Results matching “money from adve”

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

While newspapers struggle to turn a profit from their websites, an encouraging finding from the Columbia Journalism Review has good news for media websites: 60% of larger magazine websites are profitable, MediaGuardian reports.

The survey and report Magazines and Their Web Sites, conducted by Victor Navasky, chairman of the CJR, and Evan Lerner, Editor of SeedMagazine.com, is the first effort of its kind to document and clarify what advantages and strategies 665 consumer magazines utilize on their websites.

The final report revealed that more than half of consumer magazines that receive over 1.5 million visitors per month are more profitable. Advertising, as expected, accounts for the largest revenue source for 83% of the magazines which answered the question.

The Miami Herald Media Co. - responsible for The Miami Herald - has stopped accepting volunteer donations to finance its online editorial content, according to The Miami Herald's website.

Last December, the Miami-based daily, experimented with an innovative way to finance its online operations by asking its online readers to donate if they "prefer the convenience of the Internet."

A move that worked for the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was reported to have been working well for The Miami Herald.

Journalism Online's e-commerce service for publishers, Press+, has begun to release more details about the online payment system that allows publishers to implement a variety of payment methods for their digital content, according to eMedia Vitals.

Gordon Crovitz, a Journalism Online co-founder and a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, spoke to eMedia Vitals about the company's progress and about the online payment form that early adopters are leaning towards: a metered, segmented option.

The launch of Apple's iPad has garnered much optimism in the newspaper industry, driving hopes that the innovative tablet computer will be able to breathe some new life into an industry battered by an advertising downturn.

Much speculation has placed very high hopes on the capacity of the iPad and a slew of new generation e-readers to revamp the industry and bolster its business model. But, as Poynter Online's Bill Mitchell reports, the iPad will probably not be the solution to all of the newspapers' woes, but this sleek electronic device could play a substantial role in the migration of users from a cost-heavy past to a more efficient future.

The London Evening Standard's readership has gone from 556,000 in April to September to 1.37 million in the last three months of 2009, Stephen Brook from Guardian reports.

These positive readership figures follow the newspaper going free in October of last year and more than doubling its circulation to 600,000 copies in the process. The London Evening Standard was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebeveb in 2008, and his decision to drop the paper's 50p cover price was made in the hope that boosted circulation would increase advertising enough to make up for the lost revenue of having no cover price. His move towards the freesheet format prompted speculation that other London quality newspapers may drop their cover price as well.

Time's James Poniewozik has suggested that the significance of the New York Times's paywall is symbolic, rather than a sign that paid online content is the future for news. "Any pricing scheme that can raise actual money risks chasing away actual readers," and this why the NYT's charging method "probably won't make much difference to the Times's coffers or its readers at first."

As Poniewozik  says, there are many people who won't end up paying for an online subscription to the New York Times. Print subscribers will get free access, casual readers won't have to pay, and those directed via other websites won't pay. 

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

When newspapers run community events, it's important to stay committed to the convictions of the paper, says Marcin Gadzinski, editor of Sport.pl/Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'. Get that right first, and profit will follow, he adds.

His paper, which runs some sporting events, is no. 2 in Poland in terms of circulation, and likes to get involved in social issues and public advocacy campaigns. People all around Poland work for the paper, so it's helpful to use their contacts to organise activities.

They were not very successful when putting sports content on the web, he says, so in 2007 Sport.pl was launched, a strictly internet sports brand. They added online-only features rather than seeing it as a way to promote newspaper content. In 2009 the paper jumped from the number 5 to the number 2 sports website in Poland, with 5 million unique users a month. Plus, every Monday the paper publishes a Sport.pl-branded section.

The Telegraaf Media Groep has the advantage of already having a significant presence in the news landscape of the Netherlands, and Brouwers hopes that his new network can collaborate with Telegraaf's more traditional properties. He realises, however, that his platform is going to be very different, and also that the Telegraaf newspapers will be careful about how much of their content they give away. 

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.

The Guardian's new iPhone app sold 9000 units in its first two days, in a development that may point to a key future source of revenue for newspapers.

The app was launched on Monday, and it was uncertain whether or not consumers could be prepared to pay the £2.39 asking price. Many news apps are free, including those offered by The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch is optimistic about the future of journalism in this age of newspaper cutbacks and the overwhelming concerns with bottom-line budgets rather than quality journalism. 

With all the recent hype surrounding Google's aggregation of news websites, one blogger has carried out a simple observation task with some interesting results. Kevin Sablan, writing for his blog Almighty Link, decided to find out just how much Google relies on news organizations for content.

A new Spanish language newspaper was launched by a group of Latino journalists last week in Boston.

El Tiempo de Boston, a free weekly, began publishing last week in response to what founding director, Maximo Torres believes is a lack of focus on issues affecting Latino communities, despite the existence of seven other Spanish language publications in the area.  

It has been a rough couple of years for the newspaper industry with the recession taking its toll on the financial stability of many organisations. In the past year alone at least ten publications have filed for bankruptcy and many have been forced to close their doors. With newspapers treading fast to try to keep their heads above water many have cut back funding for more costly types of news. One of the first things to go has been investigative journalism, considered by many publications to be a luxury. The time and investment of multiple resources in a single issue is something that many publications simply can no longer afford.

These cuts have raised alarm bells. The potential loss of 'the fourth estate' and 'government watchdog' have united many in the cause to protect the practice of journalism, even if the business and profitability of it is doomed to fail.

One method suggested to preserve this type of journalism is to run as a non-profit organisation. Seeking the status under the claim that journalism is a 'public good' publications are free from commerical pressures and the disappointment of dwindling circulation figures, relying only on donations from those who feel the cause worthy enough.

It is at this point that the Texas Tribune enters the scene. The online-only news site launched early last week as a non-profit venture in an attempt to fill a gap in quality local journalism in Texas. The Editors Weblog spoke with editor-in-chief, Evan Smith to look at Tribune's website and non-profit ambitions in closer detail.


The inspiration:
The big name in non-profit news is ProPublica. Led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, the organisation began publishing in June 2008 and has consistently drawn in large sums of donations, with key sponsor the Sandler Foundation contributing annually. ProPublica, which will write an article then offer it to a newspaper to publish, has carried out some impressive investigative feats to date, most notably its collaboration with the New York Times, published in August. The 13,000 word article which cost an estimated $400,000 to produce examined the events that took place at the Memorial Medical Centre following Hurricane Katrina. The piece highlighted the importance of such investigative journalism and made the need to save it even more apparent.
 
The Texas Tribune aims to achieve something similar on a smaller and more political scale, offering Texans a news source designed to compliment local newspapers that already exist: "We've made a point of not presenting this as a binary choice: A or B. We believe it's additive: A and B. Read your local paper and read us. In fact read as much stuff as there is out there" says Smith.

"We're simply presenting ourselves as one in a series of things that you need to read and listen to and view and access if you want to be a thoughtful and engaged Texan." 

In his first posting on the website Smith talked about what the Tribune was attempting to achieve: "What we mean to do on an ongoing basis is right there in our stated mission: to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern."

In ProPublica fashion, the Tribune has said that all the information published on its website is up for grabs for other media organisations as part of a content-sharing plan designed to aide other reporters who might not have the time to look into an issue in depth.  Matt Stiles, one of the Tribune's staff reporters writers told Poynter Online in an interview: "Ultimately, we'd like to tell every paper in the state, 'If you like this data set, just take it'."

"I hope reporters will come see the information, download it, remix it and be creative with it."

The build up:
In July this year Smith announced he was leaving his position as editor-in-chief of established Texas Monthly magazine to take up the post as CEO and editor of the Tribune. A few months later, the Tribune added Elise Hu, Emily Ramshaw and Matt Stiles to its list of experienced journalists.

In an interview with Poynter in September, Ramshaw talked of her decision to join the project: "I feel, and still feel, that the newspaper business is in serious crisis. I'm not content to cling to a deck chair and go down with a sinking ship."

Ramshaw worked for The Dallas Morning News for six years, the last three of which she was state investigative reporter.  "We're trying to prepare for the next incarnation of journalism. If this venture is going to work, it's going to work because serious, talented journalists were brave enough to take the risk," she said.

The Tribune has built up a selection of notable reporters willing to do this and Chairman and co-founder John Thorton had been quoted as saying: "We didn't hire journalists out of work. We hired reporters who their editors were pissed off that they lost them."

Smith and Thornton worked hard on securing donations, with Thornton himself donating $1 million to the Tribune. In early October the founders confirmed they had received a further $750, 000 in grants from the Houston Endowment and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Tribune is now only slighty short of the $4 million target it needs to continue running for two years, with a current total of $3.7 million.

The sum is considerable for a start up website, as paidContent's Staci Kramer has noted: "Unlike some of the new crop of local and regional news startups, the Tribune is launching with enough money for a well-paid staff of 16, including 11 reporters," referring to salaries of $315K for the editor in chief, and up to $90K for seasoned reporters.

As for promotion of the site itself, Smith told the Editors Weblog just how useful social networking sites have been. Regular updates for the public on the status of the site via Facebook, Twitter and the site's own newsletter built up a sense of curiosity over what exactly they had in store for last Tuesday's launch.
 
"We've been very aggressive on Facebook and Twitter both to promote the content and also to connect with our community of followers" said Smith. "We've also used both to aggressively push for funding. We've generated quite a lot of memberships in the Tribune which are much like memberships in public radio by pushing over Facebook and over Twitter messages that relate to our fundraising campaign, and they've been very successful," he says, citing the 1400 founding members who have given between $50 and $5000 to the Tribune out of their own pockets.

What does the site look like?
The website debuted with top stories on the mistreatment of disabled children in public schools, the Democratic lean of El Paso in an otherwise Republican state, and the results of a poll carried out by the Tribune and the University of Texas.

The site itself is divided into ten pages, the organisation of which differ from your average news website. Offering 11 databases under a section titled 'Library' for further reading, the databases contain information ranging from federal campaign donations, gubernatorial appointees and lawmaker spending. In addition to this there is a complete electoral directory of every Texan senator and governor- the site essentially offers a single space for complete personal and political data on the '242 occupants of the state's highest offices'.

It is clear that a lot of time has gone into collaborating this research, and according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the Waco Tribune-Herald has already taken advantage of the new resource and published some Tribune content. 

Aside from the databases, the site boasts eight of its own blogs and links to some 25 others; has a 'topics' section where stories can be found based on theme; a calender, where information about local events can be found or submitted; and a 'Tweetwire', a Twitter feed from all Texan politicians on the website's front page.

Compared to the recent launch of another local non-profit news website, Oakland Local, the Tribune's website is much more sophisticated. The Texan team have embraced the capacities of the internet and technology to their full, utilizing social media, widgets, videos, blogs and mobile applications- something Smith believes to be key to the way in which the use of media is changing.

"In consumption of media people are paying more attention to online media today then ever before," say Smith. "I look at my almost 13 year old daughter and how she consumes media and it's not at all in print it's almost entirely online and I think that's the trend line."

Smith suggests that publishers need to adapt to measure up to this changed method of consuming news: "You cannot simply go out and record the news, present that to people and believe that that's going to be enough. You need to give them the tools to better understand their world, to better know their state, to better know the people they elected, to better hold them accountable and that often is all not simply conventional reporting but the amassing and presenting of data that allows people to access the world in which they live from a more detailed level."

Why will the Tribune succeed where others have failed?
Whilst successful local non-profit news publications do exists, the Voice of San Diego and the MinnPost to name a few- there are also notable failures such as the Rocky Mountain Independent and InDenver Times, two online start-ups founded by Steve Foster earlier this year. How will the Tribune ensure that it doesn't suffer the same fate?

Smith says that the Tribune essentially has a better business plan, arguing that the RMI and InDenver Times failed because they were run by journalists, not business people and "didn't really have a plan for how to make the model sustainable."

Part of the reason the Tribune is choosing to remain online-only is because "the cost of printing a print publication for postage and paper and print facilities is so expensive that you reduce your overhead dramatically and therefore make it much more likely that your business model will sustain."

Of course the Tribune's has also managed to raise a healthy budget, further insulating itself against some of the problems faced by other publications. "Money is, as in all things, the mother's milk of your operation," Smith says, continuing on to mention that the having the financial capacity to buy the latest technology and hire top journalists will "go a very long way to allowing us to do our best work."

Smith's views bear resemblance to industry commentator Alan Mutter, who recently critized many online non-profit publications for not being business-minded enough. Mutter accuses these publications of "a suicidally stubborn determination on the part of the organizers to be in the business they want to be in, instead of attending to the business they need to attend to," and he argued early last month that, "A business, especially a start-up, requires far more than passion for the work. It requires close attention to the nuts and bolts of raising money, making sales and controlling expenses."

How will the Tribune navigate ethical issues?
A nagging question over the non-profit model is how publications will be able to resist influence from major donors. Smith argues that the seperation between donors and the editorial team is no different to the situation between advertisers and editorial: "I edited a magazine for nine years in which we had big advertisers who also happened to often be the subject of stories and the transactional economy that supports the operations of a for profit publication has no relationship what-so-ever to the journalism inside, or it shouldn't anyway, not at a good magazine and not at a good newspaper."

"Just because someone advertises doesn't mean you go easy on them or you go hard on their competitors."

Nevetherless, the non-profit news model is still in early stages and very dependent on the income from donors. Even for-profit news publications have not been immune to advertsing clients flexing their muscles in tough financial times, with a Detroit paper recently being accused of reporting on private health care following a request from client Humana (who subsequently purchased an ad next to the story).

What would Smith do if he was approached by a donor to cover a particular story? 

"Donors don't expect that were going to write about their issues or about their enemy's issues in a negative way, they're not looking for us to take sides- they're supporting the principle that hovers above all this activity: that journalism in the public interest has value."

"Any donor who is unhappy with the coverage we provide because of such an expectation is welcome to his or her money back," he says, adding: "I'd rather lose my funding then lose my integrity."

So are non-profits the next incarnation of journalism?
The wider debate on whether or not non-profits are the future of journalism has been raging for a while. Online magazine, Slate's Jack Shafer has weighed in for the negative: "In the current arrangement, we're substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately."

Thornton, the Tribune's chairman, hit back at the remarks: "I call it the Stockholm Syndrome. They are sympathizing with their advertiser-captors."

So who is right? Is the non-profit model the future of journalism?

Yes and no. It is unlikely to become a general solution for newspapers simply because of the huge sums of money involved, but for nieche reporting and more time/fund consuming journalism such as investigative reporting, it could definiatley be a viable option.

The idea compares favourably at least to the suggestion of government bailouts. As Thorton wrote of the "obvious fox-in-the-henhouse issues that arise--to mix animal metaphors--from government watchdogs funded out of government coffers."

As the first serious, state-focused news site with a decent enough amount of money behind it and what seems to be the right attitude toward embracing the capacities of the digital age and the changing face of journalism- whether or not the Texas Tribune succeeds will be key to the way in which the non-profit model is viewed.

As Tribune reporter Christe Hu suggests: "Journalism is at a crossroads right now. We're seeing not just survival of the fittest but a 'mutation of the species.' "

"I think the non-profit model has just as good a shot as anything else."

The report is quite detailed, and includes various examples and covers many topics, but focuses on local news and the value of quality journalism. Beginning with a history of the newspaper industry that culminates in its weakness in the face of internet news, Downie and Schudson explain the importance of investigative and accountability journalism for a democracy, holding it as a public good. 

After 180 years as a paid-for publication, the London Evening Standard will become a freely distributed newspaper on the 12th of October.

Owner Alexander Lebedev, who bought a 75% share of the Standard in January, has announced that the 50 pence price of the daily paper will be dropped and issues will be freely distributed in the streets of London. It is expected that the paper's circulation will more than double, from 250,000 to 600,000.

Lebedev is confident that the paper will succeed with this unexpected business model, which comes as quite a surprise as more publishers turn towards paid content and since the closure of the free paper thelondonpaper in September, which many held as marking the end of the free print model, at least in the UK.

"The Standard has been producing exceptional journalism since 1827 and that is not going to change under my ownership. The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow," Lebedev says.

How to tackle copyright infringement has recently become a hot topic in the news industry. Attributor is offering a novel solution via the Fair Syndication Consortium that aims to keep all parties happy. The Silicon Valley-based start up has developed technology capable of tracking news outlets' online content, and came together with a group of publishers to form the FSC, which plans to seek advertising revenue when their content is reused. The Editors Weblog spoke to Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor, about what the company can offer to newspapers in terms of increasing revenue and protecting copyrighted material.

More than 1,000 publishers have now signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium and agreed to have their content tracked. Pitkow explained that he started to persuade some of these of the extent of the problem in January when Attributor took 250,000 articles from 25 major publishers and ran these through its system for 30 days. Attributor found that each article was reproduced fully an average of 11 times across the Internet. So the seriousness of the issue was clear, and Attributor decided that a type of ad revenue sharing scheme was the best solution.

Leave the content, take the money

Rather than ordering those who reuse content to take it down, Attributor wants "to find ways to share in that advertising revenue that's being generated."  This solution stems from the idea that the larger the audience for news, the better, and as long as the original producers of the content are able to receive revenue, it is fine for their content to be reused elsewhere. Pitkow explained that Attributor had decided to "work at the currency level" in an attempt to come up with a proposition that would mean that "everybody can still profit from the syndication of this content."

So, the Fair Syndication Consortium plans to work with advertising networks like Google's Adsense, which are used by many smaller sites to place ads, to demand a cut of the revenue generated alongside reused content for those who originally produced it. If this demand is denied, then the rights holders can order their content removed.

The sites that the FSC will target are those that "are specifically geared towards repurposing other people's content and using Adsense alongside," Pitkow clarified. As well as being more profitable for publishers, the FSC also intends to make the process of responding to misappropriation of content simple and straightforward, involving dealing with advertising networks rather than having to serve lawsuits to publishers.

For the FSC to work, it is essential to seek the cooperation of ad networks. The Consortium's first agreement has been reached, with AdBrite, and Pitkow was confident that this signals significant progress.  The company is looking to get other ad networks on board but even just one is a good start, Pitkow said. "If you have one network that participates, and the rest are going to be forced to remove their ads, it means that everybody who's syndicating content is going to move to the ad network that does."

There is a financial incentive for advertisers to take part, as well as the motivation to appear to do no evil, Pitkow emphasised. That is, if they do not participate, the rights holders might choose to remove the ads that such networks have placed.

Will the money be enough to make a difference?

PSFK, a trends research consultancy, believes that "the numbers don't add up:" smaller sites make such a small revenue per article that the effort would not generate much income for publishers, and larger sites have often noted how to stay on the right side of fair use law. Pitkow, however, pointed to comments made by Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, who said that Attributor's work would make a significant financial contribution and could really help change the nature of content syndication. Ahearn told the New York Times that there was "tens of millions of dollars worth of inventory that is likely being created that we are not getting our fair share of."

As well as a means to protect copyright, Attributor's proposal could be seen as a way to more effectively syndicate content. Pitkow pointed out that licensing deal essentially consist of estimations of the value of advertising that could be generated from content, and that this is what Attributor does, but more accurately. Pitkow said that smaller sites that do not have a formal syndication team could use Attributor for this.

So will it work?

Pitkow explained that Attributor is now taking this content of 1,000 publishers have signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium into its system and starting to monitor how widely it is being used. He anticipates that the revenue-sharing scheme could be fully operational this autumn.

The Associated Press is independently looking at ways to track its and its members online content to ensure that unauthorised use does not occur, using a microformat tagging system via what it is calling a news registry. It is not clear yet what the AP intends to do when it finds misappropriated content. Other solutions also exist, such as the WAN-IFRA backed ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol; however although this is a step forward in terms of a commitment to protect content, ACAP does not as yet seem to have a strategy on how it would actually make publishers more money.

And this is where the advantage of the Fair Syndication Consortium lies. Rather than simply trying to stop content being reused, it is accepting that this is inherent in the nature of the Internet and is looking at how to use this to publishers' advantage. It may well not be a solution that all publishers approve of as it does mean that their content might remain on websites that they do not support, but at least it could contribute to tackling one of the news industry's current key challenges: how to make more money from online news. 

It is seeming increasingly likely that charging of online general news content may well become commonplace in the immediate future; 'within a year' according to Financial Times editor Lionel Barber. The New York Times has been surveying its subscribers to ask how much they would be willing to pay for online news, and Guardian blogger Steve Busfield pointed out that listeners of the London Times' The Bugle podcast have been asked whether they would be prepared to pay for the 'season' each week. But can a pay strategy work online? The answer has been debated at length.

The big question is, will enough people be prepared to pay enough money, via a subscription scheme or per article, for online content to compensate for and exceed the revenue generated by advertising? The answer to this was thought to be definitively negative for quite some time, but the global economic slowdown and subsequent falls in advertising revenue, particularly online, has started to change this.

Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, has taken a look at newspaper companies' second quarter results and analysed revenue from advertising and circulation. He has found that although ad revenue is falling at companies such as McClatchy and the New York Times, income from circulation is actually increasing. Ad revenue at both companies was down 30% in the last quarter compared to the same period last year.

Revenue from circulation, however, rose 5% in the second quarter at McClatchy, to $69.4 million. The daily circulation actually fell, but price increases made up for this. And at the New York Times, Chittum points out, circulation revenues will pass ad revenues sometime this quarter for the first time ever, if current trends hold. In this year's second quarter, the paper brought in $185 million in ad revenue and $166 million from subscribers. So if the ad income continues to decline at a rate of 30% and the circulation revenue keeps increasing, the latter is likely to overtake the former any time now.

This, Chittum suggests, "points the way toward a new model" based less heavily on advertising. He suggests charging $15 a month for full access to NYTimes.com, and if half of paper's print readers and 2.5% of the website's visitors were to pay, the paper could bring in $189 million a year: enough to pay for the entire Times newsroom. And of course, the paper could still advertise. The Wall Street Journal is expected to bring in $120 million in online advertising this year despite its paywall, Chittum notes. If the Times was able to bring in a similar amount, it could easily survive in online-only format, he proposes.

Chittum disputes Jeff Sonderman's theory, recently outlined in News Futurist, that newspaper subscribers have traditionally paid for the delivery of the paper rather than for the journalism. Their money may have actually gone towards this, but the reason that people have always bought newspapers is, in fact, because of the content. Yes, people are also paying to have this content nicely packaged and delivered to their door, but it is the news that they are after. This contradicts the often-cited concept that content in itself has no value.

And this idea that people will in fact pay for quality content, though not necessarily a consensus, as concluded by The Wrap's Sharon Waxman, does seem to be gaining momentum in the media industry. As well as the New York Times, News Corp and MediaNews Group are looking at paid online content, and start-up Journalism Online is promising to facilitate this for any publishers. News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said last week at the Fortune Brainstorm conference that journalism will increasingly become a "paid model" online.

And this feeling is not only prevalent among newspapers: Disney just announced plans for a subscription-based product for the internet. "We have ample evidence both in traditional and new media that people are willing to pay for quality, to pay for choice and to pay for convenience," CEO Robert Iger said at the same conference. Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, also expressed his opinion that content on the Internet is "not free, and is not going to be."

So could revenue from paying readers online more than compensate for lost advertising?

The results of the Times of London's poll on whether people are prepared to pay for The Bugle is not very encouraging so far: when presented with different pricing options, 59% of those polled responded 'nothing.' However, of course this does not mean that these people might not be prepared to pay if forced to: it is a very different thing to be asked whether you would like to pay.

Chittum's figures for the New York Times suggest yes, although he does not claim that the numbers could support printing and distribution as well as journalism, and it is unlikely that the Times will kill its print product any time soon. And it is necessary to remember that the Times has always brought in an unusually high proportion of its revenue from circulation: in recent years this has typically been 30-35%, while many newspapers would rely on advertising for 80-85% of revenue. And a subscription is expensive, at about $770 a year for those in the US but outside the New York metro area. The paper has seemingly successfully increased its price twice within a year. It is undoubtedly seen as a product worth paying for: can the same be said for newspapers with less impressive reputations?

Journalism Online's co-founder Steve Brill has presented figures to potential partner publishers that suggest that participating newspapers would be able to keep 88% of page views and 91% of ad revenue. The company's assumptions are that 5-10% of current monthly unique visitors will be willing to pay for content; that 95 percent of those paying customers will choose subscriptions over micropayments; and that after subscribing, those readers will view 30-40 percent more pages than non-paying readers. If these numbers are correct, charging for content might well make sense.

Others believe, however, that paid online content would definitively not be able to make up for lost advertising revenue. Alan Mutter, co-founder of ViewPass, sees increasing the value of advertising by making it highly targeted is a better solution to the newspaper industry's problems. And start up CircLabs is working on creating a product that aims to up the number of page views to newspaper sites. Both of these would, however, allow publishers to make the choice to charge.

Persuading people to pay for something they have got free for many years is likely to be a tough challenge, and it is going to be risky. It is likely to take some time to discover the most effective way to do it. It has a far greater chance of succeeding if it does in fact become commonplace, and the idea that premium content must be paid for is firmly established in the consumer mindset. And although one can argue that the consumer will be benefiting from the quality content that would be supported by pay schemes, their online news experience is likely to suffer if they are confronted by frequent paywalls that stop them from roaming the web freely.

It is a common refrain in the news industry: readers paid for printed news content, so they should pay for the same thing online. To the overwhelmingly majority publishers, this principle appears fair and logical. Thus, the justifications apparently resolved, business managers are now grappling with the choice of payment structures most appropriate for their products.

Yet, according to News Futurist's, Jeff Sonderman, such convictions ignore the fundamentals of newspaper production and distribution, namely: marginal-cost pricing. Subscriptions to online content are entirely unworkable, largely because the concept is antithetical to the way that newspapers have functioned for the past 180 years.