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It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

On January 12 last year GlobalPost was launched, a new international news service focused on getting the context behind the headlines, hoping to combat diminishing foreign reporting in the US. Its number of foreign correspondents is second only to the Associated Press and they are expected to provide both text and visual reports.

A year on, and the news outlet has made considerable progress in terms of covering a wide range of international stories, establishing a significant audience, and implementing a successful business model. The Editors Weblog spoke to President, CEO and co-founder Philip Balboni about his first year at the helm of this project.

Balboni was clear that he considered GlobalPost's first year a success. "It has been an extraordinary year, it has exceeded any reasonable expectations that I could have had when I started out on this journey," he said.

"To a large degree, the stories on GlobalPost are ones that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere," said Balboni. As one of GlobalPost's aims was to fill the gaps in the reporting of traditional outlets, this must be satisfying.  The news outlet has also remained true to its original stipulations: its reporting has broad geographic diversity, and consists of a wide range of types of stories and topics.

And much of this reporting has had the potential for considerable impact. Balboni highlighted a recent story on how the Taliban have been taking a cut of funds supplied by the Indiana National Guard to local Afghan contractors for development projects in Afghanistan's Khost province. The issue of the Taliban skimming American aid in Afghanistan is one to which GlobalPost has dedicated much coverage over the past few months.

Such investigative pieces are accompanied by more entertaining reporting, such as an article from Paris about how the French are rediscovering the joy of wearing berets. Correspondents also write ample blog entries.

GlobalPost adopted a relatively unique correspondent model, hiring country-based, part-time reporters who could produce one article a week. The compensation level - a monthly salary plus shares - has proven "very successful" and working for GlobalPost seems to be a popular job: the news service now has correspondents in more than fifty countries and "we have far more people who would want to work for us than we could possibly hire."

The correspondents work with regional editors based in Boston and Balboni said that so far this system has been functioning "with a remarkable degree of smoothness."

Building an audience from scratch

Developing an audience is "really more important than anything else," said Balboni. "We could have the most spectacular content in the world but if you can't build an audience for it then you can't succeed, right?"

The news outlet's highest-traffic month this year was November, when more than 750,000 people visited the site. This exceeded Balboni's goal of 600,000, set before the launch. In addition, "we are retaining more than 50% of all the visitors," he said.

The target for 2010 is to top one million unique visitors, and Balboni mentioned the company's "very sophisticated marketing strategy" aimed at audience building.

Prize partnerships

Building a brand on the web with no support from legacy media has been a considerable challenge, and GlobalPost's partnerships with other high profile brands have been very helpful in doing this, and "particularly important in the validation of GlobalPost as a brand," Balboni said. Such partnerships have helped present the outlet's content as authoritative, and often "raising our visibility is more important than any compensation we might achieve." From the beginning, GlobalPost has sought to present itself as a complement rather than a competitor to newswires and newspapers.

The partnership formed with CBS in September, for example, is a syndication deal, with CBS paying GlobalPost for help with foreign reporting. But having a broadcast news partner was also something that Balboni and his team considered a high priority in terms of brand-boosting, and such a deal "certainly goes beyond" purely syndication. He sees the recent partnership with PBS NewsHour as a "significant achievement" and mentioned that GlobalPost has upped its video production so that it might have the chance to forge other broadcast partnership. 

Compensation is obviously an important consideration, however, and syndication is one of GlobalPost's major revenue streams, the other two being advertising and subscriptions. Currently, advertising comprises about 70% of GlobalPost's income, but Balboni hopes that over time this share will fall to around 50%, with syndication and membership rising to make up the other half.

Passport to premium services

The most unusual of these revenue streams is the subscription, or membership, scheme called Passport. For $99 a year (discounted to $50 for students, academics or seniors), readers can have access to conference calls with GlobalPost reporters, the chance to suggest stories, global and country briefs and newsletters. There is also the option to commission custom research projects, something Balboni said he was "very excited about." One client, for example, has ordered a series of ten reports for the coming year. "It takes careful shepherding but it's very interesting and I think it could scale up to be a meaningful part of our Passport financial strategy," he said.

"I am very bullish on the membership aspect," Balboni said, "I think it's the hardest one but if you want to point to one thing that could be a potential salvation for quality journalism then it's that." He always wanted to encourage a subscription or membership scheme, but explained that as a new little-known media brand it would have been foolish to put up a paywall immediately.
 
Passport does not offer pure paid online content, rather additional editorial services. "My hope and my expectation is that GlobalPost will remain free and open to all but we need to find more effective ways to get all of the people who are most engaged to help support our mission," he said, specifying that GlobalPost was likely to continue to ask for, rather than to require, reader contributions. He does think, however, that it would be "entirely fair" for a news organisation to demand payment.

So far, Passport has 450 - 500 members: "just not enough," according to Balboni. He hopes to increase this by making "a strategic shift in how we market our membership" and by using some new technology starting this spring that will help the membership base and subsequent revenue to grow. Currently, visitors to the GlobalPost site can read about Passport but there is no chance to test it out first and they have to "take a leap of faith" if they want to subscribe, Balboni said.

From a purely financial standpoint, 2009 was "a decent year," especially given the global economic recession. Balboni specified that the $1 million revenue figure that was reported in November was not accurate, but described the amount as "consequential." The company's original business plan projected profitability in 2012, and Balboni thinks this is still likely.

What's next?

GlobalPost seems to have demonstrated that there is an audience for more international news and has set up a structure to cover this that works. As Balboni explained, its challenges now are to build that audience into the millions and (like almost every other news organisation) to shift its business model so that it depends less substantially on advertising.  

Editor of the London Evening Standard, Geordie Grieg, revealed the paper has managed to reduce its distribution costs from 30 pence per copy to 4p since going free, according to the Guardian.

London's major afternoon daily dropped its 50 p cover price in mid-October and went free, a move that has seen the paper's circulation more than double from 250,000 to some 600,000.

The Economist has decided to extend its paywall in the latest development in the paid content debate, adding to a UK publishing industry-wide shift in favor of paywalls.


On October 13 all archived materials older than 90 days will only be available to subscribers, rather than the 12 month free availability currently offered.

Another major change will be the subscriber-only access to the 'This week's print edition' feature, where online users (now only those who pay) can browse through the current issue as it appears in print.

"We consider this to be a premium reading experience and plan to develop the online edition of our magazine for our most loyal and engaged readers: subscribers," said Ben Edwards, the publisher of the Economist's website.

Currently an online subscription costs £50 a year, while a print subscription costs £127.

Source: MediaGuardian

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

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within the next 12 months, in a speech given at a Media Standards Trust event in London last night. While discussing how the Internet has affected journalism, Barber highlighted the need to "radically rethink" the business model that has sustained it thus far.

The path that he suggests is "figuring out what is special, distinctive and original" about a news organisation's content and focussing on that in terms of charging. Barber stressed the necessity for news outlets to establish an online platform "capable of charging for content, whether on a payment per article basis or a package subscription." Although "how these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air," it is essential to take this step, he believes, as "without new revenue streams, quality journalism will wither."

The latest issue of Courrier International to hit French newsstands gathers translated newspaper articles themed on the uncertain future of the press. From Washington, in a lengthy set of extracts from the New Republic, Paul Starr makes three strong cases for why democracy will be endangered without a newspaper. He hints that American democracy may already have been slighted seeing that national, regional and local newspapers are dwindling in terms of content they can run since printing costs have caused them to scale back on the numbers of pages they print.

He opens his debate by lamenting the fact that Americans have taken [American] journalism (in the form of a printed newspaper) for granted as newspapers have been such an ''integral part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are.''

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

The Internet has changed the way that people read newspapers in many ways: not least because news aggregators such as Google News have helped to bring readers away from the habit of focussing their news reading on just one paper's website. Now most Internet-savvy users are accustomed to visiting many different websites and choosing the source that they find appropriate for each story they would like to read. But as newspapers' print revenue drops, frustration at the way that aggregators make money out of content which is not their own has been increasing amongst newspaper publishers. Could Google's recent adoption of small text advertisements on US Google News be the last straw?

The basics of news aggregation

Many different news aggregators exist: those run by media giants such as Yahoo, those based on reader interaction such as Digg and others like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast which provide aggregation alongside original reporting and commentary. Some provide just headlines; Google News, however also collects brief excerpts from articles on its homepage, and makes them available via a search function. Unlike some aggregators such as the Drudge Report that have a human editor choosing the headlines, Google News aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. According to Google, articles are ranked based on "how often and on what sites a story appears online," and "based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity."

Google's mission

News aggregation has been an extremely controversial issue for many years. Google News creator Krishna Bharat claims that Google's service aims to "encourage readers to get a broader perspective by digging deeper into the news - reading ten articles instead of one, perhaps." This in itself is undoubtedly a respectable idea, and reflects one of the great advantages of online news for consumers: the ability to easily read around a topic. According to William Echikson, Google's Senior Manager for Communications, "Google makes the news more accessible and more interesting - encouraging people to read more and so benefiting the news industry as a whole." It can be argued that Google does indeed benefit the news industry by directing traffic to newspaper websites and hence promotes newspaper content. This is perhaps especially pertinent for smaller papers which would not otherwise get many visitors to their sites: when a major event occurs locally, they might suddenly find themselves topping the Google News homepage.

Publishers vs. Google

Despite some undeniable benefits for readers and apparent benefits for newspapers, some newspaper publishers are resentful of Google News and other similar aggregators. The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites. For Google News search results, the click through rate is only about 10%. People scan headlines and the brief article excerpts that appear but then few seem to bother to read full stories, meaning that despite their content being used, newspapers are not receiving any income. And even if people do click through, it means that they are less likely to visit newspapers' homepages and therefore newspapers cannot make much money from their premium advertising spots. There have already been protests: Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse is in the process of seeking 49 million euro in damages from Google for storing and reproducing Belgian newspapers' articles without permission. Another of the complaints that newspapers have is that the aggregators' crawlers do not distinguish between "good" journalism and everything else.

Advertising adds to conflict

Newspaper owners have also been opposed to the fact that advertisements are placed alongside search results on the general Google site, meaning that Google is directly making money from other people's content. The recent decision to place advertising on search results for the US version of Google News after keeping it ad-free for six years is a move that can only further anger many publishers, as it seems now obvious that Google is, after all, just trying to make money out of newspaper content. According to the New York Times, a Google spokesman said that Google had devised an approach that could deliver contextually relevant ads so had decided to go ahead with them. NYT writer David Carr was extremely unimpressed, stating that "newspapers' audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place."

It is not clear whether the company intends to start putting ads on Google News outside the US. According to Press Gazette, Europe's notions of "fair use" are more heavily weighted in publishers' favour than in the US. CopiePresse has asserted that it will take further legal action if ads are placed on Belgian Google News.

Newspapers' anti-aggregator options?

So, apart from simply suing Google and trying to halt a seemingly irreversible trend, how can newspapers tackle these problems, which are all the more relevant in this time of financial crisis?  One possibility is the solution provided by ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, a coalition of newspaper, magazine and book publishers led by the World Association of Newspapers, which claims to put "content owners in control of their online content in a way that is conducive to developing new online business models, putting new, high-quality content on the net and to maximizing the benefits of the relationship with search engines." In essence, it would mean that copyrighted material could not be used so freely in search engines. Over 700 news organisations have implemented ACAP as a symbolic gesture in anticipation of search engines recognising the service.

One further non-confrontational solution could be for newspapers themselves to provide more aggregation, such as the NYT's Times Extra page: an alternative homepage which includes links to articles from other sites under the Times' own stories. The Washington Post has a politics-specific Political Browser which freely links to other publications. If newspapers embraced this linking further, they could succeed in providing significant competition to aggregators. As well as just linking to other papers, they could utilise a product such as Pluck's BlogBurst, which is effectively a blog syndication service, allowing newspapers to easily search 'quality' blogs and find content to supplement their own stories. Obviously to do this newspapers must adopt "a fundamentally different mindset" to quote Scott Karp, who coined the term "link journalism": they must stop trying to keep people within their own sites and realise that sending them away to appropriately interesting articles may well keep them coming back for more. The Huffington Post, for example, thrives on sending readers away to other articles, and managed to become the most linked-to blog on the web.

Can newspapers supply the competition?

Evidently people do like to be able to get the news from many different sources around the world, and younger readers who have grown up with online news possibly have less loyalty to individual newspapers. With this in mind, newspapers could even provide a better service than Google and co. One of the problems with automated aggregators such as Google is the lack of a real editorial agenda: Google's algorithms try to judge the importance of stories in ways described above, but there is no editor to provide an informed, professional view of events by appropriately arranging stories on a homepage. A newspaper might not be able to provide as comprehensive an aggregation service as Google, but it would have the advantage of being able to offer a clear editorial voice in its selection of articles and how they appear, which is one of the aspects of newspapers that readers value highly.

Another more radical and highly controversial option to defy the search engine aggregators is to start charging for content. If newspapers were to come together and universally start charging online readers, via joint subscriptions or micropayment, they could create a newspaper-owned search engine and aggregator which included advertising and fairly distributed revenue, hence keeping all income from newspaper content within the control of newspapers. It would be a huge step, but as more and more publications contemplate a return to paid content, it seems at least a possibility.

Will Google's additional ads spur newspapers into action? Or will they continue to somewhat reluctantly tolerate the Internet giant's profit from their industry, and accept the directed traffic in return? The Internet has revolutionised the way that people read news, and aggregation and linking is undoubtedly going to continue to be a part of the news landscape. The issue is whether it will be newspapers themselves or third parties which manage the system.

Thomson Reuters plans to "roll out a major social media coverage package "to enhance its coverage of the World Economic Forum which begins tomorrow in Davos, Switzerland.  Reporters will use Twitter and YouTube to share video and updates from the Forum. 

According to Mark Jones, global community editor at Thomson Reuters, "We want to turn the coverage around, by asking delegates what they think the biggest issues facing the global economy are, then use social media to let the public offer their opinion."

In the run-up to the 16th World Editors Forum being held in Hyderabad, India March 22-25, 2009, the Editors Weblog 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. This week, we looked Global Post and Huffington Post, two news websites that are challenging the traditional newspaper business model. Below, editors from around the world share their own thoughts about ONLINE-ONLY NEWS PUBLICATIONS.

AFRICA
Azubuike Ishiekwene, Executive Director, Punch Nigeria
A Nigerian site equivalent to the Huffington Post named Saharareporters.com is a competitor of Punch, but we don't consider it a threat. However, the site has helped to keep us on our toes. We believe that print will remain an indispensable medium for the validation of meaning among readers. We have nearly 36 years of credibility which must count for something. My colleagues in the newsroom agree that competition from online can only make us stronger and is unlikely to supplant our relevance as long as we're listening to the readers.

LATIN AMERICA
Marcelo Rech, General Product Director, RBS Group, Brasil
By now, newspaper people should always have in their head that they and their newspapers are competing with every kind of consumer distraction, from YouTube to Twitter.

That's why we have to work harder and harder to promote the newspaper to the public and advertisers, especially the basic idea behind the newspaper; to be THE place for news (local, political, national, general, etc., depending on the strategy of your paper), and be far better than your competitor. This is not a new story; it is the same concern of our ancestors 150 years ago.

EASTERN EUROPE
Roman Gallo, Director of Media Strategies, PPF Financial Group
Online-only news sites are not a threat to traditional news gatherers. These project are only threats for media companies that do not understand changing media landscape, that do not understand that publishing on only one channel, one platform media (only print, only TV...) is not a future. One platform media will be able to survive only if they are strictly targeted and focused at a very clear (and I would guess a very limited) audience. In the case of my former publishing house, we are partially in competition with these sites because we run a fully-integrated and clearly targeted multimedia system. .

WESTERN EUROPE
Espen Egil Hansen, Editor-in Chief, Verdens Gang Multimedia, Norway
Several of the stand alone online news sites are really good, they are often better than us to utilize the possibilities of internet, and they force us to improve our own products. Nonetheless, I believe these are not our most important competitors.

The key now is to understand that the technological development gives traditional media a competition from a range of players we don't necessarily define as "media". There are three factors demanding that we analyze the competition with fresh eyes:

THE USER'S TIME: The time spent on popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Nettby.no and so on is dramatically longer than on news sites. This trend is reinforced by new mobile platforms like iPhone. Look around you: On the metro, in the cafeteria, at the breakfast table -in all the situations where people traditionally have been enjoying a newspaper, more and more people are now staring into some sort of screen. This represents a dramatic competitive shift because these services steal time from that which used to be allocated to newspapers and news sites.

NICHE SITES and SOCIAL NETWORK: Within any thinkable niche there exist special interest sites and services with more depth, higher quality and that are perceived as more effective than newspapers and news sites. Although many of these are not in the news business in a traditional sense, they are still our competitors because they so strongly affect the way in which we gather information in our daily life.

ADVERTISING: We are in direct competition with Google when it comes to the big advertising money. In addition, we see that the classified ads, that have been a great source of income for many, are now moving to sites not attached to traditional media houses in any way. In my mind, the most important question for 2009 is this: What will fund the journalism in the future?

Altogether, these three factors represent competitive challenges that must have consequences for all parts of our operation. Rather than pointing out the stand alone news sites as our new competitors, we need to search deeper and ask ourselves: "With this new media reality - what should we be in the future?"

NORTH AMERICA
Ed Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief, Globe and Mail, Canada
We don't see these sorts of sites as a threat per se to traditional news gathering. But we do see them as competitive. They are in the business of aggregating niche audiences around a public debate of the issues of the day. Anyone who aggregates audience obviously is a competitor, but can be seen as a partner, too.

First off, our unique proposition lies In our ability to generate the news,  often news that would not exist without our journalistic efforts, that feeds the fires of public debate. Of course, newspaper companies have long been in the commentary and opinion part of the business, too, and need to remain so.

But unlike with print, where the barriers to entry are so high, we have no option to live with many more alternatives in the digital world. So we have to consider whether we are primarily distributors or creators, along with our audiences (or communities) of content.
While I suspect we will continue to distribute through our own channels, I see no reason why we won't seek to maximize our reach by aligning our branded content through other distribution channels, such as Politico. Communities are being formed all over the place. We need to get out of the old mindset that they will come to us and go out, introduce ourselves and overwhelm them with the quality of our insights in their areas of interest.

Terry Eberle, Executive Editor and Vice President, Fort Myers News Press, Florida
Local information is what we are about. No one can compete with us for information in Southwest Florida. We must keep that in mind as we do our online work and plan our online and print newspapers. How can we make that national story local? How do we bring a national story home to our readers. On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will be sworn in as president of the United States. The world and national press will be all over that story. But, we will be on a bus traveling from Fort Myers, FL filled with people going to see this historic day. We will be on this bus, we will be doing live video on this bus. In other words, we won't be spending our time just rewriting the main story that we will receive from dozens of other places. We will spend our time reporting on this historic event through the eyes of local people.

US newspapers have recently begun working together on content sharing deals on an unprecedented scale. There has been much speculation that the driving force behind these agreements is dissatisfaction with the recent changes at AP. The most recent announcement came from five papers in the Tri-State area of the US last week.  

Content sharing deals vary and although many are just starting, a group of three papers in Florida - the Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald - started content sharing about three months ago.  However, there is one group of five papers in New Hampshire who have had an agreement in place for the past 15 years.

In an effort to understand the inner workings of content sharing, how it will affect the future of newspapers and journalism, and if these deals are related to AP's actions, the Editors Weblog spoke with Dave Solomon, the vice president of The Telegraph of Nashua in New Hampshire, and Anders Gyllenhaal, senior vice president/executive editor of the Miami Herald.

The Florida Method

Three months ago the Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald began to share content. What is most striking about this deal is the complete shift in mentality that has accompanied it. These three papers have been fierce competitors for the past 100-years and now they find themselves posting each other's stories.  According to Gyllenhaal at the Miami Herald, the shift is not designed to change the competitive relationship between the three, but it has changed the way they work together.

What was the trigger for such a change after so many years? Gyllenhaal believes that the increasingly challenging newspaper market has necessitated a more mutually supportive relationship. For the Herald, it began on the business side, "with a distribution agreement. In the case of the Herald and the Sun Sentinel, the Sun was circulating the Herald in its prime territory, and we were circulating their paper." After this, "the newsrooms began to talk, and we have come up with the initial step, a way of trading routine content between the three papers."

The papers follow a strict guideline of what content they can and cannot use. Gyllenhaal believes that "websites are where the news competition exists" so in an effort to preserve this, "you cannot pick up a story from another website and put it on your website but you can put in the paper the next day." Gyllenhaal goes on to say, "It's a defined group of stories, which are events that happened in the last 24 hours or are about to happen, and as a rule we are picking up a couple of items a day from each others websites."

Gyllenhaal reports, "What we can't pick up are things that kind of define an individual paper - in the sense of their franchise elements, their personality elements, you can't pick up columnists, major investigative pieces the things that define, the more important pieces."  This aspect of the agreement maintains the competition, therefore Gyllenhaal does not see this changing anytime soon.

What next for the Florida method?

As for the future, Gyllenhaal confirmed plans for individual departments to start working with each other across the three titles for specific stories.  He gave the example of when a sports department cannot make it to a game; they will make arrangements to get the story from one of the other papers who would be at the game. 

When asked about the possibility of expanding partnerships statewide or across the nation, Gyllenhaal believes that it is possible, but complicated.  He notes that in order to grow such a partnership it would require a different system than they have put in place.  However, there are plans to extend the content-sharing deal to two papers north of Palm Beach, but he confirmed that it is probably as far as they will go for now.

The New Hampshire model

The Nashua Telegraph has been content sharing with five of their neighbor newspapers since 1993. The deal here is different to Flordia's method as the papers are not in direct competition with each other. However, their approach does provide some insight into how such a system can work for a sustained period of time.

 
According to Solomon at The Telegraph of Nashua the system started as a means, "to get feature stories and in-depth stories from the other papers for our then-new Sunday editions that we were struggling to fill state copy."

Unlike the Florida papers, "anything and everything is available for reuse," whether on the website or in the print edition, a routine story or an in-depth investigative piece as long as they credit the newspaper of origin.

The five papers involved in the deal extended the agreement to two other papers in the state that are not part of the full open-content sharing deal.  

As for their readers, Solomon believes that they, "appreciate the better reporting." He gave the example of a hypothetical airport accident in a near-by town, Concord.  If it were to happen, the "Concord Monitor is going to write a very thorough story. They are going to give it to AP and AP is going to flatten out the language, neutralize the tone and convert it to about eight inches. I think our readers are better served by the Concorde Monitor coverage."

Are these agreements a reaction to the changes at AP?

Such content sharing deals seem to be becoming increasingly popular just at a time when a growing chorus is criticising AP: are the two related?

Gyllenhaal said that the Miami Herald's agreement had, "nothing to do with AP. We are taking a different route than those other papers, so this is unrelated to that."

The Telegraph filed a termination notice with the AP in April, so between now and 2010 the Telegraph is looking for alternative vendors.  

Solomon explained that the Telegraph's reason for terminating their AP contract was monetary, it spends around $130,000 a year on AP copy. However, this expenditure does not correlate with the amount of syndicated material that they actually use since they are so, "intensely local."

In addition to the AP, the Telegraph spends another $30,000 on syndicated copy from Scripps Howard, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Soloman is, "convinced a newspaper our size should only be paying half of that or less given the amount of syndicated material we use.  So unless I see a package where we can get AP and combo of other syndicates for half as much as what we are currently paying, I don't see any alternative but to move forward.  I don't expect that by canceling AP we will have a net savings of 130k, but expect to come out of it spending about half as much."

For Solomon, the AP is a "great institution that does remarkable work." However, he believes that "there has been a deterioration in state report over the years. Through no fault of AP personel, but through the continued reductions in staffing at the state offices."  

Solomon believes that the AP has, "demonetized world and national news because they give it to the pure play sites like Google and Yahoo."  

Solomon also pointed out that the daily news reports from most AP bureaus are 50 percent member contribution and 50 percent AP staff generated. Solomon further highlighted that this "is certainly not the case in New England, I would estimate its 80 percent member generated and 20 percent AP staff generated."  So for the Telegraph, this is another reason why the AP is not a vital contributor to its news operation.

Where will these newspapers get additional content from?

Since the Telegraph has been content sharing for the last 15 years, it is nothing new to them; however, now that they have terminated their contract with the AP, things are going to change for them.  

Solomon emphasized his hope that the Washington Post and LA Times will "seize the opportunity and become more aggressive in realizing breaking news, where they are certainly not comparable to AP at this point.  But they have the capabilities to do it."

The Telegraph will also have to find sources for sports news, photos, world and nation coverage, Nielsen ratings, top ten movie releases and so forth.  In order to do so, Solomon said the Telegraph is looking into other options that can provide content for them and even expanding upon "the state-wide cooperative that has been in existence for so long."  

What can other newspapers learn from the Miami Herald the Telegraph?

The two models for content sharing demonstrate that anything is possible when it comes to expanding a newspaper's coverage capabilities.

For some newspapers the AP will continue to be an essential part of their operation, but for others this relationship will end or significantly change. According to Solomon, the AP must not see content sharing as a threat, but what happens if this system grows?

To compound to the woes at the AP, many have voiced opposition to its new "boldness" when reporting, with some headlines that stretch far from the AP's position as a "a neutral arbiter of the news".

Whether AP sees content sharing as a threat or not, it is certainly an innovative and positive step for newspapers in the US. These newspapers are demonstrating a willingness to break down old rivalries in pursuit of more comprehensive coverage; content sharing may well be a key step on the long and difficult road to restructuring the industry for the changing industry-wide and global economic climate.

A number of US newspapers have submitted cancellation notices to the Associated Press (AP), announcing that they are dropping their contracts with the news service. Reasons range from the recent changes that the AP has made to its fee structure to its diversion from regional news. The Wenatchee World of Wenatchee, Washington, The Yakima Herald-Republic of Yakima, Washington, The Spokesman Review of in Spokane, Washington and The Post Register of Idaho Falls, Idaho, spoke to the Editors Weblog about their decision to cut back on AP content and future plans that they have.

The AP's new fee structure

The new pricing structure, approved by AP's board last year, includes state, national and international breaking news and allows newspapers to buy individual articles and other services, as opposed to its old structure of one bulk membership fee. The AP claims this will cause fee increases for only 10% of its subscribers,

But the Post Register's editor and publisher Roger Plothow refers to the new fee structure as "too rigid" and "too expensive", pointing out that the AP hasn't adapted too well to the changing newspaper industry.

Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith mentions that he had to lay off 16 of the papers staff in December 2007 and choosing to unsubscribe from the AP ("even considering the cost of replacement services") would save the paper nearly USD$300,000 and permit it to keep 10 to 15 jobs.

"The AP's declining content contribution?" or "Focus on Local News"
 
"They do far less for us than ever before. This year, we would have had to pay extra for basic Olympics coverage once included in the basic rate. And the AP staff in Olympia, the state capitol, told us they were unable to provide statewide coverage of last month's primary election. That is simply not acceptable, not considering how much we pay," says Smith.
 
The Wenatchee World, apart from financial concerns, dropped the AP for similar reasons. It wishes to pay more attention to regional news and the AP's regional reports have "gone by the wayside," says the paper's editor and publisher Rufus Woods.
 
"We've started a free story-sharing service with other papers in our region to enhance our regional report. We do it for free and it works great for everyone," says Woods.
 
"I believe that successful news organizations are gonna be the ones that will have the strongest local content and the challenge for us is that it's more expensive to provide local content than anything else," says Jenkins.
 
Plothow predicts that smaller and medium-sized regional papers will rely less on the AP for content since most of it may be obtained through other sources or be less relevant to readers of papers like the Register. He says that in two years time, the Register will be 80-90% regional and local, with only the most important national and international news articles.

"We will take our savings and invest it into local reporting resources. For newspapers like ours, local is the only future," says Plothow.

Smith reflects a similar idea: that while his paper has international and national coverage, its focus is primarily on local and regional events. For this, the Review cannot rely on the AP, he says. Perhaps it is due to the news outlet's job cuts or the "restructuring and emphasis online and in multi-media." He also mentions that dropping the AP's online service, like audio and broadcast coverage, made no change to the Review's site traffic.

"The big question is what kind of news report resonates with readers. Given changing reader habits, it may be that an all-local paper is in our future. Or perhaps just a slimmed-down national/international report," says Woods.

Newspapers defecting to AP competitors?

The Register is replacing the AP with other services such as Thomson Reuters, the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times-The Washington Post, European Pressphoto Agency, sports providers like PA Sports Ticker and a  "reconfigured coalition of regional newspapers that share content," according to Plothow.

The Review is adapting a similar technique. It may also make use of McClatchy-Tribune's proposed network that would be set up "under their auspices" and would pay the paper for any Review content that it would use.

Tim Brettingen, the AP's chief revenue officer, said that an AP contract is "one of the great bargains in the industry," in an interview with PaidContent.org.

But Spokesman Review's Smith countered that opinion, saying, "Frankly, I think it's highway robbery. And obviously, I am not alone. I have heard from several dozen editors who have dropped or soon will drop the service for most of the same reasons. Most of the major papers in our region are opting out."
 
Jenkins says that submitting a two-year cancellation notice gives the paper time to look at alternatives "that are available now" and those that "are being developed".

"When you look back two years, so many more sources would have become available in that period that it's hard to tell what will be available two years from now," Jenkins adds.

The effects of AP's pricing structure on the US newspaper industry

"The industry's going through dramatic change and we have to be open to radically new ways of doing business to stay in business. AP assumes they are a necessity but more newspapers are viewing it as a luxury and are weary of the "corporate" approach of the organization. If AP wants to partner with members in this evolution, great. If not, so be it," Woods says.
 
Smith, referring to the way in which the American media landscape is evolving, said "If more regional papers begin to share their content between themselves (as has begun in South Florida), the change to our industry will be seismic. AP has been the backbone service for more than 100 years. That could change in the next few years with AP becoming less of a provider and more of a competitor in the race to survive the new information revolution." He continued, " The mere fact that once competing news organizations -- The Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post for one example; a growing Northwest coalition for another -- will now collaborate signals a huge and unprecedented shift in the news landscape. And any sort of mass shift is going to boost the growth of fledgling content providers such as PA/SportsTicker. There will be some entrepreneurs who will make their fortunes with these changes. And new partnerships will grow between unlikely parties such as CNN and MLB.com."
 
The Post Register's Plothow predicted, "The AP will likely become a service for large newspapers. In the U.S. 1,200 of the 1,400 daily newspapers are under 50,000 circulation - these are the papers that will begin leaving the AP en masse over the next year or so." He concluded, "This will likely only improve local journalism, and national and international journalism is rapidly moving onto the Web. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen."

Circulation:

Wenatchee World: 22,579 daily, 24,414 Sunday
Yakima Herald-Republic: 38,000 daily
Spokesman Review: 89,000 daily, 113,000 Sunday
Post Register: 25,500
(last audit, June 2005)

Since 2004, the number of new, "citizen-generated" media and reporters at the US political conventions has significantly increased. It has become more difficult to differentiate between independent bloggers and traditional ones as traditional media is adopting a "multi-platform" method, according to Media Shift's Mark Glaser.

Press freedom in China has relatively loosened in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake in Sichuan, but the government is still heavy handed in directing the coverage.

Taking advantage of their unprecedented access, journalists have been generating a continous stream of updates from the disaster site, using a variety of tools including Twitter (see image). Citizen journalists as well have been active generating news from the province.

"I think we can say right now that Chinese media is reporting the quake with an intensity previously unseen," said David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project.

The openness is particularly striking when compared to the non-coverage of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, when China's press gave a short announcement that it had occurred and then fell silent.

However, according to AFP, China's journalists are by no means free from government interference. China's top propaganda director, Li Changchun, recently visited the major state-run media outlets "to deliver what appeared to be a stern reminder of the angles the press must take."

"The leadership's more open attitude toward reporting on the disaster so far is a very positive development. But it does not necessarily signal an epic shift in media policy," Bandurski said. Indeed, press repression in China has generally grown worse in the lead up to the Olympics.

Unlike Chinese journalists, foreign journalists have not reported any attempts to curb their coverage, representing what may be attempt to show a degree of openness in light of the Tibet protests.  

Sources: AFP, E-Media Tidbits 

Political newspaper and news site Politico has partnered Yahoo and will carry today the first-ever video interview of George W.Bush exclusively for an online audience.

Start political reporter Mike Allen, now at the Politico, will conduct the interview.

"It's the first time he (Bush) has granted an interview exclusively for an online audience," said Tony Fratto, deputy assistant to United States President George W. Bush and deputy press secretary.

"This interview is a natural progression in political news coverage, mirroring the change in the habits of Americans, who are increasingly turning online for their news," said Alan Warms, vice president and general manager, Yahoo! News.

Without a doubt, this interview is representative of a major shift in the habits of the audience and the credibility that is given to the Internet as a platform of distribution.

Last September, Yahoo! News had teamed with the Huffington Post to host the first-ever online presidential debate. In February, Yahoo and Politico had already partnered to conduct video interview with GOP candidates before Super Tuesday.

It seems both parties have benefited from this agreement: Yahoo! News is the most-visited overall online website, Politico can offer very in-depth and reactive political coverage.

Source: Politico.com - MediaChannel

Although some of the main findings of this year's Newsroom Barometer relate to trends of newsroom integration, the survey's results also revealed some major trends as to the future of the press and news in general.

The fact that a large share of editors believe the most common platform for news in the future will be online - and not print - is significant. It is also significant that a majority of them think the majority of news will be free in the future. Even more interesting though is the fact that these numbers have quickly grown since last year.

Among the main findings:

- A plurality - 44% - believe online will be the most common platform for reading news in the future, compared with 41% last year.  Thirty-one cited print (down from 35% last year), 12% mobile and 7% e-paper. The rest were unsure.
- A majority of editors - 56%- believe news in the future will be free, up from 48% from last year's survey. Only one third believe the news will remain paid for, while 11% were unsure.
- Two-thirds believe some editorial functions will be outsourced, despite frequent newsroom opposition to the practice.
- Perhaps one of the sadder findings of this year's Barometer, as only 45% of editors think journalism's quality will improve.

Looking 10 years into the future, what do you think will be the most common way of reading the news in your country?

Editors increasingly see online as the platform of reference for news in the future (44% compared to 40% last year), now significantly more so than print (30.6% compared to 35% last year).
Overall, 63% thought a type of digital platform will be the most common format, including 11.5% for mobile and 7% for e-paper, a relatively high figure combined (18.5%) for technologies that are still relatively uncommon. Results for mobile and e-paper stayed stable, indicating that news executives perceived few major evolutions in these technologies over the last year.

Do you think that the majority of news (print and online) will be free in the future?

A clear majority of respondents (56%) believe that the majority of news will be free in the future, a significant evolution, as only 47% answered 'Yes' last year. Only a third of respondents (33%) believe news will remain paid for. The future of the paid-for model - paid by users directly - is increasingly put into question, even by those who produce it.
Respondents from Western Europe, the cradle of the paid-for model, were less likely to believe in free news (48%). North American respondents were on par with the average, at 58.5%. The shift towards the free news model is more apparent when it comes to 'emerging' newspaper markets: in South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Asia combined, 61% of respondents believed news would be free.

One might have expected Western European and North American editors to be more open to the free news model (after giving birth to freesheets and free online news), but many still think that users should pay for a quality editorial product.

Do you think it very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not all likely that in the future some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced?

Surprisingly, nearly two thirds of respondents (64%) believed that in the future traditional editorial functions will be outsourced, despite frequent newsroom resistance to such announcements. Granted, 44% of editors thought it be merely "somewhat likely," but this shows editors are conscious of - maybe not thrilled by - the growing trend of outsourcing.

One might have expected that North Americans and Europeans (West and East) particularly believe in the outsourcing trend (as the ones primarily concerned by outsourcing due to higher staff costs), but the results pointed in the opposite direction. On average, respondents from other regions of the world were more likely to believe in the outsourcing of editorial tasks in the future.

Over the next 10 years, do you think that the quality of journalism will:

A near majority thought that journalism's quality would improve (45% versus 27% who thought it would worsen). Yet while this is positive, it also means 55% of respondents didn't affirm that journalism would improve: the finding illustrates both the relative confidence and the uncertainties of this transitional period for the newspaper industry. Furthermore, this number is slightly down from last year, when 50% of respondents thought the quality of journalism would improve.

The hardships for the North American newspaper industry continue to be felt, as a mere 30% of respondents thought that journalism's quality would improve. Similarly, Russians and Eastern Europeans (34%) and West Europeans (45.5%) were skeptical.


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

Here's Part 2 of a piece submitted to us by Chris McGillion, former Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He currently coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

In the following, he outlines five key points presented by some of his journalism students to top execs in the newspaper industry, who it seems would be better off heeding their advice :

Also read Part 1: The value of the journalism graduate.

Last year the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association (Panpa) invited five of my journalism students from Charles Sturt University (CSU) to give a keynote presentation at its annual conference in Melbourne on what their generation wanted from the newspaper of the future.

Newspaper decision-makers have access to the latest statistics and trends in audience research as a matter of course. But they rarely if at all have five representatives of Generation Y - the readership base of the future - holding court without interruption for ninety minutes on what they want in a newspaper and why.

My students made five major points. First, while not discounting a continuing (if diminishing) market for hard-copy newspapers, they argued that the "newspaper' of the future would have to be web-based in order to attract sustained patronage from their generation.

This is consistent with the results of annual surveys of first year communication students at CSU (200 in all of whom almost half are journalism students). These results show an increasing trend toward accessing news online (34.7% did so at least weekly in 2007) and decreasing hardcopy newspaper consumption (down to 41% at least weekly in 2007).

Further evidence of our students' attachment to web-based technology is daily usage of Hotmail accounts (60.7% in 2007), the Google search engine (72.7%), and social networking websites such as MySpace (33.3%).
 
Second, the student presenters argued that future web-based news sites would have to play a "gateway" role rather than the traditional "gatekeeper" role. Put simply, young people these days don't like to be told what news is or what they should consider important: personalised, tailored content will be the hallmark of Generation Y's media consumption.

Another side of this cultural shift is that Generation Y doesn't like to be told what to buy: they will certainly follow trends and adopt brands but both must be - or must appear to be - peer-recommended (and remember we are dealing with people who may have up to 400 "friends" on their social networking websites).

This shift has important implications for advertisers and thus the way media organizations fund their operations.

Third, the most popular news sites will allow for a degree of interactivity. Young people don't only want to know what's happening in the outside world: they also want the outside world to know what they think about what's happening and even, increasingly, to be the ones defining and providing whatever it is that is happening.

Fourth, reputable media organisations remain highly valued. This seems to be a function of information overload and the consequent need to filter what's "out there" together with attitudes ingrained from parents (and reinforced by teachers and public figures) about reliability and quality. 

Fifth, and most important, Generation Y will change the economics of the newspaper industry. In an internet age, young people do not see the need to pay for information.  But nor do they have the same concerns about privacy as their parents and grandparents. Their's, after all, is the "Big Brother' generation whose private lives have become the stuff of public consumption.

The students at Panpa then unveiled their idea for a proto-type web-based "newspaper". It was designed as a gateway to the internet: it allowed readers to pre-sort the news they received, to access email and other social networking sites, and to provide their own "news" stories, comment and photos. It also offered free mobile phones and/or phone accounts in exchange for personal information which the site host then sold on to advertisers.

I had worked closely with the students for three months on this presentation. Sitting in the audience of 300 or so (mostly middle-aged male) editors and publishers, I heard enough grumbling about what the students were saying to fear that the presentation was a PR disaster for the journalism course I run. "Free newspapers and mobile phones!" I heard one editor complain under his breath. "What else do these people want?"

Then, one by one, three international experts on the subject of trends in the newspaper industry - representing IFRA, INMA, and News Digital Media - were invited to respond to the students' presentation. Their message was clear, simple - and reassuring for me at least: in no uncertain terms they each told the audience that they ignored what my students told them to their peril.


Chris McGillion coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University, Australia (cmcgillion@csu.edu.au).

If you would like to contribute your views and insight, please feel free to visit our 'Contact Us' page and send us suggestions for stories or articles.

Stay tuned, as we will shortly be resuming our 'Future of Journalism' series with interviews from editors at The New York Times and the Financial Times.

There is a major shift from traditional media toward online media, and journalists should consider the journalistic possibilities of social networks, YouTube, and other new technology instead of using them for fun and socializing.

Readers of online news is up to 71% in 2007 from 60% in 2000 and 37% said they went online for news "yesterday" compared to the 22% in 2000, according to Project for Excellence in Journalism.

MediaShift journalist Mark Glaser outlines "The New Rules of Media" with this shift:

1. "News is a conversation, not a lecture"
Traditionally, reporters had the answers and told the rest of us what was going on in the world. In reality, the audience and its "collective wisdom" knows more and can be experts on a subject. Thus, news is a conversation that may begin with a journalist but extends its form online where audience can help with ideas, comments, corrections, updates, etc.

2. People control their media experience
People are now listening and watching to what they want on the devices they want, whether it be podcasts, radio, TV, etc. This allows more control over media experience, and people are "no longer slaves to programmers," according to Glaser. But what people lose are shared experiences: watching shows or sport events together or at the same time. Now with TiVo-ing or taping shows for later, people no longer can immediately talk about these shows until everyone has finished watching them.

3. "Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer"
Anyone with a cell phone or video camera can capture and share experiences, and these devices and editing software are becoming increasingly affordable. Amateurs are noticed by the work they post online, which has the power to change the agenda in politics. However, anyone can create or remix their own media, but skills to use these tools are required to stand out from the millions of others who are doing the same thing.

4. "Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die"
Because of the speed of innovation and change in technology and its importance in news dissemination and analysis, the media business must live by this same rule, originally a Silicon Valley mantra.

In the mid-'90s, the New York Times launched online-only publication called CyberTimes which later had a pay wall around its archives in order to increase diminishing print subscriptions, rather than innovate online. Eventually the Times opened all online archives and began blogs (though opposed to them in the beginning) after learning that "traditional media must live in the digital world on its own terms."

Traditional media must evolve by changing their mindset first, before adding new features.

5. "Despite Censorship, The Story Will Get Out"
People have the knowledge to get a story out around repressive governments, for instance, when China blocked YouTube because of the videos of conflict in Tibet, people viewed the sites through Google cache. Also, people can get around new technology that cannot be suppressed, for example: the music business shut down Napster, but people are still sharing music online.

As Glaser puts it, "Once the technology genie is out of the bottle, there's no way to put it back in."

6. "Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together"
With the distinction between the bloggers and journalists becoming blurrier, the animosity between the two should end, and theyshould learn from one another. Bloggers can learn about "being fair and having ethical standards" while journalists can "learn the 'incremental journalism' of bloggers, adding facts, analysis and aggregation over a period of time."

7. "Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform"
Journalists need to learn the skills of broadcast, print, and photojournalism to reach different audiences. Becoming a community moderator, a freelancer (as journalism jobs are no longer stable), learning how to design or run a website are all essential skills to acquire.

Ultimately, journalists need to understand the basic journalism skills before knowing the new technology.

Glaser writes, "It's crucial that those skills, those ethics, that fairness, is not lost in the rush to new technology...This is the best time in history for new journalists to make their own way, start their own media outlet and get noticed."

Source: PBS through I Want Media

Since the Financial Times integrated its newsroom in 2006 and moved into a new one in 2007, it has been among the few British newspapers to increase its circulation, ad revenue and profits. Changes in the editorial process resulting from integration included “storybuilding,” new work shifts and lunch-hour training sessions.

According to Group M, a media buying agency, UK internet ad spend will exceed that of TV in 2009. This would mark a major shift in media trends, since TV has been the leading advertising medium for about half a century.

A new report from private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that Internet ad spend will surpass print ad spend by 2011. Over the next four years, Internet advertising will grow at an average rate of 21%, reaching a total of $61.98 billion in 2011, whereas print advertising will continue to grow slowly, topping off at $60 billion in 2011.

RAP 21 had the opportunity to interview Azubuike Ishiekwene during the 14th World Editors Forum the unique structure of Punch newspapers' advertising department, their integration of new technology, and ultimately the future of the newspaper industry in Africa. Here's the full interview.

On June 2 Goldman Sachs announced that over the next four years, online growth will not offset print losses for the newspaper industry and downgraded the ratings of two major publishers to “sell.”