Results matching “the financial times newsro”

ABC recently announced plans to initiate a paywall for some of its online content starting this June, hoping to alleviate some of its financial troubles and increase revenue.  The announcement comes in the wake of ABC's restructuring plans and its decision to eliminate 300 to 400 jobs through buyout propositions.

ABC's initiation of a paywall should come as no surprise to those watching media news over the past year.  Beginning with the success of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal's moves to paid content, NewsCorporation, MediaNews and the New York Times followed in their path with plans to erect paywalls by 2011.  Just this week, the Washington Post announced its launch of Capital Business, a business weekly for  subscribers only.

These changes result from a steep decline in ad revenue for online newspapers over the past year, with American newspapers earning 17% less from advertising on the web than they had a year earlier, according to the Economist.  The Washington Post alone lost four percent of its revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009, and new paid content plans hope to alleviate some of the financial stress of the past year.

The Trinity Mirror will not implement a broad paywall strategy on its websites, according to Sly Bailey, chief executive of the newspaper group.

Bailey discussed the group's stance on charging for online access to content with MediaGuardian, confirming there are no plans to install a broad paywall. The group favors charging for more specific online services and products instead.

"We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," said Bailey. "It won't be possible for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it's free elsewhere...the BBC is an obvious one here."

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.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told Reuters that "if we get the right functionality and design," the iPad could "produce interesting, significant revenue streams," according to PaidContent.

Because developing an application for the iPad will not require any different skills from the ones required to launch an iPhone app, news publishers that have had success with iPhone apps, are now looking to cash in on the iPad.

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.
 

 

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? 

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in the favour of five media companies yesterday, recognising a journalistic right to protect anonymous sources, reports AFP.

The Financial Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Times and Reuters news agency won an appeal against British courts who had ordered them to hand over documents relating to a Belgian brewing firm, Interbrew.

The deadline for the previously announced New York Times optional buyouts was yesterday and according to a memo sent out by editor Bill Keller last Friday, the paper will be far short of meeting its goal of having 100 staff accept the offer. This will force the paper to resort to layoffs, reports paidContent. 

The Washington Times just announced that it is cutting up to 40 percent of its staff, reports Politico, which quotes acting publisher and president Jonathan Selvin as saying that there will be "significant staff reductions." 

The Financial Times is looking into accusations that advertisers have paid for articles to be written as editorial in its business specialist magazine publishing division, the Guardian is reporting.

The investigation was prompted by a letter sent by the National Union of Journalists to the division drawing attention to the claims.

Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy has said that the freedom of the press 'depends on responsibility, protection of sources, and a newspaper's financial security,' accusing the Internet of posing a "huge threat" to the latter.

Speaking at a public discourse on press freedom at NUI Galway's Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies yesterday, Kennedy said that the world wide web had put a serious dent in the 'traditional structure and financing of the newspaper industry'.

BNO News, which achieved fame for the use of citizen journalists to report breaking news via its @BreakingNews Twitter service in 2007, has announced it will launch a paid-subscription wire service early next year.

In January this year, it was reported that the 20 year old Dutch founder, Michael van Poppel, was attempting to move away from the Twitter feed, which now has more than 1.4 million followers, in order to try to monetize the content.

Media heavyweights Arianna Huffington and Mathias Döpfner went head to head on Thursday in a debate concerning the future of paid content at  The Monaco Media Forum, the Financial Times has reported.

Döpfner, CEO of German media giant Axel Springer, opened the debate with a message of hope for traditional media: "I don't share the cultural pessimism that media is dying. I think it is the opposite." In its latest results, out this week, Axel Springer's German newspapers
bought in a tidy 25.4% profit margin. "If print is dying, this death feels pretty comfortable," Döpfner quipped.

The Tribune's newspaper chain will go AP-free as of next week in an experiment to see if it can manage without the news feed and eventually cut back on the cost of subscribing to it altogether.

The trial period is expected to start next week (Nov 8), just over a year since Tribune Co. gave AP the required two year notice of cancellation.

A hyperlocal project the Seattle Times is taking part in, is already showing results, writes Linda Hersey for Poynter. The "Networked Journalism" program was introduced across the country by American University's J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and has united the Times with five neighbourhood blogs and news sites: West Seattle Blog, Next Door Media, CHS Capitol Hill Seattle, Rainier Valley Post and Local Health Guide/Seattle.

"Seattle has become a hotbed for neighborhood and niche blogs," said Kathy Best, the Times' managing editor for digital news and innovation. "As we watched our own newsroom resources shrink, we began talking about how we could tap into that hyper-local community movement to create partnerships that would allow us to continue to offer quality coverage in key areas."

The New York Times is planning to cut 100 newsroom positions by the end of the year, it was reported yesterday. Voluntary buyouts will be offered to all on Thursday and if enough people do not take them the paper will start lay-offs.

Times writer Richard Perez-Pena wrote that the 5% pay cut instigated earlier this year was intended to forestall staff reductions, but that "hopes for a year-end turnaround in the newspaper business have faded." Another round of budget cuts will be implemented on the editorial, op-ed and business sides, executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a letter to newsroom employees, published on BNOnews.com.

There has been quite a bit of recent news about closures, cutbacks, reduced ad revenue and the like so perhaps it is time for des bonnes nouvelles:

Laid-off L. A Times staff have been particularly pro-active in dealing with the current employment slump. They are selling their reporting, managing and creative talents on an online platform,the Journalism Shop. The site was developed by ex- Times reporter, Scott Martelle with tech specialist, Brett Levy.

The Shop offers links to the resumes and profiles of investigative reporters, page designers, project managers and book reviewers. The site acts as a match making service; if a searcher is unsure as to who he/she needs for a specific project, the Shop will point them in the right direction.
                                                                                                                                                                

How to tackle copyright infringement has recently become a hot topic in the news industry. Attributor is offering a novel solution via the Fair Syndication Consortium that aims to keep all parties happy. The Silicon Valley-based start up has developed technology capable of tracking news outlets' online content, and came together with a group of publishers to form the FSC, which plans to seek advertising revenue when their content is reused. The Editors Weblog spoke to Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor, about what the company can offer to newspapers in terms of increasing revenue and protecting copyrighted material.

More than 1,000 publishers have now signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium and agreed to have their content tracked. Pitkow explained that he started to persuade some of these of the extent of the problem in January when Attributor took 250,000 articles from 25 major publishers and ran these through its system for 30 days. Attributor found that each article was reproduced fully an average of 11 times across the Internet. So the seriousness of the issue was clear, and Attributor decided that a type of ad revenue sharing scheme was the best solution.

Leave the content, take the money

Rather than ordering those who reuse content to take it down, Attributor wants "to find ways to share in that advertising revenue that's being generated."  This solution stems from the idea that the larger the audience for news, the better, and as long as the original producers of the content are able to receive revenue, it is fine for their content to be reused elsewhere. Pitkow explained that Attributor had decided to "work at the currency level" in an attempt to come up with a proposition that would mean that "everybody can still profit from the syndication of this content."

So, the Fair Syndication Consortium plans to work with advertising networks like Google's Adsense, which are used by many smaller sites to place ads, to demand a cut of the revenue generated alongside reused content for those who originally produced it. If this demand is denied, then the rights holders can order their content removed.

The sites that the FSC will target are those that "are specifically geared towards repurposing other people's content and using Adsense alongside," Pitkow clarified. As well as being more profitable for publishers, the FSC also intends to make the process of responding to misappropriation of content simple and straightforward, involving dealing with advertising networks rather than having to serve lawsuits to publishers.

For the FSC to work, it is essential to seek the cooperation of ad networks. The Consortium's first agreement has been reached, with AdBrite, and Pitkow was confident that this signals significant progress.  The company is looking to get other ad networks on board but even just one is a good start, Pitkow said. "If you have one network that participates, and the rest are going to be forced to remove their ads, it means that everybody who's syndicating content is going to move to the ad network that does."

There is a financial incentive for advertisers to take part, as well as the motivation to appear to do no evil, Pitkow emphasised. That is, if they do not participate, the rights holders might choose to remove the ads that such networks have placed.

Will the money be enough to make a difference?

PSFK, a trends research consultancy, believes that "the numbers don't add up:" smaller sites make such a small revenue per article that the effort would not generate much income for publishers, and larger sites have often noted how to stay on the right side of fair use law. Pitkow, however, pointed to comments made by Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, who said that Attributor's work would make a significant financial contribution and could really help change the nature of content syndication. Ahearn told the New York Times that there was "tens of millions of dollars worth of inventory that is likely being created that we are not getting our fair share of."

As well as a means to protect copyright, Attributor's proposal could be seen as a way to more effectively syndicate content. Pitkow pointed out that licensing deal essentially consist of estimations of the value of advertising that could be generated from content, and that this is what Attributor does, but more accurately. Pitkow said that smaller sites that do not have a formal syndication team could use Attributor for this.

So will it work?

Pitkow explained that Attributor is now taking this content of 1,000 publishers have signed up to the Fair Syndication Consortium into its system and starting to monitor how widely it is being used. He anticipates that the revenue-sharing scheme could be fully operational this autumn.

The Associated Press is independently looking at ways to track its and its members online content to ensure that unauthorised use does not occur, using a microformat tagging system via what it is calling a news registry. It is not clear yet what the AP intends to do when it finds misappropriated content. Other solutions also exist, such as the WAN-IFRA backed ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol; however although this is a step forward in terms of a commitment to protect content, ACAP does not as yet seem to have a strategy on how it would actually make publishers more money.

And this is where the advantage of the Fair Syndication Consortium lies. Rather than simply trying to stop content being reused, it is accepting that this is inherent in the nature of the Internet and is looking at how to use this to publishers' advantage. It may well not be a solution that all publishers approve of as it does mean that their content might remain on websites that they do not support, but at least it could contribute to tackling one of the news industry's current key challenges: how to make more money from online news. 

It is seeming increasingly likely that charging of online general news content may well become commonplace in the immediate future; 'within a year' according to Financial Times editor Lionel Barber. The New York Times has been surveying its subscribers to ask how much they would be willing to pay for online news, and Guardian blogger Steve Busfield pointed out that listeners of the London Times' The Bugle podcast have been asked whether they would be prepared to pay for the 'season' each week. But can a pay strategy work online? The answer has been debated at length.

The big question is, will enough people be prepared to pay enough money, via a subscription scheme or per article, for online content to compensate for and exceed the revenue generated by advertising? The answer to this was thought to be definitively negative for quite some time, but the global economic slowdown and subsequent falls in advertising revenue, particularly online, has started to change this.

Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, has taken a look at newspaper companies' second quarter results and analysed revenue from advertising and circulation. He has found that although ad revenue is falling at companies such as McClatchy and the New York Times, income from circulation is actually increasing. Ad revenue at both companies was down 30% in the last quarter compared to the same period last year.

Revenue from circulation, however, rose 5% in the second quarter at McClatchy, to $69.4 million. The daily circulation actually fell, but price increases made up for this. And at the New York Times, Chittum points out, circulation revenues will pass ad revenues sometime this quarter for the first time ever, if current trends hold. In this year's second quarter, the paper brought in $185 million in ad revenue and $166 million from subscribers. So if the ad income continues to decline at a rate of 30% and the circulation revenue keeps increasing, the latter is likely to overtake the former any time now.

This, Chittum suggests, "points the way toward a new model" based less heavily on advertising. He suggests charging $15 a month for full access to NYTimes.com, and if half of paper's print readers and 2.5% of the website's visitors were to pay, the paper could bring in $189 million a year: enough to pay for the entire Times newsroom. And of course, the paper could still advertise. The Wall Street Journal is expected to bring in $120 million in online advertising this year despite its paywall, Chittum notes. If the Times was able to bring in a similar amount, it could easily survive in online-only format, he proposes.

Chittum disputes Jeff Sonderman's theory, recently outlined in News Futurist, that newspaper subscribers have traditionally paid for the delivery of the paper rather than for the journalism. Their money may have actually gone towards this, but the reason that people have always bought newspapers is, in fact, because of the content. Yes, people are also paying to have this content nicely packaged and delivered to their door, but it is the news that they are after. This contradicts the often-cited concept that content in itself has no value.

And this idea that people will in fact pay for quality content, though not necessarily a consensus, as concluded by The Wrap's Sharon Waxman, does seem to be gaining momentum in the media industry. As well as the New York Times, News Corp and MediaNews Group are looking at paid online content, and start-up Journalism Online is promising to facilitate this for any publishers. News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said last week at the Fortune Brainstorm conference that journalism will increasingly become a "paid model" online.

And this feeling is not only prevalent among newspapers: Disney just announced plans for a subscription-based product for the internet. "We have ample evidence both in traditional and new media that people are willing to pay for quality, to pay for choice and to pay for convenience," CEO Robert Iger said at the same conference. Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, also expressed his opinion that content on the Internet is "not free, and is not going to be."

So could revenue from paying readers online more than compensate for lost advertising?

The results of the Times of London's poll on whether people are prepared to pay for The Bugle is not very encouraging so far: when presented with different pricing options, 59% of those polled responded 'nothing.' However, of course this does not mean that these people might not be prepared to pay if forced to: it is a very different thing to be asked whether you would like to pay.

Chittum's figures for the New York Times suggest yes, although he does not claim that the numbers could support printing and distribution as well as journalism, and it is unlikely that the Times will kill its print product any time soon. And it is necessary to remember that the Times has always brought in an unusually high proportion of its revenue from circulation: in recent years this has typically been 30-35%, while many newspapers would rely on advertising for 80-85% of revenue. And a subscription is expensive, at about $770 a year for those in the US but outside the New York metro area. The paper has seemingly successfully increased its price twice within a year. It is undoubtedly seen as a product worth paying for: can the same be said for newspapers with less impressive reputations?

Journalism Online's co-founder Steve Brill has presented figures to potential partner publishers that suggest that participating newspapers would be able to keep 88% of page views and 91% of ad revenue. The company's assumptions are that 5-10% of current monthly unique visitors will be willing to pay for content; that 95 percent of those paying customers will choose subscriptions over micropayments; and that after subscribing, those readers will view 30-40 percent more pages than non-paying readers. If these numbers are correct, charging for content might well make sense.

Others believe, however, that paid online content would definitively not be able to make up for lost advertising revenue. Alan Mutter, co-founder of ViewPass, sees increasing the value of advertising by making it highly targeted is a better solution to the newspaper industry's problems. And start up CircLabs is working on creating a product that aims to up the number of page views to newspaper sites. Both of these would, however, allow publishers to make the choice to charge.

Persuading people to pay for something they have got free for many years is likely to be a tough challenge, and it is going to be risky. It is likely to take some time to discover the most effective way to do it. It has a far greater chance of succeeding if it does in fact become commonplace, and the idea that premium content must be paid for is firmly established in the consumer mindset. And although one can argue that the consumer will be benefiting from the quality content that would be supported by pay schemes, their online news experience is likely to suffer if they are confronted by frequent paywalls that stop them from roaming the web freely.

The Guardian.co.uk's Greenslade Blog first reported that the UK government report which was published this week, entitled "Unleashing Aspirations" has prompted action from a social enterprise group, Catch 22, whose aim is to provide discriminated 18 to 30-year-olds with professional work experience. These "excluded" individuals lack experience due to their initial lack of experience stemming on the basis of their ethnicity or lack of funds to get them through school, or both.

The Unleashing Aspirations report suggested that media companies provide grants and loans for aspiring journalists who come from low income households who want to pursuit an internship but cannot afford to accept an unpaid one because of the cost factor or living in cities such as New York or London which are very dense with media associations.