Results matching “still in test p”

The National Union of Journalists has published its reaction to the Digital Britain Report, which was released yesterday. The most significant components of the review for the printed news industry concerned merger laws, for which the policies were formulated in conjunction with the Office of Fair Trading and alterations to the BBC licence fee.

Merger Laws

The OFT review, published simultaneously with Digital Britain, advised that the existing laws regulating media ownership should not be revised.   The calls for modification had come from the big regional press companies, desirous of more malleable merger laws.  

Westminster announced yesterday that the length of time government records had to be kept secret would be cut from thirty years to twenty.  Additionally, Justice Secretary, Jack Straw is considering the extension of the Freedom of Information Act to more bodies responsible for the handling and spending of public money.


The proposals require that all official documents be available to public access after twenty years of their production.  This does not, however, include documents deemed 'sensitive', Royal family or Cabinet papers.

The National Union of Journalists has urged the new Culture, Media and Sport Minister, Ben Bradshaw to take action in the campaign to reinvigorate local journalism in the UK.  General Secretary, Jeremy Dear has also requested a meeting with the Minister to discuss the specific issue of industry job cuts.

The minister, who only assumed the role last week through a ministerial reshuffle, is under pressure from the NUJ to support an economic stimulus package designed to boost the newspaper industry.   The need for a comprehensive financial policy is evident; regional newsrooms across the UK have been subjected to sizeable staff cuts and reduced budgets as they strive to cope with the double burden of the recession and the decline in circulation.

It is becoming increasingly clear that a proportion of general news content is going to be put behind some kind of a pay wall in upcoming months. Several publishers have expressed their intentions to start charging, and several third parties want to help them do it. Journalists don't seem to want it, it seems pretty unlikely that readers would want it, so how are publishers going to succeed? Can it restore value to good journalism which is increasingly becoming a commodity? The Editors Weblog takes a look at some of the different services on offer and strategies being considered.

Journalism Online

First, Journalism Online, a start-up founded in April by industry experts Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery, has taken facilitating charging for online content as one of its core goals. Brill made a presentation at the NAA-organised newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago on May 28 at which Journalism Online's mission was stated as enabling "news organizations to restore the optimal mix of circulation and advertising revenue necessary to finance original reporting and editing" hence giving them the chance to "realize the revenue they deserve--and can command--from readers and distributors for their digital content."

Journalism Online is marketing its proposal as an e-commerce platform. The idea is that it would make premium content from multiple publishers easily accessible to readers and allow annual, monthly subscriptions, day passes or single articles. There will also be all-you-can-read bundling options. Publishers will decide what content they want to charge for, how much to charge (though it is unclear how all-you-can-read prices will be decided) and how to charge. In the presentation, Brill suggests $50-60 a year and $5-6 a month for small to large city papers, but he stressed that this was an arbitrary choice and clearly the price would depend on how much content the publisher put behind the pay wall. He had previously suggested $15 a month for an all-you-can-read subscription.

The company maintains that implementing its system will not lead to a substantial loss in traffic or ad revenue, claiming that papers would be able to keep 88% of page views and 91% of ad revenue, as any paid content would be part of a hybrid model. In his examples, Brill demonstrates how he believes a paper could essentially double its income. Brill has also stressed that Journalism Online will incorporate lots of sampling. He told Nieman Lab's Zachery Seward that Journalism Online's assumptions are that 5-10% of current monthly unique visitors will be willing to pay for content; that 95 percent of those paying customers will choose subscriptions over micropayments; and that after subscribing, those readers will view 30-40 percent more pages than non-paying readers.

Overall, the company seems to be presenting its service as a chance for newspapers to focus on their best customers, offering a premium service to those who are prepared to pay. At the Chicago meeting, Journalism Online also emphasised the advantages of paid online content in terms of preserving the print product: it is "about the value proposition of print... about print subscriber acquisition and retention costs."

ViewPass

Another third party service was presented at the NAA-organised meeting in Chicago: ViewPass. It is the brainchild of Alan Mutter and Ridgely Evers, and could be implemented in 9 months at a cost of $6 million. The idea is that newspaper readers would be required to register once with ViewPass and it would then track their activity across participating websites.

Like Journalism Online, it would aim to offer readers the chance to purchase premium online content from multiple sources, with potential for subscriptions, micropayments and bundling. Essentially, the ways in which it differs is that ViewPass would be industry-owned, giving publishers the chance to (hopefully) share profits in the business itself, and it most crucially it would allow users to 'pay' for their content with their time or their information instead of with cash, because of their increased value to advertisers. In fact, ViewPass would focus on presenting readers that were attractive to advertisers for highly targeted ads. Mutter himself is not enthusiastic about charging for much online content, suggesting to Nieman Lab that it would only work for specialist content.

Circlabs

The creation of another start up was announced the day before the Chicago meeting: CircLabs, founded by Bill Densmore, Jeffrey Vander Clute, Martin Langeveld and Joe Bergeron. Its first product, code-named Circulate, aims to "offer a solution" to publishers who are experimenting with micropayments and subscriptions, suggesting that they should charge for content which is "both scarce in nature and of high utility to a segment of the audience." CircLabs is also focussed on developing opportunities for "high-value" advertising revenue, and plans to incorporate personalised news services. Further details are yet to appear.

Efforts of individual publishers

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has announced that all the company's newspapers would be charging within a year. It is looking at bundling content, according to chief digital officer Jonathan Miller, such as putting all the media conglomerate's New York-based content into one subscription package. One of the company's prime assets, the Wall Street Journal, is proof that paid premium content does work, although of a specifically financial nature. The paper is to expand its paid online options, with plans to introduce micropayments later this year along with a further level of premium subscriptions. Murdoch suggested that the company wants to "test" a pay model on some of its stronger properties first, and there has been speculation that the Sunday Times will be among these. The paid online content debate, although definitely present in the UK, has not been as strong as across the Atlantic, and it would be interesting to see what sort of reaction such a move would provoke.

MediaNews Group is planning to charge online under the belief that "we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free." A memo to staff from CEO Dean Singleton and president Jody Lodovic suggested that a part-paid strategy is in the works, and made it clear that the company is intending to charge for existing content rather than for new products or services.

The New York Times is apparently looking at two different ways in which it could charge for online content. The first would be somewhat similar to the Financial Times' model, whereby readers could surf the site without charge until a page-view or word limit were reached, when a 'metre' would start running and it would charge a user for the rest of their time spent. (The FT allows 10 free articles per user per month, then demands a subscription.) This would have the advantage of not putting specific content behind a paywall, and therefore not angering journalists.

The other option is a 'membership' scheme: readers would donate money and subsequently be invited into a "New York Times community," which would offer them free merchandise and other benefits. Possibly a tiered membership scheme could be implemented. When these proposals were discussed, Bill Keller told staff that a decision would be made by the end of June. The NYT is wary following its failed TimesSelect experience back in 2007 and seems determined to find a solution that will not damage its significant ad revenue.

Potential obstacles: search and antitrust

Currently many people find their news through search engines such as Google, and for articles to get good Google rankings and appear higher up in search results, they cannot be behind a paywall. Newspapers must strive to find an appropriate solution to this when they start charging: the Wall Street Journal's tactic of allowing its paid content to be accessed free via Google is clearly not fair to its paying customers, and is a definite deterrent to potential subscribers.

Antitrust regulations in the US effectively prevent publishers from coming to a joint agreement on when and how they should start charging for content. At the newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago on May 28, an antitrust lawyer was present to make sure all the discussion was legal. Poynter analyst Rick Edmonds suggested that the use of a third party "vendor" such as Journalism Online could be the solution to these concerns. Journalism Online has taken on David Boies and Ted Olson for antitrust advice.

So, is it going to work? And how?

Undoubtedly, implementing paid content is going to be a considerable challenge and is likely to involve substantial experimentation. Newspapers need to consider what exactly they would want to charge for, for example whether they could create a new paid service or put what is currently free behind a pay wall. It seems as if it would be easier to persuade people to pay for something new, rather than telling them they have to start paying for something previously free. But then people might decide that they are happy with what they get now and that they do not want to pay for anything extra. A paper with a highly developed website such as the New York Times could possibly offer basic news free but keep its interactive graphics and other more innovative content for its premium customers.

As yet, Journalism Online seems to be ahead of the pack with regards to third party services. No papers have publicly signed on but Brill told Seward that he had already spoken to about half of those at the Chicago meeting. In terms of connections and credibility of its founders, Journalism Online has a head start. ViewPass and CircLabs do seem to be onto something, however, with their focus on offering consumers as targets for higher-revenue advertising and effectively allowing them to pay for their news by looking at ads. Could these companies coexist, or is there only room for one?

A crucial factor which should not be underestimated in any attempt to charge online is ease of use for the consumer. People will be far more likely to part with their cash if doing so is simple and straightforward. For this reason, sign-in-once and all-you-can-read offers are likely to appeal. And once people are paying, the level of service should reflect this: good journalism presented attractively and accessibly. An element of personalisation would also seem worth paying for.

Can paid online content 'save' newspapers? If Journalism Online's figures are correct, it looks like it could make a significant difference to a newspaper's fortunes. The next few months will be telling in terms of experimentation and competition between proposals, but it will take some years for the definitive answer to this question to be realised.

According to an article in today's Guardian Media, the Sunday Times is planning to launch its own standalone website and is even considering introducing a paywall.

Publisher News International is a subdivision of News Corp headed by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch has expressed his desire - to see his newspapers based around the world to follow the example of the Wall Street Journal by charging readers for content - on numerous occasions.

"The media has a duty to wrongfully accused", wrote Eamonn O'Neil on the Guardian's website yesterday.  Sadly though,  journalists and editors, apparently fearful of the professional and legal implications of fact-finding missions, are increasingly shying away from performing this duty.  Whether this is due to a lack of journalistic confidence, the constant threat of legal procedures or a response to a lack in public demand, this avoidance has deprived not only the journalistic practice of the satisfaction of fulfilling one of its great original purposes, but social justice of what was once a highly effective tool.  

O'Neil's call to arms forms part of the Guardian's recently launched 'Justice on Trial' campaign, which "aims to highlight cases where there are major concerns of a miscarriage of justice."  The project is a result of the realisation that journalism is at risk of forsaking an arguable raison d'etre; its opening statement recalls the profession's past successes in contributing to the correction of infamous miscarriage of justice cases, such as those of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.   O'Neil, moreover reflects upon his own involvement in rough and ready evidence digging investigations, such as that of the Christmas Island nuclear test victims, while working at Scottish TV in the late eighties.

Reports recently out say that the Telegraph online attracts an impressive 8% of its traffic from
news aggregators and social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

The 8% figure is equivalent to a staggering 75,000 unique visitors daily. So, how does the Telegraph do it?

"It's the online world where large Czech media companies see the future now," so writes Czech News in an article describing the state of the Czech press. According to the national news agency, in the first three months of 2009, almost 20 print titles have closed, that more closures are soon expected and that even television stations are slashing budgets to keep pace with falling demand and plummeting advertising sales. But does the solution lie with the Internet?

Facing financial difficulties, a month ago the Detroit Free Press decided to limit home delivery of its paper to only three days a week, to print small editions on other days, and to encourage people to get information online. Poynter reporter Bill Mitchell takes a look at how Detroit's initiative is progressing so far, saying that "readership of the e-edition is up -- a lot -- and cancellations of print and online combo subscriptions haven't been as massive as feared."

Since the change, only half as many subscribers have canceled as was projected, and papers are re-starting those subscriptions at a rate of 100 per day. About 6,300 people have been willing to triple their subscription price to have the paper delivered on the days home delivery is normally not offered. The paper's e-editions, which are different from the web sites, attract 30,000 people per day and 3 million page views a week, and the traffic to the web sites has increased.

Mario García talks about how he and Alexis Johann worked with the Austrian paper, Wirtschafts Blatt's staff to reinvent the paper's focus on when and where to report a news event first. All journalists were trained to work on both online and print. García says that newsroom staff was trained to think as news people rather than newspaper people.

According to Pew's State of the News Media 2009 report, the younger demographic, between 18-24 and 25-34 have the lowest levels of daily newspaper readership and 49% said they get their news online. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, owner and founder of Facebook, announced the 200 millionth active user on the networking site, one third of which are in the young age group that has limited exposure to news on a regular basis. That said, there are two new experiments in action to get the news to young Facebook users: mndaily.com and Hot Dish. Both efforts are funded by the Knight Foundation and are powered by NewsCloud, a news sharing website.

Could mobile be the future of newspapers? And crucially, can it make them money? Garcia Media recently reported that the number of people getting news via a phone doubled from 10.8 million in January 2008 to 22.4 million in January 2009, according to comScore. As phones get "smarter" and people become accustomed to accessing their email and finding information on the go, it makes sense to offer them a good quality news service. Many major newspapers such as the New York Times, USA Today, and Le Monde have developed iPhone applications that users can download and which are intended to improve the reading experience, while many others have created special mobile versions of their websites.

Why an application?

There are advantages to viewing news via an iPhone application rather than via the mobile website or even on your computer; as Michael Logan, one of the founders and directors of Kanchoo, pointed out: "it's not just a version of the website." Obviously, the stories should be made easier to read on a small screen, and you can do things like scrolling through slideshows with your finger. But also, for example, using GPS technology a newspaper application could give you news stories relevant to your precise location, something otherwise not possible.

However, developing an iPhone is expensive, involving spending up to $20,000, according to Realising that the expenditure was too great for the newspaper he worked for, and that the cost would undoubtedly prevent many other smaller newspapers from creating their own application, Logan decided to take action and start a company that would develop iPhone apps for newspapers at a far smaller expense. Kanchoo launced in a beta version on March 6 offers its a basic service package for a start-up of $88, and a $28 per month charge for bandwidth and hosting: Logan commented that the low start up cost meant that newspapers could test the application's effectiveness rather than having to make a huge commitment upfront. Having someone else operate the app also means that "newspapers can just focus on producing content," and not have to worry about keeping up to date with technological developments, as the service will do that for them.

Small screen: less potential?

So with companies such as Kanchoo, developing iPhone apps should become a possibility even for smaller papers. But there will always be limitations, the most obvious being the size of the screen. The reading experience cannot be comparable to reading a print newspaper, and for some users it will always be a source of frustration. As a result of the small screen, there is also somewhat of a lack of potential for originality and differentiation: Logan described the reading experience as "pretty uniform" aside from basic branding and colour differences. Although perhaps as technology advances, this situation will change.

The development of smart phones as tools on which to read newspapers is definitely something that producers of e-readers, such as Plastic Logic whose device will be released early next year, should be looking at carefully. The more sophisticated newspaper and magazine applications get on phones, the harder it will be to persuade people to buy a new product. Plastic Logic VP of business development Daren Benzi claimed that phones do not offer competition to the experience that the company's e-reader will be able to provide, which he hopes will be as close as possible to actually reading print, and seemingly more suited to in depth reading.

Mobile money: is it a possibility?

The big question for newspaper publishers is: how to monetise its mobile audience? Obviously advertising is one, though the small size of the screen might make this harder possibly some kind of scroll over system makes sense. Logan explained that there are various companies, such as AdMob, which can help newspapers provide ads to their applications. The other possibility is subscriptions: similar to those utilised on e-readers, whereby the reader pays a monthly fee to receive an electronic version of a paper. It is not clear yet how this would work and whether it will even be a reality in the near future, but speculation has been mounting across the industry following Apple's recent announcement that its iPhone 3.0 operating system, due to be released this summer, will allow consumers to make purchases via applications. Currently, the only way to charge users directly is a download fee for the app.

The Revenue 2.0 group which met on March 21 to discuss strategies for funding journalism concluded that while mobile users might not be actually willing to pay for content that they can get free on the web, they seem happy to buy iPhone apps that provide features to "customize content on iPhones" and enhance the experience. They suggested a suite of features such as off-line reading, geo-tagging, archive/export, sophisticated customisation and text-to-speech which could be used when literally on the move.

Newspapers throughout the developed world should now be seriously taking their mobile audience into account: even though it is only a small proportion of people who currently have iPhones or other suitable 'smart' devices, the number is likely to grow as they become the norm. It does seems as if phones will always be more suitable for brief news updates rather than reading long in-depth articles, but there is definitely an increasing public desire to be kept up-do-date, for which mobile news works perfectly. If a way can be found to generate significant revenue, whether by paid applications, ad-ons or via subscriptions, then this market will become ever more appealing to newspapers as they address the financial challenges presented by today's media environment. But, as the Revenue 2.0 team pointed out, it is important to start charging now, rather than allowing readers to start taking free mobile news for granted, as they do with news on the web.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last ever issue yesterday, 17 March 2009, and is looking at an online-only future. Parent company Hearst decided it could not afford to keep the paper open in its current form after it lost $14 million in 2008, and after trying and failing to sell it, they proceeded to stop the presses but keep the website. The P-I is not the first paper to make such a move, but it is by far the largest US publication so far. What does this closure mean for the paper and the people of Seattle, and what are the implications for the wider industry: will other papers follow suit?

The cost of keeping the Seattle P-I's website should be a fraction of the cost of printing the paper: Poynter's Rick Edmonds estimates costs have fallen by 80%. Staff numbers have been reduced from 165 to 20, including just one photographer, and the site will be less like that of a traditional newspaper and more like the Huffington Post, according to the New York Times, as it will have limited original reporting and consist largely of links, advice and commentary, with several local columnists. It will repackage some health and home material from Hearst's many magazines, and has about 150 unpaid bloggers who will continue to provide content. The original reporting will focus on more hard-hitting news such as government, spending and crime, said P-I executive producer Michelle Nicolosi.

Seattle will be left as a one-paper town: the Seattle Times is now the only major daily in the city and although it should benefit from no longer having competition from Hearst's paper, it will no longer be sharing printing, delivery, advertising and marketing expenses with the P-I, as it had been for more than 20 years. P-I subscribers will automatically start to receive the Times instead.  It remains to be seen whether the paper will flourish or continue to lose money. The P-I's new most direct competition is a non-profit local news website focusing on the Northwest, CrossCut.com.

How should the web-only paper tackle the competition?

This huge change for the P-I can, and arguably should, be seen as an opportunity to revamp its site and be a front-runner in innovation. Online news leaves plenty of room for original development and possibilities for increased interaction with readers, personalisation options and linking are particularly relevant for local papers such as the P-I. It is "an adventure in journalism," according to columnist Joel Connelly. Slate editor Jack Shafer called upon Hearst to plunge into experimentation by sending in the "interactive cavalry," as everything that the publisher learns in Seattle can be used at its other newspaper sites. Examples he suggests are going hyperlocal, updating the site as much "as humanly possible," and to hire as many developers as they can. Rick Edmonds seems to be in agreement, writing that as long as losses are kept low, the P-I could be an effective "real-time test of what works and what doesn't in an online-only local site." And Nicolosi has promised that the paper will "experiment a lot, fail fast" with what is on the site: if something is not working they will cut it immediately and try something else.

Does going online-only make business sense?

The paper's online traffic is 1.8 million unique viewers per month and is usually more than its former rival/partner, the Seattle Times, which has considerably higher print circulation. And according to Forbes magazine in January, Seattle is the most broadband-connected US city: hence a place seemingly well suited for an online-only publication.

And online readership figures are high: according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media in the US report just released, traditional media has not lost its audience, rather this audience is shifting online. The Pew Research Center reported at the beginning of the year that the Internet had overtaken print as a primary news source in the US for the first time. This trend is not just American: British papers reported record online readership in January: with the Guardian website boasting almost 30 million unique viewers.

Several other smaller publications have made the switch to online-only over the past few months. The most well-known is the Christian Science Monitor, which announced its intention to cut its daily print edition in October 2008, though it will not actually make the conversion until April 1 this year. The CSM reasoned that its web product had a far wider reach than its print paper, particularly due to its international audience, and that producing the print publication would become untenable as the Christian Science church was preparing to stop its subsidisation. Others include the Monitor in Canada, and the Kansas City Kansan, San Francisco's AsianWeek, Hoy Nueva York and Wisconsin's The Capital Times in the US: all for financial reasons.  

The State of the News Media report, however, argues that it does not currently make sense for suffering papers to "kill their print editions and go online-only" as print still commands "premium ad pricing" and US papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and the average cost of printing and delivering the printed paper is 40% of costs. So, the report believes, why would you cut almost all your revenue to save less then half your costs?

Is online-only the future of news?

Arguably, despite many people's love of print, online is the future of news: how distant a future, it is difficult to say. But the vital, million-dollar question remains: how to actually make enough money out of all these online readers in order to support good quality, in-depth reporting? Nicolosi said that she thinks it is "possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city's readers well while turning a profit" and that "a digital news product is a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate." She seems to be convinced that the paper will make money online, but gives no indication of how this will happen. With the traditional ad-based business model proving less and less effective as online advertising prices fall, will the P-I come up with an innovative strategy? One of the major criticisms of the industry in the State of the News Media report was the lack of innovation in the sector in terms of business models. Nicolosi has assured readers that she is willing to try out new things on the site, but will the paper be as experimental in terms of business models?

For an online-only operation, the incentive to try to make money from Internet readers is surely greater than for a print publication with a website. And if the P-I does manage to find a way to support itself, whether through being successful enough to generate sufficient advertising revenue, or by adopting some kind of paid content system, the model will undoubtedly be looked at very carefully by other suffering papers around the world.

MediaNews Group plans to test its "individuated newspaper" concept this summer in an undisclosed market. The "I-News" project will be a targeted and customized online newspaper that allows the reader to select the types of news they want delivered. "You'll be able to choose the news you want about anything, whether you're a Detroit Red Wings fan or if you're green-oriented," said Mark Winkler, executive vice president of sales and marketing for MediaNews Group. "You become your own editor and publisher."

I-News will be delivered to subscribers via their computers, cell phones, or a special stand-alone printer plugged into a phone line. The printing manufacturer and the publisher participating in the MNG experiment may subsidize ink and paper prices to offset users' costs. MNG will continue research into the role of high-speed digital printers in the future of newspapers, and it is currently working with printer company Océ to develop user-friendly products for I-News and other projects.

Slate.fr, US online magazine Slate's French edition, finally saw the launch of its beta edition on Tuesday, after experiencing financial complications that pushed the date by a month in January. Co-founder Johan Hufnagel, former 20minutes.fr editor-in-chief, spoke to Le Figaro about the launch.

Slate.fr's goal is to follow in the footsteps of Slate.com by offering reporting that is both "ironic" and "precise". The site will not only feature political and economic stories but also  "original subjects" such as articles about the Internet or cultural issues, according to Hufnagel.  

The Journal du Dimanche, part of the Lagardère Active group, has announced plans to launch a Saturday edition to complement its current Sunday publication. It has confirmed that the new addition will begin to be printed in March, and whilst a specific date has not yet been verified it is thought that the first edition will hit the stands on the 7th.  This new publication is being started over a month earlier than its initially expected launch in April.

Paris and its surrounding areas will be the test run for the Journal du Dimanche's Saturday edition, with some 50,000 copies being printed.  It will contain articles independent to those of the Sunday paper, although the magazine will remain the same.  The test will run until the end of June, after which a decision will be made on whether or not to extend the Saturday edition to the rest of France.

Source: Yahoo! France

USA Today announced on Friday that the international edition will stop printing as of February 6th. The top-selling newspaper, owned by Gannett Company Inc, will continue to look for partners in Europe and South America to continue publishing, like it recently did its Caribbean edition.
 

The Tribune Co. is considering buying its foreign and international coverage from the Washington Post, reported the Wall Street Journal, in a deal that could mean the closure of dozens of Tribune bureaus.  

According to the WSJ, talks between Tribune and the Post Co. have been under way for more than a month but no agreement has been reached.  The move could save the Tribune Co. millions of dollars a year.  As the company is currently operating under bankruptcy protection, this sounds particularly appealing.  

Other papers are also looking at cost-saving measures for the coverage of news outside their territories.  The New York Daily News has decided to use new international news website GlobalPost for its foreign news coverage, and according to the Gannett Blog, the company is testing a service to replace some Associated Press news stories on websites of its 84 US community newspapers.  The idea is that the AP stories would be replaced by stories from Gannett-owned USA Today, saving up to a million dollars a year.

Source: Wall Street Journal, Gannett Blog

The Wall Street Journal is planning new online ventures to improve and monetize its site, according to the Associated Press.

In addition to improved site customization and search, the paper is also exploring an "à la carte" payment service for features, which MarketingVOX finds could "offset the cost of online content provided for free."

Editor Robert Thomson has declared that the Journal's most important test is to tailor online content to suit readers' needs, and how the paper will charge them for that service.

An Editor and Publisher column by Ted Knutson detailed his voyage as a consumer of news from print, to online, to print again after realizing how much he was missing in the online news world.  

With the evidence growing that readers want customisation instead of pre-packaged portfolios, the newspaper sector is challenged to develop alternative publishing formats (see Part 1 and Part 2 of our eReader series). A recent McKinsey survey (August 2007 newsletter) revealed the growing habit of 'brand promiscuity', with consumers using up to 16 different news sources weekly. Moreover, readers classified internet as much more useful compared to established media such as print. Modern news junkies go for convenience, comprehensiveness and timeliness rather than the traditional quality standards.

Is the print industry taking up the challenge? Not really. When it comes to using the Net, many newspapers feel more comfortable with direct transfer of existing copy onto the new medium. Companies like NewspaperDirect make a business out it; from next year on this company will start its PressDisplay news portal for delivery of associated papers on e-readers, tapping directly into the pre-print workflow and keeping the trusted appearance.

Not surprisingly, the innovative formats come from media outsiders. These startups have one thing in common, they believe in the electronic newspaper as a composite product, made up of a variety of professional and non-professional sources, tailored to the requirements and profiles of the individual news consumer. The New York-based start-up Daylife, which experiments with new editorial and financial models for online news, offers a mix of traditional and innovative formats for news distribution. A range of reputed titles is already using this platform for additional content delivery, but the site itself features an attractive and constantly updated news overview, produced by an amalgamation of contributors. Already closer to the network-driven medium of the future is FeedJournal, an RSS syndicating newspaper producing a digital daily building on defined user preferences. A comparable initiative, but now based on profile-steered net-crawling, is Newser. This service delivers summaries of hot news from across the globe and links to the original stories. The Radus New Media Platform follows the same philosophy, be it that additionally social networking sites are integrated: Personal highlights blend in with world events.

The aggregation game is on - so much is clear. But these applications don't change the content itself. Ultimately, the very nature of news needs to be reexamined and adjusted to the principles of digital delivery. Research at the Poynter Institute pointed out that alternative story forms are more effective than classical narrative, especially in an electronic information context. An equally interesting study was conducted by Associated Press. AP worked out 'A New Model for News' after observing the reading habits of a group of young-adults, the generation that has meanwhile grown up with or migrated to the Net. The study demonstrated that consumers are accessing the news from a range of different entry points, as much by chance as by design. The need for multiple entry points challenges the conventional container approach and article architecture. The AP model moves news into a new space - a universe of stories made up from different spheres, each ranging in size and scope (facts, updates, back stories, spin offs) - and readers interacting with story particles from different entry points and platforms. What these 'spheres' exactly should look like needs to worked out in practice.

One project exploring the journalistic formats for multi-entry news is the Dutch MePaper project. In a design studio jointly manned by journalists and researchers, key concepts are being developed and tested with proofreader panels. The project uses the term 'collection' to describe the journalistic raw material of the digital era, a loosely defined and ever changing combination of story elements. Quite a contrast with the well-defined nature of the standard article. News collections can be combined into news clouds, according to readers' general preferences and actual reading habits. This leads to four types of newspapers based on:
1. the editor's choice
2. the personal profile
3. the reading pattern of the preferred social network
4. the most read stories at a given time.
While reading, you can switch from one type of newspaper to another. The traditional line up of story titles is replaced by revolving cylinders in which stories, pictures and video are grouped according to theme or genre. In the test groups, the net-native proof readers almost intuitively roamed the presented information space.

Clearly there will be more solutions and design principles popping up. The main thing is that newspaper publishers stop with the easy repackaging and start digging for authentic formats which fully exploit the vast opportunities of electronic news delivery. Things can only get better, eh?

Director of the Euorpean Centre for Digital Communications and long-time journalist, Jan Bierhoff is currently conducting studies on e-reader technology and the consumer trends that will define their use.

As outlined in the first entry of this series, consumers will start using mobile electronic reading devices routinely. But will these versatile tools also become the preferred display for news and current affairs? Publishers' ability to inhabit this uncharted territory will matter greatly, but even more important is the decision of media consumers that news offered in this way best fits today's lifestyle and nicely blends in with their expectations and routines.
 
The readers' view is currently being explored and tested in several prototyping and/or pilot initiatives, although this effort is modest compared to the involvement of hardware and software engineers. Nevertheless, first results reveal the contours of what in the eyes of the digital reader will be the ideal form of electronic information delivery. Based on four recent research actions, this contribution will sketch the preconditions for successful deployment of e-readers and services, seen from the users perspective.

The eNews project, set up by Ifra, explored the consumer readiness for e-readers. Via focus groups in European and Japanese locations it was found that the use setting is different: more lean backward compared to the lean forward use of PC and print. This finding will have consequences for the kind of content that can be offered. Surprisingly, the consulted test persons appreciated the daylight readability of the e-readers, but by no means hyped it as heavily as the manufacturers themselves always do. The love for the device stems much more from its environment-friendly image.

Microsoft, partner in the design of the New York Times News Reader, has evaluated the user appreciation of this application in a field study. A selected group of readers worked for weeks with the NYTReader, especially while commuting, and was interviewed afterwards. Overall assessment was very positive: two-thirds, especially the serious travellers, would stick to the service. The kind of use however depended much on personal reading style: the news junkies appreciated the amount of detail, the skimmers the quickness of updates while the fun-seekers enjoyed the sophisticated layout. The synchronisation feature for permanent updating was less popular: too time-consuming and difficult to understand.
Conclusion: newspapers will have to bear in mind all these different use categories, and with an improved product.

In the Dutch MePaper project, the five participating newspapers are exploring novel journalistic formats for two types of e-readers: the e-ink devices and the mini laptops (UMPCs). New content models for mobile reading are developed in a joint design studio and these prototypes are tested in lab-based proof reading sessions. Here, it shows that there is a difference between what journalists think is important, for instance the addition of time frames to story overviews, and what the public wants (don't bother us with release hours). Also in this R&D effort, the variety of user demands is apparent. Many want both local (often hyper local) news, without loosing the global perspective. The preference can change from day to day, depending on personal circumstances and the attraction of news on offer. A definite outcome is the demand for customisation of the e-paper, ideally composed of sections, even editors from a range of different media. This result is in fact a cry-out for joint ventures between titles and across newspaper groups. Thus, e-reading will provoke unconventional business practices.
If the newspaper world manages to respond to these user requirements, there certainly is scope for a quick roll-out of the e-reading technology. In a Swedish large scale online survey (part of the UbiMedia project), 42 percent of the 3600 readers indicated to be ready for it now, and another 19 percent in the next five years.  Would these people want to change their trusted print edition for an electronic version? Two-thirds said yes, only one-third would be faithful to newsprint. The e-service however is expected to be considerably cheaper (says 58 percent), with a meagre 8 percent willing to pay extra for premium content.

The conclusion is obvious, the adoption potential for mobile electronic reading is certainly high, but it is a medium in its own right, not just another print or online edition spin-off. It needs to be well designed, fully user-driven, with convincing personalisation options. Valuable lessons in this respect are being learned by a Dutch paper, NRC. The e-reader service it launched last year based itself on simple copy streaming, and it obviously doesn't work. Disappointed users created an open forum in wiki format to voice their concerns, criticism and improvement suggestions. The company hasn't been able to respond to it adequately yet. E-reading clearly asks for special content formats, a different type of navigation architecture and innovative forms of news organisation. In the next entry, first design principles will be reviewed.

Director of the Euorpean Centre for Digital Communications and long-time journalist, Jan Bierhoff is currently conducting studies on e-reader technology and the consumer trends that will define their use. 
 

Reuters, AP and AFP have announced that they are suspending all coverage of cricket matches, training sessions and events for cricket in Australia because they claim to have been faced with "unacceptable accreditation terms from Australia's governing body, Cricket Australia," according to the News Media Coalition.

According to NMC, "no text stories, photos or video of any of the training sessions, matches, press conferences or events will be distributed by the international news agencies to media around the world for the first test against New Zealand later this month, and potentially for the South Africa test coming up in December."

Following on from yesterday's article about newspaper integration and aggregation, the Editors Weblog continues its interview with Ian Fernandes, head of the Digital Division at Nation Media Group (NMG). Today, we look at its new social media platform, mobile classifieds and cross-promotion.

Social media and the Daily Nation - Who wants to be famous?

The NMG has been looking at how to get their readers more involved with the company's activities. Fernandes says, "We are taking a lot of knowledge from what we see happening abroad and from being in the entertainment industry with radio and television. From this, we are noticing that the younger generation are spending more time on Facebook or MySpace than watching television. So we are starting our own social website which will be launched before the end of the year." The name of the site has been under wraps, but Fernandes exclusively revealed to the Editors Weblog that it will be called Zuqka, and the style of the site will be a mixture of Facebook and citizen journalism.

NMG receive pictures, video clips, and songs from readers, listeners and viewers from across its various platforms and it is unable to use it all as there is only so much content they can carry. Users of this new site will be able to share this content with other subscribers and who will then be able to vote on how good or bad it is. The best of this content will be used on NMG's mainstream media platforms. Fernandes says, "We are killing two birds with one stone. Firstly, we are using content that we couldn't use before and, secondly, we are giving people the chance to be famous. A lot of Kenyans want to be famous but there is no chance to be. For example, you can send in a song and if the site users vote for it and it gets in the Top Ten of songs on the site, it will then be played on NMG's Easy FM radio station. In the same way, the top ten blogs on the site will be put in the Saturday newspaper. Whatever topics are being discussed on the blogs and pictures being sent in and so forth, will be shown on a TV magazine programme."

NMG are also going to introduce a platform called Events whereby you can see what is happening in terms of concerts and so forth in Kenya. Through this portal your network of friends on the site can see what you are attending and you can send details of the, for example, concert, to your circle of friends and invite them to come along.

NMG are in the final stages of putting the site together, with the design template scheduled to be completed by the end of this month. Once Broadband is introduced to Kenya (scheduled for next year, please see yesterday's article) sites such as this will have a real opportunity to take off. Fernandes reports, "We want to inform people that there is a lot more you can do with the Internet."  The site is set to be launched at the end of November, and a newspaper pullout also will be unveiled at the same time under the same Zuqka brand name. This pullout will be driven by content from the site.

Fernandes say, "We are at an advantage in terms of tapping into social media as we have all the other platforms within the NMG to drive it. Just telling a user that they can send a video or audio and share it with their friends is not good enough. With the NMG site, the user could get in the newspaper or on TV, this will be the selling factor."

Fernandes goes on to say, "Media has changed. The editor used to select what we saw and so forth whereas today it is the subscriber who chooses. By allowing subscribers to contribute to your product you can also test to see what is the big story... Getting your readership involved by sending in content to you is so important."

Mobile news ahead of online site

With Internet connectivity being so slow, mobile usage in Kenya is significantly higher than internet usae, with four out of every five Kenyans having a mobile phone. To explot this usage, the Daily Nation website also has a Wapsite, providing readers with a mobile web version of the newspaper. Customers who are looking for Daily Nation content on their phone are directed to the Mobile version of the news site.

The Daily Nation mobile site sends breaking news alerts, sports alerts, religious phrases, and horoscopes to subscribers. Furthermore, in the coming months, NMG is looking to introduce video news alerts for mobile phones via MMS or video content.

Classifieds through mobile

The company is also looking at the classified platform whereby if, for example, you are looking for a red BMW and you are willing to pay 200,000 shillings you will be able to punch the details into your phone and this data then links to the newspaper classified database. The relevant seller details will then be sent to your mobile phone. Once again, the slow Internet connection has resulted in the online classified section being underused, this should change next year. Fernandes predicts that once broadband hits Kenya, "we will see an explosion in Internet usage and we want to be ready for that."

Who wants to be a millionaire?

A key target of the newly established digital division is the monetisation of the various platforms within NMG, it seeks to pursue this by linking its platforms and cross promoting. Fernandes told the Weblog that every Tuesday on NTV (NMG's TV channel) there is a quiz show and viewers send in their answers by SMS, the winner is the person who sends in the most correct answers fastest. The winner of the show wins 1,000 shillings. This show is being cross-promoted across all of NMG's brands and has proved a hit with Kenyans. Fernandes explains the popularity of the show, "Kenya is probably one of the few countries where the "Who wants to be a millionaire" format did not work, not because people did not find the show interesting but because they were too shy to go on TV and look stupid if they did not know the answer. With this format Kenyans can play along from the comfort of their own home and no one knows if you get an answer right or wrong or what you look like."

Secret of NMG's success

Looking at all the various changes and innovations that the NMG has introduced, and is looking to introduce, it is clearly at the cutting edge of innovation within the newspaper and media industry. The cross-promotion across its platforms and the integration of not just the newsrooms but also the content is particularly notable. The Zuqka site looks set to be a success and the vision behind it is exciting, it should generate a real buzz in Kenya and around the NMG brand. Furthermore, it will also attract the key youth readership and create loyalty. Fernandes says, "Our philosophy is that the world is changing and we need to give our customers what they want when they want it and in the way they want it." This seems to be why NMG is so successful, the company knows and understands its readers, and anticipates what they want before they even want it

See also:

Kenyan Media Part 1: Is newsroom integration possible for media conglomerates

The average editor will follow the news about emerging electronic displays with amazement: the promises are mind-boggling, yet the practices so far rather poor. Will e-readers really be the saviours of the trade and if so, how come it is taking so long before a standard solution comes to market? To a large extent, the answer lies in the craving for effective breakthroughs of a beleaguered industry, much more than in the technology itself. Producing the versatile, flexible, crystal clear electronic reading pane is a formidable technological challenge. Several hardware producers are achieving promising results, but what they have launched up until now are at best pilot devices to test the principles and explore the market. However, the learning curve is steep and in a few years time the assessment will be much more positive.

It is difficult to foresee which technology will become the default application. A strong position is held by e-ink mounted devices that companies like Sony, PlasticLogic, iRex and content provider Amazon have embraced. Their e-readers progress from one version to another, often within a matter of months, with relevant but not revolutionary improvements. They boast splendid daylight readability and prolonged battery life, but remain black-and-white, static (no streaming) and cannot impress with their interfaces.

And the competition is gearing up from two sides. On the one hand even more advanced technologies are presently being lab-tested, such as electro-wetting (using thin liquid layers which can be manipulated with an electric charge) and OLED (using clusters of organic, light emitting diodes). These promise even more advantages - full colour, video, and foldability - surpassing the crucial black-and-white limitation that disadvantages publishers today. On the other hand, there is the revival of the 'classical' flatscreen LCD display, built into a new generation of mini-pc's (or ultra mobile PC's - UMPCs). These slim, lightweight, powerful and cheap devices finally close the gap between the PDA and the bulky laptop with a medium size, versatile handbag PC, ideal for people on the move. Frontrunner ASUS hit the mother load with its EEE series, and meanwhile has many followers in the competitive hardware sector.

The final verdict is as always in the hands of the consumer. Which tool will become the preferred 'universal mobile reading device'? First of all, size, price and nice determine the choice. Whichever technology is built in, the device must gently fit in everybody's travel outfit, be not too expensive and have a certain show-off value. Second, features are key. Connectivity, ease of navigation, customisation options - the mobile reader demands instant performance. And for the moment, easy access to an array of content also plays an important role: Amazon plays that card very cleverly.

At this point, the UMPC seems to have the advantage, with the e-ink based e-readers left behind being too limited and too expensive. Some manufacturers work in the direction of low cost hybrid solutions. The OLPC consortium (which stands for One Laptop Per Child) for instance has announced the XO-2 for early 2010, with a dual-mode display featuring a technology to 'freeze' the LCD screen to maximise readability in full sunlight, so far the most important e-ink selling point.

Besides the choice of hardware, software standardisation will determine how we will be reading our future electronic newspapers. In these early e-reader days, many players try to lock-in their customers in proprietary solutions: Amazon connecting the Kindle to its own portal, iRex with its distribution platform, operators like Orange and Telecom Italia with dedicated hard ware and software: a seemingly attractive business model in the short term, but a serious handicap for widespread adoption of the technology. A major step forward is the introduction of the epub format, adopted by a growing number of larger publishers that could become a de facto standard allowing various content sources to be read, customised and transferred across e-readers from most manufacturers. Anything goes on any e-device: we move in that direction, and newspapers should have their offerings ready for it.

Director of the Euorpean Centre for Digital Communications and long-time journalist, Jan Bierhoff is currently conducting studies on e-reader technology and the consumer trends that will define their use.