Results matching “impressions of”

The British national, the Independent, is launching its own mobile site.  It is the latest in a string of newspapers to recognise the future importance of mobile news and the need to tap into this potentially large market. A mobile site could capture a wider readership and provide an additional flow of revenue for publishers, New Media Age reported.

Bill Swanson, digital MD at The Independent, said:

"The growth of the internet has invoked an enormous change in the world of publishing and now the ubiquity of mobile devices and the evolution of the commercial model surrounding them has finally made the medium a viable one for publishers," he said.

The media coverage of the shock death of Michael Jackson has served to highlight press dynamics, raising interesting questions concerning the nature of breaking news reporting, the cult of the celebrity and the relationship between newspapers and their online news rivals. Has the fact that most newspapers were delayed in the initial reporting of the death emphasised the widening gulf between print and digital channels of breaking news? Conversely, has the death been exploited by the printed press as a facile, reader guaranteeing hit?

The news of the performer's death, in terms of rumour, confirmation and reaction has been overwhelmingly 'digital' in expression. The scoop belonged to the Los Angeles based celebrity website, TMZ, which confirmed the death an hour after it aired whispers of a suspected heart attack. The reporting was rapid fire: time of death: 2.26pm, LA time, time of update: 2.44pm. 

This week Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, aimed at challenging market dominator Google as the world's second most popular search tool after Yahoo and AOL.

Launched on Wednesday, the European version was available to use in Beta mode while in the States the decision was made for Bing to go live. Bing was coined thus for it is supposed to represent the "sound of found," although some say it is already floundering.

According to researchers from City University London's Graduate School of Journalism, going online only could cause a newspaper to lose 75% of its revenue and web traffic can actually fall. For their report 'Taking the paper out of news,' Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti studied Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat which dropped its print edition at the end of 2007, due to declining readership and heavy losses. They interviewed the CEO and Editor-in-Chief, as well as several other editors and journalists.

The researchers state that "logic might suggest that if a newspaper's content ceases to be available in print form, the title's website would start to register a significantly higher number of visitors." But in fact, following an initial rise, the paper's unique users started to fall months after the paper went online-only, and "compared with the websites of three newspapers who retained a print version, Taloussanomat's performance looks very poor indeed." One such website is that of its main competitor, Kauppalehti, which runs an integrated print-online operation.

According to an article published on the Nieman Journalism Lab website, "print is still king", with only 3% of newspaper reading taking place online.

Journalist Martin Langveld says that his study - in which he attempts to calculate the average number of online page impressions compared to print - "was prompted" by an earlier article by John Duncan on his blog, Inksniffer, which concludes that web metric data for newspaper sites is grossly misleading. Using the UK's Guardian site as a starting point, Duncan's study shows that the act of digesting a newspaper online only equates to about 17% of the total page impressions made by its print equivalent.

The United States presidential election is over and many are asking what is going to happen to the political press that has been focusing on this monumental race for the last two years.

The Big Money points out that traditional news sites have seen record numbers of pages views, start up sites such as the Huffington Post and Politico have become front-runners in online news; candidates gave shows such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live record numbers of viewers and political figures on the cover of magazines have boosted their sales.

Google unveiled its new, much anticipated, T-Mobile G1 Android phone that is set to launch in the United States on October 22.  The G1 is direct competition for Apple's iPhone, however according to Business Week, the G1 is set to take a very different path than its counterpart.

The phone hosts the Android operating system created by Google.  It features a full Web browser and connects to the Internet with Wi-Fi technology.  It has a large touch-screen and a full Qwerty keyboard.  The GI will also have a music player which allows for downloads from Amazon.

According to Mossblog, the GI is tightly linked to Google's web-based email, contacts and calendar programs.  Users must have a Google account to use the phone and it cannot sync with PC-based calendar programs.  The G1 also hosts the Google Maps program with photographic street views of some locations.  

Critics claim that the G1 is not as stylish as the iPhone.  It is nearly 30% thicker and 20% heavier than the iPhone.  It also lacks in multimedia capabilities and does not have a built in video player.  In addition users will not be able to use standard stereo headphones with the G1.

According to Business Week, analysts predict that roughly 200,000-400,000 units will be sold this year.  The G1 will be sold for $179 USD will a two-year contract.

The phone will be released by Deutsche Telekom in the U.K. on October 22 and elsewhere in Europe in 2009.  

Sources: Business Week, Mossblog

Guardian.co.uk is still the most popular UK newspaper website, with 20,622,063 unique users last month, compared to 20,499,858 in June. This may be largely due to the sports-focused coverage that the paper featured in that month, such as the Tour de France, Wimbledon and English Test cricket, reports Guardian.co.uk.  

Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures show that Guardian.co.uk had a 28.4% increase in uniques since July 2007. Meanwhile, page impressions jumped by 1.8% to 186,430,603 in July.

Telegraph.co.uk ranks second, with 18,746,025 unique users in July, having dropped by 4.9% from 19,712,622 in June. Mail Online remains in third place with 18,705,552 uniques, a 16.8% growth from 16,015,211 in June.

Year-on-year, both Telegraph.co.uk and Mail Online experienced growth in uniques since July 2007, the figures being 108.5% and 57.7%, respectively.

Sun Online has a 69% growth in uniques from July 2007 and a 3% growth since last month, reaching 15,972,490.

Telegraph.co.uk had a decrease in page impressions from 151,857,375 to 140,318,137 while Dailymail.co.uk's page impressions surged to 143,587,842 in July from 119,483,455 in June. Mail Online, meanwhile, had 143,587,842 in July.

Times Online's and The Independent site's page views were at a record high of 123,978,303 and 27,768,695, respectively.

Independent.co.uk had a 9% plunge since last month in uniques, reaching 6,588,929 while Mirror Group Digital uniques decreased by 5% since June to 5,177,230.

UK users are more valuable in terms of advertising revenue. However, the ABCe figures show that UK audience decreased since June for Mirror.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk.

Mirror.co.uk had a drop of 73,000 to nearly 3 million uniques in the UK, whereas Telegraph.co.uk had a fall of 80,000 to 6.5 million.

Guardian.co.uk's and Times Online uniques in the UK increased to 8.5 million and 5.9 million, respectively. The figure rose for Mail Online and Sun Online to 5.5 million uniques for both titles.

The figures are expected to have an explosive growth this month, following coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games.

Source: Journalism.co.uk, Guardian.co.uk

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) is going to work with social media provider Pluck on embedding social media tools across the company's digital properties. Sky intends to boost audience interactivity by incorporating social networking features.

"With over 1 billion monthly page impressions and many millions of unique visitors, the Sky portal needed a social media platform that could support the high-volume needs of our growing network," said Andy Jonesco, Managing Director of BSkyB, the Online Business Unit.

Sky News will be the first of Sky properties to launch such tools, including blogs, discussion boards user comments and a citizen journalism section. Other Sky properties such as Sky.com, Sky Entertainment and Sky Motoring would follow suite, reported Market Watch.

Users will be able to use a single profile to access the various Sky websites, allowing for better integration.

Source: MarketWatch

The Guardian recently spoke with John Wintherow. In his first interview in nine years, the Sunday Times editor discusses the "tactile" joy of the Sunday paper, reading every word of the paper (and other nostalgia) and impersonates the competition. Below follows an edited transcript of what appears on the Guardian's website:

Over the past year, speculation about the future of the longest-serving editor in Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has mounted as his paper's sales have declined... Highly successful and very low-profile, Witherow is in some ways like his newspaper - admired and respected, but without much fanfare.
 
Declining print sales and online competition have led several newspaper groups to merge the daily and Sunday staff with their online counterparts. News International has ruled out such integration. "We will remain separate entities with separate staff" says Witherow, adding that Sunday titles suffer from integration. There will be no editorial job cuts despite an efficiency drive conducted by the Murdoch-appointed Boston Consulting Group. He is talking to his daily counterpart, James Harding, about how the Sunday can be better "represented" online - the weekly drives a third of timesonline's traffic. Witherow is boyishly enthusiastic about the "tactile" joy of a Sunday read and wonders jokily whether the environmental damage of reading his newspaper online is greater than printing all that paper. "Newsprint still has the same elemental excitement about it - don't you think that?"

He still receives a weekly call from Rupert Murdoch, typically on Saturday evenings. "It's always been the same," he says. Unlike his counterpart at the Sun, Rebekah Wade, Witherow wasn't called to give evidence in the recent House of Lords inquiry about the influence of the media titan on his titles but he has always been "open" about it, he says. Does Murdoch suggest what the paper should be covering? "No ... he just likes to know what's going on. The conversation is invariably about world economics."

...One of the biggest criticisms of recent years is that the paper breaks fewer stories than it did. Even the first two issues of the relaunched paper failed to deliver a knockout scoop. "Ideally we would have liked something bigger but you can't always organise it that way," Witherow concedes. The conservative paper has instead landed big interviews with the former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and French first lady Carla Bruni.

A former foreign and home news reporter, Witherow sounds a little nostalgic for the fiercer competition of the 1980s and accepts that "generally Sundays on the news front are not as strong as they were" then. Staff and former colleagues suggest that he is far from complacent. One calls him "absolutely relentless", regularly berating editors if he felt their sections could improve. And Witherow does admit that there's something in a rival newspaper every Sunday that he wishes he'd had.

He denies that the Sunday Times is going downmarket in a bid to beat the Associated titles or the top-selling Saturday Telegraph and instead suggests there must be something for everyone in the paper. "He knows the Sunday Times reader better than anyone else and, annoyingly, he is always right," says Will Lewis, who spent three years as Witherow's business editor before going on to edit the Telegraph.

Despite a reputation as a tough perfectionist, Witherow is relaxed, thoughtful and funny during our interview - even doing impressions of rival newspaper executives. His public image seems largely derived from his failure to grant many interviews - "are they a useful thing to do with your time?" - and from the contrast with his predecessor Andrew Neil. "Both he and Dacre are in the same mould," says Hinton. "They're old school in that way and don't hang around on TV ... You can't get him to go out for lunch after Wednesday. He is a very, very involved editor."

Witherow used to read every word of the enormous newspaper before it went to print. "I tried to do it for a few years and went cross-eyed," he laughs. "It drove me bonkers, not because of the content but just demands of time." Now he signs off every front cover and reads three main news sections before publication.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Reed Business Information is debating a pay-per-view pay model for its journalists, according to RBI managing director Jim Muttram.

Should the company adopt the idea of compensating journalists based on number of page impressions, journalists would have to take a lower basic salary in return for a commission style bonus, reports Journalism.co.uk.

"We have done some thinking about how we might reward journalists for page impressions. It's such a controversial view I think it would take some time before that comes around but it makes good sense," Muttram said.

Some companies, like Incisive Media, have already put in place similar models. At Incisive, senior editorial staff amongst the publisher's titles receive bonuses for meeting online and digital targets.

A pay-per-view model of the sort proposed by RBI is a mixed bag. Optimistically it could encourage journalists to work harder to get a story. But it is just as likely to lead to sensationalism, as journalists try and one-up each other to attract the most readers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service  

Google's recently introduced search function is getting a mixed reception.

The new feature (click on the photo fora better view) allows users to surf newspaper and other sites remotely. For example, if someone searches New York Times, Google brings up an in-page Search nytimes.com box that lets a user browse NYT content without ever going to the newspaper's site. The feature has not yet been introduced to Google's foreign language sites. See here for more details on the search function and Google's other new service, Google Trends.   

The initial fears that Google's new feature would detract from advertising revenue are still alive and well. As the New York Times and blogger Martin Belam contend, there is a risk that the new function "could reduce page impressions" for the publisher itself, reports Paid Content.

Others, however, are much more optimistic.

"If [the search] does such a great job as to make our internal search too redundant, then that's fine," said Edward Roussel, Telegraph.co.uk digital editor. "At the end of the day we want people to read our content but we don't mind how they find it."  

Guardian.co.uk blogs editor Kevin Anderson also points out that some news organizations are pushing their readers to use Google because their own search functions are so inefficient.

Source: Paid Content 

A month and half after the launch of Hubdub, we spoke with CEO Nigel Eccles about Hubdub so far, where it's going from here, and how the Hubdub concept might be a ticket to improved editorial quality.

Hubdub is part news, part e-Bay, letting would be news experts make predictions and wager Hubdub dollars about topics ranging from politics and sports, to entertainment and international affairs (see here for a full synopsis of Hubdub). Although the Hubdub team is UK based, the site questions have tended to be U.S.-centric, with politics and sports receiving the most attention. According to Eccles, Hubdub initially peaked with 40,000 unique monthly users, and has now leveled out at 20,000. Around 400 new questions and 2200 predictions are made per week. Popular questions are often ones that will be settled in the short term, with a clear-cut outcome; naturally questions of Spitzer's resignation date flooded Hubdub after the scandal broke.

Overall "the U.S. election has been huge." Case in the point: the current top question is "Will Obama drop out of the race by April 30th?" The presidential race is also a "more liquid and active market," with people tending to make higher wagers on outcomes, because "there's such a big news flow about it."

So who's your typical Hubdub user? As you'd expect, "there's certainly a group of a couple 100 hard core users." Beyond that, visitors to the site tend to split along two lines: "some people tend to focus on question creation... to get onto the [home] page," Eccles said. "Some are focused on the leader board."  Those who make more accurate predictions are ranked higher on the leader board.

As a service that puts citizen journalism in the expert seat, the accuracy rate is an interesting point of discussion. Hubdub doesn't yet have any succinct figures, but Hubdub betting rates are aligning with real life prediction rates. "Whenever we have a question that is one with real money bets, we are generally in line with those, so I would say accuracy should be quite good."

Moreover, Eccles has been impressed with the quality of the comments. "We've really moved to an era where a news organization can't produce a poor quality article and just expect people to accept it." Sometimes, "the quality of the comments is much better than the original article."

Eccles contends that the interest in Hubdub is indicative of readers' desire for someone to "come out and say what's going to happen." And therein rests a potential force to improve editorial quality.

"I've spoken to editors and journalists about this, and they saw this as an opportunity to put some discipline on journalists in terms of making predictions about what's going to happen," Eccles explained. "[The Hubdub model] is quite a good discipline mechanism" as well because it is then possible to see if a particular journalist is making successful suggestions on likely future events.

Indeed, the application of Hubdub's concept to newspapers may not be that far off.  According to Eccles, Hubdub has "very engaging functionality," with around 60 page impressions per unique user. "We would love to distribute that functionality," Eccles said. "[Users] are discussing news content, so we are aiming to take our functionality and let news organizations put it on their site."

This raises the question: is making predictions really the ultimate goal of a newspaper? Although readers may want to see journalists forecast outcomes, that type of outlook leans towards news becoming opinion, which is a concept at odds with the long standing journalism principle of striving for objectivity.

Newspapers still have time to debate; integrating Hubdub functionality within newspapers is still several months off. In the meanwhile, a more simple development will debut within weeks: a widget to place on a website "which shows where the market currently is."

Certainly such a move adds a social dimension to the news, in the same vein of the Twitter effect. Moreover, incorporating citizen journalist opinion can be an excellent way to give weight to a story.

However, there is a risk for a sort of tyranny of the majority. A blogger or journalist might choose to align his or her story with the mass opinion just for the sake of seeming authoritative: a kind of mob mentality for grown-up journalists. It's important to remember that users, while informed, are taking their cues from professional journalists; journalists can't be afraid to contradict majority opinion if that is where their research leads them.

Click here to visit Hubdub.

The Daily Mail’s online network’s popularity rose throughout January, up 31% from December to 17,9 million unique users, only 2 million behind Guardian Unlimited which totaled 19.7 million unique users.

The Guardian’s online network, which includes guardian.co.uk and observer.co.uk, also increased its unique users by 24%, up from 16 million in December.

Just under 5 million users to the Mail Online were from the UK, compared to 8.7 million for the Guardian.

Times Online, including timesonline.co.uk and www.sunday-times.co.uk, came in third place with 15 million users (up 35% from December), 6 million of which were from the UK.

Telegraph.co.uk did well last month by having a 17% rise in unique users.  The Sun Online network, incorporating thesun.co.uk, page3.co.uk and newsoftheworld.co.uk, stayed in fifth place. However, Sun Online
witnessed a 40% rise in unique users since January 2007.

The ABC altered the way the figures are presented this month. ABC reports no longer include data for page impressions.

Source: Brand Republic

A cross-section of today’s front pages selected by Robb Montgomery.

Post and comment on the Bhutto front pages posted by other visual editors.

Newspaper political blogs are becoming more and more popular these days, causing bloggers to have to answer to critics and allegations of bias on a daily basis.

There’s no question that video is one of this year’s biggest priorities for newspapers, whether national or local. In this Q&A, the Editors Weblog interviewed Alexander Houben, editor of volksfreund.tv, an online local TV channel launched by the German local paper Volksfreund. Houben describes video’s costs, its effects on journalists and how the editorial content fits the paper's strategy.

The recent terrorism plots in the UK have caused the British press to examine the restrictions on reporting on criminal investigations, which prohibit news organizations from publishing most pictures or articles about the cases and suspects.

After re-launching its site in March, the Times Online registered close to 1 million additional unique users in April. This translates to an increase of about 11%, moving from 8 million to 8.9 million unique users. 

Based on the speculation that the UK's Prince William has signed up on Facebook, The Guardian has invited several users to give their impressions of their favorite social networking sites, digital gathering places that for the most part have eluded any significant (don't even think about profitable) use by newspapers. Can they learn any new ideas from the article?

Google Print Ads Director Tom Phillips was at again this week at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention, touting the benefits of the printed newspaper and pushing his own product which has received warm reviews from newspapers that have used it.

An Online Journalism Review wiki aimed at independent publishers provides some key tips to choosing which advertising programs work best for individual news content websites.

The Mail and Guardian (MandG) Online has just launched a South African blog aggregator, Amatomu, which ranks and sorts out the country’s blogosphere according to ‘most-popular’, categories, newest postings and more. Amatomu symbolizes the paper’s evolving philosophy, from being a content producer to being a “facilitator of knowledge-makers.”

As video news on the Web gains popularity, newspapers are realizing that they can benefit greatly from allowing their journalists to get creative with online video –an expert recently gave some tips to Media Guardian on how newspapers can move forward in the video revolution.

How can a multimedia and online-focused publication be so successful in South Africa, a market in which Internet and broadband access are still relatively limited and telecommunications’ costs are excruciating? Matthew Buckland, publisher of Mail & Guardian (M&G) Online, explains how his newspaper used these obstacles to its own advantage.