti, Jonathan M. Katz of the AP, many major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal struggled initially to get their journalists on the ground. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake had destroyed what little infrastructure Haiti already had, razing government buildings, hospitals, and homes. Telecommunications and power lines have been unreliable if present at all.

Is sports coverage news or entertainment? "Everyone in this room would say both," says Larry Kilman, Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs for WAN-IFRA, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

The traditional partnership between sports and media is collapsing, he says. Sports organisers aim to extend intellectual property rights to their matches, which will affect news coverage, and what is paid and what is free. If newspapers become betting companies, the lines are blurred, he adds.

Can an event be copyright? French draft law would give sports organisations extra copyright protection, and a French court has ordered Unibet to pay the French Open tennis event €300,000 in recognition of ownership rights. Proposed British legislation calls for stricter licensing as sports bodies want the government to ensure a fair return for them. And the Sports Rights Owner Coalition, composed of international and national sports bodies, is lobbying for sport-specific intellectual property protection.

It appears that Rupert Murdoch has been making good on his promises this week. A Massachusetts newspaper owned by his Dow Jones Local Media Group has begun charging readers for online news, News & Tech reports.

This comes after the announcement that News International will block aggregator NewsNow from all its websites. Murdoch has previously accused news aggregators of theft.

The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts, this week started charging readers a fee to access articles from its website SouthCoastToday.com. Users are still able to access 10 articles a month for free, after which only a short excerpt is displayed with a prompt to log in or subscribe. Rates vary, up to $3.56 for new subscribers.

Pakistan is set to get a new English-language newspaper focusing on Pakistani news and business, under an alliance between the International Herald Tribune and Century Publications. The launch date is tentatively set for March of this year, and the paper will be distributed inside the IHT.

Publisher of the yet-unnamed newspaper Bilal Lakhani told Media Mughals that Pakistan needs "a credible and authoritative news source" because of the social and political turmoil the country faces.

Search engines could be protected from liability for copyright infringement under proposed changes to UK copyright law, Press Gazette reports.

If implemented, amendments to the Digital Economy Bill would mean that publishers of websites, including news websites, would be presumed to give open access to search engines. This would make it impossible for a news website to take legal action against a search engine for indexing its content. This would not apply if the website used specific technology to block sites which aggregate content, using, for example, the Robots.txt protocol.

Midland News Association, owner of the U.K.'s best selling regional paper, Wolverhampton's Express & Star, has revamped the paper's online offering complete with a useful business directory, Press Gazette reported.

The website has undergone aesthetic work to make it more user friendly, complete with larger photos, a simplified page layout and more intuitive navigation capability.