Results matching “not to publish mo”

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, the journalism nonprofit launched by Ariana Huffington in September 2009, has produced roughly 50 stories since its inception.

Nick Penniman, executive director of the fund, estimated that his editorial staff of nine publish between three and five stories a week. Some are "deep-dive" pieces, requiring months of reporting, while others are "quick-strike" articles that are less in-depth.

The fund's articles are posted on their website and can be distributed by other news outlets free of charge under a Creative Commons license.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

Bloomberg media recently revealed a redesigned version of its recently acquired weekly publication, BusinessWeek. In adopting what MediaWeek described as a "bullish" strategy, the new version will feature more content including a "leisure/arts" section, and the number of annual issues will increase from 47 to 50. 

The New York Times drew attention to the fact that unlike many American towns and cities that are losing publications and becoming one-paper towns, California's Palo Alto has three papers: two of them daily, all of them free. All are small, but told the NYT that they are profitable and here to stay.

The newest, and appartnetly most controversial of these is the print-only Daily Post, started by Dave Price and Jim Pavelich in 2008, in the former offices of the Palo Alto Daily News, which they had founded in 1995 and sold in 2005. The Daily Post's website explains that in 2008, new owners of the Daily News, MediaNews Group, moved the paper's offices so Price and Pavelich took the space. The idea was to return to "the spirit of the old Daily News, with hard-hitting, fearless news reporting."

In another development in the case of the controversial Muhammad cartoons, the Danish newspaper Politiken apologized today to eight Muslim organizations for the offense it caused them by reprinting the cartoons. The Muslim organizations have promised to drop legal action against the newspaper if it printed an apology, according to the Guardian.

The newspaper's apology was condemned by a wide range of Danish figures that believe the apology compromises Denmark's freedom of the press.

French daily newspaper Le Figaro has announced details of its plans to charge for online content, offering three different tiers of subscriptions.

The three levels will be called Connect, Select and Business. Connect is a free subscription that allows access to free email newsletters with general, cultural and financial news. It also enables users to comment on articles and create a personalised front page.

The Paris-based citizen photojournalism agency Citizenside has partnered with Metro International to launch a new website for citizen reporting.

The site, MetroReporter, allows readers to upload and share their news photos and video. All contributions are vetted by editors before being posted. If they are published in print or on Metro's primary site, the member is paid between €10 and €70. Membership of MetroReporter is free and Metro has agreed to purchase and publish user contributions on a regular basis. This means that an international publication has plans to regularly pay its audience to contribute content, rather than expecting user-generated content to be free.

Reading newspapers on Amazon's e-book reader the Kindle is less appealing than reading the print version, a new study by the University of Georgia has found. But portable e-readers that feature colour, photographs and touch screens could win readers back, particularly among young adults.

Over the course of a six-month study, participants read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Kindles, and then provided feedback through focus groups and interviews.

The readability of the Kindle screen impressed adults of all ages. Similarly, nearly all respondents, regardless of age, found the $489 price tag too high.

A new web-only daily newspaper has launched in Scotland, The Guardian reports, after being expected for some weeks.

Called the Caledonian Mercury, the paper takes its name from one of Scotland's first news journals. It is edited and largely written by former staff from The Scotsman who departed after deep budget cuts at the paper. They will work as freelancers, and will be paid partly according to the "value" of their copy to readers and advertisers. How this will work is not yet clear.

News and reviews from the Washington Post are now published in the Hindustan Times, under a content-sharing agreement reached by the two organisations.

The Hindustan Times, the second-most read English language newspaper in India, will publish a special section with the stories from the Post. It will include reports from the paper's global bureaux, opinion pieces, book reviews and columnists. The option is also available to share content from the Post's magazine, Newsweek.

Non-profit investigative news groups have been encountering many of the same financial difficulties as the newspapers they have been working with, according to the AP's Andrew Vanacore.

As newsrooms cut costs and staff, investigative non-profit groups like the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) have picked up where they left off, or more appropriately, what they left out. Charitable foundations and philanthropists have pumped tens of millions of dollars into these non-profit watchdogs to investigate issues like corruption and the environment, which some newsrooms lack the resources to cover.

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

Editor & Publisher, "America's oldest journal covering newspapers", has risen from the dead, following its acquisition by a boating magazine chief.
  
Editor & Publisher, an independent news organization reporting on all aspects of the newspaper business, has resumed publication in print and online following its sale on Thursday to Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc, as Poynter Online reports.

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Two newspaper printing plants, one each in the US and the UK, are set to close, and substantial layoffs are expected to follow.

In the UK, Harmsworth Printing has begun a 30-day consultation over closing its Plymouth printing plant. If the plant is closed, 90 staff could be lost, although the company has said it would try to find jobs for them elsewhere in the organisation.

Newspaper readers in France have been disrupted this week, after distribution company Presstalis blocked the distribution of papers to different parts of the country two days in a row. In response to the action, one newspaper has refused to publish an edition today.

It was northern France and part of central France that went without their national daily newspapers on Wednesday. Papers were distributed normally in the east, west and south. Le Monde made a PDF version of that day's paper available for free on its website.

On Thursday, distribution was interrupted in the east and south of the country. By contrast, the north of France, including Paris, received its newspapers mostly as normal. Only Le Figaro and France Soir suffered a smaller distribution than normal in this area.

The Kitanippon Shimbun has closed its evening edition and will now publish a morning edition only, NSK News Bulletin reports.

Plans are in place to redesign its morning edition, including moving some content from the defunct evening edition to the morning one. The website will also get a makeover, adding more content and featuring the latest news ahead of the print edition.

The Telegraaf Media Groep has the advantage of already having a significant presence in the news landscape of the Netherlands, and Brouwers hopes that his new network can collaborate with Telegraaf's more traditional properties. He realises, however, that his platform is going to be very different, and also that the Telegraaf newspapers will be careful about how much of their content they give away. 

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.

Looks like it's not just newsagents that are paying for free newspaper the London Evening Standard. Some shops in suburban London are charging consumers to cover their costs, The Guardian reports.

In October, the paper dropped its 50 pence cover price and went free. Since then, it has more than doubled circulation, from 250,000 copies to just fewer than 600,000 copies. There are plans to increase this number even further, to 800,000 or even 1 million.

The trade-off is that it also cut back on the number of its distribution outlets, particularly in the outer suburbs of London. Demand from newsagents and consumers in suburbs outside its new distribution area has been strong enough, though, that the newspaper is trialling delivery to two new areas in north-east and north-west London.

An article on the Washington Post by Paul Farhi has looked at recent media coverage of the Tiger Woods' alleged extra-martial affairs, and pointed out some ethical issues that arise from what appears to be the simple repetition of celebrity gossip in established publications. Farhi writes that whilst: "There's little doubt that Woods cheated on his wife... two weeks after stories about the world's greatest golfer began detonating, much about this story has taken on the coloration of fact without the facts themselves."

The January edition of Editor & Publisher will be published as previously planned, Editor Greg Mitchell announced yesterday, citing overwhelming reader and advertiser demand.

After the surprise announcement last week of Editor & Publisher's closure, both the print and online versions were expected to fold at the end of the year.

But Managing Editor Shawn Moynihan expressed hope that they would still be able to publish the January edition, which staff had already started working on before the announcement. His wish has been granted with this announcement.

In a move that saw two daily newspapers absent from news stands in France, editorial staff at Le Parisien and Aujourd'hui en France have gone on strike.

Last week, staff were protesting against management's restructuring plans, which would include cuts to 35 staff. The newspapers did not publish a Wednesday edition, but were back on the stands on Thursday.