The Pink Paper has been forced to suspend the publication of its printed edition, due to the 'economic downturn', it was announced on the paper's website yesterday.
The fortnightly paper, the only national in Britain to cater for a gay readership, will cease printing after the current edition, due to insufficient advertising revenue. As a free publication, it relied entirely on advertising revenue, which has fallen sharply with onset of the economic recession.
The tabloid press is proliferating at a surprising speed in Serbia, to the extent that the country can claim to be the state possessing the greatest number of titles per habitant. This development is having interesting repercussions on mainstream reporting style.
The already impressive list of 200 dailies is increasing with the frequent arrival of new tabloid titles, such as Kurir, Press, Pravda, Alo and Grom. The wave of new newspapers is somewhat surprising as according to surveys only 9% of the population actually use the press as a information tool. According to the Belgrade based Vreme publication, the privileged position of the tabloid press lies very much in the nature of its contents and its involvement in the forming of public opinion.
The Associated Press will start distributing watchdog and investigative journalism from nonprofit organisations at no cost to its member newspapers on July 1, it announced at the 2009 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference in Baltimore. It will be a six-month trial project involving four nonprofit journalism organizations, reported a press release.
The project is aiming to provide the nonprofits with an additional distribution channel, while making it easy for the AP's 1500 member newspapers to find and use this content. It will be provided via AP Exchange, the AP's web-based delivery system, at no cost to either the newspapers or to the contributing organisations. Exchange users will have the option of routinely displaying the nonprofit journalism in their news searches.
Parliament will next Tuesday witness the testimonies of the chiefs of four regional newspaper publishers, as they deliver their views on the condition of the British local media. The issue will be slanted towards the financial situation.
The meeting will unite the Culture, Media and Sport select committee and the regional representatives, who have been named as Carolyn McCall from Guardian Media Group, Sly Bailey from Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press chief executive John Fry and Christopher Thomson from DC Thomson. Also present will be Claire Enders, the founder of media research firm Enders Analysis.
The governmental and corporate document leaking site, Wikileaks, has been awarded Amnesty International's New Media Award, for its role in the production of the revelatory document, "Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Report on Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances, Sep 2008". The attribution of this award is indicative of recognition of the work done by the site by bodies similarly concerned by the exposure of human rights abuses. Moreover, the accolade should function as an alert to the mainstream press to the exisitence of a penetrative and useful journalistic resource.
The report was based on evidence provided by Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, which suggested that more than 500 men were killed or made to disappear in a police campaign. As expressed by Wikileaks, this may have been 'with the connivance' of the Kenyan Government. The document is not publicly available in Kenya. On Friday, a UN special rapporteur investigating the events called for the resignation of the top Kenyan officials, emphasising the political significance of the evidence revealed in the report, and the utility of the online resource in global campaigns for social justice.
As newspapers continue to shutdown, some journalists have managed to stay upbeat during these tough times.
In an extensive article published by the American
Journalism Review, journalist Beth Macy describes how her fellow journalists manage to
keep good spirits despite the challenging nature of the current economy. Macy, a reporter for the state of Virginia's Roanoke Times since
1989 specializing in matters that concern the 'real-life struggles of
ordinary people', still gets "excited" when covering a good story, "even as [journalism] threatens to bail on me."
Will people voluntarily pay to read news that they could easily read for free? Cynthia Typaldos, founder of Kachingle is convinced that they will. Kachingle proposes a novel solution to the news industry's revenue problems: encourage people to donate money to their favourite sites, whether these are major news outlets or small-time blogs. The Editors Weblog spoke to Typaldos to find out more about the scheme, which is due to launch in late July or early August.
How it works
Kachingle users, who the company are calling Kachinglers, need to sign up once to set up their subscription, which, via PayPal, will charge them $5 a month. When they go to a news site that is participating in the venture, it will display a Kachingle 'medallion', which the user can click on to indicate their support for that site. The reader can choose to highlight as many or as few news sites as it wishes, and Kachingle will track the number of times that they visit that site in a month. At the end of a month their $5 will be divided and distributed proportionally between the sites which they have flagged, according to the amount of times visited (with a 15% cut going to Kachingle and 5% to PayPal.) "The algorithm is meant to be a proxy for value received the consumer," Typaldos explained.
Why will people pay?
The main reason Typaldos thinks people will be prepared to offer this $5 is not because they have a strong desire to help save newspapers but because of the social advantages of using Kachingle. Contributors create a profile that shows which sites they are supporting, which they can post to their Facebook profiles or send on Twitter, Typaldos suggested. There will even be a Facebook application. "It becomes a very real view of the things I value, part of my online persona," she explained: something which she believes is "very important" to people as their online existence becomes more and more complex. Essentially, "there's a very powerful peer pressure recognition element to Kachingle" which is what she thinks will drive people to become involved, she feels that users will be "getting something back" in the form of social recognition. The more altruistic wish to help support news would come second to this, she believes.
Another reason Typaldos gave for why Kachingle will work is simply how easy it is: a crucial factor for such a venture. Registering involves providing just basic details, and thereafter, a Kachingler's job is straightforward, marking the sites, without having to consider how much they would like to contribute to it. "There just can't be any mental transaction costs," as Typaldos put it. And the system still allows people to move freely around different publications without encountering pay walls, which Typaldos is firmly against. "Pay walls are just the kiss of death for newspapers," she claims, "we just think it's the wrong economic approach." Those who are trying to implement them "are trying to take the old business model and stick it on the Internet," which she believes is a doomed approach.
To start with, anyone who registers as a Kachingler will make a $5 a month payment. It is fixed thus because Typaldos did not want the decision of how much to contribute to be a barrier for users. The company plans, however, to allow people to give larger amounts in the future, and to encourage them to do so by suggesting amounts based on how many sites they have chosen to support. Typaldos hopes that the typical amount given will rise to about $20 a month. Unsurprisingly, content providers would like people to contribute more money, she said.
The start-up has been in contact with many major news publishers, Typaldos clarified, and these have been by no means only US based: publishers in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Brazil, Hungary and across Scandinavia, for example, have been in touch. "We are not country specific," she confirmed. For news organisations, the benefits are clear, and the medallion button is extremely easy to install: a simple Java script widget which "you can put on your site in three minutes."
Will it work?
So how much could Kachingle actually raise for newspapers? Could it make a difference? "I think that we will bring enough revenue to sites that are very high quality with original content," Typaldos asserted. She is not under any illusions that such an effort could save a major newspaper that has "debt, so many overheads, print, a huge staff," but she is confident that Kachingle could have a highly significant impact on smaller publications such as MinnPost, which has low overheads but respected journalists. "We will be very powerful for them," she added.
The idea is a good one in the sense that it manages to combine the notion that people should and can pay for news, without putting up paywalls that would block off sections of newspapers and seem incompatible with the idea that news readers should be able to jump around as they please online. It is also compatible with an advertising model. Typaldos described it as "not like tipping, not like micropayments, but we have taken the best elements of both." The fact that readers can choose what they think its worth paying for is likely to appeal to many, and the cost is sufficiently low to not be a deterrent. It does seem that quite a substantial marketing campaign will have to be carried out to spread the word and persuade people that it is worth making the effort to sign up: social pressure alone might not be enough. Once they do so, however, they will probably appreciate the service.
According to an investigation conducted by Princeton economists Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, print journalists can bask in the knowledge that their work is sill important, the American Journalism Review maintains.
The spring report, "Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post" found that "even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed - can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life." The researchers qualify that the results are "statistically imprecise", but conclude that local newspapers have an important role in the civic life of a community.
A new right-leaning online news site will be launched in the next few weeks, it was announced Tuesday by its founder, Tucker Carlson. The DailyCaller, as Carlson explained to conservative bloggers assembled at the Heritage Foundation, will be "a general-interest newspaper-format style site". The ethos of the site was summed up as such, "tell the truth, and be accurate...It's very important to live up to the basic standards of journalism."
Internet newspaper the Huffington Post has since its inception provided a means of communication and dialogue for left-leaning pundits and politicians to air their views to a predominately sympathetic audience. So it may have come as a bit of a surprise to regular readers when blogs and comments by Republican Party members began to appear more frequently on the site, Politico reports.
Surely, to obtain an appreciative reception to criticisms of their opponents and the pitch of their plans, it would be safer for Republicans to use conservative platforms, such as the RedState blog or the Wall Street Journal? Yet online political debate today, it appears, is all about stepping out of the comfort zone. Controversy and argument equal greater impact, and the reach is increased hugely by stepping into enemy territory.
According to a study by BIA, local advertising is set to slump over the next four years - however it predicts that local mobile advertising will saw. A drop of approximately $10 billion is foreseen for local advertising across newspapers, direct mail, TV, radio, yellow pages, outdoor, magazines and online, but BIA forecasts a $1.5 billion increase for mobile advertising in the same period.
The figures are indicative of the changing nature of news; digital and online advertising are included with newspapers in terms of an advertising decline, whilst it is mobile devices which currently seem to have the brightest future. The Associated Press has just revealed that a year after the launch of its mobile site, 55 million local stories have been read on it. The advent of e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, as well as the wide range of news applications on iPhones and Blackberries have undoubtedly had an impact on these figures.
In an article on the Guardian.co.uk,Peter Wilby asks if popular UK
tabloid, the Sun, still has what it takes to sway popular opinion.
"In the name of God ... Go!" were the Sun's carefully chosen words to prime minister Gordon Brown last week, as it called for an early
general election.
The future of printed media has become a major political issue in countries like the United States or France, even being debated in ad-hoc committees set up by the legislative or the executive powers. Discussions along the Potomac or the Seine rivers have been focusing on the impact of Internet and new technologies, or on the need for state subsidies.
Meanwhile, on the Vltava in Prague, a group of editors and reporters working for PPF Media, the recently created division of insurance and consumer banking group PPF, is already opening new ways of covering a whole country in what may be a newsroom of the future. With other journalists for the moment based in four provincial towns from the Czech Republic, they are launching the so-called "hyperlocal weekly" Nase adresa ("our address"), which combines print and online journalism with particular efforts to sustain high professional standards and get closer to the readers. "It can only work with well prepared journalists who will be trained in the Futuroom, our central newsroom," explains Roman Gallo, 44, director for PPF's media strategies and conceiver of the project. "We are also opening newscafés in our local bureaus, which will facilitate the contact between Nase adresa's journalists and the public, to enrich the content of our newspaper and of its webpages," adds Matej Husek, 33, director of news operations.
The newspoints, combining local newsrooms and Internet cafés in often small, rural towns, may be the most visible originality of this new undertaking. A few weeks before Nase adresa's launch, for instance, PPF Media's already hired staff had the chance to taste two products, the first print prototype of the weekly, and a cake likely to be served in the cafés. "The project represents a special challenge in terms of logistics, of room for storage, as we will be managing dozens of bistrot-Starbucks-like coffee shops in local newsrooms," comments Tomas Chejn, 41, the manager of PPF Media's branded cafés, a food specialist hired for his long time experience in quality catering. Petr Vitasek, 38, the director and chief editor for the Moravia region, based in the eastern Czech city of Olomouc, thinks this effort is worth the investment, because these "well located newspoints will be critical in getting Nase adresa's journalists to work closer to their readers."
But the whole project is innovative at other, multiple levels. To start with, for the first time a newspaper's birth is tightly associated to the creation of a multi-media training center - with several international partners including Google, Atex and the World Association of Newspapers/ World Editors Forum. The Futuroom will be a newsroom in charge of assisting and training in-house editors, some having no previous reporting experience, as much as a real life teaching field for future journalists. These will include a group of students within another partnership with Brno's Masaryk University, in the second largest Czech town.
Nase adresa's approach could also become a school case due to the organization of the newsroom. "I like how the Futuroom is shaped. Journalists are not confined to one theme, like health or education, but to a way of reporting, and I enjoy changing topics," says Vendula Krizova, reporter in the "Human approach team" and young (25) like many of her new colleagues. Adds Radim Klekner, 50, who joined the "Institutional team" - after working for 10 different newsrooms - to do researches on European Union institutions in particular: "Vertical structures dominate in traditional newspapers, while in Nase adresa it is more horizontal. In my case, for instance, I will be covering many European issues based on the Czech reality."
Klekner had some doubts initially, however, because he has been covering foreign news in the past 15 years. Why would he join a hyperlocal news project as an international editor, then? "There is a need for benchmarking with other European countries in all aspects of the Czech society, and with Nase adresa I will be able to give a EU presence in the remotest Czech villages", he believes. "Our role is to assess general issues like the lack of general practitioners in the country, compared to others, and connect them to specific cases brought up by the local newsrooms."
Local journalists with long intensive experience covering their community are also convinced they are working for an innovative project. Vitasek, in Olomouc, even tried a hyperlocal news concept on his own five years ago, called Olomoucky Tydenik. "It was a weekly published on Mondays and strong on local sports, like Nase adresa. We had to stop it after one year, but this time I have with me a 10-people team supported by PPF and by the Futuroom managers and trainers. Our office, in a central strategic area of Olomouc, will be a space for constant direct contact with readers and potential contributors."
Based on her 30 year experience in local journalism, Hana Vojtova, 52, the chief editor of the Teplice newspoint, in the north Bohemian city near the border with east Germany, also believes Nase adresa is a new improvement for community journalism: "We will get nearer to the people from the region, who are tired of politics and want to be informed on human interest stories," explains Vojtova, whose district is dramatically affected by problems like crime and unemployment. "We are going to cover better our readers's activities and their dreams!"
The project has attracted several other seasoned editors from all backgrounds, including Jiri Zavozda, 50, Nase adresa's head of the copy editing team. He just finished a seven year experience in major private television "Prima", as news editor-in-chief, after working more than a decade for national newspapers. "The TV experience was good because it teaches you how to write short, but I prefer print because it is less superficial," says Zavozda. There are other reasons why he joined the Futuroom. "I see my in-laws, who live in a little village in Moravia and who have only access to media not specifically targeted to them, national daily Mlada Fronta, newsweekly Tyden and the television. Only Nase adresa will inform them well on the Sunday afternoon firemen team's competitions, which are particularly popular in the Czech republic. We will get spectacular photos of fires being extinguished!"
Adds Peter Sabata, 48, the editor-in-chief responsible for the local newsroom: "I strongly believe in the hyperlocal level of information, with the combination of newspoints, and print, online journalism. The weekly will be a bridge from now to the near future, when everybody in the regions will be connected." Sabata just moved back to the Czech republic after eight years at the head of national Slovak paper Pravda's newsroom.
Other Nase adresa team members are particularly enthusiastic because of the new challenges specific to a project combining teaching and praxis, online and print journalism, so far never achieved at such a level. Ondrej Besperat, 31, who manages the photo-video team in a duo with veteran photojournalist Jan Silpoch, is well aware of the differences between shooting for a newspaper or for a website. Before joining the Futuroom, he was a photographer for national daily Hospodarske Noviny and then worked for Aktualne.cz, the successful, Internet-only Czech media outlet. "In printed media, you have to do one or two pictures a day, and you invest all your energy in the best one, while in Internet, you try more different perspectives as you know that several pictures are likely to be released for each story."
Besperat anticipates he is likely to spend two third of his time training reporters from the local newsrooms, at the beginning at least. "One of the main challenges will be to shoot sport with our standard high-end amateur cameras," he says. "The idea is not to have journalists who do everything all the time, but reporters who are multifunctional, able to provide good texts and images."
Nase adresa will also represent new challenges beyond the expertise usually expected from journalists, especially for the local chief editors who will have to look after a coffee shop part of their time. "Ten years ago I had a short experience working for Coca Cola, but this will be new because I am not at all a food and beverage specialist," laughs Vitasek, in Moravia. Krizova, who is glad to cover very diverse topics, is also ready for another type of special assignment as a young reporter. She will be asked to take care of children visiting the Futuroom - turned into a "Junioroom" or "media camp" - to learn how to write an article or produce a video footage.
PPF Media's project will be preparing new generations of journalists and not just showing new forms of getting and providing the news.
BACKGROUND The Czech Republic is a country of 10 million people living in 14 regions subdivided in 75 districts in total. Until 20 years ago, only the government and Communist Party related entities could publish newspapers. This was also the case for the regional dailies, and for more local publications at district or town levels. German group Verlagsgruppe Passau took over most of them in 1990 and after, under its Czech branch Vltava-Labe-Press which currently controls over 10 weeklies and over 70 dailies called Denik ("daily", followed by the name of the concerned locality). Nase adresa will have no direct competitors except in a few cases, because its editions will typically cover areas of 20-30,000 people while Denik and its affiliates are designed for larger groups, of over 100,000 inhabitants on average.
After three weeks of personal experimentation with a Kindle e-reader, a Poynter writer has seen it fit to hail the gadget as a component of the "hybrid future of the news". Bill Mitchell concluded that the Kindle would function as a third platform in his personal reading of the news, alongside printed and online forms, "I see the Kindle (and other e-readers) more as a supplement to print and online as opposed to a substitute for either."
Indeed, Mitchell's relatively positive testimony of the product, whilst
not an explicit endorsement, is an interesting contribution to the
current hot debate surrounding the relationship of devices such as the
Kindle with the beleaguered print industry and online news sites, the
latter being currently embroiled in the pay for viewing controversy.
Regardless of the controversy surrounding the revelation of MPs expense claims, both around the MPs themselves and the Telegraph's reputed purchase of the data, the episode has been an out-and-out commercial success for the Telegraph - and the reputation of newspapers in general. Sales of the publication have soared by a reported 600,000 copies in the eleven days since the initial articles on Friday 8th May. The publication's circulation boost has remained steady throughout the period, due to its progressive release of information - new revelations have been coming to light in every day's edition.
From the outset, media commentator Roy Greenslade has been keen to emphasise the fact that the Telegraph played exactly the role it should have done in publishing the data. He also makes the point that newspapers and journalism are ultimately commercial enterprises - and that those who "like to think that journalism exists independently of business" are very much mistaken. The success enjoyed by the Telegraph in relation to the scandal demonstrates the continued relevance of newspaper reporting.
It would seem that student newspapers in the UK are beset by the same problems as their mainstream counterparts - perhaps even more so. According to a survey by the Leeds Student newspaper, over 45% of UK student newspapers have had to cut their print run or cancel issues, 60% haven't hit their advertising target for the year, and over 25% of their editors "have serious concerns about their financial future."
A similar situation from a different perspective on the other side of the Atlantic: a Bloomberg report claims that the outgoing writers and editors of student publication the Harvard Crimson rarely end up at newspapers. Moreover, those current employees with journalistic ambitions "avoid mentioning it in front of classmates, wanting to avoid expressions of concern, if not ridicule" according to Abigail Phillip, 20, a junior editor at the Crimson.
In a letter sent to the Office of Fair Trading today, Google is
expected to show its support for newspaper mergers, arguing that
current laws do not reflect the true scope of competition that
relatively recent newcomers such as search engines and internet
companies, in general, represent to publishers, the Times has reported.
Despite changes to competition laws as recent as the Competition Act of
1998 and the Enterprise Act of 2002, the internet giant believes the
existing framework on mergers is potentially stifling to newspapers and
insists that if publishers are to be able to seriously compete with
other information and content providers, they should be given the
freedom to merge with the local and regional news titles of other
publishers.
The European Newspaper Publishers' Association has issued a statement in which it outlines its concerns regarding the expansion of news aggregators' activities in the field of online news using newspapers' content. The association is particularly concerned by the introduction of advertising on Google News. ENPA represents over 5,200 European newspapers.
The ENPA states is belief that "respect for copyright legislation by Google and others based on right holders' prior consent (opt-in) is essential to ensure a proper basis for discussions and partnerships between news aggregators and newspaper publishers" and calls attention to ACAP, a World Association of Newspapers-backed solution that gives publishers more control over their online content.
Writer Beth Teitell doesn't think the serious impact the (theoretical) demise of newspapers would have upon society is being communicated to the public in quite the right way. Citing a Pew survey which found that just 33% of Americans would personally miss reading their local newspapers "a lot", she writes in the Boston Globe that, "No one cares about the sanctity of the news. We need to make the case on grounds that actually matter to people." How does Teitell propose to alert people to the problem? By letting them know how their lives would really look without newspapers.
How would kidnappers write ransom notes, she muses? Or how would people wrap up valuable china during a house move? "Let the papers die, and your tableware goes down, too." Try covering your head with your iPhone during a rainstorm, she challenges - let alone the impact on papier-mâché "when your kid's homework assignment calls for making a model of Earth or an erupting volcano." It is doubtful how successful these arguments would be as part of a campaign to save newspapers, but they are entertaining nonetheless - along the same lines as a newspaper using flavoured ink and front page nudity to win back readers perhaps...
The BBC's in-house magazine, Ariel, earlier this week disclosed that
BBC News would be cutting its Paris envoy, as well as making similar
cutbacks to its offices in Moscow and Brussels, a Guardian article
reveals.
The reductions within the news arm of the BBC is part of a savings
strategy that should see the corporation save about £155 million, although "the BBC is planning to plough £70m over the same period back into BBC
News for new investments in areas such as foreign coverage, online and
on-demand news." Included in the plans is a reshuffle of the news teams in the UK. By
next April, 88.5 jobs are expected to have gone.
Citizen photo journalism outlet Citizenside has teamed up with FrontView Production to launch FrontView Report. The site is a collection of photos and videos from social, humanitarian and environmental activists who witness and record key events from around the world. "Some of them find in photography and video a powerful means to express and document their commitment and feelings," explains the summary on the site.
The photos and videos the site is designed for record "dramatic events and larger than life stories that need to be told". Uploaded photos and videos are then sold on to media companies via the site. Photos accepted have to meet the site's criteria; they must display a situation or activity with visual impact, and their content is more important than their quality. The site is a way for photographers, both professional and amateur, to profit from their work - increasingly difficult given the wealth of pictures distributed for free online.
GlobalPostwriter Patrick Winn reported on a group of academics from six Thai universities who are petitioning the country's newspapers to "choose restraint over grisly voyeurism." Thailand's editors do not seem to have too many qualms about presenting distressing images: according to Winn, "few days pass without a corpse, face-down and blood-soaked, appearing on Thai newspapers' front pages."
Yubol Benjarongkij, dean of the communication arts department at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University told Winn that she realises their campaign will be hard to win. "The [publishers] think these pictures make big sales. It's hard to change that belief." Photos that have particularly shocked her include one of the decaptitated head of a man who had hanged himself off a bridge. The academics will not propose government intervention to stop such horrifying images, however, said Yubol. The group does not intend to restrict press freedom and acknowledges that the choice ultimately lies with the publishers.
Journalists who use Wikipedia as a source for their articles have been "exposed" after a 22-year-old student in Ireland revealed that he had inserted a fake quote into a Wikipedia entry which was then used by multiple newspapers. Shane Fitzgerald, studying sociology at University College Dublin, decided to perform an experiment when he heard that French composer Maurice Jarre had died on March 30. He went swiftly to the Wikipedia page, entered his invented quote, and then watched to see who used it.
"I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong," Fitzgerald wrote in the Irish Times, after his words were used in obituaries in newspapers in the UK, India, the US and Australia. The Guardian issued a correction, having used the quotation to open its piece on the composer. In February, a similar hoax occurred in Germany, reported the Columbia Journalism Review.
The issue here is clear: journalists should not use Wikipedia as a primary source, as there is absolutely no guarantee that it is accurate. The site is an extremely useful resource for background information and for gathering more authoritative sources as most entries contain many links, but anything on it must be verified. The quote written by Fitzgerald was uncontroversial and the incident has only caused embarrassment, but deliberate misinformation could have more serious consequences if it is used in generally trustworthy sources.
A new report produced by the publishing arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers
- the world's largest professional services company - in conjunction
with the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), examines the outlook
for newspapers as they seek to realign themselves within a digital
framework and minimise the impact of the global recession.
The study identifies interactivity, specialisation and new business
models as being key to ensuring the survival of the newspaper in an
online age.
In an interview with Poynter, Kaiser mostly stresses that ASNE must take a leadership role in the future of journalism, to protect it in a time of crisis. "Our industry's business model is broken," he says, "but we as journalists have an obligation to protect, nurture and build trusted news coverage that is necessary to our democracy." He believes that newsrooms and companies need a goal to rally around, and that goal should be to concentrate on what journalism can do for communities. Editors and journalists must continue to fight: "The urgency could never be greater to take chances, be creative and use new technology to be more meaningful."