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As the excitement of the World Cup dies down, the South African media fades back into the familiar territory of fighting for freedom of speech. The African National Congress (ANC) is currently in the process of passing a couple of new pieces of legislation which appear antithetical to freedom of the press. The first being the Protection of Information Bill, in which there are relatively low standards for protecting what journalist are allowed to publish. Information such as commercial governmental contracts, state-owned enterprise and state entities are considered classified under the Protection of information. If the bill passes, journalist who violate the this law could spend up to 25 years in jail. The second is the announcement that a "media tribunal" will oversee the general media to stop "unfair" criticism. 

Much media coverage has been recently devoted to so-called 'content farms' such as Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com. The goal of these companies is to produce vast amounts of content on topics that readers have been searching for that will attract large numbers of readers, and they have been described at 'robotic' 'sweatshops' or 'factories' that produce work that critics insist is not journalism.

These content networks use an algorithm to study and analyse web searches and behaviour to identify what is popular and what gaps in coverage might exist, and it then commission their networks of freelancers to write on these topics. Demand Media, the most prolific, publishes its content on properties including eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.com and Cracked.com, among others.

Executive VP Steven Kydd described Demand's output as "service journalism, or sidebar content" in a speech at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in April, explaining that it does not hope to compare to serious investigative journalism. Demand Media freelancer Andria Krewson explained on ReadWriteWeb that "The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now." She added, "You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement."

Demand Media publishes about 7,000 articles a day, and the company's chief revenue officer Joanne Bradford told AdAge that over 50 million unique visitors per day see Demand content on its top site eHow.com. She insisted that every article is vetted and fact-checked, with 1,000 copy editors. CMO Dave Panos told AdAge that each piece of content is touched by "11 qualified professionals."

As well as filling its own sites with content, Demand Media supplies articles for others, including USA Today's travel section. In April the Travel Tips section of the newspaper's site was launched with about 4,000 items from Demand Media's freelance writers. Demand Media supplies the content and sells keyword advertising, USA Today is selling display ad inventory and the two are splitting the revenue, AdAge reported at the time. USA Today travel journalists still produce more in-depth, expert articles, but these are supplemented by those provided by Demand. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also uses Demand Media, but only for a story a week.

Associated Content, which was acquired in May by Yahoo!, produces around 1,500 pieces of content a day. Articles from AC contributors, including (according to the AC blog) "compelling personal stories and expert insights" are appearing throughout the Yahoo! network of sites.

A less well-known site is Suite101, a publishing platform that manages to product 500 new pieces of content per day on niche topics, focusing on beginners articles on thousands of topics. According to ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, who spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger, it currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites, with 24 million unique vistors per month going to the English language site. Berger told ReadWriteWeb that he did not see Suite101 as a competitor to traditional journalism, but rather as competing with "non-fiction publishing." Its articles answer users' questions about practical matters in their lives, rather than providing them with news. 

Giving the audience what it wants, and fast

The existence and swift growth of such sites has provoked much debate about what they mean for the future of journalism. The first issue is that of giving the audience the content that it wants: the Internet has made this far easier to do, but is it something that news organisations should be considering? As Nieman Lab recently pointed out, in any other industry, offering the customer what they wanted this would be an approach that no one would question. But in the news industry, the idea that the editors know best has always prevailed. Providing news is a public service, and only trained professionals are capable of deciding what is most important.

This is undoubtedly a valid principle, and the experience that comes with working in the news industry makes an editor's opinion extremely valuable. However, at news organisations there have always been concessions to giving the audience what they want. For many, that is what sells papers, and editors are fully aware of the necessity to sell papers.

Online it has finally become possible to track what readers actually read. And with news being effectively sold in micro-form, even if not directly, there is clearly an enhanced motivation to give readers what they really want to read. Who knows how many articles a print newspaper buyer reads and how many they discard? Now that it is possible to tell what people are reading, is it surprising that publishers want to give them more of this?

Clearly, just spewing out stories about Lindsey Lohan because they get a lot of hits is not an editorially ethical decision. But as Nieman Lab's Laura McGann points out, what the public wants is not always junk. She highlighted a Pew Research Center study that showed that the public's interest in coverage of the Gulf oil leak remained relatively high even when the amount of coverage dropped significantly in early-mid July. The same study reported that many people believed that news organizations were giving too much coverage to stories about Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James, however. 

It is not just 'content farms' that have come under criticism for looking at what readers want to read. In a recent article about Yahoo's blog 'The Upshot,' the New York Times discussed how the top-down editorial model was being 'inverted,' with reporters looking at search statistics to help decide what to cover. As the NYT noted, the Yahoo blog is focused on news rather than the 'how-to' topics that Demand Media and others specialize in. Editors at the Upshot were clear however that the information from analyzing search data is supplementary and does not "lead Yahoo content."

The shifting relationship between content creation and SEO

A related concern, as recently highlighted by the Financial Times, is that Google's algorithm is beginning to have a significant effect on content that is produced. In the quest to attract large numbers of readers, content-creators are not only looking at what readers want but at what appears high in search engine results.

Obviously news organisations all use search engine optimization to a certain extent, and it makes sense that if you have good content you should make it easily findable by your audience. But ideally content should come first, and SEO after, and the concern is that SEO, in particular how to manipulate the Google algorithm, is being prioritized over the content itself.

Low-paid journalists = low-quality work?

Contributors to 'content farms' are paid a low price for each article, and the companies make it clear that this is not intended to be a full-time job, but something to supplement your income. The pay at Associated Content (for at least some writers) is based on page views - $1.50 for 1000 views - and at Demand Media it is around $15 an article, with copy editors receiving $3.50 per article. Evidently the fact that writers can work from home and in their own time must be taken into account, but this figure is still low.

The idea, as  explained in a Wired article by Daniel Roth in November 2009, is that rather than "trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." CEO Richard Rosenblatt clarified to Jay Rosen that this is part of an attempt to build "a sustainable business model"

The fear, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington aptly put it, is that "anyone who spends their time and effort on their content is pushed out of business." Journalists will be paid less and less and journalistic quality will be forced down.

Despite staff's insistence that articles are fact-checked and edited, and the fact that writers are required to reference their sources, the general impression is that the quality of content at content farms is low, and the audience doesn't seem to mind that much.

But is this really "the end of hand crafted content," as TechCrunch concludes? Should professional journalists at established media outlets feel threatened by an excess of content on the Internet? Is it actually competing directly with what they do? The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational? Demand and others have found a hole in the market and they are seemingly successfully filling it, and news organisations should probably continue to focus on producing the best content they can.

WikiLeaks has struck again, with the biggest intelligence leak in history. Several weeks ago, WikiLeaks received about 91,000 reports concerning raw information of the war in Afghanistan. In an unprecedented decision WikiLeaks decided not to immediately release the highly classified reports, but instead shared its findings first with the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Der Spiegel.

It can be speculated that these three newspapers where chosen as a prestigious validity check on the reports, as they are top media outlets in the US, the UK, and Germany respectively. Conversely The Telegraph criticizes WikiLeaks for its supposed stance on being politically neutral while only releasing the reports to left-wing newspapers.

SachManya, the creators of YAPPER (Your APP makER) recently announced the release of two mobile applications for newspaper organizations. The company boasts about its user friendly YAPPER application, which allows news outlets to create their own applications without having any developing skills. The new Palo Alto Online and the West Seattle Herald mobile applications are created solely for the news industry. Without any hassle, newspapers can build their application once and publish it across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and the Blackberry, according to a press release. These applications include full news delivery, photos, enhanced video capabilities, social networking abilities, and the option for community engagement. 

Italian publisher L'Espresso has announced that it will start using mobile phones to allow access to paid digital content from its flagship daily, La Repubblica. From 2 August, all Italian customers mobile customers will be able to use their phone credit to purchase paid-for digital content.

The digital version of the newspaper, La Repubblica +, will be available on PCs, tablets and smartphones and Vodafone customers are being offered a two week free trial starting today, until 2 August. "Content can be readily and securely purchased with a simple click if accessing from a cell phone or, if using another device (a PC or tablet), by entering a cell phone number and the customer's chosen password," said a press release. Those without an Italian mobile account will continue to be able to buy the editions online with a credit card or via iTunes on Apple products. 

ABC News has launched a new iPad application letting users find out current events by hitting on any area of the globe they are interested in.  This links the user directly to a news item on the newspaper website.

'Spin, Shake, Touch, Filter, Save, Share, Engage' are the keywords used to present the software.

As the iPad seems to be living up to its popularity and expected hype, it has become necessary not only for the media to be present on it and to its numerous users, but to focus on originality, especially for those news organisations who are attempting to charge for their apps.

Recently launched apps such as Flipboard, for social media, and Apollo, for news personalisation, show how fast the iPad world is changing and what news outlets have to compete with.

Source: PaidContent.org

Apollo, a new news app for the iPad, aims to offer "the world's first fully personalized newspaper," loosely based on the music platform Pandora, which suggests to users new music that it thinks they will like, based on their preferences. After its release on Friday by Hawthorne Labs, Apollo quickly jumped to number 11 in the Apple iPad store, according to co-founder Evan Reas. It is priced at $4.99 (or €3.99).

Quoted by TechCrunch and others as saying that the app aimed to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," Reas stressed to the EW that he did not in fact intend to destroy news providers, but simply that he believed that print newspapers were becoming less relevant to younger people, and that digital news was the future. "What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying," he wrote on his blog.  

In fact, Reas did not want Apollo to be seen as a threat to the news industry. "We believe that we are a friend to traditional news sources, helping them get new views from a new medium," he said, adding that  "we think it is mutually beneficial for us and the content sources."

Apollo aims to help readers discover new content that they will like, based both on their expressed preferences - they can like or dislike specific articles, and favourite sources - and on which articles they read, how much time they spend on each, and what 'similar' users like.

The news is separated into different category groups, which are displayed as boxes along the bottom. Each of these has a choice of several different subcategories, which were chosen following extensive user testing, Reas said. The categories are intended to prompt users to read different types of news, and maybe to discourage them from only reading about the topics with which they are already familiar. One of the arguments against personalized news is that it takes away the element of serendipity, the chance to discover something totally new, but Reas said that the categories and the fact that Apollo is continuously bringing in new sources and articles will retain an element of this.

Apollo selects news from thousands of sources, both established news sources and blogs, using their public RSS feeds to link to content within the app. No content is licensed, and as the RSS feeds are public this should not be a problem. Another iPad news reader however, Pulse, had problems immediately after its launch when the New York Times objected to the use of its content within the app. Pulse essentially offers nicely-presented RSS feeds, allowing readers to choose their sources. One possibly important difference between the two though in terms of copyright is that  Apollo only offers a title and small snippet of an article before the reader clicks through to the page of the news outlet, while Pulse reproduces the whole text of the article that is available via the RSS feed.

For now, Hawthorne Labs' single stream of income is from app purchases: there is no advertising within Apollo. "In the longer term, we are considering other options like offering premium services to readers," Reas said.

He has faith in the iPad's potential as a news reading device: "I think the iPad will be how most people get their news in the future," but hopes to create Apollo apps for the iPhone, Android and a web browser too. "We are thinking about a lot of new ideas, especially around social, recommendations and personalization of content in our goal to be the daily destination for people to discover their content."

Many news publishers have been hoping that the iPad and similar devices will represent a significant revenue stream, at a time when they are determined to make money out of digital news distribution. The hope is that consumers will be prepared to pay to subscribe to specific news apps on the iPad, even if they are not prepared to pay to subscribe online. Much of this expectation seems to have been created by the fact that people are prepared to pay for news apps on the iPhone and other smart phones.

Something to note, however, is that most customers are far more likely to pay a one-off fee to download an app rather than pay regularly for a subscription. And with applications like Apollo or Pulse, which offer news from multiple sources in a relatively readable format for a one-off payment, news outlets are going to have to up their game if they want to persuade a high number of readers that they are worth paying for. Plus, it is significantly easier to read news in a web browser on the iPad compared to a smartphone due to the far larger screen size, reducing the need for an app at all.

Reviews of news apps have been middling so far, as Alan Mutter noted in May and with which present ratings concur, but the potential for innovation in the way news is presented is huge. And subscription-based apps have been selling, with the Times counting 12,500 subscribers, and it was reported in early June that the Wall Street Journal already had 10,000 iPad subscribers. As a comparison, the BBC's free app has been downloaded more than a million times. 

The iPad and other similar devices will remain niche, elite products for at least the immediate future, but those who do buy them are likely to be prepared to spend some money on apps if they are offered something interesting enough. Will consumers prefer the personalised aggregation of news offered by Apollo, or will they choose a premium experience from their favourite newspaper? Or both? 

The Washington Post released its "Top Secret America" project describing the national security buildup in the US following the 9/11 attacks.

In light of continuing debates over paywalls, the Observer's Peter Preston contemplates the Daily Mail's "online miracle," suggesting that due to its vast number of website visitors, the paper might manage to bring in enough revenue from Internet advertising to survive.

Apple announced that the iPad will be available in nine more countries this Friday, 23 July: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

Following a New York Times editorial questioning the bias of Google's search algorithm, Wired discussed whether it was possible that Google might be using the algorithm for its own gain.

Republican congressional candidates are convinced that the media have it in for them, argued WP's Howard Kurtz.

Google News has introduced further changes following its redesign two weeks ago, to better reflect user feedback.

Roy Greene, senior assistant metro editor at the Boston Globe, explained in an article on Poynter.org how the paper used crowdsourcing to complement its World Cup coverage.

He described the four steps the Globe took, starting with creating a simple, web-based questionnaire, to identify  Boston.com readers who were travelling to South Africa. The questionnaire asked for information including full name, hometown, email address, job, plans for the tournament and favourite team, and asked whether respondents would be willing to speak to a reporter. The form was posted on the home page and the soccer page just before the launch of the World Cup, and Greene saved the responses that he thought could be valuable: about a dozen, he specified. 

Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing mapping platform created by Kenyan lawyer and blogger Ory Okolloh in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan general elections. The idea is that with enough input from users, the platform can use the aggregated information to monitor situations such as riots, or natural disasters and help to provide a useful overview of the situation, via a map. Ollokoh received $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge in 2009 to develop Ushahidi further.

Nieman Lab's Megan Garber spoke to Ushahidi's director of crisis mapping and strategic partnerships, Patrick Meier, about how media outlets can use the platform. Meier gave Al Jazeera's work in Gaza as an example: its journalists were texting and tweeting direct to an Ushahidi map and the news outlet directed its audience to the map as their "first stop." The map was then opened up to the public in Gaza to add their own information. Meier found this combination of professional and amateur coverage very interesting, particularly as comparing reports made it possible to start to detect who were the more credible members of the crowd. 

Zero Hora, a southern Brazilian newspaper covering the Porto Alegre region, has a proactive online strategy aiming to foster an innovative, interactive website while protecting its print edition, the circulation of which grew 2% in 2009. According to data from the World Bank World Development Indicators, about 37.5% of Brazilians are Internet users, and the number is rising fast, constantly creating new challenges for the country's newspapers. The Editors Weblog spoke to Zero Hora's editor-in-chief Altair Nobre to find out more about the paper's strategy, which has resulted in unusually high penetration among young people.

There are 210 journalists at Zero Hora, working in newsroom that has been integrated since the end of 2007. Although there are specific teams allocated to print and online, these teams are fluid and journalists are expected to understand the work of others and be flexible in what they do. Print is still very important to the paper, and the company invested $50million in a new printing plant in June 2009. A lot of energy is dedicated to the design and layout of the paper.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way that Zero Hora puts its paper together, Nobre said. People now look for news online, so what they want from a newspaper is context and analysis to accompany the straight news stories. This means, said Nobre, that a greater investment in editing is required "to translate the storm of information that the Internet put up the day before." As a result of the Internet, he said, newspapers constantly have to strive to be more original and creative, working harder to convince people to read the paper.

Online, the paper focuses on breaking news and multimedia, but saves many of its exclusive stories to publish fully in print first. When Zero Hora is planning to break a big story in the following day's paper, "to create tension and increase anticipation we put a hint or a teaser online," Nobre explained, adding that "we tell readers that to find out more they should see tomorrow's paper." The following day the story will also go online, but not until it has been published in print. "The Internet provides a way of sending an alert and it helps to get attention for the paper," he said.

"We believe that it is foolish to hide content from the web because you affect the impact that the information could have." Nobre believes that many of the same readers use both platforms to consume news, and that linking the two makes a lot of sense. He gave the example of one reporter who works on a series of 'stories with no ending,' publishing one each Saturday. He started to make videos each Friday for the web in which he discusses the story that will appear the following day, and the series is now a success both in the print edition and on the web.

High levels of interactivity online

Zero Hora aims to make its online version very interactive. The Porto Alegre region has a rather unstable climate, Nobre explained, and so Zero Hora editors invite readers to send in pictures and short reports when there are storms. These are put on the web and the best pictures will often be put in the print paper the following day. Readers are not paid for their contributions but having their content in the paper is motivation enough, said Nobre.

This effort to promote reader interaction extends to the very young: children are invited to send in photos of them with their friends at various events, and there are story-writing contests for children and adolescents, with a published story or a trip to the printing plant as a prize.

A young attitude = more readers

The newspaper has very high penetration among younger people: a 78 percent penetration rate among 20- to 29-year olds in its market, and a 71 percent penetration rate among those aged 15 to 19. Voted 2009 Young Reader Newspaper of the Year, Zero Hora has looked innovatively at ways to encourage young people to take an interest in the paper. As well as having specific sections of the paper aimed at children - supplements, series about children's lives and games and contests, for example - the feeling at Zero Hora is that a young attitude in general is the way forward, believing that older generations are unlikely to be alienated by the issues in which younger people are interested. Sports news, for example, steers away from golf and racing and towards surfing and more extreme sports. One third of the newsroom is under 30 years old and 25 journalism students work in the newsroom in support functions, so the paper is not out of touch touch with the younger generation.

Nobre believes that a main motivation for young adults to read the paper is its potential to help them with their careers. "In Brazil, the young people read the paper to get a job or to get a better job: to get training or to improve their career," he said. Zero Hora has supplements about university entrance exams, a large amount of information about post graduate studies and employment sections with career tips.

Using social networks with care

Zero Hora journalists use social networks such as Twitter to alert people about their stories and to keep track of what people are talking about, but Nobre stressed that his staff are careful to use information from social networks wisely. "They can be a good source of news, but also a trap," Nobre said. The paper has many different Twitter accounts, and journalists are told to be careful that what they write on social networks, even when they are not at work, could not damage their credibility as journalists.

Focusing on younger readers while putting considerable effort into both print and online initiatives, while keeping the two relatively separate, does seem to be working for Zero Hora. Although operating in a very different market, are there lessons that American and European newspapers can learn from Zero Hora's success?

 

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

"Do we have an excess of daily press journalists? And, if so, how does the surfeit vary from country to country?"

Frédéric Filloux is a French journalist, academic and editor of a newsletter about business models of media and technology (full disclosure: Monsieur Filloux has in the past spoken at conferences held by WAN, which also owns EditorsWeblog).  In a report released earlier this week on MondayNote.com, Filloux has performed statistical analysis of data contained in the recent OECD report, "The Evolution of News and the Internet".  In his analysis, he looks at the relationship between the number of active journalists in a given country and  the gross circulation of newspapers in that country during the same time period.

The Sun Chronicle has announced that, effective this Wednesday, readers will be asked to pay a $1 fee in order to comment on any articles on the website.  In addition, all posters will be required to register their name, address, phone number and a legitimate credit card number.  The poster's name as it appears on the credit card will automatically be attached to the poster's comments, as will the name of the community in which they live.  The Chronicle's publisher, Oreste P. D'Arconte, stated that the change is being made in an attempt "to eliminate past excesses that included blatant disregard for our appropriateness guidelines, blind accusations and unsubstantiated allegations."  If past efforts by other sites are any indication, this affront to privacy and free speech is likely to attract fervent opposition.

Italy is experiencing an almost complete 24-hour news blackout today as news outlets join together in a strike against a bill that proposes a type of gagging law which has become known as the Alfano law. The law would limit the ability of police and prosecutors to intercept and record phone conversations, and would stop journalists from publishing transcripts of these. Journalists fear that the law has been put forward to protect politicians from scandal, most notably the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"Italian journalists are called together to a type of extraordinary protest that will express itself in a 'loud' news silence on the 9 July, against the rules of the "interceptions bill" which severely limits the right of the citizens to know the progress of judicial trials, inflicting grave limitations on the free circulation of news," said the Federazione Nationale di Stampa Italiana (the Italian federation of newspapers.)

The news 'silence' is intended to represent the daily silences that such a law would impose on the press, the FNSI website explained. An editorial on the site of left-leaning daily La Repubblica specified that the initiative "is not a corporate strike, but a protest to protect the citizens, who are denied by law the right to be freely informed." Corriere della Sera echoed this sentiment, stressing that its journalists were giving up a day's salary not for economic reasons, but for a "civil battle," adding that by taken part in the strike "we hope to contribute to making our country and its politicians aware of the dangers represented by the proposed legislation to the democratic and constitutional rights of all our citizens who want to know what is going on around them."

Arianna Ciccone, co-founder and co-director of the International Journalism Festival told the Editors Weblog that she believes the proposed law "is using privacy as an excuse to try to protect a caste [of politicians]." She is one of a team of Italian journalists who have created a website called 'Valigia Blu' or Blue Suitcase, named after the bag in which she carried signatures protesting an incorrect statement made on a TG1 news programme. The site's editors decided to use the day of the strike to "post articles, recordings and videos that explain the law and what will happen to our freedom if it is definitively passed."

La Repubblica editor-in chief Ezio Mauro explained to the EW that cases take a long time to come to trial in Italy- four to six years, sometimes up to ten - which means that if the law were to pass preventing reporting on ongoing cases, this could mean such an absence of information that the public could end up voting in an election while having no idea if the candidates involved had been charged with a crime. He believes that with this law, the government is trying to "break the circuit between those in power, the magistrates who investigate, the newspapers who provide the news and the citizens who get informed, and can therefore understand and judge."

As well as participating in the strike, La Repubblica has appeared with the front page blank, and encouraged young people to send in photos of themselves with post-it slogans representing gags to protest the law.

TG1, a news channel from the state-run RAI network, is also participating in the strike online, but is broadcasting its 13.30 and 20.00 news shows.

Il Post, an online-only news site founded earlier this year joined the newspapers in striking, though with some reticence about the method chosen. A note on the site explained that "we would have preferred more constructive and exemplary protest initiatives, but suggestions made to this end were not taken on and therefore we are adhering to the decision taken, as we share the reasoning." The site is instead offering readers a selection of articles from the press over the years, to demonstrate the value of good journalism and "because a strike is not only an absence."

La Stampa's management was also unhappy with the method chosen as it denied citizens of news for a day, and appealed to the FNSI to find an alternative. FNSI secretary general Franco Siddi replied that he believed a strike was the type of protest which most effectively made the seriously of the situation evident.

Il Giornale, owned by Berlusconi's brother Paolo, is the only national daily to appear on the newsstands and to update its website today. Editor Vittorio Feltri explained in a video clip on the newspaper's site that although Il Giornale also disapproves of the gagging law, it believes that the "biggest mistake in responding is to put the gags on ourselves." He continued, "the newspaper is on the newsstand for the readers, but also for the journalists who work here and don't want to relinquish the right to express themselves."

Is striking a legitimate protest to such a law? The symbolic significance is clear, but should citizens be deprived of news for a day? What if there was a major disaster or similar event? The argument that it is the only way to bring the public's attention to the implications of the law is valid, but it is unclear whether it will have the desired effect.

The Italian media is one that is largely dominated by television, with Internet access at a lower level compared to several other western European countries. Berlusconi controls, through direct ownership or influence on the state run channels, a large proportion of the television network available. He has a confrontational relationship with the press, having called for boycotts from readers and advertisers of papers which are critical of his policies, and having sued several papers. Various press freedom demonstrations have taken place in the country, but as yet little has changed.

The recent debate over the gagging law seems to have led to support for pushing for better press freedom from an unexpected corner. Gianfranco Fini, co-founder of Berlusconi's ruling party the Popolo della Libertà (Freedom People) said earlier this week during as speech to the Italian media regulation body Agcom that  "a great democratic country needs to have strong, free and authoritative news and in a great democratic country, the press is never free enough." He continued "we still need to introduce ... further rules to protect access to sources of information."

Will Italy's tenuous press freedom status be improved?

In a recent article, Michael Arrington, writing for TechCrunch, argues that journalists should openly express their opinions and biases, despite the longstanding idea that journalists should hide their political biases. This argument by Arrington comes on the heels of CNN's firing of Octavia Nasr because of a controversial tweet and the forced resignation of Helen Thomas because of her statements about Israel. "I think journalists have the right to express their opinions on the topics they cover," he writes. "More importantly, I think readers have a right to know what those opinions are."

The BBC is about to redesign its news website, according to the site's editor Steve Herrmann in a blog post. "We have focused on design and navigation, looking to see how we can make all the existing content we produce each day easier for you to find, use and share," he wrote. It is the biggest redesign of the site since 2003.

The BBC asked users about how they use the site and decided on areas to improve, such as indicating which are the newest stories on the homepage by flagging them with a 'New' badge. There will also be more space for the main stories of the day On story pages, it will be more clearly indicated what other latest top news there is. Local UK news will be easier to find, and video features will be more accessible with a bigger video player and better quality video, placed at the top of the front page. It will also be easier to quickly share stories on Facebook and Twitter. 

CNN has removed editor Octavia Nasr from her job yesterday because of a controversial statement that she published on Twitter, reports the New York Times. Nasr, a 20-year veteran of CNN, was CNN's senior editor for Midde Eastern affairs. The controversial tweet read: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah ... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot." 

So major UK dailies the Times and Sunday Times have gone behind an online paywall: those wishing to read beyond the homepage will have to register and pay £1 for a day's access, £2 for a week. The sum is not huge but in today's news landscape where online readers jump swiftly and easily between news sources, how many are likely to pay?

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted that a column on the Sunday Times' site this weekend had lifted an item from a free website, Gentlemenranters, without giving proper attribution. The editor of Gentelmenranters confirmed to Greenslade that the Sunday paper had not contacted the site. In the world of blogging and linking it has become almost standard practice to refer to the work of others, but citing the source is essential, and when a website is behind a paywall there does seem to be a feeling that it is less justifiable to take content from other sources. Presumably this is because, if people are paying for content, they expect it to be top quality and definitely original.

This raises the question of whether people do value and expect more from content that they pay for more than free content. News organisations all want their content to be regarded as valuable, but the ubiquity of news online does mean that many people may well have started to take content for granted, and flick through different sources, disregarding articles that are not immediately gripping.

This has for some time been one of Murdoch's arguments for implementing paywalls, and it is a valid concern. But do people now value news enough to pay for a specific paper? A loyal base of print subscribers will get online access free. Of those who do subscribe to the new Times websites, there will presumably be some who immediately sign up because they love the paper, and maybe others who later realize that they miss it so much that they are prepared to pay, and others who choose to make a one off purchase for a day or a week to access a specific piece. But has the Times is now practically invisible on Google, and bloggers can't link to it, how might new readers find the site?

Another Guardian blog post has offered "A warm welcome to guardian.co.uk for all former readers of the Times." Writer John Crace asserts that "here at the Guardian we can offer everything you ever wanted from the Times - and more - for nothing" and offers a tongue-in-cheek comparison of the two papers. Although many of those commenting on the article were disparaging about the Guardian's self-righteousness and questioned its own business model, its point is legitimate: there undoubtedly exist many good-quality, viable alternatives to the Times for readers who do not want to pay.  

The Guardian has made it clear that charging for online news is not something that it intends to do in the near future. Editor Alan Rusbridger has firmly underlined his belief that news should be free, stressing the importance of a wide reach and immediacy of access. The paper consistently has among the highest number of unique users of any UK paper (upwards of 30 million per month) and although its losses are currently substantial, it seems to be holding out for a way to make money from these.

And as well as other quality dailies with free websites, there is the BBC. Newspapers might be able to offer superior comment and analysis, but for the news, the BBC is an excellent source. The new Times sites are impressive, with improved navigation and search, and more multimedia elements: interactive graphics as well as more photos and videos. 'Behind the story' is also a useful new feature, and the live Q&As are likely to appeal. However, it is not far and away the best news website available, which is arguably what it needs to be in order to succeed in charging.

Poynter's Bill Mitchell took a look at the Times' paywall alongside two other British examples, the Financial Times and the Guardian. He was surprised by the strength of the Times paywall: the fact that articles are not indexed on Google and that all content, even blogs, are now paid-only. Other papers, including the New York Times, are looking at a 'metered' strategy which would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month before being asked to pay, overall keeping the paper more visible. Even Murdoch's financial daily, the Wall Street Journal, offers some articles free via Google.

As Steve Outing notes, at least Murdoch "has the guts" to try out a paywall strategy on a major daily, and to try it in the most extreme sense.  However, the extreme strategy is undoubtedly highly risky. As well as the inevitable loss of online reader numbers which risks marginalizing the Times and making it less relevant in the online news conversation, there is the subsequent risk that journalists will not want to work for a paper where their work is not read by many. It was one of the complaints made by New York Times star journalists such as Thomas Friedman during the TimesSelect experiment which ended in 2007. One law blogger from the Times, Tim Kevan, has already quit and been taken in by the Guardian - will others follow?

So in its quest for more revenue and trying to get readers to give greater value to its content, the Times risks losing an awful lot. If it does end up making a huge profit (paidContent looks at the figures here), others will follow and News Corp might end up dramatically changing the news landscape. There has been so much talk about paywalls with little consensus: doing it is the only way to find out if it actually will work, and the rest of news industry must be relieved that somebody is trying. That said, it really is a big risk. 

Three US newspapers are set to introduce paywalls to their websites later this week, reports journalism.co.uk. The newspapers, The Tallahassee Democrat in Florida, the Spectrum in Utah, and Greenville News in South Carolina, will introduce a range of subscription packages on July 1st. Gannett owns all three of the newspapers and the paywalls are reportedly part of the company's subscription trials. 

At Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory, multiple experiments are underway looking at how to automatically add value to news and even automatically generate stories. The Editors Weblog spoke to Kristian Hammond, co-director of the InfoLab, to find out more about the projects and their implications for the news industry.

The essential goal of InfoLab's projects is to aggregate information, to synthesize and add value to news stories. Hammond, who is with the university's engineering school, explained that on a regular basis, the university organises classes where cross-functional teams are created between computer science students and those at the Medill journalism school. Particularly relevant projects for news organisations include:

• - Stats Monkey takes data, the record of a baseball game, for example, analyses this and constructs an article around it. It will use statistical models to figure out what the 'news' is in each game and uses a 'decision tree' to decide what the narrative arc of the game should be. Stories can be generated from the point of view of either time, the site notes.
• - News@Seven is a virtual news show. The virtual producers present an automatically generated script: a film review, for example. The script is based on reviews that it finds and amalgamates from around the web. The project came directly out of the engineering lab, Hammond said, with its graduate students having been sent to the journalism school to take classes in broadcast journalism. "It has its own notion of narrative structure and uses that to pull together the information into a single unified experience," he explained
• - Tell Me More takes a given news story and searches the web for other articles on the same topic, locating those that contain information that is different to the original, aiming at "providing more background, or more detail, than any single story can present." It allows news audiences to rate the information it presents. "It's about augmenting, not just aggregating," Hammond said. There has been interest in this project as a potential aid for journalists, he added.
• - MakeMyPage continuously aggregates news on popular topics, from news sites, encyclopedia entries, online video stores and others to create wiki-style pages on different topics. It has the capacity to disregard irrelevant information, and adjusts the position of links and media based on users' votes for the information that they like.

"What we are striving for in general is to take the editorial judgement and skills that come out of journalism and map them onto automated systems so that you can get the scale," Hammond explained. "In the current environment the scale is going to win," he believes. The work that InfoLabs does is very much a partnership between journalism and technology, however, and he stressed that "we didn't want to lose our connection to editorial judgement and that ended up being a major component of what we do."

Can computers become journalists?

Stats Monkey is arguably the most controversial of the InfoLab's projects, as unlike News@seven, which lifts information and opinions from other sources, it actually generates text. When asked "Is this journalism?" Hammond responded "Absolutely," and he described Stats Monkey as "a meta-journalism project." Sports writers help the developers to craft the system, and help it to make judgements about how to approach and craft the story, and make it "the right kind of story for the data that's coming in."

A significant concern that readers might have when reading an automatically generated text is that it might be lacking in accuracy and that facts might have been misinterpreted. Hammond explained that as a human reporter could be fooled by bad data, so could the Stats Monkey system, but he seemed confident that it was unlikely that correct data would be mis-reported.

InfoLab's automisation of the work of a journalist has encountered limited opposition, Hammond said, and less so "when people understand what we are trying to do." The Stats Monkey system is not trying to replace journalists, he emphasized, rather it is trying to provide coverage that would not otherwise have been there. "We would never be interested in doing World Cup stories, for example," Hammond explained, "because everyone else is doing stories there and it's covered." Where he thinks the technology behind Stats Monkey is most valuable, is for producing stories about more obscure sports events, for instance, for which there is an interest, "but the interest is small enough that it would never be worth an organisation's time or money to pay anyone to write these stories."

He believes that Stats Monkey's potential is not just limited to sports coverage, but could also be used for financial results of small local businesses, or real estate statistics, and he anticipates using the census. "Anywhere where there are numbers and a way to do analysis around those numbers, Statsmonkey can do something," he said. "There is so much data out there right now that it's a clear win to have us generating stories around it."

In fact, Hammond said that InfoLab is trying to create technology that could support small news organisations, who for some reason might not have the resources to cover what they want to cover. He suggested that the Stats Monkey technology could be used to provide coverage of more local sports, or news about small local businesses, and that through this it might be able to provide small publications with an extra page, which would then generate revenue through additional advertising.

Narrative Science is the company founded to pursue the commercial side of the Stats Monkey 'authoring engine,' which Hammond described as no longer a research project, explaining that it made sense to develop it within the confines of a commercial entity.  It is already being used by the Big Ten Network website to cover some college sports games, which Hammond noted were not being covered by anyone else.

Could this kind of reporting become more widespread? InfoLab's work does seem to be targeting the gaps left by traditional forms of reporting, but if the technology were to be adopted and developed more extensively, could it end up threatening the work of journalists? Maybe in some limited areas, but however advanced the computer programmes become, there will always remain many types of journalistic work that could only be successfully carried out with the expertise and skill of an individual. 

Twitter co-founder is hoping to make the social networking site more localized, reports CNBC. Twitter now allows for users to opt if they want their location attached to a tweet or not, thus making the service a slowly growing enterprise. However, Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, believes that localized tweets could be beneficial to the company's followers. The Twitter blog explains "if you're like everyone at the Twitter office, you're going crazy about the world cup. When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from--is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium?"

The Times iPad app, which debuted in May, is stirring up some trouble for Rupert Murdoch. PaidContent reports the £9.99-a-month app was launched without any mechanism for users to renew their subscriptions for a second month. Tuesday, the paper released an upgrade that includes a renewal mechanism via iOS' in-app purchasing system. Without a renewal system The Times risks losing a significant par of its subscribers from month to month as they would have to go back to the iTunes store to renew their subscription.