Results matching “blog from the web”

Vendors shipped a record 54.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, 39% more than the 39.2 million shipped in the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC information on PC World.

Four of the top five smartphone sellers beat their shipments records for a single quarter, according to numbers released by the International Data Corporation (IDC). Following a 98% increase in smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, Apple has regained its spot as third largest smartphone vendor, behind longtime leaders Nokia and Research in Motion

A newspaper in Manchester has been using various multimedia tools to liveblog council meetings from across the Greater Manchester Area, Press Gazette reports.

Meetings of the local authorities are attended by a reporter from the Manchester Evening News (MEN) or one of its sister weekly publications. Reporters then use Twitter to file updates minute-by-minute. Their updates are then streamed on MEN websites using CoverItLive technology, which allows liveblogging and other forms of real-time updating.

The MEN has so far used this to report on meetings of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and the Greater Manchester Police Authority. The newspaper wants to extend the service so that it can cover every full meeting held by ten local authorities across Greater Manchester.

Following a week of much speculation over whether the new London freesheet existed, and if so, if it would launch at all, the London Weekly is finally here, says Guardian.

The launch of the new freesheet was announced in November of last year, with its website opening in December. Executives at the Global Publishing Group, the company responsible for the publication, initially announced the freesheet would launch on February 1st, but later pushed back the start date to February 5th.

Facebook is rivaling Google News and Google Reader as a distributor of news content on the internet, according to recent data from Hitwise.

Hitwise online analyst Heather Hopkins reports that Google Reader accounted for .01% of visits to news and information websites in late January - roughly the same figure as a year ago. Meanwhile, Google News accounted for 1.39% of upstream visits and Facebook for 3.52%.

Jake Dobkin, co-founder and publisher of the local New York blog, Gothamist, gave New York Times' executives an idea of what to expect during their Thursday morning panel discussion with him with some provocative comments published via his Facebook page last Tuesday.

In preparation for the panel, the moderator, the Times' media critic David Carr, sent Dobkin the following question in advance: "Jake, you've competed with the NYTimes in the metro space. It has formidable resources, but how do you see the newspaper landing in the local market? Do you think that the incoming cohort of consumers see the Times as a credible editorial resource in New York political and cultural affairs?"

In what seems to be the latest move in the battle of the e-readers, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch screen technology, to possibly update its Kindle e-reader so it can better compete with Apple's iPad.

The New York Times reports that Amazon will merge Touchco's technology and staff members into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, based in Cupertino, California, a source briefed on the deal said on Wednesday.

The iPad isn't the key to monetising news online, opines journalist and consultant Steve Outing in a new post on his blog, but personalisation might be.

He suggests that he will be no more likely to pay to read news websites on the iPad than on his computer. Since he reads many different news sources, he finds that there is too much news to pay for all of it, and highlights the importance of personalisation beyond iGoogle or Twitter feeds amid all this choice.

In this context, he compares the personalised web news service iCurrent, still in beta, to the personalised music service Pandora, which offers similar music to songs and artists that the user already likes. It learns more about what users enjoy as they click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on different songs.

Google has just launched a new tool that allows visitors tell its news website what topics they would like to follow, AFP information on Yahoo! News reports.

This will allow users to click on "stars" to mark groups of stories on preferred subjects to signal Google News to watch for updates or developments, according to Google software engineer Jude Britto. When there are significant updates, Google will send alerts by putting the headline in bold for its users. Google will also allow people to follow their 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News, according to the Google News blog.

Although only 35 people have signed up for Newsday subscriptions since it was put behind a paywall last October, these dismal figures hide the Long Island daily's grander scheme: a paywall that nobody notices because it is bundled with a cable television subscription.

The owners of Newsday also own Optimum Cable, according to Guardian, which supplies cable TV to 75% of Long Island homes, Newsday's backyard. Newsday.com was offered to these subscribers at no additional charge, bundled with cable and high-speed Internet services. Therefore, the number of people who signed up for to the Long Island daily since October was not 35, but 1.5 million, the people that currently have Optimum Cable subscriptions.

The New York Times has gained another 1100 subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area after launching a local section for the area last autumn, the San Francisco Business Times reports.

A senior Times executive, Jim Schachter, told the Business Times that it wasn't just subscriptions that have risen. "Single-copy sales are up too," he said. "We're delighted at the reception we're getting from Bay Area readers for the pages that Felicity Barringer is editing, and for our Bay Area blog." San Francisco-based technology reporters also write for the paper's business section.

Twitter has introduced a 'Local Trends' filter, which allows users to see what others are posting about on the site in their area.

The official Twitter blog explained that the trends function began as a way to see what was popular on a global scale in real-time, but this would create another way for members to discover relevant topics to them.

"The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation," a spokesperson writes, "but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those (in) São Paulo, Brazil?"

As world leaders plan the future of the global economy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, journalists are using social media and other innovative ways to bring the discussion closer to the people.

The Los Angeles Times and the journalism school at the University of Southern California have announced they will collaborate on homicide reporting, the LA Times reports.

Under the arrangement, students from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will write stories for The Times' Homicide Report blog. This will provide more content for the blog and give crime-reporting experience to the student journalists.

The Homicide Report has been re-launched this week, to feature a searchable database and an interactive map of homicides in LA County.

The Guardian has appointed three bloggers to its new experimental Guardian Local initiative.

Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been appointed to cover the cities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively. They will take on the position of 'beatbloggers', that is, bloggers who stick to a well-defined beat or coverage area.

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.
 

 

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

How do non-profit news organisations pay their bills? The Texas Tribune had a fundraising goal for 2009 of $3.5 million, and managed to end the year with close to $4 million. In a note on the Tribune's website, chairman John Thornton has explained where the money is coming from.

First, it's helpful if the co-founder has deep pockets, or if someone else who does is prepared to chip in. Thornton and his wife contributed $1 million to the Tribune, and financier T. Boone Pickens has donated $150,000. Foundations have also helped out to the tune of around $1.1 million, including a total of $750,000 in grants from the Houston Endowment and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Google News has introduced a 'recrawl' feature which will check for updates in news articles and add them to its index, the Google News Blog has announced.

News articles often aren't static, software engineers Andy Golding and Kiran Gunda explain on the blog, and often change over time to correct errors or add new information. Sometimes they change URLs or become unavailable after a certain amount of time.

Google's news bots crawl the internet looking for new news articles and adding them to the Google News index. The recrawl feature will enable them to focus on collecting all the newest news articles, while still making sure that the index displays the most up-to-date information.

When The Times Direct Delivery Service launched back in 2008, delivering the company's publications directly to the doorsteps of its newspaper subscribers living within the parameters of the M25 for free, it seemed a pretty good deal - particularly in light of the fact that the Independent's also newly launched delivery service was paid for.

At the same time however, the Times also increased its cover price to match the Daily Telegraph, hovering around the £1 ever since.

Yesterday, following months of deliberation, the New York Times announced that it was to go forward with charging online, with a plan to implement a metre system in 2011. It is the biggest publisher yet to lay out paywall plans, and the move is undoubtedly highly significant for the newspaper industry as it struggles with a failing business model. Will this save the New York Times? Could it signal the end for free online content?

Similar to that used by the Financial Times, a metered payment system would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month, and then request payment for more: a flat fee for unlimited access. Print subscribers will continue to have free access, even those who subscribe to just the Sunday paper. An online subscription will also cover access via smartphones. The first click free from search engines, which is used by the Wall Street Journal, will also apply. More details such as pricing have been released yet, and the publisher's statement said that the next year will be used to build "a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms."

A metered system rather than a more fixed paywall has the advantage of not alienating the casual reader who can still visit the site free on occasion, and not angering journalists by blocking off specific articles (an issue with the Times' previous attempt at charging online, TimesSelect). "It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web," reads the Times memo sent to staff by executives Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, published by Poynter.

It does have potential flaws, however. Before the NYT's announcement, Reuters writer Felix Salmon criticized the way that the FT's flat fee system does not actually work like a metre: suggesting that instead the New York Times should implement a payment process under which readers are charged depending on how much content they consume. And presumably those who are determined not to pay will find ways around the paywall, using multiple accounts, for example.

The Financial Times welcomed the New York Times' decision, according to the Guardian, with CEO John Ridding saying "We welcome the New York Times' new online business model, which is similar to the FT's. We believe in the value of quality journalism and we are pleased that others feel the same way." The FT recently announced that for the first time, its content revenue was greater than its advertising revenue in 2009, after raised cover prices and more online subscribers signing on.

The FT now has 121,000 subscribers. Going by the pricing on the FT's website, it seems that they pay between €186 and €363 per year (depending on whether they choose a standard or premium subscription). Working on the assumption that about half of subscribers pay for each (and that the FT is not counting joint print-online subscribers in this figure), that would mean that the paper could be bringing in something in the region of €33 million from its paywall in direct revenue from readers. And the Wall Street Journal, which offers a different kind of paywall, has an estimated one million paying online subscribers.

This figure is encouragingly high, but how much encouragement can the NYT take from this? As a general interest paper with the most popular website out of all US papers, the Times has a far bigger pool of potential subscribers. But the FT's specialist financial content is something that more people might see as worth paying for. Indeed for some, it is news that is necessary for their business. And with the FT's main international rival the WSJ also charging, there is not an ubiquity of similar news free on the web.

The New York Times does seem to have a better shot at making charging for online content work than other US general interest newspapers. Its status as the number one national paper is largely unquestioned. It has always made a greater proportion of its revenue from content than most newspapers do, receiving 55-60% of its income from advertising compared to a typical figure of 80-85%. The current price for a print subscription is high, at between $550 and $770 a year, depending on location and offers, but many people are still prepared to pay this: more than 800,000 continue to renew their subscriptions, according to the NYT's David Carr.

Given the paper's financial situation, it is unsurprisingly that the paper is looking at changing its business model. Despite its reputation and high number of website visitors, financial constraints have pushed the New York Times into carrying out lay-offs and pay cuts. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim came to the publisher's aid last year with a $250 million loan, but if the paper is to continue to produce top-quality journalism, it needs a steady revenue stream.

Poynter writer Rick Edmonds maintains that the NYT's decision to charge "makes business sense." He believes that the Times will not "lose any meaningful number of unique visitors," and agrees with Ken Doctor that paying users represent a significant targeting advertising opportunity. The Times' memo sent to employees said that executives expect that "digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web."

Slate editor Jack Shafter is critical of the NYT's strategy, judging it "too easy for freeloaders to game their way around it" and "a waste of the gargantuan audience they've attracted." He suggests that looking into improving web advertising would be a better way to go forward. Jeff Jarvis argues on his blog BuzzMachine that the NYT's plan will end up charging "the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least," which he believes does not make sense. 

With the New York Times on board, efforts to charge online are likely to speed up. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp publications are expected to introduce paid online content in coming months, and there is an increasing sentiment that it just doesn't make sense to give away content that should be seen as valuable. Not everybody agrees, however, and over at the UK paper with the most popular website, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said that his publication will remain free online. Others will undoubtedly stick to a similar course and provide free alternatives, making it harder for those who do charge. Which business model will eventually prove more successful? 

On January 12 last year GlobalPost was launched, a new international news service focused on getting the context behind the headlines, hoping to combat diminishing foreign reporting in the US. Its number of foreign correspondents is second only to the Associated Press and they are expected to provide both text and visual reports.

A year on, and the news outlet has made considerable progress in terms of covering a wide range of international stories, establishing a significant audience, and implementing a successful business model. The Editors Weblog spoke to President, CEO and co-founder Philip Balboni about his first year at the helm of this project.

Balboni was clear that he considered GlobalPost's first year a success. "It has been an extraordinary year, it has exceeded any reasonable expectations that I could have had when I started out on this journey," he said.

"To a large degree, the stories on GlobalPost are ones that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere," said Balboni. As one of GlobalPost's aims was to fill the gaps in the reporting of traditional outlets, this must be satisfying.  The news outlet has also remained true to its original stipulations: its reporting has broad geographic diversity, and consists of a wide range of types of stories and topics.

And much of this reporting has had the potential for considerable impact. Balboni highlighted a recent story on how the Taliban have been taking a cut of funds supplied by the Indiana National Guard to local Afghan contractors for development projects in Afghanistan's Khost province. The issue of the Taliban skimming American aid in Afghanistan is one to which GlobalPost has dedicated much coverage over the past few months.

Such investigative pieces are accompanied by more entertaining reporting, such as an article from Paris about how the French are rediscovering the joy of wearing berets. Correspondents also write ample blog entries.

GlobalPost adopted a relatively unique correspondent model, hiring country-based, part-time reporters who could produce one article a week. The compensation level - a monthly salary plus shares - has proven "very successful" and working for GlobalPost seems to be a popular job: the news service now has correspondents in more than fifty countries and "we have far more people who would want to work for us than we could possibly hire."

The correspondents work with regional editors based in Boston and Balboni said that so far this system has been functioning "with a remarkable degree of smoothness."

Building an audience from scratch

Developing an audience is "really more important than anything else," said Balboni. "We could have the most spectacular content in the world but if you can't build an audience for it then you can't succeed, right?"

The news outlet's highest-traffic month this year was November, when more than 750,000 people visited the site. This exceeded Balboni's goal of 600,000, set before the launch. In addition, "we are retaining more than 50% of all the visitors," he said.

The target for 2010 is to top one million unique visitors, and Balboni mentioned the company's "very sophisticated marketing strategy" aimed at audience building.

Prize partnerships

Building a brand on the web with no support from legacy media has been a considerable challenge, and GlobalPost's partnerships with other high profile brands have been very helpful in doing this, and "particularly important in the validation of GlobalPost as a brand," Balboni said. Such partnerships have helped present the outlet's content as authoritative, and often "raising our visibility is more important than any compensation we might achieve." From the beginning, GlobalPost has sought to present itself as a complement rather than a competitor to newswires and newspapers.

The partnership formed with CBS in September, for example, is a syndication deal, with CBS paying GlobalPost for help with foreign reporting. But having a broadcast news partner was also something that Balboni and his team considered a high priority in terms of brand-boosting, and such a deal "certainly goes beyond" purely syndication. He sees the recent partnership with PBS NewsHour as a "significant achievement" and mentioned that GlobalPost has upped its video production so that it might have the chance to forge other broadcast partnership. 

Compensation is obviously an important consideration, however, and syndication is one of GlobalPost's major revenue streams, the other two being advertising and subscriptions. Currently, advertising comprises about 70% of GlobalPost's income, but Balboni hopes that over time this share will fall to around 50%, with syndication and membership rising to make up the other half.

Passport to premium services

The most unusual of these revenue streams is the subscription, or membership, scheme called Passport. For $99 a year (discounted to $50 for students, academics or seniors), readers can have access to conference calls with GlobalPost reporters, the chance to suggest stories, global and country briefs and newsletters. There is also the option to commission custom research projects, something Balboni said he was "very excited about." One client, for example, has ordered a series of ten reports for the coming year. "It takes careful shepherding but it's very interesting and I think it could scale up to be a meaningful part of our Passport financial strategy," he said.

"I am very bullish on the membership aspect," Balboni said, "I think it's the hardest one but if you want to point to one thing that could be a potential salvation for quality journalism then it's that." He always wanted to encourage a subscription or membership scheme, but explained that as a new little-known media brand it would have been foolish to put up a paywall immediately.
 
Passport does not offer pure paid online content, rather additional editorial services. "My hope and my expectation is that GlobalPost will remain free and open to all but we need to find more effective ways to get all of the people who are most engaged to help support our mission," he said, specifying that GlobalPost was likely to continue to ask for, rather than to require, reader contributions. He does think, however, that it would be "entirely fair" for a news organisation to demand payment.

So far, Passport has 450 - 500 members: "just not enough," according to Balboni. He hopes to increase this by making "a strategic shift in how we market our membership" and by using some new technology starting this spring that will help the membership base and subsequent revenue to grow. Currently, visitors to the GlobalPost site can read about Passport but there is no chance to test it out first and they have to "take a leap of faith" if they want to subscribe, Balboni said.

From a purely financial standpoint, 2009 was "a decent year," especially given the global economic recession. Balboni specified that the $1 million revenue figure that was reported in November was not accurate, but described the amount as "consequential." The company's original business plan projected profitability in 2012, and Balboni thinks this is still likely.

What's next?

GlobalPost seems to have demonstrated that there is an audience for more international news and has set up a structure to cover this that works. As Balboni explained, its challenges now are to build that audience into the millions and (like almost every other news organisation) to shift its business model so that it depends less substantially on advertising.  

Back in the day, before newspapers were home-delivered, middle-class men used to go to coffee shops to read the newspaper and debate important social issues. This Thursday, reporters at the non-profit investigative outfit California Watch have similar plans, except they'll be writing the news, rather than just reading it.

Staff members from California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting will hold an 'Open Newsroom' day, where reporters will work from cafes across the state.

New media skills are becoming key for journalists, as social media such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly used for sourcing information and distributing articles. So in the future, will all journalists need to know how to write code as well, The Guardian's Digital Content Blog asks?

One on level, coding appears lucrative, with former Daily Mail journalist Greg Hadfield founding football news website Soccernet and then selling it for $40 million.

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

"Blogging is the biggest change to BBC journalism", Kevin Marsh, the head of the corporation's College of Journalism, said at the Journalism rewired conference. He added that blogging by senior figures like Robert Peston and Nick Robinson has helped to fundamentally change the way BBC delivers its news.

Kevin Marsh told conference attendees that in the last couple of years, the BBC had shifted its news focus away from its traditional TV bulletins, adopting a "live and continuous" model centered on multimedia content on the web, according to the PressGazette.