Results matching “to share content online”

Fairfax Digital has acquired the Weather Company, owner of Australia's most popular commercial weather site, weatherzone.com.au. The deal will give Fairfax Digital a 75 percent stake in the Weather Company. Mark Hardy, founder of the Weather Company, holds the remaining share, and will be retained as managing director.

"Fairfax Digital is all about breaking news, and providing current weather information is the ultimate in breaking news," says Jack Matthews, Fairfax Digital CEO. "This acquisition confirms our position as Australia's most comprehensive news and weather information source."

The Weather Company was founded in 1988, and provides weather content to several organizations, including those in energy, insurance, and agriculture.

Fairfax Digital comprises over 30 websites, and is a subsidiary of Fairfax Media. Earlier this month, the company launched Western Australia's first online-only newspaper.

Source: Fairfax Media Press Release, PaidContent.org

In the days after the 61st World Newspaper Congress and 15th World Editors Forum, the debate was still raging:
Will print products remain the core business model of the newspaper industry in the long-term?
Will digital platforms become newspapers' primary source of distribution and revenue?
Or will both print and digital work side by side to sustain newspaper journalism?
Guardian Comment is Free columnist Roy Greenslade and World Association of Newspaper CEO Timothy Balding sounded off on the topic.

Greenslade struck first. Having attended the conference, he pointed to what he considered a divide between publishers and editors and their respective conference programs; "The congress, the publishers' conference, was dominated by the upbeat statistics about the good health of newspaper sales, newspaper launches and newspaper profits"... "Yet all the discussions at the editors' forum were dominated by how to deal with the decline - whether rapid or gradual - of newspaper circulations and the accompanying flight of advertising as people turn their backs on newsprint in favour of the internet."

Balding responded by noting that, on the whole, global newspaper industry figures are positive. Circulations are up in 105 nations and stable in 31. Paid titles are up in 85 countries and stable in 83. But this doesn't stop at print. The Congress, Balding pointed out, gave many examples of traditional publishers succeeding in the digital realm and shared multimedia strategies with their colleagues from around the world. WAN continues to do "absolutely everything we can to make sure that our publishers and our editors receive the best and most reliable information about digital developments and the best success stories on their successful exploitation," said Balding. The association does not "pretend... to know the digital future."

Perhaps the real divide comes not from the publishers and editors at the World Newspaper Congress, but rather from developed and developing nations. It is no surprise that in the United States and many countries in Western Europe, print newspapers are experiencing declines in circulation and profit margins. These papers have had trouble making up for lost revenues on the Web. On the other hand, newspapers in developing countries such as India and China are witnessing huge growth and will continue to do so for years to come. Their digital offerings and revenues will also increase as Internet and mobile penetration rapidly spread.

The essence of the Congress, is to bring papers from these nations together. It is the platform where they share ideas; new ways to create and distribute content, strategies for reaching new audiences, and creative ways to make money in print and online. And sharing ideas between different markets will ensure that the newspaper industry, in both developing and developed nations, will continue to flourish.

The Chicago Tribune has partnered with digital video recorder specialist TiVo, for the video service to carry content from the Tribune's TV critic Maureen Ryan.

The recommendations of Ryan will only be available to those who sign up, among the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the Chicago area. TiVo's chief executive said he was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets.

The Tribune could benefit from the deal in several ways, including increased visibility of its brand name, but also potentially additional subscription revenue.

"Maybe we'll get a few people to do the unthinkable and subscribe to the newspaper," said James Warren, managing editor for features at the Tribune. This partnership comes as the Tribune is reshuffling its TV print digest, whose value is diminishing with the rise of online or on-screen guides. "He said the TiVo partnership seemed like a no-lose proposition," reported The New York Times.

The Tribune will also get a share of revenue from newly-subscribed TiVo users, if these came through one the newspaper's advertisements for TiVo.

 

 

Source: New York Times through I Want Media

Managing offensive journalists is easy; if the journalist pushes the envelope too far, terminate his or her employment. But since papers can't fire readers- nor would they want to - newspapers must learn how to manage the questionable user-generated content that inevitably comes with increased interactivity.

Guardian.co.uk's Sean Dodson looks primarily at the example of The Telegraph's MyTelegraph service, which gives readers the opportunity to publish their own stories under the paper's masthead. The service has won The Telegraph accolades, but the year-old service has also put the paper in the middle of the debate over how to best manage and develop UGC.

MyTelegraph, which will launch a redesigned version this summer, boasts some well-written, thoughtful blogs. It also has its share of users with extreme opinions, ranging from active members of far right party BNP to members of an anti-feminist "men's movement."

A statement from a Telegraph spokeswoman emphasized the inevitable fact that "a multiplicity of views will be expressed" on the site. She continued, "Our readers are entitled to their opinions and, within the scope of the law, they're entitled to publish on MyTelegraph."

What do to do though if the comments toe the line of legality? Or if they are just too extreme for most to stomach? Most papers now employ a team of moderators, although the moderation system varies from publication to publication. Newspapers also rely on their users to help moderate; The Telegraph, like others, has a flag offering readers to chance to report offensive material. Moreover, a poll suggests that almost half of internet users favor a voluntary blogger code of conduct in order to suppress overly offensive material.

What distinguishes MyTelegraph from most other UGC services at other newspapers (and what makes effective moderation all the more pertinent) is The Telegraph's rejection of the "gatekeeper" model. Most newspapers, like The Guardian's Comment is Free, allow only bloggers sanctioned by the newspaper to start user debates. But in the Telegraph model, users themselves can propose topics; "MyTelegraph unlocks the gate and hands over the key," writes Dodson.

Newspapers looking for a solution to nasty contributors can also look to Norweigen paper Daily Verdens Gang, which launched a service in 2005 allowing readers to set up their own blogs (25,000 bloggers have joined, 15,000 are fairly active).

"A minority can go too far outside of the legal borders but we have a good control system," said Geir Ruud, VG's online foreign editor. "If they continue to misbehave we kick them out."

Source: Guardian

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results


But here are a few more results that may have gone under the radar.

If provided resources to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated two clear concerns for editors, which superceded all others: their staff needs to be attuned to new media (36% of the respondents would first train their staff in new media), and they need more journalists to produce quality coverage (30%, up from 22% last year). As more newsrooms face layoffs and tight budgets, editors are increasingly seeking to safeguard one of the main conditions to quality journalism: a team of qualified journalists.

For editors from newspapers whose number of journalists had decreased, their main priority was to recruit more journalists, at 50%, while also recognizing the necessity of new media training, at 31%. Even among newspapers whose staff had increased, 26% of editors wished to recruit more journalists (36% new media training).

This clearly shows that, in the view of editors, cutting staff and journalistic resources is not a solution - to the contrary - to resolve financial concerns a newspaper may have.

Overall, what do you view as the two greatest threats to the future of your newspaper?

57% of respondents saw the biggest threat to the future of newspapers coming from declining readership among young people. One of the greatest challenges faced by newspapers today is structural, linked to a change in habits among readers, as they become consumers of alternative forms of media.
Tied to this, a good share of respondents (37%) saw the Internet and digital media as a threat. This was closely followed by lack of editorial innovation (36%) and lack of investment (29%), which are also inter-related.

The results showed a split between perception of threats as being external, due to contextual evolutions of the market (young readership decline, digital media) and internal, due to lack of newspaper innovation - or the financial means to innovate.

Now looking specifically to your newspaper's editorial independence in the future, what do you view as the principal threat?

Perceived threats to editorial independence ranged relatively closely from 13% who listed 'other' concerns, to 23% who thought the biggest pressure would come from advertisers, through 19% who listed political pressure and 20% shareholder pressure (20%). Still, a combined 42% perceived the main threat as being related to newspapers' financial dependence, whether on shareholders and advertisers.

Where newspapers were heavily capitalized in the stock market, such as in Western Europe and North America, shareholder pressure was strong, 35% and 23% respectively, but political pressure didn't pose any threat - 3% for both.

Inversely, in many other regions, financial pressures were less important, but lack of press freedom led many editors to fear political pressure.

Do you think that in the future opinion and analysis pages will:

The results were stable compared to 2006. Two thirds (67%) of the respondents believed opinion and analysis pages would increase: many foresaw the upcoming evolution of newspaper content, which will be less about factual news and more about analysis and commentary.

An astonishingly small number of respondents from North America (50%) believed analysis and opinion would increase, compared to 76% for Western Europe (and 78% Eastern). This large difference underlines a divergence in editors' perception of the function their newspapers will have in the future, whether these increasingly focus on constant breaking news or instead turn to more analytical, magazine-type content. These results also reflect worries by American editors about having the proper resources to increase their opinion and analytical content.


If you would like more information about the Newsroom Barometer, don't hesitate to contact us. And let's not forget that the bright revelation of Barometer, as was the case last year, was that 84% of newspaper editors are optimistic about their newspaper's future, despite frequent doom and gloom reports...

Fairfax Digital in Australia just launched a news site targeting youth, which can be found at TheVine.com.au.

The site, a joint venture with youth marketing company Lifelounge, will target 18 to 29 year-olds and offer news, entertainment and social networking content.

Research by both companies have found that the 18 to 29 demographic prefer the Internet over all media, spending over 14 hours per week online.

Fairfax will contribute to a share of the site's content, but Lifelounge will be responsible for hiring, housing and managing TheVine's editorial team.

TheVine will benefit from lifestyle and entertainment content from Fairfax's newspaper websites, including those of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and Brisbane Times.

Looking to renew ties with young readers? Read this recent piece by Chris McGillion:
- Part 2: 5 key lessons from Generation Y to newspapers

Source: Fairfax Digital - The Australian News through IFRA Executive News Service

Website traffic is measured by several factors: page views, unique visitors, time spent on a page, etc., but David Cohn of Columbia Journalism Review writes that there is no precise way to calculate web readership or traffic.

Cohn asks: Why would advertisers choose a news site over one like Google, which obviously garners thousands of viewers, if there is no accurate way to measure web traffic? And how can they agree on rates?

"This may be the most measurable medium in history, but the measurements all suck," says Steve Yelvington, an Internet strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, which manages websites for more than sixty newspapers and thirty radio stations.

Most publishers know their statistics through census data from web servers that count how many times a site is visited. However, the data includes "bots" and "spiders" that search engines send out to index content for searchers, and they inflate the number of visitors counted by internal servers, mostly because of "cookie deletion." Cookies allow a page to recognize a viewer, so unique visitors can be counted. But with users constantly emptying their cookies, a site's traffic can be increased by 150%, according to Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore Inc., a global Internet information provider. Essentially, 10 million viewers is probably closer to 4 million.

Organizations such as comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings will share traffic numbers within a plus-or-minus 2% error margin from panelists of randomly selected sites who agree to be monitored. Cohn writes that these sample-based numbers can underreport, especially since these panels don't account for international traffic or traffic from work computers.

Though the panel and census system aren't perfect, publishers and advertisers can make relative comparisons within their market with the two.

George Ivie, executive director and CEO of the Media Ratings Council (MRC), wants to reconcile the two systems with his not-for-profit trade association. The council began with TV and radio audience size, but turned its attention to the Internet in 2002 and wrote standards for audience census data, including page views, clicks on a page, and time spent on a site, all new measurements with the Internet.

MRC requires news organizations that want their traffic counts to be approved by the ratings council to adopt the council's standards, such as counting only content that is accessed through an end browser.

Only a few organizations have been audited by MRC, such as Yahoo, msn, and AOL and advertisers like Atlas and Doubleclick, giving them an advantage when negotiating advertising rates, according to Cohn.

In 2006, MRC began auditing comScore and Nielsen/ NetRatings. Nielsen/Net-Ratings had decided that time spent on a site was more important than total Web page views because visitors spend more time on a page when watching videos and new programs allow visitors to interact with a page (like voting in a poll) without having to reload an entirely new page. But, having a window open does not necessarily mean that the visitor is engaged the whole time, thus this measurement is also inaccurate.

Because the Internet is always changing, there may be new metrics in the future to retrieve more accurate statistics.

Source: CJR

In an attempt to offset losses in its US newspaper market, McClatchy Co. has partnered major Spanish-language publisher Impremedia to share content.

McClatchy's Spanish-language websites will feature information produced by seven of Impremedia's newspapers, including El Diario La Prensa and Hoy Nueva York in New York; El Mensajero in the San Francisco Bay area; La Opinion in Los Angeles; La Raza in Chicago; La Prensa in Orlando, Fla.; and Rumbo in Houston, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

McClatchy has three Spanish-language newspapers including El Nuevo Herald in Florida, Vida en el Valle in California's Central Valley and La Estrella in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In March, Impremedia announced it would launch a single and centralized online platform for its Spanish-language papers.

Source: Yahoo News through IFRA Executive News Service

At the beginning of March, Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, unveiled two video studios in its new Sydney headquarters. Fairfax hired some broadcast consultants to help with the construction, which lasted about six months (with a previous four months of planning). Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, explained why newspapers shouldn't focus on TV-type bulletins, how journalists can manage the extra workload, and why newspaper video is financially viable.

The top floor studio is smaller, integrated within the Herald's newsroom. It is equipped with broadcast-quality HD cameras and 2-3 people can be on camera at once.

A larger studio on the downfloor, which can fit a car, was designed to be used by all Fairfax Media outlets. It is equipped with six editing suites with Final Cut Pro, and Fairfax has installed a fiber optic cable to enable quick transfers: all videos shot in the studio are centralized in a database which is made available to the various platforms.

The new building for The Age in Melbourne, which is to be ready towards the end of 2009, will also be equipped with two similar studios.

For Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, Fairfax and its newspapers can be at an advantage for online video, compared to broadcast TV professionals. Because they are not tied to a traditional broadcast news schedule, they can often bring breaking news online faster.

They can also benefit from the newspapers' core coverage, by using a "short video story associated to a much more in-depth newspaper story." In other cases, a news video can be the main story, if it has more impact or is more illustrative than a text report.

Fairfax's video and digital production team counts 18 staffers, 10 of whom are dedicated to news video. Each major city (each major newspaper newsroom) counts two or three videojournalists, one or two staff supporters and a local multimedia editor. Fairfax Digital news sites have been drawing about 6.5 million unique users monthly, with up to 3.4 million monthly video views, delivering video to over 800,000 unique browsers.

What type of video content works? Not TV news bulletins

Fairfax produces two main types of video content:
- video news reports, short and local
- everything else that can't be considered 'news', which consists mostly of sports, panel shows, thematic reports...

Fairfax's video content runs along the spectrum of newspaper video offerings, whether it's in-house studio footage, a TV review program with occasional guests, punctual shows focused on sports events, local news reports shot by specialized videojournalists or Fairfax journalists, or one-minute interviews with journalists about a topic in their field of expertise.

However, Vaile and Fairfax have already experimented with online video and TV-type content (see similar lessons from Le Télégramme) and have a clear view of the type of content that works. Vaile's words speak for themselves:

"The studios will make it much faster to turn around news from the newsroom. We are unlikely to do typical TV news bulletins for some time because they don't work online."

"The typical TV short bulletin didn't work online. That's because online people can choose to watch the stories they're interested in and don't want to watch the stories they're not interested in. The normal linear TV news bulletin fails online."

Even for typical broadcast channels, such as ABC in Australia, where Vaile previously worked, online TV-type news reports weren't successful online, "although they worked very well on mobile phones," because "the navigation on mobile hardware is so much more difficult" than online, so "people are much more willing to adopt a linear viewing platform."

"So it will be some time before we go to making digital TV news bulletins again."

Fairfax will try other online video alternatives, "the kinds of things which use newspaper journalists who are specialists in a particular area and have very high credibility," to produce specific reports.

Do multimedia journalists work more? No, if workflows change

As mentioned above, under Fairfax's integrated approach, local news video reports could potentially be shot by Vaile's digital production team, or by a regular reporter, or by a combination of both. In some cases, the reporter will simply take a few minutes to walk to the studio and provide some comment. In others, the text reporter will be expected to shoot video, perhaps even edit it himself (this year Fairfax is making available in every newsroom a couple Canon Tx-1 cameras, a hybrid between a still and video camera, which cost about 400-500$, for reporters to take while on the ground).

Does this mean more work journalists?

"That's a problem that has yet to be fully resolved," Vaile said, admitting that "inevitably it's more work and / or different work to what they have been doing."

For Vaile, management must make "space in their working day for them to do this work without it being on top of what they have to do already."

"Working as a cross-media journalist means that you are expected to work in many different platforms, on the paper, for online, potentially for radio or for video, but you clearly can't do all those in addition to everything else."
"The working day has to be planned bearing in mind that each of these things takes time and precludes you doing something else. Because this is all new it's a balance that has yet to be fully worked out."

In some cases, the idea of multi-skilled journalists can also be counter-productive. For some aspects of video production, such as editing, it can be much more efficient to have specialists rather than waste hours of reporters' time.

Audience and business: is video viable?

The construction of the studios was "a very significant investment," in the range of "several million dollars," said Vaile.

Traffic to Fairfax Digital news sites (mainly those of The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald) have been averaging about 6.5 million unique browsers and 214 million page views monthly. In contrast, there have been roughly only 3.4 million monthly video downloads, for over 800,000 unique video browsers (so roughly 12-13% of the total audience watches video, about 4-5 times monthly on average).

About 50% of video traffic goes to news items, while 'the rest' draws the other half. Interestingly though, Fairfax is attracting significantly more advertising revenues for segments within 'the rest', as advertisers are more interested in a less scattered, more targeted audience, such as for sports.

High traffic goes to news, high value advertising goes to the rest, according to Vaile.

Ads consists mostly of display advertising, pre-roll ads, as well as sponsorships for shows, However, sponsors "have no say in the editorial content in the programs," said Vaile, following standard editorial independence practices of newspapers - and quite unlike TV. In 2008, major advertisers are starting to flock towards online video, such as LandRover which will sponsor a 28-part travel program that launches at the end of March.

Future of newspaper online video: HD, streaming, tapping the TV market

In the future, "we are ready to go broadcast in HD, should we need to do that," said Vaile. "There's no question that at some stage in the near future we'll be delivering something in HD format, whether it's podcasts or products going into a very high bandwidth environment."

Vaile also believes "very much" in the future of live video streaming. Fairfax has already had a few successful experiments with live streaming, including coverage of a ship that ran aground last June thanks to cameras from the local surf patrol boat, as well as live streaming from the victory speeches of last November's federal elections in Australia. Fairfax has equipped a few of its reporters with 3G kits, which enable live video wireless streaming.

But considering the significant investments and costs of newspaper video online and badnwidth, is the current business model viable?

"Yes, definitely," said Vaile, although "we're at the very beginning of seeing the benefits of a business model which is based on display advertising around online video."

Although Fairfax doesn't have the same resources or content as a TV network, many traditional broadcasters aren't sure how to approach online video, and many traditional TV media buyers are hesitant to buy into the much smaller online audiences. So Fairfax Digital's longer term goal is to eventually tap into some of TV's advertising budget, both in news and non-news areas.

"The intention is that by providing a comprehensive video news service during the day, we will remove a share of the people who watch broadcast news bulletins at night."

Source: Ian Vaile, Director Fairfax Digital Productions

In August 2007, a European newspaper aggregator venture, dubbed Imooty.eu, was launched in beta version (read background here, based on a profile by the Online Journalism Review). Over the weekend, Imooty has launched a new headline aggregator widget for newspapers to implement on their sites (pictured left - see their widget platform here).

Imooty's "plan is really to develop a powerful tool for news syndication," said co-founder Kristoffer Lassen (who founded the site with Blaise Bourgeois). "The purpose is to democratize access to the most important mainstream information sources of Europe." The site now aggregates RSS feeds with latest headlines from about 450 newspapers in 19 European countries.

Imooty.eu, a newspaper and blog aggregator

Unlike services such as Factiva or LexisNexis, which are geared towards professionals and have costly fees, Imooty aims to provide a mainstream and free news search resource. Newspapers' RSS feeds that are featured on the homepage are generally chosen for their prominent size and influence, but sometimes also for their known expertise in a particular domain (Morgenbladet in Norway for its 'Culture' coverage).

Users can conveniently view latest headlines by country, newspaper, or category of news. A tab enables users to view recent blog headlines - about 700-800 have enrolled so far. Users can also customize search fields by these same criteria.

Does it still make sense to distinguish 'News' and 'Blogs', at a time when some blogs do original reporting and some traditional news brands are turning to lighter, blog-style news?

"It's basically to make a distinction between news brands as we know them today and independent reporters," said Lassen. The line between both may be getting blurry - especially concerning newspaper blogs, but Lassen believes the news consumption and expectations are different between blogs and news sites, although both may be news.

Pros and cons of Imooty for newspapers

Imooty has launched a specific section called 'Newspaper Universe', so that partnering newspapers can directly upload their feeds and customize them. "You decide how your newspaper brand will appear on the  Imooty platform."

Pros:
- Reach: Imooty "puts newspapers in touch with users who normally wouldn't use them," said Lassen. Through Imooty, readers who are geographically distant, or on the other side of the political spectrum, can discover new titles.
- Mobile: Imooty offers a mobile platform that can be of interest to newspapers.
- Revenue share: Imooty's revenue model will be based on redirecting readers to newspapers' premium (archived) content, and it will share revenues with papers.

"Cons":
- "I can see how, under the old news paradigm, some newspaper people might feel threatened by the model, because it's possibly taking away from loca