Results matching “newspaper industry in crisis”

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.''

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.

On 19 June, Paris' Sciences Po École de journalisme played host to a selection of the world's leading journalism educators (Chile, China, Denmark, Jordan, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, UK and the USA) who were invited to discuss the "Challenges and Evolution of Journalism Education."

Opening the conference, Bruno Patino, dean of the Sciences PO School of Journalism, said: "The only thing certain is uncertainty," in reference to the news industry, which has seen advertising revenue across developed countries plummet in the wake of the economic crisis and the growing influence of the Internet.

Nine projects with a strong focus on crowdsourcing, mobile technology and digital investigative journalism have been named winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge.

The winners (see below for details) will each win a share of a $2 million investment fund that is part of a 5-year $25 million global initiative set up by the Knight Foundation. The organisation is offering financial assistance to enterprising groups and individuals committed to developing and delivering "bold community news and social media experiments."

As editorial teams the across the globe seek to increase and diversify their papers' revenue streams, a wealth of diverse ideas and business models have appeared.  One of the latest to be aired comes from Laurent Joffrin, editor of the French national La Libération.   He suggests that editors of the press, publishers and website unite in the request that the leading internet servers providers (ISP or FAI's in France) Free and Orange add a few extra euros to their clients' bills.  This would serve to finance the costs of the services provided by publishers.  The fees would then be invested back into newspapers and other productions, the amount corresponding with the title's popularity and size of its newsroom.

The concept of a mutually rewarding financial model has a strong precedent in France.  The French cinema industry is financed this way, which according to Joffrin, 'has saved the industry and allowed its expansion', as reported by Challenges.fr. The editor is convinced that newspapers are an essential component in a democratic state, thus highly worthy of greater financing. 

The launch of a cross-party select committee's investigation into the future of newspapers in the UK today was overshadowed by the ominous prediction that half of the nation's local and regional papers will be lost within the next five years.

The predictions are based on research conducted by the media analysts, Enders Media.  Its founder, Claire Enders, voiced her concerns in front of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning:  

"We are expecting that up to half of all the 1,300 titles will close in the next five years."  

The Cabinet Office Minister, Angela Smith has urged for action to be taken to encourage people from diverse backgrounds to become involved in journalism.  The call was made during the Commons debate yesterday on social mobility and free access to professions.  

Smith, who was appointed to her position only last week in a ministerial reshuffle, said:  "We believe that everyone, if they have ability, from across the whole of society, should have the opportunity to get the most senior jobs in society.  What has happened is that some professions have perversely become less not more socially representative over time, especially in accountancy and journalism."

According to an investigation conducted by Princeton economists Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, print journalists can bask in the knowledge that their work is sill important, the American Journalism Review maintains.  

The spring report, "Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post" found that "even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed - can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life."  The researchers qualify that the results are "statistically imprecise", but conclude that local newspapers have an important role in the civic life of a community.

Newspapers really aren't doing as badly as media commentators would have us think, says Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers and CEO of Independent News and Media. He did not deny that the newspaper industry has difficulties, but said that these are shared by many other industries in a period of economic crisis.

Speaking at the WAN Power of Print Conference in Barcelona, he explained, "this is not to deflect the seriousness of the situation, and it is very serious, but it remains a fact - all major media are suffering alongside our colleagues in other major business sectors."

Former industry analyst and media commentator Lauren Rich Fine wrote a strong criticism of the growing consideration of not-for-profit status as an option for newspapers. Last week she took part in the Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media, where she saw her role as "to remind everyone that the business model wasn't working and that philanthropists don't typically give funds to organizations that have yet to find stability."

Rich Fine believes that the best way to preserve good journalism is to "let the market figure it out on its own." She asserts that successful not-for-profit start-ups such as ProPublica or MinnPost are surviving not because of their philanthropic support, but because of their "entrepreneurial spirit and lean cost structure, two things most newspaper companies are lacking."

Charging for online publications is looking more appealing among publishers as we see News Corporation, and The New York Times Company leaning towards the idea of putting up pay walls either for part or all of their websites.

Tough advocate for paid online content, Rupert Murdoch announced News Corp is considering charging within a year. "That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience," he said in reference to growing WSJ.com subscription revenues. He said that they might start the moves in the next year.

In the space of one week, three of Belgium's "quality" newspapers will have undergone a total design overhaul. On Tuesday, Le Soir (published by Rossel) unveiled its new look, followed on Wednesday by La Libre Belgique, part of the IPM portfolio. Saturday will see the anticipated launch of L'Echo, the country's business newspaper, whose most noticeable change will come in the choice of its new choice of colour, salmon pink, bearing a striking resemblance to the UK's Financial Times.

Le Soir, for instance, has decided to give more prominence to its analysis articles. "It is by no means a coincidence that the [country's] three "quality" newspapers have decided to act," said Daniel Van Wylick, director general of the Soir, adding that their efforts "demonstrated the dynamism of the Francophone press in Belgium."

Even niche and humor media are suffering with the current crisis as we see The Onion has been forced to close its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions. The free weekly daily saw a circulation of 60,000 and 50,000 in each city respectively.

"Let's face it. The traditional model for print is broken," said Maurice Levy, at the FIPP World Magazine Congress in London yesterday. The chairman and chief executive of the advertising giant, Publicis Groupe, stressed that he does not see advertising revenue improving for newspapers and magazines in the next two years.

Instead, Levy believes revenue will continue to shrink and that newspapers should not rely on a comeback after the recession clears. "The current crisis is not the cause of the problems of the media industry, it's just a brutal accelerator and identifier of long-term trends," he said.

This week Marty Kaiser, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, will become the new president of the American Association of News Editors (ASNE). However, since ASNE canceled its annual convention, which was scheduled to begin April 26 in Chicago, the ceremonial passing of the gavel will not take place, and Kaiser will not have the opportunity to address ASNE members with a speech.

In an interview with Poynter, Kaiser mostly stresses that ASNE must take a leadership role in the future of journalism, to protect it in a time of crisis. "Our industry's business model is broken," he says, "but we as journalists have an obligation to protect, nurture and build trusted news coverage that is necessary to our democracy." He believes that newsrooms and companies need a goal to rally around, and that goal should be to concentrate on what journalism can do for communities. Editors and journalists must continue to fight: "The urgency could never be greater to take chances, be creative and use new technology to be more meaningful."

The Boston Globe reports that the Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote a letter to New York Times Company chairman Arthur Sulzberger about the threatened closing of the Globe, asking him to work toward a solution that "preserves the newspaper for the future." The letter, released by the Boston Newspaper Guild, was signed by every member of the delegation, including Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, except for Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of South Boston.

Earlier this month the NYTCo threatened to shut down the Globe, which is projected to lose $85 million this year if unions do not agree to $20 million in concessions by May 1. "We understand the serious financial challenges facing the newspaper industry today,'' the letter said." The ramifications, however, of closing the Globe would far outlive the current recession. We urge you to treat the the Globe fairly and to work together on a solution to this immediate crisis that preserves the future of the newspaper."

David Akin, of Canwest News Service published an article in The Windsor Star that compared Canadian newspapers to US newspapers, showing how Canada is better off. Akin makes the point that throughout the recession, Canadian businesses always seemed to be doing slightly better than the US. For example, about 73 percent of adult Canadians read the printed version of a daily newspaper at least once a week, while American readership lags a little more.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released its figures for US newspapers, for the six months ending March 31st - and they've created quite a stir. Data for 395 American newspapers was recorded, displaying an overall decline in circulation of 7.4% compared with the same period in 2007-08. Of the 25 top newspapers in the US, all bar one have seen drops in circulation.

It is the Wall Street Journal which has bucked the trend and managed an overall increase, albeit of just 0.6%. The WSJ has recently been displaying signs of a change in its editorial direction, leaning towards a slightly more mainstream news role and increased competition with newswires via Dow Jones. In a recent interview, managing editor Robert Thomson explained the WSJ's success was in part due to the demise of some US newspapers, which "creates a tremendous opportunity for us to gain readers".

CEO of New York Times Co. Janet Robinson confirmed in an interview with the Boston Globe on Thursday that the company intends to follow through with its May 1 deadline for the Globe unions to concede $20 million. According to union officials, the NYTCo has threatened to close the paper unless these concessions are met. This week Robinson also addressed the company's Q1 report, which shows that the NYTCo lost nearly $75 million this quarter as advertising sales dropped.

Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley also divulged for the first time that the newspaper is, in fact, projected to lose $85 million this year. Times executives have not publicized the Globe's cost nor explained how $20 million in concessions could save the newspaper, and the Globe's management rejected union officials' proposal for public negotiations.

The Federation of Journalist Associations in Spain (FAPE) has revealed that the government could be looking to provide direct aid to the country's press industry. Although the measures have not been disclosed, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega and the FAPE were studying the proposals at a meeting on Monday. As well as direct aid to the press, the measures could reportedly include expanded access to state credit.

This news follows calls for action made to the Spanish government from media groups such as the Press Association of Madrid (APM). Ignacio Benito, director general of the Association of Editors of Spanish Newspapers (AEDE) recently warned of the "pathetic situation" which the Spanish press is currently in, and said that the economic crisis has had a "devastating impact" upon its newspapers. State intervention into newspapers raises questions over democracy, and the potential effect direct aid could have on a publication's editorial line. Following Sarkozy's bailout of French newspapers, it will be interesting to see what form Spanish aid will take.

Source: Expatica

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced - and, in the first year that online entrants have been accepted, an online winner has been selected in the national reporting category. The St Petersburg Times has been recognised for its PolitiFact project, the majority of which was published on PolitiFact.com. The recognition of the project displays the growing importance of online reporting in the modern news landscape.

It was the New York Times that emerged triumphant, however, picking up no fewer than five prizes across a range of categories - including international and breaking news reporting. There have only been two occasions where a publication has won more than five prizes, the NYT in 2002 and the Washington Post last year. Interestingly, neither the NYT nor any other publication, won any recognition for their coverage of the financial crisis.

Yesterday, the Middle East Times published its final Internet-based free edition, but not before reminding readers that it will be back, albeit in a paid-for format.

Earlier this week, the online newspaper said it regretted the decision of having to start charging readers for content and, although it did not explicitly list its reasons for the change, it's fair to say the global economic crisis played a substantial role in the decision-process.

Speaking at the Observatorio del Notariado forum for the Society of Information, Ignacio Benito , Director General of the Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles  or the Association of Editors of Spanish Newspapers (AEDE), warned of the "pathetic situation" the sector finds itself in, reports El Mundo online.

Benito said the newspaper industry has been hit by a "devastating impact" as a result of the economic crisis and upheld his belief that it was the worst period for Spain's news titles since 1993.

Personalisation is one of the many avenues that the Internet has opened up to readers of news: rather than buying one newspaper with everything in it, people now have the chance to easily choose what sort of news they want to read, and from where. Back in 1995 Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab project, coined the term 'Daily Me' to describe a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual's tastes, and since then many services have been launched to make this concept of personalised news a reality. One such successful company, which offers users the chance to create highly personalised home pages using many different widgets, is Netvibes. Founded in 2005, Netvibes now has 30 staff at its headquarters in Paris, five in San Francisco and a presence in London. The Editors Weblog spoke to CEO Freddy Mini to find out more about how Netvibes' different services work, and how they contribute to a user's personalised experience.

Netvibes operates on the principle that we should be able to feel at home in our online world. When a user creates a Netvibes page, they can change everything: they choose which widgets they want, where they are placed, how big they are, what shape they take, or what colours they use: "widgets must be fluid or liquid enough to participate in a more sophisticated layout," commented Mini. It is also possible to install Netvibes widgets on a computer desktop or on another website. There are plenty of opportunities to personalise within the widgets themselves, such as moving tabs around, or choosing a slideshow view. "There is a lot of intelligence in the product and we built it to make sure that people will try things and the product will react and surprise the user," he remarked. "It's all about making the pages really yours," stressed Mini, "as you can see, there is no prominent Netvibes logo." The interface is available in most European languages and progress is being made to translate it into others.

The platform is very user-friendly (see my 'Easter egg'-themed page, which took a matter of minutes to create), and it is easy for companies or publications to create simple RSS-based widgets, using a Netvibes 'wizard.' About half of the 180,000 widgets on Netvibes are RSS-based, Mini specified, meaning that they are essentially one or more RSS feeds in widget format, but there are many more complex ones involving video feeds or programming: searches for flights or hotels, or the possibility to access email or social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.  Many different newspapers and news services have created widgets, often showing a list of the most recent stories.

Netvibes for newspapers

Netvibes can also help clients to develop more advanced widgets. With newspaper clients, Netvibes helps the paper to "granulize" the content into a widget and make that widget into a destination in itself, rather than just a way to "fish for an audience and drag the user immediately back to the site." Mini believes that if the widget simply links back to the site in one click, then "it is like an ad and it gives the user a poor return." So Netvibes built widgets have at least one or two clicks within Netvibes before redirecting to the paper's website, on the premise that the user feels at home within their page and will not want to be directed away the instant that they consult the news.

When asked if he has faced opposition from newspaper publishers who believe that services such as Netvibes are reducing their website traffic and advertising revenue, Mini explained that a few years ago this existed, but not any more. "If you are a newspaper you want to be in the widget game," he asserted, "now it's not even a choice: if you're not, another rival paper will be, and you will lose that part of your audience."

As well as their private page, which they can sign into from any computer, Netvibes also offers the chance to create a public page, or a Universe. It is published in real time, and can be seen by anybody who knows the URL  - www.netvibes.com/[username]. Other people cannot alter the page in any way, but can see what another user is reading. Users can search for friends and connect to set up a network within Netvibes; Mini clarified that the site was not built to be a social network, but it has "the basic capabilities" so that if people do not use another service they still have the opportunity to share what they are reading. The public pages are not necessarily just personal, publications such as the Financial Times have created one, which Mini described as a "showcase for their widgets."

Making money without advertising

No money is exchanged when papers place widgets on the Netvibes site in a standard sense. The company makes money in three different ways, notably not through advertising. The first is through promoting widgets by listing them first to make them far easier to find among the more than 180,000 options. The widget owner pays per install, and the widgets are marked as sponsored.

The second is through selling its 'Premium Universe' service, which allows companies to create their own page using Netvibes' software, but with their own branding and own URL. There is a set-up fee, and then a yearly contract to pay. The pages are fully 'personalisable,' unlike the free public pages, which are static, and consumers can create accounts and sign in. Unlike a user's personal page which they build from nothing and add content to, the Premium Universe pages come fully loaded with widgets, and they then have the choice to keep what the company is offering them or change it. The 80-90 clients include advertising agency Ogilvy, which created The Daily Influence, and French daily Le Figaro (www.lefigaro.fr/maune). The company can advertise and keeps the revenue generated. In this area, Mini explained, Netvibes is effectively being used as a publishing tool such as Wordpress, as there is the option to add "very sophisticated" notes.  

Installing Netvibes on the servers of others, effectively licensing Netvibes' source codes, is the company's third source income: Netvibes for Enterprise. This gives the client even more power to customise than with the Premium Universe, which is a turn-key solution that Netvibes maintains, and which remains on its server. For this service Netvibes sends the client one of its engineers who will spend five days installing the software and will remain for a further two days to train the relevant IT staff. The licenses are tailor-made depending on what the software is used for.

Each of these revenue streams accounts for about a third of the company's total income, said Mini, with some fluctuations. Amidst tales of financial woe throughout the industry, Netvibes' revenue is actually growing, with first quarter results significantly up compared to last year. "We should continue to thrive," Mini hopes, and confirmed that the company is on track to break even in September. The one way that the financial crisis has had an effect, he explained, is that interested customers are taking far longer to make decisions than usual: "that is the challenge."

Is personalisation the future: do people care?

One of the big questions concerning personalisation is: do people care enough to bother to do it? Netvibes has more than 3.7 million active users according to Mini, so seemingly some people do. Mini emphasised that for him, Netvibes' reason for being is to empower people, to give them the choice to make the pages that they want: he realises it is not something that everybody wants to do, but at least they are being given the chance. He thinks that in terms of news, it is unrealistic to assume that people will want to get all of their news from one source: for example if you follow several different sports based in different countries, why would you read about all of them in one newspaper?

The Netvibes service is fully driven by users: they choose what they want, there is nobody tracking what they read or use to recommend different articles or products which is the basis of some other personalisation offerings, such as the DailyMe. This avoids one of the potential problems connected with personalisation: privacy issues. Registering for Netvibes involves providing minimum personal information. However, it does mean that it is likely to only be used by more proactive, tech-savvy Internet users. There are also limitations to the service, for example, news can only be chosen by source rather than by topic or keyword, meaning that a user will still have to scour the web for information they need.  

From a newspaper owner's point of view, the proliferation of such sites cannot entirely welcome as they give readers the chance to access news without visiting the paper's website, hence generating no income. However, as Mini explained, there is now little point in resisting, and the possibilities provided to publishers, such as Premium Universe, are a valuable opportunity for those newspapers which are eager to embrace personalisation on their own sites, and there is an opportunity there for advertising revenue.