Results matching “the second germ”

In Janowo, an 850-person village in north eastern Poland, on a Monday last month, a dozen people - mostly teenagers or over 40s - were gathering in a multi-activity meeting hall. They were listening to Igor Hrywna, a journalist at Gazeta Olsztynska, the dominant newspaper in this "Warmia-Mazury voivodship" (Varmia-Masuria). That day he left his base in the regional capital of Olsztyn to meet this group for the third time in one month. With his assistance, they are learning how to contribute to the recently launched hyperlocal website janowo.wm.pl, covering the 3,000 people "gmina" (commune) centered on Janowo, one of the smallest of the region.

"There are fewer than 120 broadband Internet subscribers today. Our goal by the end of the year is to have at least 6000 unique users", explains Hrywna, who supervises Gazeta Olsztynska's commune portals. "To achieve this, we are organizing two to three hour long training sessions for citizen journalists. I also learn from them!" The training for citizen journalists always begins with the easiest things, like sending pictures with a short description. It includes how to search and browse in the website, how to write, and how to be accurate.

Gazeta Olsztynska's hyperlocal websites like Janowo's are typically 80% filled by local citizens, with user generated content (UGC) mostly on social events. Staff journalists provide the rest, through their assistance and through their own written and edited pieces. "Small communities know what kind of information they need. That is why we base our portals on civil journalism supported by our professional knowledge. The goal is to have the so far marginalized villages really exist in the social cyberspace," comments editor-in-chief Ewa Bartnikowska.

During the Janowo training session, a retired music teacher, Janina Sadowska, who has been a reader of the regional daily for a long time, explained that she was there for two reasons. "First, it is a natural prolongation of my habit of sending readers' comments to the editor. Second, I am at the head of a women's club, and we want to have a presence in our gmina's website."

The young aspiring journalists, between 12 and 18 years old, came from a nearby agricultural school. One of them was filming the reunion with a small camera, planning to post some sequences in the website. Another one, Przemyslaw Ciesielski, 18, explained in clear English: "We don't buy newspapers, but we are interested in news."

For Jarek Tokarczyk, the president of Edytor, Gazeta Olsztynska's publishing house, the involvement of the young in his online projects is critical, because "they already know the Internet, which is accessible at school, even in the most remote villages; through them we can also reach their parents for other publications." Bartnikowska added: "It is very important for us to have roots in print, even though we go at the lowest geographic or smallest community levels only online. This strategy for localism is also only possible if we have social and not only media projects."

Edytor is already managing 35 such hyperlocal websites, as a way to get closer also to small advertisers. In the villages, the biggest companies are often the bakery which employs only eight persons, or the hairdresser with a staff of four. "We want to reach the places where print is not profitable, asking our advertising salespersons to monetize potential markets which have been ignored until now. For this purpose we also train our print representatives to understand the web, setting online revenue goals for each of them," explains Tokarczyk. "We know that the number of Internet users in the country and small towns is going to grow. We have to do it now because tomorrow will be too late." This "deep in localities" strategy is timely with new legislation to be implemented in the coming weeks, for broadband access everywhere in Poland. There are also local governments elections in September, which will boost the interest for hyperlocal news.

Gazeta Olsztynska and its separate edition Dziennik Elblaski, covering an area integrated only ten years ago into the region, have a quasi-monopoly in Varmia-Masuria, one of Poland's 17 voivodships. National daily Gazeta Wyborcza has local editions, but they are read principally in the biggest cities like Olsztyn, where they have a weaker position. In addition to the Internet portals, Edytor controls 21 hyperlocal weekly freesheets, which encompass numerous news areas, social to e-commerce activities. Each has its online version, is available as a supplement of the daily, and corresponds more or less to a county ("powiat").

Janowo, for instance, is attached to the local newsroom based in Nidzica and covering a 35,000 people powiat. Weekly Gazeta Nidzicka's editor-in-chief Jerzy Grala is assisted by four reporters and three sales representatives. The portal nidzica.wm.pl is updated at least twice a day, and links to and sometimes feeds the central newspaper's website gazetaolsztynska.wm.pl. It is enriched by content provided by its communal websites, including janowo.wm.pl, which is updated a few times a week. Grala also posts occasional on his blog grala.wm.pl, which is easily accessible from his newsroom's portal.

There are 25 regional dailies in Poland in total, Edytor being an exception as an independent group. Most others are controlled either by Polskapresse (owned by Germany's Verlagsgruppe Passau) or Media Regionalne (owned by Great Britain's Mecom). The Varmia-Masuria voivodship is one of the less populated, with 1.4 million inhabitants, out of a total population of 38 million in the coutry (plus about 6 millions Poles living abroad). The region has a particularly high unemployment rate, exceeding 19% versus less than 12% on average nationally.

Given this context, Gazeta Olsztynska's intense efforts to develop online activities and "deep localism" are unusual. "We have over 30 equipped multimedia journalists covering the region, who already produce around 600 pieces of different information every month. With the contributions of the mobilized civil journalists, we expect to double within one year the level of 500,000 unique visitors we got last month," explains Bartnikowska.

Edytor is multiplying editorial and marketing projects, both in print and online, including 200 different supplements and freesheets, family service and obituary websites, a schools of excellence campaign (proposing pupils to write about their schools), celebration contests requiring payment via SMS, special publications promoting the natural wonders of the region and its lakes. "The wm.pl suffix that we use online [for "Warmia-Mazury"] is the most important brand here. We want to be a regional Google!" Tokarczyk says.

Another illustration of Edytor's focus on "hyperlocalities" are its Nowe Miasto operations. In this 11000 people town - or large village - about 85 kilometers far from Olsztyn, it publishes weekly Gazeta Nowomiejska, covering a population four times bigger. Its online hyperlocal news endeavours are already one year old, as shown in the "gminas" listed at the bottom of portal nowemiasto.wm.pl. Unlike in Nidzica, the newsroom is not based on a main central square, but its position may be more strategic. Gazeta Nowomiejska is located on a street in front of the church where, for deeply catholic Poland, mass sermons easily hit the headlines and a significant part of social life relates to religious activities. "The priest sometimes promotes our portal during the mass," says chief editor Stanislaw Ulatowski, also a local celebrity as a print journalism veteran.

His deputy, Lukasz Paczkowski, is a young online and multimedia reporter and Internet geek, who manages his blog paczkowski.wm.pl, which is also displayed in the front page of Gazeta Nowomiejska's portal. "We start updating the website before 10 am, when most people open their computer, until 8.30pm", he says. His partnership with Ulatowski also illustrates the complementary cross-promotion between the platforms. "The photo galleries encourage user generated content" comments Paczkowski. "Our online correspondents are very helpful, because our staff cannot be everywhere in the county, and they are more likely to create communes' portals. Then we print the most newsworthy pieces in the weekly."

To extend his team's expertise, Tokarczyk has built a partnership with the promoters of the C3 concept ("Complete Community Connection"), Chuck Peters and Steve Buttry in the United States (the former is the CEO of Iowa's Gazette Communications, and the latter just left this paper to be the director of community engagement at a high-profile, Washington DC based digital start-up). In spite of being based in a remote region of central Europe, Edytor is being very pro-active in looking for ideas directly provided by the world's top experts in its fields of coverage.

Along with the hyperlocal websites, the Gazeta Olsztynska team has also launched numerous thematic portals about students, community centers, and even an "ethnic" group recently. Website ukraincy.wm.pl is dedicated to the 60,000 strong Ukrainian community, made of descendents or survivors of the group displaced by force to this part of Poland in 1947. It is benefitting from and promoting the revival of their language and religion (Greek Orthodox). "Our aim is to have half of the community visit the portal at least once a month by the end of this year. It will be 100% UGC, and fun," says Hrywna, who is also Polish-Ukrainian.

In the lead up to the Christmas, the Miami Herald is asking that the spirit of giving extend to their pages and is requesting donations from readers.  In what has been a financially troubling year for the paper the Herald has made some 200 job cuts, suffered steep losses in revenue and drops in circulation numbers.

Yesterday the McClatchy-owned newspaper began using its website to invite users to donate with a link at the bottom of each story directing them to "Support ongoing news coverage on Miamiherald.com." There, readers can donate however much they wish with a credit card and are guaranteed their money is going to a good cause.

Rupert Murdoch is not the only mogul looking to make money from online content - it's just that what with the intense media circus surrounding his rants, not to mention the severity of his accusations (think calling Google and Yahoo out and out thieves on international TV) he's the only one we've really heard about of late.

Led by Matthias Döpfner, Axel Springer, publisher of Europe's biggest daily, Das Bild, and other newspapers across Germany and Eastern Europe, is plotting the numerous ways in which it too can go about monetising its content online.

Christoph Keese, Springer's head of public affairs, said: "The meta-philosophy of free - we should get rid of this philosophy. A highly industrialized world cannot survive on rumours. It needs quality journalism, and that costs money." Döpfner added: "I see no justification, neither democratic nor market-related, for content to be generally free on the Internet. For centuries, people have been willing to pay for things of interest to them."

Two German entrepreneurs are setting up a new kind of home delivered newspaper among worldwide news print failures. On November 16^th the brave young businessmen are venturing into the industry with an innovative newspaper service - the first of its kind in Europe - at arguably the worst time, and for a limited Berlin-only market. But its very unorthodoxy, the essence Wanja Oberhof's and Hendrik Tiedmann's Niiu personalized newspaper, could be its saving grace.

Niiu Beginnings

The Niiu started with an idea, two and a half years ago, ultimately about information convenience. Having grown up in a newspaper-reading household, Mr. Oberhof became used to reading multiple papers to pursue the news and information he was interested in.  Having to juggle multiple national, local, and international papers to find one's interests would inevitably become a chore, especially vis-à-vis the speed and convenience of internet news. The same behavioral phenomenon is in fact the very reason why the internet seems to be ruining traditional newspapers; people, especially young adults and students, are tending find their news and information from a variety of sources on the internet rather than a single source that marked the newspaper's monopoly and success in the 20^th century. 

Oberhof's resulting idea was simple and clear: an individualized newspaper, composed of selected pages and sections from papers, delivered each morning to one's door just like a regular paper. This combination of paper format and internet convenience and accessibility found Oberhof a business partner in Hendrik Tiedmann, who shared the same idea. Together they founded InterTi GmbH, Niuu's parent company, funded out of their own pockets, and began doing their homework.

"The whole idea was based on our own behavior research and experience; [as young people] we're used to very different information sources. The main idea was to combine all the varying sources of news and information, because it is normal for young people who have grown up with the internet to have not one source of information but many," Mr. Obherof said in a telephone interview with The Editor's Weblog. But why a newspaper format? Surely a less risky and lower-cost alternative would be setting up a personal news aggregator.

Oberhof disagrees. "We asked this target group which is the most comfortable and which is the best distribution channel; is it an e-paper, is it only on mobile, is it printed or online? The feedback was that for now, paper is still the best distribution channel." Hence the simple combination of the internet and printed paper that is the essence of Niiu.

Interestingly, the founders have no particular allegiance to print, it just happens to be the currently favored distribution channel. "The vision that we offer is all the information that is relevant for the reader. As a next step it is the reader's choice which distribution channel they will use, whether it's a mobile phone, e-paper, the internet, or whatever else." Their focus is information amalgamation and distribution, the particular channel being largely irrelevant and ultimately the client's choice. This is quite an unusual position for a company entering the print industry, which these days seems to require a great deal of faith.

What Niiu is and How it Works (The Technical Bit)

On the client's side the process is very simple. After signing up for a short-term subscription (more on that later), they have until 2 p.m. to choose their news sources for the following morning's paper. On Niiu's website they can select from a wide variety of publications and online sources; from national, local or international newspapers like the New York Times, or internet news sources and blogs. A 24-page personalized paper, researched from and composed of their choices, then appears on the subscriber's doorstep the next morning.

"At this first step, for the reader it is only possible to select whole pages or sections," says Oberhof. From newspapers the readers can select pages or sections, from the internet providers they choose from over 600 very diverse rss feeds, from "Women's tennis blogs to local garden pages, we have lots of special interest content available." Clients currently cannot access their personalized paper online, as this would basically defeat the purpose of the delivered print format.

On Oberhof and Tiedmann's side, however, things are a bit more complicated. It is no easy feat to compile, print, and distribute thousands of individual papers. Over the past two years, InterTi GmbH has had to create a specialized software for compiling sources and setting the layout, arrange digital printing deals, close licensing contracts with news sources, attract advertisers, create a new business model and work out delivery schedules. So how did they do all that?

"We outsource everything," says Oberhof. "We don't have an editorial team, we don't have the printing machines, we don't have a delivery structure; we have partners. First we had to create software, so we got a partner with a Swiss web and print specialist service. They produced our software that combines all the pages and articles and news for each reader into a print-ready .pdf that is sent to the digital printing machines from the Netherlands, and a German copy house takes care of the actual printing. Then we have an agreement with a Berlin delivery service that delivers all the international newspapers that will also now deliver Niiu." Given all this outsourcing and subcontracting, one wonders whether circulation revenue will cover the costs.

Luckily there is another revenue source, the very one that is ruining traditional papers, and where the Niiu shines most brightly: it offers a space for highly targeted advertising, something already optimistic advertisers will pay dearly for. At first, during the 'trial phase' of the first few months, advertising will be more general because the Niiu is new and won't have a large circulation. But with an expanded subscriber base ads will become more targeted, focusing on neighborhoods their corresponding socio-economic groups.

Oberhof is confident of his advertising model. "We have had large amounts of positive feedback from advertising clients, and they have several different ideas such as at first only distinguishing between male and female readers, then differentiating by neighborhood and age in Berlin. Some big German car players are interested and have said 'different cars for different people' based on the interests of the readers, like the family man being interested in the new X5 or the young student being shown the BMW 1." Who the people are and more particularly what their interests are would be clear from their choice of news sources for their Niiu's composition.

Ignoring that their proclaimed audience is exclusively young students and not old people and family men, this raises some questions about whether using personal information for advertising violates some privacy protections. But this is doubtful as various advertisers and distributors have used similar techniques for years: think about those supermarket coupon promotional catalogues, also known as 'junk mail,' which you might get at your front door. They differ per neighborhood using the same concept (in my experience, I got Pioneer Supermarket rice coupons up in Harlem, while my friends downtown got brochures for Citarella).

Of course, a paper cannot live on adverts alone. In terms of subscriptions, Niiu continues to be innovative. The subscription packages are aimed towards young readers and students, the paper's perennial target audience (and probably one of the more difficult market sectors to enter, especially in media and technology).

Mr. Oberhof explains: "We have several different packages, not a traditional subscription but a pre-paid system. You load up money for packages, like the one-day trial, or the longer-term packages over 25, 75 or 150 days. It's not a classical subscription at all, that's an important point for us, because many young people, according to our feedback, don't want a subscription for a year because they do not know where they will be in the near future, whether studying in a different city, or doing an international internship or living at home, so they want short-term packages." Currently Niiu is priced at €1.80 per issue, €1.20 for students.

Is this really a good way to build subscriber loyalty? There is a risk of high turnover, potentially running through the market potential before they get established. However this model makes sense for their target demographic. Personally I find this an appealing arrangement. Not really knowing where I will be in six months has prevented me from subscribing to my publications of choice, so I read online news while I would prefer the print editions.

Challenges

One of the biggest questions I had for Mr. Oberhof was regarding the licensing and use of articles and content from news providers. In the context of the current debate over paid online content and the associated problem of the cost of news and journalism, this is quite a pressing concern and I was most interested in what Niiu's arrangements were. Surprisingly, it was unsurprising and rather simple.

Niiu has a contract with each newspaper and online provider, in which "we have a little license fee which we pay for every used page," Oberhof explains. The licenses, and thus the copies of Niiu itself, are based on pages: "we pay a fixed fee for each page we use...because we take one-to-one pages from each newspaper," meaning the pages of Niiu are exact replicas of the original page from the source. This setup will be the working model for the first few trial months.

"The newspapers give us access to everything they have. That means every page and article that is used in the New York Times we can have the next day in Niiu," although details on how blogs and internet sources would be presented are a bit fuzzy. It would be safe to assume that they would appear in Niiu as they would in your browser, albeit reformatted and resized.

An obvious question regards how newspaper publishers feel about Niiu and why they would allow access to their articles, when this could very well cannibalize their own sales. While some certainly think so, the majority of publishers approached by Oberhof and Tiedmann have embraced the idea and accepted licensing contracts.

"Most of [the news publishers] think it's an interesting new project for a target group which doesn't read much newspapers. The young people, the students, in Germany don't read that much newspaper so for [the newspaper publishers] it's an experience; they want to have a look at the feedback and to test it out. Most of them also don't think that we will take the long-term single paper reader away from them, since our audience is the reader who doesn't know which paper is right for them or likes a variety of news sources," Oberhof asserts.

So, in theory, there is no direct competition because they target different audiences. However, the Niiu provides the same service as the internet but in print form; it is hard to see why publishers who would blame the internet and the news aggregators (which is basically what Niiu is doing) as the newspaper's bane would embrace that service in their own industry.

Some industry experts are not so optimistic. Joachim Blum, a digital media consultant, voices 'considerable doubts' over Niiu's future. He says the idea is interesting, but it just won't work because the target audience has left paper behind: "People who read newspapers are office workers, not students," Blum tells Spiegel Online. This is similar to the problem discussed above, where it seems that the assumption has been made that students who are used to getting news quickly and for free online will suddenly start paying for it to be physically manifested; they surely won't be paying for the service, as they can do it themselves. They would therefore be paying for the physical product, the newspaper, and its aesthetic appeal. But we all know how fickle young people and students are when it comes to aesthetics.

Another issue is more topical as to how Niiu relates to traditional newspaper and the internet, its status in between and bridging these media forms. For all its supposed innovation, "Niiu shares the same dilemma of print journalism in the age of the Internet: every paper you read in the morning only contains yesterday's news," says Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. "The Web offers news every second and gives the option to link to blogs and other websites. Why would people read and even buy a story or information, which they select on the Internet the day before? It's old-school journalism," he tells Time. Again, the same underlying problem is pointed out; the combination of paper and internet has great potential, but it also combines the weak points of both and confuses the primary audiences of both mediums.

Time will tell whether these criticisms will stand or whether Niiu will live up to its potential.

The Future!

For the time being it seems like the main challenges for Oberhof and Tiedmann have been surmounted. They are looking forward to the November 16^th launch, for the time being to serve Berlin only. The circulation scope for now is limited because of the high quality but rather slow digital printing. "You can't compare it to a classical offset machine that could print 200,000 copies of Niiu in an hour; our digital printers can only do about 2000 in an hour," Oberhof explains. "That means it is not possible to deliver from one printing machine to several cities, so we start in Berlin. But obviously it's planned to expand to other cities in Germany and Europe," if the paper gets off the ground with the aim of around 5000 subscribers by the first 6 months.

However Oberhof knows there is much to be done, and that the work is far from finished. "For the next month the biggest challenge will be whether the whole work flows as we want it to. The first actual non-test paper will [hopefully] have around 5000 subscribers and this will be a lot to handle since every newspaper is individual. We might not actually know or can't imagine what the real work flow will be, what will come, and that's definitely the hardest thing." Meanwhile, he already has plans for future products and services once Niiu gets going and is established in the market.

Oberhof and Tiedmann's mission is more about giving the market what it wants, i.e. providing whatever information the reader desires in whatever format they prefer, rather than innovating the newspaper industry (which seems to be a side effect of their project). So if the market preference shifts, so will their products and services.

Having recognized that newspaper may only be around for so long, InterTi GmbH is planning "to offer an e-paper as a second step, probably by the end of this year," Oberhof revealed. Other editions are in the works, but no plans have been formally announced given that the formal launch is still a few days away. "For the future, I think that things like the Kindle will be very interesting for our product developments, but for now its not actually enough, not many people use e-readers at all," Oberhof confides. However, given the company's service-oriented vision, we can reasonably expect an e-reader version once the market for them takes off.

Whether you think newspapers are doomed or just in a rough spot right now, there is no denying the simple ingenuity and appeal (however limited) of Niiu. Its combination of the strengths (and unfortunately some of the weaknesses) of printed news and online news could make it a product to be reckoned with, even for those newspaper publishers who feel no competition from it. The potential for newspaper innovation through individualization is huge, and it remains to be seen whether Niiu will capitalize and profit from that potential

The Editor's Weblog wishes the best of luck to Oberhof and Tiedmann. It is now up to the Berlin public to decide the fate of Niiu.

Mr. Wanja Oberhof will be speaking at the WAN 2009 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderabad

Sources: Personal interview with Mr. Oberhof.

Spiegel Online

PrintWeek

Time

Morocco blocked the distribution of El País on Saturday after the Spanish daily reproduced two cartoons considered to "undermine the institution of the monarchy," reports AFP.

The first image, by French cartoonist, Jean Plantu, was originally printed in Le Monde last Thursday, and depicts 'a hand reaching out of a Moroccan flag to create a child-like drawing of a funny face wearing a crown'. The cartoon also resulted in a ban on distribution of Le Monde in Morocco on both Thursday and Friday.

Last week Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product manager at Google, published a response to newspaper publishers' Hamburg Declaration which was made public on 9 July. The Declaration states that "going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." It discusses ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, which is a tool created by WAN-IFRA and the European Publishers Council to enable content providers to communicate their copyright terms and conditions online in a machine-readable way. Cooperation from search engines is essential for such an initiative.

Cohen contends that publishers do in fact have to give permission before their content appears on search engines, pointing to a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol which tells search engines what can and cannot be crawled. He points out, correctly, that news organisations make their content available because they want it to be found and read via Google, which does deliver many consumer visits to newspaper websites each month.

The dilemma

How is one news source, totally funded by subscriptions, to compete with another that receives government subsidies? Such is dilemma that arose when WAZ, Germany's second-largest newspaper group, dropped its subscription to the independently-run German press agency DPA in favor of government-subsidized Agence France-Presse.

As Isabelle de Pommereau points out in the Christian Science Monitor, the decision has consequences for both WAZ and DPA. Since the WAZ group started relying on AFP for all its wire coverage, "the papers' depth of German-based coverage has become undeniably more shallow." Pommereau adds that the loss of such a major client also puts financial pressure on DPA as it struggles against cutting coverage or raising the cost for its other clients.

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.

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.

The German market at first appearance would seem the perfect place to start up a free daily newspaper, but the market remains untapped, report Newspaper Innovations. German publishers seem determinedly anti-free dailies, overlooking the chance they represent.

Metro and Schibsted wanted to go to Germany while Dagsbrun also (Iceland) made plans. These incumbents have met with difficulty in the home market. Springer reportedly has a 'war fund' of EUR300 million ready and could launch competitor Gratissimo 'within days', and WAZ - the second largest German publisher - also wants to fight a free daily launch.

FTD cites 'informed sources' who report that it would take at least six years for a German project to break even, and that it would cost at least EUR400 million. Newspaper Innovation ask how this figure is calculated as launching costs are between EUR10 and EUR20 million in Spain, France, UK and the Netherlands.

The article even states that the actions of some players in the market could be for the attention of the Bundeskartellambt, the German anti-competition agency.

Source: Newspaper Innovation via IFRA Executive News Search
 

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 World Editors Forum, Reuters and Zogby International on Feb. 20 began collecting data for the second annual Newsroom Barometer, a global survey of chief editors about their attitudes and strategies in the multimedia age.

The Newsroom Barometer aims to provide a better understanding of the changes in newsrooms through the eyes of editors-in-chief and senior news executives.

Senior editors wishing to participate in the on-line survey, which tracks attitudes about the future of media and editorial strategies, should send their requests by e-mail to Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, at bpecquerie@wan.asso.fr (including name, title, newspaper name and country).

The Barometer is being conducted in eight languages to expand its reach beyond the four languages that were provided last year (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Japanese).

The 2008 poll results will be published in the next Trends in Newsroom report and presented by John Zogby, President of Zogby International and Monique Villa, Head of News at Reuters, at the 15th World Editors Forum conference to be held in Göteborg, Sweden, from 1 to 4 June next.

The first Newsroom Barometer, released last year, found the vast majority of newspaper editors world-wide are optimistic about the future of their newspapers. Full results can be found here.

As the Figaro readies the launch of its own in-house video studio (still fully under construction when visited), Bertrand Gié, head of new media for the paper, agreed to give us a few words about the role of video within the quality daily.

A few weeks ago, El Pais underwent a redesign to emphasize its renewed global reach and connect with a younger readership. In this email Q&A, editor-in-chief Javier Moreno explains everything about the paper's relaunch.

A report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) indicates that the UK is the dominant market for Internet advertising, with more than one-third of total online spending in Europe last year. 

As newspaper editors try to achieve more with a thinned out staff and lesser resources, two major European newspapers have launched a new ‘multi-newspaper newsroom’ model. The editors-in-chief of the Dutch NRC Handelsblad and German Die Welt will come discuss it at the 14th World Editors Forum, to be held from June 3 through 6 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Axel Springer’s project for a Bild-type title in France has been confirmed, to be launched in the second half of 2007. Yet the French Bild won’t – can’t – follow the same success formula of its German tabloid counterpart, because of France’s different news culture.

On Jan. 4 2007, Carlo Caracciolo acquired around 30% of Libération, the French daily newspaper. He is now the second shareholder behind Edouard de Rothschild (38%) after investing 5 million euros in the newspaper.

This December, the Internet virtual community Second Life will have its very own tabloid.  The site created in 2003 is an online world where people can make characters called avatars that live, play, and buy things within Second Life’s Internet borders. Now, Axel Springer, the publisher of Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper, plans on creating a weekly gossip tabloid about avatars for site users.

It's no secret that free papers have been expanding exponentially across the European newspaper market for several years, already comprising close to 20% of total newspaper distribution in a number of countries and over 50% in Spain and 75% in Iceland while causing an uproar in Germany. Most recently, the success of freesheets has caused a war in London and a practice that began in America with the freely distributed Examiner is about to arrive in Denmark.

These were the words from Eugen Russ, Managing Director of the Austrian company Vorarlberger Medienhaus, at the Annual Digital Media Round Table that took place in Moscow this morning. On Monday the 13th World Editors Forum and the 59th World Newspaper Congress will start in Moscow.

With his provocative words Russ referred to the fact that the website of its newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten reaches more people than Google in the region around Vorarlberg.

The German newspaper group WAZ (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung) prepares for a potential launch of a free paper in Germany and plans its own free paper, reports Persoenlich. It is the second publisher that does so: back in September publisher Axel Springer has announced plans to launch a free paper called Gratissimo in case Schibsted or another publisher launches a free sheet in Germany (see former posting).

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

The German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung changed its structure. Starting last Saturday, the paper appears now Monday to Saturday in the same structure. The first section (politics) ends with two pages "Panorama". These two pages are made by a new department with 6 journalists. The new department will focus on topics such as lifestyle and societal developments.