Results matching “of online news sites”

Remarkably, over this past week search giant Google was surpassed by social networking site Facebook as most visited website online in the US, with only 7.03 percent of all website visits to Facebook's 7.07 percent, according to an analysis done by Hitwise.  The difference in visits, albeit small, is telling, as it reflects the growing tendency of internet users to look to their friends rather than search engines for online media.

Facebook does come in as the fourth source for visits to specifically news and media websites, behind the main Google search site, Yahoo, and MSN.  But when compared to smaller search sites Google News and Google Reader, which direct 1.39 and .01 percent respectively of all upstream visitors to news and media websites, Facebook has a clear lead in providing 3.52 percent of all visits.

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."

Nonprofit investigative news website California Watch is aiming to boost reader participation by offering a free iPod touch to its best commenters each month over the next six.  

California Watch follows in the well-tread footsteps of small blogs across the internet hoping to boost their readership and strengthen their online community.

While some sites, like Scienceblogs.org, require users simply to comment to be entered into their contests, California Watch requires its winning commenters to be "thoughtful, focused, and articulate in making your argument."

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.

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.

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.

A report from the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism published Monday found that just over a quarter of Americans read news on their mobile devices.

The study, "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer," explores the effect of digital media and wireless mobility on news consumption. The center surveyed owners of cell phones, Blackberries, and other mobile devices about the different ways they access news remotely.

The report revealed that 26% of American adults get "some form of news via cell phone" - a figure which breaks down to 33% of adult cell phone users and 88% of adults who have mobile internet. Among those "on-the-go news consumers," 68% get current events and news on their cell phone.

The BBC is to halve its number of web pages, as well as closing two radio stations and cutting spending on imported TV shows, the Times reported. The changes will be announced next month by director-general Mark Thompson, according to the Times, and Thompson will admit that the corporation has become too large and must shrink to allow its commercial rivals more room to operate.

The halving of the number of pages on the BBC website will be accompanied by a 25% cut in staff numbers and a 25% cut of its £112m budget. To appease rival publishers, it will pledge to include more links to articles from other news outlets, and not to produce news services at a more local level than it does currently. These latter elements do not signify a dramatic change in policy: last month, the BBC's director of news Helen Boaden asserted that the organisation was not looking to go more local, and the corporation's news website already provides a "from other news sites" section alongside each story where it displays links to similar articles on newspaper websites.

Newspapers are still the most used and valued local news destinations, and online is no exception, according to a new study from comScore and the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web sites are the "most used and valued sites for consumers seeking credible and trustworthy local content and advertising online," the survey found.

About 57 percent of the more than 3,000 respondents said local newspaper sites are their top online sources for local information - more than the totals for all other media. The percentage is higher for those with a college education (60 percent) and households with higher incomes (63 percent).

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

The Newspaper Publishers Association (the representative body for all big UK publishers) is stirring up a backlash against the BBC, 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.

In a staunch statement emailed to paidContent:UK, the NPA's director Director David Newell wrote:

"Not for the first time, the BBC is preparing to muscle into a nascent market and trample over the aspirations of commercial news providers.

The average time spent on US news websites fell in January this year, compared to January 2009, Editor and Publisher reports.

The figures from a year ago are difficult to compare with those from this year because of the presidential inauguration in January 2009. Of course, it is important that audience measurement remains consistent, as there will always be large news stories that make comparisons more complicated.

The study from Nielsen Online defines 'time spent' as the average time spent per person over the course of one month. The top news and current events sites managed between seven and 24 minutes of user attention.

The New York Times' website has moved back up to fifth spot on the Nielsen Online rankings of top current events websites, Editor and Publisher reports.

In the January rankings, the NYTimes.com had the fifth-highest number of unique users at 20.5 million, two spots up from seventh place in December when it had 14.8 million.

The top spot was taken by CNN Digital Network with 40.6 million users, overtaking Yahoo! News, which managed just under 40 million.

More details have been released about the MediaNews paywall plans, which will charge for investigations and analysis but not for breaking news, Poynter Online reports.

Vice president for content development Howard Saltz said that investigations, enterprise, analysis, columns and reviews will be behind the paywall. "The kind of content that goes behind a wall is the kind of content that paid, professional journalists do," he told Poynter, "the kinds of things that you really couldn't count on bloggers and Web enthusiasts to do."

Articles will be free if it's necessary to remain competitive with other news sources, including breaking news and multimedia, he said.

The Huffington Post has launched an application for Yahoo!, Media Bistro reports. The app will allow Yahoo! users to browse the popular opinion and aggregation website without leaving their homepage, use their Yahoo! account to log into HuffPost and join HuffPost Social News, and to share their comments with other contacts on Yahoo! as easily as sharing to Facebook.

An editorial partnership between the two parties will lead to more HuffPost stories featured on Yahoo! News.

The application features sections for front page news, most popular stories, blog posts and general news. Users can flip between different sections including politics, media, business, entertainment, sports, technology and others.

From the loss of advertising revenue for newspapers to the emergence of a slew of multi-functional, deluxe e-readers, times are changing for the print industry - and they are doing so quickly.

So, what can we expect for the future of the printed word in the next couple years? Some media insiders spoke to CNN to offer some insight on what could be in store for newspapers.

The New York Times' free iPhone application has been downloaded 3 million times since its launch in July 2008, The Guardian reports.

In December, the Times managed at least 75 million mobile pageviews across its mobile sites and apps. The figures were announced by president and CEO of the Times Janet Robinson during the company's earnings call.

The Times had 3.1 million unique mobile users in December, placing it seventh in Nielsen's mobile news rankings, MocoNews reports. It ranked behind CNN.com's mobile site, which had 12.3 million uniques, and Yahoo News, Fox News Digital and Google News. The app also ranks second in the 'free news' category of the app store under Zinio's magazine reader app.

The MediaNews Group has released details of its plans to charge for content online, announced in November last year, Bloomberg reports. The publisher will adopt a metered system similar to that planned at The New York Times.

Two newspapers, the Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania, and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, will start charging in May. They will give users access to up to 25 'premium' articles a month, after which they will be required to pay a fee. Print subscriptions will include access to the website. Premium content may include some columns and investigative reporting, MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic said.

The founding director of a Political Management master's degree program at the George Washington University surveyed 371 print and web journalists from September to October of last year, with the aim of establishing to what extent social media tools are used in the research and distribution of articles.

The results of the online survey, reported on the university's newspaper website, found that 56 percent of those surveyed said that social media was important or somewhat important for reporting and producing stories, with the overwhelming majority citing the internet as the starting point for their research- despite the fact that 84 percent said news and information delivered via social media was slightly less or much less reliable than news delivered via traditional media.

German publisher Axel Springer has made good on its promises and put up online paywalls for two of its German newspapers, Paid Content reports.

Two of its newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Hamburger Abendblatt, are now charging for online content. It now costs €4.95 a month for access to all content on morgenpost.de. By contrast, abendblatt.de has a mixture of free and premium content, with a premium subscription priced at €7.95 a month. It appears to charge extra for content specific to the Hamburg region while providing national news for free. Subscriptions for both sites are renewed on a monthly basis.

In a time where newspapers seem to be losing more and more revenue, figures from Gannett Co. Inc.'s fourth quarter released today, showed potential positive results for the months ahead.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannett swung to a profit in the fourth quarter following $5.6 billion in prior-year write-downs. Lower declines in advertising sales combined with much lower expenses helped the newspaper publisher show improvement.

The past few years has seen the explosive growth of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, and a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue that has set about ravaging the newspaper industry. PoynterOnline has now reported new enterprises between the two industries however, which could prove profitable for both.  

Few news outlets are without their own Twitter account these days, using the site's micro-blogging capabilities as a means to distribute stories and attract a wider audience. The Austin American-Statesman is using theirs to sell tweets to local business, which can advertise their enterprises on the newspaper's Twitter account.

Mirror.co.uk has this week followed the lead of News International and blocked its content from online news aggregator NewsNow, paidContent reported. NewsNow is now the only site blocked from crawling the Mirror online.

"We're not big fans of their business model," Mirror.co.uk digital director Matt Kelly said.

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.

Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, French news sites like L'Express and Le Figaro will be providing paid-for online content, Le Monde has reported.

Le Figaro mentioned that it was introducing a "premium" paywall option in January but put the plans on hold for a while. It may launch the feature in February, Le Monde added. The newspaper's paywall model is not yet ready or profitable, and would, in its current state, cost more to implement than it would make from subscriptions.

For more on this story, please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com.