Results matching “online and blogs ove”

Nytimes.com blogger Timothy Egan points to an interesting paradox about newspapers: how can we be talking about the death knell for newspapers when readership for many publications has never been higher?

We have all seen the stories of 1,000 jobs being cut in the American newspaper industry, just this week the LA Times announced 150 editorial layoffs. However, Egan points out, "all of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater."

Although the Internet may have damaged the traditional newspaper, it has also "increased the readership of some newspapers ten-fold."

US Newspaper websites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 -- a record, and a 12 percent increase on a year ago, according to Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site.

"A visitor, it should be noted, is different from a reader, but it's the measurement of choice. The Web is the future," writes Egan.

However, online advertising accounts for only around 10 percent of total ad revenue for newspapers. In its present form, the Web format does not generate enough revenue to support a full reporting team at a national newspaper. This is an area that newspapers need to focus on, and currently only a few newspapers are doing successfully.

Egan also discusses another interesting business model for the future; could newspapers go down the route of non-profit national broadcasters such as the BBC, CBC and National Public Radio? He discusses the possibility of a quality, independent media no longer driven by the search for ad revenues.

However, this system arguably couldn't support a nationwide competitive media, but it's something worth considering, even if it is an option with limitations.

Egan's blog puts a new slant on the debate about the future of newspapers and exposes the weakness in the argument that newspapers are in their last days. Egan's research demostrates that there is much vitality in the industry and that newspapers need to adapt to a changing media environment.

Source: New York Times

Sky News has relaunched its website today with a raft of new features. The revamp is aimed at personalizing the site for users and expanding its range of user-generated content and videos.

Steve Bennedik, the editor of Sky News Networked Media, states that, "The features we are introducing to personalize the site are just the start of a process aimed at allowing our users to tailor sky.com/news to suit all their online needs."

Sky is introducing an online community element to its website, powered by Pluck, enabling users to have their own blogs, to comment on other people's blogs, and discussion boards.

The redesigned website will incorporate SkyCast, a video platform powered by a "white label" version of Google's online video technology, into its news pages to encourage users to submit their own videos relating to news stories.

The new Choose Your News function allows users to hone their news search with categories including most popular stories, most recent video clips and "special interest" topics.

A Story Tracker function will automatically update users on news stories they are following.

Sky News is also launching a news service, powered by news aggregation company Daylife, which will provide readers with any related stories from "external sources" from the UK and international providers.

The website will also include more video, graphics and a new "bold design", as well as an interactive and searchable weather map of more than 4,500 destinations.

Source: Guardian

The UK should ensure that the budding online news community becomes a medium for quality journalism, according to a report from the Lords communications committee.

Media companies have become too laissez-faire with their "news gathering" amid the rush for online advertising revenue, the report says. Many companies are relying on news agencies and PR firms for their news.

Lord Fowler, the committee chairman, said that the BBC should put less focus on paying "talent" - such as talk show host Jonathan Ross - and more focus on generating original, quality news.

"Much of the news available on the Internet and on the new television channels is not new. It is repackaged from elsewhere," the report stated.

Fowler believes the Internet boom has resulted in a weakened environment for journalism.

"With the expansion of the Internet, what has not happened is...a similar expansion of news gathering and journalists being employed to get the news," he said.

The report made several other recommendations. Here are a few of them:

1) Strengthen Ofcom's (UK media regulator) powers to allow independent investigations into media mergers.

2) Let the Competition Commission (another regulator) investigate competition issues, and let Ofcom evaluate public interest.

3) Investigate mergers on a case-by-case basis. Under the current laws, an online company buying a newspaper could not be investigated.

Related:

Because the online news community is so nascent, media companies (and legislators) are still figuring out how to approach it.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade thinks newspapers should embrace blogs and online news. Read his argument here.

Source: The Guardian

In light of the recent the Associated Press (AP) vs. bloggers conflict, automated software known as "content recognition systems" is becoming more practical for companies seeking to keep track of their content, and even to maximize revenue.

To track down its articles in the DR, the AP used a content recognition system from California start-up company Attributor, which tracks copyrighted content on the Web.

Other companies that provide fingerprinting technology include Audible Magic and Vobile.

Pros of online content-tracking software:

- Tracking technology will let publishers know which ssites are using their content, thus "flowering information on the Web."

- For Sarah Chubb, CondéNet.com president, tracking software may be used to track down sites that could feature cooking or golf content. She said she is not interested in copyright violations but in "revenue opportunity." 

However, the blogosphere is concerned because "the software could act as a kind of ever-present police," according to BW.

BW also reported that the technology has flaws since it cannot identify when a clip or an article is used for legally protected things like book reviews.

Source: Business Week, Editors Weblog

See Also:
Associated Press vs. Drudge Retort and blogosphere: facts and outcome
US: AP admits to being "heavy-handed", will define standards for fair use on blogs
US: Associated Press vs. Drudge Retort "matter closed"

At the Future of Journalism conference Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at City University New York, MediaGuardian contributor and BuzzMachine blogger, offered 10 questions news outlets should be asking themselves and the Guardian in particular. Here's a selection:

1 - "Who are we?"
History is "full of companies that had failed to answer this question and lost their way", said Jarvis.

He discussed how AOL could have become what Facebook is today if they hadn't been sidetracked into thinking they were a "content company." Likewise, Yahoo could have become what Google is, if it had embraced the fact that it was "really an advertising company."

In his opinion, the Guardian is "increasingly a 'community' company" but future growth could stem from thinking of the paper as a "platform" or "network". News organizations should try to "collaborate and mobilise" effectively, perhaps by including audience reports of news events. 

3 - Are we generous?

This may be done by "sharing technology, supporting people with the Guardian ad network" and "allowing people to be stars in the outside world", reported the Guardian.
 
5 - Are we findable?

News websites should be findable and should include "distributed content, content that is open for developers to build applications (or widgets), content that is findable on social media, and content that can be consumed on mobile."

Newspaper websites should act like platforms, sharing "knowledge and promotion and traffic and advertising and branding" Jarvis said.

Other questions for newspapers to ask themselves include:

"Are we inventing new narratives?"
"Are we in data layers?"
"Are we having fun yet?"
"Are we agile?"

Source: Guardian Online

See Also:
@Future of Journalism: the benefits of Twitter
@Future of Journalism: reporting celebrity news

This week, Richard W. Stevenson, political editor and deputy Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, will be answering questions from readers. The Q&A is part of the Time's regular Talk to the Newsroom feature, which most recently hosted NYT managing editor, Susan Edgerley.

Stevenson started off by addressing political bias, blogs and content decisions.

What follows is an edited transcript of Stevenson's thoughts on blogging, politics and the attitude that often accompanies the two.

The Blogs/News Balance

Q. As political editor, does your franchise extend to The Caucus blog and, if so, have you established editorial guidelines for the blog that differ from guidelines for news articles and news analysis? I'm not simply referring to tenor but to subjects blogs may cover while articles and analyses shouldn't. It seems schizoid to have Kit Seelye speculating on Hillary Clinton's emotional state of mind in the blog and then doing straightforward political reporting for the newspaper...

-- Patrick Murphy, Lionville, Pa.

A. Mr. Murphy, you are on to one of the biggest challenges we face, and perhaps the solution to it as well.

Yes, The Caucus, our political blog, is a core element of our election coverage, and is fully integrated into our reporting efforts. Nearly all of our political reporters file regularly to the blog, both breaking news and other pieces that are more analytical or observational. The wonderful thing about blogs is that they are infinitely flexible, and we are always experimenting with how we can do New York Times quality journalism that takes advantage of the Web.

But as your question implies, that can be tricky, because the Web ethos is different from a traditional newsroom ethos.

Consider the Web's key attributes. First is speed, immediacy...When news breaks, we can get it online quickly, giving our users quick access to information.

Second is the ability to link to or package with all kinds of resources, from background to primary source documents to audio and video.

Third, for better or worse, is a bit of attitude - or, in many cases, a lot of attitude. A whole lot.

As we have shifted more of our focus toward the Web, we've done all we can to master and take advantage of the first two attributes, while acknowledging but keeping a wary distance from the third.

We have not relaxed our news standards for the Web. The reporting needs to be solid and as transparent as possible. It needs to be presented clearly and concisely. It needs to be fair.

But within those guidelines, we are changing our journalistic culture to adapt to the reality that the Web is a big part of our future. So sometimes we will post on The Caucus or elsewhere on our Web site a first take on a breaking news story. Then we will update it as more information becomes available.

It's a different way of doing things for those of us who came up in a system that was directed to producing a single and comprehensive version of the news at the end of the day. It can be jarring for some reporters and editors to post breaking news on the Web even though there are lots of questions we know we still need to answer for our readers.

... There's much about blogging culture that can work for us on our terms, starting with encouraging a two-way conversation with readers.

Source: The New York Times

In the wake of Tim Russert's death, we are reminded again that in the world of Wikipedia and Web 2.0, breaking news waits for no man.

Following the sudden death of Mr. Russert, the former moderator of "Meet the Press" and the chief of NBC's Washington bureau, NBC chose to withhold the news for over an hour, wanting to first inform Russert's family, who were vacationing in Italy.

"We were not prepared to say anything until all the family had heard," said Allison Gollust, an NBC News spokeswoman. "The last thing we wanted to do was to have the family discover this on the air." Gollust said NBC had asked the other networks to hold back and all agreed.

Russert collapsed from a heart attack in NBC's Washington newsroom around 1:40 p.m. and was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital at 2:23. The official announcement came from NBC's former anchor Tom Brokaw, on air at 3:39.

But almost 40 minutes earlier, the news broke on Wikipedia. Mr. Russert's page was updated at 3:01 p.m. -- adding the date of death and turning present-tense verbs into the past tense. "The entry was particularly influential since many journalists had heard of Mr. Russert's becoming stricken, but did not know the outcome," noted the New York Times. "If some turned to Wikipedia to refresh themselves about Mr. Russert, they found an article that seemed to confirm what many had been hearing."

The IP address of the editor traces to a "junior level" employee at Internet Broadcasting Services in St. Paul, Minn., which contracts Web services to local NBC TV stations. The employee, who posted thinking the information was public record, has since been fired.

Sources: The New York Times, The Daily Online Examiner

Prominent South African newspaper Mail & Guardian (M & G) recently revamped its website with social networking and Web 2.0 functions. New features include a new layout, the ability to save article clippings, StoryHistory, StoryPredictor, the ability to comment and debate, semantic tagging, and the implementation of NewsSwarm.

In an interview with the Editors Weblog, the M & G Online general manager Matthew Buckland said that the aesthetic aspect of the redesign includes "a wider layout, top navigation instead of left", use of mixed fonts and more white space.

The new site attempts to "build networking features", Buckland said. The ability to see other people's news clippings allows a user to "meet users based on similar interests."

NewsSwarm allows users to see who is viewing what at a given time. "It's interesting from a user perspective to see what articles are important," Buckland mentioned.

StoryPredict will forecast what stories a user will be interested in based on the browsing history, which is in turn saved.

In the past, users were not able to comment but this was due to technical restrictions, according to Buckland. Now comments to the news site are enabled for registered members. "We ensure comments. We encourage users to post under real names. We ensure a high level of intelligent debate," Buckland said.

Every site except the Thoughtleader.co.za, the Techleader.co.za and the Sportsleader.co.za sites require users to register if they want to comment.

Registered users are also able to blog, Buckland said.

The advanced printing function allows for articles to be printed in a row.  

Buckland pointed out that the new site is "tagged quite heavily". Related news stories are linked to articles, even if they are "from competitors and blogs", according to Buckland.

In his blog, Vincent Maher, strategist at the M & G, said that because the old code and the database were "messy", the developing team had to reconstruct "the site from the ground up on a completely new set of technologies."

According to Maher's blog, "the project scope and order of production" included:

- Redesigning and developing front end, designing a new strategy for ad formats, new CMS
- Developing a new data structure to accommodate real-time visualization and semantic tagging
- Integrating an advertising engine and negotiating with advertisers
- Integrating national-level navigation mapping, city-level mapping through Google Maps, "contextually-relevant" outside news sources through Google News, "contextually-relevant" blog postings through Google Blog Search
- Creating new templates for e-commerce partner sites
- Rebuilding newsletter system
(For the whole list, go to Maher's blog) 

Source: Matt Buckland, General Manager Mail & Guardian Online, VincentMaher.com

See also:
South Africa: Mail and Guardian launches Amatomu blog aggregator

Pierre Bellanger, founder and CEO of the French radio station Skyrock and blog network Skyrock.com, knows something about transitioning from a traditional media model to a digital one: Skyrock.com now draws 4.2 million unique visitors daily and about 7.5 billion page views monthly, and the group makes more than half of its revenues digitally.

At a conference in early June, Bellanger listed seven pointers for brands to establish and sell themselves online:

- Integrate collective intelligence: of particular importance to newspapers (see this interview with Bellanger), this means repurposing user-generated content such as comments or blogs in an add-value package for the brand.
- To be an individual: the brand should be engaged in the conversation with online users.
- Establish a relation of trust with users: this also entails getting rid of corporate and commercial communications, which online users can see through.
- Combine conversation and advertising: a 'chief community officer' should serve both to engage the community and drive profit.
- To remain useful.
- To remain polite.

Watch the video of the presentation here.

Bellanger was also a speaker at the 15th World Editors Forum in Göteborg, Sweden (video below).


Source: Skyrock - Mobinaute.com

The Telegraph has created widgets that distribute online video content to various social networking sites and blogs.

The widgets are compatible with 26 different websites, including Facebook and Myspace, and are available to mobile users. They will cover several of the Telegraph's news sections, including news, business, arts and entertainment, and sports.

According to Alison Reay, new media director of Telegraph Media Group, the video player is only temporary; the company hopes to embed videos within articles during the next 12 to 15 months.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

A conference called "Will newspapers survive?" was held last week in Chicago, featuring prominent journalists who brought to surface the arguable future of the newspaper industry, the Chicago Reader's Michael Miner reported.

Monroe Anderson from EbonyJet discussed the newspaper industry as it was around three decades ago, saying that with time it became "very corporate, very structured' and "they're looking to the bottom line."

Anderson reminisced about a Tribune editor with an eight-grade education, something that today seems "unthinkable", Miner reports. This was "before the suits took over", Anderson said.

The Tribune's Bill Adee mentioned that the "business model is broken" and the Herald's Eileen Brown said that she has to convince "the business side" to look for new things so as to save the print newsroom.

The Hindalaen is a weekly hyperlocal paper from Illinois and its publisher, Jim Slonoff, said that "the old way still does work."

Miner pointed out that Brown thinks one of the problems of newspapers today is the "middle ground," those stories about national and international topics that can be read online for free.

Miner mentioned the Tribune and how "just that morning almost every story" he read there was valuable because he said he would never think of looking for it online and because it would never had been written had it not been for the paper's commission.

Brown said that print journalism continues to offer more revenue than online journalism. Advertisers are not comfortable selling ads online and "are in the ice age", according to Brown.

"So it's this weird transitional phase where you'd love to say 'OK we'll move everybody over here,' but you can't because you still have to feed the mother ship," she said.

Adee mentioned online success such as sites like YouTube, who are user-generated, and the Tribune will not get "anywhere close" to that, Miner reports, because its aim is to provide professional "house-generated" journalism.

RedEye is the "fastest growing paper in the country", according to Adee, since it provides the news to an audience that does not think about paying for them.

"People want what journalists do more than ever. They want it in different forms. They can accept it in amateur form, semipro form, or professional journalism," Adee said.

Soource: ChicagoReader.com

Video:

YouTube (part 1)
YouTube (part 2)