Results matching “bloggers future”

The Printcasting model is on its way to "democratise" print publishing in more cities in the US, it was announced last week. The initiative, financed by the winnings of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, has made its first newspaper partnership with Denver-based MediaNews Group. The publishing group controls 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

The project originated out of the newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian and first went public in March to cater for the town of Bakersfield, California.

There is a crisis in trust and communication between the British public and the mainstream media, a new report has concluded. The gulf between public expectations of news provision and the actual nature of articles, which oscillate between esoteric or irresponsible, leaves readers feeling confused and excluded.

The report, entitled 'Public Trust In The News' was conducted by researchers from Manchester and Leeds Universities and was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It investigated the dynamics of news production and consumption, to ascertain if there is a difference in what "the public expects from news media and what journalists mean by serving the public".  The paper highlights the underlying causes of an apparent widespread disenchantment with the media and the detrimental effects this is having on the standards of reporting and civil participation in democracy. Thankfully, the report offers several propositions for a new journalistic direction, which could refresh the reader-writer compact.

The Huffington Post unveiled its newest addition of the HuffPo clan this past Monday. Huffington Post New York, "The Internet Newspaper" features news, blog and video posts from Nora Ephron, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), former Mayor Ed Koch, as well as a host of well-known comedians and playwrights. The site is also welcoming of citizen journalist via its Eyes & Ears Citizen Reporting component that boasts citizen journalists of all ages from around the world.

A memo on the front page from Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, explains that the website "features our curated selection of the best New York news coverage, plus a collection of bloggers eager to share their takes on everything from local politics to the city's fashion, food, entertainment, and sports." She goes on to explain the site's partnership with 14 local news outlets in order to reel in hyperlocal coverage.

"The future of online writers and journalism in the Gulf is very uncertain," said Saudi radio journalist Samar Fatany. Fatany arrived at this conclusion based on the outcome of a workshop organized by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) to address the challenges of mainstream media in the Gulf.

At the workshop, Gulf online writers, journalists and media professionals from Malaysia, Eastern Europe and the United States (such as senior newsroom editor of the Huffington Post) gathered to debate the role of new forms of media that are changing and reshaping public debate and discussed how to generate more revenue online. The date and location of the event is not disclosed in the article written by Fatany posted on Al Arabiya.com.

The city of San Diego is a microcosm of the current battle raging between the new and the old for the headlines of local news. As American cities struggle to maintain their regional papers, online initiatives are springing up to fill the gap left in community reporting.  Now California's second largest city is covered by three reporting projects, functioning on very different business models.   

The classic first: the San Diego Union Tribune is the city's only newspaper, which has an apparently bleak future.  Revenue from advertising has dropped by 40 per cent from 2006.  In March, a buyout shop, Platinum Equity, eager for its first publishing venture, announced that it would buy the paper.  Last month the buyers revealed that 200 of Union-Tribune staff would be made redundant.  However, it seems that the cutbacks at the Union-Tribune have not damaged its online edition, which averages 1.3 million unique visitors a month and racked in an estimated $10 million on $18 million in sales last year.

The I Want Media's The Future of Media: 2009 discussion held at NYU yesterday gathered the most renowned names in the new media world to present their visions of the future of information media.  Present were Gawker chief Nick Denton, Jack Dorsey, cofounder and chairman of Twitter; Bonnie Fuller, creator of Us Weekly and founder of Bonnie Fuller Media; Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor online at The Wall Street Journal; and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

Perhaps of most interest to have come from the exchange were Denton's statements about journalists' attitudes, their inaptitude for internet blogging and the pay wall debate which is currently dominating news provision dialogue.

A new right-leaning online news site will be launched in the next few weeks, it was announced Tuesday by its founder, Tucker Carlson.  

The DailyCaller, as Carlson explained to conservative bloggers assembled at the Heritage Foundation, will be "a general-interest newspaper-format style site".  The ethos of the site was summed up as such, "tell the truth, and be accurate...It's very important to live up to the basic standards of journalism."

A panel discussion held earlier this month by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association concerning the pay versus free online subscription models has served to fuel the debate raging over this current predicament for the newspaper industry.  This time, the benefits of the online version of the Arkansas Democratic-Gazette have come under scrutiny from media consultants and journalists wary of its pay wall model.  

The Democratic-Gazette, alongside its higher-profile counterpart the Wall Street Journal, is often hailed as a future model for newspapers looking to charge for their content.  The paper operates a pay wall system, in operation since 2001, whereby viewers must pay in order to be able to read a full article.  The supporters of this system use the example of the low-key paper as a fine example of a publication profiting from its on-going transformation into a digital product.  

The Economist has made the news industry the special focus of its business section for its latest edition. "Established" news is described as "being blown away" but news in general is otherwise considered to be "thriving."

In an opening paragraph which does not bode well for advocates of traditional media, the Economist ponders if "the surest sign that newspapers are doomed is that politicians, so often their targets, are beginning to feel sorry for them," in reference to Barack Obama's pledge to newspapers last weekend at an industry dinner in Washington, as well as Massachusetts senator, John Kerry's commitment to help the "endangered species" and, in particular, his region's beloved Boston Globe.

Online news aggregator the Huffington Post is well known for not paying its bloggers - however it is taking that policy one step further and asking one of its future interns to pay for the privilege of working at the Post. With all profits going to the Robert F. Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights, the bidding for the two to three month internship currently stands at $13,000.

The internship is just one out of 25 which the Huffington Post will host this summer, and a spokesman for the site said that Arianna Huffington chose to make the donation as "it was for a good cause".

Source: Guardian, AdAge

What is the "Fifth Estate?" By definition, it could be any class or group in society outside the clergy, the nobility, the commoners, and the press--anything from trade unions to the poor to organized crime--and is often used in reference to media, especially in reference to outlets who consider themselves in opposition to mainstream media. In his book, Arthur Hayes claims Press Critics are the Fifth Estate: Media Watchdogs in America, whereas Stephen Cooper's book is titled Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers as the Fifth Estate and in The Political Pundits, Dan Nimmo and James Combs say that pundits constitute the Fifth Estate.

In his article "Who is the Fifth Estate and What is Its Role in Journalism's Future?" Poynter journalist Roy Clark discusses what he believes is, or should be, the Fifth Estate in the US: "a frame that sees that the freedoms and responsibilities of the First Amendment empower not just a professional caste of news gatherers and distributers, but potentially every citizen."

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.

As twenty of the world's leading political figures convened at London's Excel centre something unprecedented was happening in the media world - with coverage going digital in a way never before seen.

What's more was that the key players providing the coverage were not just your usual brigade of journalists but also consisted of the general public who, by using social networking tools such as Twitter, provided an additional news element to this year's summit.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last ever issue yesterday, 17 March 2009, and is looking at an online-only future. Parent company Hearst decided it could not afford to keep the paper open in its current form after it lost $14 million in 2008, and after trying and failing to sell it, they proceeded to stop the presses but keep the website. The P-I is not the first paper to make such a move, but it is by far the largest US publication so far. What does this closure mean for the paper and the people of Seattle, and what are the implications for the wider industry: will other papers follow suit?

The cost of keeping the Seattle P-I's website should be a fraction of the cost of printing the paper: Poynter's Rick Edmonds estimates costs have fallen by 80%. Staff numbers have been reduced from 165 to 20, including just one photographer, and the site will be less like that of a traditional newspaper and more like the Huffington Post, according to the New York Times, as it will have limited original reporting and consist largely of links, advice and commentary, with several local columnists. It will repackage some health and home material from Hearst's many magazines, and has about 150 unpaid bloggers who will continue to provide content. The original reporting will focus on more hard-hitting news such as government, spending and crime, said P-I executive producer Michelle Nicolosi.

Seattle will be left as a one-paper town: the Seattle Times is now the only major daily in the city and although it should benefit from no longer having competition from Hearst's paper, it will no longer be sharing printing, delivery, advertising and marketing expenses with the P-I, as it had been for more than 20 years. P-I subscribers will automatically start to receive the Times instead.  It remains to be seen whether the paper will flourish or continue to lose money. The P-I's new most direct competition is a non-profit local news website focusing on the Northwest, CrossCut.com.

How should the web-only paper tackle the competition?

This huge change for the P-I can, and arguably should, be seen as an opportunity to revamp its site and be a front-runner in innovation. Online news leaves plenty of room for original development and possibilities for increased interaction with readers, personalisation options and linking are particularly relevant for local papers such as the P-I. It is "an adventure in journalism," according to columnist Joel Connelly. Slate editor Jack Shafer called upon Hearst to plunge into experimentation by sending in the "interactive cavalry," as everything that the publisher learns in Seattle can be used at its other newspaper sites. Examples he suggests are going hyperlocal, updating the site as much "as humanly possible," and to hire as many developers as they can. Rick Edmonds seems to be in agreement, writing that as long as losses are kept low, the P-I could be an effective "real-time test of what works and what doesn't in an online-only local site." And Nicolosi has promised that the paper will "experiment a lot, fail fast" with what is on the site: if something is not working they will cut it immediately and try something else.

Does going online-only make business sense?

The paper's online traffic is 1.8 million unique viewers per month and is usually more than its former rival/partner, the Seattle Times, which has considerably higher print circulation. And according to Forbes magazine in January, Seattle is the most broadband-connected US city: hence a place seemingly well suited for an online-only publication.

And online readership figures are high: according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media in the US report just released, traditional media has not lost its audience, rather this audience is shifting online. The Pew Research Center reported at the beginning of the year that the Internet had overtaken print as a primary news source in the US for the first time. This trend is not just American: British papers reported record online readership in January: with the Guardian website boasting almost 30 million unique viewers.

Several other smaller publications have made the switch to online-only over the past few months. The most well-known is the Christian Science Monitor, which announced its intention to cut its daily print edition in October 2008, though it will not actually make the conversion until April 1 this year. The CSM reasoned that its web product had a far wider reach than its print paper, particularly due to its international audience, and that producing the print publication would become untenable as the Christian Science church was preparing to stop its subsidisation. Others include the Monitor in Canada, and the Kansas City Kansan, San Francisco's AsianWeek, Hoy Nueva York and Wisconsin's The Capital Times in the US: all for financial reasons.  

The State of the News Media report, however, argues that it does not currently make sense for suffering papers to "kill their print editions and go online-only" as print still commands "premium ad pricing" and US papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and the average cost of printing and delivering the printed paper is 40% of costs. So, the report believes, why would you cut almost all your revenue to save less then half your costs?

Is online-only the future of news?

Arguably, despite many people's love of print, online is the future of news: how distant a future, it is difficult to say. But the vital, million-dollar question remains: how to actually make enough money out of all these online readers in order to support good quality, in-depth reporting? Nicolosi said that she thinks it is "possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city's readers well while turning a profit" and that "a digital news product is a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate." She seems to be convinced that the paper will make money online, but gives no indication of how this will happen. With the traditional ad-based business model proving less and less effective as online advertising prices fall, will the P-I come up with an innovative strategy? One of the major criticisms of the industry in the State of the News Media report was the lack of innovation in the sector in terms of business models. Nicolosi has assured readers that she is willing to try out new things on the site, but will the paper be as experimental in terms of business models?

For an online-only operation, the incentive to try to make money from Internet readers is surely greater than for a print publication with a website. And if the P-I does manage to find a way to support itself, whether through being successful enough to generate sufficient advertising revenue, or by adopting some kind of paid content system, the model will undoubtedly be looked at very carefully by other suffering papers around the world.

At this years Digital News Affairs conference, debates have ranged from the merits of the online aggregation business model to questioning who made Barack Obama President, and speakers have come from new online-only start-ups and established print publications alike. The two-day Brussels based event has been covered in detail by Journalism.co.uk, and has been live blogged by dedicated Twitter users both in the audience and on the podium.

Before proceedings began, associate editor of Wired UK and co-host of DNA 2009 Ben Hammersley spoke with Journalism.co.uk about how news organisations use social media and new technology online. Hammersley feels that many "have embraced an awful lot of stuff because it's fashionable or they feel they should", but that some hastily started projects are "not just a waste of time, they're a waste of creative resource and money". He believes that social media experiments are fine for bloggers, but that for mainstream media such action "needs to be assessed very strongly and thoroughly". He also says that news organisations need to be more ruthless and Google-esque in their attitudes to cancelling projects which aren't working - online "the key metric is which online companies kill the rubbish stuff the fastest".

On Sunday, with the aim of discussing the future of journalism and newspapers, the Chicago Journalism Town Hall unusually brought together traditional media moguls and new-age bloggers alike.  There were confessions of resentment, jealousy, error and disillusionment - from both sides.  The ability of the meeting to combine the darlings of Chicagoan new media with the established old-hat of mainstream media was a somewhat unprecedented achievement.  That was the analysis of Fran Eaton of the Illinois Review, in any case.

Time Out Chicago took a slightly more cynical view of events; Scott Smith reported that only 3 of the 13-person panel could consider themselves to be professional full-time bloggers, with the result being that the Town Hall felt like a funeral "rather than an exchange of ideas between the print and online worlds".  Smith also reports that many of those present seemed to be there to "pat themselves on the back for a job well done, rather than perform an autopsy".

Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene with a camera, it is extremely unlikely that they will be a member of a citizen photojournalism organisation. But has Citizenside, a small, young company based in Paris, found a solution? The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder Matthieu Stefani and editor-in-chief Aurélien Viers about Citizenside's work and the way they see the future of citizen photojournalism.

Citizenside operates in two different ways. On its own site, it functions in a similar way to other agencies: it gathers photos from its community - 35,000 members, close to 7,000 of which are active - which are published after thorough checking of the photos' validity. Staff receive 500-600 images a day, and those which pass the checking are categorised into sections such as headlines, showbiz, or unusual, or gathered into portfolios with others along the same theme or about the same event. Media outlets can purchase the photos from Citzenside, with up to 75% of the price going to the contributor. Agence France Presse owns a 34% stake of Citizenside, and is currently trialling incorporating the company's amateur images into its image forums, where any of the news agency's 7000 partners would be able to buy them. Content is clearly labelled as amateur, and Citizenside stressed the importance of differentiating the work of 'citizens' from that of professionals.

AFP is currently trialling incorporating Citizenside's amateur pictures into its image forums where any of its 7000 partners can buy them

Staff are proactive about finding images, "we don't just wait for people to send them," explained Stefani. Their kit allows them to locate users within a certain radius of any given spot, so if something happens which they want to know more about, they can send out an email requesting photos. "We send 3 or 4 of these a day," Stefani clarified. The company tries to avoid receiving photographs straight from mobile phones via MMS as the quality is poor and it is much harder to check an image's authenticity. Developers have however released an iPhone application, and are looking at launching similar products for Blackberry and  Google's Android phone. Staff also provide feedback when contributors send in images that cannot be used.

Mainstream Media success through factchecking

Citizenside photos have recently been on the cover of French daily Liberation, and in Le Point magazine and Le Figaro magazine, so the company is making a name for itself. The Liberation photo was of a snow storm, and Viers explained how a storm was a good example of an instance when citizen photo reporting really works: anybody can be a witness and as it might be harder to travel, professional photographers will not necessarily be able to cover the whole storm effectively. He added that Citizenside members were definitely not trying to play the role of reporters, rather they are "news witnesses."

One of the ways in which Citzenside differs from other sites that gather user photos and video, such as self-declared "unedited, unfiltered" CNN's iReport, is that all images are checked for authenticity. The company's developers have created a tool through which users can send photos, and which provides various details to staff about each photo or video that they receive, such as the camera brand and model, the resolution, and the date the photo was taken. Crucially, the programme can also alert staff to whether a photo has been modified online. Using the sender's IP address, the tool also shows from where in the world images have been sent. With this information, Citizenside staff can get a pretty good idea of whether what the contributor has told them about the image is indeed true. "I think at the moment, we are the only company who can offer such a specialised tool for the media," Viers remarked, and Stefani explained that developers would continue to refine the product to make it more and more effective. If staff still have doubts, particularly in the case of major, potentially controversial stories, they will contact the sender directly via telephone or email. "We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story," stressed Stefani. "If someone appears to be trying to mislead us, we will expel them from the community," he added.

"We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story." 

This emphasis on checking the authenticity of the images significantly increases the value of Citizenside's service, as amateur content with no professional input can be relatively meaningless. Citizen journalism site The Observers offers a similar commitment to fact-checking, a trend which has the potential to bring citizen journalism closer to the mainstream media in terms of respectability. Stefani asserted that he believes it is the company's focus on "quality not quantity" which makes their service so appealing to clients.  "We don't believe in the idea that everybody is a journalist, just because they have a camera and a blog," underlined Viers. Rather what he believes works is a form of professional-amateur collaboration: "an association of bloggers, witnesses, journalists and editors."

A global citizen photo network?

The most crucial difference of Citizenside, however, is its mission to share its technology. Stefani explained that he and the other Citizenside founders quite quickly understood that, as Kyle MacRae pointed out, one agency alone will never be able to get an image from every breaking story. But what if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? This is what Citizenside is aiming to do by offering its 'Reporter Kit' to traditional publications, sold via AFP. The tool was released in September 2008 and the first client to purchase it was Voici, a French gossip magazine. Citizenside is about to launch the same service for Public, one of Voici's rivals and is also in talks with one of France's biggest daily newspapers, a couple of regionals and one UK paper. The Voici community allows readers of the magazine to upload their images to the site, and if Voici decides to use them in its print magazine or on its main website, then it will pay the contributor, and Citizenside takes commission. If Voici would like to sell an image to another outlet, then Citizenside retains exclusive resell rights, and the profit will be split equally between Citizenside, the magazine and the contributor. Recently, for example, a video showing Hollywood star Lindsey Lohan being showered with flour by animal activists on her way into a Parisian club was sold to US TV channel Extra TV for a considerable sum. Stefani described how he plans for Citizenside's income to be based largely on this reselling of content, rather than on sale of the technology itself. Incidentally, a years' use of the Reporter Kit tool would start at about 13,000 euros, moving to upwards of 20,000 for premium tools and tailor-made development.

What if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? 

Citizenside hopes to make the checking process easier and easier for its clients, for instance by developing a system which would make automatically judge an image's authenticity based on different variables and display a red or green light. Viers stressed that he sees citizen contributions as essential in today's media environment, if news organisations "ignore UGC they are going to make mistakes, and they are going to miss opportunities." Stefani explained that "we had a hard time being understood at first because journalists would just see us as competitors." But he insisted that rather than a competitor, Citizenside aims to be "a new tool, a new source of information." They believe that particularly in a local context, such a community could be extremely valuable to their clients, who would be able to forge better relations with readers, and provide a greater level of coverage. Viers pointed out that hyperlocal news is often incredibly important to people, and it gives citizen witnesses a real chance to flourish.

Dollars for amateurs

So Citizenside believes it has found the solution to the problems raised by Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae. Stefani brought up the example of the man with the first Hudson plane crash photo previously cited by MacRae, who argued that it was the man's instinct to share the photo rather than sell it, and that he was very unlikely to have heard of a citizen photojournalism project that would help him sell it. If Citizenside achieves its goal of establishing popular image sharing community sites for major newspapers, then in the future, a similar witness to an event may well think of sending such a photo to their favourite newspaper, where it would be shared amongst the community, but could also be sold for a significant amount of cash. The project has a great of deal of potential. Obviously, the company is still very small and is yet to break international barriers, though they hope to soon. Stefani admitted that they will need a cash injection if they are to expand beyond Europe into Asian or American markets. There is likely to be some resistance from more traditional media operations to the inclusion of amateur content in their publications, and it might take time to change mindsets.

But the current economic downturn could in fact benefit the rise of citizen journalism as news organisations look for cheaper ways to obtain coverage of events. Editor and Publisher recently ran a story on World Press Photo and Pulitzer prize winning photographer Anthony Suau, who is currently struggling to find work because media outlets do not have enough money to pay him. Using photos from readers is undoubtedly cheaper than employing prize-winning professional. Citizen photojournalism does make sense, if there is a way to prove that the photos are real. A reporter can write a story from afar, but you cannot take a photo from afar. And although many photos will not be of the quality of those taken by experienced photojournalists, professionals cannot be everywhere at once, and taking advantage of the camera-armed public is definitely better than nothing.

Photo credits: Laure Bernard

Walter Isaacson, ex-managing editor of Time magazine and current CEO of the Aspen Institute yesterday addressed the current conundrum of the printed press: how to make money.  The crux of the dilemma is that printed news costs money, yet identical content online is given out for free.  This combined with a decrease in advertising revenue due to the global economic crisis has left many newspapers and magazines struggling.

In a Time piece entitled 'How to save your newspaper', Walter Isaacson bluntly reveals his attitude to the printed press; "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it."  His logic is indisputable; very few people would pay for that which they can have for free.

Isaacson is struck by the irony of the situation; news publications have a higher readership that ever when you consider both print and online figures, yet they have never been more under threat.  He links the problem back to the online advertising boom which at the time looked like its revenues would be more than sufficient to carry both online and print editions of any newspaper.

While newspapers around the world are putting their bets on digital technology to survive the future, The Printed Blog, made its mark by being one paper that doesn't believe in just going with the flow. The brainchild of Joshua Karp, the free paper gathers and prints the best content from the web, featuring "the best content" from online blogs about anything interesting.

With the first issue ready for distribution on the 27th of January, the nytimes.com website reports that the paper has so far received permission from over 300 bloggers to publish their content. Saving costs of reporters, Karp believes that techniques that were working online could be applied to the print industry too.

The paper will publish blog posts as well as readers comments and photographs submitted by readers, on a three or four column format which will be laid out like blogs instead of columns. Users can custom-make their papers by going online to choose which blogs they want in their edition. Dismissing eventual doubts of bloggers allowing their content to be published, Karp says he "will be happy if it (the blog) get exposure to 20 new people".

Sources. nytimes.com, poynter.com

To mark the relaunch of the Editors Weblog, the World Editors Forum is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. The fourth of the series takes a look at the hugely successful online-only news site, the Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post was a runaway success in 2008; with 8 million readers during the US election campaign, it is now the most 'linked-to' blog on the Web and is valued at up to $200million. It only employs around 50 staff, just a handful of which are editorial. To do so much with so little, is an impressive feat indeed. The Editors Weblog spoke to HuffPost's Founding Editor Roy Sekoff, and National Editor Nico Pitney, to examine the crucial elements that contribute to its success and look at how it plans to maintain that success post-elections.

HUFFING AND PUFFING TOWARDS SUCCESS

Content
To explain HuffPost's huge popularity, Sekoff pointed to the mix of different content you can get on the site. "It's a very vital and dynamic blend of breaking news, aggregated news and real-time commentary," meaning that you can find out the information you want and immediately see what people have been saying about it. It offers a bit of everything, both "esoteric and pedestrian," And a crucial factor is the mix of people who write on the site, from Hillary Clinton to Larry David to Arianna Huffington herself. Sekoff explained that it is "not just a certain kind of writer. You could get an actor, an architect and a politician all weighing in on the same issue."

Speed
The speed at which news can be reported in an online model is invaluable for HuffPost's success and for the news industry today. "The Internet has enabled us to get what we want, when and how we want it," Sekoff declared, "and it turns out they want it fast." He described the moment when the benefits of online really hit home in HuffPost's early days. It was the day of the July 2005 London bombings and HuffPost had been covering the story from the early hours of the morning, with bloggers sending in information and pictures from London. Then the morning New York Times appeared, with London on the front page but topped with the wrong headline: about the city hosting the 2012 Olympics. "It literally was yesterday's news," Sekoff stressed. Pitney was enthusiastic about how HuffPost can provide "instantaneous coverage about what's happening," and can immediately try to get comments from people involved in the story.

Interconnectedness
The HuffPost team have also made a considerable effort to make the whole site as appealing and user-friendly as possible, as while it was originally envisaged that readers would purposefully come to the home page and then move around the site, now many people end up landing on other pages through links from searches or social media sites. Sekoff explained that they had been "working to make each landing page full of as much content as possible," with images, related stories, or recommendations for further reading, "to make much content intuitively available for people who are interested in certain topics." There is extensive "interconnectedness" between elements of the site, which both reduces the chances of readers missing things in the vast array of stories available, and makes the site more 'sticky,' increasing traffic.

Links
Sekoff was confident that the HuffPost was a financially sustainable endeavour. Its revenue largely comes from advertising, and this is based on its high traffic as a result of being the most linked-to blog on the Web. "It has become a link-based economy. You are not being paid in dollars any more for your piece, but rather you are being paid in traffic." So from a financial standpoint, the main focus is simply to get good content onto the site, which will encourage people to link to it, increase traffic and then generate more advertising revenue. The HuffPost does syndicate some of its content but Sekoff stressed that this was not an element of the site's business model.

"It has become a link-based economy. You are not being paid in dollars any more for your piece, but rather you are being paid in traffic."

Free contributions
HuffPost has invited over 2000 people to be part of its group blog. These successful, influential leaders in their fields are not paid but many still regularly offer their insight and comments to the virtual pages of HuffPost. So in terms of getting good readable content onto the site, this is a very cost effective way to do it. Sekoff explained why he thinks so many people are willing to write for the site: "we offer our bloggers a tremendous platform." The most obvious reason is simply the volume of readership HuffPost can offer: "on the HuffPost, stuff gets read." Very few people receive more than a few thousand readers on their individual blogs, while on HuffPost they can get millions. The "engaged readership" is a related factor, Sekoff believes. "People are always struck by how immediate the response is and how reasoned and interesting the comment section can be."

Another simple but important reason people like to blog for the HuffPost is the lack of commitment and deadlines. "People are free to write what they want when they want," Sekoff clarified, "so it's great for people who have something to say but don't have time to maintain their own blog." As most of the people who blog for HuffPost do other things - and in fact it is these other things that they do that make them so interesting - they appreciate the freedom to be able to speak out when they want to but have no obligation. "Nobody is carrying the weight themselves," he added, one of the advantages of having so many contributors.

Citizen reporters
HuffPost has also been embracing the free resource of citizen journalism and is confident of its potential. During the campaign the Off the Bus initiative, in conjunction with pro-am journalism venture New Assignment, used readers as reporters and was very successful. It was actually used to break stories, such as the 'Bitter Gate' scandal, and Sekoff described how readers continue to be excited about contributing to the site. In a project called 'Blogging the Meltdown,' people recount how the economic breakdown is affecting their communities, "putting flesh and blood on the statistics." He believes that tapping into the "storehouse of information and knowledge" provided by readers could be the future of much journalism.


PERFECTING POST-ELECTION PLANS

After its tremendous success during the election campaign, HuffPost is making plans for the future. Sekoff said that main areas of focus now are the presidential transition and the world economic downturn, and Pitney explained that much of the original reporting the Washington team are doing now is centred around the bailout plan. However, the site has already diversified from its original political focus and plans to continue doing so. A $25 million funding injection from Oak Investment Partners was announced in December last year and HuffPost has been looking at how to spend it.

One major area of expansion is localizing - HuffPost Chicago began in August 2008 and is described by site founder Arianna Huffington, as "part local news source, part resource guide, part virtual soap box." It includes a roundup of local services. San Francisco is coming next. A world section, in partnership with new international news service GlobalPost was recently launched. HuffPost has plans to create an investigative journalism fund, which will fund both daily breaking scoops and longer pieces, according to Sekoff, in an effort to make sure that this vital aspect of reporting is not lost due to a financial downturn. HuffPost will hire editors, but most of the writing will be done by freelancers, Pitney explained. He added that they will try to take advantage of the skills of some of the "great journalists" who are having trouble finding work due to the current financial situation in the newspaper world.
 
Although aggregation still very much forms the basis of the news reported on the site, HuffPost's original reporting team is expanding, according to Pitney, who added that a full time congressional reporter had just been hired. There are no photographers or videographers, but all reporters have been issued with a Kite phone, allowing them to take short videos at events which "almost instantly upload to an 'embed-able' video player online."

TRUMPING TRADITIONAL MEDIA?

Arianna Huffington insisted in an interview with Iwantmedia that HuffPost is not contributing to the demise of US daily newspapers in any way. Sekoff agreed, and Pitney stressed that newspaper journalists "are vital to what we do, and hopefully we are helping their work in the sense that we send them lots of readers, and we try to highlight their best work." Sekoff mentioned that he foresees a "hybrid future" for media operations, in which people will still get their information in a variety of ways.

"Newspaper journalists are vital to what we do, and hopefully we are helping their work in the sense that we send them lots of readers, and we try to highlight their best work." 

HuffPost is just one way in that variety. It has come up with a ground-breaking formula that involves minimum expenditure but provides maximum coverage: up to date, comprehensive aggregation combined with insight from famous names and readers, all of which is obtained for free. And although reader numbers have fallen from their peak during the US election campaign, what HuffPost offers is still original and effective enough to make its continued success very likely. Its expansion into local sites could be particularly popular considering the well-documented troubles of US metropolitan newspapers, and as investigative journalism is cut at newspapers, this could be area in which HuffPost excels. One potential threat comes from the fact that more and more newspaper websites are offering aggregation services themselves, But being first off the mark, HuffPost has a significant headstart.

Forecasts for 2009 are, unsurprisingly, relatively pessimistic for traditional media and more positive for new media developments. But not all commentators were as determined as Jeff Nolan that "if 2008 was bad for newspapers, 2009 will be devastating," and many saw hope in the possibility of changes in content and format.  

Taking on Independent columnist Johann Hari, Media Guardian's Roy Greenslade finds that the "newspapers-versus-bloggers argument is entirely false," and that there is a future for the industry with the involvement of citizen journalists.

Hari uses the financial state of the industry, following the bankruptcy of the Tribune Co. and the arrival of the Internet, to form a new paradox: "more people are reading quality newspapers than ever before," he writes, and yet, "newspapers are dying."  The reason for this is, Hari says, because "we don't just want it all, we want it free."

There will be an "aching hole where newsgathering used to be," Hari writes, because the leftover sources of news--online sources, such as bloggers--don't have the resources necessary to "make sense of the world."

Greenslade disputes the "us versus them" attitude that many professional journalists take toward bloggers and other citizen journalists.  The future of journalism, Greenslade writes, lies in "participation" between the professionals and citizens.

Traditional newspaper owners are "clinging desperately to an outmoded model," and journalists are following suit, Greenslade writes.  The future of news organizations will be "very different," but there need not be a "hole" if traditional sources fail.  

"We should be finding ways to fill it," Greenslade concludes, building business models to provide resources for the future.

Source: Media Guardian

Unlike those he decries as "misguided cynics," global media mogul Rupert Murdoch believes that newspapers will reach "new heights" in the 21st century.

Although the print newspaper is going to face changes, "it will always be around," Murdoch said, in one version or another.

The media stands accused of failing to foresee the global financial crisis, of a lack of understanding of the issues, and even of having a hand in the problems we now face. The Editors Weblog has been following the debate, beginning with an interview with the Managing Editor of the Financial Times, Daniel Bogler, who highlighted the problem of the media "fanning the flames" of the crisis. Is the media responsible, or are these accusations merely a knee-jerk reaction?

Danny Schechter is a respected investigative journalist and the author of Plunder, a searing indictment of the modern banking system, the role of government in finance, and the greed-is-good mentality. Schechter's book was published one week before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on the 1st of September, and it examines the very problems that were about to unfold. The Editors Weblog spoke to Schechter about the media's failure, the ethics of advertising, responsible journalism, and the cult of the CEO.

Two key failures

Schechter believes that there were two key areas where the media failed. He says that there was little or no examination into the new breed of exotic financial products that caused many of the problems, such as CDO's, and that the media ignored the warnings from community housing organisations of the predatory lending practises in some of America's poorest communities. "This was a big media failure, we were not warned about it" says Schechter. If Schechter's assertion is correct, why did the media fail to fulfil its role? Newspapers, and the media in general, are supposed to be the fourth estate, a watchdog for citizens. Is it a lack of knowledge on the workings of high finance or has the media lost its way and become part of the problem?

Why did the media fail in its early warning role?

Schechter believes that the media failed in its role because of vested interests. He points out that one of the key sources of revenue for newspapers is real estate advertising in weekend supplements and classifieds, as well as advertisements for credit card and refinancing companies. As a result, he argues there is a connection between the real estate and newspaper industry, their future and success are intertwined. Schechter says, "The newspaper industry is the marketing arm of the real estate industry. In some cities you actually had newspapers getting a piece of the action of sales through the ads that they generated. So they were actually part of the corruption of this whole relationship. So of course there was little real scrutiny about what was actually happening in the neighbourhoods where houses were flipping, where people who couldn't afford to buy houses were buying them with bogus mortgages. Newspapers were making money on the sales of these homes."

Schechter argues that after the dot.com bubble burst back in 2000, all the advertisements from these new emerging businesses stopped, so the $3 billion in lost advertising revenue for the media industry had to be found somewhere. Schechter puts forth that credit card companies and refinancing firms stepped into the gap. He points out that the majority of people do not automatically spend money that they don't have, but it was marketed to them through the media in advertising and life-style supplements. Most of the money that the media makes in advertising is in the last quarter in the run up to Christmas, newspapers run articles on the best presents to buy, and so forth, all of it driving a concept of "buy and shop" which "stimulates consumption." Schechter says, "for me, on the consumer front newspaper's are a marketing instrument and on the investment front it's a confidence building instrument. The media was part of this whole sales machine, and it happened at the same time that newspapers were cutting back on investigative reporting, and ironically expanding business news targeted at the business world; not at the general public, not on the economy and how it affects you and me."

Has financial journalism lost its teeth?

Another criticism levelled at business reporters is that they are too close to Wall Street and the City, and have too much respect for the institutions they are supposed to be examining. John Friedman of MarketWatch was at the press conference announcing the Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch and wrote, "the media were so polite and deferential to the two CEOs; they behaved as if the press conference were a victory lap for the financial services industry." Schechter believes that "business men are seen as heroes" and it's all part of the "cult of masters of the universe"; he cites the endless sycophantic articles about Bill Gates of MicroSoft and Richard Branson of Virgin. He argues that there is a kind of "cultural embedding, as financial journalists cover business, they become part of the scene, they identify with the players, go to the parties, they are increasingly in a world of fewer and fewer people that is cut off from the mainstream of American life." He believes that many financial journalists want to be like these Masters of the Universe that they write about every day.

Schechter also says that there is no real pressure at the top of media organisations to thoroughly investigate these companies. Thee reason being that they would be investigating their advertisers. As a result, there is no impetus behind financial reporting, no push for the truth and the heart of the story, not enough cynicism.

Furthermore, with the advent of multi-platform publishing and shrinking newsrooms, journalists are frequently, "fireman, going from one fire to the next. When you are doing that, there is very little time for reflective analytical reporting."

Where is the counter-narrative?

During an interview recently on the Editors Weblog, the FT's Managing Editor Daniel Bogler said, "It's unfortunate that the financial literacy and understanding of how things work in the City and of basic accounting and so on, is actually very thin in financial journalism." Schechter agrees with Bogler's point saying, "You have people who are not really very well educated covering these issues. Hence they go to a briefing and a company gives them a story, and they don't really have a counter-narrative."

Reviewing his argument, Schechter's assessment of the media is damning indeed; but it is not unilateral. Schechter points out that many newspapers and bloggers are asking the right questions and searching for the truth in this financial crisis. He cites the UK's Telegraph and Guardian newspapers, saying they "have been way ahead. I find the coverage of the British media better, and increasingly much more critical of what is happening."
 
Omission and Commission

Looking back over the rapid collapse of the world's financial markets, and the uncertainty ahead, Schechter says it is, "a financial system failure, a regulatory failure and a media failure. Everyone is willing to talk about the first two, but they are not willing to discuss the last one. We are all in this. It's a media failure of omission and commission."
 

The big news lately has been mainstream news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, beginning to link to outside sources.  However, according to Publishing 2.0, few are talking about what impact this will have on the web's "link economy."

According to Publishing 2.0, the big players may have been slow to start news aggregation and linking, but, "now that they have figured it out, they can completely disrupt the balance of power."  In other words, even though "the 800 pound gorilla is late to the party -- he's still going to shake things up."