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A conference called "Will newspapers survive?" was held last week in Chicago, featuring prominent journalists who brought to surface the arguable future of the newspaper industry, the Chicago Reader's Michael Miner reported.

Monroe Anderson from EbonyJet discussed the newspaper industry as it was around three decades ago, saying that with time it became "very corporate, very structured' and "they're looking to the bottom line."

Anderson reminisced about a Tribune editor with an eight-grade education, something that today seems "unthinkable", Miner reports. This was "before the suits took over", Anderson said.

The Tribune's Bill Adee mentioned that the "business model is broken" and the Herald's Eileen Brown said that she has to convince "the business side" to look for new things so as to save the print newsroom.

The Hindalaen is a weekly hyperlocal paper from Illinois and its publisher, Jim Slonoff, said that "the old way still does work."

Miner pointed out that Brown thinks one of the problems of newspapers today is the "middle ground," those stories about national and international topics that can be read online for free.

Miner mentioned the Tribune and how "just that morning almost every story" he read there was valuable because he said he would never think of looking for it online and because it would never had been written had it not been for the paper's commission.

Brown said that print journalism continues to offer more revenue than online journalism. Advertisers are not comfortable selling ads online and "are in the ice age", according to Brown.

"So it's this weird transitional phase where you'd love to say 'OK we'll move everybody over here,' but you can't because you still have to feed the mother ship," she said.

Adee mentioned online success such as sites like YouTube, who are user-generated, and the Tribune will not get "anywhere close" to that, Miner reports, because its aim is to provide professional "house-generated" journalism.

RedEye is the "fastest growing paper in the country", according to Adee, since it provides the news to an audience that does not think about paying for them.

"People want what journalists do more than ever. They want it in different forms. They can accept it in amateur form, semipro form, or professional journalism," Adee said.

Soource: ChicagoReader.com

Video:

YouTube (part 1)
YouTube (part 2)

Gannett Co. and New York Times (NYT) Co. both announced this week that their total revenues have dropped in May 2007, by about 10 percent and 6.6 percent respectively. Yahoo reports that ad revenues decreased in both cases and could not be compensated.

Gannett, operating some 85 US newspapers and 23 TV stations, said its advertising revenues fell by 14 percent from $404.9 million to $347.1 million since last year. Classified ad revenue dropped by 10 percent, retail ad revenue by 19 percent and real estate ad revenue by 31 percent.

Over the same period, the same trend occurs with the NYT and ad revenues cannot be counteracted by an increase in circulation revenue. Meanwhile, Internet revenue grew by 9 percent and Internet ad revenue augmented by 14 percent.

While Internet may be providing a new portal for ad revenues for newspaper and media, a PricewaterhouseCoopers report said that the "oft-reported death of traditional media remains greatly exaggerated."

Source: Yahoo

Over the last couple of days the future of the printed newspaper has been discussed and debated 15th World Editors Forum. Some declare it dead, others are optimistic. Pierre Haski, Founder and Editor in Chief at Rue89.com, doesn't need to worry. He spoke at the 7th session session under the slogan "There's a life after the newspaper".

Rue89.com was launched about a year ago on the same day that Nicolas Sarkozy was elected for president. And a year later Rue89.com is doing a lot better than he is, Pierre Haski stated. The independent French news website was launched from Pierre Haskis apartment since they did not have an office at the time. Today they have 650,000 unique readers each month. The websites was founded by journalists who, just like Pierre Haski, have kept blogs in the past and really come to see the how the Internet enables journalists to connect with their readers.

Rue89.com does not have a Reuters-wire. They did a first but soon realized that it was "money for nothing", since people are overflowed with that sort of free information, and if readers came to their site it was to read something unique, and they don't feel that they've suffered from not having that kind of material.

The site belongs to the "pro-am" family, with content produced both by professionals and amateurs. Their information comes from three voices, one being the actual journalists, the other experts and the third from readers/bloggers. Approximately one third of the content is produced by non-journalists, including the experts. Already from the beginning Rue89.com decided that journalists should have the final say in what goes up on the website, since they have knowledge about ethical rules etc. The biggest challenge has been to manage the comments. In the beginning they were over-flooded by comments and they had a crisis on their hands after a few months and needed to make some changes. Now readers have to be registered to be able to make a comment. You can use a free e-mailadress which really doesn't give you a real identity, but just by introducing that they "got rid of 90% of the crap".

Pierre Haski explained how the comments really are gold-mines, even though not all of them are gold. Many of their most successful stories over this first year have come from the comments made by readers, either the comments have contained actual tips or a journalist has found a good story in the ten or so lines that the reader has written.

World Editors Forum SESSION THREE

Paul Cheesbrough, Chief Information Officer, Telegraph Media Group, UK Ilicco Elia, Product Manager - Mobile & Emerging Media, Reuters, UK Michael Cooper, Director of Advanced Reading Technologies, Microsoft, USA Oscar Westlund, Doctoral Student, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Chairman: Robert Andrews, Editor-in-Chief, paidContent.UK, United Kingdom

For the second year, the Newsroom Barometer, a survey organized by Reuters and the World Editors Forum and conducted by Zogby International, was presented at the 15th World Editors Forum conference, being held this year in Göteborg, Sweden. The Barometer is an exclusive international survey designed to give insight into newsroom strategies.
The survey represents newspapers throughout the world including international, national, regional and local papers.

John Zogby, President of Zogby International, USA introduced the study. He announced that two of the most important results found in the survey was that newsrooms today need to train journalists to be multimedia oriented for the approaching dominance of integrated newsrooms.

When asked about the multimedia capabilities of their own newsrooms, 54% of survey respondents said that their newsroom is already integrated. Another 30% said that they will have an integrated newsroom within 5 years. But Zogby pointed out that there is no standard definition of what an integrated newsroom actually is, and that this is a discussion that must occur amongst media executives.

The biggest problem for printed newspapers is the declining readership of young people, especially in United States. Linked to this problem, many young people read their news on the Internet.
Despite the seemingly bad news, the survey shows that 85% of editors-in-chiefs around the world are very or somewhat optimistic about the future of newspapers.

George Brock, chairman and Editor, Saturday TImes, UK answered that today headlines repeat themself. "The challenge for us is the generation shift. Young people have new habits and they are not going to change," said Brock. "If we would deliver more depth it might raise their interest level. It's not only the content that needs to change but it's the way we deliver it as well. Chances are if you deliver on YouTube it will reach it's audience."
Brock also said that there is a new generation of adults that have adopted a new set of tools, and they are not going to change.

The general lesson from the session was that publishers have to develop and intergrate all media. Their job is not only finding the right media on which to tell the story but also finding the right media on which to find the audience.

New media proponent Jeff Jarvis blogged last week about the "need to develop distributed strategies for news." In other words, not only are traditional news outlets increasingly aggregating relevant news from a variety of sources, they should also make their news available on those sites.

Jarvis suggests a few strategies to help this:

- creating widgets to embed your news on any other site
- establishing a platform strategy that enables people to build on your content
- a network strategy including blog networks

For example, Reuters recently opened its news content to the developer community, through Reuters Labs. Developers can now take Reuters news and build applications around it, or make the content fit existing applications.

"News cannot continue to think of itself as a destination. It has to think of itself as a feed that goes to where you are," wrote Jarvis.

Source: BuzzMachine through David Black

Thomson Reuters has released a 2.0 version of its semantic markup API, Calais. According to ReadWriteWeb's Josh Catone, the new version aims to be less business focused, which posed major problems in the initial release version.

Reuters says that Calais 2.0 will have an increased utility for "pop-culture publishers and bloggers covering the media, music entertainment and sports..."

In tandem with the 2.0 release, Thomson Reuters has also announced three plug-ins compatiable with Calais.

    -Calais Marmoset: allows users to create metadata for use with Yahoo!'s open search platform Search Monkey

    -Tagaroo: a Wordpress plugin that lets bloggers "automatically tag relevant people, places, and things in their posts"

    -Calais plug-in for the CMS Drupal

Source: ReadWriteWeb through Journerdism

News Corp.'s .Fox Networks has launched an international online ad network specifically geared towards financial news and advice.

Created with help from the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, the network, called Worthnet.Fox, comprises about 30 web site publishers, including WSJ, Barron's and MarketWatch.

The network is designed with the jet set executive class in mind: people "who spend time in myriad global regions at economic borders dissolve." reports Reuters.  

.Fox Networks is an online advertising network which markets unsold advertising space on websites outside of the U.S.

Source: Reuters through I Want Media

News and financial information Thomson Reuters Plc. is expected to announce 1,500 job losses this week, a move that stems from the £8.7bn merger in mid-April that created the company.

Many of the cuts are to come from the technology operations division, although 100 jobs at the news wire service are on the line. However, reports on the exact figure of cuts have been conflicted.

Further cuts are expected by the end of the year, reports thisismoney.co.uk. An internal email from Peter Moss, global head of content, technology and operations indicates that his group alone will reduce approximately 600 to 650 jobs.

Sources: ThisIsMoney, Interactive Investor through IFRA Executive News Service

According to paidcontent:UK, the Guardian is now considering the launch of new international online editions, following the launch of Guardian America last year.

At the Online Publishers Association Forum For The Future in the UK, guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell suggested, for future plans:

"You would certainly look to India; you'd probably look to the Middle East as a brand around comment and analysis. We're looking very much at the Anglophile world because it's a very simple step."

Thanks to a deal with Reuters in February, the Guardian has extended its advertising to the US already, and is looking to further internationalize its ad reach.

Source: paidcontent:UK

Hackers managed to shut down the website of the state-owned Herald in Zimbabwe, for three days. The Herald is perceived as the official mouthpiece of President Robert Mugabe and his political party, who have contested the victory of the opposition's party during the March elections.

Headlines on the site were replaced by the word Gukurahundi, in reference to a campaign of atrocities after the country's independence, which the government is accused of.

Human rights groups claim that Mugabe and his government's atrocities left about 20,000 dead after independence.

Source: Reuters

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results

The following is a brief narrative of the last World Editors Forum Study Tour in the US. We accompanied 26 newspaper editors through some of the most advanced newsrooms in the area, including Reuters, the Associated Press and The New York Times in New York, The News-Journal in Wilmington, and the Politico and Washington Post Newsweek Interactive in Washington D.C. (not all are depicted).

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

It seems the only way to make captions appear is by clicking on the pictures - and pausing the slideshow. Captions are included below too:

- After having visited Reuters, AP deputy managing editor Tom Kent and others gave us the tour of the Associated Press' new integrated newsroom...
- ...which spans over plus 100,000 square feet on an open-floor plan.
- The main feature of the new design was spatial flexibility...
- ...and, at times, the newsroom may resemble a construction site. But, Kent assured, this didn't disturb journalists' work.
- Another feature at AP: editors have two working spaces. They can work outside the closed office, preferably, to be closer to their staffers...
- ...but they can also use their private office if need be.
- The tour ended by AP's video production control rooms.
- At the New York Times...
- ...editors got a glimpse of the brand-new newsroom...
- ...and its modern design and architecture.
- NYT Futurist Michael Rogers treated us to the Times' top-floor research labs...
- ...lined with tech gadgets...
- ...that thrilled the editors.
- On our way to D.C., we stopped by Gannett's innovative News Journal...
- ...where editors greeted us warmly around the central hub...
- ...showed us their video studio...
- ...explained the editing work...
- ...and how the website has set up databases...
- ...and implemented mobile journalism.
- In Washington, we visited the Washington Post's online newsroom.
- Here again, a hub-like centre...
- ...and plenty of video equipment.
- The tour ended with a visit at the recently inaugurated Newseum...
- ...and the editors flew home.

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

You can now view the results to more questions regarding areas of investment according to editors, as well as what they view as the biggest threats to their newspapers, by reading Part 6.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results