Results matching “editors rss feeds”

Qatar based news network, Al Jazeera has announced a partnership with Sony Ericsson.  The partnership will allow Al Jazeera to provide built-in AJ RSS feeds on Sony Ericsson phones in the Middle East and North Africa, according to journalism.co.uk.

The RSS feeds will offer daily international news updates in both English and Arabic on certain models of Sony Ericsson phones.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

With shrinking newsrooms due to increasingly drastic budget cuts and a biting global economic environment, newspapers have been searching for a solution to the age-old problem of profit margins versus quality of product. A relatively new player is marketing a solution to this problem; Daylife this week is launching Daylife Select, a tool that enables newspapers to enhance and expand their content easily and quickly.

This new product launch is the latest chapter in the Daylife success story; its client list reads like a "Who's Who" of the newspaper world, and yet it is a small New York based operation run by a team of just 25, most of whom are technologists.

Back in 2005, a team of news junkies and techies began work on a technological solution to the news industry's increasingly difficult business climate. The team looked at the web and saw the likes of Amazon and EBay racing ahead in the user experience, while news online hadn't changed that much in terms of navigation and fluidity of the whole site. The team, a bunch of "self-confessed frustrated media fans" started building a system that was launched in January 2007. It was clear to them that the demand for news had not declined, but that the product was heading for rocky waters unless it pushed its boundaries.

The Editors Weblog spoke to the CEO of this team of news junkies, Upendra Shardanand, about the new product, his organisation, the technology behind it, and the future of newspapers.

Solution

Shardanand begins his explanation by saying, "Publishers looked at Google and other aggregators getting all this traffic without doing the original reporting, and we are just saying, well, here is the technology, so you can go and do it under your own brand, around your own original content. I do believe that original content is absolutely critical; that is going to be the draw that brings a user back to your service and establishes your brand and so forth, but that can only scale so far; so, do what you do best and link to the rest. This is a different way to think about publishing."











This new product in the ever-expanding stable of services provided by Daylife is being marketed as a solution to help newspapers through the difficult business climate. Using one platform, it enables editors to access content such as photos, YouTube clips or blog postings on any subject they are looking to cover. One of the issues is that newspapers are frequently cash-strapped in terms of IT, so this product lets anybody with just a web browser and a click on the interface launch a content portal. This portal can cover anything from technology companies to Manchester United, and goes so far as to even allow customisation of the site.


Daylife describe itself as the layer between raw content and the news organisation. The system is an Intelligent Content Service, it being a substantial database with the ability to pull together relevant information for any news organisation on any topic. Simply put, if for example, a journalist is writing an article on Barack Obama's health care policies, the Daylife system will rapidly pull together all relevant stories, pictures, video and so forth from a multitude of sources. This database can therefore provide you with all quotes from Obama on healthcare and all photos of him at, for example, a hospital.

Daylife has various agreements with the major content providers, be it AP or Getty Images, but Shardanand reports that the deal that follows with the client is worked out individually depending on the relationship the client has already with AP, for example, the level of content they are looking for and the size of the client's publication.

The Daylife news website, despite it only being a beta product who's sole purpose is to work as a demonstration to potential clients, achieves 3 million hits a month. When the site first launched many reviewers thought it was a straight news site and questioned the lack of RSS Feeds and so forth.

With shrinking newsrooms due to declining revenues, one of the most significant facts about the Daylife web site is that it is run with zero human input. Shardanand informed the Weblog that the team could go on holiday for a month and it would in no way affect the running of the site.

Shardanand further points out that all the clients they have are, "renewing their contracts."

USA Today experience - 600% increase in page views for a blog

All of this sounds highly impressive, but what impact is this product having on its clients? Shardanand cites the work it has done with USA Today; the newspaper had a blogger writing about cruise ships, making it perfect for advertisers such as P&O and other holiday companies, but one blogger can only achieve so much, and the page was thus too small to attract significant advertisers. USA Today talked over these problems with Daylife, and it thereafter delivered tailored content to the publisher. The resulting page was far more comprehensive and resulted in a 600% increase in page views. It's the same blogger working, but with the help of Daylife's tailored service he is now able to increase content and improve layout.

Advanced algorithms

The software that runs this product is produced in-house, it runs on an open source platform with extra work put in by the "team of rocket scientist" for advanced algorithms. Furthermore, as Daylife hosts the portal, newspapers are able to wash their hands of any technological maintenance or responsibility.

With hindsight?

Considering the great leaps that this small company has made in a relatively short period of time, Shardanand is thoughtful about how they got to this point. The only regret is perhaps a desire to speak to publishers earlier to spread the word and have speeded up the process sooner for inputting the system for clients.

The future for Daylife

Looking ahead Shardanand believes that we will see news coming from a more diverse group; Shardanand informs the Weblog that one of its clients is a pet food company in the UK that wanted to set up a blog containing pet news and stories. He expects more of such diversified providers of news and content in the future as it becomes easier to start publishing.

For Daylife itself, Shardanand is content with the direction the company is going in, but hopes to be able to move the technology into foreign languages "at some point in the future." Daylife also just want to keep on "experimenting and trying new things."

Future of newspapers

Despite the fact that Daylife's success is almost directly as a result of the problems that the industry is facing, Shardanand is positive about the future of the industry: "The outlook is bleak in the short term for newspapers, but I am an optimist and I have to believe that the demand for news will always be there from consumers, and at some point in time, once we are through this whole murky phase, there will be a model for publishing that is probably a lot more efficient. A model where the publisher can extend the newsroom staff because all the other staff can be outsourced. I think even though we are seeing newsrooms being slashed today, I think the right model is where editorial is actually a bigger percentage of the staff than it is today because of outsourcing."

"You need to make a mobile site," said Ilicco Elia, Head of Mobile Europe at Reuters, at the 3rd World Digital Publishing Conference & Expo held in Amsterdam. He also said media organizations should begin thinking of mobile as an equally important platform, rather than as an isolated venture.

A number of newspapers have yet to even create a mobile edition, but Elia encouraged them to try to launch a basic version.

Take your regular website, strip it from its pictures, RSS feeds and every other bells and whistles but text.

Once the content is made available to users, then developers can begin implementing fancier features.

According to him, Reuters' current mobile site was initially designed to be as simple as possible, "so you can get what you want as quickly as you want."

But "First things first, get the content available on a mobile phone."

Relative to business opportunities, "You need to start thinking of mobile as a part of a much bigger platform," said Elia. "This as a package is worth more than the sum of each part."

He did warn publishers and editors not to expect generating substantial revenue through mobile, at least in the short term.

Source: Ilicco Elia, Head of Mobile Europe, Reuters - Photo credit: Emiel Muijderman

Google News cannot be compared to other news sites like Yahoo News or CNN.com, according to PaidContent.org.

Google News gathers content with the help of computers who scan news on the Web and does not contain any ads. Meanwhile, other news sites like CNN.com create licensed material that passes through editors.

Google News groups articles by subject and ranks article by importance based on factors like  authority of publisher or placement of article in site. NYT writes that Google "packages the results as a set of links, sending readers to the sites where the articles appear."

According to the New York Times, Google executives claim that traffic is not the primary aim but that Google News "helps the company produce better search results and helps users find news sources that they might not know about otherwise."

According to the NYT, the growth rate of Google News is only 10 %, compared to MSNBC.com's 42 %, which got the site 10.4 million in traffic.

Dan Gillmor, who is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Arizona State University School of Journalism, said that he is surprised "how little" Google News "evolved, at least on the surface", NYT wrote.

Marissa Meyer, vice president for Google search and user experience, said that Google News is one of "the most innovative" Google features and that its users actively employ the  Google search engine  and other services, NYT wrote.

She also mentioned that news results do emerge on the main Google search page, alongside adverts.  According to Meyer, "it directly feeds the main business."

Google News is sometimes seen as a competitor to other news providers, even if it brings traffic to the news site. Industry executives, according to NYT, think that because Google News links to a remote article, the readers are not likely to stay on the news site.

According to Braig Moffett, a Sanford C; Bernstein & Copany analyst, the Internet "made it possible to aggregate news cheaply". Consequently, news providers stopped charging for content. "Google may be doing more to accelerate this trend than anyone, but they are not doing it out of malice,"  Moffett said.

Tribune Co. owner Samuel Zell accused Google of stealing news stories for their own gains. In Europe, Belgian prosecutors said that Google News had "violated copyright laws" without asking for permission to link to the articles, NYT reported.

Google said that the company wishes "to help, not hurt, journalism", NYT wrote. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that the company has "a huge moral imperative" to aid news outlets in becoming more "successful online", NYT wrote.

Last year, several features were added, such as different country and language versions of Google News. The number of "duplicate articles" is being reduced, as "authoritative" and "original" news stories are being displayed, according to NYT.

There is also the chance to personalize Google News, by focusing on local news and mapping the news event sites on Google Earth. Users can also post comments and search quotes.

Different sides to the same story are being provided by the news search engine, helping to make people "wake up and think," said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist behind Google News. "That's what makes people news junkies," she added.

NYT wrote that even if there have been some innovations, Google News "still lacks many of the flashier features that have attracted users to more conventional news sites, including interactive graphics and video."

Analysts have begun to question automated products and their limitations. Mark Glaser, PBS MediaShift editor said, "there is only so far you can go with an algorithm" because , "in the long run, people want a human touch."

Source: PaidContent.org, New York Times

See Also:

8 efficient and visual ways to present your online news
How to maximize your site's visiility in Google search ranking

A great post that will be of interest to all visual editors: 10000words.net recaps eight original and graphically enticing ways to present and organize information (click here to view all graphic representations):

- The Photo stream:
Instead of displaying headlines and links, this format features news photos in a grid. When the mouse cursor is over one of the pictures, the headline is displayed.

- Newser:
A tiles news combination of photographs and headlines. When the mouse cursor is moved over one of them, more detailed information pops up. Newser also offers a toggler feature to switch between soft and hard news.

- Spectra:
MSNBC.com developed a visually pleasing template to read RSS feeds.

- NewsWorldMap:
A very basic format that can be useful to readers, as NewsWorldMap simply combines a Google map of the world with Google News items related to each location.

- Visual Dictionary Online:
The Visual Dictionary Online doesn't aggregate news, but its interface, which displays a picture with links to the various elements of the picture, can be useful to newspapers.

- 10x10:
This site presents the news in a ten by ten grid of photos. It's a little overwhelming but can be visually attractive.

- Times:
The Times newsreader is a simple animation that aims to replicate the feel of flipping through print pages online. It is only available for Mac OS X Leopard though.

- LiveNewsCameras.com:
Recently launched, LiveNewsCameras.com proposes a grid of live video feeds from broadcasters and news organizations internationally.

Unfortunately, due to a few technical difficulties, we can't show you the screenshots here. You'll have to click on the individual links or please click below to view all the various formats on screen.

Source: 10000words.net through Journerdism

David Dunkley Gyimah, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminister, UK, was one of the speakers at the fifth session at the 15th World Editors Forum. The topic of his speech was "Videojournalism-now and what next...integrated multimedia videojournalism?"

Since the birth of the videojournalism newsroom at Channel One in the United Kingdom in 1994 the change has been dramatic. That establishment cost 25 million pounds. The equivalent of the media inventory in that office can now fit in one laptop. Videojournalism has become a very effective and inexpensive way of producing fast visual news.

But what are the key elements of good videojournalism?

One of the most important parts is a clear vision at the newsdesk of what is wanted and expected. Good communication between the editor and the journalist is crucial.

There's a few clear considerations to decide before heading out into the field, for instance the mobility, the robustness and the ergonomics of the equipment. Videojournalism is about being quick and ready to go. It's essential that the camera and other equipment makes this possible. It may perhaps not always be the wisest choice to buy the most expensive camera just for the sake of it.

Another necessity is to invest in a good computer and professional editing software like Adobe Premiere for PC's and Final Cut Studio for macs.

The work of creating news from videojournalism is a process of co-operation between management , journalists and technical support. This cooperation must be perfected because videos are published on news websites, on tech news blogs, in rss-feeds and as video podcasts.

The workflow behind this output is based on ideas before the actual production takes place. According to Dunkley Gyimah, a few of the questions that have to be asked during this procedure are; What sort of content?, What is the style of the reporter?, Are VJ's suppose to fill other articles?, How long should the video be? Where and how does the production take place? Finally there's the question of output. In what mediaforms should the video be published? Web? TV? Phone? Or all three?

For Mr Dunkley Gyimah one very important thing that must not be forgotten is that the journalistic quality usually isn't the problem. " It's the paradigm shift of thinking visually," he said, emphasizing the quality of the visuals.