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.

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@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.

Indy joins monthly ABCe reporting

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 12:14
Tags: ABCe, Independent

The Independent’s web site will join its broadsheet rivals in revealing its ABCe web traffic figures each month, Revolution reported this week.

This is very good news — hopefully the other newspapers web sites will take the same approachh. So far only the Guardian, Sun, Times, and Telegraph reveal their ABCe-audited server-centric web site traffic data each month, and the lack of a uniform metric makes it difficult to make comparisons about the sites’ relative growth.

While no audited server log data is available for the Indy, user-centric data like that provided by online market research firm Nielsen/Netratings gives some indication of where the Indy stands in the online news universe.

According to Netratings, Independent.co.uk has a monthly UK audience of 706,000 — still furlongs behind Guardian Unlimited (2.37m), The Sun Online (1.98m), Times Online (1.73m) Telegraph.co.uk (1.59m) and even DailyMail.co.uk (1.1m).

Still, the Indy may have good reason to start revealing its audited web traffic figures. The Netratings data shows that Independent.co.uk could currently be Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper web site. Despite starting from a relatively low base, the Indy was up 54.5 per cent since last October, the first month Netratings figures were available.

Earlier this year, Indy editor-in-chief Simon Kelner told the Guardian that the site was being redesigned with “bells and whistles attached to it”. So watch this space.

New research on UK newspapers’ online business models

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 July 2007 at 14:11
Tags: Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, International Herald Tribune, Mail on Sunday, Star, Sun, Times, Times Online

National newspapers’ online editors and managers are increasingly seeing print and online editions as complementary products, and at some titles concern about cannibalisation has “diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy”.

These are among the key findings of newly-published research in the business models of national newspaper web sites by Jack Herbert and Neil Thurman of City University.

Ironically, perhaps, given its findings about the diminishing importance of paywalls at newspaper web sites, the definitive version of the study is only available to subscribers of the academic journal Journalism Practice. Non-subscribers can download it for £14.

However, a pre-print version is available from City University’s web site.

The report is the result of interviews conducted last summer with the online editors or managers of the national newspaper web sites.

Sites are charging for news, columnists, archives, digital editions, e-mail alerts, mobile services. But in a buoyant advertising market, many of the sites are finding it advantageous to make more of their content available for free to increase overall traffic, the study finds.

None of the sites charge for general interest news, a finding the authors attribute to the “availability of this relatively generic content for free”

Times Online’s former editor Peter Bale told the researchers that the site had experienced a “huge” increase in traffic when it dropped pay barriers to overseas users and has also opened its archives.

Even those running sites with paywalls, like Independent online edition, FT.com, and Scotsman.com could see the potential benefits of dropping the barriers.

Advertising is the main revenue stream for national newspapers’ web sites, with up to 90 per cent of revenues coming from advertising. The study also found that revenue from online services and commercial partnerships is growing rapidly. It accounted for a third of total profits at Telegraph.co.uk, and was growing by 20 to 30 percent at Guardian Unlimited.

Several of the editors and managers interviewed indicated that they were increasingly unconcerned about cannibalising their print editions. Alan Revell of Associated Northcliffe Digital told the researchers that a survey of Daily Mail readers had found that they did not view DailyMail.co.uk as a substitute for the print edition, and that the site’s presence did not affect frequency with which they buy the printed edition.

Pete Picton, editor of Sun Online, told the researchers that the real competition competition was the Internet as a whole.

“[T]here is cannibalization by the Internet, not by the Sun Online per se,” he said.

The theory of cannibalization, the researchers found, is based on the assumption that that people stick with a particular news brand, regardless of medium. That idea may now be “completely dead”, Richard Withey of the Independent told the researchers. Simon Waldman of the Guardian agreed, stressing the behaviour of “promiscuous readers” online. Exactly: the attention economy is hungry for our lunch.

Some other key findings from the interviews with online editors:

• Digital editions are only providing marginal revenue streams and see them as an imperfect technology
• Email services were a growing area and editors were excited about their
  revenue potential
• Concerns about cannibalization “have diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy” at the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

Could Kelner be right about podcasting?

Posted by Patrick Smith on 20 March 2007 at 20:15
Tags: Independent, Podcasting

Only 13 per cent of people in America have “ever” listened to a podcast, according to a new study.

This grim view of the online audio world was given by Tom Webster at this week’s Commercial Podcasting Summit in London. The figures come from the as-yet unreleased Arbitron/Edison Internet and Multimedia Study 2007.

The gathered new media industry chiefs did learn however that the figure had risen since last year. By two per cent.

In a move that seems to closely resemble clutching at straws, the chairman of the summit, Paul Colligan, whose mission is to prove the profitability of podcasting, said that awareness of podcasting had increased from 22 per cent last year to 37 per cent now.

He may be right in saying that the study shows that 40 per cent of those who had ever downloaded a podcast had paid for it, but this figure represents a low percentage of a very low percentage of people.

This news comes hard on the heels of Independent editor-in-chief Simon Kelner’s remarks about the irrelevance of podcasting. “I’ve never met anyone who listens to podcasts”, he asserted. It seems ironic that he chose the new media-crazy, and better performing, Guardian as the stage to denounce industry innovations.

The Guardian itself estimates that the podcast figures are a bit better in the UK. In October 2006, The Guardian found that 8 per cent of UK internet users — about three million people — have downloaded a podcast. And the paper claims to be reaching more than 1 million audio downloads each month

And Kelner clearly hasn’t met Adrian Monck or his fellow commuters. Monck points out that the podcast Kelner picks out as particularly pointless — Simon Heffer analysing David Cameron’s latest policy announcement — may not even exist.

7 comments

Relaunching and circulation: The ugly truth

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 November 2006 at 17:43
Tags: Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Observer, Times

Mark Friesen of Newsdesigner.com has a fascinating post that visualises the effect of relaunches on newspaper circulation.

Graphing the before-and-after ABC figures of several American newspapers that have recently undergone expensive redesigns, the continued — and sometimes worsening — downward trend is unmistakable.

But here in Britain, the relaunch effect appears to be slightly more positive.

Friesen also plotted ABC figured from the Times, Independent, Guardian and Observer in the same way. It shows the Times and Indy posting circulation gains since embracing the compact format. The Guardian and Observer achieved big circulation spikes when they relaunched in the Berliner size, but have since tumbled back to their circulations of around a year before the relaunch.

GMG’s Waldman: Indy is ‘not even on my radar’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 September 2006 at 18:20
Tags: Guardian, Independent, Journalism

Jemima Kiss of PaidContent.org last week conducted a wide-ranging interview with the newly-promoted Guardian Media Group group director of digital strategy and development, Simon Waldman.

Waldman addresses the challenges facing GMG regionals in developing their web strategies.  He hints that new investments could affect Guardian Unlimited’s profits (£1m this year) and that the major aim now is sustain the site’s revenue growth (up 50 per cent this year) and its plans for warding off competition from Times Online and Telegraph.co.uk — not to mention Yahoo! and Google.
Judging by comments buried right at the end of the interview, though, Waldman isn’t losing any sleep over the print Guardian’s rival in the left-of-centre newspaper market:

The Independent is a tiny little newspaper that has only really got smaller on the web. If they’d really, really got things right very early on they would have had the opportunity, along with us, of punching well above their weight. I’m sure they find they have lots of people reading their content in the US, but really the Independent on the web is Robert Fisk and that’s it. There’s nothing of any interest to anyone, and he’s behind a subscription wall so it’s not that heavily looked at. I can’t remember a single presentation I’ve done in the last 6-7 years where anything the Independent has done has featured as anything like a threat to us. They are not even on my radar.

The Indy has of course, been quite clear about the web-scepticism that has led it to have a far less ambitious online presence than the other quality newspapers. But Press Gazette understands that Fisk is actually a surprisingly big money-spinner the Indy’s low-key web site. Subscription walls may be an unfashionable strategy, but the Indy seems content to collect the revenue rather than enduring the decade of costly online investment that others have only recently begun to recoup.

Weekend paper roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2006 at 10:54
Tags: Blogs, Five, Guardian, Independent, Journalism, Metro, Observer, People, Times

The continuing fake sheikh brouhaha wasn’t the only meta-news item this extended weekend.

Columnist and documentary-maker Dominik Diamond did not go through with his planned Easter crucifixtion in the Philippines, the Scotsman reported. The Scotsman also reported that the Scottish Information Commissioner will be naming and shaming public authorities that are failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

Friday’s Guardian says former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie is exploring the possibility of launching an upmarket sports magazine and had a profile of Seymour Hersh, the legendary American investigative journalist who has been making waves again about his stories about the US military’s plans for Iran.

The Sunday Times says Swedish tycoon Pelle Tornberg is planning to bid for the new free afternoon commuter paper in London, the one major European city where his Metro group does not own the commuter title of that name.

In the Independent, Peter Cole argued that newspapers are vacillating between panic and complacency over bird flu. There’s also a profile of Trinity Mirror boss Sly Bailey, on the occasion of her 12.9 per cent pay rise.

The Observer says racism is rife in British newspapers, according to the Commisson for Racial Equality. In a story laden with martial metaphors, the Observer also suggests that the recent newspaper acquisitions in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia by David Montgomery’s Mecom group is just a warmup for an assault on British newspapers. Peter Preston says the latest ABC figures show the People is in big trouble, but that this is part of a bigger transformation of the tabloid universe:

We know the ancient redtop order of things is crumbling. Lads have their boob-filled mags; cable TV runs gossip shows; websites peddle porn unlimited. The target arena, in sum, is a lot more crowded than it used to be, and the working-class audience may be Polish or Pakistani now - so not much into seaside humour and Union Jackery.

Preston also has some interesting views on the success of the newly-compact quality papers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Independent, Times, and Guardian titles don’t owe their recent success to sardine-tinned commuters enjoying the new tabloid or Berliner format. Most of their gains, after all, seem to be coming on Saturdays.

It was also busy weekend in the blogosphere. Those who were not obsessing over the ‘Euston manifesto’ published in the New Statesman noticed some interesting things, as well. Regret the Error caught the Gloucestershire Echo naming the wrong man as a convicted criminal.

Chicken Yoghurt has some pointed questions about the Independent’s commitment to environmentalism. Why are they giving away free flights on the same front pages that fret about global warming, Justin McKeating wants to know.

On the Huffington Post, Larisa Alexandrovna accuses the Associated Press of plagairising a story she wrote for the news web site Raw Story. But the AP was independently contacted by some of Alexandrovna’s sources, so it’s all a bit of a storm in a teacup about the wire not attributing the story to her investigation. But it does speak volumes about big news organisations’ attitudes to online-only upstarts like Raw Story. Alexandrovna says an AP spokesman told her that the agency’s policy is that information gleaned from blogs does not require attribution.

Finally, forget the well-known traffic-boosting effect of a link from Slashdot or Digg. Among blogging journalists in the United States, the major traffic-driver is Jim Romenesko’s blog at the Poynter Institute. Just about every American journalist reads it, and a link from Romenesko can drive a small blog’s traffic through the roof in an instant, as one journalism lecturer in Florida discovered last week.

British Press Awards: Bragging rights

Posted by Martin Stabe on 22 March 2006 at 10:32
Tags: Art Newspaper, British Press Awards, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Mirror, Sun

Now that the British Press Awards have been announced, let the bigging-up begin.

The papers are busy bragging about their successes. The Mirror yesterday said Sports Writer of the Year Oliver Holt is “simply the best”. Today the tabloid’s web site boasts that it “scooped three gongs at the prestigious British Press Awards proving we are unbeatable for news and sport.” In addition to Holt, the Mirror’s Stephen Moyes won Scoop of the Year for the “cocaine Kate”. The paper also also took Team of the Year for its 7 July coverage.

[Update: Strangely, a new version of the story has just gone up on the Mirror web site, changing the boast to the more modest "proving our unbeatable talent for news and sport". That version also appears in the dead-tree form. Perhaps the Mirror can be beat, after all.]

Rival redtop the Sun yesterday brags of scooping “an amazing hat-trick of gongs“: reporter of the Year Oliver Harvey, Showbusiness Reporter of the Year Victoria Newton the “Harry the Nazi” splash that won Front Page of the Year.

The Indy notes that Hamish McRae “beat an impressive field which included the new editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Patience Wheatcroft”, to win Business and Finance Journalist of the Year while Francis Elliott of the Independent on Sunday was named Political Journalist of the Year. Also noting Elliott’s award is the News & Star in Cumbria, where he once worked.

The FT’s Columnist of the Year Lucy Kellaway got just a one-sentence nib on the front of yesterday’s Pink ‘Un, but the Guardian carries news of its “Newspaper of the Year” title in the biggest font size possible above the masthead. Inside, the City Diary begins the inevitable nitty-gritty gossip about who was sitting where:

One Indy staffer who has no need to strike is Jason Nissé. The business editor of the Independent on Sunday yesterday crossed the journalism/PR divide to join Barclay’s press office. Nissé was straddling both his past and future careers on Monday night, sitting on the Barclays table at the British Press Awards. We hear he also bonded in the past with Barclay’s former press chief Chris Tucker (who left to travel the world) over a mutual love of Arsenal.

The Art Newspaper didn’t even win, losing out to the Mirror for Team of the Year. But being singled out for special commendation was honour enough for the specialist title, which was a surprise finalist for its in-depth coverage of the Sheikh Saud affair. The paper notes Jon Snow’s words when presenting the award: “The judges were very impressed with the Art Newspaper’s brilliant scoop by a small team which exposed one of the great art stories of the decade.”

British Press Awards: Business and Finance Journalist of the Year

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 March 2006 at 20:22
Tags: Independent, Journalism

For journalists working on City, business and personal finance desks. THe judges looked for the ability to break news, predict trends, analyse stories and explain iissues to a general audience.

The 2005 Business and Finance Journalist of the Year is Hamish McRae of the Independent.