Results matching “newspapers online news and”

This week, a tax break for newspapers in Washington state went into effect, giving print publications a 40 percent reduction in the state business tax. One lawmaker stressed the tax cut was "not a bailout." It is interesting to note Washington already offered equal exemptions to the aerospace and timber industries, both of which are critical to the state's economy.

In a year which saw the Seattle Post-Intelligencer make the move to online-only and the Seattle Times cut 500 staff members, many publications will welcome any relief they can get. However, others wonder whether the measure will be enough to revive struggling papers and what such aid means for the publications' journalistic independence.

Local and regional newspapers will have the opportunity to further develop the visual content on their online editions, with use of a new multimedia wire service. Tradeclips.com, which launched this week, aims to facilitate the streaming and sharing of online video content between news providers subscribing to the reasonably priced service.  

The service will offer free uploads and downloads of video, audio and still files, for which storage is offered at a fee. Registered users will also have access to a sizeable trove of archived multimedia footage.

The British tabloid, the Daily Mirror has confirmed that it will launch its own stand-alone football website. Mirrorfootball.com will be up and running for the start of the next football season in August.  

Fans of the beautiful game can expect to enjoy a wealth of information and entertainment offered by the site.  As described by the Guardian when the news of the site broke last month, it looks set to offer a predominately visual, up-to date experience of football scene. Video and audio applications will convey live match reports and press conference broadcasts.  A new 'Football Spy" application will present a daily football agenda programme, match previews and reports and transfer talks.  

One of the latest products to appear on the market for newspaper publishers looking to improve their revenue is Circulate, from new start-up CircLabs. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and executive vice president Martin Langeveld, former newspaper editor and executive who now also writes for Nieman Journalism Lab, about the project.

The CircLabs team decided to look for a user-centric solution to monetise online content through improving the user news experience, as opposed to what Langeveld sees as publisher-centric solutions that focus on how to charge users for content. Charging users for content could indeed be incorporated into Circulate, but he does not see it as the main source of revenue. Rather, what Circulate hopes to do is essentially make it easier for people to find the news they are interested in, hence encouraging them to read more and therefore increasing traffic to and engagement time on newspaper websites, offering greater advertising opportunities.

The Circulate concept evolved out of research carried out by Bill Densmore at the Reynolds Institute of the University of Missouri into a project he called the Information Valet. This, Langeveld explained, is a more "comprehensive and very complex system" and Circulate hopes to be a starting point for something similar. The founding CircLabs team consists of four: Langeveld and Densmore plus Jeff Vander Clute and Joe Bergeron. The University of Missouri offered initial funding and Langeveld is confident that the company will soon announce its first round of seed funding, which would include investment from the industry and private investors as well as from the university.

What Circulate actually is

As the consumer will see it, Circulate will consist of a narrow strip that will appear within the user's browser window that will be branded and recommend journalistic content throughout the user's time online. The bar will be along the top of the window and generally narrow enough to include one line of type, though would have the ability to expand when necessary. A small programme must be downloaded to install the strip, but a user can log in to their account on any computer that has the programme. There will also be a destination URL that users can access on computers on which they cannot download the software, and the team plans to develop applications for smartphones, and offer email alerts.

When the user installs it, it will ask them some questions about them and about their interests and preferences. The user is not obliged to enter any information, but the more that they do, "the better Circulate can bring content to you," Langeveld explained. He added that his team understands how important privacy is to consumers and stressed that Circulate will be very clear with regards to the amount of information it stores about its users and will give them an easy option to access or delete this.  "It won't just be buried in one of those user agreements that everybody just clicks through," Langeveld clarified.

The programme will also track your movements online and make recommendations for content based on these and the information you provide. Article suggestions will appear as links in the Circulate strip, and it might expand to offer the user three or so recommendations on a specific topic, or to ask or answer a user's question. As the technology develops, it will be able to gather new applications, so additional icons might appear on the bar that could offer a user access to their Twitter feed, for example.

A home base for users

Users will sign up for and download Circulate via a 'home base' which is likely to be their local newspaper. The Circulate strip will be branded according to the home base, so this newspaper brand will 'travel' with the user throughout their online experience. The user would be free to change their home base at will. Eventually the local newspaper, as a Circulate partner, would be able to sell advertising and do other kinds of marketing and promotion through the strip.

How it can make money for publishers

Although Langeveld does not believe that revenue from charging users will be "more than the smallest fraction of the total potential of Circulate," it will be possible to do that within the Circulate framework. If newspapers decide that they do have premium content which is unique and valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it, Circulate will facilitate this through a universal subscription to all multiple papers' premium content, or on a per item basis.

However, as stated above, Circulate's main aim is to increase traffic to newspaper websites. Langeveld pointed out that his team's research shows that in the US, web users spend only about 1.2% of their time online on newspaper websites, and traffic to newspaper sites accounts for only 1% of page views. "That really is the challenge for newspapers, to increase that percentage," said Langeveld. And Circulate hopes to do this by "constantly recommending journalistic content from newspapers and other news outlets the other 99% of that time."

The possibility for the papers acting as homebases to brand the strip also "has value" for local papers, according to Langeveld, as it means that their brand travels round the web with the user whenever they are online, thus constantly reminding them of their relationship with the paper. Circulate also intends eventually to include advertising on the bar itself, although the format has not yet been developed. Langeveld believes that there are opportunities for both national and local advertising. There would be the possibility to target users and therefore create more value, and participating papers could sell space to local businesses. He sees this as a good selling opportunity: "now you can reach our readers all the time when they're online rather than just the one or two percent that they're on our site."

Will it work?

Software development has already started and the Associated Press has agreed to allow Circulate access to its content. Langeveld confirmed that the company is planning a beta rollout with a group of newspapers and users in autumn. Could it be the solution that newspapers have been waiting for?

Many publishers seem to be concretely moving towards charging online, and others seem to be contemplating it as a solution to their financial difficulties and in an attempt to restore value to news and prevent it from becoming a commodity. The fact that Circulate would be able to incorporate this is thus a point in its favour. When asked if it could be compatible with Journalism Online, a start-up aiming to facilitate charging for content that has reportedly been in talks with many publishers, Langeveld said that it is something that his team has not explored, but that it was "certainly possible."

Increasing engagement time does indeed seem to make sense, although in terms of monetising it means that newspapers are still dependent on the advertising market. It is clearly something that newspapers should be working on themselves or through companies like Apture that try to keep readers on news sites through multimedia enhancements, but it does seem that Circulate can help in actually getting readers onto a site. Persuading readers to sign up could be tough, most likely requiring an aggressive marketing strategy, and the CircLabs team is wise to anticipate privacy concerns. Assuming that users do sign up, it is hard to say how many people will click through links and how often, but it seems as if it could well contribute to an increase in traffic. 

The Printcasting model is on its way to "democratise" print publishing in more cities in the US, it was announced last week. The initiative, financed by the winnings of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, has made its first newspaper partnership with Denver-based MediaNews Group. The publishing group controls 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

The project originated out of the newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian and first went public in March to cater for the town of Bakersfield, California.

The Internet was responsible for Barack Obama's election to the White House, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post claims. Although this statement will inevitably incite dissenting views, in the context of Huffington's talk on the power of the Internet it does not seem wholly unreasonable. Huffington was speaking at the Activate Conference 09, convened to discuss the social implications of the rise of the Internet and technology.  

The conference reiterated discussions of technological and cultural trends, which are conditioning not only how news needs to be presented, but how these new forms of diffusion can directly affect politics and society.

The American newspaper publisher Gannett plans to get rid of somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 positions, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal. The job cuts will hit the company's 80 local dailies, rather than USA Today.

Former Gannett editor and reporter Jim Hopkins had previously predicted up to 4,500 slashed jobs on his Gannett Blog. He now says there will likely be 600 actual layoffs as a result of the restructuring, naming July 8 as the axe date.

The regional press in America is in the midst of a whirlwind of stylistic, managerial and media development, to the extent that its face is changing beyond recognition.  That evolution is a necessary but merciless concept has been demonstrated by the disappearance of many regional daily newspapers and the unpredictable life span of modern ventures.

Michelle Ferrier, the former managing director of the development team of the soon-to-be late hyperlocal community site, MyTopiaCafe.com, laments the failure of the initiative of the Daytona Beach News-Journal. The experiences of the Daytona project have been shared by other now redundant initiatives of media organisations eager to offer new services while drastically cost-cutting and downsizing. Hyperlocal, however, is not necessarily a prematurely defunct form of community news provision. The problems were symptomatic of the approach, warns Ferrier, yet lessons can be learned.

There is a crisis in trust and communication between the British public and the mainstream media, a new report has concluded. The gulf between public expectations of news provision and the actual nature of articles, which oscillate between esoteric or irresponsible, leaves readers feeling confused and excluded.

The report, entitled 'Public Trust In The News' was conducted by researchers from Manchester and Leeds Universities and was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It investigated the dynamics of news production and consumption, to ascertain if there is a difference in what "the public expects from news media and what journalists mean by serving the public".  The paper highlights the underlying causes of an apparent widespread disenchantment with the media and the detrimental effects this is having on the standards of reporting and civil participation in democracy. Thankfully, the report offers several propositions for a new journalistic direction, which could refresh the reader-writer compact.

Journalism Online has announced that it has retained ITZ Publishing to lead its efforts in working with small- and medium- sized newspaper companies to maximize their online revenue opportunities. ITZ will help Journalism Online's affiliated news publishers to design marketing and packaging strategies for online subscriptions, micropayments and combined online/print subscription packages.

It will do this by assessing audience usage patterns and hence helping the newspaper companies to build appropriate pay strategies through Journalism Online. "Greg Swanson and the ITZ Publishing team have been market leaders in developing breakthrough solutions for news publishers," Journalism Online's Co-founder Steven Brill said in a press release.  Another of the co-founders, Gordon Crovitz commented that "The marketing and data analysis expertise of ITZ Publishing will be especially valuable to publishers in retaining a large number of unique visitors and page views online while converting many free users to paying subscribers."

San Diego is set to be home to the new Watchdog Institute, which will provide "data-driven investigative journalism" to media outlets.  The venture is being led by Lorie Hearn, a senior editor of the town's only printed daily, the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Institute and the paper will collaborate closely.  The details of the project were illustrated by in an email sent by U-T editor Karin Winner to newspaper staff last Friday.  The Institute team is comprised of the director, Hearn, two reporters and a data specialist, who will work closely with the newspaper staff on 'long and short projects'.  

Would expanding US copyright law to incorporate news articles help protect newspapers from unfair competition online? Several columnists and commentators have come out on both sides of the issue in the past week, raising questions on the role of online aggregators and the efficacy of any action regarding copyright.

First off, US Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner proposed on his blog that copyright law should be changed to "bar access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing online content without the copyright holder's consent." Essentially, that would mean news aggregators like Google News would have to ask permission each time they linked to a newspaper article. Posner argues that traditional media lose so much revenue by these "free riders" reusing content it will eventually drive newspapers out of business.

Twitter asks its users one question: "What are you doing right now?" It is a simple enough concept; 'tweeters' answer this question and their response enters the real time feeds of those who follow them, but it is becoming increasingly useful for reporters and papers as the social network attracts more and more users. Essentially, journalists can use Twitter in three ways: to find stories and other information and to track events, to publicise their work, and to connect with readers.

A real time feed of breaking news and thought

Twitter is an extremely useful journalistic resource: reporters can use it to watch for breaking news, follow sources and search for information. "It's like monitoring another wire service," said Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors. It can be used to get an idea of which topics are attracting interest and what people are talking about right now. There is a list of top 'trending topics' on the Twitter home page. It is a real time search, ahead of even Google in terms of timeliness.

The useful information can sometimes be hard to find amongst multiple messages about what users had for breakfast, or what they thought about last night's TV show, but as Noam Cohen said in Global Journalist "it turns out that when a million people stare at their navels, more than a few of them will also notice that the ground is shaking, the plane is nosediving, the police are shooting." Twitter is particularly relevant during events that involve large numbers of members of the public, and a shining example of its effectiveness arose after a US Airways flight landed on the Hudson River and the first picture of the plane was posted to Twitter by an observer. Online news editor at Sky News Jon Gripton, discussing his reasons for appointing a Twitter correspondent, said "it is effectively another news feed. It helps us source eyewitnesses and photos and other people who are on the scene of an event." It is also crucial for following conferences, for example.

Applications such as Tweetdeck allow users to sort their contacts into groups and to search more and more easily for Tweets on specific topics. The custom of adopting hash-tags to make searching easier has been widely adopted: if a user is tweeting about a particular subject they can add a tag into their tweet, such as #IranElection, #Mumbai, #Gaza. The hash or pound symbol distinguishes the tag from random mentions of the same word, and is a custom developed by Twitter users.

Twitter's fame as a news source grew curing the terrorist attacks on Mumbai last November, and during the ongoing conflict in Iran following the election on June 12, Twitter has come into its own, with those inside Iran using the social network to stay in touch and communicate with the outside world while phone networks are down and many websites are blocked. News outlets turned to the service for the latest updates, as they were forced to abandon the principle of only relying on their trusted sources for information due to what the New York Times described as a "news vacuum."

Questions about the reliability of Twitter have also been highlighted by events in Iran. Clearly, it is impossible to judge the authenticity of Tweets from a non-trusted source. During 'normal' circumstances, a journalist would be able to contact the 'Tweeter' for more details and verification, but that is currently overwhelmingly difficult. Journalists who incorporate news obtained by Twitter into their reporting should always be careful to stress their uncertainty about the source.

Publishing: one-to-many

According to a Harvard Business study, there is a small group of very active Twitter users: it found that "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets."  Researchers Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski concluded that "Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network": in other words, perfect for journalists looking to publicise their work. It is simple enough to use as a publicising tool: send a link to the story with a Twitter-friendly headline, which should generally be casual and chatty, even more so than web headlines.

It is without doubt a good way to attract extra readers. One of the advantages of Twitter to spread the word is that it is viral, users frequently "re-tweet" the links that they have enjoyed. A CNN breaking news feed, not actually started by CNN but purchased by the news outlet when it gained substantial recognition, was the second Twitter feed to reach one million followers and now has well over 2 million. The New York Times main feed has 1,238,673 followers at time of publishing, and the Guardian has 25,009 on its main feed, though far more on its Guardian Tech account: 782,662. Many news organisations now have multiple Twitter feeds for their different sections. Montgomery stressed the need to "explore" the best policy for your newsroom when deciding whether to stick to one or split them

Some feeds are generated automatically, and for many journalists and bloggers it has become second nature to 'tweet' an article immediately after publishing. Robb Montgomery believes that the "more successful Twitterers have moved beyond auto-tweeting their RSS feed" to make their tweets more personal. "You want to show that there's a real person there."

A social tool for branding

As well as using Twitter as a one-to-many publishing mechanism, journalists can also take advantage of the social element of Twitter, using it to connect with their readers and to receive feedback on articles. It is a contact point between reporter and reader, making the journalist more accessible. "You can run quick polls, get a pulse, get some ideas," said Montgomery. Twitter can be used as part of a journalist's own personal branding, to develop their own network of followers, depending on their personality as well as their reputation as a journalist. This could be particularly helpful for freelance journalists and bloggers.

Newspapers' advice to staff

Many news outlets have become concerned about the way that their employees use social networks such as Twitter. New York Times executive editor Bill Keller called for a "zone of trust" after reporters Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Luo and Brian Stelter sent 'tweets' on what executives were saying about the how the paper might charge for online content, amongst other things during a staff strategy meeting. Shortly after, the New York Times announced the appointment of social media editor Jen Preston via Twitter. She is to concentrate "full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers," including, it seems, policing Twitter use.

The Wall Street Journal's advice on Twitter in a staff memo is that "business and pleasure should not be mixed" and although "common sense should prevail," staff meetings should not be discussed on social networks. The Washington Post's guidelines also mentions its reliance on reporters' common sense. The AP's new rules tell reporters "Don't report things or break news that we haven't published, no matter the format, and that includes retweeting unconfirmed information not fit for AP's wires."

Embracing Twitter seems to be essential for journalists and newsrooms in today's media landscape. This does not mean that all reporters should be tweeting all day long, and certainly does not mean that they should believe everything they read, but they should familiarise themselves with the site and work out how they want to use it. A newsroom policy might be necessary to encourage or warn journalists with regards to how the paper would like to see it used, and if possible, a social media expert could monitor and coordinate the paper's efforts. It is not necessary for journalists to embrace every aspect of Twitter, but most who try it find something beneficial.

On Tuesday 30 June at 15.00 London time, Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors will be speaking at a WEF webinar on "How the real time web can improve your newspaper's journalism." More details here.

The media coverage of the shock death of Michael Jackson has served to highlight press dynamics, raising interesting questions concerning the nature of breaking news reporting, the cult of the celebrity and the relationship between newspapers and their online news rivals. Has the fact that most newspapers were delayed in the initial reporting of the death emphasised the widening gulf between print and digital channels of breaking news? Conversely, has the death been exploited by the printed press as a facile, reader guaranteeing hit?

The news of the performer's death, in terms of rumour, confirmation and reaction has been overwhelmingly 'digital' in expression. The scoop belonged to the Los Angeles based celebrity website, TMZ, which confirmed the death an hour after it aired whispers of a suspected heart attack. The reporting was rapid fire: time of death: 2.26pm, LA time, time of update: 2.44pm. 

In November 2008, the New York Times' investigative journalist, David Rohde, was taken hostage by the Taliban not far from Kabul, the Afghan capital, where he was conducting research for his book.  His driver, Asadullah Mangal, and local reporter, Tahir Ludin, were also kidnapped. Rohde and Ludin escaped earlier this month and their freedom, say the press, would not have been possible without the self-imposed media blackout.

Thanks to the efforts of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, for seven months news of the kidnapping did not enter the public domain. Fellow newspapers understood that lives were at stake and nobody was willing to compromise Rohde's safety by breaking the media silence. "But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia," says one New York Times journalist.

The World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the leading international associations for print and digital news publishing, have merged into a new organisation, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). The combined new organisation will represent more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3000 companies in more than 120 countries. WAN-IFRA is dedicated "to be the indispensable partner of newspapers and the entire news publishing industry worldwide, particularly our members, in the defense and promotion of press freedom, quality journalism and editorial integrity, and the development of prosperous businesses and technology."

There are many ways to measure the success of a newspaper and its website. A recent report from The Media Audit has ranked the top newspapers in the US based on percentage of adults living in the area who read the print version or visited the site in the last 30 days, and the results are surprising. The top-ranked publication: the New Orleans Times-Picayune and its online counterpart nola.com.

Nola.com tied for first in terms of the proportion of adults visiting the site, with 50.4 percent making it online in the past 30 days. The Times-Picayune came out second for print readership, with 75.6 percent of New Orleans' adults picking up the paper. However, when factoring in duplicate readers (those who read the paper as well as visit the website) the Times-Picayune reaches 85.8 percent of adults in the metropolitan area.

The advertising slump for traditional media is here to stay, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, where he was named "media person of the year," Ballmer described the current economic situation for media as a "reset" not a "recession." That means media companies must completely rethink their business models to keep up with the changing landscape of publishing.

Ballmer also faulted newspaper publishers for not doing enough to make money out of their online ventures, adding that Google is the only digital company with a track record for earning significant revenue. And traditional media will have to figure out how to squeeze out revenue from online content soon, as Ballmer predicted all content will be digital in the next 10 years.

The Dutch government and the Temporary Commission on the Future of the Press are struggling to reach a consensus as to the most effective manner of improving the health of the nation's press. Media Minister Ronald Plasterk reacted unfavourably to the suggestion made by the commission that his ministry should impose an Internet tax, the proceeds of which going to the newspaper industry.

The Commission, which was set up by the Minister, is concerned that 'old medias' are ill equipped to deal with the challenges raised by the increasing prevalence of new technologies, particularly webblogs.To enable traditional forms of media to ride with the modernisation of information, they apparently need greater financial support.

The CEO of News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co is convinced that people will be willing to pay for digital content, a statement which will be welcomed by publishers currently developing pay models in an attempt to create revenue from digital editions of their news sites.

The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp. publication already charges for access to its online content. In the keynote speech at the official launch event for the PricewaterhouseCoopers "Media and Entertainment Outlook 2009-2013", Les Hinton suggested that Dow Jones is currently developing a technical application to facilitate the payment for the WSJ, other Dow material and some third party content.  Without offering great detail, Hinton revealed that the arrangement could include micro payments and subscriptions. 

When the Ann Arbor News ceases printing in July, Ann Arbor will become the first US city with no daily newspaper. The publication as it exists now will disappear completely, although a new venture, AnnArbor.com, is set to take over local news on the web and will produce a print product two days a week.

In a column for Poynter's The Biz Blog, Rick Edmunds postulates on what factors led to the decline of the News in Ann Arbor, whose vibrant, educated community would appear to be the ideal location for a newspaper. Edmunds even goes so far as to suggest starting over with AnnArbor.com might not be such a bad idea.

German publishers have united behind demands that the government pass legislation
shielding their intellectual property from "ongoing theft" over the Internet.  The principle publishing houses aligned themselves with trade unions of the music, film and advertising industries at the "International Media Dialogue" in Hamburg earlier this month to discuss to question "No Future for Paid Content? Media Industry Under Pressure".  

A statement warned about the greatly damaging financial repercussions of intellectual property theft by providers and demanded legal protection for online content. The signatories of the statement were: the German Producers Alliance, the German Association of Communications Agencies, and the big publishing houses Springer, Bauer, Ganske, Gruner & Jahr, Spiegel and Zeit.  

Seventeen of the top 30 US newspaper websites showed a decline in the average time users spent on their sites in May versus the same period last year, according to an exclusive article in Editor & Publisher. The data come from Nielson Online, which keeps track of the most widely read newspaper sites based on number of unique visitors.

On the bright side, that means nearly half of the sites posted gains year-over-year, some of them fairly significant. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, a paper struggling to get out of bankruptcy, added 20 minutes to the time readers spend on the site - at an average of over 47 minutes per user, it's also the newspaper site that users stay on the longest. The San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com also recorded sizeable gains, jumping to 21 minutes this year compared to 12 minutes in May 2008.

The latest issue of Courrier International to hit French newsstands gathers translated newspaper articles themed on the uncertain future of the press. From Washington, in a lengthy set of extracts from the New Republic, Paul Starr makes three strong cases for why democracy will be endangered without a newspaper. He hints that American democracy may already have been slighted seeing that national, regional and local newspapers are dwindling in terms of content they can run since printing costs have caused them to scale back on the numbers of pages they print.

He opens his debate by lamenting the fact that Americans have taken [American] journalism (in the form of a printed newspaper) for granted as newspapers have been such an ''integral part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are.''

We live in a world, not a village

The directors of international journalism courses talked about the importance of internationalisation and giving students a chance to interact with other students from around the world in a bid to understand the effects of global media in a local context.

According to Eric Scherer at AFP, the future of journalism will lie in enterprising journalists and their efforts to come up with journalistic solutions that will facilitate the communication process and continuously revise the business models in place. He also believes that a new mindset will eventually need to replace the typical journalist's attitude of today, as well as in the value of a broad general knowledge base - something that internationalisation makes possible.