Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 February 2008 at 11:23
Tags: Online, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, audio, video
National and regional newspaper websites have been using audio and video capabilities to good effect today in their coverage of the controversy over the “Mosquito” device, which uses a high-pitched sound audible only to young people in order to keep teenagers from congregating.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 4 January 2008 at 12:04
Tags: Times Online
Times Online seemed to be experiencing a heavy load on its servers earlier this morning. But it also showed off an interesting solution to dealing with temporary downtime: Direct readers to an unaffected corner of the site — such as your blogs.
That’s what Times Online’s error message was doing this morning, when readers trying to reach its site saw an error message providing links to its blogs, which are hosted separately from the rest of the site on Six Apart’s Typepad service.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 6 November 2007 at 12:09
Tags: Google, Google Maps, Google News, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph, video
An organisation that produces no news at all is the third most trusted brand for delivering news, Phil Harding, notes from the floor, and asks the panel to respond. The answers suggest that the debates about the role of the seach engine have moved on about the relatively simple concerns about driving traffic versus the question of whether copyright law demands aggregators should seek permission before indexing sites.
“We’ve only recently woken up to the problem with Google,” says Peter Wright of the Mail on Sunday says. “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”
He says: “Things move quickly, and what seems like a big threat To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are going to come to the site.”
Mark Dodson of GMG regional and Telegraph editor-in-chief and Will Lewis agreed that it is important to driving traffic.
But Anne Spackman gave the most forceful answer: “I think Google is hugely dangerous“, noting the search giant’s moves into collecting ever more personal information. “It’s the number one topic of conversation in News Corp.”
Speaking to Press Gazette afterward, Spackman said Google was now having a significant effect on the way Times Online does business. It’s dominance of the search market means the slightest changes to its search algorithm has major impact on traffic, she said, pointing to last moth’s change that had a major impact on the Washington Post.com’s PageRank. Google’s ownership of Doubleclick means it now controls an enormous part of advertising inventory. Google Maps, Spackman predicted, will transform local newspapers as Google enters the geographically-defined advertising market.
Online Video
Responding to another question, about online video, Spackman sas one of the most successful pieces of video on the web site was created when they handed Baghdad correspondent Stephen Farrell a camera and said “point it at interesting stuff”. This resulted in some amazing detail about everyday life in Baghdad, such as private military company vehicles with signs warning anyone approaching within 20 feet will be shot.
Will Lewis, meanwhile, says the advantage newspaper video has over television is that it is non-linear, allowing people to jump around in the running order. Telegraph TV recorded 2 million downloads this month, he says.
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 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:
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 28 June 2007 at 16:43
Tags: Journalism, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online
The new editor of Telegraph.co.uk, Marcus Warren, has been blogging for a week now.
Another feed to add to the newsreader, even if it has already had a post about cats that look like Hitler.
Despite its title, that post is actually very interesting. It seems a mole at Times Online has been supplying Victoria Place with top search terms, a rather handy piece of intelligence for Telegraph.co.uk’s search engine optimisation efforts.
The Wapping spy reported that the terms “cats that look like Hitler”, yields a post Daniel Finkelstein’s Times comment blog on the first page of Google. Well, it did anyway, until Warren acted on his newfound intel.
“I’m just a bit browned off that the ‘cats that look like Hitler’ traffic was going to Times Online, not us,” wrote Warren.
The title of his post on the subject of course, ensured that that was taken care of the next time Google’s spider came around. Now Warren’s post is near the top of the Google search restults for that phrase.
Good to see the Telegraph so doggedly pursuing the fascist feline fan search demographic. I’d guess lolcats yield a better CPM, though.
Posted by
Ian Reeves
on 24 May 2007 at 09:45
Tags: Belfast Telegraph, Computing, Eastern Daily Press, FHM, Financial Times, Guardian, Haymarket, Hull Daily Mail, ITN, InStyle, Journalism, Lancashire Evening Post, Magazines, Media Week, Mirror, Nationals, New Scientist, Newspapers, Northern Echo, Nuts, Roo, Sun, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, VNU, YouTube, Zoo, icBirmingham, video
Ian Reeves looks at how he printed press is experimenting with video, from locals to the big players.
Continue ReadingPosted by
Martin Stabe
on 11 April 2007 at 15:40
Tags: Times Online, design
NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh has posted an extensive and “effusively positive” review of the relaunched Times Online over on his site Substraction.com.
The new site, writes Vinh, “beautifully translates (versus simply transferring) its broadsheet aesthetic into something vibrant and native to the Web.”
He also enthuses over the grid used by Times Online the way only a designer can. It’s a great write-up for anyone interested in developments in online news design.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 21 March 2007 at 13:20
Tags: BBC, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Guardian Unlimited, MEN Lite, Manchester Evening News, Newbury Weekly News, Newbury today, Pinkun.com, Reading Chronicle, Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph, thelondonpaper
Reading Chronicle editor Simon Jones has good reason to be boastful: his paper’s Polish edition has been nominated for The Fujifilm Grand Prix Award for the “most significant contribution to future newspaper success” at the 2007 Newspaper Awards.
The Kronika Reading is certainly in good company. Other nominees for the award are the Telegraph’s new newsroom, the Financial Times’ mobile news reader, the Guardian’s afternoon PDF edition G24, and free papers MEN Lite and thelondonpaper.
Meanwhile,
BBC News Oniline, Guardian Unlimited, the Manchester Evening News, Newbury Today, Pinkun.com, Telegraph.co.uk, and Times Online are nominated for the “Electronic News Site of the Year”, an award described as “The Press Computer Systems Award for all electronic news sites”.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 November 2006 at 19:14
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Guardian Unlimited, Times Online
The growth in the number of blogs around the world is slowing somewhat, but “a few thousand” people are now blogging for a living, according to the latest “State of the Blogosphere” report by Technorati founder Dave Sifry.
The latest edition of Sifry’s quarterly report, which was released this week, seems to shows that Technorati now tracks 57 million blogs worldwide.
The number of blogs is doubling approximately every 230 days, a figure that represents a slight slowing in the growth of the number of blogs.
Around 100,000 new blogs are added to the Technorati database each day, but that the growth is slowing slightly.
But as the MIT Advertising Lab blog points out, however, this may be a statistical glitch caused by improvements in Technorati’s ability to filter out automatically-generated spam blogs designed to defraud contextual advertising services. If fewer such splogs are being counted, it is possible that more genuine blogs are being created than ever.
Sifry told Frank Barnako of Marketwatch that “a few thousand” people are now blogging for a living. Most bloggers, Sifry said, do not make enough money to live on, but “hundreds of thousands” can at least cover their bandwidth costs with income from their blogs.
A major factor in the growth of commerical blogging, is the emergence of advertising brokerages being set up by groups of popular bloggers. MessageSpace in the UK is one example of this.
Sifry’s report also shows that BBC News Online remains the British news source that is most frequently linked to by bloggers. The BBC was sixth over all in that league table, with Guardian Unlimited 11th and Times Online 17th.
