@DNA2008: Who is getting it in the digital age?

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”.

Journalists’ use of Wikipedia and social networks

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.

3 comments

The big questions for the Scottish media in 2008

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:

• What will News International’s pricing strategy be under James Murdoch? Will the price war that saw the Scottish Sun sold at 20p continue?
• How will the Scottish Executive’s plans to launch a jobs portal affect newspapers’ recruitment revenue?
• What are the Scottish papers doing online? The Herald papers are preparing to announce a new joint portal for their titles as they become more integrated. The Scotsman and Daily Record have both also recently relaunched their web sites.
• Will SMG follow ITV’s lead and acquire independent production companies?
• How will redundancies affect output at STV and BBC Scotland?

@Beyond the Printed Word: MySun moderators tested on 152-page policy

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:

• News Group has a 152-page moderation policy for what it terms “reader generated content” on MySun community and article comments. Moderators are tested on the policy each quarter, and the results affect their bonus.
• There are seven moderators and a manager at News Group Digital. The skills needed to recruit them depends on how much editorial input they have to have - and these are not necessarily journalists. But at the Sun, the ability to pun is very imporant.
• Qualifications for night moderators are somewhat different from day moderators, Dagan jokes. They tend to like sitting alone in front of a computer at night and may speak fluent Klingon.
• The Sun has a strong ethos - it’s very British, and want to be very fun. This isn’t the same as having a blogging tool or a blog on blogger. BLogging on a tabloid means you’re making a statement.
• Justifying the cost of moderation teams is easy when you compare it to the spending on editorial production, and compare the number of page impressions and user loyalty that user generated content.
• A key piece of registration data the Sun gets a high degree of voluntary disclosure on is “What is my favourite football team”. The default is “I don’t follow football”, which provokes and indignat response from users &mdash 60 per cent of registered user tell the SUn their favourite football team.
• Between two and 200 comments are removed each day, depending on the topics being discussed.
• Volunteer moderation is problematic, because there have been employment tribunal cases of moderators seeking retrospective payment.
• Dagan declines to answer the most interesting question at the close of the session: the proportion of Sun Online users who register and use Sun Online.

@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?

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:

1. Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
2. Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
3. Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
4. Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
5. Customer obsessiveness - It is no longer a secret what our readers actually want. We will sell more papers where people now shop. “Our customers will be as much outside the UK as within it,” he concludes.

@Society of Editors - Does Gavin O’Reilly ‘get it’?

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.

Tits and RSS

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.

• Martin Belam has noticed that the Daily Star web site has a um, unique way of promoting its RSS feeds: use a picture of a half-naked model clutching the familar orange icon.
• The Sun, meanwhile is using its MySun community platform to solicit entries to a competition called Page 3 Idol. Sun Online users, the headline says, “are simply the breast“.

Blog community doesn’t care for mag’s view of social workers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 16:52
Tags: Blogs, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph

Community Care has had to close a comment thread on one of its blogs after a string of nasty comments on a post attacking the Daily Mail’s coverage of social work.

The post, by the RBI magazine’s deputy editor Janet Snell, promises a story in this week’s issue that will examine how, from its point of view, the Mail and the Telegraph had “hijacked” the story of an expectant mother who may have her child taken into foster care at birth. The magazine promises to put forward the social workers’ point of view.

Suffice to say that many commenters on Snell’s post do not share the her benign view of social workers.

“I had no idea that there was such a strong and virulent hatred of social workers,” says RBI’s head of blogging Adam Tinworth in an interesting post explaining the rationale of the decision to end the comments thread, a first for RBI’s B2B sites.

The silver lining, Tinworth notes, is that the discussion on the blog has become more active since the “Daily Mail incident”. His theory: the row drew more attention to the blog, and the sight of an active comment thread may have given timid readers the sense that the had “permission” to start leaving comments on the blog.

Sambrook: transparency and humility essential to trust in journalists (audio)

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 September 2007 at 10:55
Tags: Andrew Keen, BBC, Fox News, Guardian, Richard Sambrook, Television, The Sun, The Sun Online

“Arrogance” was a major part of how the BBC “tripped up” in reporting the story that led to the Hutton inquiry, and journalists should show greater humility and transparency, the BBC’s director of global news, Richard Sambrook, has said.

Sambrook made the comment last night while interviewing Web 2.0 critic and Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen at the Frontline Club in London.

Sambrook’s remarks came during an exchange about trust in the media, after Keen had argued that journalists “should be more arrogant”.

“There’s a crisis of confidence in mainstream journalists,” Keen said.

“They need to be more arrogant. They need to remind people that they are seasoned professionals, the way doctors and lawyers and chefs do.

“Why apologise to the public? I see that more and more: The idea that we don’t know any more than you, so you should be telling us we should be reporting.If that’s true, all of you should just resign. Let’s just have the blogosphere.”

Sambrook disputed this view, saying that the real problem is that there isn’t enough humility or transparency in journalism.

“Yes, we do have expertise or skill, but we we’re not going to get the credit that may be conferred on that if we behave arrogantly or say ‘we know best’,” said Sambrook.

When Keen challenged Sambrook to offer an example where the BBC has been “really screwed up” or should have shown more humility, Sambrook mentioned the crisis that engulfed the BBC following Andrew Gilligan’s May 2003 Today programme report that the Blair government had, against the wishes of intelligence agencies, “sexed up” a dossier on the case for going to war in Iraq. That report was followed by the death of Gilligan’s source, Dr David Kelly, and led to the Hutton inquiry. Sambrook was director of BBC News during the crisis and testified before the inquiry.

“Personally, I think we got a lot of things right, but where we went wrong and where it became a crisis was because Andrew Gillian was sloppy — and he was sloppy probably because there was a touch of arrogance there. And the Today programme was overly defensive, probably because there was a touch of arrogance there.”

“Actually the story was right. Others may disagree with that, but I think the story was right but we tripped up because of our arrogance, which covered up a degree of sloppiness and let the government and other critics come in and the whole thing kicked off.”

Journalism’s gatekeeping function requires professionalism, not arrogance, Sambrook went on to say. Making decisions about what to report should be based on reassons, which should be open and transparent.

“If one of our journalists makes a statement on TV as a professional judgment, then I would hope they have some evidence or backing behind that to justify that - and by showing that evidence, the public can have faith in their professional judgment. If they just say ‘hey I’m a really clever person, I’m cleverer than you and I say this’, why would you trust them? I wouldn’t.”

See also:

• Comment is Free: Andrew Keen v Emily Bell: Is today’s internet killing our culture?

Edinburgh: ‘IPod moment’ could render print extinct, predicts Guardian editor

Posted by Colin Crummy on 25 August 2007 at 16:33
Tags: Channel 4, E-paper, Edinburgh 2007, Edinburgh International Television Festival, Guardian, ITN, Journalism, Podcasting

The newspaper industry could be rocked by its own “iPod moment” where a device reads text so well that renders print extinct, according to the editor of The Guardian.

At a session entitled “Who’ll Win the Web?” at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Alan Rusbridger said: “For the newspaper there will be an iPod moment where someone creates a device that is so brilliant at reading text, the newspaper becomes irrelevant.”

Rusbridger also said the death of The Guardian in print would “in some ways make life simpler” and said that he was confident his team would continue to produce the product within the same Guardian spirit elsewhere. “I’d be quite relaxed about it,” he added.

He admitted that The Guardian was tying up people experimenting with podcasts that gained few listeners but said it was because the newspaper was experimenting with everything. “There’s a fair amount of wasted effort at the moment but we’re learning all the time.”

The debate centred on whether print media or broadcasters might prosper in the digital age.

Rod Henwood, new business director at Channel 4 said: “In some ways we are less threatened than newspapers because free broadcasters don’t have paying customers to lose. We have paying customers to gain through the internet.”

He said that broadcasters could better retain exclusivity on products in a way that news providers could not. “News is very much commodised on the net. Immersive, long form video entertainment is harder to commodise. For broadcasters that have got rights that are their own, have a chance to stand out on the internet more than purely news providers.”

ITN chief executive Mark Wood said newspapers were more than just news and it was crucial to make those elements – like lifestyle sections - pay in a multimedia strategy.

Rusbridger said: “The BBC, CNN, ITN – it’s sort of an article of faith that they are impartial and unbiased. We can be as impartial and biased as we like and on comment is free we have thousands of robust opinions.” He foresaw this as “an interesting battleground” which would be partly settled by regulator.