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First we had the Amazon Kindle, then Plastic Logic came along - yet to go on the market - and now Michael Arrington and the team at TechCrunch bring us the CrunchPad.

It all started with a dream

Last July, Arrington posted an article with the following headline: "We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet for $200. Help Us Build It." Arrington went on to describe what his dream tablet would look like and how it would function: Running as an open-source device, the screen would be Apple-thin with an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. There would be a headphone socket, a built-in camera, speakers and microphone and the tablet would function on Wifi, be Firefox-enabled, support Skype (or other VOIP service) and be fitted with an internal battery and solid hard drive. The goal? "To keep the machine very simple and very cheap."

Apture has created technology that aims to make flat web pages more three-dimensional: the third dimension being boxes that pop-up to show the reader further multimedia assets relating to an article. At first glance it does not sound too ground-breaking, but taking a closer look, the implications for both readers and publishers are considerable. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris about how Apture works and how it can help publishers.

Harris described what inspired him to start working on Apture. He and his co-founders came up with the idea while studying at Stanford, during conversations with the Knight Fellows. Frustrated with the fact that despite the web being "truly the richest medium we have ever had to communicate with, with all the computational power and multimedia assets" it has "this flat characteristic of flat story-telling," they decided to try to do something about it.

Easy access to multiple multimedia sources

Apture has created a media search engine that allows writers to "quickly leverage all the media that's available on the web, in many different APIs and digital libraries," Harris explained. The journalist highlights keywords in the text, such as the name of a person, place, event, or a certain topic, and a box will then appear with a list of possible media assets to link to. These include reference tools such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Twitter search, even the US Congress, photos from Flickr or Yahoo, videos from YouTube or Daily Motion, maps from Google Maps, documents from Scribd, and the journalist can pick what assets they feel are apppropriate - possibly more than one - and set up a link.

When the reader clicks on the hyperlink, instead of opening in a different browser window, another small box appears to display the article snippet, video, photo or map which the reader can consult without losing their place in the original article. And as Apture allows journalists to clip a specific section of a video or link to a certain quote in a book, the box will hopefully offer them only the most relevant information. Readers can click through to the original site by clicking on a link within the box.

For individual publishers, their own archives and assets can be incorporated into the search engine. Apture has also developed deals with some clients so that any Apture users can access their archives: for example Reuters videos, or snippets from New York Times, BBC or Washington Post articles. Apture just added Google Books and NPR audio podcasts to the asset list.

The technology is free to blogs and websites with fewer than 5 million page views per month. Harris added that as the company is "getting a lot of valuable information from people using it," meaning that the system is getting better and better. Larger publishers pay "hundreds and thousands a month" to use Apture, however. Harris explained that they are willing to do this because the tool creates a "more compelling experience on their websites," as shown by the fact that there is "a proven difference" in user's engagement with pages.

Benefits for publishers

According to Harris, putting one or more Apture links on a page leads to 2 or 3 minutes added engagement time. Looking at Comscore media matrix data, he clarified, it appears that 20 to 30% of publishers' traffic is lost to search. If a paper does not answer a reader's questions, it is extremely easy for the reader to just leave. Harris believes that if journalists are thoughtful and thorough about the links they add throughout a whole site, you could imagine that the publication "may well be able to double the amount of time spent on the site." And obviously, more time spent on the site means more advertising money.

As well as this financial benefit, Harris described a less tangible but arguably equally valuable advantage of using Apture: the fact that it allows newspapers to be a more effective guide for their readers and to offer them a more coherent reading experience. When a paper sends their readers away, either by linking to an external source or just not providing enough information, it is "severing its relationship with you as your guide to that information." By using Apture to supply necessary background information in multiple different formats while keeping the reader on its site, a news organisation can "be the guide to an entire web's worth of resources, but retain a relationship with that reader," Harris asserted. The fact that publishers are "the owners of that relationship" puts "a lot more power in their hands," he added.

For those publishers contemplating offering their content back to Apture, one concern might be that by displaying their content in boxes on other sites via Apture, they could end up losing traffic. Harris stressed, however, that readers can always go back to the source, and that rather than trying to remove traffic from websites, Apture sees its role as "providing an opportunity for those media partners to get their content in front of new eyeballs that they would not have seen before."

What next?

"What we are really doing is creating an efficiency in the market that really wasn't there before," Harris concluded. Apture is connecting information "in a way that wasn't possible before." He said that the company intends to improve its current product by continuing to integrate new content partners and bring costs down. He also hopes to create new products that will "transform the medium, changing the way that people interact with the web," and which are "not constrained to the two dimensions that we've had up until now."

The advantages offered by online journalism are numerous, and products such as Apture's should be welcomed by journalists striving to find better ways to tell their story in a multimedia environment. The fact that the Internet allows us to see, hear or find out more about pretty much anything and consequently make a story richer and more meaningful is something which papers should take advantage of. Arguably, going a step further and creating their own new multimedia experiences should be a priority for newspapers, but using existing content to supplement their articles is a good start. 

Google yesterday announced the introduction of Google News Timeline, which it describes as "a new feature on Google Labs that organises many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline." At the Google Labs press event, the company also revealed its new "Similar Image" feature in its image search which allows you to click on an image from your initial search results to see more like it, a week after introducing a tool that allows users to search by colour.

According to the Google News blog, the timeline tool can be used to search and browse results from Google News and its hosted news partners, and YouTube partner videos, as well as archived newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search. Users can also choose to see search results from blogs and "sports scores, as well as information about books, music, movies, tv shows, video games, and even artists, to see how they've appeared over time." It is possible to refine the search to specific publications, or specify a date range for searches.

ACAP, a new tool to help make copyright work on the web, has surpassed 800 implementers in 43 countries, and is now pushing Google to work with and accept the publishing industry's standard.

The ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) initiative is backed by a coalition of newspaper, magazine and book publishers led by the World Association of Newspapers, puts copyright and use information in machine readable format and makes it difficult for third parties to claim ignorance about a publisher's terms and conditions for using the content. Given the ongoing tension between publishers and search engines/aggregators over use of newspaper content, the issue is an extremely pertinent one.

Despite the government subsidisation that they have received, Cyril Blanc of the Guardian thinks that French newspapers are still in trouble. Blanc writes that the problems of the US industry look particularly gloomy from France, as "the French regard the NYT and papers like the Los Angeles Times as the perfect incarnation of what their own papers should be." So, it is with great irony that he quotes former Le Monde director Alain Minc, who has previously said that French newspapers should become more like the NYT but writes in his new book that "this very same paper will be bought out by Google for a symbolic dollar by 2011".

Criticising the French for ignoring online successes such as Rue89, whilst subsidising the struggling newspapers, Blanc believes that "a more creative approach is needed".  He cites other examples that the French media could learn from, such as the Huffington Post. Blanc believes that Sarkozy's tax exemptions and advertising boost for newspapers "could only have the effect of postponing their collapse", whilst the "more dramatic move to give every 18-year-old in the country a one-year subscription to a daily paper... is perhaps the only measure that might have a longer term effect".

The Internet has changed the way that people read newspapers in many ways: not least because news aggregators such as Google News have helped to bring readers away from the habit of focussing their news reading on just one paper's website. Now most Internet-savvy users are accustomed to visiting many different websites and choosing the source that they find appropriate for each story they would like to read. But as newspapers' print revenue drops, frustration at the way that aggregators make money out of content which is not their own has been increasing amongst newspaper publishers. Could Google's recent adoption of small text advertisements on US Google News be the last straw?

The basics of news aggregation

Many different news aggregators exist: those run by media giants such as Yahoo, those based on reader interaction such as Digg and others like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast which provide aggregation alongside original reporting and commentary. Some provide just headlines; Google News, however also collects brief excerpts from articles on its homepage, and makes them available via a search function. Unlike some aggregators such as the Drudge Report that have a human editor choosing the headlines, Google News aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. According to Google, articles are ranked based on "how often and on what sites a story appears online," and "based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity."

Google's mission

News aggregation has been an extremely controversial issue for many years. Google News creator Krishna Bharat claims that Google's service aims to "encourage readers to get a broader perspective by digging deeper into the news - reading ten articles instead of one, perhaps." This in itself is undoubtedly a respectable idea, and reflects one of the great advantages of online news for consumers: the ability to easily read around a topic. According to William Echikson, Google's Senior Manager for Communications, "Google makes the news more accessible and more interesting - encouraging people to read more and so benefiting the news industry as a whole." It can be argued that Google does indeed benefit the news industry by directing traffic to newspaper websites and hence promotes newspaper content. This is perhaps especially pertinent for smaller papers which would not otherwise get many visitors to their sites: when a major event occurs locally, they might suddenly find themselves topping the Google News homepage.

Publishers vs. Google

Despite some undeniable benefits for readers and apparent benefits for newspapers, some newspaper publishers are resentful of Google News and other similar aggregators. The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites. For Google News search results, the click through rate is only about 10%. People scan headlines and the brief article excerpts that appear but then few seem to bother to read full stories, meaning that despite their content being used, newspapers are not receiving any income. And even if people do click through, it means that they are less likely to visit newspapers' homepages and therefore newspapers cannot make much money from their premium advertising spots. There have already been protests: Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse is in the process of seeking 49 million euro in damages from Google for storing and reproducing Belgian newspapers' articles without permission. Another of the complaints that newspapers have is that the aggregators' crawlers do not distinguish between "good" journalism and everything else.

Advertising adds to conflict

Newspaper owners have also been opposed to the fact that advertisements are placed alongside search results on the general Google site, meaning that Google is directly making money from other people's content. The recent decision to place advertising on search results for the US version of Google News after keeping it ad-free for six years is a move that can only further anger many publishers, as it seems now obvious that Google is, after all, just trying to make money out of newspaper content. According to the New York Times, a Google spokesman said that Google had devised an approach that could deliver contextually relevant ads so had decided to go ahead with them. NYT writer David Carr was extremely unimpressed, stating that "newspapers' audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place."

It is not clear whether the company intends to start putting ads on Google News outside the US. According to Press Gazette, Europe's notions of "fair use" are more heavily weighted in publishers' favour than in the US. CopiePresse has asserted that it will take further legal action if ads are placed on Belgian Google News.

Newspapers' anti-aggregator options?

So, apart from simply suing Google and trying to halt a seemingly irreversible trend, how can newspapers tackle these problems, which are all the more relevant in this time of financial crisis?  One possibility is the solution provided by ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, a coalition of newspaper, magazine and book publishers led by the World Association of Newspapers, which claims to put "content owners in control of their online content in a way that is conducive to developing new online business models, putting new, high-quality content on the net and to maximizing the benefits of the relationship with search engines." In essence, it would mean that copyrighted material could not be used so freely in search engines. Over 700 news organisations have implemented ACAP as a symbolic gesture in anticipation of search engines recognising the service.

One further non-confrontational solution could be for newspapers themselves to provide more aggregation, such as the NYT's Times Extra page: an alternative homepage which includes links to articles from other sites under the Times' own stories. The Washington Post has a politics-specific Political Browser which freely links to other publications. If newspapers embraced this linking further, they could succeed in providing significant competition to aggregators. As well as just linking to other papers, they could utilise a product such as Pluck's BlogBurst, which is effectively a blog syndication service, allowing newspapers to easily search 'quality' blogs and find content to supplement their own stories. Obviously to do this newspapers must adopt "a fundamentally different mindset" to quote Scott Karp, who coined the term "link journalism": they must stop trying to keep people within their own sites and realise that sending them away to appropriately interesting articles may well keep them coming back for more. The Huffington Post, for example, thrives on sending readers away to other articles, and managed to become the most linked-to blog on the web.

Can newspapers supply the competition?

Evidently people do like to be able to get the news from many different sources around the world, and younger readers who have grown up with online news possibly have less loyalty to individual newspapers. With this in mind, newspapers could even provide a better service than Google and co. One of the problems with automated aggregators such as Google is the lack of a real editorial agenda: Google's algorithms try to judge the importance of stories in ways described above, but there is no editor to provide an informed, professional view of events by appropriately arranging stories on a homepage. A newspaper might not be able to provide as comprehensive an aggregation service as Google, but it would have the advantage of being able to offer a clear editorial voice in its selection of articles and how they appear, which is one of the aspects of newspapers that readers value highly.

Another more radical and highly controversial option to defy the search engine aggregators is to start charging for content. If newspapers were to come together and universally start charging online readers, via joint subscriptions or micropayment, they could create a newspaper-owned search engine and aggregator which included advertising and fairly distributed revenue, hence keeping all income from newspaper content within the control of newspapers. It would be a huge step, but as more and more publications contemplate a return to paid content, it seems at least a possibility.

Will Google's additional ads spur newspapers into action? Or will they continue to somewhat reluctantly tolerate the Internet giant's profit from their industry, and accept the directed traffic in return? The Internet has revolutionised the way that people read news, and aggregation and linking is undoubtedly going to continue to be a part of the news landscape. The issue is whether it will be newspapers themselves or third parties which manage the system.

Hewlett-Packard has designed a digital Inkjet Web Press especially for newspapers, book publishers and commercial print shops.

The printer runs $2.5 million and can print full-color, newspaper-sized pages.  It also prints wider than other editions.  The goal of HP was to "expand the business model for publishers by driving down the cost of small-volume press runs.  And because the press is digital it allows publishers to tailor their content to specific audiences."

SignOnSanDiego gives several examples of what this could mean for the print industry, "for a book publisher, the digital press might allow it to print small volumes of currently out-of-print books. For commercial printers, it opens the door to printing personalized ads on bank statements, telephone bills and other transactional documents."

Google Inc plans to partner with newspaper publishers in order to make millions of news archives be available digitally. The company announced on Monday that it will make "dozens" of historical newspapers and the images featured accessible online.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," says Punit Soni, Google product manager.

US papers like The New York Times and the Washington Post would work alongside Google to index their content in Google's News Archive. Papers that are included in the deal range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which is the oldest paper in North America being first printed in 1764.

The first newspapers that are linking up with Google for the project are based in North America, according to a spokesman.

Source: European Journalism Centre

In light of the recent the Associated Press (AP) vs. bloggers conflict, automated software known as "content recognition systems" is becoming more practical for companies seeking to keep track of their content, and even to maximize revenue.

To track down its articles in the DR, the AP used a content recognition system from California start-up company Attributor, which tracks copyrighted content on the Web.

Other companies that provide fingerprinting technology include Audible Magic and Vobile.

Pros of online content-tracking software:

- Tracking technology will let publishers know which ssites are using their content, thus "flowering information on the Web."

- For Sarah Chubb, CondéNet.com president, tracking software may be used to track down sites that could feature cooking or golf content. She said she is not interested in copyright violations but in "revenue opportunity." 

However, the blogosphere is concerned because "the software could act as a kind of ever-present police," according to BW.

BW also reported that the technology has flaws since it cannot identify when a clip or an article is used for legally protected things like book reviews.

Source: Business Week, Editors Weblog

See Also:
Associated Press vs. Drudge Retort and blogosphere: facts and outcome
US: AP admits to being "heavy-handed", will define standards for fair use on blogs
US: Associated Press vs. Drudge Retort "matter closed"

The Sports Rights Owners Coalition and the recently created New Media Coalition are disputing their respective interests in the broadcast and the sales of video and photo content taken on sport events.

Economically, print publishing is very different today than it used to be. There is massive amounts of free content on the Web, content that hasn’t really changed that much in general, or in value. It’s the value of the distribution of that content that has changed.

Business daily Les Echos launched its e-paper offer, a one-of-its-kind service. Subscribers can read the paper digitally on one of the two readers offered by Les Echos.

In a recent Business Week video interview with senior editor Diane Brady, Andrew Keen, founder of Audiocafe.com and author of the new book The Cult of the Amateur, expounded on his beliefs that user-generated content and Web 2.0 are bringing down culture and professional media.

Newspapers’ book sections are suffering from lack of advertising, which may even threaten their existence. In recent years, book publishers have preferred to buy ostensible locations in bookstores rather than single ads in a newspaper’s book section.

Microsoft Corporation has prepared to launch an attack on rival Google, arguing that the latter’s growth in new media markets has been at the expense of book, video and software publishers. A Mircrosoft official was very explicit in calling out Google’s practices.

Where is the future? Publishers across the globe frenetically explore formulas for continued success, and particularly dive in digital waters searching a beacon, a base to build future business on. These are often company-specific ventures, but in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, the industry is now joining forces in the ‘Flemish E-publishing Trends’-project. This four-year R&D-effort will create the conditions for a varied and solid e-publishing practice, with new roles and portfolios for the incumbent newspaper companies. The changeover from hardcopy to soft publishing is not an easy one. The FLEET deliverables will facilitate this transition.

Washingtonpost.com will be publishing fiction for the first time, as a series of installments of Post reporter David Hilzenrath’s novel, “Jezebel’s Tomb.”

Friday 24^th of November, a good 80 Dutch and Flemish editors and researchers gathered in the European Journalism Centre, Maastricht, Netherlands, to assess and discuss several prototypes of novel newspaper products or services. All are web-based one way or another, and ready for the Web 2.0 publishing environments. The in total six demonstrators feature remote reporting tools, video content based on strategic alliances with non-journalistic partners, e-paper trials and online reader communities. Most were developed in close cooperation with specialised R&D centres. Together, the prototypes reveal the contours of the future electronic newspaper.
Al least half of the demonstrators will make it to real applications, the other are subject to further testing in living lab conditions.
General conclusion of the event: we need further experimentation to capture the essence of digital presence. In the conference report, the applications as well as the editors’ appraisal are described more in detail.

The user content generated “wiki” revolution is starting to spread beyond the Internet.  Publishing group Pearson PLC is teaming up with top business schools, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, to created a user content generated book.

Publishers offered an olive branch to Internet search engines such as Google Friday amid bitter legal tussles with
new technology that would make content widely available but safeguard copyrights. Book publishers and media companies have accused US-based giant Google of riding roughshod over intellectual property rights by providing free access to protected content.

The TimesOnline is to unlock some of its digital archive, announced the paper's digital publisher Zach Leonard at the Association of Online Publishers conference. By doing so, the News International daily hopes to open up a new stream of revenue.

As newspapers look to maintain the value of their content while still making money in a commoditized news world, many have deemed archives a steady source of both value and income. A couple of interesting developments in archive technology have emerged which may either give newspapers some ideas or create problems for them.

After prolonged delays, Sony is set to launch its portable E-book reader this week.  Sony Reader is smaller than most paperbacks and features enough memory to hold up to 7,500 pages at a time.

In the week that the publishers of Le Soir and La Libre Belgique won their case in the Belgian Courts against Google for illegally publishing content on its news service without prior consent, the World Association of Newspapers (W.A.N.), the European Publishers Council (E.P.C.) the International Publishers Association (I.P.A.) and the European Newspapers Association (E.N.P.A), are preparing to launch a global industry pilot project that aims to avoid any future clash between search engines and newspaper, periodical, magazine and book publishers.

Ever hear of Bluffton, South Carolina?  If you are a newspaper professional, you should know about this small US community of 15,000 people, where a new model for newspapers and newspaper web sites is succeeding.