Archive for the 'Newspaper news' Category

Read All About It – some links and news (23 July 2010)

Published July 23, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news , Online News Leave a Comment
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First up, a rather wonderful guide to digital storytelling, which is designed for educators. However journalists with little exposure to these types of skills could benefit greatly from it. The guide is compiled by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano – I found it via Twitter but cannot find the original Twitter link!

Next, a fine round-up of relatively inexpensive multimedia equipment from Adam Westbrook. Great for those starting out or adding to their repertoire.

Hyperlocal alert! Will Perrin has a very nice slideshow, which provides an action plan for free and effective local journalism based on local authority data. Pay particular attention to the final slide (slide 18).

Excellent post from Advancing the Story called the ’10 laws of multimedia’. Quick, relevant and to the point. A must read.

There has been plenty of discussion about this article in the New York Times on reporter burnout – but here’s the link just in case you missed it.

Finally an amusing link from 10,000 words on journalists learning programming skills.

Festival bound with Clockwork Noise, have a good weekend,
B

Limber up news organisations

Published May 25, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news Leave a Comment
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Once upon a time the equation for funding a news organisation was a lot more straightforward. Most of the budget came from a combination of advertising (inc classifieds) and either cover price or subscriber fees and sometimes tax-payer’s money.

Things have become more complicated recently. These days organisations, through trial and error, are attempting to come up with new ways to fund journalism.

Today, the new ready-for-a-paywall Times and Sunday Times websites launched. Later this year the New York Times will try out a metered pay model.

However, Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski has another less-straighforward suggestion dubbed the ‘Heinz 57′ model, which I think is very interesting.

I’m sometimes asked what the new business model for media will be. My answer is that it will be a “Heinz 57″ model. The Heinz food brand often has “57 varieties” in its promotions. And that’s a good metaphor for the emerging media business model.

He highlights the case of Australia’s Fairfax Media, which media consultant Frédéric Filloux looked at in February.

Filloux says Fairfax Digital (the part of Fairfax Media that runs hundreds of publications, websites and more than a dozen radio stations) has ‘no less than 15 revenue streams’ and it has an ‘entire team devoted to strategic advertising’ to react fast to changes and maximise ad money.

Filloux lists seven lessons to take from Fairfax Digital, which he expands in his post.

1. Accept the coming digital domination
2. Focus on reader engagement
3. Be an online company. Period.
4. Bet on multiple business resources
5. Capture readers and users one group after the other
6. Control your advertising innovation
7. Stay awake

The launch of the two News International sites today has put a spotlight on how news is funded and it’s going to be fascinating to see whether it can work. But I think there’s something in what Foremski and Filloux are highlighting.

Organisations must be flexible going forward. There will not be another simple equation, no answer to the 64-million-dollar question. A multiple-revenue model may be more complicated but it would hedge the bets, however organisations, no matter how big or small, need to be limber and able to react fast like Fairfax does.

Lots to think about,

B

Read All About It – Social Media, Citizen Journalism, iPad and US Presidential Press Corp

Published May 24, 2010 Newspaper news , Online News 2 Comments
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Here are links to four articles that I think are worth reading.

First off, some interesting analysis of research carried out by Pew on the types of stories consumed on various new media platforms versus ‘traditional’ media.

It seems to me that news organisations will have to take a different strategy with each platform if they are going to succeed on it. You can’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, which is bad news for budgets and resources. If new platforms continue to emerge how can news organisations adopt a successful platform-neutral approach?

Next up, here’s a nice post from Kimberly Wilson (follow her on Twitter @kimberly_wilson) about crowd-sourced websites. She has reviewed six examples  (from Washington DC, Chicago, Minnesota, Canada, Grand Rapids, and Sonora and Tuolumne County).

Yesterday, Peter Preston had a piece in The Observer about the iPad and newspapers. His thesis is that iPads won’t be the saviour as some have enthusiastically predicted, more just one small revenue stream. He uses numbers and anecdotal evidence to support this theory and asks some good questions along the way.

Finally, Brian Stelter has an article in the New York Times about the decreasing number of journalists travelling with the US president when he goes on trips. The obvious downside mentioned is that news when he’s outside of Washington DC is now coming from fewer and fewer sources.

Have you seen any interesting articles about the industry?

B

Emily Bell leaving Guardian role for Columbia University

Published April 21, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news , Online News Leave a Comment
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Guardian News & Media’s Director of Digital Content Emily Bell has been named Director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Earlier today, Wired reported that Bell will ‘oversee the university’s new dual-degree Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism with The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science’.

Bell envisions these graduates heading up the newsrooms of tomorrow, bridging the divide between media and tech and creating software that helps journalists work more effectively to wrangle the ridiculous proliferation of data into meaningful information.

Bell will take up the role in July, according to the article.

In a statement Guardian News & Media Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger says Bell will continue as a consultant to the Guardian, ‘giving strategic advice from her new base in New York’.

Rusbridger says Janine Gibson will take up a ‘wider strategic role in addition to her present duties as editor of guardian.co.uk’.

However he adds that further announcements will be made about the development of the Guardian’s digital content ‘in due course’.

More from Columbia University about the Bell appointment here

Irish Times offers free e-paper trial

Published March 11, 2010 Newspaper news Leave a Comment
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The Irish Times is offering a free trial of its newspaper via e-paper. A yearly subscription to read the publication through this service costs E89, shorter subscription models are also available.

The free-trial period lasts until 24 March, according to IT journalist Shane Hegarty.

Personally I am not a huge fan of e-paper, mostly because of the navigation. I do use it when I need to, but couldn’t imagine consuming news in this manner on a regular basis.

However, I think it will find an audience with the Irish diaspora. While reading a newspaper on a website is great, I can imagine some miss seeing how the paper looks, reading stories in the order that they were placed etc.

The Irish Times has been on e-paper, via pressdisplay.com, for a while now and its archive stretches back to May 2004. I wonder what has prompted the free trial offer?

In other IT-related news, Deputy Managing Director Liam Kavanagh has been appointed Managing Director taking over from Maeve Donovan who announced her retirement last month.

B

What’s happening in hyperlocal…

Published February 23, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news 1 Comment
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Yesterday, the New York Times announced a collaboration with New York University to cover local news in the East Village.

NYT journalist Richard G Jones will edit the Local East Village site, developed by staff and faculty at the University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute. The site will ‘live’ on nytimes.com.

The Times has already collaborated with another journalism school on a hyperlocal project in Brooklyn, it has a venture in Chicago and an upcoming Bay Area link-up in San Francisco.

Speaking about the most recent announcement, the Editor of Digital Initiatives at NYT, Jim Schachter, says:

We want to continue to expand our network of collaborations, in the New York area and across the country, through associations with individuals, companies and institutions that share our values — foremost, increasing the volume and scope of quality journalism about issues that matter.

The new East Village site is not the only recent development in local news.

AOL is expanding its local news venture patch.com. According to a report last week from Business Insider, the group is planning to grow the number of local news websites from 30 to ‘hundreds’.

Citing an internal communication with employees, Business Insider reports that AOL said it wants to be ‘the global and local leader in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content.’

Insider says:

Patch is already growing fast. It served just 12 communities in New Jersey and Connecticut as of October 2009, when it announced plans to expand to another 11. It currently covers about 30.

Insider also reports that AOL is out at events (recently in NYU) seeking to hire journalism grads.

Writing about the AOL news, GigaOM’s Matthew Ingram says if patch.com is a failure it will be the biggest blow to hyperlocal yet.

Across the Atlantic, guardian.co.uk took its first steps into the world of hyperlocal with its Leeds website. Sites for Edinburgh and Cardiff are on the way.

Journalism.co.uk says Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger told Twitter the move was a ‘tiny toe in local web water’.

On her blog, Director of Digital Content for Guardian News and Media, Emily Bell says:

A hugely important part of this project has been the involvement of MySociety, who we’ve collaborated with to provide customised versions of their civic tools, allowing and encouraging local residents to report issues, contact their representatives and generally become engaged in the governance and care of their locality. This is an important partnership for us because we share many of the same values with MySociety, and it has been very valuable to work with them on a project like this.

I think hyperlocal has a big future – I have thought that for a long time.

I find it bothersome, however, that it mostly, at least in the US, remains the preserve of citizen journalists, journalism students and recent grads. Aside from the person tasked with being the editor, it seems the big names or more established journalists tend to be missing.

How do organisations expect readers to take local news seriously if they are not throwing major muscle, including journalists, behind it.

Local news is important. After all it can have the most immediate impact on readers’ lives and could possibly drive them to other parts of a media organisation’s operation.

B

Donovan to step down as MD at The Irish Times

Published February 6, 2010 Irish Media , Newspaper news 1 Comment
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It was confirmed on Friday evening that Maeve Donovan, 55, is to step down as Managing Director at The Irish Times after eight years in the role.

Deputy Managing Director Liam Kavanagh has been tipped as a front runner to succeed Ms Donovan in the role, according to the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner.

Ms Donovan, who worked at the organisation for more than three decades, said now was a good time for a successor to lead the organisation through the next ‘inevitable wave of change’, according to a story in The Irish Times, which added that she had not envisaged staying in the role past 2010.

During Ms Donovan’s time as MD, The Irish Times made a number of investments and interesting decisions as highlighted by Laura Noonan in the Irish Independent today:

Ms Donovan’s tenure as managing director began with a substantial re-organisation of the core newspaper business, but she is best known for the “investment and diversification” strategy pursued more recently.

Under that strategy, ‘The Irish Times’ spent €50m on property website myhome.ie at the peak of the boom and also bought substantial stakes in ‘The Gloss’ magazine, Dublin freesheet ‘Metro’ and multi-city radio station 4fm.

Those joint ventures and subsidiaries triggered more than €26m of losses in 2008 and have been slammed by the newspaper’s own journalists, who last year urged their company to “urgently review the flawed investment and diversification strategy”.

Asked if she regretted any of the investments, Ms Donovan replied: “Oh God, no.”

I wonder how the next MD is going to handle the challenges The Irish Times, like all newspapers, faces in relation to digital change. Will it follow the NYT and Murdoch with online pay models or continue like the Guardian and stay free?  It’s a difficult time for anyone to take over when surely the first task is to pull back last year’s estimated cash losses of between €1o to €11m. It’ll be interesting to watch.

B

Pay walls, strategy and content…

Published January 21, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news , Online News Leave a Comment
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Yesterday’s New York Times’ announcement has solidified a few things in my head.

Here goes…

1. I need to get this one out of the way first, what type of long-term, strategic planning is going on in the New York Times Co that it got rid of NYT Select three years ago and the more than 220,000 subscribers that went with it only to introduce a new pay model now. I understand there are differences between the two models but it would have made for a nice customer base to start off with.

More importantly though, this indecisiveness about whether online content should or should not be paid for is becoming more confusing to the consumer by the day. This is not helping the industry in the long run.  It is good NYT has decided their content, be it in print or online, has value that should paid for, I just wish they had decided earlier and stuck to it. Trends in advertising, while of course important, should not be the determining factor as they may have been with the Select decision.

2. With that out of the way, I think it is good that it is not a straight pay wall. Although metering could just lead to reduced news consumption by NYT.com readers (and generally if this was to be replicated across the industry), I would rather have fewer readers and more revenue than the unsustainable position of lots of readers and no revenue.

3. Now is a time of survival for newspapers/organisations – they have to try and hang on – by whatever means necessary. Given the changes in the industry, there are clearly too many newspapers and the economics of content have changed. Those who manage to survive the next decade will emerge with less competition from established media organisations – giving them a privileged and potentially profitable position.

4. This is not a carte blanche to over-zealous, money counting publishers. You need to invest to get good content that is worthy of a pay wall. It should be something people have to read and value as the only reliable source in town. Good quality, well investigated and reported journalism that people can depend upon will be the scarce, but in-demand commodity.

Of course I am sure some of these arguments were heard back when TV news emerged and will be rolled out for any subsequent innovations but I strongly believe people have been placing too much emphasis on the platform as the commodity not the content. Spare it another thought.

B

NYT to start charging online readers

Published January 20, 2010 Newspaper news , Online News 1 Comment
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The New York Times Company has announced today that it will be introducing a ‘paid model’ for its website NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011.

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.

Read the full statement from the company here

More on this later…

The Skiff Reader – a saviour for newspapers?

Published January 18, 2010 Future of journalism , Newspaper news , Online News Leave a Comment
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The Guardian has a profile today of the Skiff electronic reader. The article says some of the world’s biggest newspaper groups are eyeing the device.

Gil Fuchsberg, the former journalist and new media deal-maker who has overseen Skiff from its origins as an R&D project within Hearst Corporation, argues that the time is right for magazines and newspapers to follow books, which are available on electronic readers such as Kindle. Fuchsberg says he looks forward to travelling on the tube in London surrounded by commuters reading touchscreen tablets.

Personally I don’t think Mr Fuchsberg is going to see that sight.

At one point I thought there might be a role for a device like this, but that was more than five years ago – when the digital media landscape was less developed. If people are going to consume news digitally they are going to do it on whatever mobile digital device they currently own (that also does video, audio and is in colour!) or on one they purchase that does everything else too – newspapers are not books – they can’t be treated in a similar way. People may pay for an e-reader for books because they are used to paying for them in the first place. Books have a different place in people’s lives. They won’t pay for a special device for newspapers because they are used to getting that for free (aside from connection charges).

The only market this device has is the group that still buys newspapers. Why re-invent the wheel for them – they already buy your device (a newspaper). The Skiff is about selling hardware not content. This is not the solution – newspapers steer clear!

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Blathnaid Healy

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All views and opinions are my own. © Blathnaid Healy 2008