Results matching “newspaper provides online video”

Google News and YouTube are extending their collaborative applications in an attempt to attract more news outlets to use their services. The project will target the 25,000 plus news outlets which are already on Google New's source list, to encourage them to join the YouTube partner programme and become an official partner. The aim is to help news publishers generate a larger audience for their video content.  

The plans were announced Sunday on the Google News Blog by YouTube news manager Olivia Ma.

Integrated journalists for integrated newsrooms

Almost everyone present agreed that journalism schools had a duty to train students across all media disciplines, with everyone having the opportunity to learn about print, web, video and audio platforms regardless if they were specialising in newspaper, broadcasting or online journalism.

As for content, the educators had differing views on the importance of choosing a specialist field, with some saying it was important to cater to the needs of the industry and the wider community. Recent outbreaks in bird and swine flu as well as the global downturn were cited as examples of areas where journalistic expertise was lacking, with Doreen Weisenhaus, associate professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, saying there was a great need for health journalists, particularly in Asia, where bird flu was first detected. She also said that as a key financial hub, Asia was calling out for journalists trained in financial reporting. Others made similar points about science and business journalism.

As the world's political and media spotlights focussed on the Iranian elections, the Internet was always expected to play an important role in keeping people up to date with developments, but little did we know the Web would also prove to be the scene of political unrest.

As news emerged that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had secured 62.6 percent of the 46.2 million votes cast compared to rival Mir Hossein Mousavi's 33.75 percent, tweets started circulating from a section of the country's disappointed and disenfranchised voters.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Labour MP Tom Watson go head-to-head on Twitter, as Watson and the Daily Mail accuse the centre-left paper of going too far. Last week, the newspaper went ahead with a front-page editorial urging the British PM Gordon Brown to resign.

Daily Mail obsessed with idea of Guardian 'putsch' (in collusion with BBC?). A question of media ethics, apparently. http://tiny.cc/7Wp3M"

And so went the tweet that started it all, with Rusbridger linking to the Daily Mail article, in which Stephen Glover asks "Was it [the Guardian] trying to orchestrate events so as to secure the resignation which it had called for in its editorial?"

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

The I Want Media's The Future of Media: 2009 discussion held at NYU yesterday gathered the most renowned names in the new media world to present their visions of the future of information media.  Present were Gawker chief Nick Denton, Jack Dorsey, cofounder and chairman of Twitter; Bonnie Fuller, creator of Us Weekly and founder of Bonnie Fuller Media; Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor online at The Wall Street Journal; and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

Perhaps of most interest to have come from the exchange were Denton's statements about journalists' attitudes, their inaptitude for internet blogging and the pay wall debate which is currently dominating news provision dialogue.

Are any dailies hiring? That seems to be the question on every aspiring journalist's mind. A recent graduate student who uses the penname "Where to Look?" asked this very question of whether or not daily newspapers are hiring to expert recruiter Joe Grimm. Grimm is a visiting professor at the Michigan University School of Journalism whose Q & A advice column is aimed at tackling 'the toughest recruiting questions.' A former editor, Grimm has moved into public communications and is the host of the weekly live online chats that address a designated issue in addition to his column.

Grimm candidly replies to the graduate that there are jobs available at daily news publications. The future of those dailies, as well as others that are not hiring is, however, less certain. What is certain is that the way media is delivered (as print, on-air, or through the internet) will become far more advanced.

Philly.com will probably start charging for content by the end of 2009, its owner Brian Tierney told Fox 29, a local Fox TV affiliate,  on its 'Good Day Philadelphia' show. Philadelphia Media Holdings owns the Inquirer and the Daily News as well as the city news website.

"I think by the end of this year we'll starting doing what a lot of other newspapers are looking at doing and charging something for it," Tierney said. "We can't spend $53 million on newsroom costs and give it away on the back door in terms of things. There will be a small charge for that."  He added that "I think we have the value there that people would be willing to pay."

According to the New York Times, American television network CBS has joined efforts with live video web site, Ustream, to have its news video content and special reports streamed live on the site, in a bid to draw in a younger crowd.

"Seeking a younger audience more accustomed to watching the news on the Internet than on television," reports the Times, Ustream will show the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, as well as a variety of real-time news reporting and other coverage, including news conferences and speeches.

UK-based PageSuite, a software development company which creates digital publications, has come up with a new software tool that will enable readers of newspapers on the web to search for key words and phrases. The search results appear instantly highlighted.

Currently, such a function is possible with the website versions of a newspaper, but few electronic titles offer the option. Outside the UK, El País' English-language version, produced in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune, is a good example of a newspaper e-edition where this service is already available.

The future of printed media has become a major political issue in countries like the United States or France, even being debated in ad-hoc committees set up by the legislative or the executive powers. Discussions along the Potomac or the Seine rivers have been focusing on the impact of Internet and new technologies, or on the need for state subsidies.

Meanwhile, on the Vltava in Prague, a group of editors and reporters working for PPF Media, the recently created division of insurance and consumer banking group PPF, is already opening new ways of covering a whole country in what may be a newsroom of the future. With other journalists for the moment based in four provincial towns from the Czech Republic, they are launching the so-called "hyperlocal weekly" Nase adresa ("our address"), which combines print and online journalism with particular efforts to sustain high professional standards and get closer to the readers.

"It can only work with well prepared journalists who will be trained in the Futuroom, our central newsroom," explains Roman Gallo, 44, director for PPF's media strategies and conceiver of the project. "We are also opening newscafés in our local bureaus, which will facilitate the contact between Nase adresa's journalists and the public, to enrich the content of our newspaper and of its webpages," adds Matej Husek, 33, director of news operations.
 
The newspoints, combining local newsrooms and Internet cafés in often small, rural towns, may be the most visible originality of this new undertaking. A few weeks before Nase adresa's launch, for instance, PPF Media's already hired staff had the chance to taste two products, the first print prototype of the weekly, and a cake likely to be served in the cafés. "The project represents a special challenge in terms of logistics, of room for storage, as we will be managing dozens of bistrot-Starbucks-like coffee shops in local newsrooms," comments Tomas Chejn, 41, the manager of PPF Media's branded cafés, a food specialist hired for his long time experience in quality catering. Petr Vitasek, 38, the director and chief editor for the Moravia region, based in the eastern Czech city of Olomouc, thinks this effort is worth the investment, because these "well located newspoints will be critical in getting Nase adresa's journalists to work closer to their readers."
 

 
But the whole project is innovative at other, multiple levels. To start with, for the first time a newspaper's birth is tightly associated to the creation of a multi-media training center - with several international partners including Google, Atex and the World Association of Newspapers/ World Editors Forum. The Futuroom will be a newsroom in charge of assisting and training in-house editors, some having no previous reporting experience, as much as a real life teaching field for future journalists. These will include a group of students within another partnership with Brno's Masaryk University, in the second largest Czech town.

Nase adresa's approach could also become a school case due to the organization of the newsroom. "I like how the Futuroom is shaped. Journalists are not confined to one theme, like health or education, but to a way of reporting, and I enjoy changing topics," says Vendula Krizova, reporter in the "Human approach team" and young (25) like many of her new colleagues. Adds Radim Klekner, 50, who joined the "Institutional team" - after working for 10 different newsrooms - to do researches on European Union institutions in particular: "Vertical structures dominate in traditional newspapers, while in Nase adresa it is more horizontal. In my case, for instance, I will be covering many European issues based on the Czech reality."


Klekner had some doubts initially, however, because he has been covering foreign news in the past 15 years.  Why would he join a hyperlocal news project as an international editor, then? "There is a need for benchmarking with other European countries in all aspects of the Czech society, and with Nase adresa I will be able to give a EU presence in the remotest Czech villages", he believes. "Our role is to assess general issues like the lack of general practitioners in the country, compared to others, and connect them to specific cases brought up by the local newsrooms."
 

 
Local journalists with long intensive experience covering their community are also convinced they are working for an innovative project. Vitasek, in Olomouc, even tried a hyperlocal news concept on his own five years ago, called Olomoucky Tydenik. "It was a weekly published on Mondays and strong on local sports, like Nase adresa. We had to stop it after one year, but this time I have with me a 10-people team supported by PPF and by the Futuroom managers and trainers. Our office, in a central strategic area of Olomouc, will be a space for constant direct contact with readers and potential contributors."

Based on her 30 year experience in local journalism, Hana Vojtova, 52, the chief editor of the Teplice newspoint, in the north Bohemian city near the border with east Germany, also believes Nase adresa is a new improvement for community journalism: "We will get nearer to the people from the region, who are tired of politics and want to be informed on human interest stories," explains Vojtova, whose district is dramatically affected by problems like crime and unemployment. "We are going to cover better our readers's activities and their dreams!"
 

 
The project has attracted several other seasoned editors from all backgrounds, including Jiri Zavozda, 50, Nase adresa's head of the copy editing team. He just finished a seven year experience in major private television "Prima", as news editor-in-chief, after working more than a decade for national newspapers. "The TV experience was good because it teaches you how to write short, but I prefer print because it is less superficial," says Zavozda. There are other reasons why he joined the Futuroom. "I see my in-laws, who live in a little village in Moravia and who have only access to media not specifically targeted to them, national daily Mlada Fronta, newsweekly Tyden and the television. Only Nase adresa will inform them well on the Sunday afternoon firemen team's competitions, which are particularly popular in the Czech republic. We will get spectacular photos of fires being extinguished!"

Adds Peter Sabata, 48, the editor-in-chief responsible for the local newsroom: "I strongly believe in the hyperlocal level of information, with the combination of newspoints, and print, online journalism. The weekly will be a bridge from now to the near future, when everybody in the regions will be connected." Sabata just moved back to the Czech republic after eight years at the head of national Slovak paper Pravda's newsroom.

 
Other Nase adresa team members are particularly enthusiastic because of the new challenges specific to a project combining teaching and praxis, online and print journalism, so far never achieved at such a level. Ondrej Besperat, 31, who manages the photo-video team in a duo with veteran photojournalist Jan Silpoch, is well aware of the differences between shooting for a newspaper or for a website. Before joining the Futuroom, he was a photographer for national daily Hospodarske Noviny and then worked for Aktualne.cz, the successful, Internet-only Czech media outlet. "In printed media, you have to do one or two pictures a day, and you invest all your energy in the best one, while in Internet, you try more different perspectives as you know that several pictures are likely to be released for each story."

Besperat anticipates he is likely to spend two third of his time training reporters from the local newsrooms, at the beginning at least. "One of the main challenges will be to shoot sport with our standard high-end amateur cameras," he says. "The idea is not to have journalists who do everything all the time, but reporters who are multifunctional, able to provide good texts and images."

 
Nase adresa will also represent new challenges beyond the expertise usually expected from  journalists, especially for the local chief editors who will have to look after a coffee shop part of their time. "Ten years ago I had a short experience working for Coca Cola, but this will be new because I am not at all a food and beverage specialist," laughs Vitasek, in Moravia. Krizova, who is glad to cover very diverse topics, is also ready for another type of special assignment as a young reporter. She will be asked to take care of children visiting the Futuroom - turned into a "Junioroom" or "media camp" - to learn how to write an article or produce a video footage.


PPF Media's project will be preparing new generations of journalists and not just showing new forms of getting and providing the news.
 

BACKGROUND
The Czech Republic is a country of 10 million people living in 14 regions subdivided in 75 districts in total. Until 20 years ago, only the government and Communist Party related entities could publish newspapers. This was also the case for the regional dailies, and for more local publications at district or town levels. German group Verlagsgruppe Passau took over most of them in 1990 and after, under its Czech branch Vltava-Labe-Press which currently controls over 10 weeklies and over 70 dailies called Denik ("daily", followed by the name of the concerned locality). Nase adresa will have no direct competitors except in a few cases, because its editions will typically cover areas of 20-30,000 people while Denik and its affiliates are designed for larger groups, of over 100,000 inhabitants on average.

A new report, "Analyzing the Australian Media & Advertising Industry" has concluded that the Australian newspaper industry is currently outperforming its British and American counterparts.  

The May 2009 report, published on the business intelligence website, Report Buyer, focuses on the importance of advertising revenues to the health of the newspaper industry. In order to clarify the dynamics, the researchers drew clear lines between its components, the top spenders and service providers within a global framework.

New York Times journalist David Carr has written his regular Media Equation piece about the very paper he works for. Prompted by questions from interviewees who continue to ask him about the fate of the paper, he has decided to address some of the main issues, though stressing that he does not have access to information from "the people in charge."

He addresses the question of the paper's ownership, and concludes that the Sulzberger family's control of the stock and the board, coupled with the barrier created by Carlos Slim's loan, means that nobody else is going to be able to take control any time soon. Carr also asserts that despite the company's debt and declining revenue, it is "well within its existing debt covenants," and Slim's loan and the mortgage of the headquarters have given the company "the wherewithal to operate into 2011." The company has said it is not for sale, and as it is not in imminent danger of default or bankruptcy, it need not be pressured into a deal.

At the first full day of the INMA conference, the ever controversial Jeff Jarvis insisted that "we have to redefine utterly what a newspaper is". He made a distinction between what he described as the old "content economy" contrasted with what he calls the new "link economy". "Content gains value as it gains links," he insisted, "if you're not linkable you don't exist." Continuing with his old/new divide, Jarvis said that news is no longer about people buying a product, but about giving people information and listening to their thoughts on it - he promoted the idea of newspapers fostering better relationships with their readers.

Like Jarvis, Agustin Edwards, editor and managing director of Las Ultimas Noticias (LUN), in Santiago, Chile, emphasises the need for a solid relationship between a newspaper and its readers. However, he moves in entirely the opposite direction to Jarvis in his bid to secure a "purer" reader base: LUN is replicated daily in pdf on the publication's site, a process which makes it invisible to Google. This means the search engine can not use LUN's articles - but nor can it direct traffic to them.

The Internet has affected newspapers in many ways, and though recent focus has concentrated largely on falling revenue due to reduction in print advertising, it has also given papers the chance to greatly expand their story-telling capabilities. As well as just words and pictures, there are now numerous different ways to enhance a story: through video, audio, slideshows, interactive maps and graphics, and more. But are newspapers making full use of the opportunities that the Internet offers to change the way that they produce their stories?

Upendra Shardanand, CEO and founder of Daylife, wrote in Paid Content about his belief that journalistic storytelling is "stuck in a rut." He describes how publishers he meets are eager to revamping many parts of their business such as distribution, and how do generate revenue, but "one aspect of their businesses that very few seem to question is the actual craft of writing and telling stories." The Internet offers so many opportunities that he feels journalists do not take advantage of, rather they leave it to sites such as Outside.In and Everyblock who "treat content like data and tear it apart just to reassemble it into infinitely browsable, non-linear experiences." He compares this process to the way that Amazon has "revolutionized" shopping.

In what the Financial Times describes as "a first step towards charging for its content on smartphones", Thomson Reuters has launched overhauled its mobile applications. The new apps contain video and market data, as well as headlines. Whilst remaining free for the moment, Alisa Bowen, head of consumer publishing at the company added "It would be a logical conclusion that there would be a paid element in time... The ability to launch premium services is our ultimate goal."

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's iPhone and Blackberry applications remain free - despite content being charged for on the publication's website. However, Rupert Murdoch recently revealed that users of the paper's iPhone application would soon be required to "pay handsomely". Journal editor Robert Thomson also revealed that it will launch "a sophisticated micropayments service" for the main website this autumn.

"Prepare  yourself for an all new digital media experience," says Australia's Daily Telegraph talking about Papermotion, a revolutionary new technology that will enable readers to digitally interact with advertising not online, but on print.

Developed by French company, Total Immersion, together with an Australian firm called the Dreamscape Group, Papermotion uses special animation technology to turn an otherwise static, one-dimensional object on print into a three-dimensional moving image including sound. To activate content, readers visit a special website before running the print image past their webcam which, in turn, feeds the picture to the site and transforms it using a variety of media, including video, audio, music and games.

Nick Jones, former BBC political correspondent talked about the advantages of newspapers' video use in a panel with Lain Dale and Paul  Staines at the Foreign Press Association.

Jones said that audio and video material, when used properly on newspaper websites, brings journalism to a new and better level. "Newspapers are making money out of video and audio. They are buying up exclusive material obtained in dubious circumstances - but it is getting good ratings," he said.

Silicon Valley start-up Attributor and a group of online publishers have partnered to form the Fair Syndication Consortium which aims to help publishers receive a cut of the advertising revenue generated on sites which have reproduced their content. Companies such as Google or Yahoo operate advertising networks that broker advertising to websites, and the group hopes to persuade these and other players to give them a share of the ad revenue.

Attributor Corp currently works with companies such as the AP and the Financial Times to track their text, audio and video content. If it is found that someone is using it inappropriately, the news outlet can request that it is taken down. Now, however, Attributor intends to use its technology to keep the content up, but with a share of ad revenue going to the publisher. "What we are saying is maybe there is a middle ground," said Attributor's chief executive Jim Pitkow. "If people are taking full copies of your content - why don't you take a revenue share?" Attributor would go direct to the offending company and demand a cut of the revenue.

Last week, Monty Cook - who took over as editor of the Baltimore Sun in January - led a press and public policy seminar at John Hopkins University. During the seminar, entitled "News and Content First: Protecting what matters most," Cook took the opportunity to tell the audience that his newspaper is "not in decline," before adding "it's in transition."

According to the Baltimore Brew, Cook began the seminar by going over the demise of the newspaper industry, mentioning some of the dead or soon-to-be-dead titles, but did not include his own paper among the list.

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.

The Wall Street Journal released a free iPhone application yesterday, Wednesday April 15, which allows readers to freely access WSJ's text, radio and video content, a significant move considering they're one of the few websites that still charge for content. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of WSJ stated recently that online papers should be charging for news if they want to survive.

About eight months ago, WSJ created a free application for Blackberry, yet they charge $9.99 a month on Amazon's Kindle. Critics highlight how ironic it seems that one of the oldest pay walls online is allowing users to find ways around paying. However, they also argue that it is the Journal's move to help broaden their audience.

According to researchers from City University London's Graduate School of Journalism, going online only could cause a newspaper to lose 75% of its revenue and web traffic can actually fall. For their report 'Taking the paper out of news,' Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti studied Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat which dropped its print edition at the end of 2007, due to declining readership and heavy losses. They interviewed the CEO and Editor-in-Chief, as well as several other editors and journalists.

The researchers state that "logic might suggest that if a newspaper's content ceases to be available in print form, the title's website would start to register a significantly higher number of visitors." But in fact, following an initial rise, the paper's unique users started to fall months after the paper went online-only, and "compared with the websites of three newspapers who retained a print version, Taloussanomat's performance looks very poor indeed." One such website is that of its main competitor, Kauppalehti, which runs an integrated print-online operation.

Today media executives Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, Jr. announced the foundation of their new company Journalism Online, LLC, which proposes to "quickly facilitate the ability of newspaper, magazine and online publishers to realize revenue from the digital distribution of the original journalism they produce." The company will work with all types of publishers--newspaper, magazine, online-only--to help make money with online news.

As print publications continue to fail and publishers seek to make a profit online, they battle a myriad of obstacles with the online forum: Will users be willing to pay for content that has thus-far been provided for free? How will publishers compete with free news aggregators like Google and the world of the blogosphere and citizen journalism? Once they charge for content, how will they maintain searchability and generate the traffic they will need to attract advertisers?

The call for multi talented journalists and more multimedia news coverage just got higher as Thomson Reuters journalists are to be armed with a portable multimedia suite they call "studio in a suitcase". The kit includes a video camera, microphone, lights, tripod and monitor.  As citizens all over the world are increasingly equipped with all kinds of gadgets that can collect news, journalists are needing to be just as prepared, and even less specialized in one area.