Results matching “look like in the”

After much delay, a deal is said to be on the horizon for the sale of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday to Alexander Lebedev.  Although The Times claimed on March 5th that its sources said a sale would happen that day, a finalized contract has yet to be seen.

Today, the UK's Office of Fair Trading declared that it would not be necessary to investigate the deal for competition issues, offering another green light to a deal that has been in the works for months.

Though The Guardian claims talks between Independent News and Media (INM) and Russian billionaire Lebedev have been going on since March of last year, The Independent only admitted to these talks in December.  Since then, the deal has hit many roadblocks, partly because, as Steve Busfield of The Guardian has said, "Lebedev drives a hard bargain."

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently announced that the January earthquake in Haiti resulted in the "disappearance under the rubble" the nation's sole Creole paper, Bon Nouvel.

The loss of the monthly newspaper to the earthquake, which decimated the small island nation, is seen as a "real blow" according to the newspaper's director, Rev. Jean Pierre Nzemba.

Heading up the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, an independent investigation looking at the future of public life, Geoff Mulgan has branded the majority of online news as little more that  "recycled 'churnalism'", the Guardian reports. To combat this, the commission has proposed a tax on the likes of Google and websites using news that they themselves have not produced. It is estimated that the tax could generate £100m a year, which would be distributed amongst local newspapers feeling the pinch.

The "Year of the Paywall" is upon us and in a time where most newspapers seem to be gearing up to build one around their websites - the New York Times and the News Corporation Wapping publications are just a couple of examples - some executives believe there is still room for other revenue models to coexist with paid content.   

The head of digital media at News Corporation, Jonathan Miller, told delegates at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that "dual revenue streams" are likely to co-exist as media organizations try ways of making money online, according to Guardian.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

Rupert Murdoch announced The Wall Street Journal's plans to launch a New York edition this April during a speech before the Real Estate Board of New York yesterday. Murdoch has reportedly set aside a $15 million budget for the new metro edition with the hopes of rivaling The New York Times in local news.

Murdoch, whose' News Corporation acquired the Journal in 2007 and also owns The New York Post, had not previously acknowledged public reports over the new section, one of the worst-kept secrets in the newspaper industry. His remarks mark the Journal's first foray into local news with a stand-alone daily section featuring articles on culture, sports, politics, and other news from New York.

Magazine publisher, Condé Nast, is getting ready to create iPad versions for its Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Glamour magazines, according to The New York Times.

While GQ will have a tablet-friendly version ready by April, Wired's version will come in June, with the New Yorker and Glamour getting their iPad versions by summer, said an internal memorandum on Monday.

The New York-based magazine publisher is no stranger to mobile technology. GQ has an iPhone app (pictured on the left) that sold over 15,000 copies last January.

The BBC is to halve its number of web pages, as well as closing two radio stations and cutting spending on imported TV shows, the Times reported. The changes will be announced next month by director-general Mark Thompson, according to the Times, and Thompson will admit that the corporation has become too large and must shrink to allow its commercial rivals more room to operate.

The halving of the number of pages on the BBC website will be accompanied by a 25% cut in staff numbers and a 25% cut of its £112m budget. To appease rival publishers, it will pledge to include more links to articles from other news outlets, and not to produce news services at a more local level than it does currently. These latter elements do not signify a dramatic change in policy: last month, the BBC's director of news Helen Boaden asserted that the organisation was not looking to go more local, and the corporation's news website already provides a "from other news sites" section alongside each story where it displays links to similar articles on newspaper websites.

The Associated Press' six-month pilot project to distribute content from four nonprofit journalism outlets has so far proven to be a disappointment, Nieman Journalism Lab reported Friday.

Through interviews with the participating nonprofits as well as the AP, Laura McGann of Nieman Journalism Labs found that AP members had used very little of the content provided by the nonprofits.

"We're not really seeing that many reprints and we're not really sure why," Mike Webb, director of communications for ProPublica, told McCann. "We don't know what it is," he said.

New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe has resigned from the newspaper amid allegations of plagiarism.

Several instances of "apparent plagiarism" were first brought to the attention of the Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, last Friday in a letter from the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson. Thomson pointed to six sentences that Kouwe had lifted from an article written by Journal reporter Amir Efrati on February 5th.  Kouwe's article in the Times' DealBook blog appeared almost two hours after Efrati's article had been published on Dow Jones Newswires and the Journal.

The arrival of the iPad has generated much optimism in media circles that hope it will revitalize a struggling industry, but so far, there has been much talk over what the device could do, but little evidence that shows newspapers will actually benefit from the device.

In fact, newspaper and magazine publishers have not yet agreed upon the key issue of sharing subscription revenue, as they consider deals to offer digital versions of their publications on Apple's newly released tablet, the Financial Times reports.

This vital piece of the puzzle will decide whether publishers will succeed in cashing in on the iPad.

As companies slash newsroom budgets, they are also scaling back on one of their civic duties: legal battles to gain access to government information, reports The New York Times.

But while many regional newspapers are choosing to cut expenses on lawyers, asking them to work pro bono, another trend paints the opposite story, say press advocates and First Amendment lawyers.

Some companies including Hearst and The Associated Press have been quietly stepping up their legal efforts, by doing more of the work in-house, utilizing their in-house lawyers and being more aggressive in states where they can recoup legal fees and the federal level, which also allows plaintiffs in such access cases to sue for legal fees when they win.

More details have been released about the MediaNews paywall plans, which will charge for investigations and analysis but not for breaking news, Poynter Online reports.

Vice president for content development Howard Saltz said that investigations, enterprise, analysis, columns and reviews will be behind the paywall. "The kind of content that goes behind a wall is the kind of content that paid, professional journalists do," he told Poynter, "the kinds of things that you really couldn't count on bloggers and Web enthusiasts to do."

Articles will be free if it's necessary to remain competitive with other news sources, including breaking news and multimedia, he said.

The launch of Apple's iPad has garnered much optimism in the newspaper industry, driving hopes that the innovative tablet computer will be able to breathe some new life into an industry battered by an advertising downturn.

Much speculation has placed very high hopes on the capacity of the iPad and a slew of new generation e-readers to revamp the industry and bolster its business model. But, as Poynter Online's Bill Mitchell reports, the iPad will probably not be the solution to all of the newspapers' woes, but this sleek electronic device could play a substantial role in the migration of users from a cost-heavy past to a more efficient future.

The Australian media regulatory body is set to start using social media, having appointed a former newspaper editor to create its social media strategy.

Tom Burton, former executive editor of broadsheet newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, has been appointed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to oversee its government 2.0 and social engagement strategies.

Burton was previously working in the US as the Communications and On-Line Director of The Center for American Progress. His role involved implementing web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 practices, that is, changing how the government used social networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites and wikis to interact with the public. He has also worked as a ministerial adviser to a former Australian Minister for Communications.

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

The Amaury group, responsible for both Le Parisien and L'Equipe, has given its publications a face life this week, with all 48 pages of the former appearing in colour for the first time on Tuesday, and divided into five new sections: Fact of the day, News, Local News, Sports and Leisure.

L'Equipe is set to integrate three new pages into its design, the first appearing today, the second in Thursday's edition and the third in Friday's, as a response to reader surveys. From March the publication will introduce a motoring section, which will appear every Monday- intended to deal with the production of cars as opposed to buying and selling.

The Bay Area News Project, a nonprofit news and media organization based in San Francisco,  announced last Thursday that it had filled two key positions and had reached a deal to contribute content to the Bay Area edition of the New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project appointed as its CEO Lisa Frazier, a current partner at the consulting firm, McKinsey and Company.  Frazier has experience  advising online newspapers, information, and media companies on strategies for growth and marketing and sales.

Yesterday, following months of deliberation, the New York Times announced that it was to go forward with charging online, with a plan to implement a metre system in 2011. It is the biggest publisher yet to lay out paywall plans, and the move is undoubtedly highly significant for the newspaper industry as it struggles with a failing business model. Will this save the New York Times? Could it signal the end for free online content?

Similar to that used by the Financial Times, a metered payment system would allow readers to access a certain number of articles free per month, and then request payment for more: a flat fee for unlimited access. Print subscribers will continue to have free access, even those who subscribe to just the Sunday paper. An online subscription will also cover access via smartphones. The first click free from search engines, which is used by the Wall Street Journal, will also apply. More details such as pricing have been released yet, and the publisher's statement said that the next year will be used to build "a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms."

A metered system rather than a more fixed paywall has the advantage of not alienating the casual reader who can still visit the site free on occasion, and not angering journalists by blocking off specific articles (an issue with the Times' previous attempt at charging online, TimesSelect). "It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web," reads the Times memo sent to staff by executives Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, published by Poynter.

It does have potential flaws, however. Before the NYT's announcement, Reuters writer Felix Salmon criticized the way that the FT's flat fee system does not actually work like a metre: suggesting that instead the New York Times should implement a payment process under which readers are charged depending on how much content they consume. And presumably those who are determined not to pay will find ways around the paywall, using multiple accounts, for example.

The Financial Times welcomed the New York Times' decision, according to the Guardian, with CEO John Ridding saying "We welcome the New York Times' new online business model, which is similar to the FT's. We believe in the value of quality journalism and we are pleased that others feel the same way." The FT recently announced that for the first time, its content revenue was greater than its advertising revenue in 2009, after raised cover prices and more online subscribers signing on.

The FT now has 121,000 subscribers. Going by the pricing on the FT's website, it seems that they pay between €186 and €363 per year (depending on whether they choose a standard or premium subscription). Working on the assumption that about half of subscribers pay for each (and that the FT is not counting joint print-online subscribers in this figure), that would mean that the paper could be bringing in something in the region of €33 million from its paywall in direct revenue from readers. And the Wall Street Journal, which offers a different kind of paywall, has an estimated one million paying online subscribers.

This figure is encouragingly high, but how much encouragement can the NYT take from this? As a general interest paper with the most popular website out of all US papers, the Times has a far bigger pool of potential subscribers. But the FT's specialist financial content is something that more people might see as worth paying for. Indeed for some, it is news that is necessary for their business. And with the FT's main international rival the WSJ also charging, there is not an ubiquity of similar news free on the web.

The New York Times does seem to have a better shot at making charging for online content work than other US general interest newspapers. Its status as the number one national paper is largely unquestioned. It has always made a greater proportion of its revenue from content than most newspapers do, receiving 55-60% of its income from advertising compared to a typical figure of 80-85%. The current price for a print subscription is high, at between $550 and $770 a year, depending on location and offers, but many people are still prepared to pay this: more than 800,000 continue to renew their subscriptions, according to the NYT's David Carr.

Given the paper's financial situation, it is unsurprisingly that the paper is looking at changing its business model. Despite its reputation and high number of website visitors, financial constraints have pushed the New York Times into carrying out lay-offs and pay cuts. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim came to the publisher's aid last year with a $250 million loan, but if the paper is to continue to produce top-quality journalism, it needs a steady revenue stream.

Poynter writer Rick Edmonds maintains that the NYT's decision to charge "makes business sense." He believes that the Times will not "lose any meaningful number of unique visitors," and agrees with Ken Doctor that paying users represent a significant targeting advertising opportunity. The Times' memo sent to employees said that executives expect that "digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web."

Slate editor Jack Shafter is critical of the NYT's strategy, judging it "too easy for freeloaders to game their way around it" and "a waste of the gargantuan audience they've attracted." He suggests that looking into improving web advertising would be a better way to go forward. Jeff Jarvis argues on his blog BuzzMachine that the NYT's plan will end up charging "the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least," which he believes does not make sense. 

With the New York Times on board, efforts to charge online are likely to speed up. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp publications are expected to introduce paid online content in coming months, and there is an increasing sentiment that it just doesn't make sense to give away content that should be seen as valuable. Not everybody agrees, however, and over at the UK paper with the most popular website, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said that his publication will remain free online. Others will undoubtedly stick to a similar course and provide free alternatives, making it harder for those who do charge. Which business model will eventually prove more successful? 

Conflicting reports came out of San Francisco over the weekend regarding the future of the Bay Area News Project, the non-profit local news station housed in the city's public broadcasting network KQED and bankrolled by Warren Hellman.

According to B-Net, the much reported multi-media deal combining the reporting expertise of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the radio and television capabilities of KQED finally collapsed after negotiations stalled. B-Net's David Weir alleged that infighting over resources and leadership at KQED and the GSJ's lack of clout in San Francisco made an already complicated merger just too difficult - leading Hellman to withdraw his $5 million contribution.

However, Neil Henry, Dean of the GSJ, was quick to refute those reports: "The Bay Area News Project is alive and well and ready to start business. The first board meeting will be conducted next week. We have secured an outstanding CEO and an extraordinary editor in chief whose names will be announced later this month. The only change since our announcement in September is that KQED will not play a role as a founding partner, but we look forward to its active participation."

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Most of Google's news tools are fairly self-explanatory. Fast Flip enables users to flick through different news sources. Living Stories collects all the developments about a single story on a single URL. And of course Google News aggregates news, and has been a source of ongoing conflict between Google and news publishers. But Google Wave notoriously confuses its first time users. There's even a gently mocking website dedicated to things that are easier to understand than Google Wave.

First launched as an invitation-only preview, Google Wave is billed as both a conversation and a document. It's a little like email, but also real-time and collaborative. One potential use of the tool is as a platform for collaborative journalism: different participants could add notes, information and images to a story.

It can also be used for community building, and the blog Journalism 2.0 has offered one possible example of what this might look like. A guest post by Hilary Fosdal, the interactive content manager for Barrington Broadcasting in Illinois, explains the way that the Chicago Tribune's RedEye website uses Google Wave.