Editors Weblog: Search Results

Smartphone sales soar in 2009

Posted by Maria Conde on February 9, 2010 at 12:50 PM

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

AFP launches paid iPhone app

Posted by Elizabeth Redman on January 18, 2010 at 5:14 PM

Amid all the buzz about the potential to make money from mobile news, news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has become the latest news organisation to launch an iPhone app.

The application also works on the iPod Touch and costs $1.99 from the Apple store.

"It gives access to the global news agency's multimedia content in English, Spanish, Portuguese and German, including breaking world news from wars and conflicts to politics, sport and entertainment, as well as the latest major developments in health, science and technology," AFP said in a statement.

THE YEAR IN NEWSPAPERS: top trends of 2009

Posted by Emma Heald on December 22, 2009 at 3:24 PM

2009 might well be remembered as a year of cutbacks and closures, but also a year when newspapers started to fight back, make changes and began to reassess unsatisfactory aspects of their business models. The world of journalism has indeed suffered some sad losses but there has also been much innovative thinking and progress in the way that news is gathered, reported and presented. Here are a few of the top trends that the Editors Weblog has noted this year.

Cuts, cuts, cuts: what are the consequences?

Some US cities have been left with just one daily newspaper, and speculation over which could be the first no-paper town was answered in July when the Ann Arbor News stopped printing. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer cut most of its staff and went online only, Denver lost the Rocky Mountain News. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe have struggled through threats of closure.

And even those whose survival is assured have been cutting staff - the New York Times just lost 100 newsroom staff - or closing bureaux - the Washington Post now has no domestic bureaux outside the capital. Others have cut down on international reporting. Newspapers have got thinner, some losing sections or even cutting printing days.

News agencies have also been feeling the effect of the cuts as papers look at how to make savings. The Associated Press has seen 180 papers threaten to cancel their subscriptions, though many of these have since decided not to. The Chicago Tribune, for example, trialled reporting without the AP for a week. Over in France, government-subsidised Agence France-Presse has also seen papers drop its service.

Overall, the cutbacks in Europe do not seem as drastic as in the US, though that is not to say that papers have been immune: even the Guardian is attempting to make significant staff cuts.

Can newspapers continue to perform their democratic role in society? Fewer journalists means fewer stories covered, fewer copy/sub editors means a greater chance of mistakes.

Start-ups can help to fill the gaps in reporting, but without proper funding they too will languish. It is essential that outlets must focus on efficiencies and how to make the best of their resources, and endeavour not to sacrifice quality.

To charge or not to charge (online)?

As newspapers' advertising-based business model started to let them down, one of the biggest questions of the year has been whether or not newspapers should start charging for their online content. So far, there has been a lot of talk but not much action. Walter Isaacson brought the micropayments question onto the agenda in February, sparking immediate controversy. The debate started to heat up in April when Journalism Online was founded by three industry experts with an iTunes-inspired mission to facilitate charging for online content: it proposed to offer bundled packages of content from multiple publications. This was swiftly

followed by Murdoch's promise in early May that all News Corp papers would be charging online within the year. MediaNews Group followed suit. The New York Times also seems committed but is wavering with regards to how. The Newspaper Association of America's call for payment models elicited a considerable response.

Meanwhile, some smaller papers such as the Schenectady Daily Gazette and the Texas Valley Morning Star have quietly integrated paywalls: are there lessons to be learnt there?

Murdoch, undoubtedly one of paid online content's most vocal supporters, is insistent that news is a valuable product and should not just be given away. This might seem hard to argue with, but some publishers are resolute that charging online is not the answer to solving financial difficulties, and remain committed to high traffic and other schemes such as highly targeted advertising to sustain cash flow. The Guardian, for example, is one of these. A multitude of surveys carried out have suggested that, unsurprisingly, charging online will not be too popular among consumers.

A couple of news outlets have adopted a less direct paywall: for example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has introduced a membership club that offers new additional content and special events to its committed readers. This seems like a possible option for publishers who fear sacrificing their ad revenue but want to experiment with paid online content.

Will Murdoch fulfil his promises? Could charging online be the norm by the end of 2010? And what has happened to Journalism Online: will 'bundled' charging be an option?

The TWITTER explosion

By now, the idea of a journalist not using Twitter is verging on inconceivable. After CNN and Ashton Kutcher first crossed the one million followers mark in April in a highly-publicised battle, multi-million follower accounts are now not uncommon.

Its advantages are multiple: finding news, advertising stories, curating your community of readers. Twitter's limitations, however, are that its information can be hard to verify. These uses and limitations became particularly clear during the aftermath of the Iranian election in June, when many journalists were prevented from reporting and news was increasingly spread by social networks and citizen journalists.

Twitter has had a significant impact on the trend towards up-to-the-minute, real time news. It changed its homepage in July to place more of a focus on search and its potential as a way to discover what people are talking about right now. Google recently announced that it was to integrate real-time social network updates into its search results.

Will it last? Following much debate over how it would actually bring in money, it was just announced that Twitter has indeed become profitable, so one can assume that for now, at least, it is here to stay. Its advantages for journalists are more clear-cut than those of Facebook, but Facebook is used regularly by a wider range of people. With increasing use of Facebook Connect, might this become more prominent in 2010?

HYPERLOCAL: just hype or the future for news?

The ubiquity of free online news has, quite understandably, led news outlets to contemplate what they can offer that is unique, and going very very local has appealed to many, particularly as regional papers have been suffering particularly badly and hyperlocal news has potential to offer highly-targeted local advertising.

Mainstream news outlets have been seeing the benefits of local news: US hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in has seen considerable investment from CNN, and Everyblock, originally created with a grant from the Knight Foundation, was bought by MSNBC. The New York Times introduced a blog called The Local, in an area already overwhelmed by a variety of hyperlocal offerings such as Patch and Maplewood Online. Community websites have also been springing up in the UK.

But, as recently questioned by Benji Lanyado, is hyperlocal actually making money? Has the right business model been found?

One noteworthy initiative is the Futuroom/Nase adresa project launched by PPF Media in the Czech Republic (disclosure: the World Editors Forum has been involved in the project in the role of consultant) which has taken news reporting directly into the community and constructed an unusual alternative revenue stream. 'News cafes,' which place the newsroom in a cafe in the centre of town, are at the centre of PPF's strategy: these both provide income (enough to cover overheads) and offer the public direct access to journalists, allowing the newsroom to become a real part of the community. Led from the Futuroom base in Prague, Nasa adresa weeklies and websites are produced, and it seems as if the papers are selling.

It is too early to say whether the project, launched in June, represents a solution that could be used more widely, but looks it promising. Hyperlocal undoubtedly has potential, but an innovative business model needs to be found.

i for innovation

One of 2009's success stories has been new Portuguese daily i. As newspapers around the world suffer from financial difficulties, launching a new publication could seem like madness. But, so far at least, i has proved any sceptics wrong. The impressively-designed magazine-style newspaper focused on politics and economics has been selling, and has managed to capture a new hard-to-reach audience.

The paper has willingly abandoned traditional topic sections to allow more freedom of coverage, and focuses on opinion and daily in-depth analysis on key issues, taking into account the fact that its readers are likely to already be well-informed via other platforms.

New ideas and experimentation are encouraged, and enthusiasm is high. And, the paper does not put all its print content online: the website aims to be kind of a social news portal rather than a digital reproduction of the news in the paper.

As a new paper, it has been easier for i to break the mould, but are there useful lessons that established newspapers could learn from what i is doing differently?

Does a nonprofit business model have a significant place in the media landscape?

Whether or not going nonprofit is an option for newspapers is a question that has been discussed at length by media commentators and even by the US Senate. The main advantage: protection from market forces, the main disadvantage: no freedom to endorse political candidates. And, of course, there is the challenge of finding a rich enough donor.

The idea that an entire newspaper could be funded by a foundation seems unlikely, but investigative public interest journalism has been relatively successful at attracting nonprofit support.

Several funds and start-ups aiming to produce high quality investigative journalism have sprung up, following in the footsteps of the likes of ProPublica and the VoiceOfSanDiego. Locally targeted nonprofits are becoming almost abundant in the US: over the past 3 months the Bay Area News Project began (in September), Oakland Local was founded in October, the Texas Tribune launched in November, as did the Chicago News Cooperative and California Watch appeared earlier this month.

All these launches are good news for news in these areas, but are they sustainable? It has been argued that the nonprofit concept is merely propping up a flawed business model and limiting potential innovation. Time will tell which are successful.

Is there money in mobile?

Smart phones are becoming more and more common and could start to become the norm in 2010. Many news applications that enable a better reading experience have been built for Apple's iPhone, and some for Google's Android operating system - those created by the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Associated Press seem to be generally considered to be among the best. The Guardian's paid for app sold more than 9000 in its first two days.

But can they actually be a significant stream of revenue?

Many are free, and those like the Guardian's which have a one-off download fee (something consumers are likely to be willing to pay for?) might be able to recoup the costs of development with this income, but it does not constitute regular revenue. Advertising is limited so far - there is not much space on the small screen, for a start. Briefly covering the whole screen seems to be the preferred method of some papers on the iPhone: Le Monde's app opens with a full-page ad, for example.

It is possible to make content available via subscription. The Financial Times iPhone app only allows full access to online subscribers, and the Wall Street Journal has implemented a specific application subscription charge: $1.50 per week.

Will more do this? Can consumers be persuaded to pay on their phones for what they can get free online?

E-readers: not all they promised, but could that change in 2010?

The Kindle, though widely adopted by many newspapers, might not quite have lived up to expectations. Publishers only receive about 30% of what subscribers pay, and besides, e-readers are still prohibitively expensive for many and far from being a "must-have" product. Kindle users are generally older.

But could this be about to change? New products such as the Nook and the improved Sony range are entering the market and the Plastic Logic e-reader Que is to be released in early January. A group of publishers have also come together with plans to develop their own e-reader. Could this competition improve e-reader offerings? Already, Sony is apparently offering a better revenue share than Amazon does, and presumably, giving publishers and consumers a choice will make pricing competitive.

Or might e-readers lose out to tablet computers? The Apple tablet is expected early next year - with more functionality, could it and similar products appeal more to the younger generation?

Google: friend or foe?

Conflict over copyright reached new heights this year. Attacks on Google and other 'copyright thieves' who have built a business model off newspaper content have come from many corners: with News Corp leading the fight in the US but Spanish and German publishers too. Google consistently responds that it is fact a friend to publishers, citing the 1 billion clicks that it sends to news websites each month via Google News, and pointing out that publishers can easily opt-out of Google's indexing. Publishers retort that Google's current quasi-monopoly on search would make that difficult.

But could a rapprochement be on the cards for 2010? Google has been making conciliatory moves - it has updated its 'First Click Free' program to allow publishers more control over how much of their site is accessible free, it launched its first project that shares revenue with publishers, Fast Flip, and created new ways to view news, such as Living Stories, which might offer advertising potential if developed further.

At the WAN-IFRA World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad earlier this month, INM's Gavin O'Reilly and Google's David Drummond were far from reaching an agreement but did agree that they would continue meeting in the future to try and solve the issue. Will publishers and Google find a compromise? Or might Microsoft and Bing step into the fray and change everything?

Cooperation

One of the consequences of extreme financial difficulties has been unexpected cooperation between former rivals: it has become harder and less desirable to stand entirely alone. A few examples:

Between rivals: content sharing has become more widespread. For instance, the Ohio News Organisation, a collection of seven newspapers who began sharing content last year in an attempt to substitute Associated Press coverage, produced a collaborative story in November.

Between old and new media: even one of the US's most prestigious newspapers has accepted the need to collaborate with new media projects. In August, the New York Times partnered with nonprofit investigative journalism outlet Propublica to publish a 13,000 word article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that took two years and an estimated $400,000 to produce. The paper also published a story on the Great Pacific Garbage patch that was funded by crowd-funded journalism initiative Spot.Us. These were both stories that the paper would have been unlikely to publish otherwise

Between different platforms: at many papers, print and web are competing no longer, but are part of the one team. The Washington Post is the latest major paper to undergo integration.

For a list of top publishing strategies for 2010 please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

YouTube Direct launches to help news outlets gather citizen videos

Posted by Emma Heald on November 17, 2009 at 11:11 AM

YouTube is releasing a new open-source interface called YouTube Direct that aims to make it easier for news organisations to have access to relevant clips from citizen journalists, it was widely reported. The application, to be unveiled today, will allow media outlets to integrate a video upload tool into their sites, where they can accept and screen user footage, described TechCrunch. All content uploaded will also appear on the YouTube site.

As more and more of the public are equipped to record video on cameras or mobile phones, and it becomes easier to upload, citizen contributions are being welcomed at more and more news outlets, particularly as financial difficulties are cau. So many videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute, however, that it is hard to find news-worthy content and very difficult to ascertain its reliability.

Wall Street Journal launches new Bay Area edition

Posted by Betsey Reinsborough on November 5, 2009 at 11:30 AM

The Wall Street Journal will launch its new Bay Area Edition today, reports MediaBistro. The new format will contain Bay Area specific news to be published once weekly, on Thursday, into the A Section. In addition, the Journal is also launching WSJ.com/SF, a Bay Area specific section of its web site. Most of the content on the web site, as it is general news, will be free; however, business and finance news will be placed behind a pay wall. The Journal currently has 92 000 subscribers in the Bay Area.

The New York Times recently launched its Bay Area edition, a two-page spread published each Friday and Sunday. The Times sells more papers daily in San Francisco- 40 080 copies- than anywhere else in the US outside of the Northeast, a statistic the Journal is undoubtedly looking to change following its launch.

Making news more searchable and identifiable with hNews: could it even lead to a new business model for journalism?

Posted by Emma Heald on September 3, 2009 at 12:21 PM

In July the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit that promotes high standards in news on behalf of the public, launched a new draft microformat in conjunction with the Associated Press, and the MST called for its adoption by others. The proposed microformat is called hNews: it is a semantic mark-up that uses the HTML tagging tools that are already part of the structure of the web to provide machine readable metadata and information. In less technical terms, it is code to be added into the HTML of an article that can tell a search engine or human the article's title, author, the time of publishing, and provides links to the usage rights and news principles.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Martin Moore, director of the MST and Srinandan Kasi, AP vice president and general counsel, to find out more how hNews is being used and its implications.

Background

The MST started to work with Sir Tim Berners-Lee's (inventor of the World Wide Web) Web Science Research Initiative a couple of years ago. Both the MST and Berners-Lee were trying to tackle the problem of tremendous growth in the amount of information available online and the necessity of finding ways to index and classify this, the difference being that Berners-Lee was looking at information in general and MST was looking specifically at news content. The MST obtained funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation to research and develop methodologies for distinguishing news online and allowing people to search for news more intelligently and clearly.

The Value Added News initiative was born, which aimed to develop a novel type of microformat to specifically mark up news. It also looked at RDFa, the language of the semantic web, but decided that as yet it would be "a jump too far" to try to implement this in the immediate future. Microformats are far less complex and "fantastically pragmatic," Moore explained, simply making more identifiable information that is already there.

HNews is currently a draft for a proposed microformat as it has not yet gone through the process that would lead it to be officially recognised by the microformat community. However, the MST took the decision to launch hNews in advance of this final vetting in order to "start a dialogue with news organisations and the microformat community so that we could evolve it and make it usable for all those that needed it," Moore said. "This is deliberately not a finished product," he added. It is already being used by human rights and democracy advocacy site OpenDemocracy.net and the AP is trialling it.

What can hNews do for news organisations?

The essential benefit of hNews is that by identifying content more clearly and making more of its key information machine-readable it therefore becomes easier to search for. It also could lead to the development of different ways to search via different applications. Kasi was enthusiastic about the advantages of this for the AP. "AP clearly believes that being able to better identify each piece of content for better search discovery, better linking, better aggregation allows ultimately for the customer to see more content, more trusted content, from editorial sources," he said. "Microformats are a very simple, elegant way to do that on a pretty large scale basis," he added, allowing the AP to "prime the content better for search purposes even before it gets to the publisher."

Crucial to the potential success of hNews, both Moore and Kasi stressed, is its ease of use for the journalist. As it deals with information that is actually already there, Moore explained, the mark up system can be incorporated into a news organisation's CMS and as such does not create any extra work for journalists. This is definitely an advantage, believes Kasi: "there's no separate effort needed - and that's the beauty of it." Moore said that Value Added News would ideally like to develop plug-ins for open source blogging platforms, to make the technology simple to use for bloggers also.

For the reader

Clearly, the advantage for readers of news organisations using hNews is that they will be able to search news content more efficiently. Whether they will be able to see the same information as the search engine is up to the publisher, who can choose whether or not to make the information in hNews visible to the consumer. OpenDemocracy has placed a 'value added' box below each article which shows the user the information carried in the microformat: the article name, the author, the date published and updated, and a link to the statement of principles. The author's name links to further information about this writer and his/her recent articles: "they decided they would like to make it more useful to the reader," Moore explained. "But equally," he added, "you could integrate and not have anything visible." Kasi said that the AP will leave it up to individual publishers to decide what they want their readers to see.

Evaluating content

In terms of the way that the AP uses hNews, Kasi focussed on the advantages it offers for research and licensing rather than protecting copyright, which seemed to be the key message of the press release on the topic and which attracted the most debate. The AP has taken hNews a step further and has integrated another layer into the format that will notify the AP when a tagged piece of content is viewed. Kasi explained that for the AP, as a content producer without a destination website, this is particularly useful in "understanding how our content actually gets processed and how it goes out on the web." Hence, it gives the AP information to allow it to measure how much usage a particular story gets, and lets the organisation know if there are stories that are lacking in traffic. This information will be stored in the AP's News Registry. For a publisher with one destination site, this is information that is already easily obtainable.

More flexible licensing

This extra notification also has significant potential for making licensing AP content more efficient, Kasi stressed. "It allows for more flexible licensing," he said, "giving publishers the ability to approach their own content needs more flexibly and similarly allows content owners to be able to offer the product in more flexible ways."

For example, a publisher could request to use a photo and be billed an agreed cost each time they decided to use it, rather than having to request to purchase rights each time. "You have taken the bureaucracy out of the process and allowed the publisher to have more flexibility, and content owner to get the precise revenue that is owed." Such tracking capabilities clearly have the potential to improve efficiencies in syndication of content.

Copyright

So what are the implications for copyright? HNews is not intended to entirely prevent copyright theft: serious copyright evaders would have no problem removing the relevant html code. But as Moore explained, if there is a link to the usage rights that clearly accompanies each article, it does "make it harder to claim ignorance." And clearly, the AP's additional notification coding will alert it to unauthorised as well as authorised use.

New business model?

Kasi commented that hNews "paves the way for new innovative business models" and Moore said that coming up with a new business model for news might be an "unintended repurcussion" of the work of Value Added News, which did not start with such grand ideas. Doc Searls believes that "the AP is laying foundations of a new business model for journalism" based on the idea of ascribenation: meaning the act of ascribing credit to a source or set of sources for a piece of media work. The idea would be that a reader could choose to pay the source for the content then consume.

Moore explained that hNews has huge potential for developing APIs based on news content. He pointed to the example of the Guardian, which recently released its Open Platform Content API, allowing developers access to its content and tags in order to create new applications. Developers must work with the Guardian and if one finds a way to make money from Guardian content, they must share revenue with the paper. So releasing content APIs could be a way to find new revenue streams, but it is currently expensive. By integrating hNews, however, Moore specified, "you could do something very similar but much cheaper."

How far along?

HNews is in a useable form, and all that is really needed now to give it a chance at success and to potentially help develop new business models for news is that content producers choose to implement it. The problem, Moore clarified, is that to truly demonstrate its usefulness requires a lot of content to be marked up in this way and therefore it is difficult to show its full potential until many organisations have signed on. Value Added News is creating its own search engine to help clarify the ways in which it can be used. OpenDemocracy has integrated the format to the majority of their articles and the AP will start having its English-language text processed in mid-November, with a goal of moving on to other forms of assets later.

Google announced in May that it would start supporting microformats. The benefits for the search engine, as well as more accurate search, include being able to add richer, more detailed information to the snippets that appear below the link in search results.

So is hNews the future for news? It could definitely have wide-reaching consequences for news producers, distributors and readers. On the most basic level, making content more easily searchable undoubtedly makes sense. Whether it is the best way to do it is uncertain, but at least it is straight forward, and there is potential, as the AP has shown, to adapt the technology to individual news organisations' needs.

Presidents on YouTube: what does this mean for traditional media?

Posted by Emma Heald on September 3, 2009 at 7:46 AM

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has launched his own YouTube channel, reported Media Network, apparently in a bid to reach out to the young. "We are very happy that the Russian president has opened his channel on YouTube," a Moscow-based spokeswoman for Google, which owns the popular video-sharing site, Alla Zabrovskaya, said.

Medvedev has been blogging since last year, and already has a video blog on the Kremlin website. His first video on YouTube addressed schoolchildren at the start of the academic year. Five videos have been uploaded so far, and the most popular so far has been watched more than 52,000 times.

The iPhone receives an updated AP news device and a first from the Independent

Posted by Christie Silk on August 4, 2009 at 4:15 PM

The iPhone continues to be the object of news providers' attentions. The Associated Press has recently updated its iPhone device, while the Independent becomes the latest newspaper to launch its own iPhone application.

The Push Notification feature is part of the updated AP Mobile News 3.0 device, which is available for the iPhone and the iTouch. The application transmits breaking news notifications on to the recipient's screen, even if the AP device is not being used. The updated device is available for free on the iTunes App. Store.

Blog aggregation site ChicagoNow takes Chicago by storm

Posted by Gida Hammami on June 3, 2009 at 11:03 AM

Last week the Chicago Tribune Co. revealed a new blog aggregation site aiming to "connect Chicagoans." ChicagoNow is a network of blogs featuring passionate experts on a wide range of uniquely Chicago topics such as real estate, public transportation, sports and the city's police. The current beta version of ChicagoNow features blogs from over 30 local personalities and specialized experts, but it hopes to reach 80 by the end of the year.

ABC.es launches Google Android application

Posted by Soraya Kishtwari on May 25, 2009 at 5:08 PM

Spanish daily ABC.es has become the country's first media network to launch an application compatible with Google's Android phone. Recently unveiled in Spain through mobile operators Telefónica and Vodafone, Android is aiming to be seen as a cost-effective alternative to Apple's iPhone.

USA Today launches Android application

Posted by Emma Heald on May 14, 2009 at 9:06 AM

USA Today has launched an application for Google's Android phone, available to download free in Android Market. The paper, like many others, already offers an iPhone application and is one of the first newspapers to embrace the newer Android platform.

The application includes headlines, a photo slideshow of the day's best images, interactive polls, sports scores and weather forecasts, tailored to a user's exact location via GPS. Articles can be shared via email, text or Twitter. Matt Jones, vice president of mobile strategy and operations for Gannett Digital said that "USA Today continues to develop innovative mobile products and services and the Android application is an excellent way to extend our reach to the latest emerging platforms."

Central Pennsylvania papers combine

Posted by Marion Geiger on April 2, 2009 at 5:18 PM

Starting in June 29, two U.S. papers in central Pennsylvania will start publishing together. The Intelligencer Journal is a morning paper and the Lancaster New Era is an afternoon paper. They will join to publish a single morning edition from Mondays through Saturday.

"We know of no other market in the United States where the same ownership publishes morning and evening newspapers with separate editorial staffs," said John M. Buckwalter, chairman of the board of Lancaster Newspapers. The arrangement is unusual, with the New Era's staff using the building in the mornings and the Intelligencer Journal in the afternoon. Completely separate staffs under the same ownership competing for stories.

HuffPost launches investigative journalism fund

Posted by Emma Heald on March 30, 2009 at 11:56 AM

The Huffington Post has announced that it is to launch an Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million, in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors. Founder Arianna Huffington told the AP that she believes that "All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism."

The funding should be enough to support 10 staff investigative reporters, and Huffington hopes to use laid-off journalists, who will work with freelancers to look at stories about the US economy. Although the site generally has a liberal leaning, Huffington was adamant that the investigative journalists' work will be non-partisan, and the fund's executive director Nick Penniman pointed out that the group would be quickly discredited if it puts out faulty information.

AOL launches politics news site, PoliticsDaily.com

Posted by Helena Deards on March 19, 2009 at 12:13 PM

In an interesting development, AOL has announced that it is launching a politics site entitled Politics Daily, staffed by well-respected political journalists and edited by Melinda Henneberger who has previously worked for Slate and the New York Times. Moving away from the short sharp news breaking style so commonly found on the web, the site will focus on analytics and commentary. "People have thought there's one way to do it on the web and that's to dominate the ten-second news cycle. We are gambling there's another audience that wants you to step back, for maybe a day, and do thoughtful analysis pieces that are heavily reported," explains Henneberger.

The move prompts speculation over whether or not other portals could follow suit, and begin to produce more original content as opposed to aggregation. Such a trend would undoubtedly leave its mark on newspapers that are trying to make a smooth transition into being both print and online news providers. Already struggling with online aggregation of their content by companies such as Google, these companies providing their own content would cause further problems, and introduce new competition, to newspapers and their online counterparts.

Source: The Wrap

Google News launches news streaming application for websites

Posted by Helena Deards on February 5, 2009 at 10:56 AM

Another day, another innovation from Google. The Google Blog this week announced the launch of a "Google News-based element for webmasters and developers". It allows the integration of Google News headlines in any website, and can be set to only stream relevant stories for readers by selecting keywords.

Google says that the application is helpful "for newspapers to reach new audiences across the web" - but surely as news producing organizations themselves, newspapers could be producing their own such tool instead of contributing to the traffic world dominating Google?

Source: Google Blog via EJC

Google launches feature to customize search results

Posted by Rosemary D'Amour on November 21, 2008 at 12:57 PM

Search Wiki is the newest feature to Google, allowing users to customize search results, and is available only to users with Google accounts.

The feature will allow users to rearrange search results, tailored to what they frequently use, according to Brand Republic.

Users will also be able to add and remove URLs relevant to their own searches. They can make notes on sites that will be "available for future searches."

Search Wiki allows users to "share insights with other searchers," said an engineer behind the project.

Source: Brand Republic

US: Topix launches four new partnerships

Posted by Lauren Drablier on November 18, 2008 at 11:23 AM

Topix has announced plans to partner with four other companies including lat49, ServiceMagic, Marchex and Mapquest. According to Topix, they are "the largest news community on the web."

Lat49 is an online adverstising network that delivers targeted display ads depending on a users location. ServiceMagic is a home improvement service provider and Marchex is a company that provides local business listings, similar to the yellow pages.

US: Google launches new Site Search feature

Posted by Lauren Drablier on November 13, 2008 at 11:56 AM

Google announced that it will launch a new feature to help business that use its Site Search service to instantly incorporate and update new web pages, according to Reuters.

Website owners will now be able to add new web pages immediately so that the most recent information shows up when searching.

UK: Telegraph launches Google Android application

Posted by Lauren Drablier on October 24, 2008 at 8:45 AM

Telegraph Media Group has launched an application specifically for the Google Android phone. According to Journalism.co.uk, they are the first publishers in the UK to do so.

The new application was launched by Telegraph Labs, which was launched in May in order to develop new products for the TMG.

Iran: President's aide launches newspaper, Khorshid

Posted by Katherine Thompson on October 6, 2008 at 9:01 AM

An aide of Irans's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is launching a newspaper, named the "Khorshid" or "Sun." It is due to hit the newsstands on Saturday.

The newspaper, which will be published by Mohammad Paryab, will cover everything from political issues to soap operas. Initial circulation is expected to be around 200,000. The timing of the launch is crucial, being eight months before the presidential elections, resulting in speculation that the newspaper will be used to push Ahmadinejad's re-election.

Paryab denied the talk. "No, the government has other platforms and as you can see there is only one page about political news in Khorshid, so it is not useful for that purpose," he told AFP.

"If we wanted to do that, we would have allocated 10 to 12 pages of the 24-page newspaper for political news," said Paryab, who used to be deputy government spokesman and secretary of the presidency information council.

The price is 1,000 rials, approximately a dollar. Khorshid is financed by the state-run social security organisation.

Under Ahmadinejad's Presidency, Iranian media has been hit by a raft of closures.

Source: EJC Media and AFP

Google launches news search for blogs

Posted by Alisa Zykova on October 3, 2008 at 8:43 AM

Search engine giant Google reports that it is launching technology that will let users search for news content on blog posts. The optimized Google Blog Search will find and arrange the 900,000 blog entries that are added each day. Previously the service only let users to type keywords into the search engine.

Google launches audio indexing

Posted by Lauren Drablier on September 18, 2008 at 8:43 AM

Google announced Wednesday that is has launched a new audio indexing service, the GAudi.

The service, designed to work with YouTube, will catalog all words used in audio and video clips. The words will then be added to a searchable database that can be accessed the same way text-base sites are.

In addition, the user will have the option of either watching the entire video, or starting from the exact point where the key word is mentioned.

According to Google, GAudi is only in beta, so at this point it will only index audio and video from political sources.

Source: European Journalism Centre

China: Reporting restrictions to return next month?

Posted by Katherine Thompson on September 11, 2008 at 1:02 PM

The relaxed rules that permeated during the Olympics are to be allowed to expire next month, according to the Foreign Ministry. There had been hopes that the Olympics would mark a general relaxation of the rules following hints from a Chinese official last December.

China did loosen its controls on foreign journalists -- which include requiring government permission for all interviews and travel -- at the beginning of 2007. During the Olympics, journalists were allowed to interview Chinese citizens without seeking government approval.

It is not clear at this stage what will follow after the Olympic rules expire; Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said "I think when the time comes, we will tell everyone what the arrangement will be."

The relaxed regulations did not apply to Chinese journalists; the government has maintained its control over domestic operations throughout the sporting event.

Source: The Associated Press

See also:

China: Officials allegedly released guidelines for local Olympic coverage
Media companies reporting the Olympics, Google launches online tool
China: Lifts some Internet restrictions after IOC negotiations
Thousands Protest China's Press Freedom Violations
China: Internet restrictions for journalists at Beijing

Google Inc launches digital archive of historical newspapers

Posted by Alisa Zykova on September 9, 2008 at 8:17 AM

Google Inc plans to partner with newspaper publishers in order to make millions of news archives be available digitally. The company announced on Monday that it will make "dozens" of historical newspapers and the images featured accessible online.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," says Punit Soni, Google product manager.

US papers like The New York Times and the Washington Post would work alongside Google to index their content in Google's News Archive. Papers that are included in the deal range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which is the oldest paper in North America being first printed in 1764.

The first newspapers that are linking up with Google for the project are based in North America, according to a spokesman.

Source: European Journalism Centre

US: Satirical paper The Onion launches serious site

Posted by Alisa Zykova on September 1, 2008 at 9:46 AM

The Onion, a "fake news" source, announces the launch of Decider, a serious local entertainment website featuring interviews, event information and restaurant reviews, writes Tech Crunch. The site's content will focus on the Chicago area, although more cities are planned to be included soon.

Decider"s "clean" interface will use Google Maps to locate reviewed restaurants and provide a calendar showing future events. "Regular" editorial content would be accompanied by users' own reviews and comments, reports Tech Crunch.

The Onion previously included "legitimate" local reviews and event calendars. While the site may be known for its satirical news content, Decider will be more sober.

Tech Crunch suggests that Decider would bee in competition with sites like CitySearch and Yelp, although it may "do just fine" as an expansion of The Onion's newspaper.

Source: Tech Crunch

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