Results matching “of the new yor”

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.

A cacophony of voices from across the web have begun to take issue with that holdover from legacy media, the op-ed page.  

Ezra Klein, Washington Post domestic policy blogger, posted an indictment of the Washington Post's op-ed page on Monday.  

"I don't really understand why my op-ed page, or all the other op-ed pages, waste so much real-estate publishing talking points from politicians," he lamented.  He went on to argue that op-ed pages should post pieces written by experts "for a different purpose...than those written by political experts."

Nikkei Inc., the Japanese newspaper publisher of Japan's five largest newspapers, has announced it will launch a paid digital edition for its business daily, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (known as The Nikkei), on March 23.

Access to the publisher's previous newspaper website, Nikkei Net was free of charge. However, after March 23, access to part of the content of the new website will be limited to paid subscribers only, The Asahi Shimbun reports.

Nikkei President Tsuneo Kita said in a news conference that the company is approaching "this project from a different concept than the conventional perception that information on the Net is free of charge."

The New York Times' hyperlocal efforts will soon be supplemented by its new partnership with newswire Fwix.

Created 2 years ago by then-21-year-old Darian Shirazi, Fwix's CEO and founder, the newswire relies on a number of sophisticated search algorithms that pull together news articles and blog posts related to a certain area from across the web.  Fwix programmers also select local news sources and blogs to watch for relevant items to aggregate.

This allows for articles on the web to offer readers a series of related links pertaining to news from around that area.  A reader of an article about robberies in New York city's Chelsea neighborhood could theoretically be guided to further articles about Chelsea using Fwix's software.

Despite promising growth forecasts made by many in the industry, staffing cuts at news organizations big and small indicate that the news media industry is not yet out of the woods.  

Today, Journalism.co.uk reported that BBC's Global News division is undergoing restructuring that will result in the elimination of a number of management positions.  And smaller but still significant Channel M, the Manchester regional TV station owned by Guardian Media Group (GMG), will be losing 29 positions--a reduction of 88 percent.

The BBC will be losing a laundry list of high-level positions, including the directorial positions of BBC World News, BBC World Service and BBC World Service English.

Print media may not die if the printing press is put in the hands of the consumer.  It's this idea that drives the Newspaper Club, a London-based startup that allows members to print small runs of their own newspapers at low cost. 

The venture began when a group of friends decided to compile their friends' best blog posts and photos and print it as a newspaper titled Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet.  Because printing presses sit idle for most of the day, a small run of newspapers turned out to be remarkably cheap--about 364 euros for 300 copies.  The small price led the friends to form a company and start marketing the printing option to others.

ABC recently announced plans to initiate a paywall for some of its online content starting this June, hoping to alleviate some of its financial troubles and increase revenue.  The announcement comes in the wake of ABC's restructuring plans and its decision to eliminate 300 to 400 jobs through buyout propositions.

ABC's initiation of a paywall should come as no surprise to those watching media news over the past year.  Beginning with the success of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal's moves to paid content, NewsCorporation, MediaNews and the New York Times followed in their path with plans to erect paywalls by 2011.  Just this week, the Washington Post announced its launch of Capital Business, a business weekly for  subscribers only.

These changes result from a steep decline in ad revenue for online newspapers over the past year, with American newspapers earning 17% less from advertising on the web than they had a year earlier, according to the Economist.  The Washington Post alone lost four percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009, and new paid content plans hope to alleviate some of the financial stress of the past year.

Although checking sources is a fundamental rule of journalism, with the increasing pervasiveness of social media sites like Twitter, the temptation to discard this old rule can become too strong for some journalists to resist.

As the Press Gazette's Dominick Ponsford posted on The Wire, reporters for various newpapers in the UK used Twitter as a source for an article covering rumors of marital difficulties between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. The Independent's Steven Glover reprimanded the reporters for their failure to fact-check.

"A Twitter rumour alleging adultery on the part of a home-grown politician would not be taken up so eagerly by British newspapers," he said. "We apply more stringent standards to rumours about our own politicians."

Despite the dizzying amount of news content available online today, it seems many readers are reluctant to venture too far from their circuit of favorite sites.

According to a new study released Monday by the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, only 35 percent of people who use the internet to read news have a favorite website, and only 21 percent are "monogamous," or rely on only one site for news. Of the same audience, 57 percent rely on two to five sites for news.

Apple has received roughly 152,000 pre-orders for the iPad since Friday morning, according to early estimates by InvestorVillage.

While iPad pre-orders were coming in at 25,000 per hour the first day, Apple failed to maintain that pace as transactions dropped to 1,000 per hour over the weekend, according to Daniel Tello, a blogger who has been analyzing iPad order numbers at AAPL Insanity at Investor Village.

"With three weeks and two weekends left before they ship, I wouldn't expect more than half a million in pre-orders and reservations," Tello told Fortune.

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.

The Associated Press has named former New York Times executive Nick Ascheim as general manager of its digital division. Ascheim will also lead their new strategic business unit, AP Gateway, the newswire announced Tuesday.

Ascheim previously served as CEO of TheSquare Inc, an online social network for college students, and as editorial director of FoxNews.com before joining NYTimes.com as director of entertainment and video in 2004. Ascheim was promoted to vice president of the Times' website in 2007.

While newspapers struggle to turn a profit from their websites, an encouraging finding from the Columbia Journalism Review has good news for media websites: 60% of larger magazine websites are profitable, MediaGuardian reports.

The survey and report Magazines and Their Web Sites, conducted by Victor Navasky, chairman of the CJR, and Evan Lerner, Editor of SeedMagazine.com, is the first effort of its kind to document and clarify what advantages and strategies 665 consumer magazines utilize on their websites.

The final report revealed that more than half of consumer magazines that receive over 1.5 million visitors per month are more profitable. Advertising, as expected, accounts for the largest revenue source for 83% of the magazines which answered the question.

The BBC will be teaming up with the non-profit blogging network of citizen journalists, Global Voices, to offer a "different range of perspectives and commentary from around the world," according to the BBC.

Content from Global Voices will be incorporated into the BBC's SuperPower season coverage, a special series on the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.

The BBC will be selecting and linking to some Global Voices stories, as well as asking GV editors to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news. The editor of the BBC's News website, Steve Herrmann, explained that he believes Global Voices and the wide range of opinions they feature could add an "interesting dimension to some of (the BBC's) news coverage."

This week, James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times, announced the newspaper is planning to offer its Book Review disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on mobile devices, such as e-readers, according to Poynter. Dunn hinted at the plan during a session at the Digital Publishing Alliance and E-Reader symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Dunn spoke to Poynter's Bill Mitchell and explained the NYT will release its Book Review for three different e-readers, starting with the Sony e-reader soon. The feature will then be available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. No details on when the iPad-friendly Book Review version will launch were given.

Just last week the BBC came under fire from The Newspaper Publishers Association following news that the corporation is to launch three iPhone apps from April 2010. The NPA is adamant that such a move will step on the toes of traditional print publications seeking to generate revenue in the mobile news arena.

Perhaps then, the New York Times is looking to get one over on the broadcasting corporations muscling in on print territory. Daily Finance has reported that the newspaper is to launch a daily webcast in the same vein as the Wall Street Journal - which has been doing a twice-daily online newscast of its own, called The News Hub, since September.

Specific details regarding the New York Times' offering are still uncertain, although it is expected to go live in less than a few months' time. The daily newscast is expected to be transmitted around lunch time, when video traffic peaks. A face for the show has yet to be chosen, although a staffer at NYT has hinted that it is unlikely to be Jane Bornemeier, the newspapers current TV and Radio Senior Editor.

Source: Daily Finance

In an interview with The Hofstra Chronicle last Thursday, Will Shortz, editor of The New York Times crossword, discussed how the puzzle fits into the transition to digital media.

In the 17 years that he has been at the Times, Shortz has helped the country's most celebrated crossword make a profit during trying times for print media. While a puzzle is printed in every newspaper, the crossword is the only same-day feature in the Times that the website charges for.

Over 50,000 people had paid the $39.95 annual subscription fee to access the day's puzzle as well as the Times' archive of over 5,000 crosswords, according to Shortz. In addition to subscriptions, there is also an 900 number line for people desperate for a hint as well as Times Crossword Books, the best-selling books of its genre.

The Walt Disney Company paid roughly $700,000 to the Los Angeles Times for a front page ad for its upcoming "Alice in Wonderland" movie, a source at the newspaper confirmed to The Wrap.

Readers of the LA Times last Friday morning had to flip to the second page to read the day's headlines, while a multicolored picture of Johnnie Depp, dressed as the Mad Hatter, obscured two stories on health care and the war in Afghanistan.

The editorial board at the LA Times opposed the ad, but the decision was ultimately made by the newspaper's business executives, according to anonymous sources at the paper who spoke to The New York Times.

"Obviously, it was not my decision," said Russ Stanton, the top editor at the newspaper.

"We worked very closely with Disney to come up with an exceptional and distinctive way to help them open 'Alice in Wonderland,'" said the Times' spokesman, John Conroy. "It was designed to create buzz, and to extend the film's already brilliant marketing campaign."

El Mundo is to launch a paid service for reading its content online or on a smartphone, Agence France-Presse reported. The Spanish daily's standard website - which is the world's most visited Spanish-language news site - will remain free, however.

On Monday, for a price of €14.99 per month or 60cents per day, a new application called El Mundo en Orbyt will offer full access to the paper edition as well as a range of other services including archives, pop-up video reports, access to regional editions and supplements, commenting, the opportunity to communicate with the newsroom and special offers, according to a video on the site. The paper is already developing an app for Apple's iPad, AFP said.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, believes that tablet computer devices like the iPad are going to sell millions in their first year and tens of millions after that, MediaBistro reported. Anderson was speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies in San Francisco.

Anderson believes that there is room for a  "long-battery, slim device" that is something between a phone and a computer. People are now becoming used to using their phones for activities that previously required a computer, and he suggested that a product that was superior to a phone for web browsing and writing long emails could replace a laptop for travelling, for example. 

The Trinity Mirror will not implement a broad paywall strategy on its websites, according to Sly Bailey, chief executive of the newspaper group.

Bailey discussed the group's stance on charging for online access to content with MediaGuardian, confirming there are no plans to install a broad paywall. The group favors charging for more specific online services and products instead.

"We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," said Bailey. "It won't be possible for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it's free elsewhere...the BBC is an obvious one here."

Although Facebook does send more traffic to News and Media sites than Google News, an analysis by Hitwise's Heather Hopkins reveals that these two sites send traffic to very different kinds of news websites. Facebook users seem to prefer broadcast media sites, while Google News sends its traffic over to newspaper websites.

Rupert Murdoch announced The Wall Street Journal's plans to launch a New York edition this April during a speech before the Real Estate Board of New York yesterday. Murdoch has reportedly set aside a $15 million budget for the new metro edition with the hopes of rivaling The New York Times in local news.

Murdoch, whose' News Corporation acquired the Journal in 2007 and also owns The New York Post, had not previously acknowledged public reports over the new section, one of the worst-kept secrets in the newspaper industry. His remarks mark the Journal's first foray into local news with a stand-alone daily section featuring articles on culture, sports, politics, and other news from New York.

Magazine publisher, Condé Nast, is getting ready to create iPad versions for its Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Glamour magazines, according to The New York Times.

While GQ will have a tablet-friendly version ready by April, Wired's version will come in June, with the New Yorker and Glamour getting their iPad versions by summer, said an internal memorandum on Monday.

The New York-based magazine publisher is no stranger to mobile technology. GQ has an iPhone app (pictured on the left) that sold over 15,000 copies last January.