Results matching “still in test p”

Non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica is taking advantage of the Super Bowl to dig into the fundraising efforts of politicians, Poynter Online reports.

Reporter Marcus Stern planned to use the football game, held yesterday, to spot members of Congress who were attending and figure out how they obtained their tickets. But since he knew that trying to contact 535 members of Congress would be too big a task for one person, he turned the investigation into a crowdsourcing effort and asked professional journalists and the public to help collaborate.

"To some extent, this is going to be a test of the privacy or the openness of members of Congress when it comes to fundraising," Stern told Poynter Online.

The New York Times has gained another 1100 subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area after launching a local section for the area last autumn, the San Francisco Business Times reports.

A senior Times executive, Jim Schachter, told the Business Times that it wasn't just subscriptions that have risen. "Single-copy sales are up too," he said. "We're delighted at the reception we're getting from Bay Area readers for the pages that Felicity Barringer is editing, and for our Bay Area blog." San Francisco-based technology reporters also write for the paper's business section.

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

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.  

The BBC, who yesterday announced a new initiative to grant the general public access to professional media training resources, has also revealed it will expand the content available on its news website by linking to rival sources via an aggregation-like system, reports The Independent.

The move comes after accusations headed by News Corp's chairman and CEO for Europe and Asia, James Murdoch, that the corporation, in choosing to remain free, is flooding the market and preventing competitors from expanding online and charging for their content.  The new plan would reportedly see links to commerical websites added at the end of BBC stories.  

Having enjoyed a successful career in print journalism for over 25 years, holding the position of editor in chief at Sp!ts for the last four, Bart Brouwers has announced his departure from the role, leaving the job in the capable hands of his deputy, Willem Schouten.

More comment on online paywalls today, with the Guardian offering examples of websites that charge for content successfully.

More common than the "pay to get in" wall, allowing subscriber-only access to all content, is the "freemium" style subscription, it explains. In the latter model, some content is subscriber-only and the rest is free.

With pressure mounting against Google from newspapers angered by the way it helps readers bypass their paywalls; the search engine giant has agreed to aid publishers by putting a cap on subscription websites.

The cap will limit free access to five articles per day, after which readers will be redirected to a registration page or payment screen. Previously, users have been able to continually view subscription articles for free by entering news websites via Google.

Last Sunday was an important day for Germany's quality Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag, as it made its online debut, launching a new paid-for multimedia magazine, or "eMag", developed by parent publishing giant Axel Springer.

The eMag is undeniably well-designed, which comes as little surprise considering the project was dreamed up by the newspaper's art director and general wunderkind, Jördis Guzmán Bulla, gold medal winner for her design portfolio in 2007, whose team also won "World's Best Designed Newspaper" earlier this year.

Johnston Press, the second largest newspaper owner (measured by weekly circulation) in Britain, has announced it will trial paywalls at six of the company's websites as of Monday in order to test the consumer reaction to charging online, reports Press Gazette.

Six newspapers- the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Whitby Gazette, the Northumberland Gazette, the Carrick Gazette and the Southern Reporter- are expected to take part in the experiment which will prevent readers from viewing content unless they sign up to pay £5 for a three month subscription.

USA Today have launched a new initiative in collaboration with Penn State University, Indiana University and the University of Missouri to test how students respond to e-paper versions of the print publication.  


The e-edition of USA Today is assured to be identical to the print version with the only difference being additional content and interactive features. The e-edition for Penn State, for example, includes a story chosen and written by the school about a relevant univeristy topic.

Two German entrepreneurs are setting up a new kind of home delivered newspaper among worldwide news print failures. On November 16^th the brave young businessmen are venturing into the industry with an innovative newspaper service - the first of its kind in Europe - at arguably the worst time, and for a limited Berlin-only market. But its very unorthodoxy, the essence Wanja Oberhof's and Hendrik Tiedmann's Niiu personalized newspaper, could be its saving grace.

Niiu Beginnings

The Niiu started with an idea, two and a half years ago, ultimately about information convenience. Having grown up in a newspaper-reading household, Mr. Oberhof became used to reading multiple papers to pursue the news and information he was interested in.  Having to juggle multiple national, local, and international papers to find one's interests would inevitably become a chore, especially vis-à-vis the speed and convenience of internet news. The same behavioral phenomenon is in fact the very reason why the internet seems to be ruining traditional newspapers; people, especially young adults and students, are tending find their news and information from a variety of sources on the internet rather than a single source that marked the newspaper's monopoly and success in the 20^th century. 

Oberhof's resulting idea was simple and clear: an individualized newspaper, composed of selected pages and sections from papers, delivered each morning to one's door just like a regular paper. This combination of paper format and internet convenience and accessibility found Oberhof a business partner in Hendrik Tiedmann, who shared the same idea. Together they founded InterTi GmbH, Niuu's parent company, funded out of their own pockets, and began doing their homework.

"The whole idea was based on our own behavior research and experience; [as young people] we're used to very different information sources. The main idea was to combine all the varying sources of news and information, because it is normal for young people who have grown up with the internet to have not one source of information but many," Mr. Obherof said in a telephone interview with The Editor's Weblog. But why a newspaper format? Surely a less risky and lower-cost alternative would be setting up a personal news aggregator.

Oberhof disagrees. "We asked this target group which is the most comfortable and which is the best distribution channel; is it an e-paper, is it only on mobile, is it printed or online? The feedback was that for now, paper is still the best distribution channel." Hence the simple combination of the internet and printed paper that is the essence of Niiu.

Interestingly, the founders have no particular allegiance to print, it just happens to be the currently favored distribution channel. "The vision that we offer is all the information that is relevant for the reader. As a next step it is the reader's choice which distribution channel they will use, whether it's a mobile phone, e-paper, the internet, or whatever else." Their focus is information amalgamation and distribution, the particular channel being largely irrelevant and ultimately the client's choice. This is quite an unusual position for a company entering the print industry, which these days seems to require a great deal of faith.

What Niiu is and How it Works (The Technical Bit)

On the client's side the process is very simple. After signing up for a short-term subscription (more on that later), they have until 2 p.m. to choose their news sources for the following morning's paper. On Niiu's website they can select from a wide variety of publications and online sources; from national, local or international newspapers like the New York Times, or internet news sources and blogs. A 24-page personalized paper, researched from and composed of their choices, then appears on the subscriber's doorstep the next morning.

"At this first step, for the reader it is only possible to select whole pages or sections," says Oberhof. From newspapers the readers can select pages or sections, from the internet providers they choose from over 600 very diverse rss feeds, from "Women's tennis blogs to local garden pages, we have lots of special interest content available." Clients currently cannot access their personalized paper online, as this would basically defeat the purpose of the delivered print format.

On Oberhof and Tiedmann's side, however, things are a bit more complicated. It is no easy feat to compile, print, and distribute thousands of individual papers. Over the past two years, InterTi GmbH has had to create a specialized software for compiling sources and setting the layout, arrange digital printing deals, close licensing contracts with news sources, attract advertisers, create a new business model and work out delivery schedules. So how did they do all that?

"We outsource everything," says Oberhof. "We don't have an editorial team, we don't have the printing machines, we don't have a delivery structure; we have partners. First we had to create software, so we got a partner with a Swiss web and print specialist service. They produced our software that combines all the pages and articles and news for each reader into a print-ready .pdf that is sent to the digital printing machines from the Netherlands, and a German copy house takes care of the actual printing. Then we have an agreement with a Berlin delivery service that delivers all the international newspapers that will also now deliver Niiu." Given all this outsourcing and subcontracting, one wonders whether circulation revenue will cover the costs.

Luckily there is another revenue source, the very one that is ruining traditional papers, and where the Niiu shines most brightly: it offers a space for highly targeted advertising, something already optimistic advertisers will pay dearly for. At first, during the 'trial phase' of the first few months, advertising will be more general because the Niiu is new and won't have a large circulation. But with an expanded subscriber base ads will become more targeted, focusing on neighborhoods their corresponding socio-economic groups.

Oberhof is confident of his advertising model. "We have had large amounts of positive feedback from advertising clients, and they have several different ideas such as at first only distinguishing between male and female readers, then differentiating by neighborhood and age in Berlin. Some big German car players are interested and have said 'different cars for different people' based on the interests of the readers, like the family man being interested in the new X5 or the young student being shown the BMW 1." Who the people are and more particularly what their interests are would be clear from their choice of news sources for their Niiu's composition.

Ignoring that their proclaimed audience is exclusively young students and not old people and family men, this raises some questions about whether using personal information for advertising violates some privacy protections. But this is doubtful as various advertisers and distributors have used similar techniques for years: think about those supermarket coupon promotional catalogues, also known as 'junk mail,' which you might get at your front door. They differ per neighborhood using the same concept (in my experience, I got Pioneer Supermarket rice coupons up in Harlem, while my friends downtown got brochures for Citarella).

Of course, a paper cannot live on adverts alone. In terms of subscriptions, Niiu continues to be innovative. The subscription packages are aimed towards young readers and students, the paper's perennial target audience (and probably one of the more difficult market sectors to enter, especially in media and technology).

Mr. Oberhof explains: "We have several different packages, not a traditional subscription but a pre-paid system. You load up money for packages, like the one-day trial, or the longer-term packages over 25, 75 or 150 days. It's not a classical subscription at all, that's an important point for us, because many young people, according to our feedback, don't want a subscription for a year because they do not know where they will be in the near future, whether studying in a different city, or doing an international internship or living at home, so they want short-term packages." Currently Niiu is priced at €1.80 per issue, €1.20 for students.

Is this really a good way to build subscriber loyalty? There is a risk of high turnover, potentially running through the market potential before they get established. However this model makes sense for their target demographic. Personally I find this an appealing arrangement. Not really knowing where I will be in six months has prevented me from subscribing to my publications of choice, so I read online news while I would prefer the print editions.

Challenges

One of the biggest questions I had for Mr. Oberhof was regarding the licensing and use of articles and content from news providers. In the context of the current debate over paid online content and the associated problem of the cost of news and journalism, this is quite a pressing concern and I was most interested in what Niiu's arrangements were. Surprisingly, it was unsurprising and rather simple.

Niiu has a contract with each newspaper and online provider, in which "we have a little license fee which we pay for every used page," Oberhof explains. The licenses, and thus the copies of Niiu itself, are based on pages: "we pay a fixed fee for each page we use...because we take one-to-one pages from each newspaper," meaning the pages of Niiu are exact replicas of the original page from the source. This setup will be the working model for the first few trial months.

"The newspapers give us access to everything they have. That means every page and article that is used in the New York Times we can have the next day in Niiu," although details on how blogs and internet sources would be presented are a bit fuzzy. It would be safe to assume that they would appear in Niiu as they would in your browser, albeit reformatted and resized.

An obvious question regards how newspaper publishers feel about Niiu and why they would allow access to their articles, when this could very well cannibalize their own sales. While some certainly think so, the majority of publishers approached by Oberhof and Tiedmann have embraced the idea and accepted licensing contracts.

"Most of [the news publishers] think it's an interesting new project for a target group which doesn't read much newspapers. The young people, the students, in Germany don't read that much newspaper so for [the newspaper publishers] it's an experience; they want to have a look at the feedback and to test it out. Most of them also don't think that we will take the long-term single paper reader away from them, since our audience is the reader who doesn't know which paper is right for them or likes a variety of news sources," Oberhof asserts.

So, in theory, there is no direct competition because they target different audiences. However, the Niiu provides the same service as the internet but in print form; it is hard to see why publishers who would blame the internet and the news aggregators (which is basically what Niiu is doing) as the newspaper's bane would embrace that service in their own industry.

Some industry experts are not so optimistic. Joachim Blum, a digital media consultant, voices 'considerable doubts' over Niiu's future. He says the idea is interesting, but it just won't work because the target audience has left paper behind: "People who read newspapers are office workers, not students," Blum tells Spiegel Online. This is similar to the problem discussed above, where it seems that the assumption has been made that students who are used to getting news quickly and for free online will suddenly start paying for it to be physically manifested; they surely won't be paying for the service, as they can do it themselves. They would therefore be paying for the physical product, the newspaper, and its aesthetic appeal. But we all know how fickle young people and students are when it comes to aesthetics.

Another issue is more topical as to how Niiu relates to traditional newspaper and the internet, its status in between and bridging these media forms. For all its supposed innovation, "Niiu shares the same dilemma of print journalism in the age of the Internet: every paper you read in the morning only contains yesterday's news," says Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. "The Web offers news every second and gives the option to link to blogs and other websites. Why would people read and even buy a story or information, which they select on the Internet the day before? It's old-school journalism," he tells Time. Again, the same underlying problem is pointed out; the combination of paper and internet has great potential, but it also combines the weak points of both and confuses the primary audiences of both mediums.

Time will tell whether these criticisms will stand or whether Niiu will live up to its potential.

The Future!

For the time being it seems like the main challenges for Oberhof and Tiedmann have been surmounted. They are looking forward to the November 16^th launch, for the time being to serve Berlin only. The circulation scope for now is limited because of the high quality but rather slow digital printing. "You can't compare it to a classical offset machine that could print 200,000 copies of Niiu in an hour; our digital printers can only do about 2000 in an hour," Oberhof explains. "That means it is not possible to deliver from one printing machine to several cities, so we start in Berlin. But obviously it's planned to expand to other cities in Germany and Europe," if the paper gets off the ground with the aim of around 5000 subscribers by the first 6 months.

However Oberhof knows there is much to be done, and that the work is far from finished. "For the next month the biggest challenge will be whether the whole work flows as we want it to. The first actual non-test paper will [hopefully] have around 5000 subscribers and this will be a lot to handle since every newspaper is individual. We might not actually know or can't imagine what the real work flow will be, what will come, and that's definitely the hardest thing." Meanwhile, he already has plans for future products and services once Niiu gets going and is established in the market.

Oberhof and Tiedmann's mission is more about giving the market what it wants, i.e. providing whatever information the reader desires in whatever format they prefer, rather than innovating the newspaper industry (which seems to be a side effect of their project). So if the market preference shifts, so will their products and services.

Having recognized that newspaper may only be around for so long, InterTi GmbH is planning "to offer an e-paper as a second step, probably by the end of this year," Oberhof revealed. Other editions are in the works, but no plans have been formally announced given that the formal launch is still a few days away. "For the future, I think that things like the Kindle will be very interesting for our product developments, but for now its not actually enough, not many people use e-readers at all," Oberhof confides. However, given the company's service-oriented vision, we can reasonably expect an e-reader version once the market for them takes off.

Whether you think newspapers are doomed or just in a rough spot right now, there is no denying the simple ingenuity and appeal (however limited) of Niiu. Its combination of the strengths (and unfortunately some of the weaknesses) of printed news and online news could make it a product to be reckoned with, even for those newspaper publishers who feel no competition from it. The potential for newspaper innovation through individualization is huge, and it remains to be seen whether Niiu will capitalize and profit from that potential

The Editor's Weblog wishes the best of luck to Oberhof and Tiedmann. It is now up to the Berlin public to decide the fate of Niiu.

Mr. Wanja Oberhof will be speaking at the WAN 2009 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderabad

Sources: Personal interview with Mr. Oberhof.

Spiegel Online

PrintWeek

Time

The "Free Flow of Information Act of 2009" is a a piece of legislation currently being worked out in the American Senate, and is aimed at both protecting journalists and national security interests by specifying under what conditions a journalist should be compelled to disclose a confidential source.

After more than six months of planning, preparation and speculation, November 2 saw the first edition of Germany's redesigned political and financial daily, Handelsblatt, hit newsagents' shelves across the country - as well as the launch of the revamped website and introduction of a mobile phone app.

The Garcia Media redesign signifies a milestone in German press, as the publication is the first quality German newspaper to make the decision to switch from the broadsheet to the compact size. As Garcia himself points out, other publishers will now be watching and gauging reactions, and asking themselves whether they should now take a similar step.

The New York Times unveiled its Bay Area Report last Friday, a two-page spread of local news designed to raise readership numbers and test the advertising market in San Francisco. The new section, boasting the logo: 'The world and the Bay Area. You'll find it all in the New York Times,' was announced last week and will now be published every Friday and Sunday. The spread is expected to pave the way for an entire San Francisco edition later in the year.

The Bay Area Report's debut coverage included three key stories: a profile of Oakland's new police chief;  a story on tax property assesment and a piece on local restaurant wine lists.

The stories and columns appearing in the section will also be available online at NYTimes.com where the Times will also introduce a complimetry blog called 'The Bay Area,' designed to build on the print pages by offering a space for conversation about the top stories of interest to people in the region.

Scott Heekin-Canedy, Times president and general manager, told paidContent in an interview that the expansion was a way to ensure the vitality of the paper and to 'make the print edition more valuable to subscribers and possibly convert some single-copy buyers': "In doing this, we have reason to believe that it will strengthen our subscriber retention, perhaps result in a little bit of circulation growth, but we don't have big ambitions there," he said. "By itself, it's not going to be a reason to purchase the Times or subscribe to the Times."

Rather, Heekin-Canedy says the Times has always contemplated adding coverage to various editions as part of improving the publication as a whole, but it wasn't until recently that the timing and opportunity matched. Given that the Times now sells more papers in San Francisco than anywhere else outside the Northeast (40, 080 daily) and already has a 10 person newsroom set up there- it seemed a good place to start. "That was helpful with regard to the timetable we had in mind for launching. We have the newsroom staff resources in the Bay Area to jumpstart this," said Heekin-Canedy.

A/B testing is a standard of user research that randomly presents one half of your audience with one version of content and the other half with a different version to compare the performance results. The version with a higher rating, be it more clicks or views or qualitative performance, then gets chosen as the only version presented.

What do American Idol, So you think you can dance? and The Washington Post have in common ?

'America's Next Great Pundit' : the Post's own reality-TV style talent competition designed to find it's next columnist.

Ten finalists will be selected from the entries and at the beginning of November beging to compete for the title. The contestants will face off in "challenges that test the skills a modern pundit must possess. They'll have to write on deadline, hold their own on video and field questions from Post readers," states the contest homepage. "After each round, a panel of Post personalities will offer kudos and catcalls, and reader votes will help to determine who gets another chance at a byline and who has to shut down their laptop."

A new federal law shielding journalists from subpoenas and imprisonment regarding confidential sources has met with difficulties under the definition of a 'journalist' in the Senate and the Obama administration's opposition to shielding in 'matters of national security.'

The Free Flow of Information Act (H.R.985) is a bi-partisan bill aimed at protecting journalists from being imprisoned or fined when they refuse to reveal their confidential sources. In official legalese, the headline of the Act is "to maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media."

Basically it prevents federal courts (many U.S. states already have such shield laws in place) from forcing journalists to reveal sources or information without the judge carefully 'balancing' the necessity of the evidence withheld. Although the bill has passed the House of Representatives it currently faces two problems: definitional issues in the Senate and opposition from the White House.

Again, the official text; "Conditions for Compelled Disclosure- In any matter arising under Federal law, a Federal entity may not compel a covered person to provide testimony or produce any document related to information obtained or created by such covered person as part of engaging in journalism, unless a court determines by a preponderance of the evidence, after providing notice and an opportunity to be heard to such covered person..." a list of exceptional circumstances follow that would merit 'compelled disclosure,' including terrorist threats and that the prosecution has exhausted all other means of gaining evidence.

John Ridding, Financial Times chief executive, has said that newspapers need to start charging for online content if they are to safeguard the future of quality journalism. 

Ridding told MediaGuardian.co.uk that newspapers need to abandon the "free is good" mentality and said that he fundamentally believed that readers would support the move.  "One of the worries for the industry in general is kind of a cultural expectation that news information should be free and we would challenge that because we believe quality journalism requires investment and investment requires revenues."

The problem is that publications appear to have little faith in their own products, fearing a drop in readership if they attempt to start charging for content. But Ridding stressed: "Do you gain more in revenue than you lose in readership?"

As the debate on whether or not to charge for online content heats up amongst publishers, Kachingle offers a different kind of solution: keep all content open but give readers the chance to donate. 'Kachinglers' would sign up to donate $5 a month which they could then split between different participating news providers of their choice.

MediaNews Group has expressed interested, as have Der Spiegel, Mother Jones, MinnPost and the Center for Public Integrity, amongst others. Publishers would need to integrate the Kachingle 'medallion' into their site, which their readers can click-on, and then once a month they will receive their share of revenue. (See previous posting for more information.)

Yves Huin recently came on board as European general manager and director. Huin told the EW that Kachingle is currently in an alpha test and the beta version should be released at the end of October. Prior to that, some publishers will have access to the necessary Java script so that they can decide the best way to use it.