Results matching “1 million users in”

Much media coverage has been recently devoted to so-called 'content farms' such as Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com. The goal of these companies is to produce vast amounts of content on topics that readers have been searching for that will attract large numbers of readers, and they have been described at 'robotic' 'sweatshops' or 'factories' that produce work that critics insist is not journalism.

These content networks use an algorithm to study and analyse web searches and behaviour to identify what is popular and what gaps in coverage might exist, and it then commission their networks of freelancers to write on these topics. Demand Media, the most prolific, publishes its content on properties including eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.com and Cracked.com, among others.

Executive VP Steven Kydd described Demand's output as "service journalism, or sidebar content" in a speech at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in April, explaining that it does not hope to compare to serious investigative journalism. Demand Media freelancer Andria Krewson explained on ReadWriteWeb that "The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now." She added, "You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement."

Demand Media publishes about 7,000 articles a day, and the company's chief revenue officer Joanne Bradford told AdAge that over 50 million unique visitors per day see Demand content on its top site eHow.com. She insisted that every article is vetted and fact-checked, with 1,000 copy editors. CMO Dave Panos told AdAge that each piece of content is touched by "11 qualified professionals."

As well as filling its own sites with content, Demand Media supplies articles for others, including USA Today's travel section. In April the Travel Tips section of the newspaper's site was launched with about 4,000 items from Demand Media's freelance writers. Demand Media supplies the content and sells keyword advertising, USA Today is selling display ad inventory and the two are splitting the revenue, AdAge reported at the time. USA Today travel journalists still produce more in-depth, expert articles, but these are supplemented by those provided by Demand. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also uses Demand Media, but only for a story a week.

Associated Content, which was acquired in May by Yahoo!, produces around 1,500 pieces of content a day. Articles from AC contributors, including (according to the AC blog) "compelling personal stories and expert insights" are appearing throughout the Yahoo! network of sites.

A less well-known site is Suite101, a publishing platform that manages to product 500 new pieces of content per day on niche topics, focusing on beginners articles on thousands of topics. According to ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, who spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger, it currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites, with 24 million unique vistors per month going to the English language site. Berger told ReadWriteWeb that he did not see Suite101 as a competitor to traditional journalism, but rather as competing with "non-fiction publishing." Its articles answer users' questions about practical matters in their lives, rather than providing them with news. 

Giving the audience what it wants, and fast

The existence and swift growth of such sites has provoked much debate about what they mean for the future of journalism. The first issue is that of giving the audience the content that it wants: the Internet has made this far easier to do, but is it something that news organisations should be considering? As Nieman Lab recently pointed out, in any other industry, offering the customer what they wanted this would be an approach that no one would question. But in the news industry, the idea that the editors know best has always prevailed. Providing news is a public service, and only trained professionals are capable of deciding what is most important.

This is undoubtedly a valid principle, and the experience that comes with working in the news industry makes an editor's opinion extremely valuable. However, at news organisations there have always been concessions to giving the audience what they want. For many, that is what sells papers, and editors are fully aware of the necessity to sell papers.

Online it has finally become possible to track what readers actually read. And with news being effectively sold in micro-form, even if not directly, there is clearly an enhanced motivation to give readers what they really want to read. Who knows how many articles a print newspaper buyer reads and how many they discard? Now that it is possible to tell what people are reading, is it surprising that publishers want to give them more of this?

Clearly, just spewing out stories about Lindsey Lohan because they get a lot of hits is not an editorially ethical decision. But as Nieman Lab's Laura McGann points out, what the public wants is not always junk. She highlighted a Pew Research Center study that showed that the public's interest in coverage of the Gulf oil leak remained relatively high even when the amount of coverage dropped significantly in early-mid July. The same study reported that many people believed that news organizations were giving too much coverage to stories about Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James, however. 

It is not just 'content farms' that have come under criticism for looking at what readers want to read. In a recent article about Yahoo's blog 'The Upshot,' the New York Times discussed how the top-down editorial model was being 'inverted,' with reporters looking at search statistics to help decide what to cover. As the NYT noted, the Yahoo blog is focused on news rather than the 'how-to' topics that Demand Media and others specialize in. Editors at the Upshot were clear however that the information from analyzing search data is supplementary and does not "lead Yahoo content."

The shifting relationship between content creation and SEO

A related concern, as recently highlighted by the Financial Times, is that Google's algorithm is beginning to have a significant effect on content that is produced. In the quest to attract large numbers of readers, content-creators are not only looking at what readers want but at what appears high in search engine results.

Obviously news organisations all use search engine optimization to a certain extent, and it makes sense that if you have good content you should make it easily findable by your audience. But ideally content should come first, and SEO after, and the concern is that SEO, in particular how to manipulate the Google algorithm, is being prioritized over the content itself.

Low-paid journalists = low-quality work?

Contributors to 'content farms' are paid a low price for each article, and the companies make it clear that this is not intended to be a full-time job, but something to supplement your income. The pay at Associated Content (for at least some writers) is based on page views - $1.50 for 1000 views - and at Demand Media it is around $15 an article, with copy editors receiving $3.50 per article. Evidently the fact that writers can work from home and in their own time must be taken into account, but this figure is still low.

The idea, as  explained in a Wired article by Daniel Roth in November 2009, is that rather than "trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." CEO Richard Rosenblatt clarified to Jay Rosen that this is part of an attempt to build "a sustainable business model"

The fear, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington aptly put it, is that "anyone who spends their time and effort on their content is pushed out of business." Journalists will be paid less and less and journalistic quality will be forced down.

Despite staff's insistence that articles are fact-checked and edited, and the fact that writers are required to reference their sources, the general impression is that the quality of content at content farms is low, and the audience doesn't seem to mind that much.

But is this really "the end of hand crafted content," as TechCrunch concludes? Should professional journalists at established media outlets feel threatened by an excess of content on the Internet? Is it actually competing directly with what they do? The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational? Demand and others have found a hole in the market and they are seemingly successfully filling it, and news organisations should probably continue to focus on producing the best content they can.

The Financial Times Group announced that the Financial Times has kicked off the first half of 2010 in the black with much credit going to its digital readership. Marjorie Scardino,  CEO of the paper's parent company Pearson Plc, reported that online readership grew 27% up to 149,000 viewers within the last six months. Registered users also climbed 77% to 2.5 million subscriptions. While most of Pearson Plc's profits were driven by its educational and book publishing operations, Scardino was pleased to announce that FT group turned over operating profits with digital revenues contributing more than 25% of the total.

Facebook has recently surpassed the 500 million users mark. Currently, it is the largest and fastest growing social network in the world.

The Press Gazette and The Guardian recently covered The Press Association's staff reduction. The company has released about 30 employees and has cut back on certain operations such as sports and video journalism in order to consolidate costs. Conversely, PA has lifted its pay freeze for employees earning less than £30,000.

Tensions are rising after Members of the National Unions of Journalist, Unite, and Bectu failed to come to an agreement with the BBC concerning the new pensions reforms. The unions are preparing to vote on whether further actions will be taken.

In response to the New York Times experimentation with paywalls, Peter Robins from The Guardian reminds us that the construction of an effective paywall system is a longterm process. Despite recent statistics, it may be too soon to decipher the future for online newspapers.

Paul King, a freelance newspaper photographer was recently harassed by police while he was working in Thames Valley, UK. Apparently, this is not the first complaint the Thames Valley police have received for violating the rights of journalists. 

Apollo, a new news app for the iPad, aims to offer "the world's first fully personalized newspaper," loosely based on the music platform Pandora, which suggests to users new music that it thinks they will like, based on their preferences. After its release on Friday by Hawthorne Labs, Apollo quickly jumped to number 11 in the Apple iPad store, according to co-founder Evan Reas. It is priced at $4.99 (or €3.99).

Quoted by TechCrunch and others as saying that the app aimed to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," Reas stressed to the EW that he did not in fact intend to destroy news providers, but simply that he believed that print newspapers were becoming less relevant to younger people, and that digital news was the future. "What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying," he wrote on his blog.  

In fact, Reas did not want Apollo to be seen as a threat to the news industry. "We believe that we are a friend to traditional news sources, helping them get new views from a new medium," he said, adding that  "we think it is mutually beneficial for us and the content sources."

Apollo aims to help readers discover new content that they will like, based both on their expressed preferences - they can like or dislike specific articles, and favourite sources - and on which articles they read, how much time they spend on each, and what 'similar' users like.

The news is separated into different category groups, which are displayed as boxes along the bottom. Each of these has a choice of several different subcategories, which were chosen following extensive user testing, Reas said. The categories are intended to prompt users to read different types of news, and maybe to discourage them from only reading about the topics with which they are already familiar. One of the arguments against personalized news is that it takes away the element of serendipity, the chance to discover something totally new, but Reas said that the categories and the fact that Apollo is continuously bringing in new sources and articles will retain an element of this.

Apollo selects news from thousands of sources, both established news sources and blogs, using their public RSS feeds to link to content within the app. No content is licensed, and as the RSS feeds are public this should not be a problem. Another iPad news reader however, Pulse, had problems immediately after its launch when the New York Times objected to the use of its content within the app. Pulse essentially offers nicely-presented RSS feeds, allowing readers to choose their sources. One possibly important difference between the two though in terms of copyright is that  Apollo only offers a title and small snippet of an article before the reader clicks through to the page of the news outlet, while Pulse reproduces the whole text of the article that is available via the RSS feed.

For now, Hawthorne Labs' single stream of income is from app purchases: there is no advertising within Apollo. "In the longer term, we are considering other options like offering premium services to readers," Reas said.

He has faith in the iPad's potential as a news reading device: "I think the iPad will be how most people get their news in the future," but hopes to create Apollo apps for the iPhone, Android and a web browser too. "We are thinking about a lot of new ideas, especially around social, recommendations and personalization of content in our goal to be the daily destination for people to discover their content."

Many news publishers have been hoping that the iPad and similar devices will represent a significant revenue stream, at a time when they are determined to make money out of digital news distribution. The hope is that consumers will be prepared to pay to subscribe to specific news apps on the iPad, even if they are not prepared to pay to subscribe online. Much of this expectation seems to have been created by the fact that people are prepared to pay for news apps on the iPhone and other smart phones.

Something to note, however, is that most customers are far more likely to pay a one-off fee to download an app rather than pay regularly for a subscription. And with applications like Apollo or Pulse, which offer news from multiple sources in a relatively readable format for a one-off payment, news outlets are going to have to up their game if they want to persuade a high number of readers that they are worth paying for. Plus, it is significantly easier to read news in a web browser on the iPad compared to a smartphone due to the far larger screen size, reducing the need for an app at all.

Reviews of news apps have been middling so far, as Alan Mutter noted in May and with which present ratings concur, but the potential for innovation in the way news is presented is huge. And subscription-based apps have been selling, with the Times counting 12,500 subscribers, and it was reported in early June that the Wall Street Journal already had 10,000 iPad subscribers. As a comparison, the BBC's free app has been downloaded more than a million times. 

The iPad and other similar devices will remain niche, elite products for at least the immediate future, but those who do buy them are likely to be prepared to spend some money on apps if they are offered something interesting enough. Will consumers prefer the personalised aggregation of news offered by Apollo, or will they choose a premium experience from their favourite newspaper? Or both? 

The BBC launched its new news website yesterday: the biggest redesign of the site since 2003. As well as navigational and layout changes, improved video and sharing capabilities, the BBC has created a new North American edition of the site, BBC.com (as opposed to BBC.co.uk.)

A new dedicated website team based in the BBC's Washington DC office will be "making sure that a new, North America edition front page reflects the stories, themes and issues which matter most to our users in the US and Canada," according to an article by the news website editor Steve Herrmann and the editor of the North America edition Matt Davis. 

So major UK dailies the Times and Sunday Times have gone behind an online paywall: those wishing to read beyond the homepage will have to register and pay £1 for a day's access, £2 for a week. The sum is not huge but in today's news landscape where online readers jump swiftly and easily between news sources, how many are likely to pay?

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that a column on the Sunday Times' site this weekend had lifted an item from a free website, Gentlemenranters, without giving proper attribution. The editor of Gentelmenranters confirmed to Greenslade that the Sunday paper had not contacted the site. In the world of blogging and linking it has become almost standard practice to refer to the work of others, but citing the source is essential, and when a website is behind a paywall there does seem to be a feeling that it is less justifiable to take content from other sources. Presumably this is because, if people are paying for content, they expect it to be top quality and definitely original.

This raises the question of whether people do value and expect more from content that they pay for more than free content. News organisations all want their content to be regarded as valuable, but the ubiquity of news online does mean that many people may well have started to take content for granted, and flick through different sources, disregarding articles that are not immediately gripping.

This has for some time been one of Murdoch's arguments for implementing paywalls, and it is a valid concern. But do people now value news enough to pay for a specific paper? A loyal base of print subscribers will get online access free. Of those who do subscribe to the new Times websites, there will presumably be some who immediately sign up because they love the paper, and maybe others who later realize that they miss it so much that they are prepared to pay, and others who choose to make a one off purchase for a day or a week to access a specific piece. But has the Times is now practically invisible on Google, and bloggers can't link to it, how might new readers find the site?

Another Guardian blog post has offered "A warm welcome to guardian.co.uk for all former readers of the Times." Writer John Crace asserts that "here at the Guardian we can offer everything you ever wanted from the Times - and more - for nothing" and offers a tongue-in-cheek comparison of the two papers. Although many of those commenting on the article were disparaging about the Guardian's self-righteousness and questioned its own business model, its point is legitimate: there undoubtedly exist many good-quality, viable alternatives to the Times for readers who do not want to pay.  

The Guardian has made it clear that charging for online news is not something that it intends to do in the near future. Editor Alan Rusbridger has firmly underlined his belief that news should be free, stressing the importance of a wide reach and immediacy of access. The paper consistently has among the highest number of unique users of any UK paper (upwards of 30 million per month) and although its losses are currently substantial, it seems to be holding out for a way to make money from these.

And as well as other quality dailies with free websites, there is the BBC. Newspapers might be able to offer superior comment and analysis, but for the news, the BBC is an excellent source. The new Times sites are impressive, with improved navigation and search, and more multimedia elements: interactive graphics as well as more photos and videos. 'Behind the story' is also a useful new feature, and the live Q&As are likely to appeal. However, it is not far and away the best news website available, which is arguably what it needs to be in order to succeed in charging.

Poynter's Bill Mitchell took a look at the Times' paywall alongside two other British examples, the Financial Times and the Guardian. He was surprised by the strength of the Times paywall: the fact that articles are not indexed on Google and that all content, even blogs, are now paid-only. Other papers, including the New York Times, are looking at a 'metered' strategy which would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month before being asked to pay, overall keeping the paper more visible. Even Murdoch's financial daily, the Wall Street Journal, offers some articles free via Google.

As Steve Outing notes, at least Murdoch "has the guts" to try out a paywall strategy on a major daily, and to try it in the most extreme sense.  However, the extreme strategy is undoubtedly highly risky. As well as the inevitable loss of online reader numbers which risks marginalizing the Times and making it less relevant in the online news conversation, there is the subsequent risk that journalists will not want to work for a paper where their work is not read by many. It was one of the complaints made by New York Times star journalists such as Thomas Friedman during the TimesSelect experiment which ended in 2007. One law blogger from the Times, Tim Kevan, has already quit and been taken in by the Guardian - will others follow?

So in its quest for more revenue and trying to get readers to give greater value to its content, the Times risks losing an awful lot. If it does end up making a huge profit (paidContent looks at the figures here), others will follow and News Corp might end up dramatically changing the news landscape. There has been so much talk about paywalls with little consensus: doing it is the only way to find out if it actually will work, and the rest of news industry must be relieved that somebody is trying. That said, it really is a big risk. 

Imagine if your news site let you do a search for the names of every Fortune 500 executive who has announced at least four million dollars in eco-friendly real estate purchases in 2009?  Or a search for a restaurant within a mile of a railway station in a town with a theatre that offers vegetarian lasagna and at least one lamb dish. These tasks will be trivial once the semantic web technologies have been widely adopted.  In a conference last week, Thomson Reuters VP Tom Tague was joined by New York Times Semantic Technologist Evan Sandhaus, Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen, and Read It Later creator Nate Weiner to discuss how the semantic web can connect news and make stories more accessible.

ImpreMedia, the largest Spanish-language online and print news publisher in the US, has decided to partner with behavioral tracking specialists at DailyMe in an attempt to more fully capitalize on the internet traffic passing through ImpreMedia's servers, according to a press release.  The solution that has just been deployed is known as Newstogram and it combines unique profiles on more than 25 million users to improve news relevancy and personalization to engage the readers and improve their experience.

The Knight Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2010 Knight News Challenge, reports ReadWriteWeb. The contest offers awards for innovative ideas concerning how news is distributed to communities using digital technologies. This year, 12 entrants were awarded $2.74 million with the largest sum ($400,000) going to Eric Rodenbeck who designed a data visualization project called CityTracking. Rodenbeck hopes his project will help facilitate the process of creating visual representations of municipal data. The Knight Foundation description says, "CityTracking will allow users to create embedded data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos."

In May we reported that, in a speech at University College London, James Murdoch criticized the British Library's plan to digitize 40 million newspaper pages going back to the early 1700s.  The library has now responded to Murdoch, both by challenging some of his claims, but also by backing down from its intention of digitizing papers owned by Murdoch's News Corp.

Last week, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content, a company with which Yahoo! had been developing a relationship for several months. Associated Content is a news source that provides localized articles through the contributions of mostly non-journalist individuals with knowledge of local information. Luke Beatty, founder of Associated Content, claims that AC's personalized style and Yahoo!'s incredible size allow for both news sources to be more effective when working together.

AC delivers to Yahoo! localized content that will hopefully provide more personalized content to Yahoo's 600 million users and allow it to gain a level of relevancy that could change the that way news is reported on the web. Meanwhile, Beatty claims that Yahoo!'s large audience will motivate his news contributors by giving them access to a larger audience. As part of the acquisition, Yahoo will be opening a new office in Denver.

According to a recent survey, there are now more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. Spot On Public Relations found that there were more than 15 million Facebook account holders in the Middle East and North Africa region, while the total number of newspaper copies sold in the region in Arabic, English and French is just under 14 million.

Facebook's decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to many more people, said Spot On PR's managing director Carrington Malin in a summary of the report. 3.5 million Arabic users have joined over the past year, including 1.1 million in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. 50% of users in the region still use English as their primary language, however. The top five Facebook markets in MENA - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia, account for 70% of all users in the region. The region has a greater proportion of male users than other areas of the world: 37% of MENA users are female, compared to 56% in the US, for example. 

In the past, media mogul Rupert Murdoch has lambasted search engines and news aggregators on various occasions for making profits off of content they did not produce. At a lecture to celebrate copyright's 300th birthday at the University College London yesterday, Murdoch's son and News Corp EMEA CEO, James Murdoch joined in his father's footsteps and criticized search engines for not making any contributions to newsgathering.

"Search companies and aggregators skim content from a thousand sources, sell it to clients, scoop up advertising revenues and put little or nothing back into professional newsgathering."

Paid Content reports that Murdoch criticized the long-standing status quo that most content online "wants to be free," adding that this imbalance between search engines and aggregators needs to be redressed.

Press Gazette reports that the amount of time spent reading news online has risen from seven million hours per months to twenty-two million hours (or roughly thirty-minutes per person) a month over the last three years.  The data was compiled by the UK Online Measurement Company based on tracking a sample of 40,000 internet users throughout the UK.

It has been six months since online-only nonprofit investigative journalism outfit, Texas Tribune, launched in Texas. Following in the steps of ProPublica, Texas Tribune aimed to fill in the gaps left by newspapers in investigative journalism, and moved to smash through readership targets early this year.

In March, Texas Tribune's editor-in-chief, Evan Smith, reported that the website had received over 1 million monthly page views for that month.

This week, Evan Smith wrote about what the company had learned during the past six months  to celebrate Texas Tribune's 6-month anniversary, and revealed a series of encouraging "six-month stats" for the viability of nonprofit news organizations. 

Writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Jason Fry recently discussed a South Korean academic paper, entitle "What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media," which examined what characterizes Twitter as a hybrid social networking and news media site.

Consumers have given mainstream media only "middling grades" for their iPad applications so far, according to Alan Mutter, who looked at ratings on the iTunes Store. For the ten most frequently-downloaded news apps (in order of popularity: USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Associated Press, NPR, BBC, Reuters, France 24 and China Daily) the average number of stars was 2.8 out of 5. It must be noted that many news outlets have not yet released iPad-specific applications.

The apps with the most stars were three publicly-funded news outlets. France 24 was rated highest, with 4 stars. The French government-funded TV news channel offers news in English and Arabic as well as French. Next came the BBC and NPR with 3.5 stars. 

If you thought Apple's iPad was ahead in the battle of the tablets, think again: Google is not only said to be building an edgy tablet but also just purchased BumpTop, a Toronto-based startup that specializes in 3-D multitouch technology.

BumpTop's technology would represent an innovative addition to Google's tablet's repertoire: the ability for users to to toss files and programs around, stack them, and even hang them on tiny digital walls. GigaOm reports that this kind of three-dimensional, multitouch user interface would be a "dramatic departure from the typical 2-D app/icon approach" and present an innovative alternative to Apple's design. This technology could also transform user experience with the product.

Yesterday, the Reynolds Journalism Institute hosted a conference to discuss the trends in mobile news with speakers from publications such as, The Miami Herald and National Geographic. On her blog, the Knight Digital Media Center's Michelle McLellan broke down five of the most important points from "Going Mobile: How Newspapers can Meet the Cell Phone Challenge." 

It is no surprise that the most important feature is still content. However, convenience is becoming more and more prominent. Eddie Alvarez from The Miami Herald emphasized that users would pay for the Herald's Dolphin team app even if the information was available on the websites because of the experience of the app is "much better."

Community journalism start-up AllVoices will be launching news desks in 30 cities across the globe, TechCrunch reported on Friday.  The website, founded in 2007, offers citizen journalists a platform to publish and publicize reports on everything from immigration marches in Texas to the recent death of the Polish president.

The creation of news desks will provide for training and guidance for citizen journalists from professional journalists, and those professionals will also contribute original reporting to the site.  Desks will be created in Baghdad, Beijing, Islamabad, London, Nairobi, and Shanghai, with plans to create more local news desks in the US as well.

It was back in January that Steve Jobs took the stage at a San Francisco event and told hundreds of excited Apple enthusiasts to hold the Internet in their hands.

After a three-month wait, on April 3rd, Apple fans were finally able to not only hold the Internet, but also the future of computing in their hands.

Ever since rumors of the launch of Apple's tablet computer started circulating across the Internet, opinions regarding the device have been divided. While some observers have not been optimistic as to what the iPad may mean for the future of media, some media pundits have gone so far as to call it the messiah of print media, hoping it will become a significant source of revenue for newspapers in the near future.

With the much-anticipated U.S. launch of the iPad coming this Saturday, media executives everywhere are waiting with bated breath for the verdict: Will the iPad save news media? No one's sure yet, but tech columnists across the web who managed to get their hands on advance releases of Apple's tablet computer gave generally gushing reviews of the innovative product, ensuring that consumers will be lining up on Saturday to snap up the small stock of iPads delivered to Apple stores and Best Buy.

At the time of its release on Saturday, users will be able to access over 1,000 apps made specifically for the iPad, with 60,000 books in Apple's e-book store.  Among those apps are options from numerous newspapers and magazines, all selling their products with a range of payment plans.  

The Financial Times is offering a free trial of its application sponsored by watchmaker Hublot, and Bloomberg News' app will also be free.  Reuters is offering an app which BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin claims is a "free app in which video is, again, a seamless delight."

While many news websites focus on improving their pageviews and unique users, Gawker Media, producer of nine popular news and gossip sites including Gawker and Jezebel, is banking on the readers that keep coming back for more.

As Gawker Media's head of advertising and marketing operations Erin Pettigrew puts it, the company hopes to strengthen its "core readership."

"This core audience -- borne of a compounding of word of mouth, search referrals, article recommendations, and successive enjoyed visits that result in regular readership -- drives our rich site cultures and premium advertising products," she said.