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It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

Rumours of an Apple tablet have gathered steam this week with an Oppenheimer analyst suggesting the tablet could be released in late March or April next year. Anticipating a boom, Apple's manufacturer is reportedly ready to produce one million units a month for an average price of $1000 each. 

"Our checks into Apple's supply chain indicate that the manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action and should begin to hit a mass market stride in February," wrote Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner.

The San Francisco Panorama, also known as the the 33rd edition of McSweeney's Quarterly, was released yesterday. The 320 pages of full color comes complete with investigative reporting, comics, a book section, posters, and a 16$ price tag.

According to media wonderchild and McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers, the quarterly chose to make a newspaper from scratch for its newest issue to "demonstrate the many things that newspapers can do uniquely well, and how necessary they are to a thriving democracy."

McSweeney's collaborated with over 150 freelance writers, designers, and artists. The Panorama includes contributions by Stephen King, Miranda July, Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Adichie, and Art Spiegelman.

The German coalition, led by recently re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel, has pledged to try to introduce a form of copyright legislation to help protect the content produced by journalists online, the New York Times is reporting.

The aim is to give German publishers a fighting chance when coming up against Internet giants such as Google, whom they accuse of exploiting content without sharing the profits.  

Microsoft has denied rumours that it is developing its own e-reader to rival Amazon's Kindle, reports the Guardian, with chief executive Steve Ballmer saying: "We have a device for reading. It's the most popular device in the world. It's the PC."

Ballmer said that given the company already supplies the software that runs this device (nine out of ten of the world's PCs use Microsoft's Windows operating system), and also manufactures 'Microsoft Reader', a free, downloadable software application for digital reading- it has no need to invest in creating its own e-reading hardware.

"I would love to see companies like Amazon and others bring their books to the PC," Ballmer told a reporter for the Reuters news agency. "Hopefully we can get that to happen with Barnes & Noble or Amazon or somebody. But no, we are not interested in e-readers ourselves.

The clarification comes amidst a growing buzz surrounding e-readers, with speculation over which companies will enter the market. Whispers that Apple are working on a device have only contributed to the hype, with reports that the reader will double as a portable tablet and e-reader as well as have a full colour screen.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos announced on Tuesday that the Kindle 2 would drop $40 in price from $299 to $259 in response to growing competition in the e-reader market. The decision comes amidst speculation that both Apple and Microsoft have plans to create their own devices and recent polls which have revealed that the current price point for e-readers is too high for the average consumer.

A new international Kindle that will allow users to buy books and newspapers wirelessly anywhere in the the world, will also be released on October 19 for $279, reports USA Today. Kindle users abroad previously needed a US Amazon based account and had to transfer their e-books from a computer via USB. "A book that may take two weeks to get shipped internationally in physical form can now be delivered in less than 60 seconds," Bezos told USA Today. The release is targeted at english-speaking expats and travellers and rivals the pricier iRex DR800SG ($399), previously the only e-reader to offer a global wireless network.

E-reader sales in the US have surpassed (albiet low) expectations, and Forrester Research, who previously predicted total sales would reach 2 million in May, has 'upped that projection by 50% to 3 million for 2009, with 30% of 2009 sales occuring in the holiday season of November and December.'

Reporting by Cecilia Campbell

HDS Digital runs Relay.com, a French digital kiosk for buying online versions of magazines. Ameyric Bauguin spoke at the second WAN-IFRA conference on e-reading in Paris last week, about how the press product and book distribution specialists were positioning themselves in the current market.

Bauguin emphasised the difference between selling in the 'real world' and selling on the Internet saying that it was much more difficult to manage the latter. Magazines - generally cheap, relaxing reading material - were not something that people would necessarily be immediately enthusiastic about purchasing over the Internet to read on computers. "We knew we had to make the offer very attractive, in order to be able to sell," he said. 

As more and more books, newspapers, magazines and other printed publications move onto the web for sale and distribution, so the numbers of pirated ebooks and articles increase.

Just as the music industry began suffering after 1999 from music piracy, publishing moguls are becoming increasingly aware of pirated ebooks alongside decreasing revenues from hardcover sales. In the United States sales declined 13% in 2008, and 15.5% through July 2009 versus the same period of 2008.

"We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books -- pretty much every category is turning up," said Ed McCoyd, an executive director of the Association of American Publishers. "What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy's a big concern."

The New York Times targets Rapidshare as the file sharing site that (unknown to its owners, of course) hosts the most copies of pirated ebooks. However it assumes that e-reading will take off and become a mainstream way of accessing and reading publications, and makes (as many understandably do these days) the parallel between the music and print publishing industries to illustrate the problem of piracy. The issue is one of comparison: at the moment, ebooks and e-reading constitute a tiny fraction of the publishing industry, only 1.6% of total book sales, while 95% of all music downloads are pirated, according to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of the recent "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," moderated the 'Free AND Paid Content: Business Models That Work' discussion on Tuesday night in the Condé Nast building in New York. The discussion, intended to focus on whether book and news consumers would pay for online content, quickly turned into a tense intellectual slugging match between John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishing, and Anderson.

Anderson championed the future of free content, or 'freemiums,' explaining that free content could bring books and print back into 'cultural conversation' while emphasizing that consumers could not be expected to being paying for something they can get and have gotten for free. Anderson's 'new economy' of the freemium is based in the digital world where 90% of content is free and 10% is sold, and is a radical departure from the control of the "beneficiaries of a 20th century oligopoly" (speaking of himself and the panelists) for whom "what the Internet did is ruin our party."

While he received support from panelist Gary Hoenig, ESPN Publishing's general manager and editorial director, who offered the evidence of his own site's doubling subscriptions simply by "improving the quality of the content," Anderson was strongly opposed by Sargent, who consistently cast a grim outlook for publishers and was tepidly backed by Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive online editor of the Wall Street Journal. Citing the Journal's robust business coverage and successful charging for online content, Murray called the panel's central question of whether people will pay "silly." The problem he brought up is that newspapers prematurely decided they would give away content over a decade ago; readers got used to reading their papers for free, thus "devaluing their own content."

E-readers have had somewhat hesitant popularity to date. There is a clear interest in the developing technology, but steep price tags ($399 for a Sony Reader, $489 for a Kindle DX) have meant that they haven't exactly taken off.

However, increasingly there is no shortage of supply. iRex recently released its iRex DR800SG ($399), where owners can buy books and newspapers using a global wireless network (Kindle users can currently only do so within North America) - and is planning to release a colour version by 2011.

With just over a million e-readers sold worldwide in 2008, improvements in the technology are expected to increase sales: market research firm iSuppli predicts that 5.2 million e-readers will be sold this year with a greater interest outside of North America.

The Taiwanese electronics company Asus is set to launch its very own e-reader before the end of this year, according to its president Jerry Shen, as reported in the Times.

Asus states that not only will the new devices be more intelligent and versatile than current competition, but cheaper too. Although there is little information concerning the exact details of the finished product, Shen hinted at the availability of a budget as well as a premium version.

Further details of the much-anticipated launch of the Plastic Logic e-reader have emerged on the media technology scene. The A4, flexible, electronic news and book-reading device will be launched first in the US early next year. Britain can look forward to receiving the product sometime late 2010 or early 2011.

It is expected that the product will be sold at a similar price to its main rival, Amazon's Kindle, the Times Online reports. The Kindle is currently sold in the US from $299.

Last week Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product manager at Google, published a response to newspaper publishers' Hamburg Declaration which was made public on 9 July. The Declaration states that "going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." It discusses ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, which is a tool created by WAN-IFRA and the European Publishers Council to enable content providers to communicate their copyright terms and conditions online in a machine-readable way. Cooperation from search engines is essential for such an initiative.

Cohen contends that publishers do in fact have to give permission before their content appears on search engines, pointing to a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol which tells search engines what can and cannot be crawled. He points out, correctly, that news organisations make their content available because they want it to be found and read via Google, which does deliver many consumer visits to newspaper websites each month.

The dilemma

In a move sure to rankle more than a few literature lovers, Amazon has filed two US patents for placing advertisements within the texts of e-books on its Kindle device. The ads would be linked to specific content and could appear anywhere within the books - at the beginning, between chapters, even in the margins.

Although not specifically mentioned in the patent applications, it is easy to see how this scheme could be extended to other media that is Kindle-compatible, such as newspapers and magazines.

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