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This past weekend, Google News announced a new feature to enhance its search engine capabilities. The new feature allows online readers to search for articles and headlines specific to the author that they are interested in by simply clicking on the hyper-linked text of the journalist's name.

The enhancement is designed to aid users to sift through the 25,000 news sources that Google News aggregates. This is exciting news for journalists in the way that it assists them in promoting their work as part of their own brand. The update is great news for readers who are fans of certain writers, too.

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

The basics of news aggregation

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

Google's mission

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

Publishers vs. Google

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

Advertising adds to conflict

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

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

Newspapers' anti-aggregator options?

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

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

Can newspapers supply the competition?

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

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

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

Yesterday Seattle-based news aggregator NewsCloud publicly announced Hot Dish, a Facebook publication featuring headlines from Grist.org that is designed to both provide environmental news and also engage the younger generation in current events. Hot Dish allows Facebook members to share and post their own stories and spread the information to their Facebook network of friends. "The role of traditional media is changing," the Hot Dish site states, "giving you (and your friends) more power than ever to shape both global conversation and global action."

The Hot Dish application is also a contest that will run through May 3, 2009. Facebook users from 16-25 years old may earn points for involvement in the application and personal demonstrations of environmental change. Prizes range from an Arctic expedition to an Apple Macbook to organic cotton t-shirts.

Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene with a camera, it is extremely unlikely that they will be a member of a citizen photojournalism organisation. But has Citizenside, a small, young company based in Paris, found a solution? The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder Matthieu Stefani and editor-in-chief Aurélien Viers about Citizenside's work and the way they see the future of citizen photojournalism.

Citizenside operates in two different ways. On its own site, it functions in a similar way to other agencies: it gathers photos from its community - 35,000 members, close to 7,000 of which are active - which are published after thorough checking of the photos' validity. Staff receive 500-600 images a day, and those which pass the checking are categorised into sections such as headlines, showbiz, or unusual, or gathered into portfolios with others along the same theme or about the same event. Media outlets can purchase the photos from Citzenside, with up to 75% of the price going to the contributor. Agence France Presse owns a 34% stake of Citizenside, and is currently trialling incorporating the company's amateur images into its image forums, where any of the news agency's 7000 partners would be able to buy them. Content is clearly labelled as amateur, and Citizenside stressed the importance of differentiating the work of 'citizens' from that of professionals.

AFP is currently trialling incorporating Citizenside's amateur pictures into its image forums where any of its 7000 partners can buy them

Staff are proactive about finding images, "we don't just wait for people to send them," explained Stefani. Their kit allows them to locate users within a certain radius of any given spot, so if something happens which they want to know more about, they can send out an email requesting photos. "We send 3 or 4 of these a day," Stefani clarified. The company tries to avoid receiving photographs straight from mobile phones via MMS as the quality is poor and it is much harder to check an image's authenticity. Developers have however released an iPhone application, and are looking at launching similar products for Blackberry and  Google's Android phone. Staff also provide feedback when contributors send in images that cannot be used.

Mainstream Media success through factchecking

Citizenside photos have recently been on the cover of French daily Liberation, and in Le Point magazine and Le Figaro magazine, so the company is making a name for itself. The Liberation photo was of a snow storm, and Viers explained how a storm was a good example of an instance when citizen photo reporting really works: anybody can be a witness and as it might be harder to travel, professional photographers will not necessarily be able to cover the whole storm effectively. He added that Citizenside members were definitely not trying to play the role of reporters, rather they are "news witnesses."

One of the ways in which Citzenside differs from other sites that gather user photos and video, such as self-declared "unedited, unfiltered" CNN's iReport, is that all images are checked for authenticity. The company's developers have created a tool through which users can send photos, and which provides various details to staff about each photo or video that they receive, such as the camera brand and model, the resolution, and the date the photo was taken. Crucially, the programme can also alert staff to whether a photo has been modified online. Using the sender's IP address, the tool also shows from where in the world images have been sent. With this information, Citizenside staff can get a pretty good idea of whether what the contributor has told them about the image is indeed true. "I think at the moment, we are the only company who can offer such a specialised tool for the media," Viers remarked, and Stefani explained that developers would continue to refine the product to make it more and more effective. If staff still have doubts, particularly in the case of major, potentially controversial stories, they will contact the sender directly via telephone or email. "We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story," stressed Stefani. "If someone appears to be trying to mislead us, we will expel them from the community," he added.

"We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story." 

This emphasis on checking the authenticity of the images significantly increases the value of Citizenside's service, as amateur content with no professional input can be relatively meaningless. Citizen journalism site The Observers offers a similar commitment to fact-checking, a trend which has the potential to bring citizen journalism closer to the mainstream media in terms of respectability. Stefani asserted that he believes it is the company's focus on "quality not quantity" which makes their service so appealing to clients.  "We don't believe in the idea that everybody is a journalist, just because they have a camera and a blog," underlined Viers. Rather what he believes works is a form of professional-amateur collaboration: "an association of bloggers, witnesses, journalists and editors."

A global citizen photo network?

The most crucial difference of Citizenside, however, is its mission to share its technology. Stefani explained that he and the other Citizenside founders quite quickly understood that, as Kyle MacRae pointed out, one agency alone will never be able to get an image from every breaking story. But what if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? This is what Citizenside is aiming to do by offering its 'Reporter Kit' to traditional publications, sold via AFP. The tool was released in September 2008 and the first client to purchase it was Voici, a French gossip magazine. Citizenside is about to launch the same service for Public, one of Voici's rivals and is also in talks with one of France's biggest daily newspapers, a couple of regionals and one UK paper. The Voici community allows readers of the magazine to upload their images to the site, and if Voici decides to use them in its print magazine or on its main website, then it will pay the contributor, and Citizenside takes commission. If Voici would like to sell an image to another outlet, then Citizenside retains exclusive resell rights, and the profit will be split equally between Citizenside, the magazine and the contributor. Recently, for example, a video showing Hollywood star Lindsey Lohan being showered with flour by animal activists on her way into a Parisian club was sold to US TV channel Extra TV for a considerable sum. Stefani described how he plans for Citizenside's income to be based largely on this reselling of content, rather than on sale of the technology itself. Incidentally, a years' use of the Reporter Kit tool would start at about 13,000 euros, moving to upwards of 20,000 for premium tools and tailor-made development.

What if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? 

Citizenside hopes to make the checking process easier and easier for its clients, for instance by developing a system which would make automatically judge an image's authenticity based on different variables and display a red or green light. Viers stressed that he sees citizen contributions as essential in today's media environment, if news organisations "ignore UGC they are going to make mistakes, and they are going to miss opportunities." Stefani explained that "we had a hard time being understood at first because journalists would just see us as competitors." But he insisted that rather than a competitor, Citizenside aims to be "a new tool, a new source of information." They believe that particularly in a local context, such a community could be extremely valuable to their clients, who would be able to forge better relations with readers, and provide a greater level of coverage. Viers pointed out that hyperlocal news is often incredibly important to people, and it gives citizen witnesses a real chance to flourish.

Dollars for amateurs

So Citizenside believes it has found the solution to the problems raised by Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae. Stefani brought up the example of the man with the first Hudson plane crash photo previously cited by MacRae, who argued that it was the man's instinct to share the photo rather than sell it, and that he was very unlikely to have heard of a citizen photojournalism project that would help him sell it. If Citizenside achieves its goal of establishing popular image sharing community sites for major newspapers, then in the future, a similar witness to an event may well think of sending such a photo to their favourite newspaper, where it would be shared amongst the community, but could also be sold for a significant amount of cash. The project has a great of deal of potential. Obviously, the company is still very small and is yet to break international barriers, though they hope to soon. Stefani admitted that they will need a cash injection if they are to expand beyond Europe into Asian or American markets. There is likely to be some resistance from more traditional media operations to the inclusion of amateur content in their publications, and it might take time to change mindsets.

But the current economic downturn could in fact benefit the rise of citizen journalism as news organisations look for cheaper ways to obtain coverage of events. Editor and Publisher recently ran a story on World Press Photo and Pulitzer prize winning photographer Anthony Suau, who is currently struggling to find work because media outlets do not have enough money to pay him. Using photos from readers is undoubtedly cheaper than employing prize-winning professional. Citizen photojournalism does make sense, if there is a way to prove that the photos are real. A reporter can write a story from afar, but you cannot take a photo from afar. And although many photos will not be of the quality of those taken by experienced photojournalists, professionals cannot be everywhere at once, and taking advantage of the camera-armed public is definitely better than nothing.

Photo credits: Laure Bernard

Canadian web marketing agency Dialect has created a website billed as 'an online memorial to the traditional media industry.'  Traditional Publishing, RIP aggregates headlines which document "the sad decline of traditional publishing."

According to Press Gazette, one of the site's creators, Nik Szymanis, commented that "the headlines are presented starkly and without comment, giving a sobering view of the current state of media."

Here is a selection of some of the headlines from our sister SFN Blog from today and yesterday:

Web banners most popular online ad format in U.S.
FT.com chief: Publishers must protect right to charge for content
AP asks more publishers to re-sell content
Google cuts how long it stores users' personal data

To view more stories, go to Shaping the Future of Newspapers

The mobile news market in the US will soon be ripe for mass consumption, according to Robert Samuels, Director of Mobile Products, Mobile Web, Messaging, Games and Alternative Platforms at The New York Times.

"It's been a runaway success," said Samuels, speaking of the growth of the Times' mobile site. "Numbers will continue to grow, there is a lot of industry dynamic supporting this."

The Times' mobile site, which drew 500,000 page views in January 2007, received over 10 million hits by December of the same year, and soared up to 19 million views in May 2008.

Although "most of the consumption on our site is through high end mobile devices so far" such as BlackBerry phones, Treo mobile devices and iPhones, the market is rapidly growing for the mass market, especially amongst commuters.

Generally speaking, the consumption patterns are similar for the online and mobile editions: business and politics are very popular, as well as blogs or most-emailed stories. "But amongst the mobile applications we've been rolling out, some of them are particularly tailored to the mobile user such as the mobile user real estate listings," said Samuels, which enable users on the go to receive listings based on specific criteria such as number of bedrooms, price...

"In America, I think the general web browsing for the mobile site has been at an advantage in terms of user behavior and pricing over SMS products," said Samuels.  All the Times' text message alerts link off to the mobile site to encourage users to browse it and read the whole story.

According to Samuels, text messaging will continue to grow for specific uses, such as stock listings or weather forecasts (see this study about text messaging and mobile usage), but "the predominant, long-term mass consumption, will be more than likely be browsing just because that's such a dominant behavior here in the US," he said. Still, "Text messaging for content adoption will grow in the US, we are simply well behind other markets like Europe and Asia."

As of now, the Times' hasn't created any position dedicated to editing or rewriting content for mobile consumption. "I don't think we'll hire specific people to tailor content for mobile per se," said Samuels.

However, most mobile articles are slightly edited upstream in the production process, to make headlines appropriate for mobile devices - for example, an E-hed for mobile can be made to stand alone without a picture, or pictures can be cropped to fit the device.

Is mobile news more adapted to local news outlets that can send out locally relevant alerts to users? "I think it is most definitely appropriate for them but by no means exclusive for them," said Samuels. National brands can also establish themselves on the local mobile news market. In the second half of the year, Samuels plans to roll out restaurant listings, in addition to its show time and weather services.

The Times is also developing news alerts for scheduled news events, such as the Olympics or the presidential elections in the US. For the Olympics, users can sign up to receive various updates including postings from the Rings blog, Top-10 medal count charts or the schedule of events.

While most of the Times' mobile news alert services are free, its mobile games and products will remain paid-for for the foreseeable future. "Through experience and industry research, still the model of paying for a mobile game is something that users are willing to engage in," said Samuels.

Source: Robert Samuels, Director of Mobile Products, Mobile Web, Messaging, Games and Alternative Platforms at The New York Times

Media outlets have taken the Games as an opportunity to compete for audiences as sites reveal an array of Olympics-focused features. Google announced a series of new tools that were launched for the Beijing Olympic Games this year, such as a virtual 3D tour of the stadiums that uses a combination of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Other features include an Olympics widget that can be downloaded and added to a personalized iGoogle site in order to receive features that provide Olympics coverage, sports headlines, YouTube videos, daily horoscopes, weather forecasts and a Google News feature. Users may also add applications such as a clock or games, similar to those used on social networks like Facebook.
 

The New York Times has a prominent section on the homepage that provides stories, results, schedules, multimedia and an interactive Olympics Tracker that allows you to personalize.

USA Today has a colourful section on the Games, offering everything from stories and results to blogs and Twitter feeds. There is also an "Olympics: Looking back and ahead" section that discusses former games and upcoming games as well as a section with input from fans.

The New Zealand Herald's Olympics coverage entails a section that is easy to navigate, with features like "As our Olympic team a question" and "Weird Olympics" with unusual stories about the events (e.g. stories like "Spanish team defends 'slanted-eye' photo", "China opts for lip-synching in quest for perfect Olympic image").

Numerous newspapers around the globe have launched sites dedicated entirely to the Games, such as Russian gazeta.ru, Irish Independent.ie and Ecuadorian eltelegrafo.com.

Send us examples of your Olympics coverage.

Source: The Telegraph
 

The Guardian has recently spent millions to relaunch their website, guardian.co.uk, however, some features didn't cost a pound.

On Guardian blogs Lost in Showbiz, PDA, and Deadline USA, you'll now find an "Our Faves" feature, which displays items from a Guardian account on the social bookmarking service Delicious. The Showbiz blog can even be personalized by a readers who are also Delicioius users, with a "Your Faves" tab, where relevant web pages tagged by the user with "Showbizspotted" will display on the Guardian blog, as well.

Also on the Lost in Showbiz blog, you'll see another box, "Latest Fashion and Showbiz blog posts," which aggregates headlines from five non-Guardian blogs, generated by Yahoo Pipes and delivered to the Guardian via a Google Gadget.

As Poynter points out, "Culturally, this is a hard thing for many news organizations."

None of these services - Delicious, Google Gadgets, nor Yahoo Pipes - are owned by The Guardian. It's an issue which leaves many news sites fearing a lack of control.

"Increasingly, though, they're learning that integrating other online services into their site tends to work better than unwieldy custom software," continues the Poynter column. "It's not just cheaper -- it's also much, much quicker."

Source: Poynter

Here are some headlines from our sister SFN Blog:

Sweden to abolish press ad tax
French online-only news site gets new investors
Study: Text-messaging most important mobile feature in US
MagCloud, print-on-demand service for magazine publishing launched
Survey: Souh Korean readership down
FairFax Digital temas up with eBay.com.au for online ad deal

Here are some headlines from our sister blog, SFN:

Yahoo defends "yes" to Google, "no" to Microsoft
Norway's online newspaper revenues reache €290 million
Mobile marketing still immature, but most effective among young generations
Free dailies contribute 24 percent of Swiss newspaper ad revenue
US Newspaper help wanted ads falll by month, year

In the past, there has been much debate as to whether bloggers could be considered journalists and what the distinction meant. Regardless of the possible answers, in today's context, blog editorial practices have influenced those of traditional news media online - whether it's writing styles, tones or formats.

"Blog pioneers, those 'non-journalists', have revolutionized our approach to news," writes Benoit Raphaël, who blogs and is editor-in-chief of LePost, an experimental UGC venture launched by Le Monde interactif. Many of aspects described below are currently being tested at LePost.

Here's his list of 10 things that bloggers did that fundamentally changed media's approach:

- Conversation: there are now few newspaper sites that haven't opened their articles to comments and conversation. "A story, nowadays, is not only the journalist's article but the article + the feedback from readers," write Raphaël.
- Perfectible news: as a consequence of conversation, online articles are now constant works in progress. There are pros and cons though. Among the negatives, journalists can be tempted to publish improperly checked content.
- Buzz: born with blogs, all online journalists must now be aware of online buzz.
- News without a hierarchy or anti-chronological news: an increasing number of sites such as 20minutes and Le Figaro are now including news feeds, which list news items as they come in, in reverse chronological order. But nearly all traditional media sites continue to set a hierarchy to their news.
- Indexation: because of the structure of blogs, bloggers had to be good at search engine optimization when writing headlines and such, in order to make their content visible. These concerns now also affect journalists. Although "this doesn't mean that journalists must only write to be referenced," write Raphaël.
- Trampoline news: not all news articles need to be long-winded, or on the contrary, be held within a limited amount of space. With blog news, postings can be lengthy and complex, but also simply link back to external content.
- Aggregation: many blogs don't produce original content - they simply refer and point to existing content. Simply look at the Huffington Post, which has been built around aggregation.
- Lists: it's an extremely simple and efficient editorial format that is widespread in the blogosphere...
- Layered writing: thanks to hyperlinks, but also infographics, videos and more, articles can be written to be seemingly shorter, but they actually point to more in-depth layers of related content.
- A new tone: the tone of conversation.

There are certainly other fundamental ways in which bloggers may have changed traditional media coverage online. But few online journalists would still deny that blogs haven't influenced - improved - their own journalistic practices on the Web.

Source: Demain tous journalistes (link in French)

Dutch news website www.en.nl has incorporated innovative design features under the direction of Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.

The first change is an interactive "newsriver" (see photo, click to enlarge). The numbers along the bottom, running from 0 to 23, represent the hours of the day, with each bar in the chart corresponding to the amount of new stories released that hour.

Toggle the mouse across the bars in the chart; each time the mouse reaches a new hour, the headlines from that time block appear in a list on the right hand side of the screen.

The bottom of the page also features recent images, social bookmarking tools, and lists of the most commented, most important, and most viewed, reports the Online Journalism Blog (OJB).

"We are using around ten variables to decide what's important news," Baan said. "The variables we're using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high)."

Baan concedes that the "most important" algorithm is still in development but says that "it already works remarkably well."  

A second groundbreaking change is the list of incoming links to the articles. The idea of pinging back is common amongst bloggers, but is not often embraced by mainstream news sites.  

"With one simple move the site demonstrates it's part of the conversation," writes OJB.

Source: Online Journalism Blog through IFRA Executive News Service

In the last 12 months, The Huffington Post has introduced new content areas such as entertainment and business and plan on adding international news, sports and books in an attempt to become an all-purpose Internet newspaper. This summer, The HuffPo will take it one step further by introducing a metropolitan section, local versions for major cities.

The plan will be expensive and set The HuffPo into competition with not only existing newspapers, but arguably, with companies like Yahoo, AOL, and CNN.com as well.

Many of their posts receive less than 10,000 views, and the site has a high "bounce rate," meaning users visit one page then leave the site. But the site's topical focuses resulted in 2.9 million unique visitors in January and 3.7 million in February, according to Nielsen Online. More than half the traffic comes from non-political pages.

Micah L. Sifry, Editor of the blog TechPresident.com isn't confident in HuffPo's movement toward covering a larger variety of news. "Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well. Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They're certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day," he said.

Huffington and her colleagues reject comparisons to news sites, saying HuffPo seeks to be a community with a distinct attitude, not merely a collection of links.

"Look at Yahoo or Google or CNN. Take away the branding and just look at the headlines, and they're very similar," said Roy Sekoff, the site's editor. "But if you take away the branding of The Huffington Post and the signage, you'd probably still recognize us."

In response to speculation that she'll sell the website after the election, Huffington said, "It's not something we've discussed."

Source: The New York Times through I Want Media

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 local focus. But then again, these are new times, and people relate to media in different ways," said Lassen.



No editorializing, unlike major online news portals

News featured on the homepage is ranked by 'clicks' for individual newspapers and recency for headlines: there is no editorializing of content or of the RSS feeds by Imooty. But as Lassen said in his OJR interview, "readers now demand concise information that directly addresses their personal "need to know" requirements in an age when people are swamped by news sources." So why not give readers editorial guidance?

"That's the role of the big Internet brands. Google does this, by editorializing their pages," said Lassen.

"Our philosophy is to show the user the way news is from the different publications. We don't editorialize. The purpose is to give a panoramic view of what's actually out there."

News aggregation and Imooty: a resource for news professionals

In that respect, Imooty may be of greater use to news junkies or journalists than to the general public, at least in its first steps.

"You really have to be a news-interested person to be interested in Imooty, but it can be a starting point for ordinary news users as well."

"A lot of people like to have a pre-packaged news product," said Lassen. Although the trend towards news aggregation is increasingly visible, newspapers' role is also to provide their news judgment to sort news in an organized manner.

Future developments

Imooty is working to develop its multimedia offerings, including its mobile platform, podcasts and IPTV. According to Lassen, "this is also the direction newspapers are going in," because text-based content will be less prominent on mobiles. Imooty has launched a mobile site in beta.

According to Lassen, Imooty now has about 15,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views monthly.

Imooty is still in full development and is still in the process of signing on official newspaper partners. This weekend it launched its imooty headline aggregator widget, which can be implemented by news sites that wish to open up their doors to other relevant sources.

Source: Kristoffer Lassen, co-founder Imooty.eu

Although most online journalists have heard about search engine optimization (SEO), there is still a lot for them to learn in that area. While watching out for the dark sides of SEO.

“Print headlines are often written to be clever or pithy or cute,” said new media journalist and blogger Patrick Thornton.

But on the Web, headlines need substance - style isn’t very important, said Thornton. Substance typically comes from strong keywords that users will look for, and not necessarily from well-thought wording.

For example, Thornton’s “NY Times and CNN show how an election should be covered” blog headline drew in significantly more traffic that his previous one, “How an election should be covered.”

For many reasons, traditional print subeditors may regret the online headline, which rids itself of many puns and clever editorial spins (See: Does online kill the headline?). “Save the artful headlines for print, and put the sweet science on the Web,” said Thornton. Some paper websites, such as Times Online, have gone as far as creating a “search editor” position within their newsroom.

However, exaggerated emphasis on SEO also has its downsides, as humorously exemplified by this list of CNN.com headlines, drawn up by Gawker (including: “New York readies for its Katrina” or “Police: Teen raped his mother”).

As noted by Thornton, “all of those headlines and stories are meant to drive traffic, at the expense of quality journalism.” So newspapers must teach journalists how to write online headlines, but not at the expense of their editorial standards.

Source: The Journalism Iconoclast

Journalism students, as well as seasoned print journalists, should learn the differences between online newswriting and print newswriting. Here’s how to teach journalists about new publishing formats on the Web, particular attention to headline writing, and how to be reactive.

A few weeks ago, USA Today announced the launch of widgets. The Washington Post launched its first widgets only two months ago. Both newspapers, which tend to be at the edge of multimedia innovation, plan on rolling out more widgets in the weeks to come. For those who haven’t caught on to the craze, washingtonpost.com’s Executive Editor, Jim Brady, and USA Today’s Executive Producer, Joel Sucherman, describe their use and advantages for newspapers.

Launched two weeks ago, LePost.fr is not your typical online-only news site. With a resolutely ‘new media’ approach to news, the website fearlessly tackles new trends in news consumption, and caters to a younger public generally perceived as having deserted the arena. Its editorial content and processes have been adapted to this aim, which can also be seen as a traditional media publisher’s attempt to experiment with the future of online news.

In the era of social networking and Web 2.0, more and more newspaper websites are trying to build their own communities and personalization tools. The Press Gazette looked at The Telegraph’s and The Sun’s customization features, less than a year after their launch.

The African Press Network, Rap 21, recently interviewed Ray Hartley, editor of The Times in South Africa. Hartley explains how blogging helps the newspaper become a better product, by engaging the audience rather than lecturing to it.

Widgets, small bits of software that users can add to personalize their Web space, are slowly making what could be a significant impact on online marketing, although many advertisers have yet to catch on.

The Politico is the new, multimedia, Capitol Hill, political news title. The Editors Weblog spoke to executive editor Jim Vandehei. He describes Politico’s multi-platform structure, and how it could be a working model for newspapers in the future, which he foresees as being both niche and expertise-backed.

 Every web-based news source must take great care in providing an efficient layout. For two reasons. Studies have shown that, in a general manner, the print-format of newspapers is still more practical than web versions for cursive visual scans and information retention. The second reason is common sense: since traditional newspapers’ readership is migrating to online, it’s even more essential for them to produce a quality online format. So how do you do it? 

   For a long time traditional journalists were very skeptical of blogs and bloggers – those ‘make-believe writers who reported on opinion’. Now the tendency is increasingly changing as newspaper companies realize the public interest and potential qualities of blogging. The Editors Weblog had an interview with Eric Newman, Vice President and General Manager of Pluck, the parent company of BlogBurst.