Results matching “a new media world”

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.

Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking ones.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told Reuters that "if we get the right functionality and design," the iPad could "produce interesting, significant revenue streams," according to PaidContent.

Because developing an application for the iPad will not require any different skills from the ones required to launch an iPhone app, news publishers that have had success with iPhone apps, are now looking to cash in on the iPad.

The London Evening Standard's readership has gone from 556,000 in April to September to 1.37 million in the last three months of 2009, Stephen Brook from Guardian reports.

These positive readership figures follow the newspaper going free in October of last year and more than doubling its circulation to 600,000 copies in the process. The London Evening Standard was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebeveb in 2008, and his decision to drop the paper's 50p cover price was made in the hope that boosted circulation would increase advertising enough to make up for the lost revenue of having no cover price. His move towards the freesheet format prompted speculation that other London quality newspapers may drop their cover price as well.

Newspaper publisher News International has launched a review of its search, affiliate, social media and pay-per-click business for some of its online newspaper brands, Media Week reports.

The publisher is looking for a search and social media agency to handle online brands including online bingo for The Sun and News of the World, as well as its online fantasy football game Dream Team.

The News of the World yesterday lost its court case to withhold secret evidence that allegedly documents the extensive use of phone-hacking by the newspaper's reporters and private investigators into the phone accounts of celebrities.

Judge Vos of the high court called for the evidence to be handed over to Max Clifford, a celebrity publicist. Clifford had alleged that the newspaper illegally tapped into the private voicemail of his mobile phone.

As News Corp announced profits of $254 million over the three months up to December, Rupert Murdoch said his company is close to implementing online subscription models for all of its newspapers like the Times, the News of the World, and the Sun.

The company is also in "advanced negotiations" with handheld-device manufacturers about possible paywalls that would allow customers access to News Corp content "whenever and wherever they want it," said Murdoch.

According to Murdoch, "ingenious and fabulous devices" like the iPad and the Kindle "would be unloved and unsold" without the creative content supplied by newspapers. "Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things digital. We're on the cusp of a digital revolution from which our shareholders will profit handsomely," said Murdoch.

The Guardian has ruled out implementing paywalls on its website, but may still decide to charge for specialist or niche content, the Financial Times reports.

Chief executive of the Guardian Media Group Carolyn McCall told the Financial Times that although her position is not entrenched, she sees no commercial evidence that paywalls generate returns. "It is not really the way the web works," she said.

"That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for," she added.

Three leading British phone companies have confirmed that over 100 customer accounts were illegally accessed by a private investigator and journalist at the News of the World, claims Nick Davies of the Guardian in the latest development in the phone-hacking scandal that let to a parliamentary committee enquiry.

Scotland Yard supplied 02, Vodafone, and Orange with phone numbers used by News of the World's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, to access the private voicemails of customers like Prince William and Boris Johnson. Working backwards to trace customers whose voicemail had been dialed from those numbers, Vodafone and 02 each found that "about 40" voicemails had been compromised, while Orange found that 45 customer accounts had been hacked.

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

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

The Associated Press (AP) and Yahoo have renewed an agreement for AP stories, photos and videos to appear on the Yahoo website, it was widely reported. This is in contrast to the AP's negotiations with Google and Microsoft, which have not yet concluded. New AP content has not been hosted on Google News since December 24.

Neither party has offered details of the agreement, so it is unclear whether they have achieved their financial objectives. The deal had previously been expected to set a higher price for AP's stories and impose tighter restrictions on them.

The AP has previously argued that agreements providing relatively inexpensive access to a broad range of its content only devalue its news offerings. The New York Times reported that the AP was asking news websites for more money, but that aggregators have been arguing that news content is less valuable than it used to be because advertising is down.

The Australian media regulatory body is set to start using social media, having appointed a former newspaper editor to create its social media strategy.

Tom Burton, former executive editor of broadsheet newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, has been appointed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to oversee its government 2.0 and social engagement strategies.

Burton was previously working in the US as the Communications and On-Line Director of The Center for American Progress. His role involved implementing web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 practices, that is, changing how the government used social networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites and wikis to interact with the public. He has also worked as a ministerial adviser to a former Australian Minister for Communications.

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

The Guardian website has done it again - the newspaper's website has just announced it has achieved its second record-breaking month in a row with nearly 37 million unique users for December, according to its website.

This surpassed its November record by 3.32%, according to figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, according to a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group. The study's full findings will be reported in coming weeks, and may mean the newspaper industry needs to decide even faster how to make its online offerings economically sustainable, Dorian Benkoil reported in Poynter Online.

Young people aged 18-24 were the only segment that recorded a year-on-year drop for any digital media category, specifically for online newspapers. In 2008, around 64% of those surveyed said they had read a newspaper online in the last year, while by 2009 that figure had fallen to 54%.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

Journalists should be willing to fight for strong freedom of information and open records laws, said the president of the Associated Press in a speech on Friday.

Speaking at the Kentucky Press Association, AP president Tom Curley stressed the importance of these laws as part of the "journalistic tool kit" to help reporters access information in the public interest.

"It's vital," he said. "A strong FOIA in the hands of strong journalists with strong legal support breaks news."

A new non-profit news website has launched in Connecticut today, Poynter Online reports, with the dual aims of reporting the news and providing its readers access to resources that are hard to find online.

The Connecticut Mirror bills itself as "an independent source of news and information about our state's government, politics and public policy". It comes in time for an important state budget and an election year.

Editor Michael Regan writes that the Guide to Politics and Government his site offers provides "the most comprehensive information available any where on the state's elected officials".

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

Covering major sport events is becoming more and more complex: with more "media rights" being sold every day and for every event, the straightforward businesses of news-gathering, providing news services and running commercial programmes alongside news coverage can be difficult.

In response to this, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN) has set up a special Master Class to help news executives navigate complicated "media rights" issues and avoid legal red tape when providing coverage of the 2010 football World Cup and other events.

The Master Class will include the expertise of a sport news executive, Juan Ignacio Gallardo, Deputy Editor of the Spanish sports daily Marca, who can catalogue the numerous restrictions he and his team face on a daily basis in covering sports events, along with the contribution of Andrew Moger, Executive Director of the News Media Coalition, an expert in media rights with long-standing experience as a journalist, who will describe the current regulations and help participants deal with the current rules and issues

The IASN Master Class will be held on 5 February next at the state-of-the-art Olympic and Sport Museum in Barcelona, Spain. Full details can be found at http://www.press-iasn.org, or email Rosarita Cuccoli (rcuccoli@press-iasn.org).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building an audience from scratch

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

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

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

Prize partnerships

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

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

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

Passport to premium services

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

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

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

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

What's next?

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

Journalists might be doing more harm than good in Haiti, suggests Noam Scheiber in a polemical piece published yesterday in the New Republic. While many journalists initially struggled to get to Haiti amid the chaos, nearly all major news outlets have a presence in Port-au-Prince by now. The New York Times and Washington Post each have ten staff in the country, not to mention CNN and CBS with their fifty-person production crews.

In some ways, he feels the mere presence of the media is hindering the rescue efforts they came to report. An excess of news staff puts an unfair burden on the country's already meager resources, with reporters "mooching off supplies intended for earthquake victims." On top of that, he dismisses the bulk of the news reported back as "redundant."

The New York Times Magazine reported on Sunday that the New York Times was poised to start charging online, citing un-named sources close to the decision-makers. The NY Magazine claims that the paper is looking at a metered system, similar to that adopted by the Financial Times. Reactions from media commentators suggest that the paper should step carefully, however.

Reuters writer Felix Salmon is a big fan of the New York Times' site, and believes that "any kind of paywall implementation is going to result in a deterioration of the experience of using it."

"Making people pay for access will almost certainly scotch the NYTimes.com's position," believes Jennifer Saba of Editor & Publisher. She believes that "AOL, NPR, CNN smell blood and will most certainly angle for those readers to come and read news for free." She adds that it is "baffling" that the NYT is trying to charge online but is giving away its mobile app for free: "why not charge for an app and seed people's behavior now?"

It's been a rough week for Google. After last week's standoff with China and a proposed Google tax in France, Germany's newspaper and magazine publisher associations, the VDZ and BDZV, have now taken aim at the search-engine giant through an official complaint with the country's Federal Cartel Office.

While the exact text of the complaint has yet to be released, the publishers' complaint reportedly concerns the search-engine's use of excerpts or "snippets" from online news articles which appear in the search results for Google News. The two publisher associations had previously objected to Google profiting from their copyrighted online content without being compensated from the company's ad revenues. Publishers also claim the current copyright regulations are too lax and fail to protect writers from plagiarism. In November, a BDZV official demanded more transparency from Google in the way they rank their news results.