May 2008 Archives

TechCrunch has become the latest blog network to go mainstream. The blog has finalized a syndication deal with WashingtonPost.com, and TechCrunch stories are already appearing on the Post's technology section.

The Washington Post, which already runs stories from paidContent.org and mocoNews.net, is the first mainstream source to sign a deal with TechCrunch.

It's an equally beneficial partnership; in the words of MediaGuardian's Jemima Kiss: "TechCrunch wants to reach a more mainstream audience, and WashingtonPost gets niche coverage from an authoritative source."

Sources: MediaGuardian, Wired

Although three national newspapers posted sales increases in April, overall national newspaper circulation in the U.K. dipped in April, according to ABC data released today.

The London Evening Standard saw the biggest sales jump (5.62%), a figure that was likely boosted by the Standard's role in covering the London mayoral elections, according to Press Gazette. The Sun and The Daily Mail also posted gains.

The Sunday market was most affected, enduring a 3.91% average circulation drop with no papers posting gains. The quality market did not fare much better; both The Guardian and The Financial Times had month to month circulation losses, although the FT has actually increased circulation over a six month period as compared to its six month average last year.

Sources: Press Gazette, Brand Republic

Guardian News and Media (GNM) officially announced today that it will integrate its print and online platforms for News, Business and Sport journalism once it moves into its new premises at Kings Place, London, at the end of the year.

Journalists from those sections will work for the company's three platforms (The Observer, daily Guardian and guardian.co.uk) and will produce text, audio and video.

As gathered during the World Editors Forum study tour in the UK and during our talks with head of editorial development Neil McIntosh, the Guardian's integration was planned collaboratively in the newsroom, as opposed to a top-down model.

Said Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian and Editor-in-Chief of GNM:

"Our model for integrated working has been designed through a long period of collaboration and consultation. More than two dozen editors from across the three platforms have worked together to design the ways in which they want to collaborate in the future.  It's very important that desk editors themselves have taken the lead: the last thing we wanted to do was impose a model from above.

As has often been the case for other cases of newsroom integration (Fairfax in Australia, the Daily Telegraph in the UK, The New York Times in the US and many more), the Guardian's move to a new building - and thus to rethink its newsroom design - coincides with the formal integration process.

"The move to a new building is the obvious moment to re-arrange the way we work in a way which more closely reflects the patterns of how people read and react to news," said Rusbridger.

Also discussed with McIntosh, the newsroom will redesign will include 'pods', which will group specialists around specific topics. For example, on the International News desk, pods will group reporters by time zones and regions.

The good news is that the Guardian's integration isn't synonymous with layoffs (the company had previously said this could happen) - at least for the time being.

"We've done this without any reduction in headcount.  It is important that news organisations retain quality and trust while being at the forefront of the digital revolution," he added.

Source: Guardian press release

The New York Post has been slowly shrinking in the past two weeks, reducing from a height of 34 cm. to 30 cm. The smaller paper now appears almost square.

However, the size change has not been implemented with all published copies, and the smaller Posts were only available in certain locations, according to Editor & Publisher.

"Just like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the NY Post will be making the size of the daily paper slightly smaller effective tomorrow," spokeswoman Suzanne Halpin said in a statement to the New York Times' City Beat blog on April 21.

Although Halpin did not touch on the reason for the reduction, an expert on the field said that such a reduction can save a publication millions of dollars on printing costs, reports Le Monde.

Sources: Editor & Publisher, Le Monde

According to TimesOnline editor-in-chief Anne Spackman, search engine optimization "is woven through the fabric of journalism and culture" at The Times.
 
Speaking the PPA conference, Spackman said that the paper placed more emphasis on search as part of its redesign in February last year, after research showed that 60% of the site's traffic is generated from search and external links. 

"It's inconceivable that we would start a new project now without the search team being involved at every single stage," Spackman said.

Blogger Pat Thornton too is stressing the importance of SEO, seeing it as the key to longevity on the web. Thornton noted that only 20% of his traffic comes from direct sources (RSS, users who have bookmarked pages), while half of the past month's traffic came from referring websites.

"I actively encourage deep linking to my content (links that go to individual content, not just my main page) and the use of my content on other blogs and social networks," Thornton writes.

Undoubtedly SEO is crucial, but Spackman said that Times staff are not being encouraged to write solely for search optimization. In her view, maintaining the quality of the brand is just as important, a sentiment shared by ClickZ's P.J. Fusco in a recent article on content optimization (see a summarized version).

In other news out of the PPA conference:
-The Telegraph is to integrate UGC from MyTelegraph across its website
-WSJ and TimesOnline to more closely integrate content

Sources: Journalism.co.uk, the Journalism Iconoclast

News Corp. has announced plans to further integrate its redesigned Wall Street Journal website and its News International holdings in the UK, such as the Times Online.

"It will be partly about tools, partly about deep linking to each other's content," said Anne Spackman, editor in chief of the Times Online. Spackman also suggested that similarities between The Sun and The New York Post may lead to integration between the two.

The Times had first announced plans for cross-selling advertising opportunities with WSJ. It now seems, however, that the integration will touch editorial as well as advertising content.
 
Speaking at the PPA conference, Spackman said: "We are increasingly linking to them around subjects of common interest. Our friends down under at news.com.au - we link to sport with them on cricket and rugby; with the Wall Street Journal, it will be the same on business. It will be an extremely useful thing in a way that it would never have been when we were only selling to our home audiences and when there was no power of the link."

In other news from the PPA conference, The Times, published since 1785, announced the beta launch of 200 years-worth of archive content on the web. The archives, which are supported by search technology from FAST, will be free to users initially, although subscription plans may be introduced down the line.

The Telegraph also unveiled plans to introduce user-generated content across its website.

Sources: PaidContentUK, Journalism.co.uk

The relaunch of the redesigned MyTelegraph site this summer will see user generated content integrated across other areas of Telegraph.co.uk, said Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond at the PPA conference.

Accoring to Richmond, plans are in place "to take user content into other areas of Telegraph.co.uk to advertise and integrate the service." The updated MyTelegraph service will also include new tools enabling users to upload multimedia conference, reports Journalism.co.uk.

The Telegraph opted to redesign the site following the closure of Intersource, the company that built the site's original platform.

In the interim, MyTelegraph (see image), which currently has 18,000 registered users, has been housed at Telegraph HQ, Richmond said.

"That left us in a very precarious position. We had a lack of experience in running the site," he said.

The revamped site will be run on a platform created by American company ONESite.

Source: Journalism.co.uk 

Serge, a daily in Spain's Catalunya region, will launch an e-paper version this summer, compatible with ProtecMedia's E-Paper.

Similar to Holland's NRC Handelsblad, Serge will make the e-paper available through its website.
 
The electronic version will give readers access to the same content as the print and web editions, as well as possible exclusive e-paper content, such as audio, video and extra photos, reports Editor & Publisher.

France too is looking towards e-paper solutions, where France Telecom's Orange is offering a trial version of an e-paper reader which supports electronic versions of various French newspapers.

Source: Editor & Publisher

The Editors Weblog will be away on for the holiday on Thursday May 8. We'll be back on Friday.

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

You can now view the results to more questions regarding areas of investment according to editors, as well as what they view as the biggest threats to their newspapers, by reading Part 6.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results

Online journalists have become increasingly aware of the importance of search engine optimization; see tips on newspaper website SEO. But newspaper sites can go further; according to P.J. Fusco of the ClickZ Network, managing the gap is the next step in successful online content optimization.

Gap analysis involves weighing where you are versus where you want to be. In terms of content optimization, this involves understanding two key factors:

- the difference between keywords that make your site's content optimal for search results and keywords that are used in search queries

- the gap between your site's current search positioning and your target positioning for a batch of select keywords

In choosing which keywords to use in the comparison, "volume differences between search referral traffic for particular words and phrases will be revealed," wrote ClickZ. In other words, an analysis of the keywords shows which terms are more popular, and therefore more likely to be picked up by a search engine.
 
Once you've discovered which words and phrases boost your search engine status, you can then mold your site's content to boost search traffic.

Fusco cautions, however, not to throw all your eggs in the search engine basket. If a website starts to uses search-engine friendly keywords and headlines that no longer reflect the core content of the site, you may raise search engine friendly but at the expense of readers.

"Your content must be friendly for users first and search engines second," Fusco writes.

Also read Reed Business Information, which is currently debating whether to reward its journalists for drawing in traffic, a potentially risky proposition.

Source: ClickZ
 

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results


But here are a few more results that may have gone under the radar.

If provided resources to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated two clear concerns for editors, which superceded all others: their staff needs to be attuned to new media (36% of the respondents would first train their staff in new media), and they need more journalists to produce quality coverage (30%, up from 22% last year). As more newsrooms face layoffs and tight budgets, editors are increasingly seeking to safeguard one of the main conditions to quality journalism: a team of qualified journalists.

For editors from newspapers whose number of journalists had decreased, their main priority was to recruit more journalists, at 50%, while also recognizing the necessity of new media training, at 31%. Even among newspapers whose staff had increased, 26% of editors wished to recruit more journalists (36% new media training).

This clearly shows that, in the view of editors, cutting staff and journalistic resources is not a solution - to the contrary - to resolve financial concerns a newspaper may have.

Overall, what do you view as the two greatest threats to the future of your newspaper?

57% of respondents saw the biggest threat to the future of newspapers coming from declining readership among young people. One of the greatest challenges faced by newspapers today is structural, linked to a change in habits among readers, as they become consumers of alternative forms of media.
Tied to this, a good share of respondents (37%) saw the Internet and digital media as a threat. This was closely followed by lack of editorial innovation (36%) and lack of investment (29%), which are also inter-related.

The results showed a split between perception of threats as being external, due to contextual evolutions of the market (young readership decline, digital media) and internal, due to lack of newspaper innovation - or the financial means to innovate.

Now looking specifically to your newspaper's editorial independence in the future, what do you view as the principal threat?

Perceived threats to editorial independence ranged relatively closely from 13% who listed 'other' concerns, to 23% who thought the biggest pressure would come from advertisers, through 19% who listed political pressure and 20% shareholder pressure (20%). Still, a combined 42% perceived the main threat as being related to newspapers' financial dependence, whether on shareholders and advertisers.

Where newspapers were heavily capitalized in the stock market, such as in Western Europe and North America, shareholder pressure was strong, 35% and 23% respectively, but political pressure didn't pose any threat - 3% for both.

Inversely, in many other regions, financial pressures were less important, but lack of press freedom led many editors to fear political pressure.

Do you think that in the future opinion and analysis pages will:

The results were stable compared to 2006. Two thirds (67%) of the respondents believed opinion and analysis pages would increase: many foresaw the upcoming evolution of newspaper content, which will be less about factual news and more about analysis and commentary.

An astonishingly small number of respondents from North America (50%) believed analysis and opinion would increase, compared to 76% for Western Europe (and 78% Eastern). This large difference underlines a divergence in editors' perception of the function their newspapers will have in the future, whether these increasingly focus on constant breaking news or instead turn to more analytical, magazine-type content. These results also reflect worries by American editors about having the proper resources to increase their opinion and analytical content.


If you would like more information about the Newsroom Barometer, don't hesitate to contact us. And let's not forget that the bright revelation of Barometer, as was the case last year, was that 84% of newspaper editors are optimistic about their newspaper's future, despite frequent doom and gloom reports...