October 2008 Archives

The Australian edition of The Week was launched on October 30th.  The magazine condenses all of the news from the week with comment and analysis into a 35-page publication.

The original edition was launched in the UK in 1998, followed by one in the United States in 2002.  According to the papers publisher, Dennis Publishing, the US edition has grown 165 percent since its launch and now has a circulation at 500,000.

Charlie Beckett, director of the Polis journalism initiative in the UK, said it is "frustrating" that both traditional journalism and online content may not be seen as reliable, reported Journalism.co.uk. According to him, there was no "Golden Age" for reporters to be viewed as "impartial conveyors of reality" and that "trust was always conditional."

In the changing climate of print publication, publishers have been reducing the number of print editions, cutting back on staff and shrinking newspapers all in an effort to save money.

According to Myles Fuchs, president of Pressmart, "several publishers are evaluating replacing print edition with digital edition on alternate days of the week."

The UK's National Union of Journalists reports that Express Newspapers only had 25 staff members who inquired about the voluntary redundancy terms, instead of the target 36. The company hopes to cut 36 subeditors from the current 62 working for the Daily Express and Sunday Express, writes The Guardian.

Search engine giant Google announces that it will soon be releasing a third beta version of its Chrome Internet browser, which may deal more efficiently with bugs, performance and security problems, reports ZDNet UK.

More newspapers are reducing print editions and redesigning them in order to provide a more magazine-style publication in order to allure readers and advertisers.  However, magazines are also taking a big hit, just like newspapers, with decreasing ad revenue and stiff competition from the Internet.  

Yesterday, Condé Nast Publications Inc. announced that Men's Vogue would be reduced to a biannual supplement with a staff of two people.  

For the second time this year, Russian newspaper Moskovskiy Korrespondent was shut down.

Chief Editor Sergey Varshavchik said he doesn't expect the paper to continue being published, reported Lenta.ru. According to him, Moskovskiy Korrespondent does not have enough financial backing from investor Alexander Lebedev.

Earlier this year, the paper was temporarily shut down after it published a "scandalous" article about an alleged love affair between former Russian president Vladimir Putin and gymnast Alina Kabaeva.

Source: Lenta.ru

On October 30, Bhutan launched its first daily paper, Bhutan Today in an attempt to build a free press. 

Distribution of the eight-page paper will not be easy, it is expected to take up to a week for it to reach remote areas of the country.  The initial circulation will be around 18,00 copies.  It has been launched in English, however according to Bhutanese law, the paper must also be printed in the local language.

Today, October 31, the free glossy lifestyle magazine, 20 Minuten Friday was launched.  It will be distributed in the German speaking parts of Switzerland. 

The magazine is a collaborative effort with woman's magazine Annabelle, and entertainment portal tillate.com.

Source: Newspaper Innovation

On Monday, Aujourd'hui Sport and 10 Sport will hit newsstands across France.  The two competitors will be focused on sports news.  They will both be sold for 50 Euro cents, seven days a week.

The design of the two is similar; they will both be 24-page tabloid format, full color with about 3-4 pages of advertisements.  Aujourd'hui Sport will resemble Aujourd'hui en France - a news daily published by the same company.

These are the first papers to be launched in France in the last 10 years.

Source: Press Release

Barely a day goes by at the moment without a raft of stories on the financial crisis, the US election and... the Associated Press. The Associated Press's communications team have never been so in demand, and the venerated news agency is moving dangerously close to becoming the story rather than being the one that writes about it.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Tom Brettingen, Chief Revenue Officer and Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at the AP, to discuss bad publicity, editorial content, price structure, and editorial cuts at the agency.

EW: Have you been surprised at the reaction to the price structure changes?

TB: "Generally, and for most of the industry, what we were offering was much more content for less money and a broader license to use it. We expected people to be happy, and most people were happy, the people you are seeing in the news were people, as the economic situation got worse, who were expecting larger decreases in their rates."

EW: Why were these changes necessary?

TB: "In the beginning, the goal was not drastic rate cuts, it was more about content. We wanted to help newspapers find the content that was specifically right for them in their markets and keep rates flat in doing that. We did all the work to devise the specifics and as these discussions went on the situation in the market became a lot worse and the global economy got worse. So, now the pricing and packaging that we started off with has run into this buzz of newspaper challenges and general economic challenges and that's why you find today all the stuff in the news about us"

EW: Is the AP having the same financial difficulties as the rest of the industry?

TB: "If our customers, who are generally ad supported, are hurt by the challenges that all newspapers are facing, compounded by the global economy, then of course it affects us as well"

EW: Looking back, would you have done anything differently with regard implementing the price structure changes? Do you think communication was an issue?

TB: "Some of the clients found the new packaging unnecessarily complicated. We created one level that contained all of the Breaking News, and then separate to this we had additional levels, Premium vertical segments, such as Sports, Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment and Analysis. Our thinking was "Breaking News" would satisfy a lot of customers, but some of our clients with more specialized newspapers might want to buy additional sports and business. Breaking News did have a huge amount of sports and business, but some of it was separated into Premium categories, so only those newspapers that wanted it needed to buy it."

"If we had foreseen how much more difficult the economic situation was going to get, we probably would have jumped ahead farther and skipped some of the intermediate steps. Things were not great 2 years ago, but they weren't nearly as bad as they are now.

"I am sure that (sic: communication) was part of it.... We were making this brand new separation from Breaking News, which on its face seems straightforward enough. However, say you are looking at Sports; you get the baseball results and match report, but what about analysis and sidebars? We had that planned, but we didn't have it live in the new web platform, so newspapers hearing from us couldn't go immediately to the website and see what we were talking about."

"If we'd had more time to announce it so that we could have finished the programming so that the distinctions between Breaking News and Premium would be clearer.... yeah, we could have timed that better. We were racing to get the program built and explained so people could make their choices in time for 2009. Newspapers didn't have the ability to see the differences to Breaking and Premium, and that would be something we could have done better.

"There was a huge amount of communication, it just wasn't necessarily what everyone wanted to hear"

EW: What was AP's reaction to the business-wide and economic crisis?

TB: "Last week, as the economic situation worsened and newspapers wanted a further reduction in their pricings from us, we did two things, for the small percentages of newspapers that saw a price increase in 2009, that was called off, and then we decided to abandon the two tier model. We made it part of one package, so premium is available to everyone."

EW: What is in the future for the AP?

TB: "We are undertaking a major review of what we need to do beyond changes in 2009. That will be a wide-ranging review. There are some benefits to membership of the AP, you vote for the board, you have an ownership stake; however, maybe some newspapers would prefer to not support the co-op to that level. Maybe some newspapers would prefer to be a more straightforward customer and buy a small content package for less money. That will be something that we will be examining."

EW: Do you expect to increase prices after 2009 for US newspapers?

TB: "Unless something miraculous happens and turns things around, if newspapers get to where they need to go with much more success on the web, that is theoretically possible. But no, I don't see any rate increases in the foreseeable future."

EW: Why has the AP changed its tone in some AP copy? Some of AP's content is now quite opinionated, are you moving away from neutral ground?

TB: "It's an area that can be debated, but we are certainly not moving from a neutral position. We remain committedly neutral, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't have a voice, it's a more distinctive voice. It's a different voice to that which we may have had on some of our content in the past, but there is no leaving the neutral middle ground in terms of political leanings. We are providing value to the reader, we don't go to the consumer of course: we're a wholesaler. However, if we don't interest the reader, our customers aren't going to find that much value in our content. It's not a decision to be outrageous, or voicing off... it was an incremental change to be a little more distinctive in the market place."

EW: Does the AP have any new projects or innovations in the pipeline?

TB: "If we're not going to have all the revenue that we've had in the past from US newspapers and, more than likely, a few US broadcasters, we need to replace that revenue. We have several initiatives to help us do that, and they will be in content areas. Any more detail would be premature at this stage."

EW: Do you expect staff cuts at AP? If so, can you confirm that these will not happen in editorial?

TB: "Its clearly a company where the expense is largely people, if you're going to reduce expenses, you've got to look there. We need to be sure that the cuts are done very carefully because damaging the product and damaging the quality of the product starts a spiral that we clearly have no intention of starting.

"There is no decision on not cutting editorial, but depending on the levels of cuts that is required, its unlikely that you could do that entirely without looking at where the majority of our expenses lie, which is news staffing"

EW: What do you see in the future for newspapers? What do you think they need to do to their business models?

TB: "If I had the secret potion I would get very wealthy in a hurry. There are lots of good ideas floating round out there and they almost all revolve around targeting users with information, content and services, not expecting a single product - be it print or web - to be fully satisfying to everybody you want to reach in your market. A lot of customization and niche kinds of products are the things on most peoples minds."

See also:

Exploring the content sharing model: Is this the future of the US newspaper industry?
Opinion: Is the AP threatening its own future?
US: AP suspends rate hike
US: More newspapers to drop AP
US: Tribune Co. to drop AP

The China Post, an English-language daily in Taiwan has become the 20th member of Asia News Network (ANN), a network of national daily newspapers published in Asian cities, organized to provide avenues for cooperation and increase coverage of major news events in the region.

Membership of the ANN grants The China Post access to Asian news coverage from other member national newspapers in the region. The China Post will now be ANN members source of news from Taiwan.

Daniel Huang, the Publisher and the Deputy Director of The China Post said, "We are delighted to join ANN and hope to make positive contributions to our Asian peers. China Post readers now have unparalleled access to the latest news, analysis, and entertainment information from Asia's top journalists."

The expansion in Asian coverage will coincide with the newly designed Asia section of ChinaPost.com.tw.

The alliance was founded in 1998 to provide avenues for cooperation among Asian press under the motto "We Know Asia Better."

Source: Asia Media Weekly and Asia News Network

US newspapers have recently begun working together on content sharing deals on an unprecedented scale. There has been much speculation that the driving force behind these agreements is dissatisfaction with the recent changes at AP. The most recent announcement came from five papers in the Tri-State area of the US last week.  

Content sharing deals vary and although many are just starting, a group of three papers in Florida - the Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald - started content sharing about three months ago.  However, there is one group of five papers in New Hampshire who have had an agreement in place for the past 15 years.

In an effort to understand the inner workings of content sharing, how it will affect the future of newspapers and journalism, and if these deals are related to AP's actions, the Editors Weblog spoke with Dave Solomon, the vice president of The Telegraph of Nashua in New Hampshire, and Anders Gyllenhaal, senior vice president/executive editor of the Miami Herald.

The Florida Method

Three months ago the Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald began to share content. What is most striking about this deal is the complete shift in mentality that has accompanied it. These three papers have been fierce competitors for the past 100-years and now they find themselves posting each other's stories.  According to Gyllenhaal at the Miami Herald, the shift is not designed to change the competitive relationship between the three, but it has changed the way they work together.

What was the trigger for such a change after so many years? Gyllenhaal believes that the increasingly challenging newspaper market has necessitated a more mutually supportive relationship. For the Herald, it began on the business side, "with a distribution agreement. In the case of the Herald and the Sun Sentinel, the Sun was circulating the Herald in its prime territory, and we were circulating their paper." After this, "the newsrooms began to talk, and we have come up with the initial step, a way of trading routine content between the three papers."

The papers follow a strict guideline of what content they can and cannot use. Gyllenhaal believes that "websites are where the news competition exists" so in an effort to preserve this, "you cannot pick up a story from another website and put it on your website but you can put in the paper the next day." Gyllenhaal goes on to say, "It's a defined group of stories, which are events that happened in the last 24 hours or are about to happen, and as a rule we are picking up a couple of items a day from each others websites."

Gyllenhaal reports, "What we can't pick up are things that kind of define an individual paper - in the sense of their franchise elements, their personality elements, you can't pick up columnists, major investigative pieces the things that define, the more important pieces."  This aspect of the agreement maintains the competition, therefore Gyllenhaal does not see this changing anytime soon.

What next for the Florida method?

As for the future, Gyllenhaal confirmed plans for individual departments to start working with each other across the three titles for specific stories.  He gave the example of when a sports department cannot make it to a game; they will make arrangements to get the story from one of the other papers who would be at the game. 

When asked about the possibility of expanding partnerships statewide or across the nation, Gyllenhaal believes that it is possible, but complicated.  He notes that in order to grow such a partnership it would require a different system than they have put in place.  However, there are plans to extend the content-sharing deal to two papers north of Palm Beach, but he confirmed that it is probably as far as they will go for now.

The New Hampshire model

The Nashua Telegraph has been content sharing with five of their neighbor newspapers since 1993. The deal here is different to Flordia's method as the papers are not in direct competition with each other. However, their approach does provide some insight into how such a system can work for a sustained period of time.

 
According to Solomon at The Telegraph of Nashua the system started as a means, "to get feature stories and in-depth stories from the other papers for our then-new Sunday editions that we were struggling to fill state copy."