Results matching “the changing ne”

Nytimes.com blogger Timothy Egan points to an interesting paradox about newspapers: how can we be talking about the death knell for newspapers when readership for many publications has never been higher?

We have all seen the stories of 1,000 jobs being cut in the American newspaper industry, just this week the LA Times announced 150 editorial layoffs. However, Egan points out, "all of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater."

Although the Internet may have damaged the traditional newspaper, it has also "increased the readership of some newspapers ten-fold."

US Newspaper websites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 -- a record, and a 12 percent increase on a year ago, according to Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site.

"A visitor, it should be noted, is different from a reader, but it's the measurement of choice. The Web is the future," writes Egan.

However, online advertising accounts for only around 10 percent of total ad revenue for newspapers. In its present form, the Web format does not generate enough revenue to support a full reporting team at a national newspaper. This is an area that newspapers need to focus on, and currently only a few newspapers are doing successfully.

Egan also discusses another interesting business model for the future; could newspapers go down the route of non-profit national broadcasters such as the BBC, CBC and National Public Radio? He discusses the possibility of a quality, independent media no longer driven by the search for ad revenues.

However, this system arguably couldn't support a nationwide competitive media, but it's something worth considering, even if it is an option with limitations.

Egan's blog puts a new slant on the debate about the future of newspapers and exposes the weakness in the argument that newspapers are in their last days. Egan's research demostrates that there is much vitality in the industry and that newspapers need to adapt to a changing media environment.

Source: New York Times

From college students on Facebook, to moms, and even the EU parliament, it seems everyone these days is jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and journalists can, too. 10,000 Words recommends these sites for journalists:

Wired Journalists



The place for journalists to network and discuss the changing world of multimedia journalism. "WJ's strength," writes 10,000 Words, "is in its groups, in which members discuss topics like tutorials, audio techniques and student journalism"

LinkedIn

With 23 million members, LinkedIn offers an interactive database of hundreds of thousands of resumes; where professionals can keep in touch with current and former colleagues and be introduced to mutual contacts.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a hub for page designers, graphics journalists, and web producers. The site offers searchable color schemes and patterns, groups and a blog.

Twitter































Where news breaks first (and where social networking and microblogging converge). As 10,000 Words notes, "the site is still great for keeping up with the world in 140 characters or less."

Flickr

The after hours refuge for the photographers. Flickr offers both inspiration and a worldwide audience for amateur and professional photographers alike, as well as a place for discussion on lenses, filters and camera types.

Source: 10,000Words.net

As newsrooms increasingly seek to cut costs and embrace the concept of "mojos" (mobile journalists), some papers are going as far as to remove their journalists' desks from the office.

With the increasing use of laptops, WIFI and other technological innovations, publishers are wondering, is it necessary for journalists to have an office?

No, according to Stephen Borg, Publisher of The Record in Hackensack. The New Jersey-based newspaper is leaving its main building and relocating employees to another newspaper the company owns, The Herald News of West Paterson.

Borg is a firm believer in the concept of office "hoteling". Journalists must now make a reservation for desk time. This means there will be a lot of sharing, but 'hoteling' cuts down on the need for desks, and thus the space those additional desks would require.

Borg said, "I really view this change as "moving out into the field." He envisages mobile journalists working full-time out of the office.

With Borg's changes, the company can save some $2.4 million annually, cutting down on electricity bills, cleaning crews and all the like necessary to keep a building going.

Such innovations are arguably necessary, but it will be interesting to see how these newspapers perform after the changes have been implemented.

Click on the link below for more examples of cost-cutting/efficiency measures at newspapers.

Source: Follow the Media

See also:

UK: BBC integrates newsroom with new media on-demand production unit

US: Mobile journalism is changing the newsrooms

CNN won't go down the mobile news route

This week, Richard W. Stevenson, political editor and deputy Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, will be answering questions from readers. The Q&A is part of the Time's regular Talk to the Newsroom feature, which most recently hosted NYT managing editor, Susan Edgerley.

Stevenson started off by addressing political bias, blogs and content decisions.

What follows is an edited transcript of Stevenson's thoughts on blogging, politics and the attitude that often accompanies the two.

The Blogs/News Balance

Q. As political editor, does your franchise extend to The Caucus blog and, if so, have you established editorial guidelines for the blog that differ from guidelines for news articles and news analysis? I'm not simply referring to tenor but to subjects blogs may cover while articles and analyses shouldn't. It seems schizoid to have Kit Seelye speculating on Hillary Clinton's emotional state of mind in the blog and then doing straightforward political reporting for the newspaper...

-- Patrick Murphy, Lionville, Pa.

A. Mr. Murphy, you are on to one of the biggest challenges we face, and perhaps the solution to it as well.

Yes, The Caucus, our political blog, is a core element of our election coverage, and is fully integrated into our reporting efforts. Nearly all of our political reporters file regularly to the blog, both breaking news and other pieces that are more analytical or observational. The wonderful thing about blogs is that they are infinitely flexible, and we are always experimenting with how we can do New York Times quality journalism that takes advantage of the Web.

But as your question implies, that can be tricky, because the Web ethos is different from a traditional newsroom ethos.

Consider the Web's key attributes. First is speed, immediacy...When news breaks, we can get it online quickly, giving our users quick access to information.

Second is the ability to link to or package with all kinds of resources, from background to primary source documents to audio and video.

Third, for better or worse, is a bit of attitude - or, in many cases, a lot of attitude. A whole lot.

As we have shifted more of our focus toward the Web, we've done all we can to master and take advantage of the first two attributes, while acknowledging but keeping a wary distance from the third.

We have not relaxed our news standards for the Web. The reporting needs to be solid and as transparent as possible. It needs to be presented clearly and concisely. It needs to be fair.

But within those guidelines, we are changing our journalistic culture to adapt to the reality that the Web is a big part of our future. So sometimes we will post on The Caucus or elsewhere on our Web site a first take on a breaking news story. Then we will update it as more information becomes available.

It's a different way of doing things for those of us who came up in a system that was directed to producing a single and comprehensive version of the news at the end of the day. It can be jarring for some reporters and editors to post breaking news on the Web even though there are lots of questions we know we still need to answer for our readers.

... There's much about blogging culture that can work for us on our terms, starting with encouraging a two-way conversation with readers.

Source: The New York Times

Last Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel's new layout was unveiled to readers (see top), including "more graphics, quick-read digests of top news, blog summaries and other changes" in order to make it more attractive to busy readers, Wall Street Journal reported.

Since December, Samuel Zell has been in charge of the Tribune Co., which owns Chicago Daily News, The Orlando Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. Zell's eight billion dollar buyout left Tribune Co. with a 13 billion dollar debt "amid an industrywide meltdown", according to the WSJ.

Zell has scheduled for the Tribune Co. papers to be redesigned by September this year. Some of the changes to be made include "scaled-back page counts and further paring of employees", the WSJ said.

The new look of the Sentinel attempts to make the paper become more "eye-catching" and plentiful with interesting, "alluring" stories, WSJ wrote.

"Our community is fast moving, very modern. It's changing and growing. We need to have a paper that feels like that, too." said Charlotte Hall, Sentinel Editor.

In the last year, the Sentinel's circulation has decreased to 227, 593, compared to Miami Herald's 240,000 and St. Petersburg Times 300,000. However, the Sentinel's Sunday circulation is 332,000.

The general trend for newspaper redesign, according to the WSJ, is "splashier colour, simpler layouts and more digestible stories."

Although the new version of the Sentinel corresponds to the trend, it "isn't as radical as it could be", Hall said. Lee Abrams, in charge of innovation, "encouraged" the newspaper to "emphasize its stars" by adding front-page photographs of columnists with excerpts from columns, WSJ wrote.

Local news coverage, consumer information and "government-watchdog stories" all increased and reporters have been coached on different story-telling techniques.

According to the WSJ, Zell thinks Tribune Co.'s newspaper division is "stuck in the past", perhaps not accommodating "readers used to the pizzazz and immediacy of the Web."

It isn't clear whether a makeover will change the financial condition of Tribune Co., as ad sales have generally been declining in the newspaper industry. The Newspaper Association of America said that in the first quarter newspaper ads dropped by 13 %, Tribune Co.'s falling by 15%.

The Bakerfield Californian's redesign in March 2006 got the paper a short-paced circulation and revenue growth that soon worsened. Chief Executive Richard Beene said, "Don't expect it to turn around circulation or revenue overnight. It's not a magic bullet." In his blog, Howard Owens said that he is "surprised" that not a lot of people compared the Sentinel's revamping to the Californian, terming the makeover "shocking", "wild", "bold" but not "original".

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Baltimore Sun are next in line for the revamping; meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune is to "test new ideas" in Saturday editions. Abrams mentioned that even though the Orlando Sentinel's new design will be used as a prototype, "every paper will be left to chart its own course", WSJ wrote.

Design experts have generally given the Sentinel's new look a thumbs-up, WSJ reports. Howar Greenberg, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel publisher, said advertisers are enthusiastic about the makeover, which he thought might help improve ad revenue.

Hall said that for the time being, the readers will be "listened" to "carefully", to observe the impact that the redesign has.

Source: Wall Street Journal Online, HowardOwens.com

See also:
US: Chicago Tribune's public editor on downsizing the paper: let the readers decide
US: Tribune Co. newspaper redesign, "abrupt" and "unconventional"

Since its launch on June 1 this year, the Boston Globe's Big Picture weblog has gotten worldwide acclamation. The site is simple, includes minimal advertising and maximal visual information.

The weblog's designer, programmer and writer Alan Taylor spoke to Waxy.org about the strategy and inspiration behind the site as well as his status as "a programmer in a journalist's world."

Essentially, the Big Picture features a patchwork of large-sized photographs and minimal text, focusing on the "visual storytelling" aspect of news stories. Being a developer, Taylor was able to do tasks like building templates and formatting styles himself and the site remains as his side project.

The first thing the Globe took care of was the legal aspect of using larger-than-usual photographs. Taylor mentioned that they could not find anything in the contracts that might have prohibited that.

"The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that's only about 2 inches wide, so we'd appear to be within that limit," Taylor said.

When it comes to choosing stories, Taylor searches for stories and tries "to stock up for a rainy day too" by having "stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects."

Taylor's Browsing and Posting technique:

"I use Firefox to browse the wire on an internal site, wired up with Greasemonkey scripts to give me decent-sized thumbs, extract caption and photo ID from the IMG tags. When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

I also wrote a Photoshop script in Javascript that will grab all the images in a given folder and generate HTML with proper heights and widths for the images -- that's what I use as the body of the entry. Then I paste in captions (with some editing), grab some relevant links, write a short intro and post it."

Each entry takes him about two to three hours of work and he recently minimized the number of postings to three per week instead of one per weekday.

The Big Picture's width is achieved by taking the classic 1024-pixel-wide screen and taking out 34 pixels; so that it covers the majority of browser's scrollbars without using horizontal scrollbars.

Taylor points out that even though the Big Picture is not so well-linked to the main site, "they are still working on the relationship between articles written for the Globe that are online, and content that is produced for our online property only."

News articles usually use smaller photographs and according to Taylor, photo sites that have feature photographs seem to be missing "context, depth, story." He praises msnbc.com and the Washington Post, when it comes to the use of more photographs and less links to news stories. When Taylor links to news stories, he usually tries to stick to the New York Times family but he said that if the links are good he will use them from anywhere.
 
Taylor said that even if there is a question of bandwidth, "1024 pixel screen sizes are more prevalent, more people have faster connections" and that just as much quality could be obtained from still image as from a video.

Although web programmers might have bigger salaries than journalists, Taylor thinks that is changing. There is a question of how to make journalism positions more appealing to programmers.  

Taylor said that so far, the response to the Big Picture has been "over-the-top positive" but that he hopes that the "photographers" get the credit as well. In the 20 days since it was started, the blog has gotten 1.5 million pageviews, 1,500 comments for 20 entries and international interest due to it's "visual nature", according to Taylor.

Source: Waxy.org through Journadism
 

Patrick Saliën, Manager at Belgium's Corelio, talked about the search for a working, effective CMS, during the eighth session of the 15th World Editors Forum.

Corelio is the biggest newspaper-publisher in Belgium. When the development of news websites alongside the paper edition started during the 90's, the situation was complelety new and almost improvised. In a few years time, however, the websites became a more serious business.
 
Managers weren't complaining anymore about the websites taking market space from the paper because money was flowing. Instead the journalists were complaining. Publishing a news story on the website had become a hassle since the IT-infrastructure hadn't been updated.
 
The need for a standardized content management system was clear.

Finding the best CMS for Corelio took 1,5 years. The final choice was Polopoly.
It is a flexible and open system that specialises in news sites and is built with a decent architecture prepared for web 2.0. Polopoly took centre position of the news process in Corelio providing paper, website and  mobile distribution.

Saliën mentioned some things that other publishers should consider when changing their CMS: there will undoubtedly be delays, it's a long-term investment, not a short-term and they shouldn't expect perfection; there will be problems and bugs.

In conclusion, be sure of the reasons why you think a new CMS is necessary, how it is supposed to be set to use, be prepared and competent enough to actually work with it and never forget that content is king.

World Editors Forum SESSION THREE

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

At the sixth session of the 15th World Editors Forum, Edward Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief of Canada's Globe and Mail spoke about the process of changing the design of his paper's weekend edition. The Globe and Mail did this to maintain readers and allow them to raise the price.

As at many papers, the Globe and Mail's weekend edition is its biggest moneymaker. But many weeekend editions are losing readers. The Globe and Mail, on the other hand, has avoided this while even raising the price .

What's the story behind a successful weekend paper?

The story begins with Mr Greenspon being informed of plans to raise the price of the weekend newspaper edition. How could he as an editor justify this to the readers? Only by improving the weekend edtion, he decided. He went about this by creating more feature stories and in-depth reporting, a task that he called, "more pleasure than duty."

Four key principles were implemented. The weekend edition had to be:

- smarter
- more visual
- web-paper integrated
- more accessible

The sections were more defined than earlier versions and all were redesigned. The business section that was lagging the most. To improve this, the system of stock listings was removed and instead replaced by comments and analyses by financial journalists. As a result, the readership of the business section went up 250 %.

Other developments included the introduction of an essay to please intellectual readers. The Globe and Mail also made it possible to comment and debate the weekend's essay afterwards on the website, an aspect of the web-paper integration.

The Focus section combines magazine and interview elements, as well as a lot of science news in response to readers wishes. In turn, science photos are published on the website.

Globe Sports, Globe Life and Style, Globe Travel and local sections for Toronto and British Columbia were redesigned as well in accordance with the four key principles.

Finally all section fronts were distinguished by different colours. Bright and bold colors had a positive impact. All in all, the project has been a succes; the price of the Globe and Mail newspaper weekend edition went up January 1st and the readers have remained.

Oscar Westlund, doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg spoke about the dream of mobile news and if it will go beyond news addicts at the 15th World Editors Forum.

Oscar Westlund does research about media usage in Sweden. In his studies, he has found that although many Swedes own mobile phones with internet access and news functions, few actually use their phones for news. 86 percent of the Swedes make mobile phone calls every week but only 6 percent use their mobile for news at least once a week.
   Compared with Japan where the use of mobile media is high, the specific use of news with the mobile is actually similar to that in Sweden. A study in Japan asking the Japanese if they "often" use the mobile for news showed that 12 percent did in 2006 and 13 percent did in 2007.
    Westlund admitted that one of the reasons that Swedes don't use mobile news is that the prices for internet access on mobiles can be high. But more important to his studies is that most of the Swedes don't actually want to access news through their mobiles. People mostly use their mobiles for interpersonal communications. Some feel that using mobiles for news would add an element of stress to their lives. In fact, those that most use their mobiles for news are people aged 30-39 years. Westlund says that the use of mobile news services is linked to four types of characteristics; lifestyle, technology, socio-demographic factors and news habits. Users of mobile news look for mobiles with user friendliness, usability, transfer speed and battery life.
    All in all, Westlund concluded through his studies that mobile news will not be the future of news for the large majority of the population. But as people's needs are changing all the time it is very difficult to draw conclusions about the future.

Jim Roberts, Editor of Digital News at New York Times, USA, spoke about innovations in his newsroom at the second session of the 15th World Editors