Results matching “us celebrities”

Following a week of much speculation over whether the new London freesheet existed, and if so, if it would launch at all, the London Weekly is finally here, says Guardian.

The launch of the new freesheet was announced in November of last year, with its website opening in December. Executives at the Global Publishing Group, the company responsible for the publication, initially announced the freesheet would launch on February 1st, but later pushed back the start date to February 5th.

The News of the World yesterday lost its court case to withhold secret evidence that allegedly documents the extensive use of phone-hacking by the newspaper's reporters and private investigators into the phone accounts of celebrities.

Judge Vos of the high court called for the evidence to be handed over to Max Clifford, a celebrity publicist. Clifford had alleged that the newspaper illegally tapped into the private voicemail of his mobile phone.

When newspapers run community events, it's important to stay committed to the convictions of the paper, says Marcin Gadzinski, editor of Sport.pl/Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'. Get that right first, and profit will follow, he adds.

His paper, which runs some sporting events, is no. 2 in Poland in terms of circulation, and likes to get involved in social issues and public advocacy campaigns. People all around Poland work for the paper, so it's helpful to use their contacts to organise activities.

They were not very successful when putting sports content on the web, he says, so in 2007 Sport.pl was launched, a strictly internet sports brand. They added online-only features rather than seeing it as a way to promote newspaper content. In 2009 the paper jumped from the number 5 to the number 2 sports website in Poland, with 5 million unique users a month. Plus, every Monday the paper publishes a Sport.pl-branded section.

Over the last year, newspapers have successfully utilized the micro-blogging social networking site, Twitter, to distribute their content and build up their audience.

However, newspapers have not started cashing in directly from the tweets published on Twitter - at least not yet. As Ad Age reports, early exploration from New York to Montreal is showing how newspaper publishers could cash in on their 140 character tweets.

In his upcoming documentary, Starsuckers, due to premier this month at the London film festival, filmmaker Chris Atkins dupes mainstream English tabloids into publishing untruths and made up stories about celebrities, MediaGuardian reports.

Recent changes to media laws, which have given accredited journalists permission to observe family court proceedings, are causing much confusion within the courts. That there is much uncertainty surrounding the meaning of the laws was demonstrated last week at the family courts at London's Royal Courts of Justice. Journalists were refused entry into the courts as court staff were apparently unaware of the changes to the law, while lawyers and other parties came out as explicitly adverse to press presence.

The media coverage of the shock death of Michael Jackson has served to highlight press dynamics, raising interesting questions concerning the nature of breaking news reporting, the cult of the celebrity and the relationship between newspapers and their online news rivals. Has the fact that most newspapers were delayed in the initial reporting of the death emphasised the widening gulf between print and digital channels of breaking news? Conversely, has the death been exploited by the printed press as a facile, reader guaranteeing hit?

The news of the performer's death, in terms of rumour, confirmation and reaction has been overwhelmingly 'digital' in expression. The scoop belonged to the Los Angeles based celebrity website, TMZ, which confirmed the death an hour after it aired whispers of a suspected heart attack. The reporting was rapid fire: time of death: 2.26pm, LA time, time of update: 2.44pm. 

For journalists constantly on the prowl for new ways to brand themselves, the Facebook gods have an answer, one that may turn out to be the ultimate name game. Previously, 'Facebookers' were simply assigned a random number as the URL of their personal page. But no longer.

With the advent of Facebook "usernames", Facebookers will have the opportunity to create a specific URL for themselves. Usernames will be available at http://facebook.com/username as of Saturday, June 13 at 12:01 am EST.

The proposed merger of two Polish dailies and the launch of an entertainment version of a political weely, both intended to conquer a new public and consolidate readership, have raised some doubts in the Polish newspaper industry.

Poland's largest business and legal daily Gazeta Prawna (87,000 paid circulation) will merge with the second quality news daily Dziennik (147,000 readership), in a 51/49% partnership between Infor Biznes and Axel Springer, their respective owners. The transaction, which will result in a combined newspaper strong in economics on one side, and politics, culture and sports on the other, is still subject to approval by the authorities.

A Guardian look at the way newspaper content has changed over the last 25 years reveals that today's British newspapers contain a lot more commentary than they did a quarter of a century earlier.

Amusingly, Peter Wilby opens his article by asking: "How did readers know what to think in 1984?" in reference to the lack of opinion pages on offer at the time, noting that the likes of the Times and the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Sun - known these days for their plethora of opinionated columnists - only had one or two regular dedicated contributors.

Speaking at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington DC on
Saturday 9 May, president Barack Obama said that "a government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America."

In what was mostly a speech packed with jokes and humorous anecdotes, Obama ended his discourse on a serious note about the state of journalism in the country, acknowledging that there were many good journalists who had recently found themselves out of a job.

Appearing before MPs earlier this week, a number of editors from some of the country's most
established newspapers warned of the "chilling" costs of legal action which were discouraging many newspapers from the business of investigative journalism, the Guardian has reported.

The editors were invited to demonstrate how privacy, libel and press standards were impacting the day-to-day business of running their newspapers, as part of a review on the part of the culture, media and sport select committee.

This June the Chicago Tribune will launch a new website, Chicago Now, which will combine social media, e-commerce, blogs, news content, and advertorials to "connect Chicagoans through a network of niche sites." According to its promotion video, the project will be "Huffington Post meets Facebook for Chicago" and aims to attract new local audiences who will engage with each other as well as advertisers.

Chicago Now does not intend to replace ChicagoTribune.com, which will continue, though it will replace the Tribune's web site for RedEye, its free daily targeted to a young urban audience. The new site's goal is to build an authentic and engaged local community quickly and to secure 35% of local web traffic.

The Colorado Independent reported how the start of the annual conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers turned into a confession session as business journalists and editors explained how the media 'blew it' in covering the economic crisis. They admitted both to "falling under the saw of free-market ideology" and to "missing the complex story of the rupturing system by only reporting it in parts and to almost no effect."

Several different reasons were cited by various members of the panel, moderated by ProPublica leader Paul Steiger. Jane Bryant Quinn, personal finance columnist for Bloomberg and Newsweek said it had become "unfashionable" to write about regulation, so reporters didn't.

The Huffington Post has announced that it is to launch an Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million, in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors. Founder Arianna Huffington told the AP that she believes that "All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism."

The funding should be enough to support 10 staff investigative reporters, and Huffington hopes to use laid-off journalists, who will work with freelancers to look at stories about the US economy. Although the site generally has a liberal leaning, Huffington was adamant that the investigative journalists' work will be non-partisan, and the fund's executive director Nick Penniman pointed out that the group would be quickly discredited if it puts out faulty information.

On Wednesday Metro US will have Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of the Huffington Post, as a guest editor for the day.  She will attend news meetings, as well as mediate and contribute to the news of the day.

"Arianna Huffington's unique insight, knowledge and contacts will be a superb addition to Metro," said Tony Metcalf, the editor-in-chief of Metro US.

This is not the first time Metro pulls something like this, in October 2008 they had James Blunt editing from their Rome desk for Metro International.

Other papers have invited celebrities to partake in their publications. U2 singer Bono is writing six to ten columns in 2009 for the New York Times, and Tribune Newspapers has invited Quincy Jones and other renowned musicians as guest writers. During the difficult times print faces against the Internet and the financial crisis, papers have found that these popular figures can help lure readers in.

Source: Metro

The Los Angeles Times is to integrate coverage of its arts, entertainment and Hollywood business news. From March 3, reporters working on the paper's Calendar section - overseeing entertainment and leisure news - will be expected to work side by side with the arts and business teams.

Sallie Hofmeister, who was made business editor last May, will assume the new role of assistant managing editor/arts & entertainment to oversee operations. It is understood that, as yet, no new business editor has been appointed.

Germany's largest newspaper, Bild, is looking to recruit citizen journalists, and it is doing so on a grand scale. The Springer title is working with supermarket chain Lidl to sell a basic digital camera to the new recruits who will help Bild expand its coverage.

Managing Editor, Michael Paustian, says, "We can't cover everything. We think it is an advance for journalism." The German newspaper is the most dominant player in the market, achieving circulation of 3.3 million copies from Monday to Saturday.

Pskov-City, a new free weekly regional paper was launched last Friday in Russia's Pskov area. The paper, published entirely in color, has an initial circulation of 20,000 copies, although it intends to increase the figure to 50,000.

According to gipp.ru, Pskov citizens from the age group 25-55 years who are educated, well paid and have active lifestyles are looking for a paper that focuses on their region.

Pskov-City is divided into sections like news, lifestyle, health, business, weekly TV program guides, celebrities and also features sections that are gender-specific.

Source: gipp.ru  

See also:

Germany: Axel Springer reverses strategy, to launch free weekly
The Netherlands: Free weekly to launch this month in Rotterdam
Columbia: New free daily to debut with circulation of 300,000

Do women face a glass ceiling in the blogosphere? Organizers and attendees of BlogHer, the three-year-old conference attended by more than a thousand female bloggers, think so.

Last year, a study co-authored by BlogHer and Compass Partners found that 36 million women (about 11 percent of all US women) participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs.

Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, ranked its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. And last year, Forbes.com created a similar list, naming just 3 women on its list of 25.

"It's disheartening and frustrating," said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes.

Created in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure, this year's San Francisco event "has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a '60s consciousness-raising group," reported the New York Times.

"These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained," reports NYT. "And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference... belie(ve) that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts... Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them."

The conference hosted seminars like "How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger," where many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups undercut them, and linked to them less often.

Megan McArdle, who blogs for the Atlantic monthly about economic issues, did no attend the conference, but noted "Women get dismissed in ways that men don't." "(McArdle) added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say," reported NYT.

Confronting the issue head on, and encouraging those women fighting the tide, Enkay recently created the first Top 100 Female Bloggers list and NxE created a 50 most influential female bloggers list, earlier this month.

Sources: The New York Times, About.com

With the rapid development of new media platforms, newspapers have been at the forefront of pushing through innovative and easily accessible products to satisfy their consumers thirst for twenty-four hour news. This is undoubtedly an exciting time for the newspaper industry, but how do reporters and editors on the ground feel about the changes happening in their industry?

Facts

The National Union of Journalists' survey on this issue in the UK makes stark reading: the introduction of new media has increased the workload for 75% of union members and 16% have received no training at all in new media. Reports have also emerged of journalists who routinely completed three print edition stories a day who are now being asked to provide three multi-media stories a day, with video footage and podcasts. One reporter said: "You would need to be an octopus to be able to do everything they want doing."

Positive Feedback

The survey results are worrying, however, I spoke to sub-editors and received positive feedback about the changes in the industry. Karl Smith, a sub-editor at the Daily Telegraph in the UK - a newspaper that has radically overhauled its newsroom in response to media innovations - who focuses on the print edition, told me that the change has increased dialogue between staff members and that he was comfortable with the changes.

Smith said: "Having the hub in the centre of the office makes the news conferences seem a lot less exclusive than if (as elsewhere) they're in a corner office. The web staff are right next to the print people as well - rather than off in a Siberian corner - making you permanently aware of the web product, even if you're not directly involved in it."

Andrew Higton, a sub-editor at the Daily Mirror in the UK, agreed with Smith's positive feedback. He said that the shift has involved a change in culture but that he has adapted well: he now thinks "print" and  "web" and keeps them quite separate.

Communication is key

I spoke to Mike Van Niekerk, Editor-In-Chief, Online, Fairfax Media in Australia about how he managed his team during the integration process. He spoke bluntly about the difficulties that the company faced in the early days, stating: "About eight years ago, when we introduced online video reporting at theage.com.au and wanted to piggyback on our print entertainment reporters interviewing movie celebrities there was a strong negative reaction. Print staff stopped work for a meeting to reject this approach, and any integration with online in the newsroom. One newsroom leader said, "If I had wanted to go into the TV business I would have joined a television station, not a newspaper"."

Reflecting on these times, Van Niekerk said: "It was entirely our fault for not introducing the changes through proper consultation and explanation, for dealing with the fears - some justified - and misunderstandings of our colleagues."

Lawrence Shaw, an NUJ representative dealing with new media, told me that how media companies are handling their staff through these changes is, "a real issue for the NUJ".  He said: "It is still unfortunate that in many places changes come from on-high with little consultation with staff..."

The lack of communication is not the only problem.

Drop in Standards

A drop in standards brought about by a rush to embrace the new technology is another concerning development at some media organisations. A local newspaper reporter in the North of England reports that he was given a camcorder, told to go into the office broom cupboard, drape some material behind him and simply read his article out straight to camera. Such reports indicate that some media organisations are perhaps missing the point. This new technology can make the news come alive, but it is pointless to use it unless it really contributes to the story.

Moving Forward

I asked Van Niekerk how Fairfax moved past their initial problems, he said: "The most important part of the process has been more effective communication, which is how it should have been from the beginning."

Fairfax Media also utilized the Unions as a method to communicate with their staff.  In 2007, "the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance began to take a fairly pro-active approach to understanding and dealing with the changes. The company's journalists as a whole are now more engaged and finding the rewards of new skills and new opportunities."

Van Niekerk said that it is an ongoing process and that they are still working on it, however, the lines of communication between the newsroom and Editors are now open.

Shaw argues that it is best to deal with staff concerns upfront rather than allowing bad working practices and resentment to set in.

It seems clear that just as there has been a synergy between online editions and print editions with newspapers, there needs to be a synergy between editors and their newsrooms. Communication and training are quite clearly the key, and if handled correctly, it allows the newsroom to focus on delivering the news.

Source: National Union of Journalists - Shaping the Future

Non-professional photography gets a boost, as the motto "right place, right time" becomes the guideline. Guardian.co.uk blogger Ravi Somaiya has shown that it doesn't take much to snap photos of celebrities, relating back to the Getty Images-Flickr deal that might turn the everyday person into a photo source for publications.

"Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity. Advertisers are looking for authenticity," said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive of Getty Images.

"Citizen journalism" such as including yourself alongside a celebrity may "work" better because it shows interaction, said Rob Bennet, a New York Times photographer and Photojournalism professor at Columbia University.

"You need good information or a good sense of where celebrities are going to be. Situations develop quickly so you have to be able to use your camera to be up and firing very fast. A certain tactfulness can go a long way, coupled with a willingness to take calculated risks. You're also going to have a lot more luck outdoors in the daytime than indoors," said Bennett.

Although the economic explosion that lead to the wide-spread availability of cameras gave a more "authentic" feel to photographs, editors may have to put more effort into verifying that a photo wasn't taken under illegal circumstances, such as a breech of privacy.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

See also:
New software detects doctored photographs

The Los Angeles Times' website drew 115 million page views in June, just short of its all-time traffic record of 120 million PV set in May.

A quick glance at the list of most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia features in June gives a good idea of readers' favorite topics of interest - namely a push towards celebrity news and away from global issues and traditionally important topics such as the general elections. The lists also show that, despite newspapers' widespread emphasis on blogs and videos, these platforms still account for a minimal share of total traffic.

Furthermore, these lists provide some indications about how reader interests may vary from one platform to the other (news, blogs, videos, picture galleries).

If one supposes that latimes.com readership isn't too significantly different from average online newspaper readership, then these numbers hint toward which formats work best for different topics (Skip to 'Insights' for a brief summary).

Text - Top articles:

1. Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images (Scott Glover)
2. Mega-mansions are L.A.'s really big show (Jessica Garrison)
3. Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush (John Horn)
4. Fourth day of triple digits sends crowds to L.A. pools, beaches  (Tami Abdollah)
5. Packing in public: Gun owners tired of hiding their weapons embrace 'open carry' (Nicholas Riccardi)
6. Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil (Martin Zimmerman)
7. Judge orders TMZ to remove sex tape of actor Verne Troyer (Harriet Ryan)
8. Lakers have a collapse for the ages (Mike Bresnahan)
9. Offshore oil drilling opponents are rethinking (Richard Simon and Bob Drogin)
10. Obama leads in battle for Latino vote (Peter Wallsten)


The first thing that strikes us when looking at the list is how few stories relate to 'global' issues or to the general elections in the US: ranked 6 is a column about rising oil prices and the only story directly related to the elections is ranked 10. The majority of stories have mostly local relevance about Los Angeles.

(Only) one of the top 10 stories concerns sports - a usually strong section for most newspaper websites although June isn't the biggest season for sports in the US - and the Lakers' basketball team's demise in the championship finals.

The top three stories (and 7) revolve, more or less closely, around issues of sex and the cult of celebrities and entertainment. Number 3 is a story about the making-of Oliver Stone's latest movie about President George W. Bush. Granted, considering Los Angeles' prime location in the movie and celebrity industry, it isn't particularly surprising that many latimes.com readers are going for those stories.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that readers of latimes.com news articles prefer 'softer' content compared to readers of other online newspapers. In fact, this distribution is probably representative of a move towards celebrity news by mainstream media and the audience in general.

Limitations: This is a very cursive overview of readers' favorite topics for news stories only looking at the top 10. A more in-depth study would possibly show that while a few select individual stories about sex and celebrities receive many hits, the sections for 'hard' news (World, Business, National) on the whole generate substantially more traffic than Entertainment.

Top blogs:

1. Top of the Ticket  -- 1,743,178 PV
2. The Dish Rag  -- 1,437,462 PV
3. L.A. Land --  652,605 PV
4. Lakers Blog      
5. Show Tracker                
6. L.A. Now         
7. Technology Blog (first month out, and in the top ten)       
8. Gold Derby      
9. Web Scout      
10. Countdown to Crawford (launched June 17)


Now a look at the top-10 list of blogs gives a more intricate perspective: compared to news stories, the blog format seems to draw more readers to 'serious' topics such as politics and the general elections.

The political blog Top of the Ticket is in the lead, and Countdown to Crawford (a blog that covers the final steps of the elections) has made it to the list although it was only launched in mid-June. Ranked 6, L.A. Now covers general news about California.

It may seem counter-intuitive that readers prefer the blog format, usually associated with a more conversational tone and less formality, to read stories about politics. On the other hand, this preference could also be explained by the fact that those readers precisely prefer a format open to opinion and debate to read about those topics. Since blogs typically allow for more author disclosure, they can also be seen as a more transparent medium.

The last two blogs revolve around technology and developments in the digital landscape, a thematic that was absent from the Top 10 news stories.

Limitations: Again, this is hardly a scientific procedure, and the top 10 blogs on latimes.com account for less than 5% of total page views on the site. To put this in further perspective, five of the ten blogs relate to 'softer' content - three revolve around celebrities and the movie industry - one is about the Lakers and number 3 is a blog about real estate (note the parallel with the news story about mansions ranking 2).

Furthermore, The Dish Rag, ranked 2, is edging close to Top of the Ticket, so that in reality the number of users consulting LA Times blogs for soft and hard news is probably equivalent.

Pictures - Top photo galleries:

1.  Celebrity and sports collide in L.A.
2.  Universal Studios fire
3.  Celebrities' real names revealed (Denise Martin and Stephanie Lysaght)
4.  Hollywood hunks before they were hot (Elizabeth Snead)
5.  Celebrities by The Times
6.  Celebrity shots
7.  Midwest flooding
8.  Top 9 cars women buy more than men
9.  Hollywood's unwedded bliss list (Elizabeth Snead)
10. R-rated firsts (Susan King)

Unsurprisingly, the list of most popular photo galleries is also dominated by celebrities, even more so than for news stories or blogs (seven out of ten).

Of the three remaining picture galleries, two are big general news stories with obviously strong visual content: ranked 2 is the Universal Studios fire and ranked 7 is a gallery about floods in the Midwest.

Video - Top videos:

1. Dogs orphaned in China's quake find a home - 132,239 streams - AP
2. LAPD goes green: Maya Sanchez reports - 112,375 streams - KTLA
3. Tsvangirai on Mugabe - AP
4. Local update: Moe the chimp escapes cage -  KTLA
5. Amanda Beard heads to Omaha for her fourth Olympic swim - LAT
6. 17-year-old decapitated by Six Flags ride - AP
7. Australia marks Iraq withdraw with parade - AP
8. Evening update: USC student sentenced to time served in baby's death - KTLA
9. Fires grip parts of California - AP
10. Bush pleased with war spending bill - AP

The top-10 list for videos also delivers its share of lessons. First of all, despite newspapers' wild rush to boost video content, videos generate a limited amount of traffic compared to most text stories.

Many of the videos in the list are 'soft', but don't relate to entertainment especially. Instead, they are often emotionally-driven (dogs orphaned in China, 17-year old girl decapitated at a fair park). A lot of these popular videos are visual anecdotes with a potential for virality (Moe the chimp escapes cage).

'Hard' news, ie. a Congress debate about legislation or a business acquisition, does not typically constitute a popular pick for videos, as it is often poor visually.

The majority of successful video content is syndicated, generally provided by the Associated Press (only one of the top 10 videos was produced by the LA Times). Considering the average PVs for videos, and although CPMs for video ads are usually higher than for regular PVs, it is still often (too) costly for newspapers to produce their own quality videos.

Insights

In short, here are some of the insights brought by latimes.com's Top-10 lists:

- The Los Angeles Times has strongly emphasized 'soft' news, which is becoming increasingly popular among regular news stories.
- On the other hand, its blogs seem to attract many viewers interested by politics - although half of the blogs in the list deal with lighter content.
- The blog format is also popular when they deal with technological issues.
- To an extent, it could be inferred that the latimes.com is fulfilling its role as a newspaper by focusing on 'local' stories: Hollywood, celebrities and the entertainment industry being part of that local context.
- The photo galleries are overwhelmingly dominated by pictures of celebrities. The only two 'hard' news stories are obviously visual: a fire and floods.
- Video content must also be visually rich, but the most popular videos are those that are emotionally-driven and potentially viral (ie: humorous anecdotes, shocking stories).

The purpose of this piece was simply to make some observations as to the types of topics preferred by online users, depending on the format they were published in. The goal wasn't to quaintly warn editors against the risks of chasing eyeballs at the expense of news judgment.

However, these Top-10 lists are clearly representative of the trend, adopted both by editors and by the audience, towards more celebrity-type news, or 'soft' news in general. In January and April, when the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times announced that they were beefing up coverage of Britney Spears, at the same time as newsrooms across the nation couldn't afford the expenses of covering the elections, many newspaper editors were outraged by this rush towards more catchy, entertainment-driven, stories.

According to others, celebrity is a cultural currency that fulfils a role in the press. But at what cost?

In a five part series on CurryBet.net, Martin Belam reviews the Daily Mail's website redesign. Here are some highlights.

Layout

The new Mail website has some unwieldy designs, Belam says. First, a "skyscraper advert" lining the left side of the page results in a squeezed format that is hard to read. More noticeably, the home page is a colossal 6,369 pixels long - 10 pages of scrolling.

Finally, Belam is bewildered by the 140 links jamming the Mail's homepage. He believes that the Mail may have gotten overzealous with its coverage, leaving "designers with little choice but to include everything, to the detriment of the overall user experience."

RSS Feeds

The Mail has created RSS feeds for individual celebrities - an innovation, Belam says, that demonstrates "a real understanding of the strengths of the RSS format."

Navigation

Belam is a fan of the Mail's new interactive section, Coffee Break, which offers browsers games, crossword puzzles, and cartoons.

Message Boards

Belam likes the message board's "very graphical" front-page. He has mixed feelings, however, about the Mail's decision to display individual threads with the most recent post first. He says the ordering is "a very brave design decision" but warns that it can be "a very jarring experience the first time."

Hovering Preview

This feature, which displays the preview of a story when a mouse is rolled over it, was removed after the initial launch. Belam says it "caused more usability problems than it solved."




Source: CurryBet.net through IFRA

Tabloids' new celebrities could be politicians, instead of Hollywood stars like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Just as mainstream media borrow content from tabloids by writing about Hollywood starlets and the like, tabloids now borrow from media covering the political sphere.

For example, US Weekly put Michelle and Barack Obama on the cover last week while People wrote about Tim Russet.

"The lines between gossip and politics have blurred," ABC News wrote, in light of coverage of politicians like "gay American" Jim McGreevy and New York's prostitute-soliciting former governor, Eliot Spitzer.  

"There are a limited number of celebrities that people really care about, maybe a half dozen, including Britney and Lindsay," said New York Post's Media Ink columnist Keith Kelly. "There is a celebrity fatigue setting in. People are bored of the same people doing the same things, and there is no one new on the horizon."

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, US Weekly's circulation grew by 10% to over 1.9 million between 2006-2007 while People continued to be the most popular celebrity magazine with 3.6 million in circulation, ABC News reported.

As far as content goes, politics is "as much a function of slow gossip as it is a response to a genuine interest in the presidential elections" and including Michelle Obama was "natural" since the readers are young females, according to Bradley Jacobs, US Weekly's senior editor, ABC News reported.

"We're expanding the definition of celebrity to include politics," Jacobs said.

Barack Obama's interview on the US Weekly site in March got around 253 % more page views than "an average story", according to a spokesperson, ABC News reported.

Elizabeth Bird, a University of South Florida anthropologist specializing in pop culture and media said that it's "natural" that people see political candidates as celebrities during elections and that the general public is bored of the "distasteful" celebrity stories.

A fairly optimistic statement, if one considers the continuing success of tabloid-type content...

Source: ABCNews through World News Network