Results matching “advice on the t”

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.

Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking ones.

Reading newspapers on Amazon's e-book reader the Kindle is less appealing than reading the print version, a new study by the University of Georgia has found. But portable e-readers that feature colour, photographs and touch screens could win readers back, particularly among young adults.

Over the course of a six-month study, participants read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Kindles, and then provided feedback through focus groups and interviews.

The readability of the Kindle screen impressed adults of all ages. Similarly, nearly all respondents, regardless of age, found the $489 price tag too high.

A new non-profit news website has launched in Connecticut today, Poynter Online reports, with the dual aims of reporting the news and providing its readers access to resources that are hard to find online.

The Connecticut Mirror bills itself as "an independent source of news and information about our state's government, politics and public policy". It comes in time for an important state budget and an election year.

Editor Michael Regan writes that the Guide to Politics and Government his site offers provides "the most comprehensive information available any where on the state's elected officials".

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger ruled out erecting paywalls around The Guardian's website, expressing optimism about the future of the newspaper, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Speaking as part of the Coventry Conversation series, run by the Coventry University journalism department, he said the newspaper had no plans to put up paywalls, as Rupert Murdoch has planned to do for News International titles. "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things," Rusbridger said. He did agree, though, that it was good that journalism was "trying different things".

Identify what you can offer that is unique, was Matt Kelly's advice to participants at the WAN-IFRA conference on using sports news to optimise your revenue. Digital content director at the Mirror Group (part of Trinity Mirror), Kelly led the creation of MirrorFootball.co.uk, a standalone football-focused site that has gained the paper new readership.

Kelly explained that despite a successful redesign of the Mirror's website in 2008 which resulted in a significant increase in readership, the implosion in advertising rates meant that he and his team started to think about ways to re-engage with their readers.

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.

California Watch has launched a new website, with a focus on enabling readers to learn more and take action on the investigations its team pursues.

The new website includes investigative stories by journalists from California Watch, which is a non-profit investigative news project of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), and a blog related to the beats that its reporters cover.

The Huffington Post will accept advertising in its comment sections and in the Twitter feeds it features among its pages, in an attempt to increase revenue for the high-traffic news and commentary website.

Advertisers would receive advice on how to go about participating in the comments and tweets, creating a dialogue with readers, Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman said. For example, an advertiser sponsoring the Twitter World Series page, which provides a curated discussion in real time via Twitter about the topic, might chip in with relevant statistics, he said.

Reflection and conciliation are called for during discussions on the reformation of Agence France-Presse, Le Figaro reports. 

Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. have announced plans to jointly develop an e-reading device/service with publishers interests at heart. Disillusioned with the 30-70 per cent revenue split offered by current market dominator, Amazon's Kindle, the group of publishers have decided to unite in their cause to make the e-reader opportunity more profitable. 

No details on how much each partner will invest in the venture have been released, though according to interim managing director, John Squires, there is enough in the kitty "to give us a good start". Information on staff size has similarly not been made public, nor has a company name been decided upon.

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. 

Reporting by Cecilia Campbell

With the ever increasing popularity of mobile reading devices such as mobiles phones, net-books, and e-readers, many publishers are seeing the value in producing an e-paper alongside their print editions in order to boost subscriptions and readership. Speaking at the 2nd WAN-IFRA conference on e-readers in Paris last week, Charles Lansu, Marketing Manager for NRC Handelsblad and Olivier Delteil, Business Development Manager, Digital edition, for Groupe Les Echos gave the attending publishers their insight on developing an e-paper.

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NRC Handelsblad: the first Dutch newspaper on electronic paper

Dutch financial daily NRC Handelsblad is currently the only newspaper in the country offering it's readers an e-reading edition of its publication, following its launch in early 2008. Whilst the actual editorial content is the same for both the print and digital versions, the latter also employs it's own team of designers and publishers to negotiate how the content might be presented best on the reduced screen size or devices such as e-readers and mobile phones.

Acting independently of the daily print publication is essential to the success of an e-paper, stressed  Charles Lansu, and there must be a seperate digital strategy. For NRC Handelsblad this strategy meant being available in a popular format (for example PDF, which is suited to both iRex and iLiad e-readers), offering all the content available in the print editions as well as some 'added benefits' and emphasising the 'infancy' of the product to customers, inviting them to offer feedback and help to improve the e-paper.

Reporting by Cecilia Campbell:
Speaking at the 2nd WAN-IFRA conference on e-readers in Paris last week, Stig Nordqvist, Group Director Emerging Digital Platforms and Business Development from WAN-IFRA updated everyone on the lastest buzz and tech rumours in e-reading.

Nordqvist, who has worked in-depth with e-reading for IFRA since 2002, described his view of what the new platform of e-reading will mean for news publishers. He stressed that the type of experience e-readers offer is much more relaxed than that offered by other devices, such as mobiles and laptops, which are usually used 'on-the-go'.

October 3rd saw the relaunch of Nordsee- Zeitung, a daily newspaper in Bremen, Germany, covering local news, sports, business, jobs, and community events, reported Kress. The publication, which underwent a complete visual, content and organisational overhaul, now collaborates with a news desk organisation and uses a new layout created by chief visual designer of Dortmunder newspaper, Peter Johansmeier. In a press release, Editor-in-Chief, Jost Lübben, indicated a desire to "work more regionally and locally, and have a stronger presence across various city districts and towns." The revamp follows that of various other German titles, including Handelsblatt in November, but goes against the current trend to move away from hyper-local news coverage.

With the support of a full editorial team -again, unusual in the current climate - Nordsee hopes to establish greater in-house effort and a reduced reliance on advertising for revenue. Amongst other changes saw the addition of two new economy pages "My Money", offering consumer advice and "Concrete Economy" providing analysis on the regional, national and international economy. The Nordsee also serves eight further smaller publications with content, bringing its current circulation up to an impressive130.000 daily - which looks set to increase.

Source: Kress

Mario Garcia is 62, but he's not too crazy about older people. They make his professional life difficult - older traditional readers who scream and complain when he redesigns their newspaper. And editors who embrace these readers and resist change."If an editor can't be redesigned, he or she must be re-assigned," he said to a roomful of editors. He got a laugh from his audience, but there is seriousness behind the remark.

Thinking about setting up a team of mobile journalists? Don't buy them expensive equipment. Let them use their own phones. That's the advice of Pawel Stremski, Chief editor of the integrated online newsroom at Gazeta.pl and radio TOK FM in Poland. "What's the best phone for a MoJo? His own.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that a group of residents from Orange County, California, are set to launch a non-profit news website by the end of the year. The project's initiators, who include retired state lawmakers, lawyers and newspaper reporters, hope that the Voice of the O.C. will act as a platform for watchdog, investigative and local journalism - areas particularly affected by newspaper job losses in recent years.

Joe Dunn, a former Democratic state senator who will chair the outlet's board of directors, commented that the new website aims to bridge the apparent gap between national and local news coverage, a symptom of staff cuts at the Orange County Register and the L.A. Times.

Last week, The New York Times wrote that both it and the Wall Street Journal were planning to start special editions for the San Francisco area. Searchblog's John Battelle, a San Francisco Bay Area resident, is intrigued by the idea, but offers certain caveats if the newspapers hope to achieve success.

Last week Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product manager at Google, published a response to newspaper publishers' Hamburg Declaration which was made public on 9 July. The Declaration states that "going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." It discusses ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, which is a tool created by WAN-IFRA and the European Publishers Council to enable content providers to communicate their copyright terms and conditions online in a machine-readable way. Cooperation from search engines is essential for such an initiative.

Cohen contends that publishers do in fact have to give permission before their content appears on search engines, pointing to a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol which tells search engines what can and cannot be crawled. He points out, correctly, that news organisations make their content available because they want it to be found and read via Google, which does deliver many consumer visits to newspaper websites each month.

The dilemma

The latest Morgan Stanley report on the media has caused somewhat of a sensation: it is a document on how teenagers consume media, written by a 15-year-old boy. Matthew Robson was interning at the bank for two weeks when he was asked to compile some thoughts on teenagers' media habits, and his boss was so impressed by the report that he decided to publish it.

Much of what the teenager said was not particularly ground-breaking, but his youthful frankness and the seriousness with which Morgan Stanley took the report seems to have made people think. Head of the banks team of European media analysts, Edward Hill-Wood, told the Financial Times that the report had generated five or six times more feedback than usual. The document was reportedly discussed at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference in Idaho.

Coverage has continued of the Guardian's claims that that Rupert Murdoch's News International newspaper the News of the World illegally hacked into thousands of mobile phones and then paid out more than £1million in damages to victims on condition of silence. The Guardian broke the story on Wednesday.

London's Metropolitan Police has said that it would not be reopening its files because no new evidence had come to light. However, the director of public prosecutions, a Commons select committee and the Press Complaints Commission have all said that they are launching inquiries into the conduct of News of the World journalists with regard to phone hacking.

The parliamentary inquiry will focus on executives at News International, including Rebekah Wade, the outgoing Sun editor who has been promoted to News International chief executive; Stuart Kuttner, the News of the World's outgoing managing editor; Colin Myler, the current News of the World editor; and Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International, reported the Guardian.

A concerned mother asked Joe Grimm whether or not her son, a recent journalism school graduate, has a promising future worth pursuing. She bears witness to her son's sincere but fruitless efforts to land a paying job as a journalist.

Joe Grimm is a visiting journalist at the University of Michigan who has addressed similar concerns in his live web chat and Ask the Recruiter column. Nearly a month ago he spoke on whether or not dailies are hiring given that they are laying off reporters left and right.

Twitter asks its users one question: "What are you doing right now?" It is a simple enough concept; 'tweeters' answer this question and their response enters the real time feeds of those who follow them, but it is becoming increasingly useful for reporters and papers as the social network attracts more and more users. Essentially, journalists can use Twitter in three ways: to find stories and other information and to track events, to publicise their work, and to connect with readers.

A real time feed of breaking news and thought

Twitter is an extremely useful journalistic resource: reporters can use it to watch for breaking news, follow sources and search for information. "It's like monitoring another wire service," said Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors. It can be used to get an idea of which topics are attracting interest and what people are talking about right now. There is a list of top 'trending topics' on the Twitter home page. It is a real time search, ahead of even Google in terms of timeliness.

The useful information can sometimes be hard to find amongst multiple messages about what users had for breakfast, or what they thought about last night's TV show, but as Noam Cohen said in Global Journalist "it turns out that when a million people stare at their navels, more than a few of them will also notice that the ground is shaking, the plane is nosediving, the police are shooting." Twitter is particularly relevant during events that involve large numbers of members of the public, and a shining example of its effectiveness arose after a US Airways flight landed on the Hudson River and the first picture of the plane was posted to Twitter by an observer. Online news editor at Sky News Jon Gripton, discussing his reasons for appointing a Twitter correspondent, said "it is effectively another news feed. It helps us source eyewitnesses and photos and other people who are on the scene of an event." It is also crucial for following conferences, for example.

Applications such as Tweetdeck allow users to sort their contacts into groups and to search more and more easily for Tweets on specific topics. The custom of adopting hash-tags to make searching easier has been widely adopted: if a user is tweeting about a particular subject they can add a tag into their tweet, such as #IranElection, #Mumbai, #Gaza. The hash or pound symbol distinguishes the tag from random mentions of the same word, and is a custom developed by Twitter users.

Twitter's fame as a news source grew curing the terrorist attacks on Mumbai last November, and during the ongoing conflict in Iran following the election on June 12, Twitter has come into its own, with those inside Iran using the social network to stay in touch and communicate with the outside world while phone networks are down and many websites are blocked. News outlets turned to the service for the latest updates, as they were forced to abandon the principle of only relying on their trusted sources for information due to what the New York Times described as a "news vacuum."

Questions about the reliability of Twitter have also been highlighted by events in Iran. Clearly, it is impossible to judge the authenticity of Tweets from a non-trusted source. During 'normal' circumstances, a journalist would be able to contact the 'Tweeter' for more details and verification, but that is currently overwhelmingly difficult. Journalists who incorporate news obtained by Twitter into their reporting should always be careful to stress their uncertainty about the source.

Publishing: one-to-many

According to a Harvard Business study, there is a small group of very active Twitter users: it found that "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets."  Researchers Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski concluded that "Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network": in other words, perfect for journalists looking to publicise their work. It is simple enough to use as a publicising tool: send a link to the story with a Twitter-friendly headline, which should generally be casual and chatty, even more so than web headlines.

It is without doubt a good way to attract extra readers. One of the advantages of Twitter to spread the word is that it is viral, users frequently "re-tweet" the links that they have enjoyed. A CNN breaking news feed, not actually started by CNN but purchased by the news outlet when it gained substantial recognition, was the second Twitter feed to reach one million followers and now has well over 2 million. The New York Times main feed has 1,238,673 followers at time of publishing, and the Guardian has 25,009 on its main feed, though far more on its Guardian Tech account: 782,662. Many news organisations now have multiple Twitter feeds for their different sections. Montgomery stressed the need to "explore" the best policy for your newsroom when deciding whether to stick to one or split them

Some feeds are generated automatically, and for many journalists and bloggers it has become second nature to 'tweet' an article immediately after publishing. Robb Montgomery believes that the "more successful Twitterers have moved beyond auto-tweeting their RSS feed" to make their tweets more personal. "You want to show that there's a real person there."

A social tool for branding

As well as using Twitter as a one-to-many publishing mechanism, journalists can also take advantage of the social element of Twitter, using it to connect with their readers and to receive feedback on articles. It is a contact point between reporter and reader, making the journalist more accessible. "You can run quick polls, get a pulse, get some ideas," said Montgomery. Twitter can be used as part of a journalist's own personal branding, to develop their own network of followers, depending on their personality as well as their reputation as a journalist. This could be particularly helpful for freelance journalists and bloggers.

Newspapers' advice to staff

Many news outlets have become concerned about the way that their employees use social networks such as Twitter. New York Times executive editor Bill Keller called for a "zone of trust" after reporters Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Luo and Brian Stelter sent 'tweets' on what executives were saying about the how the paper might charge for online content, amongst other things during a staff strategy meeting. Shortly after, the New York Times announced the appointment of social media editor Jen Preston via Twitter. She is to concentrate "full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers," including, it seems, policing Twitter use.

The Wall Street Journal's advice on Twitter in a staff memo is that "business and pleasure should not be mixed" and although "common sense should prevail," staff meetings should not be discussed on social networks. The Washington Post's guidelines also mentions its reliance on reporters' common sense. The AP's new rules tell reporters "Don't report things or break news that we haven't published, no matter the format, and that includes retweeting unconfirmed information not fit for AP's wires."

Embracing Twitter seems to be essential for journalists and newsrooms in today's media landscape. This does not mean that all reporters should be tweeting all day long, and certainly does not mean that they should believe everything they read, but they should familiarise themselves with the site and work out how they want to use it. A newsroom policy might be necessary to encourage or warn journalists with regards to how the paper would like to see it used, and if possible, a social media expert could monitor and coordinate the paper's efforts. It is not necessary for journalists to embrace every aspect of Twitter, but most who try it find something beneficial.

On Tuesday 30 June at 15.00 London time, Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors will be speaking at a WEF webinar on "How the real time web can improve your newspaper's journalism." More details here.