Results matching “changes to attract you”

The Guardian is developing a new feature for its website, Zeitgeist, which organizes content into trends based on the attention of users. Instead of tracking articles by the number of page views, Zeitgeist analyzes the 'social signals' or behavior of visitors to Guardian.co.uk by looking at the websites they come from, the sites they visit after, the amount of time spent on each page, and which stories they post on social networking sites.  

The data for each story is then analyzed together for a value of "Zeitgeistiness." Stories that attract more attention than normal are then posted on the Zeitgeist page in color-coded blocks according to the section in which they first appeared in the Guardian, making it easier for readers to notice trends throughout the week. Each article is only compared to others published on the same day in the same section.

The past few years has seen the explosive growth of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, and a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue that has set about ravaging the newspaper industry. PoynterOnline has now reported new enterprises between the two industries however, which could prove profitable for both.  

Few news outlets are without their own Twitter account these days, using the site's micro-blogging capabilities as a means to distribute stories and attract a wider audience. The Austin American-Statesman is using theirs to sell tweets to local business, which can advertise their enterprises on the newspaper's Twitter account.

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.

Working closely with advertisers can help newspapers to establish a good brand image, says Paz Alvarez Sanchez-Arjona, Market Intelligence director of Marca/Unidad Editorial in Spain, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

She has worked closely with marketing and advertising teams. This was satisfactory for the advertisers because the campaigns were distinctive and became well-known. This created loyalty and gave her brand a good, dynamic image, as well as revenue.

Marca is the leader among newspapers in terms of readership in Spain. It has 2.8 million readers, far more than any other newspaper in Spain. There are 40 million people in the country, with four national sports newspapers. Marca is located in Madrid and focuses a lot on Real Madrid and football, although it covers all the sports. In the last few years, a number of local papers have popped up, focusing on local teams. These detract from Marca's readership.

The global audience for the websites of The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph has risen again, according to November figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.

The Guardian News and Media website, which includes the Observer and Media Guardian, recorded 35.8 million unique users in November 2009, up 13% from October and 37% from the previous year. This sets a new record for the highest number of unique users for a U.K. newspaper website in one month. It also shows a recovery from the October figures, which were down almost 4% on September's record of nearly 33 million users.

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.

The New York Daily News can now print every page in colour, as its three new high-speed printing presses have whirred into action earlier this month.

Although the upgrade will increase efficiency and reduce waste, spending $200 million on equipment in the midst of a recession does appear to contravene conventional business wisdom.

But owner of the tabloid Mort Zuckerman told Crain's New York Business that he hopes that the resulting high-quality images will attract more advertising dollars, as high-end brands prefer to see their advertisements in the arresting visual format common to European newspapers or luxury magazines.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch is optimistic about the future of journalism in this age of newspaper cutbacks and the overwhelming concerns with bottom-line budgets rather than quality journalism. 

Thomson Reuters is in the news again. On the same day as its new-look website went live, which features increased political coverage and comment in a bid to attract a more general audience and more advertising revenue, Reuters made another announcement. The agency plans to cut 240 jobs in its legal businesses across North America.

Its legal divisions include research sites such as West, FindLaw and Carswell, as well as its publishing unit and attorney software provider Elite. They provide information to legal professionals and employ around 13,000 people, or around a quarter of the company's worldwide workforce of 53,000. In 2008 they earned $3.5 billion in revenue.

Thursday night a refreshed Reuters.com went live complete with bolder logo, red background and refined toolbar, including a selection of pages entitled News & Markets, Sectors & Industry and Analysis & Opinion, with increased political coverage and comment. According to Alisa Bowen, head of consumer publishing for the group, the shift in perspective, with a greater emphasis on politics, will revolve around macro-economic trends. "The new site reflects all the assets that were brought together with Thomson's acquisition of Reuters in the spring of 2008. We regard this as more than just a facelift" Bowen said.

A new survey by Scarborough Research has found encouraging results for the American newspaper industry. According to the study, 74% of adults read a printed or online newspaper in the past week.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, has installed $150 million worth of new high-speed advanced printing presses at the paper's printing plant, The New York Times reports.

Two German entrepreneurs are setting up a new kind of home delivered newspaper among worldwide news print failures. On November 16^th the brave young businessmen are venturing into the industry with an innovative newspaper service - the first of its kind in Europe - at arguably the worst time, and for a limited Berlin-only market. But its very unorthodoxy, the essence Wanja Oberhof's and Hendrik Tiedmann's Niiu personalized newspaper, could be its saving grace.

Niiu Beginnings

The Niiu started with an idea, two and a half years ago, ultimately about information convenience. Having grown up in a newspaper-reading household, Mr. Oberhof became used to reading multiple papers to pursue the news and information he was interested in.  Having to juggle multiple national, local, and international papers to find one's interests would inevitably become a chore, especially vis-à-vis the speed and convenience of internet news. The same behavioral phenomenon is in fact the very reason why the internet seems to be ruining traditional newspapers; people, especially young adults and students, are tending find their news and information from a variety of sources on the internet rather than a single source that marked the newspaper's monopoly and success in the 20^th century. 

Oberhof's resulting idea was simple and clear: an individualized newspaper, composed of selected pages and sections from papers, delivered each morning to one's door just like a regular paper. This combination of paper format and internet convenience and accessibility found Oberhof a business partner in Hendrik Tiedmann, who shared the same idea. Together they founded InterTi GmbH, Niuu's parent company, funded out of their own pockets, and began doing their homework.

"The whole idea was based on our own behavior research and experience; [as young people] we're used to very different information sources. The main idea was to combine all the varying sources of news and information, because it is normal for young people who have grown up with the internet to have not one source of information but many," Mr. Obherof said in a telephone interview with The Editor's Weblog. But why a newspaper format? Surely a less risky and lower-cost alternative would be setting up a personal news aggregator.

Oberhof disagrees. "We asked this target group which is the most comfortable and which is the best distribution channel; is it an e-paper, is it only on mobile, is it printed or online? The feedback was that for now, paper is still the best distribution channel." Hence the simple combination of the internet and printed paper that is the essence of Niiu.

Interestingly, the founders have no particular allegiance to print, it just happens to be the currently favored distribution channel. "The vision that we offer is all the information that is relevant for the reader. As a next step it is the reader's choice which distribution channel they will use, whether it's a mobile phone, e-paper, the internet, or whatever else." Their focus is information amalgamation and distribution, the particular channel being largely irrelevant and ultimately the client's choice. This is quite an unusual position for a company entering the print industry, which these days seems to require a great deal of faith.

What Niiu is and How it Works (The Technical Bit)

On the client's side the process is very simple. After signing up for a short-term subscription (more on that later), they have until 2 p.m. to choose their news sources for the following morning's paper. On Niiu's website they can select from a wide variety of publications and online sources; from national, local or international newspapers like the New York Times, or internet news sources and blogs. A 24-page personalized paper, researched from and composed of their choices, then appears on the subscriber's doorstep the next morning.

"At this first step, for the reader it is only possible to select whole pages or sections," says Oberhof. From newspapers the readers can select pages or sections, from the internet providers they choose from over 600 very diverse rss feeds, from "Women's tennis blogs to local garden pages, we have lots of special interest content available." Clients currently cannot access their personalized paper online, as this would basically defeat the purpose of the delivered print format.

On Oberhof and Tiedmann's side, however, things are a bit more complicated. It is no easy feat to compile, print, and distribute thousands of individual papers. Over the past two years, InterTi GmbH has had to create a specialized software for compiling sources and setting the layout, arrange digital printing deals, close licensing contracts with news sources, attract advertisers, create a new business model and work out delivery schedules. So how did they do all that?

"We outsource everything," says Oberhof. "We don't have an editorial team, we don't have the printing machines, we don't have a delivery structure; we have partners. First we had to create software, so we got a partner with a Swiss web and print specialist service. They produced our software that combines all the pages and articles and news for each reader into a print-ready .pdf that is sent to the digital printing machines from the Netherlands, and a German copy house takes care of the actual printing. Then we have an agreement with a Berlin delivery service that delivers all the international newspapers that will also now deliver Niiu." Given all this outsourcing and subcontracting, one wonders whether circulation revenue will cover the costs.

Luckily there is another revenue source, the very one that is ruining traditional papers, and where the Niiu shines most brightly: it offers a space for highly targeted advertising, something already optimistic advertisers will pay dearly for. At first, during the 'trial phase' of the first few months, advertising will be more general because the Niiu is new and won't have a large circulation. But with an expanded subscriber base ads will become more targeted, focusing on neighborhoods their corresponding socio-economic groups.

Oberhof is confident of his advertising model. "We have had large amounts of positive feedback from advertising clients, and they have several different ideas such as at first only distinguishing between male and female readers, then differentiating by neighborhood and age in Berlin. Some big German car players are interested and have said 'different cars for different people' based on the interests of the readers, like the family man being interested in the new X5 or the young student being shown the BMW 1." Who the people are and more particularly what their interests are would be clear from their choice of news sources for their Niiu's composition.

Ignoring that their proclaimed audience is exclusively young students and not old people and family men, this raises some questions about whether using personal information for advertising violates some privacy protections. But this is doubtful as various advertisers and distributors have used similar techniques for years: think about those supermarket coupon promotional catalogues, also known as 'junk mail,' which you might get at your front door. They differ per neighborhood using the same concept (in my experience, I got Pioneer Supermarket rice coupons up in Harlem, while my friends downtown got brochures for Citarella).

Of course, a paper cannot live on adverts alone. In terms of subscriptions, Niiu continues to be innovative. The subscription packages are aimed towards young readers and students, the paper's perennial target audience (and probably one of the more difficult market sectors to enter, especially in media and technology).

Mr. Oberhof explains: "We have several different packages, not a traditional subscription but a pre-paid system. You load up money for packages, like the one-day trial, or the longer-term packages over 25, 75 or 150 days. It's not a classical subscription at all, that's an important point for us, because many young people, according to our feedback, don't want a subscription for a year because they do not know where they will be in the near future, whether studying in a different city, or doing an international internship or living at home, so they want short-term packages." Currently Niiu is priced at €1.80 per issue, €1.20 for students.

Is this really a good way to build subscriber loyalty? There is a risk of high turnover, potentially running through the market potential before they get established. However this model makes sense for their target demographic. Personally I find this an appealing arrangement. Not really knowing where I will be in six months has prevented me from subscribing to my publications of choice, so I read online news while I would prefer the print editions.

Challenges

One of the biggest questions I had for Mr. Oberhof was regarding the licensing and use of articles and content from news providers. In the context of the current debate over paid online content and the associated problem of the cost of news and journalism, this is quite a pressing concern and I was most interested in what Niiu's arrangements were. Surprisingly, it was unsurprising and rather simple.

Niiu has a contract with each newspaper and online provider, in which "we have a little license fee which we pay for every used page," Oberhof explains. The licenses, and thus the copies of Niiu itself, are based on pages: "we pay a fixed fee for each page we use...because we take one-to-one pages from each newspaper," meaning the pages of Niiu are exact replicas of the original page from the source. This setup will be the working model for the first few trial months.

"The newspapers give us access to everything they have. That means every page and article that is used in the New York Times we can have the next day in Niiu," although details on how blogs and internet sources would be presented are a bit fuzzy. It would be safe to assume that they would appear in Niiu as they would in your browser, albeit reformatted and resized.

An obvious question regards how newspaper publishers feel about Niiu and why they would allow access to their articles, when this could very well cannibalize their own sales. While some certainly think so, the majority of publishers approached by Oberhof and Tiedmann have embraced the idea and accepted licensing contracts.

"Most of [the news publishers] think it's an interesting new project for a target group which doesn't read much newspapers. The young people, the students, in Germany don't read that much newspaper so for [the newspaper publishers] it's an experience; they want to have a look at the feedback and to test it out. Most of them also don't think that we will take the long-term single paper reader away from them, since our audience is the reader who doesn't know which paper is right for them or likes a variety of news sources," Oberhof asserts.

So, in theory, there is no direct competition because they target different audiences. However, the Niiu provides the same service as the internet but in print form; it is hard to see why publishers who would blame the internet and the news aggregators (which is basically what Niiu is doing) as the newspaper's bane would embrace that service in their own industry.

Some industry experts are not so optimistic. Joachim Blum, a digital media consultant, voices 'considerable doubts' over Niiu's future. He says the idea is interesting, but it just won't work because the target audience has left paper behind: "People who read newspapers are office workers, not students," Blum tells Spiegel Online. This is similar to the problem discussed above, where it seems that the assumption has been made that students who are used to getting news quickly and for free online will suddenly start paying for it to be physically manifested; they surely won't be paying for the service, as they can do it themselves. They would therefore be paying for the physical product, the newspaper, and its aesthetic appeal. But we all know how fickle young people and students are when it comes to aesthetics.

Another issue is more topical as to how Niiu relates to traditional newspaper and the internet, its status in between and bridging these media forms. For all its supposed innovation, "Niiu shares the same dilemma of print journalism in the age of the Internet: every paper you read in the morning only contains yesterday's news," says Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. "The Web offers news every second and gives the option to link to blogs and other websites. Why would people read and even buy a story or information, which they select on the Internet the day before? It's old-school journalism," he tells Time. Again, the same underlying problem is pointed out; the combination of paper and internet has great potential, but it also combines the weak points of both and confuses the primary audiences of both mediums.

Time will tell whether these criticisms will stand or whether Niiu will live up to its potential.

The Future!

For the time being it seems like the main challenges for Oberhof and Tiedmann have been surmounted. They are looking forward to the November 16^th launch, for the time being to serve Berlin only. The circulation scope for now is limited because of the high quality but rather slow digital printing. "You can't compare it to a classical offset machine that could print 200,000 copies of Niiu in an hour; our digital printers can only do about 2000 in an hour," Oberhof explains. "That means it is not possible to deliver from one printing machine to several cities, so we start in Berlin. But obviously it's planned to expand to other cities in Germany and Europe," if the paper gets off the ground with the aim of around 5000 subscribers by the first 6 months.

However Oberhof knows there is much to be done, and that the work is far from finished. "For the next month the biggest challenge will be whether the whole work flows as we want it to. The first actual non-test paper will [hopefully] have around 5000 subscribers and this will be a lot to handle since every newspaper is individual. We might not actually know or can't imagine what the real work flow will be, what will come, and that's definitely the hardest thing." Meanwhile, he already has plans for future products and services once Niiu gets going and is established in the market.

Oberhof and Tiedmann's mission is more about giving the market what it wants, i.e. providing whatever information the reader desires in whatever format they prefer, rather than innovating the newspaper industry (which seems to be a side effect of their project). So if the market preference shifts, so will their products and services.

Having recognized that newspaper may only be around for so long, InterTi GmbH is planning "to offer an e-paper as a second step, probably by the end of this year," Oberhof revealed. Other editions are in the works, but no plans have been formally announced given that the formal launch is still a few days away. "For the future, I think that things like the Kindle will be very interesting for our product developments, but for now its not actually enough, not many people use e-readers at all," Oberhof confides. However, given the company's service-oriented vision, we can reasonably expect an e-reader version once the market for them takes off.

Whether you think newspapers are doomed or just in a rough spot right now, there is no denying the simple ingenuity and appeal (however limited) of Niiu. Its combination of the strengths (and unfortunately some of the weaknesses) of printed news and online news could make it a product to be reckoned with, even for those newspaper publishers who feel no competition from it. The potential for newspaper innovation through individualization is huge, and it remains to be seen whether Niiu will capitalize and profit from that potential

The Editor's Weblog wishes the best of luck to Oberhof and Tiedmann. It is now up to the Berlin public to decide the fate of Niiu.

Mr. Wanja Oberhof will be speaking at the WAN 2009 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderabad

Sources: Personal interview with Mr. Oberhof.

Spiegel Online

PrintWeek

Time

Jose Galang has reported on the current state of Philippine media entities for the Asia Media Forum, which he has described as being "in a state of flux". According to Galang, in light of rising production costs no longer covered by the now declining readership, newspapers are now looking for other ways to generate revenue.

Publications around the world have recognised the Internet's potential to attract a wider audience as well as boost profits: In February 2007, fortnightly magazine Newsbreak, specialising in in-depth, investigative reports, did away with its regular printed copy in favour of operating as an online publication (Newsbreak.com.ph). Editor-in-chief, Marites Dañguilan Vitug said of the decision: "We're reaching a wider audience now that we're on the web and we operate on less funds".

American journalist and professor at the City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis, has voiced his opinions on the future of journalism at the 'Is World Journalism in Crisis?' event at Coventry University on Wednesday. Supporting progress and development within the industry, Jarvis implored journalists to "support the means for entrepreneurial journalism," as opposed to trying to protect old models, warning that in doing so, journalists risk "hurting new sprouts that grow".

Spanish online-only website Soitu.es farewelled it's readers yesterday, announcing it would shut down after only 22 months of production.

In a post titled 'Hasta la vista y gracias', founder Gumersindo LaFuente thanked the half a million unique visitors a month the site had managed to attract throughout it's short life.

Hardly a week goes by in media news without gloomy forecasts for the future of print from Murdoch's corner, or floundering US titles being forced to go online only or shut up shop altogether - but one publication at least, the French website Bakchich, is going against that grain, the Financial Times has reported.

The launch of Bakchich Hebdo (which takes its name from the Arabic for bribe, and the French meaning 'Weekly',) a paper edition of the popular satirical website, comes in response to the strong French demand for parody in print. The country holds a long-standing tradition of lampooning its leaders publicly and although in economic terms the segment may be small, the appetite for satire remains big.

Reporters from America's leading daily press and cable networks flooded into New Haven, Connecticut last week, following the news of the discovery of murdered Yale grad student, Annie Le's body, hidden inside a wall in a campus building where she worked. With the latest development that Raymond Clark III was arrested and charged with Le's murder yesterday morning, the level of attention the story has received from national, as well as international press does not appear to be letting up anytime soon.

Credit goes to the university's own student news website, The Yale Daily News, partner to the college's newspaper,  which has been praised as being one of the best sources for information throughout this tragic series of events, for its unsensational and accurate daily online reports.  In another commitment to journalistic ethics, the New Haven Independent chose not to name suspect Raymond Clark III before he was arrested and charged, referring to him as the "person of interest" instead, and only supplying details that would not lead the public to him.

Kress reported that the German Press Council has reprimanded Germany's best selling tabloid newspaper, Bild and its website Bild.de for publishing what it has described to be "unsuitable and sensationalist content surrounding the death of Michael Jackson."
 
The newspaper, with its motto "independent and unpartisan," ran a front page showing Jackson lying on a stretcher and attached to breathing apparatus. According to the Press Council, the photograph, coupled with the headline "losing his fight for life," pertained to present the reader an image of a dying man, and amounts therefore, to a breach of human rights.


 

 

Twitter is planning to add paid services for businesses in the fourth quarter, Bloomberg reported. Co-founder Biz Stone told reporters at an event in Mexico City that the products aiming to generate revenue might include verified corporate Twitter accounts.

The paid services would be added features aimed at companies using the service to communicate with customers, Bloomberg reported, and Stone did not say how much they would cost or how much revenue they hoped to generate. Another possible product is an "analytics dashboard" that could help companies monitor Tweets about their business. Such services could be useful for news outlets.

Twitter had 20.1 million US users accessing the network via the website as of June this year, and many more globally and using applications or phones to log in, but the company hopes to attract more, and Stone told reporters that Twitter's designers are also working on a project to help new users discover others with similar interests or living nearby. Twitter is an extremely useful resource for journalists to help look for information, publicise articles and interact with readers, and the more users it has, the more important it could be.

Source: Bloomberg

French daily Le Monde has launched a dedicated sports news site accessible at www.lemonde.fr/sport. The portal features a very different look from the main newspaper site, with an emphasis on photos and its own navigation bar.