Results matching “california pape”

Californian paper the Orange County Register announced that all of its daily news articles are now available through Amazon's Kindle reader.

"We can't say the summers are slow anymore," Executive Editor/Interactive Meredith Artley wrote in a memo.

Latimes.com, the website for the Los Angeles Times, surpassed its previous record for page views (120 million), with an astonishing 127 million page views for July, and a record-breaking 19 million unique users.

The traffic surge can be attributed both to the conscious effort to focus resources online, including new features like the launch of a science-fiction blog and stories like "Big Burn" - a five part series covering growing California wildfires; and to current events in July, including a 5.4-magnitue earthquake that hit Southern California on July 29, that likely drove traffic to the site.

"We were on track to break that May record by a few million page views, and then the earthquake happened, pushing us even further ahead," said Artley.

Artley also added the paper is becoming more adept in using technology and the web to its advantage. "Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines. We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before."

Source: Editor & Publisher

The Sacramento Bee plans on revealing its revamped look in over a week. The redesign includes a more compact paper with new typefaces and a new nameplate, reported Sacbee.com.



Local investigative reporting, California events and health care will all get more emphasis in the new Bee.

Overall, the size of the story content will not change, aside from the obituary section that will be in larger type and shift to a six-column grid.

The makeover will also feature the addition of daily color comics, doubled stock listings and increased local coverage.

Top stories will be summarized on the front page, which will make the paper easier to navigate, Sacbee.com wrote.

"Our Region", a regional section with a business page (see image above), will be added, including both national and international coverage.

A lifestyle section featuring topics like Books & Media, Food & Wine and Style will be added as well.

The Sunday edition will have a new section on travel and arts, as well as remodeled opinion pages.

Source: Sacbee.com

Buzzmachine blogger Jeff Jarvis has come up with a self-admittedly "utter bullshit" plan for newsroom economics, or how to invest in newsroom staff, in an attempt to find the ideal distribution of roles amidst shrinking newsrooms.

Based on a newsroom with 100 staffers cut to 70, here are some of his main proposals:

- cut back on international reporting
- increase investigative reporting by 50% (1.5 reporters instead of one)
- increase beat reporting. "To me, though, the real heart of value in a newsroom is beat reporting. That's where the watchdogging comes in; that's where stories worth investigating often emerge."
- the number of photojournalists remains stable, but keeping in mind that most journalists will become multimedia-skilled.
- entertainment and lifestyle "can be handled by community and links."
- Subeditors don't entirely vanish (-80% though), but their role is to transfer skills to other staffers and the community.
- Increase local sports, as for any local features (for local papers).

Perhaps the most interesting new ideas concern new editorial positions revolving around community management. Jarvis proposes to that the budget equivalent to 10 fulltime staffers be devoted to a blog network of professional and amateur journalists. According to him, the end cost would be nil because ad revenues would be shared with bloggers.

The key element in this emphasis on a community network is the addition of seven "collaboration editors" to manage and guide this network of pro-am staffers. This notion is key in trying to develop Web 2.0 journalism (see the recent examples of The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times and The Bakersfield Californian).

Newspaper editors might be less enthused by the idea of cutting back almost entirely on national reporting, sports columnists, lifestyle reporting and opinion writers.

View Jarvis' full newsroom distribution proposal by clicking below. He has also made available a collaborative spreadsheet where editors can submit their own thoughts on the 'ideal' distribution of roles.

Source: Buzzmachine through IFRA Executive News Service

The Los Angeles Times' website drew 115 million page views in June, just short of its all-time traffic record of 120 million PV set in May.

A quick glance at the list of most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia features in June gives a good idea of readers' favorite topics of interest - namely a push towards celebrity news and away from global issues and traditionally important topics such as the general elections. The lists also show that, despite newspapers' widespread emphasis on blogs and videos, these platforms still account for a minimal share of total traffic.

Furthermore, these lists provide some indications about how reader interests may vary from one platform to the other (news, blogs, videos, picture galleries).

If one supposes that latimes.com readership isn't too significantly different from average online newspaper readership, then these numbers hint toward which formats work best for different topics (Skip to 'Insights' for a brief summary).

Text - Top articles:

1. Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images (Scott Glover)
2. Mega-mansions are L.A.'s really big show (Jessica Garrison)
3. Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush (John Horn)
4. Fourth day of triple digits sends crowds to L.A. pools, beaches  (Tami Abdollah)
5. Packing in public: Gun owners tired of hiding their weapons embrace 'open carry' (Nicholas Riccardi)
6. Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil (Martin Zimmerman)
7. Judge orders TMZ to remove sex tape of actor Verne Troyer (Harriet Ryan)
8. Lakers have a collapse for the ages (Mike Bresnahan)
9. Offshore oil drilling opponents are rethinking (Richard Simon and Bob Drogin)
10. Obama leads in battle for Latino vote (Peter Wallsten)


The first thing that strikes us when looking at the list is how few stories relate to 'global' issues or to the general elections in the US: ranked 6 is a column about rising oil prices and the only story directly related to the elections is ranked 10. The majority of stories have mostly local relevance about Los Angeles.

(Only) one of the top 10 stories concerns sports - a usually strong section for most newspaper websites although June isn't the biggest season for sports in the US - and the Lakers' basketball team's demise in the championship finals.

The top three stories (and 7) revolve, more or less closely, around issues of sex and the cult of celebrities and entertainment. Number 3 is a story about the making-of Oliver Stone's latest movie about President George W. Bush. Granted, considering Los Angeles' prime location in the movie and celebrity industry, it isn't particularly surprising that many latimes.com readers are going for those stories.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that readers of latimes.com news articles prefer 'softer' content compared to readers of other online newspapers. In fact, this distribution is probably representative of a move towards celebrity news by mainstream media and the audience in general.

Limitations: This is a very cursive overview of readers' favorite topics for news stories only looking at the top 10. A more in-depth study would possibly show that while a few select individual stories about sex and celebrities receive many hits, the sections for 'hard' news (World, Business, National) on the whole generate substantially more traffic than Entertainment.

Top blogs:

1. Top of the Ticket  -- 1,743,178 PV
2. The Dish Rag  -- 1,437,462 PV
3. L.A. Land --  652,605 PV
4. Lakers Blog      
5. Show Tracker                
6. L.A. Now         
7. Technology Blog (first month out, and in the top ten)       
8. Gold Derby      
9. Web Scout      
10. Countdown to Crawford (launched June 17)


Now a look at the top-10 list of blogs gives a more intricate perspective: compared to news stories, the blog format seems to draw more readers to 'serious' topics such as politics and the general elections.

The political blog Top of the Ticket is in the lead, and Countdown to Crawford (a blog that covers the final steps of the elections) has made it to the list although it was only launched in mid-June. Ranked 6, L.A. Now covers general news about California.

It may seem counter-intuitive that readers prefer the blog format, usually associated with a more conversational tone and less formality, to read stories about politics. On the other hand, this preference could also be explained by the fact that those readers precisely prefer a format open to opinion and debate to read about those topics. Since blogs typically allow for more author disclosure, they can also be seen as a more transparent medium.

The last two blogs revolve around technology and developments in the digital landscape, a thematic that was absent from the Top 10 news stories.

Limitations: Again, this is hardly a scientific procedure, and the top 10 blogs on latimes.com account for less than 5% of total page views on the site. To put this in further perspective, five of the ten blogs relate to 'softer' content - three revolve around celebrities and the movie industry - one is about the Lakers and number 3 is a blog about real estate (note the parallel with the news story about mansions ranking 2).

Furthermore, The Dish Rag, ranked 2, is edging close to Top of the Ticket, so that in reality the number of users consulting LA Times blogs for soft and hard news is probably equivalent.

Pictures - Top photo galleries:

1.  Celebrity and sports collide in L.A.
2.  Universal Studios fire
3.  Celebrities' real names revealed (Denise Martin and Stephanie Lysaght)
4.  Hollywood hunks before they were hot (Elizabeth Snead)
5.  Celebrities by The Times
6.  Celebrity shots
7.  Midwest flooding
8.  Top 9 cars women buy more than men
9.  Hollywood's unwedded bliss list (Elizabeth Snead)
10. R-rated firsts (Susan King)

Unsurprisingly, the list of most popular photo galleries is also dominated by celebrities, even more so than for news stories or blogs (seven out of ten).

Of the three remaining picture galleries, two are big general news stories with obviously strong visual content: ranked 2 is the Universal Studios fire and ranked 7 is a gallery about floods in the Midwest.

Video - Top videos:

1. Dogs orphaned in China's quake find a home - 132,239 streams - AP
2. LAPD goes green: Maya Sanchez reports - 112,375 streams - KTLA
3. Tsvangirai on Mugabe - AP
4. Local update: Moe the chimp escapes cage -  KTLA
5. Amanda Beard heads to Omaha for her fourth Olympic swim - LAT
6. 17-year-old decapitated by Six Flags ride - AP
7. Australia marks Iraq withdraw with parade - AP
8. Evening update: USC student sentenced to time served in baby's death - KTLA
9. Fires grip parts of California - AP
10. Bush pleased with war spending bill - AP

The top-10 list for videos also delivers its share of lessons. First of all, despite newspapers' wild rush to boost video content, videos generate a limited amount of traffic compared to most text stories.

Many of the videos in the list are 'soft', but don't relate to entertainment especially. Instead, they are often emotionally-driven (dogs orphaned in China, 17-year old girl decapitated at a fair park). A lot of these popular videos are visual anecdotes with a potential for virality (Moe the chimp escapes cage).

'Hard' news, ie. a Congress debate about legislation or a business acquisition, does not typically constitute a popular pick for videos, as it is often poor visually.

The majority of successful video content is syndicated, generally provided by the Associated Press (only one of the top 10 videos was produced by the LA Times). Considering the average PVs for videos, and although CPMs for video ads are usually higher than for regular PVs, it is still often (too) costly for newspapers to produce their own quality videos.

Insights

In short, here are some of the insights brought by latimes.com's Top-10 lists:

- The Los Angeles Times has strongly emphasized 'soft' news, which is becoming increasingly popular among regular news stories.
- On the other hand, its blogs seem to attract many viewers interested by politics - although half of the blogs in the list deal with lighter content.
- The blog format is also popular when they deal with technological issues.
- To an extent, it could be inferred that the latimes.com is fulfilling its role as a newspaper by focusing on 'local' stories: Hollywood, celebrities and the entertainment industry being part of that local context.
- The photo galleries are overwhelmingly dominated by pictures of celebrities. The only two 'hard' news stories are obviously visual: a fire and floods.
- Video content must also be visually rich, but the most popular videos are those that are emotionally-driven and potentially viral (ie: humorous anecdotes, shocking stories).

The purpose of this piece was simply to make some observations as to the types of topics preferred by online users, depending on the format they were published in. The goal wasn't to quaintly warn editors against the risks of chasing eyeballs at the expense of news judgment.

However, these Top-10 lists are clearly representative of the trend, adopted both by editors and by the audience, towards more celebrity-type news, or 'soft' news in general. In January and April, when the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times announced that they were beefing up coverage of Britney Spears, at the same time as newsrooms across the nation couldn't afford the expenses of covering the elections, many newspaper editors were outraged by this rush towards more catchy, entertainment-driven, stories.

According to others, celebrity is a cultural currency that fulfils a role in the press. But at what cost?

The growing market for e-paper technology will soon welcome a device with a foldable, flexible display screen, to be released this fall. The Readius' foldable format is predicted to prompt developments in mobile reader screens, the New York Times reported.

"Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are mobile, but also have compelling user interfaces," said Jennifer Colegrove, analyst for iSuppli Corporation, a Californian market research company.



The Readius is geared towards reading books, newspapers, magazines and e-mail on a 5-inch diagonal screen that can be folded and reduced to a pocket size.

Karl McGoldrick, CEO of Polymer Vision, the Dutch company that developed the Readius, said that although it displays only shades of gray, its "active matrix" technology might be developed to include colour and videos.

The Readius will come out in this fall in England, Italy and Germany, and in early 2009 in the United States. According to many analysts, the market for e-paper will really begin to boom in 2009.

(For more information about the functions of the Readius, see more about Polymer Vision)

Source: The New York Times through IFRA Executive News Service

See also:
Are we headed for all-electronic papers?
A paperless world?
BusinessWeek review: The Kindle an "imperfect subsititute" for the newspaper
Electronic newspapers nealy ready for release,Kuwata says

Last Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel's new layout was unveiled to readers (see top), including "more graphics, quick-read digests of top news, blog summaries and other changes" in order to make it more attractive to busy readers, Wall Street Journal reported.

Since December, Samuel Zell has been in charge of the Tribune Co., which owns Chicago Daily News, The Orlando Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. Zell's eight billion dollar buyout left Tribune Co. with a 13 billion dollar debt "amid an industrywide meltdown", according to the WSJ.

Zell has scheduled for the Tribune Co. papers to be redesigned by September this year. Some of the changes to be made include "scaled-back page counts and further paring of employees", the WSJ said.

The new look of the Sentinel attempts to make the paper become more "eye-catching" and plentiful with interesting, "alluring" stories, WSJ wrote.

"Our community is fast moving, very modern. It's changing and growing. We need to have a paper that feels like that, too." said Charlotte Hall, Sentinel Editor.

In the last year, the Sentinel's circulation has decreased to 227, 593, compared to Miami Herald's 240,000 and St. Petersburg Times 300,000. However, the Sentinel's Sunday circulation is 332,000.

The general trend for newspaper redesign, according to the WSJ, is "splashier colour, simpler layouts and more digestible stories."

Although the new version of the Sentinel corresponds to the trend, it "isn't as radical as it could be", Hall said. Lee Abrams, in charge of innovation, "encouraged" the newspaper to "emphasize its stars" by adding front-page photographs of columnists with excerpts from columns, WSJ wrote.

Local news coverage, consumer information and "government-watchdog stories" all increased and reporters have been coached on different story-telling techniques.

According to the WSJ, Zell thinks Tribune Co.'s newspaper division is "stuck in the past", perhaps not accommodating "readers used to the pizzazz and immediacy of the Web."

It isn't clear whether a makeover will change the financial condition of Tribune Co., as ad sales have generally been declining in the newspaper industry. The Newspaper Association of America said that in the first quarter newspaper ads dropped by 13 %, Tribune Co.'s falling by 15%.

The Bakerfield Californian's redesign in March 2006 got the paper a short-paced circulation and revenue growth that soon worsened. Chief Executive Richard Beene said, "Don't expect it to turn around circulation or revenue overnight. It's not a magic bullet." In his blog, Howard Owens said that he is "surprised" that not a lot of people compared the Sentinel's revamping to the Californian, terming the makeover "shocking", "wild", "bold" but not "original".

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Baltimore Sun are next in line for the revamping; meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune is to "test new ideas" in Saturday editions. Abrams mentioned that even though the Orlando Sentinel's new design will be used as a prototype, "every paper will be left to chart its own course", WSJ wrote.

Design experts have generally given the Sentinel's new look a thumbs-up, WSJ reports. Howar Greenberg, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel publisher, said advertisers are enthusiastic about the makeover, which he thought might help improve ad revenue.

Hall said that for the time being, the readers will be "listened" to "carefully", to observe the impact that the redesign has.

Source: Wall Street Journal Online, HowardOwens.com

See also:
US: Chicago Tribune's public editor on downsizing the paper: let the readers decide
US: Tribune Co. newspaper redesign, "abrupt" and "unconventional"

The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times and The Bakersfield Californian are two daily locals that, largely by supporting user-generated content, buck the trend observed by Amy Gahran, of the Poynter Institute, to move away from local coverage. The papers have developed loyal and growing audiences.

Bakersfield.com began hosting weblogs two years ago and since its launch, has become home to 1,192 individual bloggers, 314 of which are updated within the last three months. Community content now represents 18 percent of Bakerfield.com's traffic. Logan Molen, vice president of the Californian's interactive media said, "It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us."

The Caller-Times, in turn, garners around 560 comments a day - a number enviable by many larger papers - and especially impressive for a paper with a 54,000 daily circulation.
 
"One day earlier this month a Corpus businessman was shot while cycling before work. A check of the digital back fence showed 56 people had commented on the paper's coverage by noon. Acts of troubling random violence aside, a story on summer jobs had drawn 33 comments, and the newspaper's columnists each seemed to draw a healthy handful. In fact, of all the local stories on the website that day, more had comments than didn't," notes the Readership Institute.

Caller-Times Editor Libby Averyt addresses readers regularly in a column, and listens to their feedback. Wheen readers mourned the dropping of a popular comic strip, the paper reversed the decision and when the paper stopped printing the TV book, the paper smoothed over complaints with a compromise of a stand-alone section of trimmed-down listings.

Local-focus, with locally generated content has led the Caller-Times to be able to cite year over year increases in paid print circulation (up 0.25 percent daily, 0.18 Sunday, according to FAS-FACS).

Sources: Readership Institute, Poynter Institute
 

The twice-weekly Sonoma Index-Tribune in California is to convert to a "hybrid news medium" in the next six to 12 months, after launching an electronic edition in addition to its website.

According to its publisher, the move is motivated both by cost reduction and environmental concerns.

The community newspaper currently offers, in addition to its home-delivered print edition, a subscription e-edition, a paperless "SmartEdition" produced in partnership with NewspaperDirect (which also produces electronic editions for The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph in the UK or Le Figaro in France).

"We already use recycled newsprint and soy-based ink and recycle every bit of waste we can," said Index-Tribune publisher Bill Lynch.

"We cut back on the number of sections and pages we print and deliver by more than 30%. But the most important change, the one that can really make a difference, is getting our readers to join us in the biggest green revolution in the history of newspapers -- going paperless."

The e-edition already offers a number of useful features, according to Editor&Publisher: subscribers can read their newspapers from PCs and Macs, smart phones and iPhones. Suscribers will have access to up to 90 days worth of previous issues, can listen to news stories thanks to an audio function, and use an "add to my blog" function to reproduce content on their own outlets.

"NewspaperDirect's SmartEdition is loaded with features that will make this transition easier. But we know it will take time for many of our subscribers to get used to it," Lynch added. "The other part of the hybrid model is our Web site, which we will continue to improve as well."

Source: Editor & Publisher through IFRA Executive News Service

In an attempt to offset losses in its US newspaper market, McClatchy Co. has partnered major Spanish-language publisher Impremedia to share content.

McClatchy's Spanish-language websites will feature information produced by seven of Impremedia's newspapers, including El Diario La Prensa and Hoy Nueva York in New York; El Mensajero in the San Francisco Bay area; La Opinion in Los Angeles; La Raza in Chicago; La Prensa in Orlando, Fla.; and Rumbo in Houston, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

McClatchy has three Spanish-language newspapers including El Nuevo Herald in Florida, Vida en el Valle in California's Central Valley and La Estrella in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In March, Impremedia announced it would launch a single and centralized online platform for its Spanish-language papers.

Source: Yahoo News through IFRA Executive News Service