March 2008 Archives

In the last 12 months, The Huffington Post has introduced new content areas such as entertainment and business and plan on adding international news, sports and books in an attempt to become an all-purpose Internet newspaper. This summer, The HuffPo will take it one step further by introducing a metropolitan section, local versions for major cities.

The plan will be expensive and set The HuffPo into competition with not only existing newspapers, but arguably, with companies like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN.com as well.

Many of their posts receive less than 10,000 views, and the site has a high "bounce rate," meaning users visit one page then leave the site. But the site's topical focuses resulted in 2.9 million unique visitors in January and 3.7 million in February, according to Nielsen Online. More than half the traffic comes from non-political pages.

Micah L. Sifry, Editor of the blog TechPresident.com isn't confident in HuffPo's movement toward covering a larger variety of news. "Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well. Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They're certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day," he said.

Huffington and her colleagues reject comparisons to news sites, saying HuffPo seeks to be a community with a distinct attitude, not merely a collection of links.

"Look at Yahoo or Google or CNN. Take away the branding and just look at the headlines, and they're very similar," said Roy Sekoff, the site's editor. "But if you take away the branding of The Huffington Post and the signage, you'd probably still recognize us."

In response to speculation that she'll sell the website after the election, Huffington said, "It's not something we've discussed."

Source: The New York Times through I Want Media

The World Association of Newspapers and World Editors Forum have asked Jacques Rogge, the President of the International Olympic Committee, to call on Chinese authorities to honour their Olympic pledges to respect press freedom and the right of journalists to cover events.

In a letter to Rogge, who will go to Beijing next week, WAN and WEF said: "The government crackdown on journalists and others who seek to exercise their right to freedom of expression has intensified in recent months. At least 30 journalists and 50 cyber-dissidents are currently held in Chinese prisons for peacefully expressing their views.

The letter asked Rogge to help ensure that China honour the pledge it made in its successful Olympic bid to allow foreign media "complete freedom to report when they come to China."

Rogge said last week he was conducting "silent diplomacy" with the Chinese government, which is facing growing protests over its repressive policies in the run-up to the Olympics.
"We also ask that your 'silent diplomacy' becomes voluble and public if the Chinese government does not immediately release from jail all those detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression", said the letter from WAN and WEF.

WAN has also written directly to the CEOs of 12 major Olympic sponsors asking them "to express your strong moral opposition to the repression of basic human rights in China and, in particular, the daily violation of all acceptable standards for freedom of expression."
 
Full details of the WAN campaign for press freedom in China, including a conference in Paris on 18 and 19 April with a coalition of press freedom groups, an advertising campaign and a letter-writing initiative, can be found here.

Source: WAN

At the beginning of March, Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, unveiled two video studios in its new Sydney headquarters. Fairfax hired some broadcast consultants to help with the construction, which lasted about six months (with a previous four months of planning). Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, explained why newspapers shouldn't focus on TV-type bulletins, how journalists can manage the extra workload, and why newspaper video is financially viable.

The top floor studio is smaller, integrated within the Herald's newsroom. It is equipped with broadcast-quality HD cameras and 2-3 people can be on camera at once.

A larger studio on the downfloor, which can fit a car, was designed to be used by all Fairfax Media outlets. It is equipped with six editing suites with Final Cut Pro, and Fairfax has installed a fiber optic cable to enable quick transfers: all videos shot in the studio are centralized in a database which is made available to the various platforms.

The new building for The Age in Melbourne, which is to be ready towards the end of 2009, will also be equipped with two similar studios.

For Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, Fairfax and its newspapers can be at an advantage for online video, compared to broadcast TV professionals. Because they are not tied to a traditional broadcast news schedule, they can often bring breaking news online faster.

They can also benefit from the newspapers' core coverage, by using a "short video story associated to a much more in-depth newspaper story." In other cases, a news video can be the main story, if it has more impact or is more illustrative than a text report.

Fairfax's video and digital production team counts 18 staffers, 10 of whom are dedicated to news video. Each major city (each major newspaper newsroom) counts two or three videojournalists, one or two staff supporters and a local multimedia editor. Fairfax Digital news sites have been drawing about 6.5 million unique users monthly, with up to 3.4 million monthly video views, delivering video to over 800,000 unique browsers.

What type of video content works? Not TV news bulletins

Fairfax produces two main types of video content:
- video news reports, short and local
- everything else that can't be considered 'news', which consists mostly of sports, panel shows, thematic reports...

Fairfax's video content runs along the spectrum of newspaper video offerings, whether it's in-house studio footage, a TV review program with occasional guests, punctual shows focused on sports events, local news reports shot by specialized videojournalists or Fairfax journalists, or one-minute interviews with journalists about a topic in their field of expertise.

However, Vaile and Fairfax have already experimented with online video and TV-type content (see similar lessons from Le Télégramme) and have a clear view of the type of content that works. Vaile's words speak for themselves:

"The studios will make it much faster to turn around news from the newsroom. We are unlikely to do typical TV news bulletins for some time because they don't work online."

"The typical TV short bulletin didn't work online. That's because online people can choose to watch the stories they're interested in and don't want to watch the stories they're not interested in. The normal linear TV news bulletin fails online."

Even for typical broadcast channels, such as ABC in Australia, where Vaile previously worked, online TV-type news reports weren't successful online, "although they worked very well on mobile phones," because "the navigation on mobile hardware is so much more difficult" than online, so "people are much more willing to adopt a linear viewing platform."

"So it will be some time before we go to making digital TV news bulletins again."

Fairfax will try other online video alternatives, "the kinds of things which use newspaper journalists who are specialists in a particular area and have very high credibility," to produce specific reports.

Do multimedia journalists work more? No, if workflows change

As mentioned above, under Fairfax's integrated approach, local news video reports could potentially be shot by Vaile's digital production team, or by a regular reporter, or by a combination of both. In some cases, the reporter will simply take a few minutes to walk to the studio and provide some comment. In others, the text reporter will be expected to shoot video, perhaps even edit it himself (this year Fairfax is making available in every newsroom a couple Canon Tx-1 cameras, a hybrid between a still and video camera, which cost about 400-500$, for reporters to take while on the ground).

Does this mean more work journalists?

"That's a problem that has yet to be fully resolved," Vaile said, admitting that "inevitably it's more work and / or different work to what they have been doing."

For Vaile, management must make "space in their working day for them to do this work without it being on top of what they have to do already."

"Working as a cross-media journalist means that you are expected to work in many different platforms, on the paper, for online, potentially for radio or for video, but you clearly can't do all those in addition to everything else."
"The working day has to be planned bearing in mind that each of these things takes time and precludes you doing something else. Because this is all new it's a balance that has yet to be fully worked out."

In some cases, the idea of multi-skilled journalists can also be counter-productive. For some aspects of video production, such as editing, it can be much more efficient to have specialists rather than waste hours of reporters' time.

Audience and business: is video viable?

The construction of the studios was "a very significant investment," in the range of "several million dollars," said Vaile.

Traffic to Fairfax Digital news sites (mainly those of The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald) have been averaging about 6.5 million unique browsers and 214 million page views monthly. In contrast, there have been roughly only 3.4 million monthly video downloads, for over 800,000 unique video browsers (so roughly 12-13% of the total audience watches video, about 4-5 times monthly on average).

About 50% of video traffic goes to news items, while 'the rest' draws the other half. Interestingly though, Fairfax is attracting significantly more advertising revenues for segments within 'the rest', as advertisers are more interested in a less scattered, more targeted audience, such as for sports.

High traffic goes to news, high value advertising goes to the rest, according to Vaile.

Ads consists mostly of display advertising, pre-roll ads, as well as sponsorships for shows, However, sponsors "have no say in the editorial content in the programs," said Vaile, following standard editorial independence practices of newspapers - and quite unlike TV. In 2008, major advertisers are starting to flock towards online video, such as LandRover which will sponsor a 28-part travel program that launches at the end of March.

Future of newspaper online video: HD, streaming, tapping the TV market

In the future, "we are ready to go broadcast in HD, should we need to do that," said Vaile. "There's no question that at some stage in the near future we'll be delivering something in HD format, whether it's podcasts or products going into a very high bandwidth environment."

Vaile also believes "very much" in the future of live video streaming. Fairfax has already had a few successful experiments with live streaming, including coverage of a ship that ran aground last June thanks to cameras from the local surf patrol boat, as well as live streaming from the victory speeches of last November's federal elections in Australia. Fairfax has equipped a few of its reporters with 3G kits, which enable live video wireless streaming.

But considering the significant investments and costs of newspaper video online and badnwidth, is the current business model viable?

"Yes, definitely," said Vaile, although "we're at the very beginning of seeing the benefits of a business model which is based on display advertising around online video."

Although Fairfax doesn't have the same resources or content as a TV network, many traditional broadcasters aren't sure how to approach online video, and many traditional TV media buyers are hesitant to buy into the much smaller online audiences. So Fairfax Digital's longer term goal is to eventually tap into some of TV's advertising budget, both in news and non-news areas.

"The intention is that by providing a comprehensive video news service during the day, we will remove a share of the people who watch broadcast news bulletins at night."

Source: Ian Vaile, Director Fairfax Digital Productions

In addition to Trinity Mirror's revamp of regional title websites, conventrytelegraph.net is the latest website in their upgrade, with an emphasis on history as well as news.
       
The history section features pictures of old Coventry from its archives that date back more than 110 years. Readers also who send in photos, in particular, those of old sports teams and classes.

The website also allows viewers to purchase pictures from the archive and has the functionality and attributes of Trinity Mirror's new websites, including more breaking news, video footage, interactivity, picture galleries and user-generated content.

Telegraph Editor Alan Kirby said, "Of course the new website is about breaking news and sport, but our historic picture archives are immense and offer a unique glimpse into Coventry's past. There are thousands of pictures which we could never hope to publish in the paper. Our website gives us a fantastic new outlet."

Sources: PressGazette.co.uk, Journalism.co.uk
 

In August 2007, a European newspaper aggregator venture, dubbed Imooty.eu, was launched in beta version (read background here, based on a profile by the Online Journalism Review). Over the weekend, Imooty has launched a new headline aggregator widget for newspapers to implement on their sites (pictured left - see their widget platform here).

Imooty's "plan is really to develop a powerful tool for news syndication," said co-founder Kristoffer Lassen (who founded the site with Blaise Bourgeois). "The purpose is to democratize access to the most important mainstream information sources of Europe." The site now aggregates RSS feeds with latest headlines from about 450 newspapers in 19 European countries.

Imooty.eu, a newspaper and blog aggregator

Unlike services such as Factiva or LexisNexis, which are geared towards professionals and have costly fees, Imooty aims to provide a mainstream and free news search resource. Newspapers' RSS feeds that are featured on the homepage are generally chosen for their prominent size and influence, but sometimes also for their known expertise in a particular domain (Morgenbladet in Norway for its 'Culture' coverage).

Users can conveniently view latest headlines by country, newspaper, or category of news. A tab enables users to view recent blog headlines - about 700-800 have enrolled so far. Users can also customize search fields by these same criteria.

Does it still make sense to distinguish 'News' and 'Blogs', at a time when some blogs do original reporting and some traditional news brands are turning to lighter, blog-style news?

"It's basically to make a distinction between news brands as we know them today and independent reporters," said Lassen. The line between both may be getting blurry - especially concerning newspaper blogs, but Lassen believes the news consumption and expectations are different between blogs and news sites, although both may be news.

Pros and cons of Imooty for newspapers

Imooty has launched a specific section called 'Newspaper Universe', so that partnering newspapers can directly upload their feeds and customize them. "You decide how your newspaper brand will appear on the  Imooty platform."

Pros:
- Reach: Imooty "puts newspapers in touch with users who normally wouldn't use them," said Lassen. Through Imooty, readers who are geographically distant, or on the other side of the political spectrum, can discover new titles.
- Mobile: Imooty offers a mobile platform that can be of interest to newspapers.
- Revenue share: Imooty's revenue model will be based on redirecting readers to newspapers' premium (archived) content, and it will share revenues with papers.

"Cons":
- "I can see how, under the old news paradigm, some newspaper people might feel threatened by the model, because it's possibly taking away from local focus. But then again, these are new times, and people relate to media in different ways," said Lassen.



No editorializing, unlike major online news portals

News featured on the homepage is ranked by 'clicks' for individual newspapers and recency for headlines: there is no editorializing of content or of the RSS feeds by Imooty. But as Lassen said in his OJR interview, "readers now demand concise information that directly addresses their personal "need to know" requirements in an age when people are swamped by news sources." So why not give readers editorial guidance?

"That's the role of the big Internet brands. Google does this, by editorializing their pages," said Lassen.

"Our philosophy is to show the user the way news is from the different publications. We don't editorialize. The purpose is to give a panoramic view of what's actually out there."

News aggregation and Imooty: a resource for news professionals

In that respect, Imooty may be of greater use to news junkies or journalists than to the general public, at least in its first steps.

"You really have to be a news-interested person to be interested in Imooty, but it can be a starting point for ordinary news users as well."

"A lot of people like to have a pre-packaged news product," said Lassen. Although the trend towards news aggregation is increasingly visible, newspapers' role is also to provide their news judgment to sort news in an organized manner.

Future developments

Imooty is working to develop its multimedia offerings, including its mobile platform, podcasts and IPTV. According to Lassen, "this is also the direction newspapers are going in," because text-based content will be less prominent on mobiles. Imooty has launched a mobile site in beta.

According to Lassen, Imooty now has about 15,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views monthly.

Imooty is still in full development and is still in the process of signing on official newspaper partners. This weekend it launched its imooty headline aggregator widget, which can be implemented by news sites that wish to open up their doors to other relevant sources.

Source: Kristoffer Lassen, co-founder Imooty.eu

Last week, Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age wrote that the ombudsman's time may be up, but Guardian journalist Siobhain Butterworth challenges his view. She argues that Dumenco "misses the fact that the ombudsman's role is about self-regulation," thus the issue should be "whether self-regulation is worthwhile" instead of whether the newspaper ombudsman's role is redundant in the digital age.

In the UK, newspaper ombudsmen were "thin on the ground" in March, with several front-page apologies, such as Express to the McCanns and Daily Mail to Sheldon Adelson.

"Because newspapers are also web publishers," writes Butterworth, "discussions about the possibility of regulating the press have to take into account the impracticability of regulating the internet."

Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, told the European parliament in 2006, "We believe that [a] combination of self-regulation and media literacy is the most effective way to regulate content in the new media environment."

Self-regulation is in the interests of the press, Butterworth concludes, even without the threat of statutory regulation hanging over editors' heads. The newspaper should be open about mistakes, be prepared to correct them, and assess itself to see if it is meeting its standards. This necessary internal self-regulation is why a newspaper ombudsman is needed.

Source: The Guardian

Digital Editor of The Journal in Newcastle Graeme Whitfield embarked on a quest to write a dictionary of 'English-journalese', or misused language that seems to appear in newspapers but not real life in February 2008.

His online blog has attracted visitors from the UK and America who contribute to the ever-growing dictionary.

Whitfield said: "It does seem to have caught on. It got picked up by a few news aggregators like del.icio.us, where users put stuff online that they like, so we got a flurry of responses from America. I think it may be a bit of a guilty pleasure."

The dictionary began with "tot" meaning child ("What a nice tot you have"; "How old is your tot now?" would not be used in real life) or "slam" instead of criticize (Would you tell a friend: "That's a terrible decision. I slam it."), but now includes words such as "pact" for political deals and "snarled" when referring to traffic.

"Despite my efforts to stop people using these words, it hasn't worked," said Whitfield. "You still see 'tot' in the tabloids all the time. But it's nice to start a debate."

Contribute to the dictionary of journalese on Whitfield's blog.

Source: Hold the Front Page

The Wall Street Journal's front page has become very political in the four months since Rupert Murdoch took over. Though it isn't news that the WSJ is moving toward a "general news model", the paper is becoming a high-profile paper in the presidential campaign, according to Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, a step in their goal of challenging the New York Times "for national supremacy."

In his first public comments as WSJ publisher, Robert Thomson, former Editor of Murdoch's Times of London, said, "I think American journalism has some soul-searching to do. American newspapers generally have kept up poorly with change... If there's a presumption that what you might call New York Times journalism is the pinnacle of our profession, the profession is in some difficulty." He adds that Murdoch is "clearly interested in challenging the journalistic establishment."

Thomas also said that Murdoch is willing to pay for expanding foreign coverage. Murdoch has already spent money to expand the news hole and staff, increased space in the paper (the space for political reporting has already doubled), and enlarging the 40-person Washington bureau. The newsroom staff of 750, which is 600 more than two years ago, is predicted to increase modestly this year. "A-heds" or business coverage, long features, and off-beat stories, which the Journal was known for, are now being pushed to the bottom of the page.

Political analyst Charlie Cook says that the Journal is "a less essential read" for campaign junkies, but "the level of political reporting has improved lately."

John Harwood, a CNBC analyst who recently left the Times, says the increased campaign coverage "reflects Murdoch's desire for a newsier paper, and for my former colleagues covering politics, that's a great thing. The question that will get asked over time is, does it erode some of the things that made the Journal great in the first place?"

Murdoch's response? "What sells newspapers is news."

Source: The Washington Post

During Sunday congress in Caracas, La Société Interaméricaine de Presse (SIP) attacked Cuba and Venezuela for the lack of press freedom, including the restrictions on the Internet and called for the "unconditional release" of 25 journalists imprisoned in Cuba. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has condemned this as "media terrorism," which he says is a "global evil."
 
The SIP includes the heads of about 2,000 communication companies and has asked that Cuban blogs remove their locked access and that the government guarantee journalists freedom of press and ensures "respectful treatment" to foreign correspondents. SIP acknowledges that Cuban President Raul Castro's regime has helped "advance some measures" in the communication field.

The SIP congress concluded with a condemnation of Venezuelan government for its "hostile attitude towards the press and Journalists." 

"The owners of the means of communication are the richest in the world, many of them are well versed in fascism and terrorism," Chavez said during his weekly television program Hello President.
  
The Venezuelan authorities had organized a counter-demonstration, Latin American Meeting on Media Terrorism.

Source: AFP
 

It's been about two years since Cultural Editor of Jyllands-Posten Flemming Rose commissioned and published satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. The cartoons sparked a global debate on Islam and free speech, as well as violence in some countries. In a recent interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Correspondent Jeremy Bransten, Rose believes that there have been positive changes at least inside of Denmark. with 17 papers reprinting the cartoon of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban.

A new opinion poll taken two weeks ago showed that 2/3 of the Danish population now think it was right to publish the cartoons back in 2005. The problem, according to Rose, is that Denmark, including its Muslim population, is ahead in the debate compared to several other countries
 
"It is between those who support the values embedded in the constitutions of the liberal democracies and those who don't," said Rose, as opposed to the Muslim community and "us."

Rose believes that the change in Denmark is "a combination of several factors" and "definitely the strong stand by the government [to protect freedom of speech] is very important."

One of the leading Muslims who had tried to take Rose and his newspaper to court in the beginning of the debate came forward to Rose, saying, "OK, we now know from the court decision that we live in a country where it is allowed to ridicule and defame our religion. We don't like it but we have to accept it."
 
"What is really controversial in this case," Rose remarked, "i