Results matching “news sites new”

The MediaNews Group has released details of its plans to charge for content online, announced in November last year, Bloomberg reports. The publisher will adopt a metered system similar to that planned at The New York Times.

Two newspapers, the Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania, and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, will start charging in May. They will give users access to up to 25 'premium' articles a month, after which they will be required to pay a fee. Print subscriptions will include access to the website. Premium content may include some columns and investigative reporting, MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic said.

The founding director of a Political Management master's degree program at the George Washington University surveyed 371 print and web journalists from September to October of last year, with the aim of establishing to what extent social media tools are used in the research and distribution of articles.

The results of the online survey, reported on the university's newspaper website, found that 56 percent of those surveyed said that social media was important or somewhat important for reporting and producing stories, with the overwhelming majority citing the internet as the starting point for their research- despite the fact that 84 percent said news and information delivered via social media was slightly less or much less reliable than news delivered via traditional media.

German publisher Axel Springer has made good on its promises and put up online paywalls for two of its German newspapers, Paid Content reports.

Two of its newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Hamburger Abendblatt, are now charging for online content. It now costs €4.95 a month for access to all content on morgenpost.de. By contrast, abendblatt.de has a mixture of free and premium content, with a premium subscription priced at €7.95 a month. It appears to charge extra for content specific to the Hamburg region while providing national news for free. Subscriptions for both sites are renewed on a monthly basis.

Australian public broadcaster the ABC has launched a new digital initiative called ABC Open to feature user-generated content on existing ABC local websites.

The initiative aims to develop the digital skills of local communities to tell their own stories. The reports produced through the project will be published on the broadcaster's local websites and other sites, and may also be distributed on radio, television or mobile platforms.

More than 50 editors and producers, based in local radio offices around the country, will be charged with helping communities design and develop media-rich local stories.

The Guardian is developing a new feature for its website, Zeitgeist, which organizes content into trends based on the attention of users. Instead of tracking articles by the number of page views, Zeitgeist analyzes the 'social signals' or behavior of visitors to Guardian.co.uk by looking at the websites they come from, the sites they visit after, the amount of time spent on each page, and which stories they post on social networking sites.  

The data for each story is then analyzed together for a value of "Zeitgeistiness." Stories that attract more attention than normal are then posted on the Zeitgeist page in color-coded blocks according to the section in which they first appeared in the Guardian, making it easier for readers to notice trends throughout the week. Each article is only compared to others published on the same day in the same section.

Jake Dobkin, co-founder and publisher of the local New York blog, Gothamist, gave New York Times' executives an idea of what to expect during their Thursday morning panel discussion with him with some provocative comments published via his Facebook page last Tuesday.

In preparation for the panel, the moderator, the Times' media critic David Carr, sent Dobkin the following question in advance: "Jake, you've competed with the NYTimes in the metro space. It has formidable resources, but how do you see the newspaper landing in the local market? Do you think that the incoming cohort of consumers see the Times as a credible editorial resource in New York political and cultural affairs?"

In a time where newspapers seem to be losing more and more revenue, figures from Gannett Co. Inc.'s fourth quarter released today, showed potential positive results for the months ahead.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannett swung to a profit in the fourth quarter following $5.6 billion in prior-year write-downs. Lower declines in advertising sales combined with much lower expenses helped the newspaper publisher show improvement.

The past few years has seen the explosive growth of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, and a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue that has set about ravaging the newspaper industry. PoynterOnline has now reported new enterprises between the two industries however, which could prove profitable for both.  

Few news outlets are without their own Twitter account these days, using the site's micro-blogging capabilities as a means to distribute stories and attract a wider audience. The Austin American-Statesman is using theirs to sell tweets to local business, which can advertise their enterprises on the newspaper's Twitter account.

The Australian media regulatory body is set to start using social media, having appointed a former newspaper editor to create its social media strategy.

Tom Burton, former executive editor of broadsheet newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, has been appointed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to oversee its government 2.0 and social engagement strategies.

Burton was previously working in the US as the Communications and On-Line Director of The Center for American Progress. His role involved implementing web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 practices, that is, changing how the government used social networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites and wikis to interact with the public. He has also worked as a ministerial adviser to a former Australian Minister for Communications.

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.

Google News has introduced a 'recrawl' feature which will check for updates in news articles and add them to its index, the Google News Blog has announced.

News articles often aren't static, software engineers Andy Golding and Kiran Gunda explain on the blog, and often change over time to correct errors or add new information. Sometimes they change URLs or become unavailable after a certain amount of time.

Google's news bots crawl the internet looking for new news articles and adding them to the Google News index. The recrawl feature will enable them to focus on collecting all the newest news articles, while still making sure that the index displays the most up-to-date information.

The Huffington Post has benefited the most from the work of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to John Cook of Gawker.com.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund was founded as a non-profit independent journalism venture in March of 2009.  Affiliated with and partly funded by Ariana Huffington's news website, it pledges to investigate "abuse, fraud or waste in government, business, and other institutions." The fund is also supported through tax-exempt donations  from the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the Atlantic Philanthropies. All of its content is available to  publishers for free through a creative commons license.

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.

Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, French news sites like L'Express and Le Figaro will be providing paid-for online content, Le Monde has reported.

Le Figaro mentioned that it was introducing a "premium" paywall option in January but put the plans on hold for a while. It may launch the feature in February, Le Monde added. The newspaper's paywall model is not yet ready or profitable, and would, in its current state, cost more to implement than it would make from subscriptions.

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

Fox News and Tribune Newspapers have overtaken The New York Times in the latest rankings for most visited current events websites, Editor and Publisher reports.

Yahoo! News was the most popular news and current events website, with over 39 million unique users, according to the Nielsen December figures for top news websites. It was followed by the CNN Digital Network, the MSNBC Digital Network, and then AOL News.

The Fox News Digital Network took out fifth place and Tribune Newspapers was sixth. The Times came next at seventh. It had been in the fifth spot in November.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has launched a new mobile-optimised website for its Asia edition, and another for its Europe edition, allowing users to access regional news on any web-enabled mobile phone.

The Asia edition features updates from Asia.WSJ.com and includes text from the sections What's News, Markets, Technology, Opinion, Personal Finance and Life & Style, as well as additional market-specific news from China and India.

The Europe edition, from Europe.WSJ.com, features similar news sections, except with market-specific news from the UK and Europe and a section titled Europe In-Depth. It will update as often as the website itself.

NewsCred launched in 2008 aiming to use algorithms combined with users' votes to rank news sources by credibility. That didn't work out, and the site is now manoeuvring in another direction, this time offering users a platform to build professionally-looking customised online newspaper sites in just minutes, TechCrunch reported last week.

Users can pick topics they are interested in or choose from a list of categories provided. The stories are then drawn from popular news sites and blogs, aggregated and listed in their appropriate sections.

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

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

Forty-four percent of people using Google News said they only scan the headlines and don't actually go on to the news sites themselves, according to a survey of online U.S. news consumers by research firm Outsell, paidContent reported today. And the more a user checks the news on Google News - "power news users," or those who checks more than twice daily -  the less likely they are to click on a news link.

This study is expected to "provide further ammunition" to content creators who charge aggregators with not sharing ad revenue they make on providing links to news articles, Agence France-Presse noted.

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

Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do and media columnist at the Guardian, has spoken out against News Corp's recent decision to block NewsNow from linking to its content, condemning Murdoch's as empire "foolish".


In his column, Jarvis argues that permitting linking is not only in News Corp's interests - as (previously) it directed traffic to the likes of Times Online, Sun Online and NotW.co.uk - but is also in the interests of democracy, allowing the public access to public information. "What's public is public - that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public," writes Jarvis. Denying NewsNow the right to link, by disabling its crawler using the robots.txt file, impedes free comment and therefore freedom of speech, he adds.

Identify what you can offer that is unique, was Matt Kelly's advice to participants at the WAN-IFRA conference on using sports news to optimise your revenue. Digital content director at the Mirror Group (part of Trinity Mirror), Kelly led the creation of MirrorFootball.co.uk, a standalone football-focused site that has gained the paper new readership.

Kelly explained that despite a successful redesign of the Mirror's website in 2008 which resulted in a significant increase in readership, the implosion in advertising rates meant that he and his team started to think about ways to re-engage with their readers.

With newspapers struggling to make a profit as advertising revenues decrease - just in the last quarter of 2009, American newspapers earned 17% less from online advertising than they had done a year earlier - many newspapers have turned to offering their online content for a fee.

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

The mobile offerings of L'Equipe are profitable, says Sébastien Valere, VP Marketing and Operations of L'Equipe 24/24 in France, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

91% of the French have a mobile phone, with the operators including Orange, SFR, Bouygues and Free. 25% of mobile subscribers access the network through 3G, which means easier access to mobile data and surfing. He expects that two years from now, 75% of the population will have a smart phone, up from 35% now. The iPhone has been successful in France, and more devices will arrive on the market. Unlimited access subscriptions are offered, with subscriptions available for around €60 per month. Smart phones translate into massive content use.

L'Equipe is a global media brand, with a daily newspaper, a website with 5 million unique visitors per month, as well as offerings in television, radio and mobile. It has 18 million customers a month, mostly male, and reaches 50% of the upper-socio-professional advertising category. Usage peaks at night, although the goal is to reach people throughout the day.