Results matching “use of wikipedia and”

About a month ago, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, published a post on his blog about an idea that could make journalism better by allowing more people to participate in the journalistic process: ExplainThis.

Aware of the importance of context and research in the news environment, Rosen explained to the Poynter Online that his idea was based on a user-centric approach to news.

The Miami Herald came up with an innovative way of generating that elusive online revenue in the weeks leading up to Christmas last year. No, they didn't plan to increase advertising or to put up paywalls. Their plan wasn't even a paid mobile application.

Instead, they asked readers of their online edition for donations.

And according to Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, early signs are that it's working.

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.

Over the autumn months, International GfK held a survey of 16,800 people aged over 15 in 17 European countries and the USA called "Internet Use" and commissioned, interestingly enough, by The Wall Street Journal Europe. 

In preparation of its spin-off from Time Warner, AOL has put the final pieces in place for its innovative news creation and searching system. 

Last night's tension filled 2010 World Cup Qualifier between France and Ireland exploded in extra time when French captain Thierry Henry set up what would be the decisive goal after keeping the ball in play with his hand from an offside position.

The controversial result, which sees France heading to South Africa and Ireland heading home, has sparked outrage over the internet with many fans tweeting about the event and a 'Wiki war' breaking out over Henry's Wikipedia page.

The Wall Street Journal's new Europe edition comes out today, with changes to both print and online offerings. The US edition of the WSJ will no longer be printed and distributed in London, and its subscribers will be offered the European version instead.

Changes to the print paper include a new simplified front-page layout, with added sky boxes and navigation bars, new columns to run throughout the week, regionally themed pages and a series of eight-page special reports. Europe.wsj.com will highlight the paper's new columnists, interviews and analysis features. A new daily email service, 'World at a Glance', will provide a late-afternoon briefing on world and business news.

The Editors Weblog (and all of France) will be taking a day off to remember the Armistice with Germany, November 11, 1918. See you on thursday!

Mobile giant Ericsson has moved to fill the void between publishers' desires to charge for online content and the infrastructure to actually do so with its Internet Payment Exchange system. 

MashLogic is a start-up that is seeking to help publishers increase their traffic by providing consumers with what is essentially a "personalised search tool," as described by John Bryan, vice president of business development. The company is based in San Francisco, funded by investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, and founders of LinkedIn and About.com. It currently has seven employees, but Bryan told the Editors Weblog that it is looking to expand.

What it is: three product variations

MashLogic is planning to operate in three ways, based on the same principle of encouraging people to consume more of the content that they are interested in. First, is the consumer offering, which is in beta and was rolled out a few months ago. A consumer can go to the MashLogic site and download an Internet Explorer or Firefox plug-in, and a MashLogic icon appears in the browser tool bar. Clicking on this gives users a choice of more than 20 sources to select, and the RSS feeds from these sources are read by the MashLogic algorithm. MashLogic then searches each web page that the user visits and underlines key terms for which it can provide extra information from the source feeds. When the user scrolls over one of these terms, a box pops up with additional links from the sources that the user has chosen. If the user wants to read an article, they click on the link and the page opens in a new browser tab.

"So what we're doing," said Bryan, "is providing users with a tool that gives them direct access to relevant content, rather than going to Google or Yahoo, which give you articles loosely associated with the terms you're searching for."

This tool has been available for about four months, though it has not yet been marketed. Bryan said that the company has found that users are spending more time on a site investigating the links that are offered, and that on average, a user will click through to a link offered by the box four times. These facts made Bryan and his colleagues think about ways in which the company could work directly with newspaper and magazines "to address some of the challenges that publishers have been facing."

What they came up with was a second scenario, 'Branded Mash': offering publications a branded pop up box that would contain links only to their own content and that of partners such as Wikipedia or Amazon. For example, visitors to the New York Times might be able to use a branded box which would link to other NYT articles and multimedia content on topics which the reader was looking at, and relevant content from Wikipedia, Twitter and e-commerce sites. The box would also have a search function. All the publisher would have to do is insert a couple of lines of Java script, and the reader would not have to download anything.

A third offering which the company is developing is to take this branded box  and give the user the chance to have this available on any website they looked at. For example, if someone was a big fan of the Guardian, they could choose to have a Guardian pop up box, linking to Guardian content, appear on any page they were looking at. The newspaper would have to insert some script, and would offer the user a link to the MashLogic website from where they could download the tool.

How MashLogic could make money for publishers

So the essential benefit of MashLogic for publishers would be to increase traffic and page views, and therefore CPMs. Using the Branded Mash, a reader would always be just one click away from content on their chosen newspaper or magazine website, even if on a competitor's site "What we've found," said Bryan, "is that if you always get your news from one source that you trust, you might always want to see how that matches up to what else you're hearing." Even using the more basic offering (second scenario) the user would have less temptation to leave the publisher's site and use a search engine, as they could find more articles on many topics within the pop-up box.

Opportunities for e-commerce

As well as increasing CPMs, another way that MashLogic could help publishers raise money is by promoting e-commerce. The pop-up boxes would, where relevant, contain links to e-commerce providers such as Amazon, E-bay, iTunes, TicketMaster and more, and if a user were to buy something then the publisher and MashLogic would receive a cut of the revenue. This is currently the only way that MashLogic itself makes money. What could also be very relevant for publications is to always offer a subscription link somewhere in the box, Bryan said, as 35% of subscriptions are now started online.

Will it make enough money?

"I don't see us as being the sole solution," Bryan said, "I see us as being one of the multiple solutions that publishers will use at different times." And it is, of course, impossible to tell how successful the MashLogic tool would be in terms of increasing traffic. Bryan said that those using the consumer tool are currently spending six to eight minutes longer on sites and accessing three or four pieces of additional information: these figures are impressive but the consumer group is small and likely to include some unusually avid news fans.

Bryan was clear that he does not see any direct competitors to what MashLogic is offering publishers: "nobody is offering a totally branded solution for publishers right now." There are, however, companies which have some comparable ideas. MashLogic's approach is in some ways similar to that of Apture: both offering a pop up box with links to more information, the main difference being that it is the journalist who chooses the key words to link to using Apture. Another start-up which has adopted the idea of a newspaper brand following users around the web is CircLabs, which plans to release a tool called Circulate which would appear as a strip within the browser window and provide links to recommended newspaper content.

As MashLogic's technology is free for publishers to use and could certainly offer the chance to generate additional income and create deeper reader engagement, hopefully promoting brand loyalty, it might well be worth trying. The idea of keeping their readers away from search engines could appeal to many publishers who are frustrated by the amount of money that a company like Google makes without producing its own content.

The Huffington Post, a liberal news website that plays the role of aggregator and blog, originally set up to comment on politics - has extended its coverage substantially since its start up four years ago - now becoming a one stop shop for business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement and world news.

Yesterday, HuffPost unveiled its latest addition to its site -a new Technology and Innovations section, "HuffPostTech." According to the sections new editor, Jose Antonio Vagas, the section will report on the latest gadgets and rivalries in the industry - as well as taking a more general look at technology and considering how it affects the people who use it. The section will also feature blog posts from Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale and others.

WhoRunsGov.com, a Washington Post-run site that tracks D.C. politicians, emerged from beta this week with two new platforms for user-generated content. The site is billed as a "moderated wiki," with 700 profiles of US lawmakers, members of Obama's administration and other government officials.

The site first launched in January. Since the public launch, users can create new profiles or modify existing content, although WhoRunsGov.com staff will monitor their contributions. Profiles are a bit of a mash-up between a Wikipedia entry and a Facebook page, with photos and YouTube videos as well as links to the profiles of "key associates" and related news stories. Much like Wikipedia, the content is backed up by links to outside sources, most of which are not WaPo news stories.

Two recent university graduates have decided to stop updating the fake Twitter account they created for UK foreign secretary David Miliband, the Guardian reported. The fake account attracted attention when several news outlets including the Guardian, AFP, the Times and the Telegraph picked up the Miliband impersonators' tribute to Michael Jackson, once again highlighting the need for verification when journalists deal with social media.

The quote "Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael" was published in several papers. Rory Crew and Knud Noelle claim that they were not aiming to trick the media, but think that journalists "learned something" about not taking such things at face value. They wrote in an email to the Guardian that "It does highlight the importance of the verification of sources, which is clearly becoming more difficult in the web 2.0 era." Crew expressed disappointment in the media and said he believes the mistakes were made as a result of newspapers cutting sub editors and hence falling behind on fact checking.

In November 2008, the New York Times' investigative journalist, David Rohde, was taken hostage by the Taliban not far from Kabul, the Afghan capital, where he was conducting research for his book.  His driver, Asadullah Mangal, and local reporter, Tahir Ludin, were also kidnapped. Rohde and Ludin escaped earlier this month and their freedom, say the press, would not have been possible without the self-imposed media blackout.

Thanks to the efforts of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, for seven months news of the kidnapping did not enter the public domain. Fellow newspapers understood that lives were at stake and nobody was willing to compromise Rohde's safety by breaking the media silence. "But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia," says one New York Times journalist.

This past weekend, Google News announced a new feature to enhance its search engine capabilities. The new feature allows online readers to search for articles and headlines specific to the author that they are interested in by simply clicking on the hyper-linked text of the journalist's name.

The enhancement is designed to aid users to sift through the 25,000 news sources that Google News aggregates. This is exciting news for journalists in the way that it assists them in promoting their work as part of their own brand. The update is great news for readers who are fans of certain writers, too.

After testing the practice with a small percentage of users, Google News has started recognizing Wikipedia articles as news sources in its round-up of the web's top stories. For many Internet users, the popular online encyclopedia represents a handy source to quickly learn about a subject that's in the news.

The number of Wikipedia links on the Google News landing page is not overwhelming; a recent visit revealed just three of the dozens of links on the site belonged to the online encyclopedia.

Online pioneer and blogger Dave Winer does not view his blog posts as 'published' until he has sent a link to them on Twitter. He describes in his blog Scripting.com how 'Tweeting' has become an integral part of his routine: "I've been posting links to new blog posts on Twitter since I started using it two years ago. It's just a natural thing, another step in the publishing process."

Essentially, he is encouraging newspapers, writers and bloggers alike to be Twitter junkies. In other words, one must litter the Twitter airways in 140 characters or less with news about a story they have published for it to be really considered 'published'. How else would you direct readers to your content if you do not broadcast it on Twitter?

Apture has created technology that aims to make flat web pages more three-dimensional: the third dimension being boxes that pop-up to show the reader further multimedia assets relating to an article. At first glance it does not sound too ground-breaking, but taking a closer look, the implications for both readers and publishers are considerable. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris about how Apture works and how it can help publishers.

Harris described what inspired him to start working on Apture. He and his co-founders came up with the idea while studying at Stanford, during conversations with the Knight Fellows. Frustrated with the fact that despite the web being "truly the richest medium we have ever had to communicate with, with all the computational power and multimedia assets" it has "this flat characteristic of flat story-telling," they decided to try to do something about it.

Easy access to multiple multimedia sources

Apture has created a media search engine that allows writers to "quickly leverage all the media that's available on the web, in many different APIs and digital libraries," Harris explained. The journalist highlights keywords in the text, such as the name of a person, place, event, or a certain topic, and a box will then appear with a list of possible media assets to link to. These include reference tools such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Twitter search, even the US Congress, photos from Flickr or Yahoo, videos from YouTube or Daily Motion, maps from Google Maps, documents from Scribd, and the journalist can pick what assets they feel are apppropriate - possibly more than one - and set up a link.

When the reader clicks on the hyperlink, instead of opening in a different browser window, another small box appears to display the article snippet, video, photo or map which the reader can consult without losing their place in the original article. And as Apture allows journalists to clip a specific section of a video or link to a certain quote in a book, the box will hopefully offer them only the most relevant information. Readers can click through to the original site by clicking on a link within the box.

For individual publishers, their own archives and assets can be incorporated into the search engine. Apture has also developed deals with some clients so that any Apture users can access their archives: for example Reuters videos, or snippets from New York Times, BBC or Washington Post articles. Apture just added Google Books and NPR audio podcasts to the asset list.

The technology is free to blogs and websites with fewer than 5 million page views per month. Harris added that as the company is "getting a lot of valuable information from people using it," meaning that the system is getting better and better. Larger publishers pay "hundreds and thousands a month" to use Apture, however. Harris explained that they are willing to do this because the tool creates a "more compelling experience on their websites," as shown by the fact that there is "a proven difference" in user's engagement with pages.

Benefits for publishers

According to Harris, putting one or more Apture links on a page leads to 2 or 3 minutes added engagement time. Looking at Comscore media matrix data, he clarified, it appears that 20 to 30% of publishers' traffic is lost to search. If a paper does not answer a reader's questions, it is extremely easy for the reader to just leave. Harris believes that if journalists are thoughtful and thorough about the links they add throughout a whole site, you could imagine that the publication "may well be able to double the amount of time spent on the site." And obviously, more time spent on the site means more advertising money.

As well as this financial benefit, Harris described a less tangible but arguably equally valuable advantage of using Apture: the fact that it allows newspapers to be a more effective guide for their readers and to offer them a more coherent reading experience. When a paper sends their readers away, either by linking to an external source or just not providing enough information, it is "severing its relationship with you as your guide to that information." By using Apture to supply necessary background information in multiple different formats while keeping the reader on its site, a news organisation can "be the guide to an entire web's worth of resources, but retain a relationship with that reader," Harris asserted. The fact that publishers are "the owners of that relationship" puts "a lot more power in their hands," he added.

For those publishers contemplating offering their content back to Apture, one concern might be that by displaying their content in boxes on other sites via Apture, they could end up losing traffic. Harris stressed, however, that readers can always go back to the source, and that rather than trying to remove traffic from websites, Apture sees its role as "providing an opportunity for those media partners to get their content in front of new eyeballs that they would not have seen before."

What next?

"What we are really doing is creating an efficiency in the market that really wasn't there before," Harris concluded. Apture is connecting information "in a way that wasn't possible before." He said that the company intends to improve its current product by continuing to integrate new content partners and bring costs down. He also hopes to create new products that will "transform the medium, changing the way that people interact with the web," and which are "not constrained to the two dimensions that we've had up until now."

The advantages offered by online journalism are numerous, and products such as Apture's should be welcomed by journalists striving to find better ways to tell their story in a multimedia environment. The fact that the Internet allows us to see, hear or find out more about pretty much anything and consequently make a story richer and more meaningful is something which papers should take advantage of. Arguably, going a step further and creating their own new multimedia experiences should be a priority for newspapers, but using existing content to supplement their articles is a good start. 

New search engine Wolfram Alpha went live on Friday, and describes itself as "the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone". The site collects all objective data and combines it with a search function, allowing users to search for the answers to all factual queries - and a few entertaining responses to more unusual questions thrown in for fun. The site has been billed as revolutionary, and its ability to throw up and compare data is indeed unprecedented - "if you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer."

Amidst speculation that the site could be the next Google, or is a potential Wikipedia killer, it must be recognised that the site provides a more specific function than either of the other two. It is, nonetheless, an incredible tool in its own right. A Nieman Lab report has written about the potential that Wolfram Alpha gives to database journalism, the most common problem with which is the maintenance and constant updating of the information and statistics provided. "As news organizations look to add high-value content that might form the core of paid-content sections for their sites, compilations and analysis of public information is one of the areas they're exploring."

Source: Wolfram Alpha, Nieman Lab, Wall Street Journal, Mashable

Reports recently out say that the Telegraph online attracts an impressive 8% of its traffic from
news aggregators and social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

The 8% figure is equivalent to a staggering 75,000 unique visitors daily. So, how does the Telegraph do it?

Journalists who use Wikipedia as a source for their articles have been "exposed" after a 22-year-old student in Ireland revealed that he had inserted a fake quote into a Wikipedia entry which was then used by multiple newspapers. Shane Fitzgerald, studying sociology at University College Dublin, decided to perform an experiment when he heard that French composer Maurice Jarre had died on March 30. He went swiftly to the Wikipedia page, entered his invented quote, and then watched to see who used it.

"I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong," Fitzgerald wrote in the Irish Times, after his words were used in obituaries in newspapers in the UK, India, the US and Australia. The Guardian issued a correction, having used the quotation to open its piece on the composer. In February, a similar hoax occurred in Germany, reported the Columbia Journalism Review.

The issue here is clear: journalists should not use Wikipedia as a primary source, as there is absolutely no guarantee that it is accurate. The site is an extremely useful resource for background information and for gathering more authoritative sources as most entries contain many links, but anything on it must be verified. The quote written by Fitzgerald was uncontroversial and the incident has only caused embarrassment, but deliberate misinformation could have more serious consequences if it is used in generally trustworthy sources.

Source: Irish Times, CJR

Last Wednesday, May 6, the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing to review the plight of the newspaper industry, to better understand new media and the new model emerging, and to assess the role that government should play in the media as it evolves. The Future of Journalism hearing was presided over by Subcommittee chair Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who called the hearing in response to the threatened closure of his local paper, the Boston Globe, and the troubles facing newspapers across the country as advertising and circulation decline and the Internet replaces traditional media.

In his opening statement, Kerry says the committee has met to discuss not only the jolting condition of the newspaper, but also its implications for the future of journalism and the country. He believes it is important to "preserve the core society function served by independent and diverse media" and questions whether online journalism will "sustain the values of professional journalism the way the newspaper industry has." The committee invited five prominent representatives of various types of media to express their views about the Future of Journalism and offer their solutions.

"Why is the government interested?" asks Kerry. "We do have a responsibility for the licensing of broadcast. We have a responsibility for the regulatory oversight of ownership of cable, satellite, other issues with respect to communications; and needless to say, how the American people get their information--what the structure of ownership is--is of enormous interest to all of us because it is the foundation of our democracy." Is there even any government role at all, he wonders, or is this simply a normal transition in the marketplace?

Considering the nonprofit model

Before it heard from the media representatives, Maryland Senator Ben Cardin spoke to the committee about his Newspaper Revitalization Act, which proposes a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status for newspapers. Cardin stresses that online journalism does not supply the in-depth reporting and investigative journalism provided by traditional newsrooms that are essential to a free and democratic society. His bill would provide an opportunity for local supporters--whether individuals, foundations, or educational institutions--to come together to preserve their community newspaper.

The major criticism of Cardin's bill is that it could threaten a newspaper's freedom of speech: 501(c)(3) status allows editorializing but prohibits a paper from endorsing political candidates. The independence of journalism from government is crucial to its role as watchdog, and it is undesirable for a newspaper to have the government involved in judging its content. However, in their addresses to the Committee, both Steve Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post, and former newspaperman David Simon, say that while they seriously oppose government interference in newspapers, they are intrigued by the nonprofit model.

Newsrooms provide an important public service, so why shouldn't the government give them the tax exempt benefit of becoming non-profits? After all, the danger of government interference in content could be exaggerated. Any single politician or political party attempting to manipulate a publication would be immediately exposed through other media outlets, and the threat is not much greater than private ownership where powerful investors might maneuver the paper to serve their own interests. Nonetheless, the greatest issue faced by nonprofit newspapers and their investors will be where to draw the line between endorsing and editorializing. If a newspaper's responsibility is to provide the public with unbiased information, then blatant political endorsements seem in violation of that role anyway, but nonprofit status could limit criticism and commentary on politicians and legislation that might reduce the media's role as watchdog.

As Coll and Alberto Ibargüen, President of the Knight Foundation, point out, nonprofit is not a universal remedy nor will it solve newspapers' profit problems. The initiative could be viewed less as a savior of the newspaper entity and more as a bridge to preserve local journalism during a transitional period. Ibarguen says that relieving profit pressures with nonprofit status might help newspapers "extend their useful life until we figure out what's next and what online model can afford professional journalism."

Relaxing antitrust could help publishers charge for online content

The other great appeal for government intervention in newspapers has been the request for changes to media ownership and antitrust policy. Last month the Justice Department rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's request to change the boundaries of media antitrust to include all media in a geographic area--including radio, TV, and newspapers--when deciding whether a sale is anticompetitive.

Pelosi's antitrust proposal raised obvious criticism about the independence of newspapers and consolidation of ownership. However, at the Senate hearing, Simon and James Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, approached antitrust from a different angle: they urged the Committee to give newspapers an antitrust exemption so that industry leaders could convene to discuss copyrighting from aggregators and charging for content online.

Unable to foresee the digital future, at the advent of the Internet newspaper publishers made the mistake of offering content free online. Now readers are accessing that content for free, not through the publisher's site, but through aggregators like Google News, which also does not pay publishers for content. Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search Products and User Experience at Google Inc., defends Google to the committee, calling it a "conduit" for journalism that provides a free service to online newspapers by driving traffic to their sites.

However, Simon and Moroney argue that aggregators do not provide adequate compensation for the revenue generated from publishers' original content. They contend that as of now, the profits publishers make from online advertising are not enough to sustain the quality journalism newsrooms have been providing. There must be an industry wide initiative to charge for content online, says Simon, as no individual can swim against the tide. According to Moroney, under the current antitrust laws, publishers cannot even begin to have a conversation about possibilities for pricing or charging aggregators.

If the government does relax antitrust to allow for this industry wide "conversation," it could possibly lead to major publications placing a pay wall around content, charging users and aggregators, but does such a pay wall threaten the free market? One of the virtues of the Internet is the accessibility of information, so where do pay walls and content hoarding fit in? A generation of Internet users already views information as a free commodity, and charging online users for content will significantly reduce traffic, which will in turn reduce advertising revenue. Even if industry leaders can convene and discuss, they still might find themselves at a loss for a viable solution.

Experimentation and innovation rather than government intervention

The hearing's last speaker, Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, opposed antitrust exemptions, paywalls, or really any government intervention. In fact, she countered some speaker's doom and gloom position with the opening statement, "Journalism will not only survive, it will thrive." Her main point is that the industry has changed and moved forward and there is no going back.

Huffington says, "The future is to be found elsewhere: it's a linked economy, it's search engines, it's online advertising, it's citizen journalism, and the foundations supporting investigative journalism. That's where the future is, and if you can't find your way to that, then you just can't find your way."

Ibargüen, Mayer, and Huffington all support embracing new media and encouraging experimentation and business models that promote digital possibilities. For Ibargüen that means providing universal, affordable digital action and adoption in the US and more inclusive public media that reaches every American. Neither he nor Huffington mourn the decline of investigative journalism, and both praise the efforts of nonprofits like ProPublica and the Knight Foundation supported Voices of San Diego for providing quality journalism outside the traditional newsroom.

According to Mayer, "The structure of the web has caused the basic unit--the atom of consumption--to migrate from the newspaper to the individual article," and because of the Web's ability to operate in real time, this allows for "living" instead of "static" stories that are constantly changed and updated like Wikipedia or the New York Times' "Times Topics." These changes to the way information is viewed, insist Mayer and Huffington, mean a different approach to monetization is necessary, which requires innovation and creativity. The solution for newspaper publishers is not to appeal to the government for a handout to preserve the old ways, but to adapt quickly and direct their time and resources into experimenting with the monetization of traffic through advertising.

What will the Senate decide?

Despite Kerry and Cardin's concern for the American newspaper, more than one of the subcommittee's senators held up a Blackberry during the hearing, proving themselves a part of the new digital audience. The general consensus of both the senators and media representatives seemed to be that their priority is not to save newspapers but to promote policies that sustain journalism.

How enlightening were the testimonies of the media representatives? Though certainly thorough in unveiling all the problems facing the media today, they failed to provide the government with a cure-all solution as to how it should proceed.

It seems fairly likely that the Senate could pursue the nonprofit solution as it seems basically harmless and might help some local newspapers stay on their feet at least long enough to find another answer. Relaxing antitrust could prove more risky, giving industry leaders the occasion to consolidate prices and possibly restrict information in a move that could prove more harmful than helpful to their own purpose.

The testimonies may have encouraged the Senate to do nothing at all for the newspaper but instead to accept that the audience and the market is evolving and no legislation can hold it back. If this is the case, then publishers will be faced with only one choice: innovate or fail. Instead of resisting change, they must get a grasp on technology and the new audience, paying attention to the success of others, then find ways to provide creative content and advertising solutions. As a few of the speakers said, this is still a transitional period for old media and new media, and there is still immense possibility for originality and advances. Though certain publications might lament their own fate, it is too early to be mourning the future of journalism.  

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.