@Society of Editors: ‘The future is already here’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 11:23
Tags: Journalism, Lancashire Evening Post, Observer, Press Association, Society of Editors, The Herald, World Editors Forum

This morning’s second panel, a “digital update” entitled “the future is already here” is chaired by Lesley Riddoch and comprises: PA’s Robert Freeman; Gordon Mack of The Herald; Simon Reynolds of the Lancashire Evening Post; Bertrand Pecquerie of the World Editors Forum; and John Naughton of the Observer.

Freeman, PA’s multimedia editor, starts with a video clip. The public have started to take the multiplatform world for granted, he says. The vox pops on the video clip prove it.

Freeman echos Carolyn McCall’s stress on software development from the AOP and World Digital Publishing conferences.

Mack is the digial media editor of the Herald, and describes himself as a “paidup member of the old media”. The Herald has increased onllne readership 45 per cent year on year, he says. It has worked with PA to produce online multimeida content, particuarlly at the Edinbourgh festival. But the paper has been “unmoved” by mobile. And there’s a digital editon, which has extended the Herald’s reach — for a few subscribers.
Web content remains wedded to print, he admits, and says this is a mistake. But now the first multimedia journalists are making their mark at the paper.Human resources, he says, is a major stumbling block to making
Another challenge are legacy print workflows that are not really adaptable to multichannel delivery.

Referring to Tim O’Reilly’s AOP speech, Mack says compares his online staff — two producers, a quarter-share of a developer and one salesman — to the 9,000 staff at Yahoo! and 85,000 and Time Warner. Asymetrical competition indeed. But perhaps old media are not the big media.

Simon Reynolds says the 120-year-old Lancashire Evening Post in Preston is no longer a newspaper, but a “fully integrated news organisation”. He shows a hilarious clip from the paper’s News Idol competition, with the mayor of Preston reading the news in a monotone that was “hardly Jeremy Paxman”. A more sombre clip shows the return of the remains of a local soldier who had been killed in Iraq. The paper managed to cover this event better than local television as well.

“The result of this revolution really speaks for themselves,” he says. “We’re doing well over 500 stories a week on our site; 500 photographs and much more audio and video”. The site has 1.5m page impresssions month, had quadrupled to 120,000 unique users, all while the paper’s print circulation has increased.

Bertrand Pecquerie tells newspapers to become a news aggregator for their region by building a network of targeted web sites, giving Dagbladet.no in Norway as an example.

Sharing tools, like links to Digg and Technorati, should be on each story page, he says, showing the sharing sidebar from WashingtonPost.com.

Next, he shows Bluffton Today as an example of hyperlocal coverage. Social community news, not breaking hard news is the centre of papers that are embracing this approach, he says.

Only one newsroom will be vry difficult to manage. He shows Axel Springer’s Die Welt group, which has three newspapers: the quality national Die Welt, the regional Berliner Morgenpost, and compact edition targeted at young readers, Welt Kompakt. They have three different teams, but they share several services. This sort of multiple paper platforms will become more common as freesheets and other

Then it gets interesting. He compares the Telegraph’s new hub-and-spoke newsroom design to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison. No seriously. It reflects an authoritarian tendancy for managment to control jorunalists, he says.

“I believe this kind of newsroom will fail,” he says, stressing that it undermines the creativity journlists need in favour of a Modern Times-style industrial news production on multiple platforms.

John Naughton deserves his own post for his presentation about future generations of “digital native” readers.

@Society of Editors: Google to sell newspaper ads

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 10:31
Tags: Google, Society of Editors

Today’s not entirely unexpected news from America — that Google will sell advertising in newspapers — should cause a stir here at the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow.

Criticism of some of the search giant’s other activities has already become one of the talking points.

The New York Times reports that Google “is trying to position itself as a friend of newspapers” while coveting the $48 billion-a-year US print ad market. Selling ad space in newspapers, the paper reports, is part of Google’s plan to make its ad-buying auction system available for advertisers to purchase space in any medium.

@Society of Editors: Andrew Neil: ‘Time to talk to Google’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 November 2006 at 21:20
Tags: Google, Journalism, Society of Editors

The recurring debate about Google’s relationship with news publishers is set to be one of the major talking points of the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow.

During his introductory speech this evening, Andrew Neil argued that the time for giving content to Google for. He didn’t prescribe any particular solution, but said that it was at least time to start talking to the search engine — about revenue sharing or perhaps to get Google’s help in improving the online business model.

Roy Greenslade immediately rose to question this stance and to play Google’s advocate. We’ll get to see this debate for real in the next two days, when one of the speakers here will be Nathan Stoll of Google News.

Haven’t we been through this before?

Well, no. Neil’s arguement is more sophisticated than most aggregator critics’. If news is a mere commodity, he argues, few publishers will have an incentive to take the sometimes grave risks necessary to report it. This could be interesting.

(more…)

@Society of Editors: Andrew Neil: Net revolution is ‘the new Wapping’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 November 2006 at 20:41
Tags: Journalism, Society of Editors

The UK media is the best in the world because it is the most competitive in the world,” says Society of Editors president Charles McGhee, opening the conference and welcoming to the stage publisher and broadcaster Andrew Neil — a Scot, McGhee reminds us — to give the conference’s opening lecture.

Neil says the media industry has been dominated by conferences where traditional media publishers and editors have discussed managing decline in the face of disruption from the Internet. This, he says, was the collective equivalent of puting a towel over its head, lying down in a dark room and pretending it was all just a bad dream.
It is time, Neil argues, time for a new mindset that doesn’t see the net as a threat but a new opportunity.

Running through the international online successess of the Guardian, Observer, Economist and Financial Times, Neil says the English language gives British newspapers an important advantage in expanding globally.

“Newspaper tend to prosper when they embrace the net,” he says. They need to become 24-hour news machines to thrive in that world.
However, “the usual voices oppose change, just as they did in the Wapping era”, Neil says.

He reminds his audience that just 20 years ago, journalists were not allowed to even touch a computer keyboard, a notion younger jounrlists have trouble imagining, and a story Neil haredly believes himself when he recounts it.

“We are in in the midst of a new Wapping, without pickets and riots, but even more radical that the first Wapping,” he says.

The days are long that they could file a story and head to the pub by six. Today, that ethos will soon have your newspaper bellyup and in the graveyard.

Financial and editorial susccess can no longer be measuresd only by newstand sales measured by ABC figures, nor exclusinvely by the revenue from paper products, he says. New measures of sucess, that take the net into account, are necessary.
Newspapers’ attitude to their web sites are in transition from defensive measure — and a pure cost — to “a potential gold mine”. Onlne advertising is booming but are only a small percentage of toal ad revenues. The ads and the revenues, says Neil, will follow the eyeballs. If online advertising does not go to traditional news organisations’ online journalism, then they will have only themselves to blame.

Neil also touches on the sometimes tense relationship between Google and content producers whose material supplies the basis for the search engine’s massive ad revenues.

“I think it is time for a conversation with Google. They have the money, they should pay for it,” says Neil.

There has never been a better time to be a journalist, Neil argues. Smart young journalists of the future will no longer serve one employer in one media. The best journalists will “be brands in their own right” and have multiple employers in order to have no boss.

The Q&A, Roy Greenslade challenges Neil’s view on Google, saying that a possibility would be for the search engine simply to stop pointing to newpaper sites if they attempt to force Google to share its revenues.

“The days of allowing our content to be accessed for free are gone,” he says.
SEO is not a great way of driving readers to your site, Neil says, becuase they just go away again after reading the one thing they are interested in.

“If Google are willing to talk to the broadcasters about copyright on YouTube, we should at least talk to them,” he says. Or perhaps Google can advise newspapers about how best to leverage our assets.

It is necessary to build a business model that rewards reporting, becuase if news gathering becomes a mere commodity, few people will bother doing it.

These discussions could start tomorrow, when Nathan Stoll, the Google product manager for Google News, joins the conference. He will have his work cut out for him if Neil’s view is representative.

Update: The Herald reports Neil’s lecture.

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PCC wants to take podcast complaints

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 November 2006 at 07:37
Tags: Ethics, Journalism, Podcasting, Press Complaints Commission, Society of Editors, Vodcasting, text, video

The Press Complaints Commission wants to accept complaints about podcasts found on newspaper’s web sites, reports Stephen Vass in the Sunday Herald.
The Sunday Herald report also suggests that convergence is proving a bit of a headache for PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer — while newpapers’ audio and video content appears to be covered by the PCC code, text on broadcasters’ websites is not.