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As far as niches go, mothers represent one of advertisers' most coveted groups. Now, some newspapers are joining the chase.

Newspaper companies, including the New York Times Co., Journal Communication, and Gannett, are launching hyperlocal websites geared toward mothers. Billed as community centers, the sites hope to attract mothers looking to review restaurants, arrange play dates, or just meet other mothers.

"They're [mothers] using the Internet to reconstitute the social capital that would come from physical interaction in a dense urban environment," said Clay Shirky, an Internet analyst and adviser to MeetUp Inc., a social networking business.

For advertisers, the appeal of these sites is enormous. With such an active core - 86 percent of moms go online at least once a month - advertisers are almost guaranteed results. But the market for mom sites is crowded; similar ventures (see BabyCenter or CafeMom) already exist.

Newspapers, however, show no signs of conceding the market to pre-existing competition. Gannett has gradually increased the number of its mom sites, and hopes to unify them soon into a nationwide network; the Boston Globe, owned by the NYT, released BoMoms.com last month; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Dayton Daily News are creating similar sites.

As the competition stiffens, the key to success for mom sites, says Stacy DeBroff, founder of Mom Central, a marketing consulting firm, will be maintaining the sites' hyperlocal appeal.

"People in different cities are really looking for different kinds of information," Debroff said. "If moms don't sense the sites are truly localized, then they'll find another place that is."

Source: Wall Street Journal, New York Times

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of the Financial Times in the UK.

Click here to view all interviews in this series. Other titles include The New York Times, the Guardian, Fairfax Media, the Hindustan Times, etc. (full list at the bottom of the interview).


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"


- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We see ourselves as a news organization and we're becoming much more agnostic about our distribution channels. We're becoming much more interested in creating relevant information for our readers and much less interested in how it gets to the readers. Pearson, the parent company, clearly is an education company with a print publishing arm and an information division, which includes the FT. At the FT level, we consider ourselves to be a financial news business more than a newspaper. Our mission is to be the gold standard for global business news in print and online - and in any other formats.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Largely but not completely. 10 years from now - 2014 may be slightly too short a time frame - we will still have printed newspapers, because people like reading  things in print. Newspapers, just like the book, are convenient to read in places you can't do with a computer; but my belief is that a lot of what will be printed will be analysis, comment, analysis and opinion. The actual news will be more or less online or in other more timely formats. In a way the FT will split in two, with FT.com for all the news that's breaking and some immediate reactions and  opinion. The more considered analysis will be almost an Economist-type publication. Maybe it wouldn't have to be broadsheet anymore, it could be tabloid or even magazine format. To put it very crudely, you'd have all the news online, and you'd have 12 pages of Martin Wolf the next day in print, and all the editorials, columnists, features and more.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

There's one thing that's old and one thing that's new. What's old and part of the continuum is that traditional companies are going online. Our journalists are now fully integrated and write online and in print. I'm sure that in 2 years time they'll all be carrying video cameras. We've gone from zero videos website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That's part of the continuum: it's us doing the same thing in different distribution channels.

What's new is the blogosphere, citizen journalists and the idea that anyone - people who are not qualified journalists, either experts in a narrow field or just interested citizens - can start a blog or website and distribute it. For the FT, you would think it's negative in the sense that there's more news and opinion and more competitors. In fact, that's not really true, it almost enhances the position of leading media brands for several reasons. One is we are trusted, people believe the news they read with us. Secondly, we select and edit, which becomes an increasingly crucial function as there is more information out there. The more 'over-informed' people are, the more likely people who want to know what's actually going on will turn to a few sources that tell them what s actually important. That's what professional newspapers do really well.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

I do believe in their increasingly active role of users: very often readers are more informed than us. If you look at an old format like the letters page in the newspaper, the amount of expertise that our readers have, who are often professionals in the City, is just incredible. They know more about it in certain aspects than our journalists. That's why we get CEOs, academics, lawyers, heads of accountancy firms and more writing in to us to say what's actually happening. They can do this online with comments or take part in Q&As, or print their views in the pages of the FT and FT.com. That sort of content is very helpful. We also have a function for any user to comment on the website's stories.

Is it a threat? Sure, to some extent. But as long as it's happening on our site or in the pages of our newspaper, it's been bundled, monitored, checked for quality and therefore is important. We're not going to turn into a place where we just repeat hundreds of readers' letters and have no journalists of our own. It's more of an opportunity for our journalists to become more informed and build contacts among readers. And it's amazing that all these readers are willing to give this information for free.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I don't know. That's a really hard one. I might say it's already past.

There's so much more information out there and it's so much harder for companies to hide information. Take the Northern Rock story, which was broken by BBC journalists, and there was a bank run as a result. It's harder to hide information. The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later - I don't think it works like that anymore. Journalists still have scoops and still break important stories, but it tends to be in a much shorter time frame. It tends to be a single development that they're breaking rather than a long series of connections.

But frankly, newspapers and media organizations are under pressure. It's hard for us to send a journalist or a group of journalists off three months investigating something - and if nothing works that's a shame but nevermind. We don't have resources to let people go off and do that for such a long time. I think The Golden Age of journalists working undercover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don't want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that's more likely. As soon as a tiny thing breaks now, it gets distributed so quickly that it's hard to see a journalist working undercover for a long time and gradually piecing something together without having it go public much earlier in the process.


Stay tuned for more interviews in our series. Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

The new Wall Street Journal debuts today. WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch has redesigned it to expand its "traditional, pin-striped base," according to Johnnie L. Roberts, Newsweek reporter. Murdoch still believes that "newspapers are the most influential media for shaping the public discourse, even in this new-media century."

The new Journal will feature:
- An increased focus on politics, international news, culture, and sports.
- A refocused front page.
- A relaunch of the A section that will cover general news.
- Marketplace, the second section, which will cover corporate America.
- Money and Investing, the third section, which will continue to report news of financial markets and investing.
- A weekly sports page.
- An additional op-ed page, so that it has 3 pages instead of 2.

Also, a culture section is being developed in the Journal's weekend edition for the fall.

The redesign of the paper is also Murdoch's challenge to The New York Times.

But many media and communication experts argue that the Journal will not be a threat to the Times even with all the changes; in fact, the changes may damage the Journal brand.

"Turning a paper into an old-fashioned variety show--we have a little of everything--I don't think is the route to success," said a former senior Dow Jones executive. "The risk you run is that you are not best at anything." 

Arthur Siskind, senior adviser to Murdoch, remarked that "the need to bolster and broaden the Journal's production and delivery is one reason [Murdoch's] battle with the Times will have to unfold gradually." Murdoch is in talks for local newspaper publishers to print the Journal, so the paper can be printed earlier and story deadlines can be extended.

Even so, the Times has faced some difficulties. Advertising has fallen almost 11%, (Read more at our sister blog SFN) "the sharpest drop in memory," the Times wrote. While it is cutting its staff by 100 (Read more at SFN), Murdoch has been spending money on WSJ's Washington bureau, seeking additional printing capacity, and developing the weekend magazine, WSJ.

"The New York Times has had broad coverage for 156 years now," New York Times CEO Janet Robinson said, "and from that perspective we are far advanced in the type of journalism we create and the type of advertising we bring into the paper."

Source: Newsweek through Paidcontent.org

The Hindustan Times (HT) has been gradually integrating its print and online operations since last summer, when new managing editor Pankaj Paul stepped in (background here). By now, the sports desk is integrated (it served as “a model for excellence” for others) and the business team is to shortly follow in the same path.

(More) process-oriented workflows

Back in September 2007, Paul was discovering the HT’s organization and workflows – many of which were informal.

Since then, workflows have been changed to become more process-oriented. But there was no reason to fundamentally change the working culture. In the absence of a centralized content management system (CMS), Paul implemented processes that mimic a CMS: for example, Sports stories are edited and laid out only once across the newspaper, and are then dispatched to all regional editions (since they don’t typically differ from one region to the other).

Integration: video, once again

As has been the case for many, if not most, newspapers this past year, one of the main traits of newsroom integration – and the expansion of multimedia capacities – was the explosive development of video production.

In the last four months, the HT has already produced about 300 videos. Nearly another 100 are already assigned, so the total should be close to 400 by the end of the month.

Content ranges across the news spectrum, from interviews and profiles to simple news events and features. Most of these are short form (one to three minutes), but the paper is looking into longer pieces (seven to twelve minutes).

Did it take a team of a dozen fulltime journalists in order to achieve this? It actually took one dedicated fulltime multimedia editor (picked from the reporter staff due to his prior experience: he also produces slideshows and other interactive projects), and three part-time staffers. Paul is seeking to hire 2 more editors specifically for multimedia and video, as well as outsource three freelance editors. 10 more reporters are soon to follow the HT’s three-day, hands-on, in-house multimedia training.



Training top-down – more work for editors

Considering how much multimedia work the HT has produced, few staffers have gone through formal training. Only about 10 reporters have been trained – out of 750. Another 10 are on the way, and the next training session is only scheduled for mid-March.

The HT’s integration and formation has thus mostly happened at an editorial level so far, top-down. “Editors are the ones to bear the brunt of this,” said Paul, who at the beginning of the process straightforwardly told them, “I m asking you to do more work.” Paul held meetings with his editors during which he showed them best practices of other online newspapers he knew from working in the US.

Editors then walked reporters through the multimedia process, teaching them how to think multi-platform and encouraging them to file video and audio. Journalists now go out and look for multimedia opportunities. Photographers now take plenty extra pictures that can be used for online slideshows. “Those conversations are happening every single day, even for smaller stories.”

Importantly, Paul didn’t adopt a coercive approach in this process – although he acknowledges this may eventually come. “We need to let them experiment a little bit.”

By the end of next summer, about 50-60 reporters are to be trained videographers and editors.

Newsroom Design – hub and clusters

The HT was supposed to move into new premises and integrate its newsroom design, but this won’t happen until the end of May. Since last September, a few significant changes have occurred though: the online team now sits with the print staff. The newsroom design will probably emulate a hub-and-spokes model, with all top editors sitting together centrally – this doesn’t necessarily mean their respective departments will be behind them. More important is the verbal communication enabled at an editorial level.


In light of the HT’s experience, integration doesn’t necessarily have to follow an overwhelming, company-wide, scenario, as was the case for the Daily Telegraph, or Fairfax. Instead, integration can also happen gradually, through verbal communication and changes in habits, starting at the top and cascading down to the journalist level.

Source: Pankaj Paul, managing editor Hindustan Times

In 2006, when the Manchester Evening News decided to make the paper free in central Manchester, while keeping paid-for distribution in the city’s outskirts, few fellow publishers understood such a decision. Yet at the heart of this commercial move lays a greater will to adapt to the decline of print ad revenues by becoming a converged media group, and the Evening News now boasts the UK’s most integrated regional newsroom.

Paul Moreira is an investigative reporter who has worked extensively in the print press and was one of the founders of the defunct French, investigative, television show “90 minutes.” In his latest book, Les nouvelles censures, Moreira describes the widespread practices of overt and covert manipulations of the news media. “One of this era’s most powerful myths is that we live in the information age. In fact, we live in a media age, in which information is repetitive, “safe” and limited by invisible borders,” writes John Pilger, Hidden Agendas. Are these theories ‘Big Brother’ paranoia, or are information flows much more controlled than the public would like to think? Is this only the case for television’s spectacular requirements, or also for trusted newspapers? Moreira investigates, and answers.

Companies such as Prime View Internationl Co. Ltd. of Taiwan and Plastic Logic Ltd. of Britain are some of the companies that are developing a new type of thin electronic display called e-paper. 

Now that the e-ink technology is maturing, the newspaper industry has decided that the time has come for serious testing and application. Most experimentation took and takes place using the trusted print content, converted for electronic reading. That will never do the job. What is mostly needed in this phase are newly developed editorial formats especially designed for the generations of e-reader hardware which now are coming to the market.

On April 11, a panel of famed international press cartoonists gathered at the French Ministry of Culture, to inaugurate the ‘Cartooning for Peace’ exhibit and debate the potential dangers of political press cartoons. Cartoons have a universal reach and pacifying effects, but they may also lead to just the opposite – violence and bloodshed. How then can press cartoons evolve to pursue their peace-making goals, especially in light of new subversive forms of censorship emerging in the West, and should freedom of expression be absolute?

Plastic Logic, a British company specialized in e-paper displays, just received $100 million in venture funding. What could it mean for print paper?

How about forgetting the traditional feud between old media and new media and working together to survive? It may seem idealistic, perhaps even naïve, but this was the main idea discussed by a panel of journalists and top editors in the Time Life Building (NY) on Dec. 7th.

Like many aspects of the Web, news is becoming a collaborative activity. Social news sites such as digg.com and Newsvine have infinitely increased their audience over the past year, attracting audiences through a system of voting on their favorite stories. But sometimes democracy doesn’t provide the best in news. To fill the gap between traditional editorial boards and the wisdom of the crowds, a social news site based on trust has been created. NewsTrust.net, which goes public today, strives to help newshounds find quality journalism. The site’s founder, Fabrice Florin, gave the Editors Weblog a sneak peek at the ideas and hard work behind the latest in social news.

In response to this week’s cover story about the decline of newspapers from the best weekly in the world, The Economist, BBC Radio 4 chatted with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and his equal at the Independent, Simon Kelner to hear what they think about the future of the newspaper.

In a speech by media commentator and former editor of The Daily Mirror Roy Greenslade at The Newspaper Society's CEP 2006, he outlined his beliefs of how newspapers should adapt to the media revolution that is putting print in jeopardy.