Results matching “reading more than th”

The Economist magazine is refashioning its image through a major new advertising campaign to appeal to a wider readership. It has launched a cinema commercial, its first in eight years, to dispel preconceived ideas about the magazine's content and ethos.  

The commercial is part of a repackaging drive to boost circulation in the magazine's birthplace, the UK, and to emulate the popularity that it enjoys in the US.  The campaign calls upon the "intellectually curious" rather than any specified demographic to "let your mind wander".

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

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

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

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

Who says the younger generation has no interest in traditional media? More than a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 20 reads a daily newspaper, according to the new Nielsen report "How Teens Use Media." In comparison, 45 percent of all adults pick up the paper on a daily basis.

About a third of 18- to 20-year-olds reads the Sunday paper, compared to 50 percent of all adults.

June 24 marked Outside.in's launch of the beta version of its latest product: Outside.in for Publishers. Outside.in for Publishers has many functionalities. The powerful tool extends any site's local news coverage to the hyperlocal neighborhood level, as well as serving as a "flexible, self-service platform that allows anyone to easily create hundreds or thousands of new high-quality pages for their site, each focused on a hyperlocal neighborhood with targeted advertising inventory," according to the site's press release.

The product is a result of the increasing sentiment that today's local media companies "are forced to do more with less." It appears that the goal for Outside.in for Publishers is to serve publishers by bridging the gap between local bloggers and the publishers themselves. This would heighten productivity by simply having more web pages and inventory. Local bloggers also get the bang for their buck in that more traffic will be directed their way.

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

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

Many newspaper readers would agree that word games are an essential component of the newspaper package. Yet, in last Sunday's edition of the New York Times magazine, the Acrostic puzzle had apparently disappeared.

The magazine has been making modifications to economise on newsprint. It has been reduced in size and the puzzle content altered: two Sundays ago the acrostic had moved page, and its original spot filled by a maths puzzle, the KenKen.

The French government is to give all 18 to 24-year-olds a free newspaper once a week for a year as part of 600 million euro aid package for the press. The concept was originally outlined in January, when the government announced its plan to offer French teenagers a year-long subscription to the newspaper of their choice, commencing on the  day of their 18th birthday. The extension of the age range was  announced yesterday at the Ministry of Culture meeting of the États généraux de la presse.

The idea has proven to be a particularly controversial component of the government's package of financing and reform formulated to restore the health of the French printed press.  The Sarkozy administration has dedicated an exceptional 200 million euros a year, for a 3-year period, to aid the printed press. The Culture Ministry announced during the meeting that more than half of this year's budget had already been designated.

Politico writer Michael Calderone believes that Barack Obama and the White House are trying to win over the New York Times. Despite the new president's team's penchant for new media and social networking, Calderone feels that the White House "remains in the thrall of perhaps the most emblematic old media institution of all."

Calderone reminisces about an "earlier age, when the Times loomed like Olympus over elite journalism" and describes how although Bush's team seemed not to care particularly about the paper, the current White House has shown it great respect. He points out that senior Obama officials posed for Times Sunday Magazine portraits during the transition and that the magazine this month produced a major piece on health care, for which it was offered top-level access. Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai and editor Gerald Marzorati both said that there had been a significant change in attitude towards their paper with the arrival of the new administration.

In a move to bulk up its digital offerings and earn some digital revenues, USA Today will launch a paid-for e-Edition in August. Editor-in-Chief, John Hillkirk, at a breakfast introducing the paper's new Publisher David Hunke, spoke of how they were "not absolutely convinced that [paid online content] works," but how USA Today would be "extraordinarily bullish" when it comes to mobile apps and devices.

The August launch of the e-Edition, which will cost $10 per month, could be just a first step in positioning the paper for a what Hunke predicted an "explosion" in the market for portable reading devices.

A new daily newspaper serving the Detroit area will be launched within the next 60 days, it was announced Tuesday. The Detroit Daily Press, a project of the two experienced publishing brothers, Mark and Gary Stern, arose to compensate for the reduced home delivery of the city's two main daily papers earlier in the year.

"There is a definite need here," Mark Stern asserted at a news conference in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. "People are used to having a newspaper in their hand. ... That's what we're going to do -- provide a newspaper."

According to Mark S. Luckie of 10000words.net, a website dedicated to advising journalists and web aficionados on how to use multimedia efficiently, the answer is yes. Luckie points to five iPhone applications that revolutionize mobile journalism as such apps "elevate journalism beyond just reading stories [by] interacting with them in new and different ways."

1. Kindle for iPhone

The success of Kindle for iPhone has demonstrated that readers are not only willing to read extensive text on a hand-held digital device, but that they are also willing to pay for that content. This gives media outlets room to speculate that readers will similarly be willing to pay for in-depth news coverage that goes beyond the encapsulated resume of a story, whether in the form of a subscription plan or in micro payments for individual stories.

First we had the Amazon Kindle, then Plastic Logic came along - yet to go on the market - and now Michael Arrington and the team at TechCrunch bring us the CrunchPad.

It all started with a dream

Last July, Arrington posted an article with the following headline: "We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet for $200. Help Us Build It." Arrington went on to describe what his dream tablet would look like and how it would function: Running as an open-source device, the screen would be Apple-thin with an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. There would be a headphone socket, a built-in camera, speakers and microphone and the tablet would function on Wifi, be Firefox-enabled, support Skype (or other VOIP service) and be fitted with an internal battery and solid hard drive. The goal? "To keep the machine very simple and very cheap."

News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller has said  the company is looking into bundling its online content when it adopts a new pay model, according to the Hollywood Reporter. He also expressed his belief that paid online news is the future and indicated that the media conglomerate is willing to lead a push for change.  

Miller, speaking at the Hollywood Reporter's Digital Power event in New York, explained that "we want to see a model established" for charging online, adding that  "what works for consumers, I think - and this has to be tested - are bundles." He suggested that News Corp's various papers or various New York media outlets could be bundled. It is an idea which has proved successful for cable TV channels and which many believe could also work for news, as an alternative to individual subscriptions to general news sites, which largely failed. It is one of the options proposed by start-up company Journalism Online.

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.

A new portal supported by the European Commission "aims to get EU citizens across the 27 member states talking and reading about the same issues" by translating selected articles from 250 of the continent's newspapers into 10 different languages. Titles such as France's Le Figaro, Spain's El Pais and the UK's Guardian will be involved in the project, which will employ 10 journalists and receive €3 million of EC funds per year.

The site is lead by Courrier International, along with Internazionale in Italy, Forum Polityka in Poland and Courrier Internacional in Portugal, and hopes to have all 23 of the EU's official languages involved within the next five years. EU communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom explained that the site will "broaden, enrich and expand coverage of European affairs," allowing Europeans to read European coverage from other nation's perspectives, instead of being limited to their own national newspapers.

Apture has created technology that aims to make flat web pages more three-dimensional: the third dimension being boxes that pop-up to show the reader further multimedia assets relating to an article. At first glance it does not sound too ground-breaking, but taking a closer look, the implications for both readers and publishers are considerable. The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris about how Apture works and how it can help publishers.

Harris described what inspired him to start working on Apture. He and his co-founders came up with the idea while studying at Stanford, during conversations with the Knight Fellows. Frustrated with the fact that despite the web being "truly the richest medium we have ever had to communicate with, with all the computational power and multimedia assets" it has "this flat characteristic of flat story-telling," they decided to try to do something about it.

Easy access to multiple multimedia sources

Apture has created a media search engine that allows writers to "quickly leverage all the media that's available on the web, in many different APIs and digital libraries," Harris explained. The journalist highlights keywords in the text, such as the name of a person, place, event, or a certain topic, and a box will then appear with a list of possible media assets to link to. These include reference tools such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Twitter search, even the US Congress, photos from Flickr or Yahoo, videos from YouTube or Daily Motion, maps from Google Maps, documents from Scribd, and the journalist can pick what assets they feel are apppropriate - possibly more than one - and set up a link.

When the reader clicks on the hyperlink, instead of opening in a different browser window, another small box appears to display the article snippet, video, photo or map which the reader can consult without losing their place in the original article. And as Apture allows journalists to clip a specific section of a video or link to a certain quote in a book, the box will hopefully offer them only the most relevant information. Readers can click through to the original site by clicking on a link within the box.

For individual publishers, their own archives and assets can be incorporated into the search engine. Apture has also developed deals with some clients so that any Apture users can access their archives: for example Reuters videos, or snippets from New York Times, BBC or Washington Post articles. Apture just added Google Books and NPR audio podcasts to the asset list.

The technology is free to blogs and websites with fewer than 5 million page views per month. Harris added that as the company is "getting a lot of valuable information from people using it," meaning that the system is getting better and better. Larger publishers pay "hundreds and thousands a month" to use Apture, however. Harris explained that they are willing to do this because the tool creates a "more compelling experience on their websites," as shown by the fact that there is "a proven difference" in user's engagement with pages.

Benefits for publishers

According to Harris, putting one or more Apture links on a page leads to 2 or 3 minutes added engagement time. Looking at Comscore media matrix data, he clarified, it appears that 20 to 30% of publishers' traffic is lost to search. If a paper does not answer a reader's questions, it is extremely easy for the reader to just leave. Harris believes that if journalists are thoughtful and thorough about the links they add throughout a whole site, you could imagine that the publication "may well be able to double the amount of time spent on the site." And obviously, more time spent on the site means more advertising money.

As well as this financial benefit, Harris described a less tangible but arguably equally valuable advantage of using Apture: the fact that it allows newspapers to be a more effective guide for their readers and to offer them a more coherent reading experience. When a paper sends their readers away, either by linking to an external source or just not providing enough information, it is "severing its relationship with you as your guide to that information." By using Apture to supply necessary background information in multiple different formats while keeping the reader on its site, a news organisation can "be the guide to an entire web's worth of resources, but retain a relationship with that reader," Harris asserted. The fact that publishers are "the owners of that relationship" puts "a lot more power in their hands," he added.

For those publishers contemplating offering their content back to Apture, one concern might be that by displaying their content in boxes on other sites via Apture, they could end up losing traffic. Harris stressed, however, that readers can always go back to the source, and that rather than trying to remove traffic from websites, Apture sees its role as "providing an opportunity for those media partners to get their content in front of new eyeballs that they would not have seen before."

What next?

"What we are really doing is creating an efficiency in the market that really wasn't there before," Harris concluded. Apture is connecting information "in a way that wasn't possible before." He said that the company intends to improve its current product by continuing to integrate new content partners and bring costs down. He also hopes to create new products that will "transform the medium, changing the way that people interact with the web," and which are "not constrained to the two dimensions that we've had up until now."

The advantages offered by online journalism are numerous, and products such as Apture's should be welcomed by journalists striving to find better ways to tell their story in a multimedia environment. The fact that the Internet allows us to see, hear or find out more about pretty much anything and consequently make a story richer and more meaningful is something which papers should take advantage of. Arguably, going a step further and creating their own new multimedia experiences should be a priority for newspapers, but using existing content to supplement their articles is a good start. 

A Nielsen Online data report for April has suggested that Internet users are yet to spend a significant time reading newspaper sites.  An individual spends an average of eleven minutes a month on the top 30 US newspaper sites.  Only half of these papers succeeded in increasing the amount of time spent per person on their sites in the past month.  

Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the Minneapolis paper, the Star Tribune keeps viewers reading its website for longer than any other US paper.  The site clocks up an average of 40 minutes a month per reader on the site, surpassing the nationals such as USToday.com, NYTimes.com and WSJ.com.

French newspapers Le Figaro and Libération have both taken the decision to not publish on certain public holidays in the country, in addition to the traditional abstention from printing on the 1st May. Both have chosen not to print on Christmas Day and New Years Day, and Le Figaro has also selected August 15th, whilst Libération will no longer be available on May 8th, the Thursday of Ascension and November 11th.

Libération co-president Nathalie Collin described the move as "a good management measure", in terms of staffing. She claims that dropping these print days will enable Libération "to better manage working schedules during the year". The main reason given by Le Figaro's director general, Francois Morel, was of the economic variety. He pointed out that many newspapers kiosks are closed on public holidays, and that "everyone agrees that sales on these days are derisory".

Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt has told the Financial Times that the company had considered buying a newspaper or supporting news businesses seeking non-profit status but that it is now unlikely to pursue either option. Speculation that Google might consider such a purchase has been rife for some time, and a feeling has emerged among some publishers that Google has a sense of duty towards newspapers, as its Google News product is entirely dependent on newspaper content.

Schmidt explained to the FT, however, that having looked into the possibility, the search engine was "trying to avoid crossing the line" between technology and content: "we have done well by letting content people do content in their own terms and in their own way." Google has concluded that any potential acquisition targets were too expensive or carried excessive liabilities.

Yesterday, the recently founded Media140 held its first Twitter and microblogging conference. Held at London's Southbank Centre - a venue in the heart of the UK capital synonymous with innovation - the event largely focussed on the effects that Twitter and micoblogging are having on the news gathering process and was attended by journalists from Guardian.co.uk, TimesOnline, TechCrunch, BBC, Aljazeera, Reuters and Sky News.

Kicking off discussions, associate editor of the Sunday Herald and author of 'The Play ethic', Pat Kane, opened up the conference with a keynote presentation on the way breaking news services were dramatically changing the face of journalism: "Reading a newspaper on a street corner might be seen as banal. What's becoming just as banal is producing news on that street corner," said Kane. You can access his slideshow from the presentation here.

The National Union of Journalists has spoken out against Newsquest's decision to accept advertising from the controversial right-wing British National Party. NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear blasted the Gannett owned company; "Newsquest should be ashamed of itself for taking money from an organisation that advocates racist policies that would directly discriminate against the communities these websites serve."

Dear was also keen to point out the reported intimidation tactics that the BNP has in the past used against journalists who tried to investigate it, "Many journalists who have investigated the party in the past have since found themselves on far-right hate websites that try to intimidate journalists to stop them from taking up investigations."

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.

Fort Collins (Colo.) is set to lose its investigative weekly paper, Fort Collins Now, the most recent paper to perish in the current economic climate, reports Editor&Publisher.

Dwight Brown, the paper's publisher announced the closure on Monday on its website "the slump that has hit the newspaper industry in recent years has swallowed yet another newspaper: The one you are currently reading."

Writer Beth Teitell doesn't think the serious impact the (theoretical) demise of newspapers would have upon society is being communicated to the public in quite the right way. Citing a Pew survey which found that just 33% of Americans would personally miss reading their local newspapers "a lot", she writes in the Boston Globe that, "No one cares about the sanctity of the news. We need to make the case on grounds that actually matter to people." How does Teitell propose to alert people to the problem? By letting them know how their lives would really look without newspapers.

How would kidnappers write ransom notes, she muses? Or how would people wrap up valuable china during a house move? "Let the papers die, and your tableware goes down, too." Try covering your head with your iPhone during a rainstorm, she challenges - let alone the impact on papier-mâché "when your kid's homework assignment calls for making a model of Earth or an erupting volcano." It is doubtful how successful these arguments would be as part of a campaign to save newspapers, but they are entertaining nonetheless - along the same lines as a newspaper using flavoured ink and front page nudity to win back readers perhaps...

Source: Boston Globe