Results matching “linking to other newspapers”

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

Towards the end of last year, Rupert Murdoch, head of News International, spoke out against news aggregators. In an interview with Sky News Australia, he condemned the likes of Google as nothing more than "thieves", intent on stealing content from his newspaper's websites for their own benefit. The media mogul has long wielded threats of removing all News International articles from search indexes and implementing stringent paywalls around all his websites by the end of 2010.

It's only January, but Murdoch has already set about putting his plans into action: On Friday, the Guardian reported that News International is to prevent the aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from linking to content found on the Times Online website, by changing its search engine settings via the robots.txt protocol.

The BBC, who yesterday announced a new initiative to grant the general public access to professional media training resources, has also revealed it will expand the content available on its news website by linking to rival sources via an aggregation-like system, reports The Independent.

The move comes after accusations headed by News Corp's chairman and CEO for Europe and Asia, James Murdoch, that the corporation, in choosing to remain free, is flooding the market and preventing competitors from expanding online and charging for their content.  The new plan would reportedly see links to commerical websites added at the end of BBC stories.  

Newsnow.co.uk, the UK's largest news aggregator with a 20% market share second only to Google, posted a public letter on its home page regarding the multiple legal actions it faces from several news publishers.

American journalist and professor at the City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis, has voiced his opinions on the future of journalism at the 'Is World Journalism in Crisis?' event at Coventry University on Wednesday. Supporting progress and development within the industry, Jarvis implored journalists to "support the means for entrepreneurial journalism," as opposed to trying to protect old models, warning that in doing so, journalists risk "hurting new sprouts that grow".

Nieman Journalism Lab has published the full speech given by Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club last week, in which he mentioned the possibility of offering AP content as an exclusive for a certain period of time. In his speech, Curley focused on how the organisation is trying to create new revenue streams and to protect its content. 

"First of all," Curley said, "more people are seeking news more times a time in more places than ever before." However, there are also more people creating news, and Curley sees "an oversupply, at least in the short term," which he believes is causing difficulties in the market. It is no secret that the AP has been suffering financially from reduced membership fees in recent years.

The Newspaper Licensing Agency has come under intense criticism for its plans to charge PR companies for links to newspaper sites sent to clients. The NLA claims that charges are necessary to "protect the rights of publishers and help the web monitoring market grow". The propositions, however, have sparked a fierce row between the NLA, PR agencies and media experts as to where to draw the line between workable and "preposterous" methods of protection, as well as what actually constitutes copyright.

The NLA was established in 1996, with the mandate to authorise and gather licenses from "paper and digital copying of press cuttings". It now represents 1,400 newspapers in Great Britain. The most recent proposals came out of the enlargement of the term "press cuttings" to include the forwarding of a URL. Consequently, the NLA now maintains that PR agencies making such links should pay to do so.

Would expanding US copyright law to incorporate news articles help protect newspapers from unfair competition online? Several columnists and commentators have come out on both sides of the issue in the past week, raising questions on the role of online aggregators and the efficacy of any action regarding copyright.

First off, US Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner proposed on his blog that copyright law should be changed to "bar access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing online content without the copyright holder's consent." Essentially, that would mean news aggregators like Google News would have to ask permission each time they linked to a newspaper article. Posner argues that traditional media lose so much revenue by these "free riders" reusing content it will eventually drive newspapers out of business.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Labour MP Tom Watson go head-to-head on Twitter, as Watson and the Daily Mail accuse the centre-left paper of going too far. Last week, the newspaper went ahead with a front-page editorial urging the British PM Gordon Brown to resign.

Daily Mail obsessed with idea of Guardian 'putsch' (in collusion with BBC?). A question of media ethics, apparently. http://tiny.cc/7Wp3M"

And so went the tweet that started it all, with Rusbridger linking to the Daily Mail article, in which Stephen Glover asks "Was it [the Guardian] trying to orchestrate events so as to secure the resignation which it had called for in its editorial?"

The American Press Institute prepared a report for last week's newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago in which it assessed the options for paid content and "fair use" fees from Google and other aggregators. Entitled Newspaper Economic Action Plan, the report concluded that newspapers "can make the leap from an advertising-centered to an audience-centered enterprise," and should do so as soon as possible.

The "integrated, five-point" plan provides "models and recommendations for the migration of online content from free to paid" which are "intended for the development of consensus, protocols and technology." The API does not see paid content as the only revenue source that will save journalism, but advocates establishing "a true value for news content online by charging for it" in the first part of its plan: the True Value Doctrine. It recommends that news organisations immediately start a "massive" period of experimentation to find the best way to do this. The report explores three options: micropayments, subscriptions and a hybrid model.

Apture has created technology that aims to make flat web pages more three-dimensional: the third dimension being boxes that pop-up to show the reader further multimedia assets relating to an article. At first glance it does not sound too ground-breaking, but taking a closer look, the implications for both readers and publishers are considerable. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris about how Apture works and how it can help publishers.

Harris described what inspired him to start working on Apture. He and his co-founders came up with the idea while studying at Stanford, during conversations with the Knight Fellows. Frustrated with the fact that despite the web being "truly the richest medium we have ever had to communicate with, with all the computational power and multimedia assets" it has "this flat characteristic of flat story-telling," they decided to try to do something about it.

Easy access to multiple multimedia sources

Apture has created a media search engine that allows writers to "quickly leverage all the media that's available on the web, in many different APIs and digital libraries," Harris explained. The journalist highlights keywords in the text, such as the name of a person, place, event, or a certain topic, and a box will then appear with a list of possible media assets to link to. These include reference tools such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Twitter search, even the US Congress, photos from Flickr or Yahoo, videos from YouTube or Daily Motion, maps from Google Maps, documents from Scribd, and the journalist can pick what assets they feel are apppropriate - possibly more than one - and set up a link.

When the reader clicks on the hyperlink, instead of opening in a different browser window, another small box appears to display the article snippet, video, photo or map which the reader can consult without losing their place in the original article. And as Apture allows journalists to clip a specific section of a video or link to a certain quote in a book, the box will hopefully offer them only the most relevant information. Readers can click through to the original site by clicking on a link within the box.

For individual publishers, their own archives and assets can be incorporated into the search engine. Apture has also developed deals with some clients so that any Apture users can access their archives: for example Reuters videos, or snippets from New York Times, BBC or Washington Post articles. Apture just added Google Books and NPR audio podcasts to the asset list.

The technology is free to blogs and websites with fewer than 5 million page views per month. Harris added that as the company is "getting a lot of valuable information from people using it," meaning that the system is getting better and better. Larger publishers pay "hundreds and thousands a month" to use Apture, however. Harris explained that they are willing to do this because the tool creates a "more compelling experience on their websites," as shown by the fact that there is "a proven difference" in user's engagement with pages.

Benefits for publishers

According to Harris, putting one or more Apture links on a page leads to 2 or 3 minutes added engagement time. Looking at Comscore media matrix data, he clarified, it appears that 20 to 30% of publishers' traffic is lost to search. If a paper does not answer a reader's questions, it is extremely easy for the reader to just leave. Harris believes that if journalists are thoughtful and thorough about the links they add throughout a whole site, you could imagine that the publication "may well be able to double the amount of time spent on the site." And obviously, more time spent on the site means more advertising money.

As well as this financial benefit, Harris described a less tangible but arguably equally valuable advantage of using Apture: the fact that it allows newspapers to be a more effective guide for their readers and to offer them a more coherent reading experience. When a paper sends their readers away, either by linking to an external source or just not providing enough information, it is "severing its relationship with you as your guide to that information." By using Apture to supply necessary background information in multiple different formats while keeping the reader on its site, a news organisation can "be the guide to an entire web's worth of resources, but retain a relationship with that reader," Harris asserted. The fact that publishers are "the owners of that relationship" puts "a lot more power in their hands," he added.

For those publishers contemplating offering their content back to Apture, one concern might be that by displaying their content in boxes on other sites via Apture, they could end up losing traffic. Harris stressed, however, that readers can always go back to the source, and that rather than trying to remove traffic from websites, Apture sees its role as "providing an opportunity for those media partners to get their content in front of new eyeballs that they would not have seen before."

What next?

"What we are really doing is creating an efficiency in the market that really wasn't there before," Harris concluded. Apture is connecting information "in a way that wasn't possible before." He said that the company intends to improve its current product by continuing to integrate new content partners and bring costs down. He also hopes to create new products that will "transform the medium, changing the way that people interact with the web," and which are "not constrained to the two dimensions that we've had up until now."

The advantages offered by online journalism are numerous, and products such as Apture's should be welcomed by journalists striving to find better ways to tell their story in a multimedia environment. The fact that the Internet allows us to see, hear or find out more about pretty much anything and consequently make a story richer and more meaningful is something which papers should take advantage of. Arguably, going a step further and creating their own new multimedia experiences should be a priority for newspapers, but using existing content to supplement their articles is a good start. 

The BBC is to unveil proposals tomorrow for a deal with local news providers that would see the national broadcaster share resources with newspapers, TV and radio stations. The suggestions will be outlined at an industry summit hosted by UK culture secretary Andy Burnham on Tuesday, which had been arranged to discuss ways to assist local papers, which have been heavily hit by the fall in advertising revenue.

BBC proposals include giving local papers free access to video content for their websites, allowing them access to its college of journalism, sharing audio content with community and local radio reporters, and making its iPlayer technology available to rivals so that they can build their own video-rich websites, reported the Guardian.

As information becomes increasingly available and accessible online, newspapers find it hard to justify paying for a subscription to news wire services: an Associated Press membership, for example, can cost up to $800,000 a year for a newspaper. As a cost cutting measure, newspapers are sharing their news rather than subscribing to costly news wire services. Some examples are Tulsa World and the Oklahoman, Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Inquirer with Pittsburg Post-Gazette,

The International Journalism Festival took place in Perugia, Italy from April 1-5. The festival addressed the differences between old and new media and the necessity to integrate the two, and many other widely discussed issues affecting the media today, such as integrating print and web news in light of readers' migration online, the necessity to finance journalism as a watchdog, and hence the need to make readers pay for online news.

As more and more readers get their news online, the problem that news providers are all contemplating, according to Eduardo Hauser of the DailyMe, is, "How do we address the overwhelming amount of content on the web and how do we deliver it to the right audience?" People today have too little time to sift through the vast amount of content they have access to online, and as a result, many different services are springing up which provide some kind of filtering. Hauser and his team decided that personalisation was the route to follow, and the DailyMe was founded: a site that offers users the chance to easily locate the sort of news that they want to read, and to read it within the site, as content is licensed.

How does it work?

Registered users are invited to choose what sort of stories they are interested in, and once they have started to use the site it will track their preferences with the aim of providing them with appropriate recommendations and advertising, through what Hauser described as "dynamic personalisation." DailyMe offers three different strands of articles: Top News, which is the same selection of breaking stories for all users, DailyMe, which allows users to select their news preferences by topic and Daily We, which is community-driven, and allows users to rate stories. Within the DailyMe section, users can choose from subjects such as world news, science, travel, or industry-specific. The DailyWe area both charts the most read stories and gathers reader feedback. Registered users can assign one of six different descriptions to rate a story: infuriating, amazing, important, sad, uplifting or odd/funny: "six emotions consistent with people's reactions when they read the news," according to Hauser. So as well as looking through the most viewed news, users can browse the most important, or the most infuriating stories.

News is sorted largely by topic rather than by source: so readers easily compare many different stories in the fields that interest them. DailyMe licenses and "processes" about 10,000 stories a day, which come from 500 different newspapers and wires, such as the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Times and the Detroit Free Press. "We have chosen newspapers because we go after an audience that is loyal to brands," Hauser stressed, adding that he believes the target audience appreciates the "value of professional structured content." He also stressed that DailyMe's sources are not chosen with any political angle in mind.

Limited editorial agenda

Due to the overwhelming amount of news and ways to find it online, Hauser believes that "the editorial role has come under enormous pressure and may be structurally unable to handle that demand." Relying on people alone is not enough any more, and stories in the personalised section of the site are chosen algorithmically DailyMe's proprietory algorithms. However, an editor's hand undoubtedly remains important, and the DailyMe's editorial team do pick what appears in the top news section, and which articles appear higher up.

Problems with personalisation?

One recent criticism of the personalisation trend, as voiced by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicolas Kristof, stems from the very idea that it allows people to focus primarily on just the news that they want to read. Is it responsible to support people going online just to look at entertainment news, for example, and skip politics and current affairs altogether? Hauser agreed that on principle, it is "probably better for people to be exposed to diverse perspectives on a variety of topics." However, he pointed out, "people have always been selective about their media," it is not just the Internet or personalisation services that have led to this; people have always skipped articles, or changed television channels. There are still opportunities for news discovery within DailyMe, and the Top News section includes articles on all topics. Hauser explained that as there are recommended links alongside each story, the site encourages readers to branch out. "We don't necessarily see personalisation as an end point. We see it as the starting point," he clarified. He believes that it makes sense to start with news within your fields of interest from many different sources, rather than "news chosen by someone else based on a common denominator of an undetermined audience."

Licensing not linking

Hauser identified several main motivations behind the decision to license newspaper content and host it on the site, rather than just offering links that send users away. Firstly, because the DailyMe is targeting an audience of 'integrators' as identified by a Pew Research Center report last year on the US audience for domestic news. This section of news readers are more accustomed to staying within one domain rather than jumping around between sites, so DailyMe intends to offer "a deeper experience, one that drives greater engagement," and allows readers to get all their news within the site. Also, for the purpose of providing an effective personalisation service which learns from readers' habits to make "the best possible content recommendations" it is necessary to keep people within the site. This is also crucial for making money from targeted advertising, as the more you know about your users, the more precise the targeting can be.  

Another aspect of licensing was the desire to enter the news market as a friend to publishers, rather than a foe. Hauser pointed out, correctly, that "we need to find a way for journalists to be properly compensated for their work," and paying the content providers evidently helps to do that. This is in contrast to many aggregation services, which newspapers often blame for loss of revenue due to the fact that people use these sites just to read headlines and do not bother to click through to the paper's actual site.

Adding to advertising

Hauser's original business model was based purely on advertising. As it is hoped that people spend a considerable amount of time on the site, an advertising model seemed appropriate. However, due to the decline in online advertising rates, Hauser and his team have realised that unless rates recover swiftly, the site will not become profitable in the next two years. So at the end of February the DailyMe started talking to newspaper publishers about licensing its technology in order to give them the ability to "deploy content personalisation and recommendation products on their own sites." As yet, Hauser could not give details of which publishers were in talks.

The future

DailyMe is in the process of developing a third version of the product, which will be "more comprehensive" in the way it applies the learning process by which it makes recommendations to users. Within the DailyWe section of the site, users will be offered the tools and environment to aggregate the best content they can find on particular topics. Having founded the company in 2006, Hauser is "happy with the product from a technological perspective" and added that funding is currently sufficient. The challenge, however, is developing a strong audience. At present, the site has 20,000 registered users, and although many more visit it, the base must grow considerably before advertising revenue will truly take off.

DailyMe has considerable potential: delivering news by topic from many sources will certainly appeal to many readers, and paying for the content that is offered keeps publishers and journalists happy. Obstacles to widespread adoption of the service however, may well arise from many people's innate reluctance to provide information about themselves or to allow their activity to be tracked.

The Telegraph and the Times are training their staff to optimise content in a bid to improve rankings by attracting users to their sites.

As part of general plans to overhaul newsroom operations, more and more newspapers are beginning to rethink their search engine optimisation strategies which not only improve the online experience for the user, but also lead to a rise in traffic, as the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) show.

The Financial Times group yesterday unveiled the launch of a new search engine called Newssift aimed at business professionals. Rather than scouring the entire web, the tool will give users access to relevant databases, as well as filtering articles from a wide array of international business news outlets, including professional sites, opinion pages and blogs.

The Internet has changed the way that people read newspapers in many ways: not least because news aggregators such as Google News have helped to bring readers away from the habit of focussing their news reading on just one paper's website. Now most Internet-savvy users are accustomed to visiting many different websites and choosing the source that they find appropriate for each story they would like to read. But as newspapers' print revenue drops, frustration at the way that aggregators make money out of content which is not their own has been increasing amongst newspaper publishers. Could Google's recent adoption of small text advertisements on US Google News be the last straw?

The basics of news aggregation

Many different news aggregators exist: those run by media giants such as Yahoo, those based on reader interaction such as Digg and others like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast which provide aggregation alongside original reporting and commentary. Some provide just headlines; Google News, however also collects brief excerpts from articles on its homepage, and makes them available via a search function. Unlike some aggregators such as the Drudge Report that have a human editor choosing the headlines, Google News aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. According to Google, articles are ranked based on "how often and on what sites a story appears online," and "based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity."

Google's mission

News aggregation has been an extremely controversial issue for many years. Google News creator Krishna Bharat claims that Google's service aims to "encourage readers to get a broader perspective by digging deeper into the news - reading ten articles instead of one, perhaps." This in itself is undoubtedly a respectable idea, and reflects one of the great advantages of online news for consumers: the ability to easily read around a topic. According to William Echikson, Google's Senior Manager for Communications, "Google makes the news more accessible and more interesting - encouraging people to read more and so benefiting the news industry as a whole." It can be argued that Google does indeed benefit the news industry by directing traffic to newspaper websites and hence promotes newspaper content. This is perhaps especially pertinent for smaller papers which would not otherwise get many visitors to their sites: when a major event occurs locally, they might suddenly find themselves topping the Google News homepage.

Publishers vs. Google

Despite some undeniable benefits for readers and apparent benefits for newspapers, some newspaper publishers are resentful of Google News and other similar aggregators. The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites. For Google News search results, the click through rate is only about 10%. People scan headlines and the brief article excerpts that appear but then few seem to bother to read full stories, meaning that despite their content being used, newspapers are not receiving any income. And even if people do click through, it means that they are less likely to visit newspapers' homepages and therefore newspapers cannot make much money from their premium advertising spots. There have already been protests: Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse is in the process of seeking 49 million euro in damages from Google for storing and reproducing Belgian newspapers' articles without permission. Another of the complaints that newspapers have is that the aggregators' crawlers do not distinguish between "good" journalism and everything else.

Advertising adds to conflict

Newspaper owners have also been opposed to the fact that advertisements are placed alongside search results on the general Google site, meaning that Google is directly making money from other people's content. The recent decision to place advertising on search results for the US version of Google News after keeping it ad-free for six years is a move that can only further anger many publishers, as it seems now obvious that Google is, after all, just trying to make money out of newspaper content. According to the New York Times, a Google spokesman said that Google had devised an approach that could deliver contextually relevant ads so had decided to go ahead with them. NYT writer David Carr was extremely unimpressed, stating that "newspapers' audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place."

It is not clear whether the company intends to start putting ads on Google News outside the US. According to Press Gazette, Europe's notions of "fair use" are more heavily weighted in publishers' favour than in the US. CopiePresse has asserted that it will take further legal action if ads are placed on Belgian Google News.

Newspapers' anti-aggregator options?

So, apart from simply suing Google and trying to halt a seemingly irreversible trend, how can newspapers tackle these problems, which are all the more relevant in this time of financial crisis?  One possibility is the solution provided by ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, a coalition of newspaper, magazine and book publishers led by the World Association of Newspapers, which claims to put "content owners in control of their online content in a way that is conducive to developing new online business models, putting new, high-quality content on the net and to maximizing the benefits of the relationship with search engines." In essence, it would mean that copyrighted material could not be used so freely in search engines. Over 700 news organisations have implemented ACAP as a symbolic gesture in anticipation of search engines recognising the service.

One further non-confrontational solution could be for newspapers themselves to provide more aggregation, such as the NYT's Times Extra page: an alternative homepage which includes links to articles from other sites under the Times' own stories. The Washington Post has a politics-specific Political Browser which freely links to other publications. If newspapers embraced this linking further, they could succeed in providing significant competition to aggregators. As well as just linking to other papers, they could utilise a product such as Pluck's BlogBurst, which is effectively a blog syndication service, allowing newspapers to easily search 'quality' blogs and find content to supplement their own stories. Obviously to do this newspapers must adopt "a fundamentally different mindset" to quote Scott Karp, who coined the term "link journalism": they must stop trying to keep people within their own sites and realise that sending them away to appropriately interesting articles may well keep them coming back for more. The Huffington Post, for example, thrives on sending readers away to other articles, and managed to become the most linked-to blog on the web.

Can newspapers supply the competition?

Evidently people do like to be able to get the news from many different sources around the world, and younger readers who have grown up with online news possibly have less loyalty to individual newspapers. With this in mind, newspapers could even provide a better service than Google and co. One of the problems with automated aggregators such as Google is the lack of a real editorial agenda: Google's algorithms try to judge the importance of stories in ways described above, but there is no editor to provide an informed, professional view of events by appropriately arranging stories on a homepage. A newspaper might not be able to provide as comprehensive an aggregation service as Google, but it would have the advantage of being able to offer a clear editorial voice in its selection of articles and how they appear, which is one of the aspects of newspapers that readers value highly.

Another more radical and highly controversial option to defy the search engine aggregators is to start charging for content. If newspapers were to come together and universally start charging online readers, via joint subscriptions or micropayment, they could create a newspaper-owned search engine and aggregator which included advertising and fairly distributed revenue, hence keeping all income from newspaper content within the control of newspapers. It would be a huge step, but as more and more publications contemplate a return to paid content, it seems at least a possibility.

Will Google's additional ads spur newspapers into action? Or will they continue to somewhat reluctantly tolerate the Internet giant's profit from their industry, and accept the directed traffic in return? The Internet has revolutionised the way that people read news, and aggregation and linking is undoubtedly going to continue to be a part of the news landscape. The issue is whether it will be newspapers themselves or third parties which manage the system.

TheStreet.com has revealed its intention to offer its articles to both online and printed newspapers - for free.  The website's only condition is that its web address is prominently linked from any online articles, and written into the byline of any of its news items that newspapers choose to print.

Four journalists from different media companies in different locations demonstrated how link journalism is the key to efficient news coverage. Using Twitter and a couple of links, they collaborated from different newsrooms to cover the floods in western Washington, Publishing 2.0 reported.

The Kansas City Kansan has announced that it is to discontinue its print edition and move to online only.  The final print edition will be on January 10 and the paper will launch a revamped Web site on January 7.

 

General Manager Drew Savage explained that the move to online only was to save on overheads and allow for more investment in electronic media.  He insisted that the Kansan would continue to thrive with "a lot more content than we have ever had," and pointed out that online readership is ten times greater than for the print edition. 

 

AsianWeek, a San Francisco free sheet aimed at Asian Americans has also announced the demise of its print edition, with the final copy to come out on Friday.  It will continue to publish online, and its editor and publisher Ted Fang attributed the move to economic hardship.  

Mark S. Luckie has graphed an interactive map detailing American newspapers using YouTube and linking to each webpage.

Newspapers with YouTube pages range from Hawaii's Honolulu Advertiser to Illinois' Chicago Tribune to the Washington Post, and include papers in 41 states.

The pages include news videos and other online features for subscribers and vistors.

Blogger Andy Dickinson has uploaded a similar map of newspapers in the United Kingdom.

Source: 10,000 Words via IFRA