Results matching “at wall street journal”

Following the success of subscription sales by The Times and The Wall Street Journal iPad apps, News Corp is "nearing a decision on whether to start a news organization to provide content for a subscription application on digital tablet devices such as Apple's iPad," Kenneth Li of Financial Times reported today.

With 5000 subscriptions in London three days after launching The Times iPad app, and 10,000 iPad subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, there is a chance that readers "are willing to pay for portability." A decision on whether plans for the tablet-content unit will be shelved or carried out is due by autumn.

According to Li, "If News Corp gives the green light to the tablet-centric news organization plans, it will hire a new staff while borrowing from the resources, but not the content, of its news assets...the product would include coverage of news, entertainment, sports and politics."

Google is considering creating a future online market for digital content through its mobile operating system Android. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt highlighted this potential source of income, alongside the possibility of newspapers providing sellable content.

"This can be a powerful business, a 10-plus billion-dollar business," Schmidt said, referring to Google's new auction system combined with the Android operating system, and the fact that Android systems are currently being given out for free to device makers. "If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can't make money from that?" He asked.

Amazon's 3rd generation Kindle will be shipped to buyers starting August 27. Smaller, lighter and faster, the Kindle has been designed to reduce chances of digital intrusions on the reading experience.

With storage capacity for 3,500 Books, a month of battery life, free 3G wireless, built-in Wi-Fi support, Text-to-Speech, and an "integrated, retractable reading light that lets you read comfortably anytime, anywhere," the new Kindle is good news, and for $189 or $139 without 3G, it comes cheaper than many of its peers.

The Huffington Post just launched a travel section, Arianna Huffington herself announced in a blog post on the site. HuffPost Travel will cover "all aspects of travel, from the glorious to the maddening," she wrote. Leading the homepage today is a collection of photos entitled 'Dare to bare' depicting "the best nude beaches in the world."

The section hope to be a "one-stop shop," offering travel news, tips and advice, deals, reviews, blogs and photographs. Readers are invited to interact by offering their own tips, photos and reviews: "we hope you'll be a big part of the section," Huffington wrote. HuffPost Travel will also offer selections of travel poetry and prose.

Apollo, a new news app for the iPad, aims to offer "the world's first fully personalized newspaper," loosely based on the music platform Pandora, which suggests to users new music that it thinks they will like, based on their preferences. After its release on Friday by Hawthorne Labs, Apollo quickly jumped to number 11 in the Apple iPad store, according to co-founder Evan Reas. It is priced at $4.99 (or €3.99).

Quoted by TechCrunch and others as saying that the app aimed to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," Reas stressed to the EW that he did not in fact intend to destroy news providers, but simply that he believed that print newspapers were becoming less relevant to younger people, and that digital news was the future. "What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying," he wrote on his blog.  

In fact, Reas did not want Apollo to be seen as a threat to the news industry. "We believe that we are a friend to traditional news sources, helping them get new views from a new medium," he said, adding that  "we think it is mutually beneficial for us and the content sources."

Apollo aims to help readers discover new content that they will like, based both on their expressed preferences - they can like or dislike specific articles, and favourite sources - and on which articles they read, how much time they spend on each, and what 'similar' users like.

The news is separated into different category groups, which are displayed as boxes along the bottom. Each of these has a choice of several different subcategories, which were chosen following extensive user testing, Reas said. The categories are intended to prompt users to read different types of news, and maybe to discourage them from only reading about the topics with which they are already familiar. One of the arguments against personalized news is that it takes away the element of serendipity, the chance to discover something totally new, but Reas said that the categories and the fact that Apollo is continuously bringing in new sources and articles will retain an element of this.

Apollo selects news from thousands of sources, both established news sources and blogs, using their public RSS feeds to link to content within the app. No content is licensed, and as the RSS feeds are public this should not be a problem. Another iPad news reader however, Pulse, had problems immediately after its launch when the New York Times objected to the use of its content within the app. Pulse essentially offers nicely-presented RSS feeds, allowing readers to choose their sources. One possibly important difference between the two though in terms of copyright is that  Apollo only offers a title and small snippet of an article before the reader clicks through to the page of the news outlet, while Pulse reproduces the whole text of the article that is available via the RSS feed.

For now, Hawthorne Labs' single stream of income is from app purchases: there is no advertising within Apollo. "In the longer term, we are considering other options like offering premium services to readers," Reas said.

He has faith in the iPad's potential as a news reading device: "I think the iPad will be how most people get their news in the future," but hopes to create Apollo apps for the iPhone, Android and a web browser too. "We are thinking about a lot of new ideas, especially around social, recommendations and personalization of content in our goal to be the daily destination for people to discover their content."

Many news publishers have been hoping that the iPad and similar devices will represent a significant revenue stream, at a time when they are determined to make money out of digital news distribution. The hope is that consumers will be prepared to pay to subscribe to specific news apps on the iPad, even if they are not prepared to pay to subscribe online. Much of this expectation seems to have been created by the fact that people are prepared to pay for news apps on the iPhone and other smart phones.

Something to note, however, is that most customers are far more likely to pay a one-off fee to download an app rather than pay regularly for a subscription. And with applications like Apollo or Pulse, which offer news from multiple sources in a relatively readable format for a one-off payment, news outlets are going to have to up their game if they want to persuade a high number of readers that they are worth paying for. Plus, it is significantly easier to read news in a web browser on the iPad compared to a smartphone due to the far larger screen size, reducing the need for an app at all.

Reviews of news apps have been middling so far, as Alan Mutter noted in May and with which present ratings concur, but the potential for innovation in the way news is presented is huge. And subscription-based apps have been selling, with the Times counting 12,500 subscribers, and it was reported in early June that the Wall Street Journal already had 10,000 iPad subscribers. As a comparison, the BBC's free app has been downloaded more than a million times. 

The iPad and other similar devices will remain niche, elite products for at least the immediate future, but those who do buy them are likely to be prepared to spend some money on apps if they are offered something interesting enough. Will consumers prefer the personalised aggregation of news offered by Apollo, or will they choose a premium experience from their favourite newspaper? Or both? 

T.L. Caswell, formerly of the Los Angeles Times editing staff and current writer for Truthdig, recently published an article criticizing the Times' decision to run a realistic looking advertorial on the July 1st edition of their LATExtra. The publication, which has won 39 Pulitzer prizes, has the fourth largest circulation in the United States. Caswell, holding the newspaper in high esteem, expresses his sentiment that the Times is "among the greatest dailies of modern time." He adds, however, that "now, the good times are gone and, some will argue, the good Times is gone."

So major UK dailies the Times and Sunday Times have gone behind an online paywall: those wishing to read beyond the homepage will have to register and pay £1 for a day's access, £2 for a week. The sum is not huge but in today's news landscape where online readers jump swiftly and easily between news sources, how many are likely to pay?

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that a column on the Sunday Times' site this weekend had lifted an item from a free website, Gentlemenranters, without giving proper attribution. The editor of Gentelmenranters confirmed to Greenslade that the Sunday paper had not contacted the site. In the world of blogging and linking it has become almost standard practice to refer to the work of others, but citing the source is essential, and when a website is behind a paywall there does seem to be a feeling that it is less justifiable to take content from other sources. Presumably this is because, if people are paying for content, they expect it to be top quality and definitely original.

This raises the question of whether people do value and expect more from content that they pay for more than free content. News organisations all want their content to be regarded as valuable, but the ubiquity of news online does mean that many people may well have started to take content for granted, and flick through different sources, disregarding articles that are not immediately gripping.

This has for some time been one of Murdoch's arguments for implementing paywalls, and it is a valid concern. But do people now value news enough to pay for a specific paper? A loyal base of print subscribers will get online access free. Of those who do subscribe to the new Times websites, there will presumably be some who immediately sign up because they love the paper, and maybe others who later realize that they miss it so much that they are prepared to pay, and others who choose to make a one off purchase for a day or a week to access a specific piece. But has the Times is now practically invisible on Google, and bloggers can't link to it, how might new readers find the site?

Another Guardian blog post has offered "A warm welcome to guardian.co.uk for all former readers of the Times." Writer John Crace asserts that "here at the Guardian we can offer everything you ever wanted from the Times - and more - for nothing" and offers a tongue-in-cheek comparison of the two papers. Although many of those commenting on the article were disparaging about the Guardian's self-righteousness and questioned its own business model, its point is legitimate: there undoubtedly exist many good-quality, viable alternatives to the Times for readers who do not want to pay.  

The Guardian has made it clear that charging for online news is not something that it intends to do in the near future. Editor Alan Rusbridger has firmly underlined his belief that news should be free, stressing the importance of a wide reach and immediacy of access. The paper consistently has among the highest number of unique users of any UK paper (upwards of 30 million per month) and although its losses are currently substantial, it seems to be holding out for a way to make money from these.

And as well as other quality dailies with free websites, there is the BBC. Newspapers might be able to offer superior comment and analysis, but for the news, the BBC is an excellent source. The new Times sites are impressive, with improved navigation and search, and more multimedia elements: interactive graphics as well as more photos and videos. 'Behind the story' is also a useful new feature, and the live Q&As are likely to appeal. However, it is not far and away the best news website available, which is arguably what it needs to be in order to succeed in charging.

Poynter's Bill Mitchell took a look at the Times' paywall alongside two other British examples, the Financial Times and the Guardian. He was surprised by the strength of the Times paywall: the fact that articles are not indexed on Google and that all content, even blogs, are now paid-only. Other papers, including the New York Times, are looking at a 'metered' strategy which would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month before being asked to pay, overall keeping the paper more visible. Even Murdoch's financial daily, the Wall Street Journal, offers some articles free via Google.

As Steve Outing notes, at least Murdoch "has the guts" to try out a paywall strategy on a major daily, and to try it in the most extreme sense.  However, the extreme strategy is undoubtedly highly risky. As well as the inevitable loss of online reader numbers which risks marginalizing the Times and making it less relevant in the online news conversation, there is the subsequent risk that journalists will not want to work for a paper where their work is not read by many. It was one of the complaints made by New York Times star journalists such as Thomas Friedman during the TimesSelect experiment which ended in 2007. One law blogger from the Times, Tim Kevan, has already quit and been taken in by the Guardian - will others follow?

So in its quest for more revenue and trying to get readers to give greater value to its content, the Times risks losing an awful lot. If it does end up making a huge profit (paidContent looks at the figures here), others will follow and News Corp might end up dramatically changing the news landscape. There has been so much talk about paywalls with little consensus: doing it is the only way to find out if it actually will work, and the rest of news industry must be relieved that somebody is trying. That said, it really is a big risk. 

The Wall Street Journal plans to leverage its reputation in the United States for its technology coverage and will soon launch a new technology section for its European readers, Journalism.co.uk reported last week. The new section will cover technology business start-ups, entrepreneurs, gadgets and service activities in the tech business in Europe.

While the shape and structure of the upcoming tech section is still undecided, it will incorporate technology content from the United States edition and from the regional market as well, providing a mix of news and commentary that include "straightforward top quality reporting" supported by analysis on Heard on the Street and other blogs.

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

Apple has recently announced an impressive feat for its new tablet: 3 million iPads have been sold since the device went on sale in the US, a mere 80 days ago. Moreover, software developers have created more than 11,000 apps for the device. "The iPad has emerged as the first tablet computer with mainstream appeal, carving out new product category between smartphones and notebook computers," writes Adam Satariano. And consumers are not the only ones fawning over the iPad: Rupert Murdoch also recently declared his love for the device. "This is a fantastic invention," he said. "It combines the ability to present all forms of media to all people, from 3 year old children to 100 year old men."

Foursquare, arguably the hottest, heavily-courted, high-tech startup since Twitter, has just inked (no pun intended) a deal with the most widely-read newspaper in the US, The Wall Street Journal.  A selection of WSJ.com articles (NYC restaurant reviews and other local cultural coverage) now include an "Add to Foursquare" button.  As TechCrunch astutely notes, "one surefire way to know that a service is doing well is when you see their buttons start appearing all over the web. We've seen it with Facebook, we've seen it with Twitter (Tweetmeme buttons), and now we're going to start seeing it with Foursquare".

USA Today president and publisher Dave Hunke, recently announced they would be reorganizing the paper, reports Gannett Blog. Most shockingly for the publication's staff, the reorganization will include layoffs. USA Today, which in April reported a 13.6 percent decrease in circulation over six months, has been under increasing pressure to revive their newspaper sales. Moreover, Today's advertising revenue fell 11 percent during the first quarter, while the overall decline amongst Gannett's (owner of USA Today) other papers was 8 percent.

Bloomberg News is doing things a little differently.  In stark contrast to media heavyweights such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The New York Times, Bloomberg has launched a fresh version of its business news website supported solely by ads rather than subscription fees.  A free-content approach to news provision would seem to be a departure from the company's traditional revenue model which revolves around selling subscriptions to its Bloomberg Terminals data feeds at the price of $1500/month.

The weekly Polish publication Polityka is trying something unexpected this week: it is publishing its cover in 3-D. With 5 days left until the presidential election, the weekly releases an edition of its political magazine that features 2 covers, one with presidential candidate Bronislaw Komorowski, and the other featuring his opponent Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The two covers can be seen by tilting the magazine back and forth to change the image. The headline of the publication reads "first election round, two candidates, three dimensions." The publisher, Spoldzielnia Pracy Polityka, decided to publish only half of the circulation (100,000 copies) with the special 3-D cover. 

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has bought Skiff, an electronic reading platform developed by Hearst Corp., and purchased a share in Journalism Online, a company formed to enable newspapers, magazines, and online-only publishers to collect revenue from online readers. Murdoch's acquisition of Skiff signifies another step in Murdoch's effort to make online readers pay for content. Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer of News Corp., said  "both Skiff and Journalism Online serve as key building blocks in our strategy to transform the publishing industry and ensure consumers will have continued access to the highest quality journalism."

Difficult times present many challenges, but they also offer many opportunities. L'Université d'Eté will give you the chance to learn and benefit from the worldwide experience of WAN-IFRA.

The Summer University will be 5 to 7 July at the Unisys International Management Centre.  Participation is limited.

All information at : www.wan-ifra.org/summeruniversity2010

As part of its effort to appeal to a wider New York audience, the Wall Street Journal will expand once again, this time by adding a new weekly lifestyle and leisure section, AdAge reported yesterday. The 15-17 page section is scheduled to debut this autumn, and is expected to run on Saturdays.

The move by the WSJ to reach more readers will also place it in direct weekend competition with The New York Times, which dominates on weekends and derives a significant part of its revenue from the advertising-loaded Sunday edition, DailyFinance.com reported. The Journal has already entered into a war with The Times on the local front, with its recently launched Metro section for New Yorkers, soon followed by an ad campaign directly aimed at its rival with slogans like, "Ahead of the times."

Speaking yesterday from The Wall Street Journal's annual 'D: All Things Digital' conference in California, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a number of significant statements about the role of journalism in a democracy, the paradigm shift presented by the iPad as well as predictions for the future of personal computing.  In an on-stage interview with Walt Mossberg, Jobs stated that "One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.  Some of these newspapers, the news-gathering and editorial organizations are really important, I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers, myself.  I think we need editorial more than ever right now.

Yesterday, Forbes announced that it had bought True/Slant, a news source created by Louis Dvorkin's that allowed for credible journalists to independently publish their work while building audiences on the strength of their own name. For some of Dvorkin's lesser-known contributors, Forbes acquirement of True/Slant will have little real consequences as they will continue build their popularity as individual journalists. Yet, for other more popular contributors, this merger will integrate them into an entrepreneurial setting in which they hope to more effectively change the news industry through their innovation and creativity.

The Bay Citizen (formerly the Bay Area News Project) launches today, aiming to "enhance quality civic and community news coverage" in the Bay Area, in partnership with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The nonprofit project was founded in September 2009 with $5million in funding from the Hellman Family Foundation and additional support from the Knight Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and others.

The site promises "original multimedia news and information about the Bay Area" distributed using "cool technology" that allows readers to share news, have conversations, and "truly be a part of the community." Readers are invited to donate. 

By now, it has become increasingly clear that 2010 is in fact, as the British weekly Economist put it, the year of the paywall. The Times of London and the Sunday Times are just weeks away from offering their online content for a fee and recently, the New York Times announced its finalized paywall plans and an official launch date.  

This has prompted Vanity Fair.com's and Newser's, Michael Wolff, to wonder what will happen to the news world when most people no longer get their sources from established sources.

Wolff shies away from the economics of paid online content's viability and delves deep into the transformations that a drop in readership might bring for newspapers behind paywalls.

Press Gazette reports that the amount of time spent reading news online has risen from seven million hours per months to twenty-two million hours (or roughly thirty-minutes per person) a month over the last three years.  The data was compiled by the UK Online Measurement Company based on tracking a sample of 40,000 internet users throughout the UK.

Consumers have given mainstream media only "middling grades" for their iPad applications so far, according to Alan Mutter, who looked at ratings on the iTunes Store. For the ten most frequently-downloaded news apps (in order of popularity: USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Associated Press, NPR, BBC, Reuters, France 24 and China Daily) the average number of stars was 2.8 out of 5. It must be noted that many news outlets have not yet released iPad-specific applications.

The apps with the most stars were three publicly-funded news outlets. France 24 was rated highest, with 4 stars. The French government-funded TV news channel offers news in English and Arabic as well as French. Next came the BBC and NPR with 3.5 stars.