Results matching “press free to move”

 

Do you speak Twitter? Come on, Tweeple... It's time to get with the program. Yes, you Tweeple, people of the Twitter universe, or Twitterverse. Whether you are a newetter (a new tweeter), an occasionitter (an occasional Tweeter) or a seasoned reportwitters (you guessed it, reporter-style twitterer), an entire range of Twitter vocabulary has arrived. 

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 Digital Britain report, published this afternoon, evokes the government's attitude and pledges to a rapidly evolving news industry, underlined by the recognition that both traditional and technological forms of news provision require both respect and support.   

Recognising the economic pressures pressing on the news industry, the report asserts that citizens, government and industry will have to work collaboratively to financially maintain the 'vital civil function of journalism.'

The French version of the free daily 20 Minutes will follow its audience to their holiday destinations this summer. The paper, which normally hibernates during the summer as its readership of commuters leave the city, will publish a weekly edition available on 150 different beach localities, where the French typically flock to during the hot summer months, in addition to the usual 20 Minutes hotspots in metro and train stations. The weekly will focus on cinema, beauty and fitness, as well as produce unique games testing readers' awareness of general news and cultural.

The American Press Institute prepared a report for last week's newspaper executives' meeting in Chicago in which it assessed the options for paid content and "fair use" fees from Google and other aggregators. Entitled Newspaper Economic Action Plan, the report concluded that newspapers "can make the leap from an advertising-centered to an audience-centered enterprise," and should do so as soon as possible.

The "integrated, five-point" plan provides "models and recommendations for the migration of online content from free to paid" which are "intended for the development of consensus, protocols and technology." The API does not see paid content as the only revenue source that will save journalism, but advocates establishing "a true value for news content online by charging for it" in the first part of its plan: the True Value Doctrine. It recommends that news organisations immediately start a "massive" period of experimentation to find the best way to do this. The report explores three options: micropayments, subscriptions and a hybrid model.

A conference held by the Association of European Journalists (AJE), held today, June 3 in Paris, discussed the path forward for journalism which focuses on Europe as geo-political reality.   Aware that the concept of Europe, as reported in the mainstream press, often fails to capture the imagination of the public as well as many journalists themselves, representatives of initiatives currently striving to revive the issue met to debate its progress. The questions raised were broad: Is reporting on Europe a 'chore'?  How can the media inspire, entertain and inform on European issues?  Which are the principle perspectives and agents responsible for revealing what's actually going on in the EU?  And will European institutions be prepared to finance new organs of information?

Participating in the debate were: Renaud de Chazournes, Chief Editor of the monthly magazine, L'Européen, Eric Maurice, Chief Editor of Presseurop.eu and Matthieu Collet, President of EurosduVillage.eu. 

According to an article in today's Guardian Media, the Sunday Times is planning to launch its own standalone website and is even considering introducing a paywall.

Publisher News International is a subdivision of News Corp headed by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch has expressed his desire - to see his newspapers based around the world to follow the example of the Wall Street Journal by charging readers for content - on numerous occasions.

Russian news agencies RIA Novosti and Interfax have launched a joint project to provide coverage of important national news with around 600 regional media, it was announced in a  press release today.

The importance of this move was
emphasised RIA Novosti Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk:

"This project is revolutionary as two rival agencies - the independent Interfax agency and the federal state RIA Novosti agency - are carrying out a joint media project for the first time".

For two of the speakers at the Power of Print Conference in Barcelona, completely new approaches - and publications - were the required missing element of the newspaper industry. Peter Vandevanter, vice president of Targeted Products spoke about his company's personalised newspapers - for which he has coined the term 'Individuated'.

Readers receive home delivery of their 'Individuated' newspaper on the days they're free to read it, and personalised 'I-News' delivered digitally on the days they're not. 'I-News' is also available in a printable format for readers that choose to print it, alongside coupons for coffee or other products they ask for - an advertiser's dream! Vandevanter said that advertising rates for the I-product are ten times print advertising rates.

After three weeks of personal experimentation with a Kindle e-reader, a Poynter writer has seen it fit to hail the gadget as a component of the "hybrid future of the news".  Bill Mitchell concluded that the Kindle would function as a third platform in his personal reading of the news, alongside printed and online forms, "I see the Kindle (and other e-readers) more as a supplement to print and online as opposed to a substitute for either."

Indeed, Mitchell's relatively positive testimony of the product, whilst not an explicit endorsement, is an interesting contribution to the current hot debate surrounding the relationship of devices such as the Kindle with the beleaguered print industry and online news sites, the latter being currently embroiled in the pay for viewing controversy.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of the International Conference on the Press and Multilingualism in the EU, executives from Catalan-language newspapers debated the future role of the printed press, in light of the global downturn and the digital revolution in the communications world.

The editor of El Periódico de Catalunya, Rafael Nadal, editor of El Punt, Ferran Espada and the editor of Diari de Balears, Miquel Serra, were among the guest speakers.

MarketWatch has redesigned its site, "showcasing the breadth and depth of its original content" and the market data and "valuable tools" it offers to investors, according to a press release. The site is part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, published by Dow Jones.

The new design features new navigation, "expanded content and features and better surfacing of the site's leading personalities and columns." Within the site there are two new tools, a "Terminal Header" at the top of each page and the "Dock" which is a floating tool bar. Both can give "on demand quotes, news and customized data and charting," A new advertising element has also been introduced, the "Kiosk," which offers "a blend of content and advertising delivered dynamically in a rotator format." There is also increased coverage on emerging markets and key European, Asian and Latin American markets.

Free newspaper company Metro International is selling off its loss-making US newspapers. They will be bought by Seabay Media, which is run by former Metro International chief executive Pelle Tornberg. It is buying publications including the New York and Philadelphia based newspapers, as well as the one in Boston which is currently published jointly with the struggling Boston Globe.

Metro International's finance officer Anders Kronborg said that the move is part of the company's plans to survive the current economic crisis, and follows the closure of its Spanish operations. Some free newspapers have found the current climate particularly difficult due to their dependence on advertising revenue - Sly Bailey, head of UK publisher Trinity Mirror recently said that "Free newspapers are in the frontline trenches of this war."

Source: Guardian

The BBC is to unveil proposals tomorrow for a deal with local news providers that would see the national broadcaster share resources with newspapers, TV and radio stations. The suggestions will be outlined at an industry summit hosted by UK culture secretary Andy Burnham on Tuesday, which had been arranged to discuss ways to assist local papers, which have been heavily hit by the fall in advertising revenue.

BBC proposals include giving local papers free access to video content for their websites, allowing them access to its college of journalism, sharing audio content with community and local radio reporters, and making its iPlayer technology available to rivals so that they can build their own video-rich websites, reported the Guardian.

The Associated Press' recent announcement of its intention to crack down on misappropriation of its content online and to create new search "landing pages" has been met with much commentary and criticism, with many interpreting it as a direct attack on search engines, Google in particular. The not-for-profit cooperative, whose ownership base is US daily newspapers and which has recently been faced with warnings from members that want to drop the service, also announced rate cuts at its annual meeting in San Diego but these did not attract nearly as much interest. The Editors Weblog spoke to the AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy to find out more clearly what the AP's plans entail and what their implications are.

Search landing pages: creating a map that will direct readers to local sources

There are two main aspects to the AP's current new strategy. One is to start creating pages of aggregated content based around news stories and topics, which would allow readers to find the most authoritative local sources for the news they are searching for. The pages will contain some content and links to other stories from both the AP and its member newspapers, and although it will not actually be a 'wiki,' (a source of information that can be updated by users), Kennedy explained that Wikipedia's design is a "rough model for it," with pages driven by topics or keywords. Such a page will be a "map for the user to access other links," commented Kennedy.

He emphasised that the plan is all about giving the user "an improved news experience," as the AP believes that currently, the mechanisms provided to consumers for news searching are inadequate. Kennedy asserted that "people are using search as a remote control for news and it's not working," as it is like a device with only "a couple of buttons; it's a remote with directional arrows and no channels." If a user does not find the information they want on their first search, they usually reach a dead end and just go back to the search homepage and try again. Also, he asserted, search engines "point people indiscriminately" towards sources, rather than towards the news' local paper which should have the most authoritative article. The AP hopes instead to offer more of a guide to a topic, with sources that are more intelligently chosen.

Pages will be largely automatically produced, a necessary tactic as the organisation plans to have hundreds, even thousands of them, but there will be a certain degree of human editing for big stories. They will have URLs so that they can be 'tweeted' or linked to on social networking sites but they will not be a destination in themselves: "This is a distribution strategy, not a destination strategy," Kennedy confirmed.

Tracking content to stop misappropriation

The second aspect is the AP's mission to "keep up the fight to protect content from misappropriation and protecting it from those who don't pay." He clarified that the he was not talking about "small time bloggers who post a link to a story," rather "people and entities who come along and scrape content systematically and have no intention of licensing it." He claimed that the AP has already been fighting this successfully for many years, and this new strategy is a continuation of that in conjunction with its members. The new mechanisms that the AP plans to put in place include new formats for news content which would carry rights information, and tracking services that follow each piece of content. "Ultimately," Kennedy explained, "we'll get better and better at tracking where the content goes, and that will help us enforce the terms and conditions of its use."

So how will this affect its relationship with Google and other aggregators?

Kennedy was clear that these moves are not being made as an attack on Google or any other specific aggregator, despite widespread reports to the contrary. He said that the AP will continue to license its content to Google, Yahoo and others, but that it wants to "introduce new ideas into the relationships over time and try to influence their search mechanisms, in particular to help us point to authoritative sources." Essentially, the AP wants to discuss search optimisation in order to know how to ensure that their landing pages appear high up on users' search results, and "may want to talk to them about having some kind of advertising relationship." The organisation has accepted that widespread use of portals and is not hoping to turn the clocks back, he clarified, rather the AP's goal is to "harness the traffic that goes through them and use the portals to move traffic to more in-depth coverage."

Selling content to open portals is old news

American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi recently argued that the AP may well be partly to blame for the industry's current difficulties in finding a way to charge for online content, as by selling its content to portals such as Yahoo, the organisation helped to make news a commodity. Kennedy responded that the decision to sell content to commercial websites was justifiable from a competitive and financial point of view, as the AP was being "outpaced by Reuters in the Internet space" and "we weren't realising any significant new revenue from the web." The board of directors hired the Boston Consulting Group to assess the situation, and it was concluded that licensing some AP content, national and international coverage rather than local, to commercial customers on the web would be an appropriate response to both issues. And indeed, it has "accomplished both goals," Kennedy affirmed: "it has put us in the position of major news wire service on the web and it has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over the course of that decade." That has meant that the members have had to pay less to support the cooperative's newsgathering, and that the AP has been able to increase its presence worldwide, "grow our video operation and expand employment around the world."


The future of news: mobile and paid-for premiums?

Currently, Kennedy insists, the AP is not trying to dramatically alter the news landscape. "This doesn't affect the current eco-system at all, it adds to it," he stressed. But he believes that the situation will be different in the future, and that "many different models will evolve," as well as the current ad-supported model which has dominated media across the board for so long. He suggested that in the future, the AP will definitely be looking to charge consumers for some services, but not all, explaining that this is what CEO Tom Curley meant when he said that "Free is not a business model."  Rather than being defeatist about the way that the Internet has changed news, Kennedy insisted that "we believe that there is still a frontier and there is still opportunity to create new models, new experiences and attract new advertising and new spending from the consumer because we can offer them something that they want."

"We are not going to put up pay walls around existing content but we are going to go forward and try to look at opportunities for premium content," he explained. "It's about creating something new:" words that echoed advice given by Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray to papers considering charging online. "We are trying to look for new ways to build our revenue base beyond strict licensing," added Kennedy.

He cited the AP's mobile efforts as an example of moves that the organisation has been taking to diversify its revenue streams. The AP created a free application for the iPhone, which aggregates its own and its members' content and organises it by postal code, so Americans have an efficient, accessible source of local news. The iPhone app is ad-supported, with local ads sold by the members and national sold by hired agencies, and a Blackberry application was recently launched, which phone owners must pay to download. "It's really a model for the kind of activity we want to do in the future," he explained, "where as an industry we aggregate our content and put it where the users are, and build a model around it."

Kennedy was clear that the two projects will be pursued "very urgently" and that both efforts will be launching within the next three to four months. With its new search pages, the AP is trying to take a far more active role in a consumer's news reading experience, a big step for a news organisation which, due to its lack of a commercial website, has always been somewhat distanced from its audience. It is proposing a solution which it feels will benefit the reader, and which will evidently benefit the AP and its members, if they have more control over directing traffic and can make extra advertising revenue on these pages. The intellectual property initiative seems to be similarly motivated: becoming more directly involved with where and how readers find AP news, while seeking further income to which the cooperative feels it is entitled, as the producer of such ubiquitous news content. Regardless of motivation, any effort to address the discrepancies in the relationship between content generators and search engines will be closely followed by the rest of the industry in light of recently growing controversy, and any initiative that does indeed improve the news reading experience should be welcomed.

In December the Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Daily News and the Detroit Free Press, announced plans which it hopes will help the newspapers survive the economic crisis. DMP's decision to end home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and instead to direct readers to its websites and truncated editions, came into effect yesterday. The new condensed editions were available free yesterday, but as of today will cost 50 cents.

However, the first day which Detroit woke up without the News or the Free Press on its doorsteps also happened on a day full to the brim with multiple news stories (including the White House effectively forcing out the long standing chairman of Detroit based General Motors) which would have graced the front pages of the full publications just a week earlier. "Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit" write Richard Pèrez-Peña and Mary Chapman for the New York Times. Such an event would previously have prompted a boost in sales for the local publications, but it just so happened that yesterday even the condensed version was being given away for free.

Spain's free press organisation, the Asociación Española de la Prensa Gratuita (AEPG), announced on its site the launch of the country's first search engine for printed free publications.

More than 150 free online publications have been made available in a move - according to the AEPG - which confirms the organisation's commitment to online.

Blick is the most widely read paid newspaper in Switzerland, and has just made the somewhat unusual decision to revert to back to broadsheet format. Blick changed to a tabloid format four years ago, reportedly in order to compete with free daily rivals. However, free daily 20 Minutes has since overtaken Blick in terms of readership. 20 Minutes' increased popularity may be a factor in the official reason for the change; that Blick wants to differentiate itself within the market, as well as from its own free daily newspaper Blick am Abend.

Moving in a more common direction, UK, two long-established local newspapers have made the leap from broadsheet to tabloid. The 236-year-old Reading Chronicle, owned by the Berkshire Media Group, and the 162 year old Newsquest owned Darlington and Stockton Times are the two publications making the change.

Chronicle editor Sally Stevens explained that the decision came in response to reader opinion and that "the compact size of the paper is a more modern format which complements our modern town".  Times editor Malcolm Warne explained that for his publication the move "means we can offer a more focused local news service - there's an additional cost to that, but we've been able to make that investment for the benefit of the paper".

Source: Press Gazette

The Guardian owner today denounced government plans for the BBC Worldwide to merge with state-owned Channel 4 - a move seen as likely to damage commercial media groups, including online news outlets.

The Internet has changed the way that people read newspapers in many ways: not least because news aggregators such as Google News have helped to bring readers away from the habit of focussing their news reading on just one paper's website. Now most Internet-savvy users are accustomed to visiting many different websites and choosing the source that they find appropriate for each story they would like to read. But as newspapers' print revenue drops, frustration at the way that aggregators make money out of content which is not their own has been increasing amongst newspaper publishers. Could Google's recent adoption of small text advertisements on US Google News be the last straw?

The basics of news aggregation

Many different news aggregators exist: those run by media giants such as Yahoo, those based on reader interaction such as Digg and others like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast which provide aggregation alongside original reporting and commentary. Some provide just headlines; Google News, however also collects brief excerpts from articles on its homepage, and makes them available via a search function. Unlike some aggregators such as the Drudge Report that have a human editor choosing the headlines, Google News aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. According to Google, articles are ranked based on "how often and on what sites a story appears online," and "based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity."

Google's mission

News aggregation has been an extremely controversial issue for many years. Google News creator Krishna Bharat claims that Google's service aims to "encourage readers to get a broader perspective by digging deeper into the news - reading ten articles instead of one, perhaps." This in itself is undoubtedly a respectable idea, and reflects one of the great advantages of online news for consumers: the ability to easily read around a topic. According to William Echikson, Google's Senior Manager for Communications, "Google makes the news more accessible and more interesting - encouraging people to read more and so benefiting the news industry as a whole." It can be argued that Google does indeed benefit the news industry by directing traffic to newspaper websites and hence promotes newspaper content. This is perhaps especially pertinent for smaller papers which would not otherwise get many visitors to their sites: when a major event occurs locally, they might suddenly find themselves topping the Google News homepage.

Publishers vs. Google

Despite some undeniable benefits for readers and apparent benefits for newspapers, some newspaper publishers are resentful of Google News and other similar aggregators. The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites. For Google News search results, the click through rate is only about 10%. People scan headlines and the brief article excerpts that appear but then few seem to bother to read full stories, meaning that despite their content being used, newspapers are not receiving any income. And even if people do click through, it means that they are less likely to visit newspapers' homepages and therefore newspapers cannot make much money from their premium advertising spots. There have already been protests: Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse is in the process of seeking 49 million euro in damages from Google for storing and reproducing Belgian newspapers' articles without permission. Another of the complaints that newspapers have is that the aggregators' crawlers do not distinguish between "good" journalism and everything else.

Advertising adds to conflict

Newspaper owners have also been opposed to the fact that advertisements are placed alongside search results on the general Google site, meaning that Google is directly making money from other people's content. The recent decision to place advertising on search results for the US version of Google News after keeping it ad-free for six years is a move that can only further anger many publishers, as it seems now obvious that Google is, after all, just trying to make money out of newspaper content. According to the New York Times, a Google spokesman said that Google had devised an approach that could deliver contextually relevant ads so had decided to go ahead with them. NYT writer David Carr was extremely unimpressed, stating that "newspapers' audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place."

It is not clear whether the company intends to start putting ads on Google News outside the US. According to Press Gazette, Europe's notions of "fair use" are more heavily weighted in publishers' favour than in the US. CopiePresse has asserted that it will take further legal action if ads are placed on Belgian Google News.

Newspapers' anti-aggregator options?

So, apart from simply suing Google and trying to halt a seemingly irreversible trend, how can newspapers tackle these problems, which are all the more relevant in this time of financial crisis?  One possibility is the solution provided by ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol, a coalition of newspaper, magazine and book publishers led by the World Association of Newspapers, which claims to put "content owners in control of their online content in a way that is conducive to developing new online business models, putting new, high-quality content on the net and to maximizing the benefits of the relationship with search engines." In essence, it would mean that copyrighted material could not be used so freely in search engines. Over 700 news organisations have implemented ACAP as a symbolic gesture in anticipation of search engines recognising the service.

One further non-confrontational solution could be for newspapers themselves to provide more aggregation, such as the NYT's Times Extra page: an alternative homepage which includes links to articles from other sites under the Times' own stories. The Washington Post has a politics-specific Political Browser which freely links to other publications. If newspapers embraced this linking further, they could succeed in providing significant competition to aggregators. As well as just linking to other papers, they could utilise a product such as Pluck's BlogBurst, which is effectively a blog syndication service, allowing newspapers to easily search 'quality' blogs and find content to supplement their own stories. Obviously to do this newspapers must adopt "a fundamentally different mindset" to quote Scott Karp, who coined the term "link journalism": they must stop trying to keep people within their own sites and realise that sending them away to appropriately interesting articles may well keep them coming back for more. The Huffington Post, for example, thrives on sending readers away to other articles, and managed to become the most linked-to blog on the web.

Can newspapers supply the competition?

Evidently people do like to be able to get the news from many different sources around the world, and younger readers who have grown up with online news possibly have less loyalty to individual newspapers. With this in mind, newspapers could even provide a better service than Google and co. One of the problems with automated aggregators such as Google is the lack of a real editorial agenda: Google's algorithms try to judge the importance of stories in ways described above, but there is no editor to provide an informed, professional view of events by appropriately arranging stories on a homepage. A newspaper might not be able to provide as comprehensive an aggregation service as Google, but it would have the advantage of being able to offer a clear editorial voice in its selection of articles and how they appear, which is one of the aspects of newspapers that readers value highly.

Another more radical and highly controversial option to defy the search engine aggregators is to start charging for content. If newspapers were to come together and universally start charging online readers, via joint subscriptions or micropayment, they could create a newspaper-owned search engine and aggregator which included advertising and fairly distributed revenue, hence keeping all income from newspaper content within the control of newspapers. It would be a huge step, but as more and more publications contemplate a return to paid content, it seems at least a possibility.

Will Google's additional ads spur newspapers into action? Or will they continue to somewhat reluctantly tolerate the Internet giant's profit from their industry, and accept the directed traffic in return? The Internet has revolutionised the way that people read news, and aggregation and linking is undoubtedly going to continue to be a part of the news landscape. The issue is whether it will be newspapers themselves or third parties which manage the system.

In the UK, issues have arisen over the effect of council run newspapers on other local publications.  The situation will be examined by the Office of Fair Trading during their current review on UK media ownership laws. "Publishers have told the OFT they are under increasing pressure from public sector bodies developing their own media outlets," reports Press Gazette.

The move follows the recent decision of the Barking and Dagenham Council to launch its own fortnightly free newspaper at the end of May.  However, the decision means that the council will pull all advertising from the local press and transfer it to its own newspaper.  The move has been highly criticised by the editor of the Barking and Dagenham Recorder, Chris Carter, as a "stab in the back" which he believes will cost the publication £75,000 per year in lost revenue.

More news of cutbacks and money-saving measures for local newspapers in the US.  According to an announcement from the two publications, the Star-Ledger of Newark and the Record of Hackensack are combining their statehouse bureaus.  The two are New Jersey's largest newspapers, and Star-Ledger editor Jim Willse explains, "At a time when newspapers have had to cut back news staffs, this cooperation allows us to pool resources and better serve all our readers".  The Star-Ledger and the Record have also recently teamed up with other publications to form the Northeast Consortium and enable content sharing between them.

In Indiana, the Bloomfield Free Press is moving online-only.  The publication's owner and publisher R. Michael Johnson has explained that the foreseen rise in postage costs in May is the last straw for the Free Press.  One third of the weekly newspaper's 2000 circulation is delivered by the US postal service, which is increasing the cost of mailing each paper by between 5 and 6 cents in three months time.  The cost of the Bloomfield Free Press had already been dropped by 25 cents to 75 cents due to the struggling economy, despite each copy costing $1 to post.

The debate about making online content paid-for has been raging in the media world for a while now. Though this move may not be completely evident to people, several media pundits have advocated the view, stressing that newspapers can be saved from extinction by making this crucial, but improbable, change in the news-providing process.

T.J. Sullivan, freelance writer and former staffer at four dailies, talked to journalism.co.uk, about his online petition, suggesting that Associated Press (AP) and other US newspapers to shut their websites for a week in July 2009. In an effort to put the spotlight on the importance of news-gathering organisations, Sullivan hopes to educate people "of the colossal domino effect that the loss of newspapers is having on both democracy and every other type of newsgathering organisation"

Media houses and industry experts have explored this idea, considering the pros and cons of having people pay for something that has always been free. Some argue that the amount of revenue generated from news websites cannot considerably change the fate of print newspapers and thus a move like this could be more self-destructing. What was clear was that if online content has to become a paid-for model, only a consolidated effort from the media industry can change the situation. Thus making petitions like Sullivan's a heroic effort, but one that could be doomed from the start.

Sullivan remains hopeful. "I hope the goal of the petition is realised - that newspapers and The Associated Press actually unplug their websites for one week starting July 4 2009."


Sources : journalism.co.uk

Walter Isaacson, ex-managing editor of Time magazine and current CEO of the Aspen Institute yesterday addressed the current conundrum of the printed press: how to make money.  The crux of the dilemma is that printed news costs money, yet identical content online is given out for free.  This combined with a decrease in advertising revenue due to the global economic crisis has left many newspapers and magazines struggling.

In a Time piece entitled 'How to save your newspaper', Walter Isaacson bluntly reveals his attitude to the printed press; "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it."  His logic is indisputable; very few people would pay for that which they can have for free.

Isaacson is struck by the irony of the situation; news publications have a higher readership that ever when you consider both print and online figures, yet they have never been more under threat.  He links the problem back to the online advertising boom which at the time looked like its revenues would be more than sufficient to carry both online and print editions of any newspaper.

The popular American cult website Slate.fr is up for its French-version release. The exact date of release is still not clear; CB News reports that it is scheduled for 10 February, while another source (electionlibre.info) cites the end of February. Jean-Marie Colombani, former chief of Le Monde, is at the head of the project that unites some well-known names of journalism; notably, Eric Leser, Le Monde's New York correspondent, Eric Le Boucher, former editorialist at Le Monde, Johan Hufnagel from 20 Minutes.fr and Jacques Attali.