Results matching “uk tabloid and”

Tabloids' new celebrities could be politicians, instead of Hollywood stars like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Just as mainstream media borrow content from tabloids by writing about Hollywood starlets and the like, tabloids now borrow from media covering the political sphere.

For example, US Weekly put Michelle and Barack Obama on the cover last week while People wrote about Tim Russet.

"The lines between gossip and politics have blurred," ABC News wrote, in light of coverage of politicians like "gay American" Jim McGreevy and New York's prostitute-soliciting former governor, Eliot Spitzer.  

"There are a limited number of celebrities that people really care about, maybe a half dozen, including Britney and Lindsay," said New York Post's Media Ink columnist Keith Kelly. "There is a celebrity fatigue setting in. People are bored of the same people doing the same things, and there is no one new on the horizon."

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, US Weekly's circulation grew by 10% to over 1.9 million between 2006-2007 while People continued to be the most popular celebrity magazine with 3.6 million in circulation, ABC News reported.

As far as content goes, politics is "as much a function of slow gossip as it is a response to a genuine interest in the presidential elections" and including Michelle Obama was "natural" since the readers are young females, according to Bradley Jacobs, US Weekly's senior editor, ABC News reported.

"We're expanding the definition of celebrity to include politics," Jacobs said.

Barack Obama's interview on the US Weekly site in March got around 253 % more page views than "an average story", according to a spokesperson, ABC News reported.

Elizabeth Bird, a University of South Florida anthropologist specializing in pop culture and media said that it's "natural" that people see political candidates as celebrities during elections and that the general public is bored of the "distasteful" celebrity stories.

A fairly optimistic statement, if one considers the continuing success of tabloid-type content...

Source: ABCNews through World News Network

Here are some stories from yesterday from our sister SFN blog:

-Google's Android phones to be available later in 2008
-Monster partners with 19 newspapers, strikes distribution deals with others
-Taiwanese paper to turn tabloid after downsizing
-Facebook launches Chinese version

For the last fifteen months, former journalists from the Journal du Québec have been publishing a rival free paper, in order to protest against the paid-for newspaper's plans for integration and the additional workloads of multimedia journalism.

The paid-for tabloid, Journal du Québec, published by Québecor, has enjoyed a comfortable situation in the sometimes grim North American print market. It has no website, a daily circulation that ranges from 105,000 copies to 200,000 copies, and churns out a few million dollars in yearly profit.

Since last year though, the paper's plans to - finally - build a website and turn its reporters into multimedia journalists (and increasing working hours from 32 to 37.5 with no additional pay) have been the cause of internal upheaval.

In winter 2007, a group of journalists from Journal du Québec prepared to roll out a competing freesheet, dubbed MediaMatinQuébec.

"On the negotiation table, we saw the requests and the attitude of management. We wondered how we could counter this. We couldn't imagine going on strike indefinitely (...) so we had the idea to launch this free daily," said Denis Bolduc, editor of the free paper.
 
In April 2007, two days after the staff of Journal du Québec went on strike and Québecor called for a lock-out, Bolduc and his team launched MediaMatinQuébec.

Against all expectations, the free paper has now strived for 15 months, boasting 40,000 copies in daily circulation.

"In the US, when there was the integration of print and online, there were debates, but never a conflict like this," said Florian Sauvageau, director of the Center of media studies at the University of Laval.

It is "difficult to think that journalists will accept to work more hours and online," he said, but they "must accept that in 10 years newspapers will be online."

According to Agence France-Presse, Québecor's profits have yet to be hindered by the rival free paper. Yet the giant publishing house is reportedly preparing the launch of its own freesheet, to compete against MediaMatinQuébec.

Source : Voilà.fr through IFRA Executive News Service
 

During a speech at the 15th World Editors Forum in Goteborg, Sweden, Garry Kasparov, leader of The Other Russia, an opposition political party, addressed subjects such as press freedom and the political climate for journalists in today's Russia.

Immediately following his address, Vladimir Sungorkin, the editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, the number one tabloid in Russia stood up and invited Kasparov to speak in Russia about these issues. The video shows Vladimir's offer being translated by Eugene Abov, the general manager of GIPP, the Association of Independent Russian Publishers.

According to Kasparov, the atmosphere in Russian newsrooms is one of caution because of the current political situation in Russia. The murders of Russian journalists such as Anna Politkovskaja have received great media coverage outside of Russia. But according to Kasparov, these cases did not receive the same attention in the Russian press.

You can also see the coverage on the website of The Other Russia, which picked up the video.

More video reports from the World Editors Forum here.

The Times of London published today its first issue featuring a full-color, revamped design, Stephen Brook of the Guardian reports.

The new design will affect the Monday to Friday paper, not the Saturday edition, and will include color-coded sections, an expanded features section, and more two-page spreads. According to Brook, journalists at the Times have been told to focus on "longer pieces or short news items," and to avoid "mid-length stories."

The redesign is approximately a year and a half removed from the Times' most recent renovation, a switch in font, and almost four years from its switch from a broadsheet to a tabloid format.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper will continue redesigning until September.

Source: The Guardian

The Hartford Courant in the US offers an interesting example of how a local paper can foster citizen journalism by gathering user-generated content online and then reverse publishing it into a print edition.

The Hartford Courant's feature, iTowns, is an online portal where readers can submit news briefs, post events, photos and videos.

In each of the 6 regions covered online by the paper, the Courant has a webhost and a local reporter who blogs about his zone and accompanies readers with their postings, in a pro-am process.

Six print tabloid iTowns editions are published every Sunday. The papers include a staff-written week-in review and two outdoor columns, but the rest of the content is entirely user-generated.

Furthermore, all user content is specific to the region covered by the edition.

For the covers of iTowns editions, the paper invites artists to submit their works, producing some beautiful front pages. The response was so good that the paper has created an online gallery for readers to submit their work.

Granted, as for any newspapers delving into citizen or pro-am journalism, this initiative has taken some reshuffling of staff.

"Believe me, I'm not bragging about the staffing part, that has been and continues to be tremendously difficult, it meant moving folks into roles they weren't terribly comfortable with and leaving holes in areas they once covered," wrote Melanie Shaffer, Director of Design and Graphics of The Hartford Courant.
 
But, "Overall, the response is terrific. We are giving the reader a place to give us their news and information, this is all the stuff we've been turning away for years for lack of space."

The Hartford Courant stands as a perfect example of a local paper engaging - and engaged by - its community.

Source: Visual Editors
 

With elite papers, such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times cutting staff, the few "No. 2" papers left are struggling to survive.

A No. 2 paper "usually keeps the dominant daily on its toes," writes Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, by reporting overlooked stories, which are typically more popular in poorer neighborhoods.

The only major cities left with head-to-head competition, excluding those where two papers have the same owner or share business operations with federal approval, are New York, Washington, Chicago, and perhaps Los Angeles, according to Kurtz. The Cincinnati Post is the latest second-place paper to close, when its operations shut down last year.

The Boston Herald's, Boston's No. 2 paper, daily circulation shrunk to 203,000 and on Sunday, it fell to 113,000, in comparison with the Boston Globe's 384,000. The Herald only has 10 city reporters left in addition to those in the feature, business, and sports sections.

"It's almost as if Boston doesn't have a place for its second daily anymore," Boston magazine columnist Joe Keohane wrote, "particularly one that features a constant parade of pervs, solons, swindlers, bums and punks."

Kevin Convey, the Herald's editor says, "The Globe is more likely to write a story about how some government program is going to assist the poor and downtrodden. We're more likely to suggest it's a boondoggle that ought to be bounced off the face of the Earth."

Tabloids are more irreverent and prone to report on big names and scandals (a headline for former governor Mitt Romney's withdrawal from the presidential race was "MITT HAPPENS.") But with blogs unconcerned about newsprint costs, there appears to be little room left for tabloids. And with cities such as Boston becoming more "upscale," it is a question whether tabloids are desired anymore.

"Tabloids in some cases say what other papers only think," says Convey. But, "a lot of people find tabloids to be beneath them. In Boston, where the air is a bit more rarefied and you're closer to Harvard, some people have a problem with tabloids. I think there's a certain nobility in tabloids."

"I don't think it's that Massachusetts has become snootier. The old Herald readers are just leaving the state. The blue-collar exodus has affected the paper," says Herald columnist Howie Carr.

The Herald depends on street sales for three-quarters of its circulation. It shut down its Washington bureau, has old presses that break down, and a 125 person staff that struggles to cover the suburbs or out-of-town reports. Moreover, the Herald plans to outsource its printing and move out of its headquarters into rented space. However, it does not plan on changing its snarky tone.

"I don't think it's time to give up the ghost," Convey says.

The Globe, which won a Pulitzer for arts criticism this month, is not thriving either. The paper, has already cut jobs and accepted buyouts. Its only remaining foreign and domestic correspondents are in Washington.

"We're facing the same challenges everyone else is, trying to figure out what the future of the newspaper is going to look like," says Globe editor Martin Baron. "We have become more local. We have significantly scaled back what we do outside the Boston area. We're realists here. We realize the business is changing."

Source: WashingtonPost.com

Early February, The Capital Times announced that would reduce its print to and shift most of its content to its website. On Saturday, the paper published its final printed edition with the headline "Beam Us Up."

WISC-TV reported that The Capital Times is down to a daily circulation of 17,000.

"(The circulation decline) really brought into focus for us a conversation about irrelevancy. How can we still be relevant if we have so few printed copies, particularly in a market of this size," said editor Paul Fanlund.

Its free publication will print twice weekly distributed within the Wisconsin State Journal with about 48 pages of in-depth stories, analysis, and commentary on Wednesdays with a circulation of about 80,000 and a revamped Rhythm arts and entertainment insert on Thursdays, with a distribution of at least 115,000.

"The sad part is being able to hold that newspaper in your hand, which for me, is going to be a big loss, personally," said Dave Zweifel, the newspaper's editor emeritus.

The Capital Times, printing since December 13, 1917, is believed to be the first daily newspaper to "make this kind of a transition to the Web," according to WISC-TV. "If it's successful, it's likely other struggling papers will follow suit."

For more information, visit our partner blog SFN.

Source: WISC-TV, Madison.com

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of the Financial Times in the UK.

Click here to view all interviews in this series. Other titles include The New York Times, the Guardian, Fairfax Media, the Hindustan Times, etc. (full list at the bottom of the interview).


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"


- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We see ourselves as a news organization and we're becoming much more agnostic about our distribution channels. We're becoming much more interested in creating relevant information for our readers and much less interested in how it gets to the readers. Pearson, the parent company, clearly is an education company with a print publishing arm and an information division, which includes the FT. At the FT level, we consider ourselves to be a financial news business more than a newspaper. Our mission is to be the gold standard for global business news in print and online - and in any other formats.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Largely but not completely. 10 years from now - 2014 may be slightly too short a time frame - we will still have printed newspapers, because people like reading  things in print. Newspapers, just like the book, are convenient to read in places you can't do with a computer; but my belief is that a lot of what will be printed will be analysis, comment, analysis and opinion. The actual news will be more or less online or in other more timely formats. In a way the FT will split in two, with FT.com for all the news that's breaking and some immediate reactions and  opinion. The more considered analysis will be almost an Economist-type publication. Maybe it wouldn't have to be broadsheet anymore, it could be tabloid or even magazine format. To put it very crudely, you'd have all the news online, and you'd have 12 pages of Martin Wolf the next day in print, and all the editorials, columnists, features and more.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

There's one thing that's old and one thing that's new. What's old and part of the continuum is that traditional companies are going online. Our journalists are now fully integrated and write online and in print. I'm sure that in 2 years time they'll all be carrying video cameras. We've gone from zero videos website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That's part of the continuum: it's us doing the same thing in different distribution channels.

What's new is the blogosphere, citizen journalists and the idea that anyone - people who are not qualified journalists, either experts in a narrow field or just interested citizens - can start a blog or website and distribute it. For the FT, you would think it's negative in the sense that there's more news and opinion and more competitors. In fact, that's not really true, it almost enhances the position of leading media brands for several reasons. One is we are trusted, people believe the news they read with us. Secondly, we select and edit, which becomes an increasingly crucial function as there is more information out there. The more 'over-informed' people are, the more likely people who want to know what's actually going on will turn to a few sources that tell them what s actually important. That's what professional newspapers do really well.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

I do believe in their increasingly active role of users: very often readers are more informed than us. If you look at an old format like the letters page in the newspaper, the amount of expertise that our readers have, who are often professionals in the City, is just incredible. They know more about it in certain aspects than our journalists. That's why we get CEOs, academics, lawyers, heads of accountancy firms and more writing in to us to say what's actually happening. They can do this online with comments or take part in Q&As, or print their views in the pages of the FT and FT.com. That sort of content is very helpful. We also have a function for any user to comment on the website's stories.

Is it a threat? Sure, to some extent. But as long as it's happening on our site or in the pages of our newspaper, it's been bundled, monitored, checked for quality and therefore is important. We're not going to turn into a place where we just repeat hundreds of readers' letters and have no journalists of our own. It's more of an opportunity for our journalists to become more informed and build contacts among readers. And it's amazing that all these readers are willing to give this information for free.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I don't know. That's a really hard one. I might say it's already past.

There's so much more information out there and it's so much harder for companies to hide information. Take the Northern Rock story, which was broken by BBC journalists, and there was a bank run as a result. It's harder to hide information. The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later - I don't think it works like that anymore. Journalists still have scoops and still break important stories, but it tends to be in a much shorter time frame. It tends to be a single development that they're breaking rather than a long series of connections.

But frankly, newspapers and media organizations are under pressure. It's hard for us to send a journalist or a group of journalists off three months investigating something - and if nothing works that's a shame but nevermind. We don't have resources to let people go off and do that for such a long time. I think The Golden Age of journalists working undercover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don't want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that's more likely. As soon as a tiny thing breaks now, it gets distributed so quickly that it's hard to see a journalist working undercover for a long time and gradually piecing something together without having it go public much earlier in the process.


Stay tuned for more interviews in our series. Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

On Monday, RedEye, the Chicago Tribune's free communter daily tabloid, launched a Facebook application that gave readers an opportunity to be one of the five in "Five on Five," the daily mock sports quiz.

The quiz features five regular RedEye writers or fictional characters, such as Bag Boy, who wears a shopping bag over his head. They irreverently respond to five sports-themed questions.

Readers can give their own responses on the Facebook page, which will be voted on by other Facebook users. The winner receives a chance to appear in the paper as one of the five.

On Monday, the question on Facebook was: "Danica Patrick winning a race against men is like ... ," which received the response "... Martina Navratilova winning a tennis tournament against women," from RedEye columnist Jimmy Greenfield. The top-scoring reader entry came Thursday afternoon from Jonathan Ozeran: "...is like Hillary winning...oh, never mind."

Many newspapers are turning to social networking sites like Facebook to gain more readers and to receive more reader participation.

Frequent "Five on Five" contributor Bag Boy said, "Facebook is for delusional people with too much time on their hands. That's why I'm confident all Chicago sports fans will join me on it."

Source: Editor & Publisher

On Monday, The Baltimore Sun launched b, a free daily newspaper and website, which targets readers from 18-34, similar to parent Tribune Co.'s RedEye. They had announced developing 'b' in February as a step to broaden the Sun's audience in times of "declining revenue and increased competition," according to the Baltimore Sun website.

The first 40 page issue featured a cover story of reader's photographs shown at sites around the city, and included a section of reader "rants" and opinions. The first issue had 75,000 copies, distributed in 1,000 bright orange boxes in 1,400 drugstores, convenience stores and athletic clubs in metropolitan Baltimore. Also, about 70 volunteer employees handed out "samplers."

"It really is going well," said Timothy J. Thomas, vice president of business development, who expects distribution to grow to 100,000. "They're kind of flying off the shelves."

Steven Duke, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, said similar young adult-targeted newspapers, such as RedEye, have succeeded by distributing in places where young readers congregate.

He acknowledged that the economy presents challenges for new publications. For instance, the free daily BostonNOW was just shut down due to economic reasons.

With a staff of about 20, the tabloid newspaper and website has a focus on news, sports, entertainment news, blogs, and listings geared to its readers. A third of its content is planned to be reader-generated material. The tabloid also has content-sharing agreements with local radio stations WTMD-FM and WNST-AM. Online readers will have to opportunity to upload photos and videos.

"This truly is a daily conversation with our target audience," said Brad Howard, b general manager.

Sources: Editor & Publisher, Baltimore Sun