Results matching “incentive to pr”

Google searchers who use Google+ will start seeing content from the social network in their search results, Google announced yesterday.  Users will now be able to see information shared with them on Google+ in their search results along with Google+ profiles and pages related to their areas of interest. Picasa photos will also be integrated into results.

"We're transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships" says Google Fellow Amit Singhal in a blog post. The new move is described by the company as "Search, plus Your World."

Newspapers are faring well in Austria, with 73% of the country reading them on a daily basis. In the last few years, there's even been an increase.

The hyperlocal trend keeps on growing as more and more companies start hyperlocal efforts. The latest one to launch is TapIn, an iPod and iPhone app by the people behind Tackable, an app designed to make newsgathering easy. TapIn, however, is something more ambitious, as it combines several elements that are found in other location-based apps in order to disseminate and gather news. 

"We think that it's going to serve as an interesting prototype for the newspaper of the future," Tackable's chief marketing officer Luke Stangel said to Poynter. At the heart of TapIn is the idea of location-based news filtering. It may not be the ideal solution for all situations, as Poynter noted, but can work very well for news outlets that concentrate on community news.

For now, TapIn uses content from the MediaNews Group's newspapers in the San Francisco Bay region, but it already has plans to expand to Los Angeles and Denver markets, where MediaNews has more newspapers.

Two major humanitarian disasters in 2010 were covered very differently by the media: why did the earthquake in Haiti attract so much more of the Italian media's attention than the floods in Pakistan? At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, a panel discussed the aspects of a natural disaster that lead to more or less media coverage, with a specific focus on Italy.

Looking at morning and evening newscasts on major Italian TV channels, there were 150 devoted to Haiti, 88 to Pakistan and more than 350 on the summer's heatwave in Italy, pointed out Sergio Cecchini, director of communications at Italy's branch of Doctors Without Borders. 

Examiner.com has released a plan to become more quality-focused, reported Social Times. The site has been called a "content farm" in the past, and has been noted for giving journalists and bloggers the opportunity to develop a following, but not necessarily for paying them well. One contributor reportedly received $35 for twenty-five posts. The site also doesn't put the most important stories first on local sites, making top stories difficult to receive without the aid of a search engine.

The site now seems to be worried that its former way of running things has hurt its credibility. As part of a change of direction, it posted a white paper April 5th discussing how to assess quality.

UK Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has approved News Corporation's plan to spin off Sky News, clearing the way for its proposed £8bn purchase of the 61% of BSkyB it does not already own, the Guardian reported. Under the deal, the loss-making news subsidiary will be spun off into a new publicly listed company called NewsCo, and will be independently funded for 10 years. News Corporation is to license the Sky News brand to the operation for seven years, providing an incentive to renew a second funding deal.

Twitter founder Biz Stone says that the company has no plans to go public and does not need additional funding, Reuters reported.

Bloomberg has hired two more New York Times staffers for its new opinion service, Bloomberg View, reported Forbes' Jeff Bercovici in an a blog post entitled "NY Times vs Bloomberg News: It's War!" Former Times deputy editorial page editor David Shipley is heading up Bloomberg's new project.

The Daily Mail and the Sun were found guilty of contempt of court over the use of Internet photographs, Press Gazette reported. The photos in question were of a murder suspect.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service    

Freedom of speech is a basic principle on which democracy depends. But the right to say anything you want can teeter-totter between a sharp nod of agreement from some--with the underlying hope that people will use their best judgment in paying it heed or not--and a slow, quizzical shake of the head from others that suggests "I'd like to say yes, but ... some things are better left unsaid."  

NPR is of both minds, and currently struggling to strike the balance. To serve a broader interpretation of the U.S.'s first amendment, the radio news organisation is allowing more liberal use of language and tone on its Facebook page. American Journalism Review writes that in this forum, conversations tend to be more casual and offhand than on the official website. Rather than adhering to polite dialogue in the comment thread, "our Facebook users are snarky and swear like sailors" says Andy Carvin, NPR's senior strategist.

As for the more reluctant interpretation of free speech, maintaining civil dialogue is the priority, one that is contributive in nature with the intention of rounding out a story. NPR has been instituting tighter guidelines for its website, npr.org, since last October in response to what the American Journalism Review calls "barrages of inflammatory posts by trolls and spammers" that pollute the radio's discussion board. 

As the 2011 World Economic Forum starts today in Davos, Switzerland, there are abundant ways in which interested public can follow the activity via various different social media. In fact, the Forum has introduced a 'Social Media Corner' in the congress centre, to "serve as the central social hub to reach out to the general public to discuss a range of topics."

The Social Media Corner includes a Facebook station, and will stream live interviews with participants on its Facebook page. Facebook will also be used to "tap into the collective wisdom of the online population" through the use of quick Facebook polls, or 'pulses,' which in some sessions will be fed back into the panel discussion.

A great debate over media concentration has been taking place in the UK as News Corp bids to buy BSkyB, whose properties include 24-hour news channel Sky News. News Corp already owns 39% of BSkyB, more commonly referred to as Sky, and there has been much opposition to allowing the purchase of the remainder of the company.

News Corp, via its subsidiary News International, owns The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World, which account for about 37% of the national newspaper market. Sky is the UK's largest pay TV platform, reaching one third of all homes. As well as news, it focuses on sports, films and entertainment. It also has a significant radio news presence. Combined, News Corp and BSkyB would have a turnover of £7.5bn, compared to the BBC's £4.8bn. 

Technology start up Attributor, which has developed software to track how online news content is being used around the web, discovered in a study this year more than 400,000 unlicensed full copies of news articles across 44,906 sites. The five-month trial was conducted from March to July and involved "many of the nation's leading news organizations," a press release said. 70,101 articles had been copied.

The Graduated Response Trial for News also found that 75% of the sites that were copying full articles complied with the rights holders' subsequent requests to pursue licensing agreements or voluntarily removed the content. The "Graduated Response" concept in practice meant that courtesy notices of unlicensed copying were sent to the owners of 107 randomly-selected sites and removal requests were sent to the search engines to remove the listing from results and to ad networks to remove ads on the page of the copied content.

Last week in Paris, Social Media Club France hosted an event titled "Audience Engagement and Monetisation: Social Gaming, a model to follow?" where the crème-de-la-crème of France's fast-emerging social gaming sector partook in a fascinating panel discussion. Presenters included notables such as KRDS, one of only two agencies in France to be included in Facebook's Preferred Developers Consultant Program, and IFeelGoods, which is the first platform that lets retailers provide Facebook Credits as marketing incentives.

Moderated by Benoit Raphael, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Le Post.fr, the discussions covered the elements of success for social games and Facebook apps, as well as the enormous potential for virtual credits to revolutionize the way money is exchanged online. Highlights of the panel discussion can be found here, what this post is about is how this lesson in game dynamics can be applied to news sites.

One of the catch phrases heard frequently these days amongst the digerati is "adding a social gaming layer" to, well, everything. For a brilliantly clear explanation of what that means, have a look at this TED talk delivered by Seth Priebatsch. Below we'll delve into what that could mean for news sites.



Social Games: a logical extension of user generated content initiatives

For any community manager, the following statement should make complete sense: positive reinforcement is key to encouraging participation. If step one is allowing your audience to participate more, step two should be rewarding them for doing so (and steps three and four: enticing them to continue the interaction regularly and then share the experience with their friends).

This thinking is nothing revolutionary, in fact it can be traced back to social loyalty schemes that existed far before the internet did (think about your super market club card), and there are a plethora of companies that have already adapted the model to work online (Foursquare, Groupon, and recently Facebook itself just to name a few). It's adding game dynamics to these social loyalty schemes that is innovative, and this is where news publishers could stand to profit immensely.

The question isn't whether or not people are gaming on the web: more than 50% of Facebook users go online to play social games and Zynga has over 200 million individual players each month. For news publishers this poses very exciting possibilities, and the obvious question arises, as Harvard's Nieman Lab put it, "...could adding a little gameplay - and some circular icons - turn casual readers into engaged ones?"

Badges, badges, badges...and MORE badges!

It has already been more than 6 months since the Huffington Post launched its HuffPo Badges initiative, which, as Ariana Huffington explained, focuses on three key member activities, "connecting with others, engaging with our content, and moderating comments." The idea was to take the HuffPo community "to the next level" by offering recognition to top users in these areas, and perhaps even more importantly from a social gaming standard, they had plans to "add more badges and more features that will make being a part of the HuffPost community even more dynamic and rewarding."

As far as we can tell, no new badges have yet been added to the HuffPo experience, which is a big no no according to Thibault Viort of WEKA Entertainment. He explained at the Social Media Club event that at WEKA, the aim is not just to make a social game, but "to make a living game, one that grows and changes everyday". Although the very concept of badges and member ranking involves a dynamic progression, if new objectives aren't regularly introduced, the game play risks becoming stale, and as we know, the novelty factor doesn't last forever.

A new news-related social gaming experiment has just emerged on Philly.com, website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, which looks to offer a more Farmville-esque experience to users. The company behind the badges system found on Philly.com is called Badgeville, and the name is indeed a play on the stupefyingly popular Zynga game. On Philly.com, users earn points for activities they already do, such as visiting the site, reading articles, sharing content, and leaving comments. 

A visitor gains different sized trophies according to the number of points they've accumulated, and various badges for completing specific tasks, such as the "Wanderer Badge" awarded to members after their 5^th visit to the site. Through the tallying of points and badges, a site's most active users can be identified and a new dimension of analytics is possible.

Engagement Analytics

There is a massive bonus to adding game dynamics to news websites in particular, and that is engagement analytics. By tracking specific actions you want to encourage with a simple point system, you can keep a close eye on the health of your community. Furthermore, with a dynamic system that allows you to introduce new badges at a moment's notice, you can actually target specific activities that you might want to encourage more.

For instance, say you notice there has been a lull in the sharing of articles over the last week, you can take this knowledge and actually act on it by creating a new badge that is unlocked after sharing 5 articles in the next week. What's more, you can link this badge to a real world incentive by allowing sponsors in on the fun. This could be branded, for example, the Pepsi Broadcaster's Badge, and earn users a free six pack of the Pepsi product of their choice.

By coupling game dynamics with an ambitious advertising department, news publishers have a real opportunity to both increase engagement AND boost ad revenue. This can be taken a step further however, by adding a social gaming layer with real incentives to a UGC initiative, such as CNN's iReport or BBC's Have Your Say. In doing so, news outlets can also benefit from richer editorial content, thus addressing virtually every publisher's ultimate goals of providing better content, improving reader engagement and loyalty, and bringing home the bacon.

This is a guest post from Garrett Goodman, a new media consultant currently working with Citizenside, a French start-up that specialises in increasing audience engagement with its UGC hub solution, the Reporter Kit. This solution uses a proprietory system that integrates badges, grades and points to add a social gaming layer to news gathering.

According to PEJ News and Coverage Index for September 6-12, news about Koran burning threats and other anti-Muslim sentiments made up 10% of the week's news. "Indeed," the report says, "attention to those hot button issues concerning Islam almost completely overshadowed coverage of the Sept. 11 commemorations themselves."

In an article published on PoynterOnline, Angie Chuang writes on how coverage of the supposed Koran burning reflects typical media attitudes. "What did the coverage tell us about the bigger picture of how the media cover Islam and Muslim Americans?" she asks, "and what can we learn from it?" She believes the episode reveals "ongoing shortcomings in the American media," pointing out that "often, the U.S. media just skim the surface when reporting on Islam and Muslims."

Emphas.is is a new platform for photojournalism that hopes to find a business model to sustain the profession, by creating "a unique bond between photojournalists and their audience." Due to launch in early 2011, its website went live at the end of August.

It would work via crowd funding, "with a difference," the website says. The incentive to contribute would be "exclusive access to top photojournalists." This will work, says the site, because there are many photojournalism enthusiasts out there who would be interested in providing support, many amateur photographers who would be eager for contact with professionals, as well as many people who care about the different issues that photojournalists can address.

"Are content farms worth it to journalists? Will more content providers in the future be based on the content-farm strategy?" These are the questions Ellie Behling tries to answer on eMedia Vitals.

Famous for their attention to topics deemed attractive to Internet users, content farms have been continously criticized for their low quality articles. However, these articles remain high in demand and therefore relatively profitable, leading to some speculation on whether content farms are pushing traditional news sites out of the scene.

The Times iPad app, which debuted in May, is stirring up some trouble for Rupert Murdoch. PaidContent reports the £9.99-a-month app was launched without any mechanism for users to renew their subscriptions for a second month. Tuesday, the paper released an upgrade that includes a renewal mechanism via iOS' in-app purchasing system. Without a renewal system The Times risks losing a significant par of its subscribers from month to month as they would have to go back to the iTunes store to renew their subscription.

The New York Observer has launched a trial incentive programme for reporters, the Awl reported, offering bonuses to staff for web popularity and web traffic. The scheme was announced last Wednesday via a memo at a staff meeting.

In May, June and July, a first place award of $500 and second place of $300 will be offered in each category - pageviews, number of posts, new Twitter followers, number of comments, and external pickups. Each employee can win a total of $2500, the Awl specified.

The Financial Times announced its latest adjustment to its paywall last Friday, restricting free access to non-registered readers, reported paidContent:UK.

Unregistered readers will still have access to five articles a month if they enter the newspaper's website through Google's First-Click-Free plan, while users who have set up a free account on the newspaper's website can access 10 articles a month, down from 25 before.

The FT first introduced their metered access model in 2007 to give casual readers incentive to subscribe for paid content. The website now has 1.9 million readers with free accounts and 121,000 readers who pay for online content.

National Public Radio is creating a new version of its website to accompany the launch of Apple's iPad early next month, according to Poynter.

In addition to the iPad-friendly website, similar to those digital editions designed solely for smartphone access, NPR is preparing an app for the Apple's tablet too.

Media Memo's Peter Kafka reports that when the iPad launches on April 3rd, users who want to access NPR's content through their brand new iPads will be able to either download a version of the broadcaster's iPhone app, optimized for the iPad, or to visit NPR.org, which will detect the user is accessing from an iPad and will show a tailored site with "no traces of Adobe's Flash," software that the device does not support.

Nonprofit investigative news website California Watch is aiming to boost reader participation by offering a free iPod touch to its best commenters each month over the next six.  

California Watch follows in the well-tread footsteps of small blogs across the internet hoping to boost their readership and strengthen their online community.

While some sites, like Scienceblogs.org, require users simply to comment to be entered into their contests, California Watch requires its winning commenters to be "thoughtful, focused, and articulate in making your argument."

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

Hundreds of managers and executives at the bankrupt Tribune Company will get bonuses as part of a $45.6 million incentive program, under plans approved by a Delaware bankruptcy judge.

This is the largest such payment in at least 12 years and will be awarded to 720 managers. Judge Kevin Carey overruled objections by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild and the US bankruptcy trustee that the payment was too high and unwarranted, particularly considering that the company had frozen salaries for most staff. Carey found that many of the targets had already been met when he held hearings on the issue in September.