Results matching “impressions of”

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.

The Sun’s online edition claimed it attracted 56 million new unique visitors from around the world in 2006, and generated 1.2 billion page impressions last year. An online surge explained by investment, good design and sharp management.

Thanks to the Audit Bureau Circulation Electronic, UK titles will now have a better picture of Internet traffic.  By changing their standard measurement method from page impressions to unique users site traffic and print sales will be more easily comparable.