Results matching “for publishers and search”

Here's Part 2 of a piece submitted to us by Chris McGillion, former Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He currently coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

In the following, he outlines five key points presented by some of his journalism students to top execs in the newspaper industry, who it seems would be better off heeding their advice :

Also read Part 1: The value of the journalism graduate.

Last year the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association (Panpa) invited five of my journalism students from Charles Sturt University (CSU) to give a keynote presentation at its annual conference in Melbourne on what their generation wanted from the newspaper of the future.

Newspaper decision-makers have access to the latest statistics and trends in audience research as a matter of course. But they rarely if at all have five representatives of Generation Y - the readership base of the future - holding court without interruption for ninety minutes on what they want in a newspaper and why.

My students made five major points. First, while not discounting a continuing (if diminishing) market for hard-copy newspapers, they argued that the "newspaper' of the future would have to be web-based in order to attract sustained patronage from their generation.

This is consistent with the results of annual surveys of first year communication students at CSU (200 in all of whom almost half are journalism students). These results show an increasing trend toward accessing news online (34.7% did so at least weekly in 2007) and decreasing hardcopy newspaper consumption (down to 41% at least weekly in 2007).

Further evidence of our students' attachment to web-based technology is daily usage of Hotmail accounts (60.7% in 2007), the Google search engine (72.7%), and social networking websites such as MySpace (33.3%).
 
Second, the student presenters argued that future web-based news sites would have to play a "gateway" role rather than the traditional "gatekeeper" role. Put simply, young people these days don't like to be told what news is or what they should consider important: personalised, tailored content will be the hallmark of Generation Y's media consumption.

Another side of this cultural shift is that Generation Y doesn't like to be told what to buy: they will certainly follow trends and adopt brands but both must be - or must appear to be - peer-recommended (and remember we are dealing with people who may have up to 400 "friends" on their social networking websites).

This shift has important implications for advertisers and thus the way media organizations fund their operations.

Third, the most popular news sites will allow for a degree of interactivity. Young people don't only want to know what's happening in the outside world: they also want the outside world to know what they think about what's happening and even, increasingly, to be the ones defining and providing whatever it is that is happening.

Fourth, reputable media organisations remain highly valued. This seems to be a function of information overload and the consequent need to filter what's "out there" together with attitudes ingrained from parents (and reinforced by teachers and public figures) about reliability and quality. 

Fifth, and most important, Generation Y will change the economics of the newspaper industry. In an internet age, young people do not see the need to pay for information.  But nor do they have the same concerns about privacy as their parents and grandparents. Their's, after all, is the "Big Brother' generation whose private lives have become the stuff of public consumption.

The students at Panpa then unveiled their idea for a proto-type web-based "newspaper". It was designed as a gateway to the internet: it allowed readers to pre-sort the news they received, to access email and other social networking sites, and to provide their own "news" stories, comment and photos. It also offered free mobile phones and/or phone accounts in exchange for personal information which the site host then sold on to advertisers.

I had worked closely with the students for three months on this presentation. Sitting in the audience of 300 or so (mostly middle-aged male) editors and publishers, I heard enough grumbling about what the students were saying to fear that the presentation was a PR disaster for the journalism course I run. "Free newspapers and mobile phones!" I heard one editor complain under his breath. "What else do these people want?"

Then, one by one, three international experts on the subject of trends in the newspaper industry - representing IFRA, INMA, and News Digital Media - were invited to respond to the students' presentation. Their message was clear, simple - and reassuring for me at least: in no uncertain terms they each told the audience that they ignored what my students told them to their peril.


Chris McGillion coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University, Australia (cmcgillion@csu.edu.au).

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Stay tuned, as we will shortly be resuming our 'Future of Journalism' series with interviews from editors at The New York Times and the Financial Times.

Website traffic is measured by several factors: page views, unique visitors, time spent on a page, etc., but David Cohn of Columbia Journalism Review writes that there is no precise way to calculate web readership or traffic.

Cohn asks: Why would advertisers choose a news site over one like Google, which obviously garners thousands of viewers, if there is no accurate way to measure web traffic? And how can they agree on rates?

"This may be the most measurable medium in history, but the measurements all suck," says Steve Yelvington, an Internet strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, which manages websites for more than sixty newspapers and thirty radio stations.

Most publishers know their statistics through census data from web servers that count how many times a site is visited. However, the data includes "bots" and "spiders" that search engines send out to index content for searchers, and they inflate the number of visitors counted by internal servers, mostly because of "cookie deletion." Cookies allow a page to recognize a viewer, so unique visitors can be counted. But with users constantly emptying their cookies, a site's traffic can be increased by 150%, according to Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore Inc., a global Internet information provider. Essentially, 10 million viewers is probably closer to 4 million.

Organizations such as comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings will share traffic numbers within a plus-or-minus 2% error margin from panelists of randomly selected sites who agree to be monitored. Cohn writes that these sample-based numbers can underreport, especially since these panels don't account for international traffic or traffic from work computers.

Though the panel and census system aren't perfect, publishers and advertisers can make relative comparisons within their market with the two.

George Ivie, executive director and CEO of the Media Ratings Council (MRC), wants to reconcile the two systems with his not-for-profit trade association. The council began with TV and radio audience size, but turned its attention to the Internet in 2002 and wrote standards for audience census data, including page views, clicks on a page, and time spent on a site, all new measurements with the Internet.

MRC requires news organizations that want their traffic counts to be approved by the ratings council to adopt the council's standards, such as counting only content that is accessed through an end browser.

Only a few organizations have been audited by MRC, such as Yahoo, msn, and AOL and advertisers like Atlas and Doubleclick, giving them an advantage when negotiating advertising rates, according to Cohn.

In 2006, MRC began auditing comScore and Nielsen/ NetRatings. Nielsen/Net-Ratings had decided that time spent on a site was more important than total Web page views because visitors spend more time on a page when watching videos and new programs allow visitors to interact with a page (like voting in a poll) without having to reload an entirely new page. But, having a window open does not necessarily mean that the visitor is engaged the whole time, thus this measurement is also inaccurate.

Because the Internet is always changing, there may be new metrics in the future to retrieve more accurate statistics.

Source: CJR

Google's recently introduced search function is getting a mixed reception.

The new feature (click on the photo fora better view) allows users to surf newspaper and other sites remotely. For example, if someone searches New York Times, Google brings up an in-page Search nytimes.com box that lets a user browse NYT content without ever going to the newspaper's site. The feature has not yet been introduced to Google's foreign language sites. See here for more details on the search function and Google's other new service, Google Trends.   

The initial fears that Google's new feature would detract from advertising revenue are still alive and well. As the New York Times and blogger Martin Belam contend, there is a risk that the new function "could reduce page impressions" for the publisher itself, reports Paid Content.

Others, however, are much more optimistic.

"If [the search] does such a great job as to make our internal search too redundant, then that's fine," said Edward Roussel, Telegraph.co.uk digital editor. "At the end of the day we want people to read our content but we don't mind how they find it."  

Guardian.co.uk blogs editor Kevin Anderson also points out that some news organizations are pushing their readers to use Google because their own search functions are so inefficient.

Source: Paid Content 

The World Association of Newspapers and other publishers organisations today (19 March) welcomed Google CEO Eric Schmidt's statement supporting the aim of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) to give publishers more control over the use of their content.

Speaking to a reporter in Sydney earlier this week, Mr Schmidt said that the only barriers to Google's implementation of ACAP were technical, and he denied that Google was reluctant to embrace the system because of commercial self-interest. "It is not that we don't want them (publishers) to be able to control their information," he said.

ACAP is a new publishing standard that allows website terms and conditions to be placed in machine-readable format so that publishers can have a say in how news aggregators and search engine companies use their content. Publishers world-wide have begun implementing it on their websites, and WAN last week again called on Google to embrace it. More on the protocol, a joint initiative of the European Publishers Council, the World Association of Newspapers and the International Publishers Association, can be found at www.the-acap.org.

Mr Schmidt said that ACAP, as currently specified, is incompatible with Google's proprietary search engine technology but that "we have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work."

Gavin O'Reilly, President of WAN and Chairman of ACAP, said: "We are pleased that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that they would be willing to implement ACAP if it were not for some technical incompatibility issues.  As Mr. Schmidt knows, we have worked very closely with Google at a technical level throughout the past year in the ACAP project phase.

"Naturally, we are disappointed that we have yet to overcome their remaining technical barriers to 'live' implementation, but we have always stressed that we will do whatever is necessary to make ACAP work technically and seamlessly for all search engines. Our aspirations for ACAP have always been led by business needs and not by any preconceived technical solution," he said.

Mr O'Reilly said Mr. Schmidt's statement, reported in IT Wire, "is hugely reassuring. We really look forward to continuing to work with Google to do the necessary work to match our business requirements with their technical specifications and thus make it possible for Google to immediately adopt the ACAP protocol for the benefit of digital publishing worldwide."

Source: WAN Press Release

Since the recent launch of ACAP,  the new standard to protect the intellectual property of anyone publishing on the worldwide web, the blogosphere has been full of comments about it -- and not all of them have been polite.

Follow the Media’s Philip Stone takes a look at ACAP, the recently launched Automatic Content Access Protocol designed to help publishers control the way search engines crawl their content. Unfortunately, while many publishers support ACAP, major search engines have yet to adopt it.

FT.com yesterday published its 10 most-read articles in 2007 on its website. The most popular article deals neither with Madeleine McCann nor the appearance of missing canoeist, instead it's an article about the “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down the Roman empire.

“The role of the journalist is key in bringing trusted information to readers… Print media is going to be the most trusted media in the future,” said information society commissioner Viviane Reding at the recent annual Publishers' Forum in Brussels, where publishers exchanged views with the European Commission.

Topix, an online news and community network, is reportedly in talks with online news publishers about expanding the use of its hyper-local editing platform to create quick-fire news pages.

Publishers everywhere are being asked to implement ACAP, Automated Content Access Protocol, developed at the initiative of the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council.

On November 8th, Google was granted a patent titled “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications.” Many bloggers have speculated that this patent was granted so that Google could offer users the ability to create customized and printed magazines from Internet content, complete with customized ads.

Technology firm Attributor, already paired with both Reuters and The Associated Press has been successful in allowing publishers to track their content on the Internet.

A new standard to protect the intellectual property of anyone wishing to make content available on the worldwide web will be unveiled at a conference in New York next month after a year-long pilot project spearheaded by leading publishing groups from around the globe.

Google announced on Friday that it struck deals with four major international news agencies. Under the agreement, Google News will become the publisher of their news stories.

Google has reportedly expanded its newspaper print-ad sales test by adding 255 newspapers across the most populous areas in the US.  In addition, the program is now open to any Google advertiser.

According to Jim Duncan, former managing editor of The Observer, the best UK newspaper website has only 30% of its print audience.  Oddly enough, a new study by the Newspaper National Network LP revealed that 81% of newspaper readers are “crossover” users.

At a June 26 conference in London, the World Association of Newspapers and a global coalition of publishing and media groups gave a progress report on the development of the Automated Content Access Protocol.  ACAP is a new standard with which online content providers could automatically regulate the use of their content through search engines operators.