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By now the world knows who was elected the 44th US President - they may have found out online or followed television coverage throughout election night. However, the following morning, it was newsstands that made the headlines, selling more copies of newspapers than had ever been sold previously.

While publishers realized that there would be an increased demand, they didn't realize how much. Major newspapers were forced to rapidly order more copies, selling out in the early morning.  Is this a sign of things to come for the print business, or is it just a sign of the significance of the election and nothing more?

A global code of conduct has been signed by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to protect free speech online and to combat official intrusion on the Internet.

The name of this agreement is The Global Network Initiative. The code has been put in place as a response to criticism that the large online companies have been complicit with regard countries such as China censoring the internet. The code's goal is to limit the data shared with authorities.

The Global Network Initiative was drawn up by the internet companies along with human rights groups, academics and investors.

The code says that privacy is "a human right and guarantor of human dignity," and the agreement commits the companies to try to resist overly broad demands for restrictions on freedom of speech and the privacy of users. The code commits participants to look at the human rights climate in a country before concluding business deals and to ensure their employees and partners do the same.

Source: BBC News

While newspapers have been fighting off declining circulation and an aging readership, social networking sites are thriving. De Telegraaf, a leading Dutch broadsheet, has tapped into this popular medium by teaming up with popular Dutch social networking site, Hyves, for the Euro 2008 football tournament and the Olympics. In so doing, Telegraaf.nl gained access to Hyves 7 million users.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Telegraaf.nl's Publisher, Lara Ankersmit, to find out how the project came about, the impact it had on its newsroom, and the benefits of working with social media.

"Brainstorm"

When Telegraaf.nl first met with Hyves back in September 2007, it was simply to have "a conversation and a brainstorm." This initial conversation led to the two companies building a partnership that would not only drive traffic to the newspapers' web edition and enable Hyves to increase its product offering to its users, but also revolutionise and redefine the relationship between newspapers and social networking sites. This partnership has now become something of a blueprint within the industry for other newspapers looking to tap into the success of this new media platform.

"We don't care where people read our news; as long as they do read it."

Explaining the thinking behind the partnership, Ankersmit says, "We don't care where people read our news; as long as they do read it." Telegraaf has come to terms with the changes the internet has brought to the newspaper industry and adapted its product offering and thinking accordingly. Furthermore, the Telegraaf is putting its product on different platforms independent of news aggregators, and is thereby controlling how its brand is presented.

Specialised Content

To launch this innovative scheme, the two companies needed a suitably big story; therefore, the launching pad for Telegraaf's content on the Hyves site was the Euro 2008 football tournament and the Olympic games in Beijing. Telegraaf's content for Hyves was not lifted directly from its web edition: the news provider moved out of its "comfort zone" and changed its tone and content appropriately for the medium.

Telegraaf.nl and Hyves worked together to produce a fantasy football game, which was hosted on the Hyves platform. This fantasy football game proved to be a great success, achieving almost 170,000 participants. The rules are the same as other fantasy football competitions, with users selecting teams and predicting which country would win the tournament. Furthermore, Telegraaf provided editorial pieces to build on the playing experience. While playing the game, Hyves users could also choose friends from their social network to play with; the end result of this being that almost 45% of the players joined the game because of a recommendation from a friend on the social network site.

After the success of the Euro 2008 competition, the teams at Teegraaf and Hyves are working together again on a game for this year's football season (till May 2009). At going to press, the game has almost 32,000 participants.

The game comes with all kinds of statistics, eg, a player can see how good/bad they perform compared to the Hyves community, other women, other participants who are of a certain star sign, who live in the same city, and so forth. Teegraaf have not yet used this data for online content as the season has just begun. However, during Euro 2008 Telegraaf used such data for stories in the newspaper and the website.

For the Olympics, the newspaper provided tailored coverage of the games in Beijing, with the Telegraaf's sports desk working on the coverage. The blogs produced for Hyves in Beijing were also published on the newspaper's web site.

Just as content for the web edition is different from the print edition, content for the social network platform also differs from the news website. As Hyves is a more informal website than a straight web edition of a newspaper, the Telegraaf needed to provide the site with something a little different. For example, in the print edition Telegraaf will feature one photo within a story, on the web version it will have five photos, but for Hyves Telegraaf it will feature twenty photos. The style of photos will also be different from Telegraaf.nl, so there will be more behind the scenes shots or photos of the journalist travelling to, for example, the Olympic Games.

The newspaper also customised its blogs for Hyves, requesting that Telegraaf journalists at the Olympic games provide blogs from a more personal perspective.

Adapt the newsroom - stay flexible

This coverage from Telegraaf.nl did increase the workload (for example, increased blog content) for the newsroom, but Ankersmit reports that the staffers were enthusiastic about the Hyves project. Ankersmit also told the Weblog that the newspaper hired two journalism students who focused on uploading pictures and monitoring the Hyves site.
The sales and marketing team and project managers were also working in the background to ensure a buzz around the new product.

Payoff

The benefits of this relationship to the two media companies are clear: Telegraaf is able to tap into Hyves 7 million users and open up its content to a younger audience who may not have considered reading the newspaper previously and Hyves is provided with high quality content from one of the Netherlands' most respected newspapers. During the project, almost 20% of the incoming traffic to Telesport.nl (the sports pages of Telegraaf.nl) came through the Hyves site. Before the project, the traffic coming via the Hyves site was negligible.

This partnership also helped the Telegraaf re-brand itself and present itself as a modern news organisation. The newspaper had a rather "old fashioned" image before the project, but this initiative made people look at Telegraaf in a new light. The games on the Hyves site also got people talking about the site on the internet and the project became a topic of conversation around water-coolers in offices.

Despite these changes at the Telegraaf, Ankersmit says that "news is still our core product," it is simply changing the way that it connects with its audience. Anksersmit told the Editors Weblog that it is important that news organisations "extend their brand" and its relationship with Hyves got people used to reading Telegraaf news on different platforms.

The future

Building on the success of its partnership with Hyves, the newspaper site is currently moving ahead with plans for its Mobile smart phone coverage. Ankersmit reports that while smart phone content was previously just read by business users, the introduction of a flat-rate fee from mobile companies has opened up the platform to a wider audience. Telegraaf has also noted that readers are using the site in a different way, they now read content in a similar fashion to that on the website. Ankersmit expects Mobile to be increasingly popular in the years ahead as it becomes increasingly commercial, and when it does, the Telegraaf will once again be ready to break new ground.

Yahoo! unveiled Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on Wednesday, a rebranding of its IndexTools product.

Yahoo! report that the product will, "provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They'll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction."

According to CNet News, it is a free service and has one up on Google Analytics in that the information is updated within a few minutes of user activity whereas Google stats can take about 24 hours.

Yahoo said that the updated version of the service is already available to advertisers and third-party application developers, with Yahoo Small Business. Currently, if you try to sign-up there is a waiting list where you can subscribe to updates.

Source: Yahoo! and CNet News

Google Inc and Yahoo Inc are delaying their controversial search advertising partnership, Yahoo reported on Friday.

"The companies have agreed to a brief delay in implementing this agreement to continue our ongoing discussions with the (U.S.) Department of Justice," Yahoo said in a statement. "We have had discussions with regulators and look forward to responding to their questions about this agreement." The deal is still expected to be pushed through during October.

The deal, which allows Google to sell advertising for some of Yahoo's online advertising space, is unpopular with advertisers who fear higher prices.

Google uses an algorithm that aims to match consumers with what it says are the most appropriate ads, a formula some advertisers find mysterious and bothersome.

An antitrust lawyer, who regularly brings mergers to the Justice Department, said that the delay was probably not a good sign for Google and Yahoo. "It means that they were not going to get a clean bill of health in time, and perhaps it's much worse than that. They don't want to go forward and be told that there's potentially a very serious problem there," said the lawyer.

Source: EJC Media and Reuters

See also:

World's press opposes Yahoo-Google advertising deal

For the first time, European readership of free dailies has gone down. At the end of 2007 it was 27,300,000 - now it's 27,000,000.

The decline is not significant, but is it a sign of a new trend?

World circulation is still up by 2%, largely because of launches in South America and Asia.

Source: Newspaper Innovation

Following in the footsteps of its rival, Wall Street Journal online, The New York Times has launched a new social network entitled, TimesPeople. According to The New York Times Company , the new network will provide "readers with a way to share their thoughts and recommendations about content with other readers, making their public activities on the site more open."

Members can share comments, recommendations and reviews with other users. Members will also have profile pages, be able to sign up for RSS feeds and sync their updates to Facebook.  

According to Marc Frons, chief technology officer, digital operations, TimesPeople was created "as a community built around sharing news and information, giving our readers a way to connect with other like-minded readers. It is a great way for our readers to discover content on the site they might not have otherwise."

The launch of TimesPeople follows the announcement of a redesigned Business section with added content.

Sources: The New York Times Company

Lowell Bergmann is a ground breaking investigative reporter, a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series "Frontline" in the US and spent 14 years as a producer with CBS's "60 Minutes".

Bergman shared a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The New York Times in 2004 for "A Dangerous Business," (which detailed a record of egregious worker safety violations coupled with the systematic violation of environmental laws in the iron sewer and water pipe industry) and is a Professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Furthermore, he is a co-founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and a consultant at ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

The story of Bergman's investigation of the tobacco industry for 60 Minutes was chronicled in the 1999 Academy Award-nominated feature film "The Insider", in which Bergman was portrayed by Al Pacino (below left).

The Editors Weblog contacted Lowell Bergman - who was an early adopter and advocate of the multimedia model - to discover his views on the key issues facing investigative reporting and its future.

EW: What do you see in the future for investigative journalism? Do you still see it as having a home at newspapers?

LB: Investigative journalism in America has always been done by magazines and in books as well as in newspaper. For many years newspapers were not doing much of it. It was a 'freelance' occupation usually with writers like I.F. Stone and others who left newspapers because they were too restrictive. Personally, I have been using the web and been 'online' for more than a decade.

But it remains true that it is newspapers and traditional news organizations that produce almost all the new information everyday.

Pure web based operations with a few new exceptions recycle information they get from those organizations. We will see web based sites becoming the providers of more and more news and quality information in the future, but the transition will take time.

EB: What do you see as the key issue facing your profession?

LB: I am not sure it is a 'profession' in the traditional sense. In this country it is open to everyone. It is not licensed. Right now the transformation of the media endangers the collective experience of news people who chose to make gathering, investigating and presenting quality information their life work. That is why non-profits and educational institutions [Universities] will become more and more important. They do not have the same pressures. Its a time of transition, a kind of "Middle Age", that will not see a resurgence of real reporting until the economic questions are resolved.

EW: How has new media changed the way you work?

LB: Obviously, the availability of databases, newspaper archives and all sorts of information on the Web makes many things easier. But the old techniques and standards have not been replaced. To do investigative or in depth reporting you have take the time to meet people, and not meet them in a chat room.

Confidentiality on the internet is virtually impossible. It depends on trust. And trust is the weakest link in terms of the reliability of information offered up on the Web by so called 'new media'.

EW: Do you think there is more pressure from editors with the advent of the 24-hour news culture? Are investigative journalists getting the time and resources necessary?

LB: At a certain point you are a stenographer, if you don't have enough time to do the kind of reporting that advances what we know. This is not just true of 'investigative' reporters.

All good reporting involves asking some skeptical questions and not assuming what you are told is true. When I think of 'investigative reporting' I mean reporting in the public interest that looks deeply into a subject or story. Often it involves developing sources or hunting for documents or both and having the time to explore what they mean. At the same time in the best of all world's your editor is happy if you come back and say there is no story, or the story you originally went in pursuit of changed.

So, in answer to your question the pressure of a failing economic model by definition means there is less time. Prior to the decline of newspapers, broadcasters in the U.S. freed from the strictures around licensing that once forced them to present programming in the public interest along with operating with the threat of punishment created worldwide news gathering organizations. They had the incentive to do documentaries and present them even if the ratings were far below those of entertainment. That is no longer the case so you have less in depth reporting on the air as well.

EW: Is the law now having an impact on your profession? Is the law becoming more restrictive for journalists in general, and investigative journalists in particular?

LB: Not really. There has been a squeeze on the confidential source privilege, but it appears that Congress and a new President will sign a federal 'shield law'. The issues surrounding what is called national security reporting and/or criminal cases where a prosecutor or defendant has no where else to turn for information are unlikely to be resolved by the legislation. It is more of a question of the attitude/discretion of the prosecutors.

EW: Do you feel protected by the law?

LB: I never expect 'protection'. My sources do.

EW: How do you think an editor should best manage an investigative reporting team or reporter?

LB: Briefly, they should provide insight, encouragement and support, especially when the going gets tough.

EW: Who are the main competition to newspaper investigative reporters now? What are your thoughts on groups such as ProPublica?

This work is non profit. I have even called it 'anti-profit' by its very nature. So ProPublica, I am a consultant, or the Center for Investigative Reporting, I am one of the founders, are non profits working the public interest. Basically, that is what a very good newspaper newsroom does: report stories without fear or favor, and without considering the resources needed to do that. It is at its root a non-profit activity.

Guardian.co.uk, News International, Associated Newspapers, Trinity Mirror, Telegraph Media Group, Bauer and ITV Sport have all signed up Perfrom, a company that specialises in "monetising sports and entertainment rights in digital media."

Perform is a sports video provider that provides publishers with an e-player to show sports highlights.

The embedded video widget shows sports video clips and a produced sports bulletin.

Sports copyright has emerged as a real battleground in recent years, with publishers, sports governing bodies and rights holders fighting for control of lucrative live coverage and highlights.

Source: Press Gazette

Earlier this year, UK paper the Daily Mail introduced its unlimited text messaging service MailTXT. The paper reports that new users will get to send 50 free international SMS messages if they sign up.   

MailTXT was launched in order to increase users on the Mail's mobile portal. Journalism.co.uk writes that the purpose of the new move is to "build a more interactive relationship with readers."

Internet users are charged for their network connection and a text message from one registered user to another costs 1.4 pence, whereas a message to a non-user costs 6.4 pence.

Users will receive 0.5 pence as "MailTXT Credit" each time a message is sent and received, and are urged to view Daily Mail material and special offers through their mobile phone.

The Mail said that tens of thousands of users have already signed up for the service.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

The Globe and Mail is positive on the future of printed newspapers, and it is putting its money where its mouth is.

The newspaper is preparing for another redesign of its print edition to take advantage of new high-speed colour presses after awarding Transcontinental Inc. an 18-year, $1.7bn printing contract.

The transaction with Transcontinental comes as The Globe and a handful of other newspapers in Canada buck the North American trend of declining readership, circulation and ad revenue.

"There is a lot of mileage in high-quality newspapers," Globe publisher Phillip Crawley said in an interview yesterday after the announcement of the deal.

Phillip Crawley said that the deal is "a sign of our continued confidence in the future of the newspaper business."

Crawley said the redesign is planned for late 2010 or early 2011 and will include a reduction in the size of the paper by 13⁄4 inches to a height of 21 inches (53 centimetres).

The new printing press will allow for the newspaper to print in full colour on all pages and offer advertisers glossy newsprint stock.

"Colour on every page opens up design opportunities that previously didn't exist."

The last big redesign of The Globe - a division of CTVglobemedia Inc. - was launched in April, 2007.

Source: ReportonBusiness.com

The mobile news market in the US will soon be ripe for mass consumption, according to Robert Samuels, Director of Mobile Products, Mobile Web, Messaging, Games and Alternative Platforms at The New York Times.

"It's been a runaway success," said Samuels, speaking of the growth of the Times' mobile site. "Numbers will continue to grow, there is a lot of industry dynamic supporting this."

The Times' mobile site, which drew 500,000 page views in January 2007, received over 10 million hits by December of the same year, and soared up to 19 million views in May 2008.

Although "most of the consumption on our site is through high end mobile devices so far" such as BlackBerry phones, Treo mobile devices and iPhones, the market is rapidly growing for the mass market, especially amongst commuters.

Generally speaking, the consumption patterns are similar for the online and mobile editions: business and politics are very popular, as well as blogs or most-emailed stories. "But amongst the mobile applications we've been rolling out, some of them are particularly tailored to the mobile user such as the mobile user real estate listings," said Samuels, which enable users on the go to receive listings based on specific criteria such as number of bedrooms, price...

"In America, I think the general web browsing for the mobile site has been at an advantage in terms of user behavior and pricing over SMS products," said Samuels.  All the Times' text message alerts link off to the mobile site to encourage users to browse it and read the whole story.

According to Samuels, text messaging will continue to grow for specific uses, such as stock listings or weather forecasts (see this study about text messaging and mobile usage), but "the predominant, long-term mass consumption, will be more than likely be browsing just because that's such a dominant behavior here in the US," he said. Still, "Text messaging for content adoption will grow in the US, we are simply well behind other markets like Europe and Asia."

As of now, the Times' hasn't created any position dedicated to editing or rewriting content for mobile consumpti