Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 3 March 2008 at 12:42
Tags: DNA2008, Ifra, Journalism, Newspapers
Ifra’s vertical search engine for the newspaper industry launched last week.
The service, announced late last year, provides news and information relevant to the news publishing industry, including Ifra’s own reports as well as partners’ and other news sources.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 3 March 2008 at 11:06
Tags: DNA2008, De Persgroep, Drudge Report, Facebook, Financial Times, Japan, Mobile Phones, Online, Reuters, South Korea, schibsted
At the Digital News Affairs Conference in Brussels, Richard Gizbert of Al-Jazeera’s media programme The Listening Post asks a “on surviving the digital news age” to name some organisations that are “getting it right” in the digital age.
Here are the suggestions they came up with:
Drudge Report
A tiny three-man operation that aggregates news now makes a fortune for its creator and drives a huge proportion of the major news media’s online traffic. “He is essentially an online DJ creating online sense of consensus about what the important story is,” says Stephen Marshall, founder and creative director of the Guerilla News Network. Drudge, he suggests understands how audiences want obtain news online.
Schibsted
But Christian Van Thillo chief executive of Belgium’s De Persgroep disagrees, because Drudge is not an example of a big media company succeeding online. The best example of big media getting it, he says is the Schibsted. With its enormous online reach and profits, the publisher of Norway’s leading tabloid VG is a clear leader online. Schibsted, he says was first to market, has great sites, a big team, focussed management, full support of the company. But he warns against extrapolating Schibsted’s success to ambitions for other markets, because, he says, commercial broadcasting is not as developed in Norway as an alternative for advertisers.
Financial Times
Maria Molland, senior vice president and global head of strategy and business development at Reuters, says there are small pieces of larger companies that are doing interesting things. She names the launch of the Financial Times’s exclusive executive social networking site as an example. More specialiast social networks are the future, she suggests. “I think that Facebook is going down,” she says, “Who wants to be on a social network that your parents are on too?”
South Korea
Tyler Brûlé of Monocle nominates a country rather than a company: South Korea (and also Japan). What impact has this highly advanced digital society’s mobile phone culture had on the newstand? “Look at what it’s done for print in thouse countries - it’s made all of those publishers fight back ever harder”.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 January 2008 at 10:46
Tags: Blogs, The Journal
A blog by Graeme Whitfield, assistant news editor of the Newcastle Journal, is collecting examples of poor writing by journalists for a “dictionary of journalese”, Holdthefrontpage.co.uk notes.
So far he has taken on words used almost exclusively by journalists, such as ’slam’ and ‘tot’.
(Hopefully JournalLive will fix the incorrect links to its blogs’ RSS feeds soon, so that readers can follow Whitfield’s blog regularly!)
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 7 January 2008 at 09:01
Tags: Ethics, Facebook, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Privacy, Wikipedia, Wikis
In yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, reader’s editor Michael Williams looked askance at journalists’ use of Wikipedia to confirm disputed facts.
After surveying the usual pro- and anti-Wikipedia arguments, Williams concludes by reading the entries about the Independent and Independent on Sunday “a subject I ought to know something about.”
“After the first 10 errors, I stopped counting. You have been warned!”
Meanwhile, Guardian readers’ editor Siobhain Butterworth has looked at how reporters use social networking sites, asking whether Facebook members have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The issue has arisen again after the paper, along with several others, published pictures drawn from Facebook showing 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto in fancy dress.
“There’s no call, in these circumstances, for a heavyweight public interest argument to justify publication,” Butterworth concludes.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 5 January 2008 at 21:12
Tags: Herald, Scotland, Scotsman, Sun, The Herald
The Sunday Herald yesterday took a look at the issues that will be facing the Scottish media in 2008:
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 30 November 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Newspapers
If rival broadcasters can meet the challenge of online aggregators by forming a joint online content portal, why not newspapers?
In Switzerland, one group of rival regional newspaper publishers is reportedly considering a joint online news regional news portal after another consortium announced plans for a cross-paper portal of their own.
Swiss newspaper publishers including NZZ and MZ, is considering whether to launch a joint, cross-title online regional news portal, according to the Swiss media publication Persoenlich.com. A decision on the project will be made by the middle of next month.
The move comes after other set of Swiss publishers, Tamedia and BZM, announced plans to launch a similar portal that will pool content from five of their newspapers.
According to the report, the regional portal project was originally conceived as a joint online news aggregator run by newspaper publishers as a rival to Google News, but that scheme has now been shelved.
Both the original aggregator idea and the latest proposals for joint online portals are intriguing.
In the Hugo Young lecture last night, New York Times editor Bill Keller pointed out that existing aggregators don’t always differentiate between high-quality news sources and more questionable ones.
He said: “Wikipedia and Google aggregate information from, well, from us. From the Times, from the Guardian, and from a lot of less dependable sources. They can pool reporting from hundreds of news outlets but what if there aren’t hundreds of news outlets? Or what if many of them are simply unreliable? And how would you know?”
To improve upon that situation, why not create a stripped-down aggregator or portal site containing only news and information produced by member publishers?
What might a news aggregator run by newspaper publishers look like in the UK? Martin Belam’s Chipwrapper is a nice approximation.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 8 November 2007 at 14:12
Tags: News of the World, Sun, Sun Online, The Sun, The Sun Online, User-Generated Content, thelondonpaper
Danny Dagan, head of online communities at News Group Digital which runs MySun and provides moderation for the News of the World and thelondonpaper.
The Sun and its sister titles take a very strict line on moderating content submitted to their sites, its approach is that contributing under the tabloids’ brands is very different than blogging on Blogger, he says. It demands higher standards:
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 6 November 2007 at 11:14
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Mail on Sunday, Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph
The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “lifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.
Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals the the Madeleine McCann story has constantly lead Sky news traffic, regardless of what else is going on. Meanwhile, the revelation that the home secretary smoked cannabis, which was a massive story everywhere else, “scored an absolute zero”.
Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the paper has been digitising its archive, which will add 20 million items to its website, which already has 750,000 “bits of content” at any one time. It is noticable how litttle the publication has changed over the first 200 years, she says, but the pace of change has increased dramatically.
Her most startling prediction for the future is the rise of football economics in journalism. Spackman describes a “Drogba effect” where pay in journalism will be greatly skewed towards stars who are able to bring in a lot of traffic online.
Spackman repeats her comments from last week about the type of journalists she is seeking to recruit for Times Online: “The people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”
Her prediction for 2020 reflects her view that many people with these attributes are currently men: “I think this will be an industry rather more full of men than it is now.”
Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, which includes the host Manchester Evening News, says things have changed dramatically in this sector. Cover prices were static for years, and companies relentlessly measured themselves against the semi-annual ABC figures. That has all changed recently, with the introduction of part-free distribution and new online products.
“Video will be a key aspect of every web site we produce,” Dodson says.
Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Group, outlines the trends he expects in the next few years:
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 5 November 2007 at 11:19
Tags: Independent, Independent on Sunday, Society of Editors, Society of Editors
Media commentators and “teenage scribblers in the investment banks” are failing to correctly analyse the newspaper industry and are failing to move beyond a simplistic analysis that describes changes in media consumption as “a gladiatorial spat between print and online”, Independent News & Media chief operating officer Gavin O’Reilly argued in a forceful opening address for the Society of Editors conference last night.
Free newspapers and strategies based on short-term promotions like DVD give-aways, rather than the internet, were the primary cause of print circulation declines, O’Reilly argued. Many free newspapers are not doing well financially, and circulation form promotions is marked by lower margins he argued. Furthermore, the commentators and analysts were failing to look at the trends in the metric that matters most: circulation revenues.
O’Reilly named the Andrew Gowers, Roy Greenslade, Peter Preston and Peter Wilby,”the newer crop of business media journalists” and City media analysists (who are all under 25, apparently) for pushing a new conventional wisdom that printed newspapers are dead or dying.
But O’Reilly also provided a heavy dose of the online scepticism. Online advertising remains relatively minuscule at $21 billion, with 65 per cent going to the three major search firms — Google, Yahoo and MSN — leaving content publishers scraping for the remaining 35 per cent.
Little is known about how people actually spend their time online, he added.
“Are they ploughing through pages of well-crafted prose, or watching mindless videos on YouTube, or social networking or searching for a plumber or blogging or booking a ticket to Spain on EasyJet, or buying car insurance or paying their gas bill, or sending e-mails?” he wondered.
“An yet, somehow in the melee of the mindless rush to all things online, we run the risk of losing sight of what we do and what we do well,” he said.
The commentary about the future of media rarely starts with consumers, he continued.
“Instead, it starts with the media luminaries, the futurologists, the advocates for change and flimsy predictions - who are as unoriginal in their thesis as they ever where”.
“For those of us who might seek to legitimately champion the future of print within this media maelstrom - we are often castigated to the realms of Neanderthal-like people who just don’t get it.
“Well Ladies and gentlemen — I assure you, I get it. I for one know that the future of newspaper companies will be what it has always been built upon, and that’s our content. And do I mean user-generated content? Well, that will clearly have its place - but I’m really talking about unique comment and analysis, well-crafted and well edited content that has faced the rigours of a well-honed editorial process.”
The unique selling point of the newspaper of the future is “built upon journalistic skills that re not simply a God-given right of someone with attitude sitting in a garage in front of a computer, but rather a skill that is learned and earned,” he continued.
Trustworthy journalism, he continued, would become even more relevant in an age when people “are being bombarded daily with information overload and too often, sadly, the lowest common denominator wins out”. Newspapers are “the ultimate browser” that do the hard work of identifying the most important information for you.
INM, O’Reilly said, wants to grow and invest across all media, including print. To do so, INM is being a “low cost operator” and believes in online as “an incremental sources of both audience and revenues”.
He repeated his frequently-made suggestion that Google should have to secure opt-ins from publishers before aggregating their content, and described ACAP, the new system for automating permissions to online coverage, as a step towards ensuring this.
He also called media organisations to arms over the growing restrictions on the coverage of sporting events.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 30 October 2007 at 16:07
Tags: RSS, Star, Sun, Sun Online
Some notes on the redtop web. Those in more conservative newsrooms might not consider the following links safe for work.
