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The International Herald Tribune is launching a news reader application in the first half of 2009 according to the New York Times Vice President of R&D, Michael Zimbalist.

The software will be based on the AIR 1.5 which was released on Monday. According to an article on CNET news, "it's pretty clear that the company will release a reader for The New York Times as well." The announcement was made at the Adobe Max Conference in the USA.

There is currently a desktop reader in the marketplace for the NYT. The recently announced IHT platform will take advantage of the newly released AIR application's new technology, such as its fast text-rendering engine that re-flows text as you resize the screen. The new app also uses the video capabilities of Flash 10, which Air 1.5 uses. The demo showed videos in ads, but it could also be used for editorial content.

Source: CNET

The 100-year old Pulitzer prize winning Christian Science Monitor has bravely announced that it is ending its daily print format and going fully digital: it will now only print a weekly "magazine" edition. The Editors Weblog caught up with the Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Science Monitor, John Yemma, and we discussed the thinking behind this move and how on earth a nationally distributed newspaper completely restructures itself for a digital future.

This story has been broken down into two parts. Part 1 focuses on why the CSM took this step and its initial steps down this path. Part 2 looks at the nuts and bolts: restructuring the newsroom, retraining, and managing staff through change.

The CSM's decision has sparked the inevitable debate about whether this is the beginning of the end for daily printed newspapers, a debate which will run and run in the years to come. However, the peculiar nature of the CSM's subsidised business model, its relatively small print distribution run and international readership base, make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions on industry trends from this move. Nevertheless, many in the industry will be watching closely to see how the CSM manages this move and whether it proves successful or not. If the CSM is successful, then this may lead to other newspapers pursuing this business model, but these papers will have to have a distinctive and loyal readership like the CSM if they have any hope of being successful.

Why the move away from print?

Yemma (left) states that there are two main reasons behind the CSM's controversial decision to move away from the daily print model. Firstly, the CSM's publishers, "saw the writing on the wall, they knew that the Internet user patterns and reader preferences and so forth were changing the business model of print. Print was becoming increasingly untenable, especially for the Monitor, which has an international audience. We just don't have enough reach with our print product, but we have great reach with our web product. That's not uncommon in the world of publishing right now to come to that conclusion, but for the Monitor we were able to make the change a little faster, because the Christian Science church wanted to move away from subsidising the Monitor within about three to five years."

The CSM is subsidised by the Christian Science church, with the church contributing approximately 50% ($13 million) of the newspapers revenue.  The newspaper itself makes about $12.5 million in terms of print advertising, circulation, web revenue and syndication. Therefore, the publishers of the CSM felt that, secondly, this level of subsidisation could not continue forever, so the team decided to look at the newspapers various options.

How the move to digital began - where to begin?

Two years ago the CSM convened a task force to look at the possibility of dropping its daily print edition. The newspaper worked at it from all angles; from prototyping to financial analysis, and working with a consultant (newspaper consultant Chris Urban), marketing group (Kadence Associates - who organised focus groups and surveys), and a PR company (Shift Communications - who handled assisted the company in communicating this move). A former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, John Hughes, and newspaper consultant, Chris Urban, headed up this task force.

Surveying the core readership base - will they buy it?

Given the nature of the CSM and its relatively small daily print run, international appeal as a Christian newspaper and its worldwide reputation, the reasoning behind this move - no matter the financial calculations and industry trends - is sound. However, if the core CSM readership did not largely support the change, then all bets would be off. The CSM surveyed its core loyal readership base, taking sample groups to sound out their response. Yemma states that the CSM was most concerned with converting this core group as quickly as possible to reading the newspaper in a new way. Its focus groups revealed that 50% welcomed the idea of decreasing the frequency of the CSM and that of the 50% who were "on the fence" only half of these wanted to preserve it as it is now.

Once the decision to drop the daily print edition was announced, the CSM had a customer service team field all calls and emails about the decision from readers, which Yemma receives a daily report on. The accumulative report of this over the past few weeks is consistently running at just 14% negative. 35% are asking questions about this new model will work, such as price and so forth, with the rest being positive. Yemma feels the CSM has got a, "pretty good response. We expected worse."

Yemma is clear that the most important thing for them to find out is how many people will convert from buying the daily newspaper to the weekly magazine. This will not be known until the new format is marketed in the spring, and they begin selling the weekly in April. The CSM's marketing estimate is that they can covert about 80% of the people currently buying the daily to take up the weekly model. On this, Yemma says, "that is the best we can do at the moment without having perfect knowledge of the future."

Communicating with your reader

On the CSM website currently there is a web cast featuring John Yemma and the Managing Publishing, John Wells. Here they talk over the various changes and why they have come about for their reader. The site also has an in depth editorial on the changes ahead for the venerated newspaper.

"The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium, it is a totally new way of telling stories"

The move to a web focused future will, "unshackle the newsroom from print."  Yemma says "We will get to see what we can do online in a way that we have never been able to do before. I really believe that journalism in is the infancy of story telling online and that online story telling is about interactivity. I expect us to look more at intelligently moderated user generated content, crowd sourcing, and expanding the reach of CSM journalism.  We can look more at speaking to our readers, and asking them to send us their images and stories of the events hitting the headlines, and thus expand our eyes and ears. There is a non-linear way of telling stories on the web that I think has to be developed by journalists who want their stories to be told in the most appropriate way for the medium."

Yemma goes on to say, "The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium: it is a totally new way of telling stories. We can really start using the web for what it is really all about, which is this three dimensional medium getting information and providing it at whatever level you can convey it."

Part 2 - In our next article on the CSM, the Weblog talks to Yemma about reorganising the team and the newsroom for a weekly magazine and web future, retraining, and staff cuts.

Last week the Financial Times relaunched its website with a new homepage, along with five other resdesigned pages and a new Middle East section. This is the first stage of its redesign and more changes will be rolled out over 2009. Reviews about the new design have been mixed; some call it a success, some say it's a failure. The FT has been applauded for finally redesigning and "clearing up the clutter" but the criticisms go further than the redesign, some critics have called their entire business model into question.

The new design aims to make the site look more like the print version through colour and layout. The homepage is now pink, just like the newspaper, and the design of the masthead reflects the print version as well. The website has also been renamed Financial Times, no longer FT.com.

The Sunday Nation of Thailand has adopted a new narrower format of 12 inches.  In addition the newspaper launched a new glossy Sunday magazine entitled Ace.

According to Leroy Sylk, the design director of The Nation, the weekday edition of paper will probably convert to the narrower format sometime in the near future.  

The narrower format allows the paper to cut costs and be more reader friendly.


Source: Garcia Media

The average editor will follow the news about emerging electronic displays with amazement: the promises are mind-boggling, yet the practices so far rather poor. Will e-readers really be the saviours of the trade and if so, how come it is taking so long before a standard solution comes to market? To a large extent, the answer lies in the craving for effective breakthroughs of a beleaguered industry, much more than in the technology itself. Producing the versatile, flexible, crystal clear electronic reading pane is a formidable technological challenge. Several hardware producers are achieving promising results, but what they have launched up until now are at best pilot devices to test the principles and explore the market. However, the learning curve is steep and in a few years time the assessment will be much more positive.

It is difficult to foresee which technology will become the default application. A strong position is held by e-ink mounted devices that companies like Sony, PlasticLogic, iRex and content provider Amazon have embraced. Their e-readers progress from one version to another, often within a matter of months, with relevant but not revolutionary improvements. They boast splendid daylight readability and prolonged battery life, but remain black-and-white, static (no streaming) and cannot impress with their interfaces.

And the competition is gearing up from two sides. On the one hand even more advanced technologies are presently being lab-tested, such as electro-wetting (using thin liquid layers which can be manipulated with an electric charge) and OLED (using clusters of organic, light emitting diodes). These promise even more advantages - full colour, video, and foldability - surpassing the crucial black-and-white limitation that disadvantages publishers today. On the other hand, there is the revival of the 'classical' flatscreen LCD display, built into a new generation of mini-pc's (or ultra mobile PC's - UMPCs). These slim, lightweight, powerful and cheap devices finally close the gap between the PDA and the bulky laptop with a medium size, versatile handbag PC, ideal for people on the move. Frontrunner ASUS hit the mother load with its EEE series, and meanwhile has many followers in the competitive hardware sector.

The final verdict is as always in the hands of the consumer. Which tool will become the preferred 'universal mobile reading device'? First of all, size, price and nice determine the choice. Whichever technology is built in, the device must gently fit in everybody's travel outfit, be not too expensive and have a certain show-off value. Second, features are key. Connectivity, ease of navigation, customisation options - the mobile reader demands instant performance. And for the moment, easy access to an array of content also plays an important role: Amazon plays that card very cleverly.

At this point, the UMPC seems to have the advantage, with the e-ink based e-readers left behind being too limited and too expensive. Some manufacturers work in the direction of low cost hybrid solutions. The OLPC consortium (which stands for One Laptop Per Child) for instance has announced the XO-2 for early 2010, with a dual-mode display featuring a technology to 'freeze' the LCD screen to maximise readability in full sunlight, so far the most important e-ink selling point.

Besides the choice of hardware, software standardisation will determine how we will be reading our future electronic newspapers. In these early e-reader days, many players try to lock-in their customers in proprietary solutions: Amazon connecting the Kindle to its own portal, iRex with its distribution platform, operators like Orange and Telecom Italia with dedicated hard ware and software: a seemingly attractive business model in the short term, but a serious handicap for widespread adoption of the technology. A major step forward is the introduction of the epub format, adopted by a growing number of larger publishers that could become a de facto standard allowing various content sources to be read, customised and transferred across e-readers from most manufacturers. Anything goes on any e-device: we move in that direction, and newspapers should have their offerings ready for it.

Director of the Euorpean Centre for Digital Communications and long-time journalist, Jan Bierhoff is currently conducting studies on e-reader technology and the consumer trends that will define their use. 

Topix, the online news community, has launched a free ReLinx headline widget and inline links for media partners.

Using proprietary categorization technology from Topix, the ReLinx headline widget returns related articles from a media property's own content. The free widget integrates with any CMS platform and, according to Topix, "saves producer time, and delivers real-time, relevant results designed to drive incremental pageviews and reader engagement."

ReLinx can also be used as an inline-linking tool within the text of an article. The ReLinx inline links and headline widget can be used together or seperately.

"News sites invest precious time and money in generating original content, but it's often difficult to package that information to take full advantage of the Web's interactivity," said Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix. "With these free tools, Topix lends its technology expertise to help news sites generate more value and reader engagement from their content."

Source: Topix

On October 24, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Amazon's electronic reader, the Kindle. As a result, Amazon's website has seen a surge in traffic and the blogs are all buzzing about it.

According to Ad Age, Amazon.com saw web-page visits increase by 6% on the 24th.  Eighty percent of blog posts about the Kindle since the 23rd have mentioned Oprah's endorsement and there was a 479% jump in search traffic for the word "kindle" after the show.

In addition, there was a 15,458% bump in web traffic from Oprah.com to Amazon.com between October 23rd and October 24th.

Source:  Advertising Age

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

Arizona newspaper, Green Valley News and Sun will no longer print a Friday edition beginning November.  According to the paper's website the decision was made in order to meet the financial challenges they face without having to make staff reductions.  Friday's content will be moved to Sunday and Wednesday editions.  

In addition the paper has begun surveying readers about what they want to see in the paper.  GVN also plans on updating and improving their website.

GVN website stated, "We believe that enhancing our product and better serving our readers who love their printed paper and our ever-changing Web site is better than chasing a non-reader."

Source: Green Valley News

At the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, exhibitors agreed that the future of electronic reading devices faces serious competition.  Most agreed that e-readers are unlikely to replace books.

There are a few reasons: First, the e-reader does not capture the true essence of a book.  Second, it faces competition from other devices used for consuming digital media, such as the cell phone (which most people already own).  Third, the price of the e-reader (anywhere from $300 to $800) combined with the current financial climate, makes it even less likely to become mainstream.

Today th