Results matching “the impact of t”

Vendors shipped a record 54.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, 39% more than the 39.2 million shipped in the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC information on PC World.

Four of the top five smartphone sellers beat their shipments records for a single quarter, according to numbers released by the International Data Corporation (IDC). Following a 98% increase in smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, Apple has regained its spot as third largest smartphone vendor, behind longtime leaders Nokia and Research in Motion

There's more fuel for the debate over council-run newspapers in the UK today, with one local newspaper revealing that its council-supported rival costs taxpayers almost £28,000 a month.

In the town of Salford, near Manchester, the council magazine Life in Salford competes with newspapers the Salford Star and Salford Advertiser. The Salford Star filed a freedom of information request to determine the cost of producing the council magazine. It determined that the council spends £27,797 per month, or an average of £333,564 per year.

By contrast, outside advertising income for the paper totaled just over £19,000 for eight issues.

The Guardian has appointed three bloggers to its new experimental Guardian Local initiative.

Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been appointed to cover the cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively. They will take on the position of 'beatbloggers', that is, bloggers who stick to a well-defined beat or coverage area.

The BBC will not try to compete with local publishers, according to director of BBC news Helen Boaden, MediaWeek reported.
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Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention, Boaden said that BBC websites would not become more localised in the future.

The UK government may ask the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to consider the impact of local council newspapers on local commercial newspaper publishers, Print Week and This is Local London report. Or it may not, media commentator Roy Greenslade points out.

Members of parliament from the three main parties last week called for council papers to be culled. Local newspapers have long protested that council papers take away from their falling market share.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building an audience from scratch

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

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

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

Prize partnerships

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

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

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

Passport to premium services

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

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

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

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

What's next?

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

Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger ruled out erecting paywalls around The Guardian's website, expressing optimism about the future of the newspaper, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Speaking as part of the Coventry Conversation series, run by the Coventry University journalism department, he said the newspaper had no plans to put up paywalls, as Rupert Murdoch has planned to do for News International titles. "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things," Rusbridger said. He did agree, though, that it was good that journalism was "trying different things".

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

The buzz keeps growing and growing around tablets - electronic devices with a touch-screen interface, e-reader capabilities, as well as web browsing among others.

Rumors about Apple's tablet, or the iSlate, as it is now being called, have been gaining momentum as the elusive and innovative device that is supposed to look like a bigger version of Apple's iPhone, prepares to launch early this year.

Several other big high-tech players have also lined up to present their own versions of the slate. Just this last Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled the Hewlett-Packard yet to be named tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

NewsNow, an fully automated, 'homegrown' in the UK news aggregator, is to remove links to many national newspaper websites over failure to reach agreement on the Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited's (NLA) proposed "Web Database License" plan. 

An inquiry into the local newspaper industry and local journalism in Scotland has been established by the Scottish Parliament, with a call for evidence launched last week.

The inquiry will examine the challenges that the local and weekly newspaper industry faces. It will consider the impact of various causes of a decline in the industry, including the recession, the internet, free council newspapers, and the UK competition rules.

It will also examine the Digital Britain report by the UK government, and its proposals for an independently funded news consortia.

A recent post on Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has rasied concerns over the potentially devasting impact the current financial crisis in the newspaper industry could have on the willingness of students to choose journalism as a profession.

Mutter argues that in a time where employment opportunities are shrinking and those who do manage to secure jobs are paid a pittance, a 'substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists' could be wiped out in a movement he dubs 'journicide'.

CNN has decided to go local. The news channel will invest in hyperlocal news aggregator Outside.in as part of the site's $7million series B funding round. CNN will begin displaying feeds from Outside.in on its newly revamped site early next year.

Outside.in aggregates news from blogs and news media sites into feeds of specific neighborhoods- there are currently 57 830 neighborhoods available (sorry, US and Canada only)- creating a personalized aggregation feed for the user. CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, will assumedly use the feeds to personalize the site for each reader.

Reporting from the AOP's Microlocal Forum in the UK, paidContent via MediaGuardian is less than enthusiastic about the prospects for postcode-level news pulling profits in 2010. 

With pressure mounting against Google from newspapers angered by the way it helps readers bypass their paywalls; the search engine giant has agreed to aid publishers by putting a cap on subscription websites.

The cap will limit free access to five articles per day, after which readers will be redirected to a registration page or payment screen. Previously, users have been able to continually view subscription articles for free by entering news websites via Google.

Johnston Press, the second largest newspaper owner (measured by weekly circulation) in Britain, has announced it will trial paywalls at six of the company's websites as of Monday in order to test the consumer reaction to charging online, reports Press Gazette.

Six newspapers- the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Whitby Gazette, the Northumberland Gazette, the Carrick Gazette and the Southern Reporter- are expected to take part in the experiment which will prevent readers from viewing content unless they sign up to pay £5 for a three month subscription.

         IN A SMALL theatre space underneath basement level of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, surrounded by videos of surreal contemporary 'dance,' the contributors to 'Libé des philosophes,' the November 19th, 2009 edition of Libération in which philosophers wrote all of the newspaper's content, gathered to ostensibly discuss the theme of 'philosophy and journalism'. We all filed in solemnly, the few young people avoiding eye contact with each other, pretending to be serious; the attitude was similar to the whole 'I'm going to go read Proust in the corner café with my notebook and black coat and coffee at 23:30 on a Saturday' kind of thing.

            The French word that is often used for 'moderated' is animé, which to my mind always means someone who 'animates' the gathering, someone who breathes life into a room of socially awkward academics, old people who have nothing better to do and young idealistic Bac or first-year Fac students. Marianne Alphant, the Centre Pompidou's lady-in-charge of expositions, and Robert Maggiori, a philosophy teacher and a regular writer for Libération, did their best as animateurs, although Maggiori was clearly in command. Probably because he seemed to be the one who organized the whole thing.

            After finding a seat, scoping the sparse audience, deciding that I was out of place then turning on the recorder (download the recording), I realized I had no actual idea what the talk was to be about. I was told to come, presumably, because I have a modest philosophy degree and an intermediate command of French; neither of which were much help when one only knows the title of the talk and have never really read Libération. Luckily for you I will draw out the interesting bits from the discussion, but it's a bit like pulling gum out of your hair; you don't get much to show for your efforts and will have to cut it in the end anyway.

            Present at the table, complete with mini bottles of water and much hand wringing underneath it, was Barbara Cassin, a philologist and sophist expert (my favorite of the speakers, 'animated' and interesting); Denis Kambouchner, a Descartes and ethics expert with big white hair; Frédéric Worms (who looks a little like Clay Shirky and managed to creep me out by staring at me for half the time), a Bergson specialist with an uncomfortable laugh; and Ruwen Ogien, who was slightly bitter about not being able to write about chemical castration.

            At first they focused on the technical and administrative details of getting 60 philosophers together to write an entire newspaper, cover to cover, including the weather and sports sections. This is the third year Libération has put together an edition written by a certain academic class, this year's philosophers having been preceded by historians and writers. Since a good portion of every newspaper that is ever published is pre-prepared as opposed to the quickly written actual 'news' parts, this posed quite a challenge for the philosophers.

            Philosophy takes a long time. The most seemingly straightforward of questions can take days or weeks to answer to one's own satisfaction, and sometimes you find at the end that you didn't even answer it or that it ends up being irrelevant to what you're working on. This is pretty much diametrically opposite to journalistic writing, and the philosophy vs. journalism, prepared vs. news theme was definitely the most interesting subject discussed by the panel, however briefly touched upon. In a nutshell, the philosophers were all competing for the pre-prepared parts during their editorial meetings, but since a good percentage of the contributors were abroad they got first dibs.

            The journalists at Libé apparently love having the philosophers there, and it's a good mix; lively discussions take place in the hallways, the pleasantness and solicitude of the philosophers enliven the journalists and together they form a community neither philosophical nor journalistic. Maybe today's struggling newspapers could learn a lesson from this and take an injection of fresh insight from 'outsiders' helping the editorial process.

            Maggiori discussed in depth these kinds practical issues, particularly the issues of dividing duties and the massive editing cuts as all the proposed articles went over the allowed length. After this Maggiori did manage to get in some nuggets that piqued my attention; he mentioned that he once met a German journalist who was taken aback by the 'Libé des philosophes' idea, and the total editorial freedom the philosophers have.

            "In Germany, it would never be possible. No newspaper would give their editing over to philosophers to write the entire edition," the German reportedly said. Maggiori thinks Libé is the only newspaper in the world that has done so, and was able to, because of the status of philosophers in France.

            In France, he said, "we are used to public and televised debates featuring philosophers, among others." Philosophers are consulted and listened to; their opinions are sought out and valued. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things about French society and a real problem in North America where it is clearly lacking.

            According to Maggiori, having a philosopher's edition allows the newspaper to have an 'organic link' with intellectuals and to facilitate the valuable 'long, slow thinking' that philosophers do. He continued to say that newspapers need to have such a link with the 'production of thought' as a way to save themselves; Libération went in the opposite direction of 'green' reporting (with short, online articles) to promote and publish the long, reflective and analytical articles of the philosophers. This is exactly the kind of quality reporting and content that has been and must continue to be newspaper's strong points if they are to survive.

            Barbara Cassin went on to detail her experience with writing about national identity and the questionnaire that accompanied that task, which was loaded with assumptions (as most non-philosophical texts are) thus required a good deal of interpretation and analysis; not quite what the writers intended but it ended up being a good article by virtue of this. Here the opposition (a concept philosophers revel in) between philosophy and journalism was seriously treated. She said "the 'time/pace' (temps) of philosophy is completely contrary to the 'time/pace' of journalism," that "while philosophers are of the 're-taking', 're-thinking', the cogitation of national identity, here in this case we had to go 'on site', find things and make phone calls" which is not really philosophers are used to doing.

            The talk continued, mostly with everyone else described what they wrote about and the process of finding a topic and writing on it. Interestingly enough, Denis Kambouchner said he knows Placebo, the alt rock/metal group, and would have liked to do a piece on them. He went on to describe the process or 'exercise' of writing journalistically as one of writing in a language of effectuation and 'in the last degree,' an 'extremely simple process for ourselves' that regardless is interesting for both the reader and writer, and valuable for society in bringing philosophical dialogue to the mainstream.

            Throughout, Maggiori controlled the talk, saving us from awkward pauses and topic drop-offs. He personally stayed the most on topic and had some good opinions.

            He thinks that rigorous philosophical critique must be defended in order to both save newspapers, which can be its home and promoter, and philosophical discussion itself. On TV, the radio, and in many newspapers journalists and writers are told to write things quickly and simply, even just mentioning a keyword. Critiques and comments are just mindless summaries, only saying whether something is good or bad with little reflection, like looking up ratings for a hair drier on the internet.

            Maggiori was clearly upset at this kind of journalism (as he outlined it), saying it has a serious negative impact on quality, and called it a 'real menace', something that as a 'stupefied avoidance of the difficult' would be 'death for us' if it appeared in Libé.  

            The speakers finished up by affirming the importance of the union of philosophy and journalism, both critiques and reflections on news and culture. Unfortunately I could not understand everything at this point because the speakers were talking quite fast, and, getting rather excited, began using a level of vocabulary and grammar I could not easily follow. Nevertheless, they all seemed in agreement that such a marriage of philosophy and journalism was important to society, and even a part of the intellectual's responsibility to reflect upon the events that shape our world, rather than just transmit 'what happened'.

            It was too bad that the questions asked seemed to rather miss the point and focused things that could have answered themselves if the inquirers had read the articles on the subjects they were asking about.  The panel seemed rather miffed by this point and eager to leave, as was I since I didn't get to ask my question.

            Actually, if had I gotten hold - from the cold, wrinkly hands of the old lady who Bogarted it - of the microphone, I'm now not sure what I was going to ask. It was surely something along the lines of the 'opposition' in the kind of work philosophers do and what journalists do that was mentioned, and the entente that they all seemed to have when thrown together to make a newspaper. I would have imagined them getting into various kinds of (potentially amusing) disagreements making publication quite difficult, but then I remembered that this is France and philosophers are respected and respectful here. This is not to pose any kind of elitist or Francophile argument about the relations and status of intellectuals in society, but it is indeed difficult, as the German reporter said to Maggiori, to imagine such a thing happening in many other countries.

            Even so, this kind of initiative of the 'special edition' type is certainly a great way for newspapers to help save themselves. Rather than focusing on online content and its instant-access, tiny summaries and gross glossing over of issues, maybe it would be a good idea for papers to play their strengths; quality reporting, respectability and accountability, high intellectual standards and intelligent critique and reflection. However those who stick to the paper format are still running a business after all, and unfortunately quality and intellect doesn't always sell.

WMA recording of the panel

With all the recent hype surrounding Google's aggregation of news websites, one blogger has carried out a simple observation task with some interesting results. Kevin Sablan, writing for his blog Almighty Link, decided to find out just how much Google relies on news organizations for content.

UK publisher Haymarket will close two of its media-focused titles this week. Twenty-five year old Mediaweek will cease to publish immediately with today being its final day in print and Revolution, a monthly publication will now become a give away quarterly publication within marketing.

The decision is part of a wider restructure of Haymarket's marketing and advertising trade titles and is expected to see 18 out of 58 editorial jobs slashed.

A few days ago in an interview with Sky News Australia, Rupert Murdoch declared he would remove his newspapers from Google results, accusing the search engine of "stealing stories."

Online traffic analyst, Hitwise, has posted an article revealing that the media mogul's threats could have a disasterous impact on the exposure of the newspapers' sites to potential readers.

The news industry is being forced to navigate some rough weather with numbers of cutbacks and closures seeming to increase each week amidst growing financial pressure. In the dismal climate, one thing many publications have made cuts on it the budget for interns, reports Editor & Publisher, reducing the numbers they take on and in some cases removing programs altogether.

"It was either staff or interns," said Julie Engebrecht, The Cincinnati Enquirer's director of news. Her paper has  not to take on any interns for the past five years, previously hiring up to twelve paid interns per year. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram also cut its four to five paid intern slots this year, a move that executive editor Jim Witt blames on budget cutbacks.

The New York Times is planning to cut 100 newsroom positions by the end of the year, it was reported yesterday. Voluntary buyouts will be offered to all on Thursday and if enough people do not take them the paper will start lay-offs.

Times writer Richard Perez-Pena wrote that the 5% pay cut instigated earlier this year was intended to forestall staff reductions, but that "hopes for a year-end turnaround in the newspaper business have faded." Another round of budget cuts will be implemented on the editorial, op-ed and business sides, executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a letter to newsroom employees, published on BNOnews.com.