May 2008 Archives

Press freedom is under serious threat from many sources -- gangs and corrupt officials in Latin America, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, conflicts in Africa, hostile governments in Asia, and from death threats and prosecutions in central Asia and Europe, the World Association of Newspapers said in its half-year review of press freedom.

The report, presented Saturday to the Board of WAN on the eve of the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Göteborg, Sweden, painted a grim picture of attacks, imprisonment and murder facing journalists in many countries.

Twenty-eight journalists have been killed since November 2007. Iraq remains the most deadly country, with 9 killed.

The report, with region-by-region details, is available here.

Source: WAN

Washingtonpost.com introduced Wednesday a housing widget that enables users to search for apartments near Metro stations. The widget is the Post's latest effort to spread its content beyond its domain site.

Ken Barbieri, director of business development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, says that such expansion is necessary. According to Barbieri, it is vital to "get your content to the place where people are consuming information."

The widget, the Post's 25th in 18 months, will utilize Google maps to provide users with customized visuals. It will be available on Washingtonpost.com, and distributed on Google's content network.

Washingtonpost.com's future projects, Barbieri suggests, will target the iPhone and Blackberry.

"Whether the consumer is on a social network or a mobile phone, we want to be there," said Barbieri.

Source: The ClickZ Network, through I Want Media

Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo recently completed a survey of 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.

When asked to name the top 10 missions of Arab journalism, participants named human rights, political reform, poverty and education as the most critical issues, trumping hot button topics like Palestinian statehood and the war in Iraq.

"Overwhelmingly, they wanted the clergy to stay out of politics. And, aside from the ever-present issue of Israel, they ranked 'lack of political change' alongside American policy as the greatest threats to the Arab world," wrote Pintak in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this week. "Many see themselves as agents of political and social change who believe it is their mission to reform the antidemocratic regimes they live under."

The results of Pintak's research will be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July.

Source: The New York Times

24/7 Wall St. has looked at the top 25 US newspapers and ranked their online business and finance sections, on an A-F scale.

Business and finance sections were selected because advertisers are often willing to pay a premium for space in a section read by readers "(that) have money that the readers of the sports sections may not." Given the readership and advertising potential, this should presumably be one of the best online sections of a news site.  

Overall, the results indicate there is room for improvement, with the news sites receiving a median grade of B-. 24/7 Wall St. reported many of the sites were difficult to navigate, lacked on content and were poorly designed. Of one they commented the site, "appears to have been designed giving no thought to the fact that the reader is looking at content on the internet and not in a newspaper. "

Yet among the 25, several stood out as having used their resources well to create straightforward site navigation, quality design and content - particularly content which catered to their readership, and foster interactivity through blogs, video and online forums.

Among the best, The Houston Chronicle was noted for excellent navigation, relevant blogs and columns and mix of major stories from wire services, coupled with "local touches like the Houston Stock Index and several Top 100 features." The St. Petersburg Times was also a stand out, with superb graphics and lay-out and interactive features on local companies.

Robb Montgomery commented earlier this year that in moving our focus online, "We are in a transition and transitions are bumpy and disorienting." Montgomery advises that digital journalism needs to be seen (and created as) its own product, unique from both traditional print journalism and traditional ways of consuming film and television.

Sources: 24/7 Wall St.

The Guardian's website drew 3 million online users in April, maintaining its position as UK's most popular newspaper website, according to Nielsen Online.

But its grip on the top spot is slipping.

Telegraph.co.uk, which holds second-place with 2.7 million unique users, experienced a traffic growth of 77%, dwarfing the Guardian's 24% increase.

Trailing Telegraph.co.uk were, in order, the Sun Online, the Times Online, and the Daily Mail.

Telegraph.co.uk owes its surge in popularity to a proliferating number of "light" visitors, users who spend less than five minutes on the website, said Stephen Brooks, UK managing director of Nielsen Online. According to Nielsen, light users now constitute 81% of all traffic.

"Analysing the Telegraph's audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site's improved visibility in search results," Brooks said.

Nielsen's announcement follows recent studies by ABCe and comScore Inc., each of which crowned a different newspaper - Telegraph.co.uk and Sun Online respectively - as most popular. PaidContent UK's Robert Andrews' advice: "You can pretty much pick your own winner."

Source: PaidContent UK, Brand Republic

Newspaper Le Figaro and mobile phone service Orange have partnered to offer a unique feature: it is the first live daily show about politics, entitled "The Talk," to be conceived exclusively for the Web and mobile phones.
The show will launch on Monday June 2 with French Prime Minister François Fillon. Every day, at 6pm, a political or financial celebrity will be interviewed by Figaro's star political reporter Anne Fulda or by Figaro.fr managing editor Laurent Guimier.
The show will be shot in the Figaro's own video studio (see the interview about their video studio) and will be broadcast live and for free on figaro.fr and on the news portal of Orange, both on the Web and on Orange mobile phones.
Truly innovative, this service will also be interactive, as Internet users can submit questions before the show and react to it live on the blog of "The Talk."
The show's business model is entirely based on its audience, thanks to banner ads sold on the sites of both the newspaper and mobile operator, for which both partners will share revenues.
The show's time, 6pm, was also geared to fill a 'news void' for the French audience, as they  are still at work or on their way home.
"There's on one side the best of content with Le Figaro, on the other the best of distribution with Orange. It's a win-win situation," said Orange President and Director, Didier Lombard.
Source: Figaro (here and here, links in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

The Chicago Tribune has partnered with digital video recorder specialist TiVo, for the video service to carry content from the Tribune's TV critic Maureen Ryan.

The recommendations of Ryan will only be available to those who sign up, among the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the Chicago area. TiVo's chief executive said he was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets.

The Tribune could benefit from the deal in several ways, including increased visibility of its brand name, but also potentially additional subscription revenue.

"Maybe we'll get a few people to do the unthinkable and subscribe to the newspaper," said James Warren, managing editor for features at the Tribune. This partnership comes as the Tribune is reshuffling its TV print digest, whose value is diminishing with the rise of online or on-screen guides. "He said the TiVo partnership seemed like a no-lose proposition," reported The New York Times.

The Tribune will also get a share of revenue from newly-subscribed TiVo users, if these came through one the newspaper's advertisements for TiVo.

 

 

Source: New York Times through I Want Media

Newspaper editors have a new reason to emphasize their video offerings - a ten-figure reason.

 

The number of people who watch online video could rise to one billion within the next five years, according to a study released Tuesday by technology research group ABI Research.

 

This means that the study expects the number of online video viewers to quadruple by 2013.

 

"As my boss, Jim Kerstetter, points out, it's unwise to put too much faith in predictions like this, but this isn't too much of a stretch," writes CNET News blogger Greg Sandoval.

 

Source: CNET News through I Want Media

Starting on Sunday June 1, the 15th World Editors Forum and 61st World Newspaper Congress will kick off and run through Wednesday June 4.

All of next week, read all the latest news, watch the videos and get exclusive summaries and interviews from one of the industry's biggest events.

The Editors Weblog team is currently travelling to Göteborg, Sweden, for the Forum. We will continue to give a share of our regular news coverage until the end of the conference.

The Washington Times unveiled Tuesday a preview of its revamped website, tailored to facilitate user interaction and allow readers a more personalized experience. The renovation marks the Times' switch from a "newspaper enterprise to a full media company offering news 24/7," said the Times' press release.

Most prominent among the new features is the News Cube, a design that enables readers to flip through articles in two ways: vertically, through general topics (Business, Sports - traditional news sections), or horizontally, through news themes adapted to specific interests (family issues, video games, the military). These news themes will include all stories written by the Washington Times since 1999.

The Times will also introduce a question forum and social networking communities monitored by citizens "who function as the bloggers-in-chief and moderators," said the release.

The prototype launched today will enable the paper to get feedback from readers before the print edition is relaunched on June 2, along with an e-edition of the print newspaper.

Source: Business Wire, press release

Copiepresse, a copyright group for Belgian newspapers, is suing Google for up to €49.1 million for displaying links to the publishers' content on Google News, the company's news search engine.

Copiepresse additionally requests that Google publish the court's ruling for 20 days on Google's Belgian website and news.Google.be. For each day Google fails to do so, Copiepresse seeks a €1 million fine.

Google News compiles links to news stories customized to fit users' searches, a service, Copiepresse complains, that allows Google to steal advertising profits away from the newspapers.

This is the second time in the past two years Copiepresse has sued Google. A February 2007 court ruling mandated that Google remove all links from its website and pay Copiepresse damages.

In related news, Google responded today to another grievance being brought against the company, Viacom's lawsuit against the Google-owned YouTube, calling it a "threat to the flow of information on the web."

Click here for further coverage of Copiepresse's lawsuit.

Source: Bloomberg News through EJC, Boston Globe

Two magazines, published by 8020 Publishing and based on an experimental user-generated model, are drawing the attention of traditional newspaper editors.

Everywhere, a travel magazine, and JPG, a photo journal, rely on citizens to create their content, greatly reducing the price of production, while managing to maintain a standard of high quality.

The magazines receive thousands of submissions online, which are then voted on by readers for publication. A small editorial team makes the final decision.

"Even in this Twittering digital age in which tens of millions of self-publishers have created their own blogs, there is still enough of a thrill in being published in a bound print publication," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

"After doing this for a bit, I'm still not seeing what professional travel writers do that our people aren't doing better," Everywhere Editor in Chief Todd Lappin says.

"Think about it. There's only one of them going to a place and there's potentially hundreds of our people already there."

Some editors have expressed reluctance to embrace a model dependent upon citizens - such a system would seem to cheapen the value of professional journalists. Sree Sreenivasan, in charge of new media program at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, recognizes the value of user-generated content, but also warns against community-based 'editorial' choices:

"'Create-your-own news sites' lose some of the serendipity of journalism. You're losing the stories that you might not see if there wasn't an editor looking out for them," Sreenivasan says.

The publishers of Everywhere and JPG are considering similar magazines for car fans and food connoisseurs.

It remains to be seen whether this user-generated model can be successfully and viably applied to news and newspapers. Initiatives at the Hartford Courant, or CNN's iReport platform, which now draws 10,000 user submissions per month, point in the right direction.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle through I Want Media

Welt Online, website of referential daily Die Welt in Germany, has chosen eScenic for its content management. Oliver Michalsky, deputy editor of Welt Online, will explain this choice at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, June 1-4.

"We thing that eScenic is a high performance content management system," he said.

The CMS is very fast compared to Welt Online's previous system: sometimes reporters had to wait for five minutes or more before a news item was published. "It was terrible for us," said Michalsky.

With eScenic, it is now both easy and quick to publish text stories, but also multimedia content such as videos and picture galleries, or interactive features like polls, said Michalsky.

Recent upgrades in eScenic also make it easy to manage Welt Online's community platform, where users can set up profiles and upload their own content; Welt Online began this project a year and a half ago with CMS Drupal, which offered better functionalities at the time, but will soon go through the process of adapting its community platform to eScenic.

According to Michalsky, staffers at Die Welt comfortably adopted the new CMS. It took about two weeks for all editors to learn how to use it. Not all reporters need to learn how to use it, but it has been very handy for reporters outside of Die Welt's Berlin headquarters.

Michalsky will discuss these issues at the upcoming World Editors Forum.

Read other preview interviews here.

Source: Oliver Michalsky, deputy editor, Welt Online