February 2006 Archives

Boris Berezovskiy, a popular Russian businessman who now lives in London, has sold his Kommersant publishing house to his friend and partner Badri Patarkacishvili, a president of the Georgia Olympic committee, who is searched for by the Russian general prosecutor.

It is widely known that newspapers, faced with competition from proliferating sites like Craigslist and GoogleBase, are losing classified ad revenues, one of their staple sources of income. Bill Mitchell of Poynter attended the Newspaper Association of America convention to find out how newspapers were faring with their own free classified experiments. Turns out, not so well. 

The widespread availability of broadband internet has upped the ante adding much variety to what internet users can view, hear, in short consume, online. In such a climate, video is set to become one of the key new requirements for newspaper websites.

UK regional daily The Hull Daily Mail began offering video news reports on its website in November after six of its journalists completed a diploma in videojournalism, comprised of three weeks of intensive practical training, organised by The Press Association and taught by David Dunkley Gyimah, senior lecturer in Digital Journalism at The University of Westminster.

The Editors Weblog interviewed David Dunkley Gyimah and Paul Hartley, assistant editor at the Hull Daily Mail, asking them about the diploma in videojournalism and the implications of online video for newspaper websites. Both agree that online video will soon be found on most newspaper websites.

Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing at The Guardian, talks about moving the newspaper's brand online in an interview with Jemima Kiss of journalism.co.uk.

Asked what has kept him at the Guardian for ten years, Waldman responded: "Whenever I've even thought about packing my bags, something fascinating has always emerged … In addition to that, there has been a long standing commitment to the net from the top of Guardian Newspapers down ... we've been able to spend most of the last decade building a fantastic online presence and business - rather than constantly having to justify our existence. Lots of organisations have been willing to chuck huge chunks of cash at the net in sporadic bursts, but few, if any, have shown the same level of steady, continuous support - and that is probably the single reason why we've been able to do so well."

The Russian city of Volgograd is to have a new newspaper after Gorodskiye Izvestia was closed down for publishing its own cartoon, showing religious figures, lampooning the row over the infamous Jyllands Posten Mohammed cartoons (see previous posting). The new paper is to be called Volgogradskaya Gazeta.

In his weekly Guardian column, Jeff Jarvis describes the website that he sees as the future of media, Digg.com. Launched by "scruffy geek," Kevin Rose, Digg is a site whose users become news editors by scouring the Web for articles, posting what they find interesting and then voting on what other articles they "dig," or in other words, articles they enjoyed and think other users should read. Articles which receive the most votes make it to the front page.

The text of an European Union statement on the Mohammed cartoons row has been contested by Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot who wished to make it "clear that we do not make an apology for the cartoons." The first paragraph of the statement currently reads "The (EU) council acknowledges and regrets that these cartoons were considered offensive and distressing by Muslims across the world."

Bill Emmott, the outgoing editor of the weekly The Economist recently commented on the success of his newspaper suggesting that dailies had contributed significantly, but not in the way one would hope. Having helped to double the paper's circulation to over 1 million during his 13-year tenure, Emmott said that the tendency of daily papers to print more "entertainment" news while sacrificing hard facts and insightful editorials left the analytical Economist a niche for educated readers craving intelligent journalism. To see if others in the industry felt that newspapers were straying from their core function, The Editors Weblog asked several newspaper men and women to react to Emmott's comments:

Does God like the internet? According to geek.com and ZDnet, "Ed Callahan had trouble getting his mother a Yahoo! e-mail address with their last name, but not because it was already taken. Rather, the name was disallowed by the company's systems because it contained the consecutive letters a-l-l-a-h, the Arabic word for God.

Callahan did further investigation and discovered that other words associated with religion were okay, just not the specific letters making up "Allah." Mr. Callahan seemed to think the policy was discriminatory, telling the Associated Press, "The war on terror is becoming a war on Muslims. The word 'terrorist' now means Muslims, and it shouldn't... They disallowed 'allah' but allowed 'jesus' and 'god,' and I don't think there is a rational explanation for that.'"

Significantly smaller than its immediate rival and operating in a market that has been on a downturn for 20 years, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's plight is well known in the American newspaper industry. Some even predict that the daily will eventually die. But several reforms the paper is undergoing could prove these pessimists wrong.

When the Daily Mail & General Trust put its regional newspaper group, Northcliffe on the block last fall, the crisis facing the market, primarily because of the Internet, became blatantly obvious. Perhaps even more telling that the future of British regional newspapers is in jeopardy were the weak offers for the 100-paper company, so weak in fact that DMGT repealed the sale. So what do editors and executives of those local papers think about threat posed to their no longer stable yet still profitable industry?

As paper and print costs rise and the Internet posts up to the minute data, many newspapers have been scaling back their stock listing pages directing readers to their websites. But not all readers comply. The latest paper to cut financial listings, the Rocky Mountain News, found out the hard way.

The mantra from digital publishing advocates at the World Newspaper Advertising Conference & Expo was that newspaper companies must rapidly move their business on-line or risk getting left behind.
 
Ironically, those same advocates provided one of the strongest arguments for staying in, and developing, the print business -- newspapers generate much more revenue per reader than on-line media, and will continue to do so for some time to come.

The Reston, VA-based The Media Center at the American Press Institute has morphed its blog, Morph, into a collaborative project that invites all to participate in various conversations about the hottest topics in the rapidly evolving world of new media. The blog is divided into six sections, each led by movers and shakers of the industry, and focused on keeping the discussion lively leading up to and after the We Media Global Forum which will take place in London on May 3 and 4, 2006.   

The German cartel office approved David Montgomery's take-over (see former posting) of the German tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost. The newspaper is now part of the Deutsche Zeitungsholding group, owner of Berliner Zeitung and Berliner Kurier, which was bought by Montgomery and his investment partner Suhler Stevenson in October 2005 (see former posting). Montgomery said the deal was the "next step in his 'buy and build' strategy for the German newspaper market", reported The Guardian.  

Sources: Medienhandbuch.de (in German), The Guardian

The Swiss public service broadcaster SRG announced on Friday that its much criticised online portal will not include classifieds and advertising. This can be seen as a compromise offer towards the Swiss newspaper publishers, who protested against the new portal in December, because they thought it was an interference into the private sector and a competitor to portals of newspapers (see previous posting). However, the SRG will continue to run the news portal, because it offers fee-payers added information to the TV programme in a modern way.

Source: Kleinreport (in German)