Newspapers have always competed with one another for the scoop and the right to boast that their newsroom nailed the story. But in the digital age, those rivalries may be fading away.
The New York Times reports that several major publications will soon be linking to each other with the help of an Internet company which strives to structure information.
Just to let you know that for the next month, we'll be scaling back on the number of postings. The Editors Weblog wishes you all a great August!
For the first time, the digital arm of the Spanish publisher Grupo PRISA which prints El Pais, has turned a profit. The division's revenues were up 47.3% to 14.28 million Euros and operating profits came in at 0.06 million euros after losing 2.99 million last year.
Source: El Pais
Cyberjournalist tells of a report by Belden Associates which shows that only 37% of people who read newspaper websites are regular visitors and that only 27% visit daily. Also, the average age of newspaper website readers has risen 5 years over the past five years showing that young readers aren't necessarily picking up the online newspaper reading habit.
Source: Cyberjournalist
American sports editor
Greg Bowers writes on
Editor & Publisher of a revelation he had not too long ago concerning how sporting news is transforming because of the Web. One day when he was deciding what the next days layout would be, his wife, not really a sports fan, mentioned the days two top stories. and then it hit Greg; why should I print these stories in tomorrow's paper if everyone already knows what happened?
For the media watcher,
the woes of the French press are
no surprise. But now it's official. An annual study of France's top 300 publishers conducted by the
Direction for Media Development (DDM), an office attached to that of the Prime Minister, has been released, and the numbers are depressingly bad.
After the French news agency
AFP sued Google for $17.5 million in damages last year, Google agreed to stop posting AFP content on its news aggregator. But as it turns out, AFP is still there.
Editors-in-chief of two of Britain's top dailies have had their say about how the Internet should be used by newspapers.
The Independent's
Simon Kelner, famous for the "
newspaper vs. viewspaper" debate, and
The Times'
Robert Thomson give somewhat contradictory messages about the future of newspaper journalism.
Jeff Mignon at
Média Café asks this pressing question about the state of the French press noting that the costs of producing the top national French dailies continues to outweigh revenues from advetisements and paid copies. If it weren't for subsidies and generous investors, Mignon wonders if these papers would have made it this far.
In the wake of last week's bombings in Mumbai, the Indian government has asked service providers to block access to blog sites giving no reasons for its demands. Indian bloggers are up in arms comparing their government to regimes in China and Saudi Arabia and citing the request as "a dangerous precedent" for Indian democracy.
We've been hoping for some time that the "bloggers vs. journalists" debate would just go away. We finally may have reached that point. A report done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 66% of people maintaining blogs don't label their acts as journalism. The other 34% considered their blogging as journalism because they engage in journalistic functions like fact-checking and linking to sources.
A new organization is being set up by Australia's leading publishers to promote newspapers to advertisers and help increase readership. Armed with 2 million in Australian dollars, the joint venture hopes to "modernize the public perception of newspapers." The plan sounds similar to one launched by the Newspaper Association of America, which began a USD$50 million campaign with similar goals.
Reuters mobile services, until now subscription based, are to become completely advertisement supported. Vice President of emerging media at the London-based news agency said, "Instead of trying to fight the trend toward advertising we're embracing advertising as the business model for our services." Readers can sign up for the service here.
Source: AdAge
In order to increase revenue, as of September, the Wall Street Journal plans on printing ads on its front page. The ads will begin to appear before the January switch to a smaller format. Although the size of the ad hasn't been announced, news content space will diminish but the layout and the number of articles on the front page will not change.
Source: Editor & Publisher
The New York Times Company released its second quarter results yesterday showing a 0.5million increase in net income from the same quarter in 2005. Total revenues were up 1.6%, including a 1% increase in ads and a 0.6% increase in circulation revenues.
The quality broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung wants to move into a relatively untapped market in Germany; the Sunday edition. If the daily goes through with the project, it would print only the fourth Sunday paper in the country after Bild am Sonntag, Welt am Sonntag and Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung.
A day before releasing its quarterly results, the
New York Times announced that it will be cutting 250 jobs and cropping the width of its page size by an inch and a half. The cuts will include the subletting of a printing plant and the consolidation of others. To make up for a loss of news space which would have been 11%, the paper will add more pages to make up for 6% of that loss.
Although China has been heralded for the growth of its newspaper market, the print side of that growth may be short-lived. It seems that younger generations, like in other countries, are rapidly adopting the Internet as their preferred medium for news and entertainment. And with 100 million Chinese Internet users and growing fast, this trend looks to be irreversible.
