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Analyses by Journalism.org on reports from PEJ New Media Index for July 19-23, have noted the "roles of - and differences between - traditional journalism and digital media in a rapidly changing news universe."

Taking up 22% of blogged news links was the story about a BP spill photo with alterations discovered by blogger John Aravosis. Closely following the oil spill photo and taking up 16% of blog links was a "satirical yet pointed column in the Washington Post magazine by Gene Weingarten who lamented the changes to newspapers in the age of online news." At 14% was a column by Andrew Alexandra on how the Post "had taken too long to cover a controversy." The Shirley Sherrod story came in at 10%, and a piece by Charles Krauthammer "warning conservatives against underestimating President Obama's political skill and the impact of his policy agenda," had 9% of the links in question.

Wikileaks has dropped two bombshells on the US military thus far this year, the more recent of which was the 'Afghan War Diary,' offering more than 90,000 reports containing raw information of the war in Afghanistan. Interestingly, the whistleblower site chose to share its information in advance of a public release with three newspapers: the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Guardian journalist Nick Davies tracked down Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in Brussels in late June to suggest that Guardian journalists took a look at some of Wikileaks' unreleased documents to find which could make good stories. Assange suggested instead offering the Afghanistan war information to both the Guardian and the New York Times for an advance preview, later adding that Der Spiegel should be included too. He believed that these three papers "were the best in the world for investigative research," he told a press conference in London. 

Even though newspapers sell only about half as many copies in France as in Britain or Germany and young people buy papers particularly infrequently, Play Bac has succeeded in creating demand for a range of newspapers created specifically for children. Petit Quotidien (6-9 years), Mon Quotidien (10-14 years), and L'Actu (14 years and up up) have combined circulation of 165,000. Is there any magic to this?

"We're like a local newspaper, with three regions. They're completely different in what you read." François Dufour, the paper's editor and founder, told the New York Times. The trick is, readers are invited to help with the editing, and their views are actually respected. In the words of Caroline Hallé, Mon Quotidien's national editor, "We propose, they choose." It's no longer a case of adults simply decided what's best for the children: twice a week, a selection of the paper's young readers are invited to help choose stories.

Three US newspapers are set to introduce paywalls to their websites later this week, reports journalism.co.uk. The newspapers, The Tallahassee Democrat in Florida, the Spectrum in Utah, and Greenville News in South Carolina, will introduce a range of subscription packages on July 1st. Gannett owns all three of the newspapers and the paywalls are reportedly part of the company's subscription trials. 

What is a newsroom? Offices, computer terminals, journalists, talent, an ambition to belong to the "Fourth Estate"? A bit of all of that, but particularly a collective intelligence that manages to produce quality information within a given time frame. This type of intelligence, founded on the gathering together of individual talents at a single location, is confronted today by a three-fold threat:

-    the crisis in the newspaper industry that is leading to job cuts,
-    technology that allows the creation of other forms of collective intelligence, e.g. in networks,
-    readers and users who contest the monopoly of power of the journalists and want to act as players in the information production process.

A certain type of newsroom has existed for the last two hundred years - from the beginning of the 19th century - but this model is dying before our very eyes and we are struggling to envisage what the newsroom in the year 2020 or 2030 will look like. In order to obtain a clearer picture, a distinction must be made between three phases in the design and organisation of newsrooms.

1) The pyramid model

It took Europe more than half a century to develop its newsroom model, from 1785, the founding date of the Daily Universal Register, forerunner of The Times of London, to the widespread availability of the "penny press" with The Daily Telegraph and Courier in 1855. It was during this period that there arose the distinction between the editor and editor-in-chief, the organisation of the newsroom into desks and the introduction of the practice of holding editorial meetings in the morning (to decide the content of the following day's paper) and in the evening (to put together its front page).

The pyramid information model also emerged from this period, with the printers in the basement, the linotype operators and advertising on the ground floor, the desks on the various floors and the management offices at the top. This is how the newsroom of the New York Inquirer was depicted in the Orson Wells film Citizen Kane, and is a good reflection of the power set-up at a classical newspaper: everything begins and ends with the chief editor, there is no other authority and the news production cycle is vertical between the base and the summit.

This model has lasted nearly two hundred years and has been implemented all over the world.

2) The centralised production model

The pyramid model was not contested up to the beginning of this millennium, but it gradually began to disappear with the emergence of a convergent newsroom with responsibility for the Internet as well as new information distribution platforms.

Thus the major buzzword of the new millenium is "convergence." The challenge is to integrate two newsrooms that have little in common: different readers, different working rhythms, different news selection criteria, etc. And the "hub and spokes" model that prevailed at the beginning of the 21st century features, symbolically, the chief editors together in the middle and all the desks arranged on the periphery. Two elements differ radically from the pyramid model: firstly, the idea that all journalists work (officially) for all platforms with a proximity between traditional journalists and new media journalists; secondly, the obligation for the desk heads to "play together" and to work to multiple deadlines throughout the day.

Often in this environment, a centralised and productivist model emerges, as at The Daily Telegraph in 2005. Centralised, as it does not really break with the pyramid model of the 19th century: you find the same desks (foreign politics, social affairs, etc.) and the same philosophy of content production. Productivist, as all integration policies have led to job cuts, from 12 to 20% of the payroll. The unspoken understanding among all newspaper groups is that "modern" equates to "staff reductions." This in itself is not reprehensible, as new content management systems permit significantly increased productivity.

Nevertheless, this model remains ambivalent. On the one hand, it largely resolves the question of integrating two newsrooms and two news production methods. On the other hand, it remains attached to the traditional model of collective intelligence that dictates assembling of hundreds of journalists in one place. It is exactly this "hub and spokes" model that is facing upheaval, making it the last classical one rather than the first of a new generation.

3) The virtual newsroom in 2015

Though we are not there yet, all the technological, human and conceptual elements are in place to create the new form of collective intelligence that will continue to call itself the "newsroom", but will be much more digitally-oriented than today.

Four changes to watch:

A - It will no longer be necessary to assemble the content-generating reporters in a single location, i.e. those who produce the articles, postings, videos, contents. Mobile technologies will allow them to spend nearly 100% of their time in the field and to format and distribute content from their computer or mobile phone. Likewise, consulting with their section heads or the morning conference with their colleagues can be carried out virtually.

The era of the "virtual newsroom" will arrive on the day when the journalist's phone will be his office.

B - The second revolution is already under way. This concerns an end to solely relying on material produced by journalists. Whereas in the past, a good article used to be one written by a member of the editorial team, in the future a good article will be closer to a wiki (collaborative work) because it will integrate elements beyond the work of one journalist: alerts, comments, multimedia elements, etc.

This development will mark the emergence of working in a network together with "readers-content producers". It will empty the newsrooms a bit more because all these casual contributors will obviously not be physically present in the newsroom. But it will be necessary to have a dedicated professional team to carry out fact-checking.

C - Who will be left in the slimmed-down newsroom of 2015? The senior editorial staff of course, but also all those not involved in purely journalistic input. Let us call this new category "dispatching and repackaging journalists" - those responsible for finishing and distributing the information. Such journalists do not generate the information, but they make it available on all the platforms operated by their media group. Their creative input will focus mainly on developing applications for the tablet computers and e-readers that are re-inventing the "daily me" or the personalised newspaper. This category of journalists will represent between one third and half of the editorial staff.

D - The fourth probable development will affect the location of the video studio in the newsroom: today - except at the Financial Times in London - it is situated in a corner and regarded as a nice-to-have, but minor element in the information production process. Tomorrow, the widespread availability of high-speed Internet and smartphones will make it a central and unifying element in a newsroom. Some newspaper organisations will become producers of video material or animated images (Flash) and distance themselves from the production of written material, both for the web and for paper.

In fact, this virtual newsroom exists perhaps already on a small scale, for example at the Huffington Post. This will be the subject of our discussion on 7 October at the 17th World Editors Forum in Hamburg , Germany (see www.wefhamburg2010.com).

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Andrew Romano, senior writer for Newsweek, has recently completed a rather scathing 'Twitter profile' of Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann for the magazine.  His instructions were to "[f]ly up there, follow her around, tweet as you go. Then we'll publish an annotated version of your Twitter feed in the magazine. Could be kind of fun."

In a follow-up "Web Exclusive" article entitled 'Tweet the Press', Romano describes his initial reaction to the unorthodox assignment from his editor and his subsequent experience with the media experiment.

The theme that emerged from the first session of the Press Gazette Local Heroes conference was the importance of engaging with your community as much as possible in order to be successful in the hyperlocal news arena, and the necessity to go as local as possible.

William Perrin, founder of a very local King's Cross-focused site and Talk About Local, an initiative that trains people to found their own hyperlocal sites. Perrin was inspired to get involved with his community several years ago and when he started attending meetings of local initiatives he realized that there was an overload of information and that it was hard to locate it all. His solution was to start a blog covering news and issues in the mile long by half mile wide area around King's Cross station. The site costs £10 a month to maintain and he and the other writers work as volunteers. Kingscrossenvironment.com hosts more than 900 articles so far, having been founded nearly four years ago.

Speaking at the Wharton School of  Business' "Future of Publishing" conference on Friday afternoon, Martin Nisenholtz, the senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times, offered remarks on the future of engagement in the wake of Facebook's new web-sharing tools.

Nisenholtz emphasized engagement as an aspect of a publication's online offering for which readers might be willing to pay for access to that online content.

"The more engaged our users are with us, the more value we deliver to them, the more likely they will be to pay," he said.

The Associated Press announced Thursday that it suffered serious losses in revenue and profit in 2009, but it also underscored the fact that it won't take the declines lying down.   During its annual meeting the news agency announced the expansion of its AP Gateway initiative through the launch of their News Registry and a niche website for college football fans.  

The bleak financial records included a nearly 10 percent drop in revenue, now down to $676.1 million, and a 65 percent fall in net income, bringing it to $8.8 million. Much of this was the result of offering lower rates to its member newspapers, who were also suffering from reduced revenue as a result of the media crisis.

To alleviate some of the pressure created by falling revenues, the AP cut staff and dropped its payroll expenses by 10 percent last year, and managed to cut debt by $1 million in 2009.  But as the Board of the AP announced on Thursday, it also plans to innovate to find new sources for revenue.

Writing for the Seattle-based tech blog, TechFlash, John Cook announced that the experimental community founded journalism website Spot.Us intends to launch a Seattle site. 

Although the iPad isn't out in Europe yet (in fact, in a controversial move, Jobs pushed back the European release of the device a month due to high US demand) UK publishers are readying their apps for its May release.  Both the Guardian and the Daily and Sunday Express have created iPad apps, the Guardian having released theirs for US customers on April 2.

The Guardian currently has a paid news app on the market for the iPhone and a free photo app for the iPad.  The iPhone app, released in December, has since received over 100,000 downloads and, despite its 3.99 price tag, is widely considered to be one of the best available news apps for the iPhone.  So it comes as no surprise to find that the Guardian's iPad app, created in conjunction with Cannon, is a hit, receiving 50,000 downloads in only ten days.

The Huffington Post announced today the launch of an all-twitter edition of the web publication, likely to follow much the same format as their current tech, politics, and comedy pages.  The move is part of an effort to fully integrate social networking into the Huffington Post site, and to emphasize breaking news.

CEO Eric Hippeau sees this focus on Twitter as an integral part of the Huffington Post.

"We're one part social network, one part news content site," he said to paidContent's David Kaplan. "So for us, the question has always been how to use Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools and our content and integrate it with our advertisers."  He added that the all-Twitter pages were still in experimental stages, and that they were likely to change as the Huffington Post tries different implementations.

Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian's Digital Media Blog recently asked whether it was time for journalists to fully embrace crowd-sourced journalism with an award. This hypothetical question was in fact just recently made a reality, when an anonymous group of Iranians received a George Polk Award in Journalism for their footage of a female protesters violent death. Despite the difficulties of determining who in the crowd should get the award, should it actually become its own award category, the blog post sheds light upon the important role the crowd now plays in journalism. 

With all the recent developments in media consumption on mobile devices, from state of the art e-readers and the sleek iPad to the advent of countless newspaper iPhone apps, it is no wonder technology has taken center stage among news companies.

Mercedes Bunz from Media Guardian spoke to executives from The New York Times and CNN, companies who have built remarkable online presences, about how to keep up with technology companies who usually figure among the biggest sources for news on the Internet.

The "Year of the Paywall" is upon us and in a time where most newspapers seem to be gearing up to build one around their websites - the New York Times and the News Corporation Wapping publications are just a couple of examples - some executives believe there is still room for other revenue models to coexist with paid content.   

The head of digital media at News Corporation, Jonathan Miller, told delegates at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that "dual revenue streams" are likely to co-exist as media organizations try ways of making money online, according to Guardian.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

Two newspapers from Germany and one from the US have been awarded the title of World's Best-Designed for 2009, in a competition run by The Society for News Design. The awards went to der Freitag of Berlin, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and The New York Times.

An international panel of judges selected the winners from hundreds of entries from around the world. Overall, the judges said: "The overview of news design in 2009 is a fascinating mixture of bad news with good. The reality of distress in our business is obvious. There are many signs of reduced resources, including smaller news holes with crowded words, less local news, an abundance of feature stories on the front page, a continued shortage of good photojournalism and more use of stock illustration. An overall feeling of looking a little confused and perhaps a bit stuck, prevails."

"But wait. The good news is that far from going away or giving up, we saw much earnest effort towards reinvention." "We find the most successful results are those that went back to newspaper basics," they continued. "Rather than competing with the Web by mimicking it, the smarter route seems to partner with it while offering what the Internet can't provide." The judges also said that they found the newspapers outside the US generally appeared healthier. They added that advertising was important and should be seen as part of newspapers' product and visual strategy.

After the first efforts to get reporters on the ground in Haiti and to get vital communications infrastructure up and running, a fuller picture of the importance of social media in the disaster has emerged. Journalist Cristina Romero, writing for the European Journalism Centre, has explained the role of social networking in the earthquake's aftermath.

Social media provide both a way for those on the ground to connect with emergency relief workers, and a way for reporters and bloggers to access authentic information about the impact of the disaster, Romero writes.

Some of the first footage of the wake of the earthquake came from civilians shooting video on their mobile phones. SMS was the primary method of reporting at first, while the landlines and other traditional channels were down.

The launch of Apple's iPad has garnered much optimism in the newspaper industry, driving hopes that the innovative tablet computer will be able to breathe some new life into an industry battered by an advertising downturn.

Much speculation has placed very high hopes on the capacity of the iPad and a slew of new generation e-readers to revamp the industry and bolster its business model. But, as Poynter Online's Bill Mitchell reports, the iPad will probably not be the solution to all of the newspapers' woes, but this sleek electronic device could play a substantial role in the migration of users from a cost-heavy past to a more efficient future.

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

Nieman Lab's Johnathan Stray has created a paywall calculator, Paywall!, that aims to juggle the different factors that could go into building a paywall and find the best combination that could generate maximum revenue. He takes the New York Times' proposed payment model as a basis: a certain number of articles per month can be viewed free, and after that readers will be asked to subscribe.

"The key to paywall revenue projections is to understand how different portions of the audience are affected differently," says Stray, and his model breaks the audience into five groups based on their number of page views per month: fly-by, occasional, weekly, daily, loyal. Depending on how many articles are offered free, it is unlikely that a huge number of visitors will be affected by a paywall, Stray points out, but the ones that will be are the loyal readers.