Newspapers Define Pillars of Transformation at mediaXchange

By Mark Contreras
(The following is an excerpt from the speech Mark Contreras gave at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference in Dallas, March 25-28, 2011)

The cowboy-poet Jim Moroney has always been an inspiration and role model for me, and a comment he made several months prior to the April board meeting of the NAA made a lasting impact. He said, "I don't mind getting together to do things. I just don't want to waste our time getting together to talk about doing things and then never accomplishing anything."
Much of what Jim said helped guide the tone, cadence, and sense of urgency for what the NAA board accomplished during the past 12 months, and I now hear Jim's prodding in many of the discussions occurring in the industry today.
Last April, we sent out a widely distributed note to those in the NAA database asking a simple question: "What are the two or three issues important to your business that the newspaper industry should try to solve collectively?"
The note went on to say, "Our goal is to cull your responses and, early this summer, gather a group of willing industry participants to discuss appropriate action and then act."
We got a very good response from a large cross-section of NAA members, and Randy Bennett and his staff whittled the responses down to approximately 60 themes. Then we got them down to 13 themes, and then - during a special board meeting in August in Chicago - to four:

* We must better protect our intellectual property and better monetize our content.
* Newspapers must agree upon mobile advertising standards.
* We must better communicate and promote the full value of the audiences we deliver across multiple media.
* We must provide an industry-wide digital shopping experience, particularly for our national advertisers.

I'd like to walk you through each of these four areas of opportunity and share how your board turned each of these opportunities into action.

Getting Paid for Content
A recent PEW study confirmed something very important: Newspapers still account for more than half of all originally reported journalism in the United States.
That journalism comes from our talent, our investment, our infrastructure, and our experience. It's the very heart of our business. But the question is, what do we get for all that?
The answer: not enough.
Way too many Web businesses are getting a free ride from the content we create. We've worked hard at the policy level to protect our intellectual property, yet the content produced by more than 1,400 newspapers is still circulating out there in a literal free-for-all of electronic cut-and-paste.
Technology and the Internet will continue to morph, tantalizing consumers with new devices and even more ways to receive news and information. Getting our content on those screens is easy. Getting it there in a way that is profitable and protects our investment is another matter entirely.
The good news is that it can work.
Working from the foundation provided by the AP's news registry, and from consensus achieved during last summer's board meeting, the industry is forming the News Licensing Group: a separate, industry-operated organization dedicated to tracking, licensing, and finding new models to monetize our medium's high-quality content. None of this would have happened without the courageous leadership
of the AP's Tom Curley.
Today, they have received commitments for funding and are putting leadership into place.

Mobile Ad Standards
While we eagerly follow the progress of the News Licensing Group, we're also tackling issues related to the explosion of digital mobility.
By next year, there will be 250 million wireless devices: Smartphones, tablets, iPads, e-readers, and other mobile screens are being activated at the rate of 200,000 per day worldwide.
In the past, newspaper companies have left money on the table by not making it easier for customers to buy across markets in print and on the Web. In the mobile space, we now have a sizeable opportunity to collaborate on standard business practices and a national sales strategy.
One industry watcher refers to it as our "digital do-over."
Jim Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News, and a large group of companies are leading the effort to develop a more efficient sales network for advertisers; one that offers easy access to high-quality newspaper audiences across the nation.

Industry Promotion
The NAA board approved an industry-wide promotion campaign that you'll be hearing lots about in the near future. The campaign will highlight the powerful attributes that our audiences bring to the table.
Donna Barrett, CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., demonstrated impressive leadership in moving us toward a campaign that companies with both big newspapers and small newspapers could get behind. She wisely enlisted the help of the Martin Agency, famous for the GEICO Gecko campaign and several others.
You'll find the campaign new, fresh, and complete with a great tag line: "Smart is the new sexy."

Digital Shopping Experience
Advertisers also communicated their needs in digital media, and so our next focus is to better position newspapers to capture retail dollars as they inevitably move from print to digital.
Several companies are building robust digital-shopping platforms, and we have asked the industry to coalesce around two or three, rather than 10 or 12, to again provide a more efficient buy for retailers.
We're also looking to develop standard business practices across platforms and exploring a national sales channel to promote our value proposition and drive more digital revenue to newspaper properties.
We're in about the 7th inning of this process, and Doug Franklin, the recently promoted president of Cox Media, deserves enormous credit for his fair and persistent leadership in this endeavor.
All of us owe Tom Curley, Jim Moroney, Donna Barrett, and Doug Franklin a very big thank-you for their selflessness on behalf of our industry.
Will these four initiatives automatically solve all of our economic and audience challenges? No, but I firmly believe that they will help change minds and change perceptions of our industry in the years ahead.

A Single Definition of Online Audience
There's another area of concentration that I'm partial to, one that cuts across the four priorities I've just laid out, and that is to create a more unified and powerful argument concerning the audiences we reach.
Have you ever tried to get directions from a group of people who all want to help? How about if they all spoke a different language? That's what our advertisers are grappling with.
Three or four different systems are competing to tell the world how to measure and value our digital audience. We need a gold standard of measurement: one way of looking at digital audiences and one way of presenting the facts to advertisers.
We've just signed on to a coalition led by the Interactive Advertising Bureau that includes the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the NAA.
The long-term goal is to create one trusted third-party with broad oversight of the audience metrics process that will be clear, consistent, accepted, and unimpeachable - driven by the business needs of buyers and sellers, not the interests of the research suppliers.
It's an important step for advertisers and media buyers across platforms, but it's a critical step for newspapers because without this there is no credible way to tell the story that I believe to be true with all my heart: Newspapers have never reached larger audiences than they do today.
There's just no mutually agreed-upon way to tell that story today, but I believe that's about to change.
The excellent work being done by NAA staff is helping to further this business in so many ways: from the wonderful programming for this meeting, to creating a bridge between our industry and digital giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
And they ensure that critical messages about the growth in online ad revenue, the realities of our reach, and our increasing digital muscle are well-covered within the business, financial, and trade press.
Overall, the staff of NAA - John, Paul, Randy, and others - have been extremely hard at work on our behalf, and we owe them a debt of gratitude as well.
We have a large, complex, and pressing to-do list. We have to accept the complexity and embrace the urgency. But in the process, we can't lose our identity or forget why our newsrooms are so important to the communities we serve.
The reason I got into this business is because I worked for Paul Simon, former senator from Illinois. He was a great legislator, first in the House, then a long career in the Senate.
He was a very smart man: author, Harvard professor, presidential candidate, but he started as a newspaper publisher.
He turned a bankrupt paper, the Troy Tribune, into a successful chain of 14 weeklies. His editorial stances - particularly campaigns against government corruption - pointed him toward politics.
At the height of his legislative power, he told me something I've never forgotten: "I love being a senator," he said, "but I made much more of a difference as a publisher."
It wasn't until I was well into this business myself that I began to understand the full meaning behind those words.
A cheap laptop and some free software means anybody can publish, but that does not make them a newspaper publisher. With enough time, some smart investment, creative thinking, and shared commitment, we can do what anybody in media can do.
But nobody can do what we do.
Nobody has the infrastructure, the history, or the responsibility. It's ours. And we can build on it. But to build with effectiveness and relevance we can't look at the world from 1,400 perspectives. We're one industry.
We have to use the leadership and the resources of the NAA to maximum effect. We have to focus on the main pillars of transformation, the value of our content, the value of our reach, and the value of our role in a free and informed society.

* Mark Contreras is senior vice president/newspapers at the E.W. Scripps Co.

Source: Editorandpublisher.com

A voice for Under Age writers

“WE can’t drink, drive or vote, but we can write”: so say the 12 young journalists behind new online newspaper The Under Age.
The Under Age, launched last week, is a collaboration between Fairfax Media’s The Age and youth media organisation Express Media. It is written entirely by Victorian high school students.
The young writers gather each fortnight at Media House in Melbourne to brainstorm and workshop story ideas – ranging from Facebook angst to political tensions in Syria – and collaborate with industry professionals.
“We have so many people coming to us and asking about how they can get involved at the Age, and this is just about getting young people engaged with news media,” said Ben Haywood, the manager of youth strategic publications at The Age.
Mr Haywood said almost two dozen Age editorial staff – including Liz Minchin, Michael Lallo, Emma Quayle and Dan Flitton – had put their hands up to work with the young writers. He added that while Under Age writers would receive guidance and advice from Age staff, editorial curatorship remained in their hands.
“We want to empower the editorial team to look at contributions themselves. They own the direction it takes and the stories they choose,” he said.
“The Age have been wonderfully supportive,” said project coordinator Bhakthi Puvanenthiran. “We’ve got kids from all over Melbourne and the state, so that’s been good to get the diversity.”
Ms Puvanenthiran was optimistic about the future of the partnership.
“[I’m] not sure what the long term plan is at this stage, but with such positive feedback, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be repeated in the future.”

Source: panpa.org.au

Hold the front page - it's time US papers had a redesign

The Wall Street Journal looks fresh and modern, and circulation is rising. For many other American newspapers, neither of those things is true


Here are three seemingly unrelated things you notice this only-in-America week. One is the rise and rise of the Wall Street Journal, up 1.2% (to 2,117,796 average copies a day) on the latest US ABC figures. Another is the impressive run of newspaper front pages posted outside the plush new Newseum in Washington DC, proclaiming Osama's death. And the third is yet another brooding prophecy of the demise of printed newspapers (this time from Ken Doctor, one of the leading US media analysts).
How long have they got? Maybe five years, maybe 15, says Ken. "Today's daily newspaper companies have little chance of surviving in anything resembling tomorrow's form very far into the future… You can't find anyone who says he has a proven, sustainable business model for moving forward." Oh woe!, as per usual, oh gloom round the globe! But hang on a moment…
You don't need to love Rupert Murdoch to admire what he's done with the WSJ. Sir Harold Evans, the white knight of the Sunday Times, has joined that fan club. The Journal (circulation revenue growing 17 straight quarters in a row, digital subscriptions up as well, by nearly 22% in a year to over half a million) has boosted its weekend edition with two new sections, added a controversial Greater New York news section, and produced the WSJ magazine more often. In short, it hasn't stood still.
The layout is crisp and notably shorter on "turns" of stories from page to page. On royal wedding morning plus one, it ran a well-focused picture across three-quarters of the front. It projects and bounces with confidence. It feels like a paper on the move.
Now examine those other front pages outside the Newseum. They're pleased that public enemy number one is dead, of course. Cue exultant headlines. But stand back on the pavement, take in the panorama, and something else registers. They all – from Lexington to Des Moines to Pueblo – look much the same. They're ex-broadsheets in format with columns squeezed to save newsprint (from crunch to crunch). They're mean, constricted, somehow shrivelling away. It's as though they'd read Ken Doctor's latest obituary and taken a turn for the worse.
That doesn't apply to the few remaining giants of the industry, to be sure. The New York Times and Washington Post may have shrunk a little, but they still seem papers in traditional mode – perhaps too traditional. Do you want a print paper, in this digital world, to turn every single one of its front-page tales to different pages inside? The Times seems to think you do. And not just that: it turns arts and business stories from their front pages inside their respective sections as well. There's nothing to read at one go. The writer, never trimmed to fit, comes first; the reader-cum-consumer doesn't seem to count. The world of Simon Kelner's i is far, far away.
Is the Washington Post also pretty much the design product you remember over the decades since Watergate – locked in a time warp, making fuzzy use of colour, prone to let stories run and run, turn and turn? Alas, yes: it, too, seems to have reacted to a world of pell-mell transition by staying much where it was. Even USA Today, which seemed to offer something fresh in the 1980s, has barely tweaked a concept since.
Newspaper websites are different. They change all the time, in look, scope and energy. $13m of NYT spending geared up its paywall. But you can't read newsstand papers in America for very long without feeling that the force is no longer with them – not because they can't still make tracks, but because faith, hope and creative endeavour have been diverted elsewhere. Suicide through atrophy.
So those three, supposedly unrelated, things are linked after all. Can the Wall Street Journal, flush with investment and edited by an Aussie Brit fresh from London's Times, advance on both print and digital fronts? It seems so. No matter that News Corp quarterly profits have taken a dive. Where there's Murdoch will, there appears to be a way. When you clear out the old obsession with a newspaper as some kind of ancestral template, you can gain, not lose, circulation.
Daily Mail executives, fresh from their 65-million-a-month unique browser figures in the latest ABCe audits, say quietly that one reason for their startling online rise in the US is simply that they do journalism sharper and better. Well, you don't need to get too mired in a controversy like that. But the US showbusiness site at Mail Online certainly knocks aggregated spots off its American competitors, at least for the moment. And the stories themselves are written hard and fast for maximum screen consumption.
So there's one question you won't find answered inside the splendour of the Newseum, the self-reverential Gannett temple of print down the ages. Are we talking tides of history here amid portents of inevitable doom? Or have too many plump, worried rabbits got caught in the headlights somewhere down Pennsylvania Avenue?

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Dare to be different

When a big story breaks, editors face the challenge of trying to avoid telling readers what they already know. MALCOLM COLLESS explores the options:

THE recent devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan highlighted a critical challenge for newspaper editors: how to strike a balance between saturation coverage and the need to be different.
It’s a hard call in the immediate aftermath of something as enormous as this but the issue becomes more pertinent in ensuing days particularly with print competing against continuous electronic media updates, specifically on television.
It is not surprising that reader and viewer attention is captivated by the impact of such major calamities.
But the increasingly common decision by TV network editors to abandon normal programming for continuous coverage – sometimes over several days – may well be turning people off, particularly when much of the footage, including interviews, is being carouselled.
Newspaper response seems to display an editorial judgment that more is better (and possibly safer). Hence, the papers compete for attention with bigger and bigger sections covering these issues.
Of course, this approach is not unique to calamities. Take for example the annual coverage of the national budgets. The dailies strive to out-do each other by boasting more details, more stories, more comments and opinions and of course more pages than their competitors.
Is this what the reader really wants, or is it a run down on the key issues in the Budget and their impact on their day-to-day existence?
Politics, they say, is more about perception than reality.
And there seems to be a growing community perception that news has become a casualty in the rising tide of comment and opinion in our media outlets.
While this is a criticism of newspapers, it is not confined to print and can be seen in the way “news” is delivered on the television networks, including the ABC.
Long gone are the days when a by-line was a prized reward for a story – often preserved for scoops or major interpretive pieces.
Today, everyone gets a by-line no matter what the size or importance of the story and more often than not it is accompanied by a colour pic of the author.
And all of this is supported by a seemingly endless parade of contributing experts delivering their own, highly profiled, views on major events.
Meanwhile, the traditional definition of news is becoming even more blurred as we find television breakfast show presenters, who are not even journalists, flying in to deliver their programs from catastrophes including mining disasters, and flood and earthquake ravaged cities.
The eternal problem for print is that it is finite.
Once a newspaper is published, that is it.
The concept of a 24-hour newspaper died at birth assisted initially by the growth of the internet that extended from PCs to laptops to phones.
To survive, print has to be part of this. So far the electronic media has continued to draw heavily on the traditional print editorial pool to bolster its coverage of issues.
In other words you are more likely to hear or see a newspaper journalist on TV or radio than to see an electronic media journalist interviewed in a newspaper.
But does this reflect readership and circulation trends, or is it more a matter of convention?
Whatever the case, the print media will continue to come under growing pressure from alternative sources of information and from the increasing challenge, particularly from the younger market, to the relevance of traditional content.
It may well come to pass that what is going to rapidly confront newspapers is not just the challenge to dare to be different, but how long can they afford not to be different and from each other.

Malcolm Colless is a former senior executive at News Ltd and writes a column for The Australian’s media section.

Source: Panpa.org.au

News Corp set to unveil iPad newspaper

WASHINGTON - After months of top secret development, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. appears poised to take the wraps off a digital newspaper for the iPad called "The Daily."
News Corp. has been tight-lipped about the project but the Australian-born media mogul acknowledged its existence for the first time in an interview last week with his Fox Business Network.
Asked what "exciting projects" his sprawling media and entertainment company was working on, the 79-year-old Murdoch cited The Daily but offered no further information about the tabloid for Apple's touchscreen tablet computer.
Details about the project have been dribbling out in the US media for weeks, however, and The New York Times, citing two employees who requested anonymity, said News Corp. intends to launch The Daily before the end of the year.
The Times said Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic at The New Yorker magazine, would become its culture editor. Others reported to be involved include Jesse Angelo, executive editor of Murdoch's New York Post, Richard Johnson, former editor of the Post's gossip page, and Greg Clayman, the former head of Viacom's digital division, who has been tapped to head business operations at The Daily.
Forbes magazine put the total staff on the project at around 150 and said News Corp. has budgeted 30 million dollars for the first year of the launch.
The Daily brings together three of Murdoch's passions -- newspapers, the iPad and finding a way to charge readers for content online in an era of shrinking newspaper circulation and eroding print advertising revenue.
Murdoch began his career with a single newspaper in his native Australia and while he has expanded into television, movies and book publishing, the News Corp. chairman has always been clear that newspapers are his obsession.
At the same time, Murdoch has a serious crush on the iPad, calling it a "game-changer" and potential saviour of the struggling newspaper industry.

In an interview in April with The Kalb Report, Murdoch called the iPad a "glimpse of the future."

"There's going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world," he said. "It may be the saving of newspapers because you don't have the costs of paper, ink, printing, trucks.
"I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper," Murdoch admitted, but "if you have less newspapers and more of these that's OK."
"It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form," he said.
Whether Murdoch plans to charge readers a subscription fee for The Daily is not yet known but the News Corp. chief has made making consumers pay for news online his personal crusade.
The Wall Street Journal requires a subscription for full access to WSJ.com and Britain's The Times and The Sunday Times, two other News Corp. newspapers, recently erected pay walls around their websites.
Murdoch has vowed to begin charging for online access to all of his titles and said in August that he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up doing the same.
"You'll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall," he said, dismissing arguments that readers used to getting news on the Internet for free would be reluctant to pay.
News Corp. chief digital officer Jon Miller told top technology and media executives at a gathering in Aspen, Colorado, in July that the iPad may allow the news industry to start charging for content online after years of giving it away for free.
"I think we're seeing a fundamental shift in where content is consumed and it's on to these kinds of devices," he said. "These tablets are heavy media consumption devices, much more than the Web by itself and even smartphones."
He said the iPad and other tablets being developed offer "very media rich experiences that I think do allow a re-set, perhaps a do-over for the media industry, a chance to get it right."

Source: AFP

Cut the price? Raise the price? Neither seems to work, according to the ABCs

The Daily Star lost 70,000 sales when it raised its cover price. The Sun kept its price low – and lost 70,000 copies

National newspapers' ABC audited sales figures for October arrive full of talking points and lip-chewing dilemmas. See, price matters: once the Daily Star stopped selling at 20p it lost 70,000 copies in a month. See, price doesn't always help: while the Sun hung on at 30p it lost 70,000 as well, but the 45p Mirror actually gained a couple of thousand. See, the Sunday Times, up to £2.20, has shed 3.07%: but see, too, that no Sunday rival (with the Observer 3.7% down) has made gains.

See, the Times is having a lousy run since its paywall went up in May. It sold 515,379 then, but 479,107 in October. Is that because the wall means out of sight, out of mind — or because Times readers don't like paying a pound for their fix, like everybody else?

See, the Independent, piling on 24,000 bulks in a year, (now up to 63,990 free giveaways against a mere 87,235 sold at £1) may be going free by stealth. But the rather muted launch of its little brother, i, doesn't seem to have blighted its modest sale, or that of any of its immediate competitors yet. They're all down just a bit. But see, too, that all the publicity in the world doesn't bring automatic reward: the News of the World, down 4.62% month on month and 8.24% year on year, is now the worst performing redtop around.

Source: guardian.co.uk

The extinction timeline

A futurist's advice: Newspapers will need to apply existing capabilities in new ways

According to the predictions of futurist Ross Dawson, we can be guaranteed newspaper jobs in the UAE until at least 2030. He has created a map to serve as a timeline of the eventual demise of print media worldwide. The map indicates newspapers will be “insignificant” in 52 countries by 2040; in USA the date is near 2017, it’s 2019 for England, 2034 for Saudi Arabia and 2040 for India.

In a exclusive interview, Ross answered five questions:

In contrast with America, Middle East and Asia newspapers are still doing good business. What’s your opinion about the future for newspapers in these regions?

As suggested in my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, there is a wide divergence in the success of newspapers around the world. In many countries, newspaper circulation and revenue are increasing. In time, the same forces that are making newspapers struggle in countries such as the US and UK will apply, but these challenges could be many years away.

Do you think there a way to revitalise newspapers and save them from extinction?

The future of the global economy will be largely centred on media in the broadest sense. The media organisations of today, such as newspapers, are well positioned to take advantage of that, in creating and editing content, and tapping large audiences. The challenge will be to take existing capabilities and apply them in new ways. The path forward for every newspaper will be different.

Do you still read newspapers? If so which ones rate as favourites?

I never buy newspapers, and only read them if they are in an airport lounge, coffee shop, or hotel. However if they are around, I enjoy reading many papers, such as New York Times, Financial Times, or Le Monde.

What is your advice for newspapers in regions like the Middle East and Asia where print media are still strong?

Many newspapers are threatened today because they didn’t fundamentally change their business even when the writing was on the wall years ago. Those newspapers in parts of the world where the industry is doing better will in turn hit the wall and collapse in time if they don’t start changing today. The imperative is to build new channels, reposition, and shift for the reality of a changing world.

What comes next? After the internet and social networking, is there anything more to be discovered in the media world?

Some of the emerging trends in media are reputation measures for media organisations and individual journalists, the social curation of news to give insights that are uniquely relevant to us, building new transaction-based revenue models, and media becoming a real hub for communities in a way that we still rarely see today. Media will dominate the economy, and in many ways be barely recognisable from the industry we see today.

Source: gulfnews.com

In Demand

A week inside the future of journalism

By Nicholas Spangler

I spent eight years at The Miami Herald, mainly writing features, and when the paper laid me off in 2009, I was humiliated and sad. But people told me getting laid off could be a good thing and I listened to them. “Invent” and “take charge” and “define” are some of the words I remember from those conversations, which left me, in hindsight, manically deluded about my prospects.

I moved to New York, where I’d always wanted to live. I thought I would polish off a few story ideas and a friend’s idea for a screenplay I’d been toying with (it featured, unwisely, a terminally blocked romance novelist); then, after a suitable period, reinvented and redefined and fully in charge, I would find another job as a reporter.

But the screenplay foundered. The story ideas turned out to be not very good and I could not think of new ones. The well was dry. So I started looking for a job, at first confining my search to New York and Washington. There were reporting jobs of a peculiar sort in these cities, and my cover letters included lines like, “My knowledge of the nuclear power industry is admittedly scant” and “Although I speak no Japanese, I know New York City intimately.”

For a long time I did not come close to any job, and then I found Demand Media, which ran help-wanted ads on JournalismJobs.com and Mediabistro.com. Demand’s own site featured a picture of a laptop on a table in front of a beachfront tiki bar. Sometimes instead there was a picture of a good-looking woman sitting with her laptop in a comfortable chair. She looked happy. She was beaming. I wanted to look like that.

Demand, which launched in 2006, doesn’t do news, which is expensive to produce and perishable. It does “commercial content.” If you’ve watched a how-to video on YouTube or read an instructional article on the web, you’ve probably consumed Demand content. More than 2 million pieces were online by mid-summer, with more than 5,000 new ones appearing every day. In September, Demand attracted nearly 59 million unique visitors, according to comScore, the Internet marketing research firm (Nytimes.com, by comparison, the nation’s top newspaper site, had 33 million), to its company-owned websites like eHow and Livestrong, and more to its 350 client sites, which incorporate some of Demand’s content. Among Demand’s clients are websites operated by USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Houston Chronicle.

Demand and its competitors—there are several, including AOL’s Seed and Yahoo’s Associated Content—rely on algorithms and search data to determine what content consumers are seeking, what content advertisers are willing to pay for, and what content can be profitably produced. There are no news meetings. There are no newsrooms. The editorial workforce is freelance, compensated by the piece, at a rate that varies but is never far from skimpy.

Demand and the specter it represents—what Clay Shirky calls the radical “commodification” of content, without regard to civic value or subjective judgments about quality or any of the other sentimental trappings of the Murrow century—have inspired loathing and awe, but mostly loathing, in the class of people that pays attention to such things. Which is to say, mainly journalists and those who love them. “We’ve got former members writing this stuff,” says Bernie Lunzer, of The Newspaper Guild. “Some are just glad to have work. They’re becoming just a raw commodity bought at the cheapest price and that, essentially, is what Demand stands for. It spells the end of what we consider journalism.”

Or take Ken Doctor, former newspaperman turned news futurist and author of the book Newsonomics: “This is the logical extension of a long-time strategy to eke out profits by squeezing labor and overhead costs.”

Most news organizations already use search-engine-optimization strategies to push their content on the web. Within five years, says Doctor, SEO and advanced metrics will play a prominent role in decisions about what to cover and how heavily to cover it, with reporters and stories graded by the number and value of the consumers they attract. “It’s a box that, once you look inside, you can’t not look,” Doctor says.

One possible consequence of looking in the box is that news organizations will increasingly turn to companies like Demand for their evergreen content. Quality may suffer, at least initially, but the money news organizations save could be redirected to actual newsgathering, benefiting not just readers but the commonweal. If, in the future, consumers demand higher-quality content from the evergreen material, wages may stabilize for the para-professional workforce producing it, as Demand and others compete for a limited number of skilled content producers.

Or not. Doctor envisions not so much a race to the bottom as a race to mediocrity, the “good-enough” that is all consumers may really want, which would mean the end of most quality journalism and the end of journalism as a middle-class profession.

In August, Demand filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public stock offering that could value the company at $1.5 billion. Forty-five percent of the company’s $198.5 million in revenue in 2009 came from a domain-registry service that is the world’s second-largest, with more than 10 million names. Besides the cash it throws off, the registry is a valuable source of information on people’s search habits, and a list of potential outlets for Demand content. The other part of that $198.5 million, the part everyone talks about, came mostly in pennies and fractions of pennies earned on video and search advertising.

For most of its brief existence, Demand has been a money-loser, and it finished 2009 with a $22 million loss. But its sec filing contains numbers that would make newspaper executives salivate: every dollar spent on written content in 2008’s third quarter, for instance, is projected to return $1.58.

Source: cjr.org

Change of direction for Guardian Media?

The Guardian Media Group (GMG) is to undergo a change of strategy under plans drawn up by its new chief executive, Andrew Miller, reports today's Sunday Times print edition [not online].

The paper claims that GMG will be restructured by separating its newspapers - The Guardian and The Observer, and their websites - from the rest of its multi-media assets.

Those assets include its holdings in Trader Media Group and the b2b magazine publisher Emap - both jointly owned with private equity firm, Apax - plus radio stations and property websites.

The Sunday Times further claims that Miller is considering a sale or stock market listing of the lucrative Trader division. Its principal brand, the Auto Trader car magazine, could be worth more than £1.5bn with its associated websites.

This claim is a repetition of the story run by the Sunday Times on 17 October, Guardian mulls Trader sale [behind paywall].

It quoted a GMG spokesperson as saying: "Trader Media Group is a very strong business and well advanced in its digital transition, which makes it a valuable asset for GMG.

"No decisions have been made about either the timing or nature of our exit from this investment."

Source: Guardian.co.uk

New York Times Co. Posts $4.3 Million Loss

The New York Times Company on Tuesday reported a $4.3 million net loss for the third quarter as advertising and circulation revenue declined, and charges at The Boston Globe weighed on the bottom line. That result, which translates into a loss of about 3 cents a share, was an improvement from the period a year ago, when losses were 25 cents a share.

The Times Company, which publishes its namesake newspaper in addition to The Globe, The International Herald Tribune and a number of regional newspapers and owns About.com, continued to accumulate cash. And costs, at $522.9 million, were essentially flat compared with the period a year ago.

On an operating basis, the company said it had earned $9 million, up from a loss of $23.7 million in the third quarter a year ago.

Total revenue decreased 2.7 percent, to $554.3 million, in the third quarter compared with the period a year ago. Advertising revenue dropped 1 percent while circulation revenue fell 4.8 percent. Digital advertising, which now makes up 27 percent of the company’s overall advertising revenue, rose 14.6 percent.

In the company’s News Media Group, which includes the newspaper businesses, advertising revenue fell 1.7 percent, as a 21.6 percent increase in online ad sales helped offset a 5.8 percent decrease in print ad revenue.

Looking to the fourth quarter, the Times Company said it expected the print advertising market to “improve modestly” and digital advertising to grow 10 percent. It cautioned, however, that circulation revenue was expected to continue falling 4 to 5 percent, and that newsprint prices would rise.

At the company’s New York Times Media Group, which includes The Herald Tribune, advertising rose 1.6 percent over all. That division’s reliance on national advertising, which has shown growth in recent months, helped buoy the results.

Advertising revenue at About.com grew 5.3 percent, to $30.9 million.

Other divisions did not fare as well. At the Regional Media Group, which includes newspapers like The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida and The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., revenue fell 4.5 percent. Revenue at the New England Media Group, which includes The Globe, dropped 6.2 percent.

The two one-time costs at The Globe that contributed to the company’s quarterly loss included a $16.1 million write-down of assets in the sale of a printing facility in Billerica, Mass., and $6.3 million for pension obligations.

Despite the difficulties in some areas, executives stressed that the company had steadied other areas of its business.

“We have remained vigilant in managing our expenses, and we were able to keep our third-quarter operating costs virtually flat with the third quarter last year, despite higher compensation costs and newsprint prices, and investments in our digital offerings,” the chief executive, Janet L. Robinson, said in a statement.

The company reported that it had $129 million in cash on hand and debt of $774 million, compared with $102 million in cash and $773 million in debt at the end of the second quarter. Ms. Robinson said this month that the company planned to repay a high-interest $250 million loan from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú by Jan. 15, 2012, the earliest date possible.

Source: nytimes.com

Newspaper asks readers: 'What would you cut?'

A regional daily newspaper is asking its readers which items of wasteful public spending they would cut as the Chancellor prepares to reveal where the government's axe will fall.
The Belfast Telegraph is calling on its readers to help it expose where taxpayers' money is not being well spent.
It launched its 'War on Waste' campaign ahead of the government's spending review, which is due to be unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne in a Commons statement today.
The paper has started the campaign to ensure public organisations spend every pound of taxpayers' money well and will report on examples of waste highlighted by readers.
Editor Mike Gilson said: "The cutbacks are highly likely to affect everybody in some way. We need to keep pushing the case for adequate funding for Northern Ireland, while at the same time making sure that savings are made in the right places.
"That is why we have launched War on Waste. We all know of anecdotal evidence of wasteful and inefficient practices.
"We are not interested in lambasting public bodies. It is very much in the interests of employees themselves to stamp out waste."
The Telegraph is inviting public sector employees, as well as those in the private sector, to blow the whistle on wasteful practices with an online form, which can be anonymous.
Chancellor George Osborne is due to announce later today where the government will make major public sector cuts to tackle the deficit under the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Source: holdthefrontpage.co.uk

Is the iPad Really the Savior of the Newspaper Industry?

Even before the iPad was revealed, analysts, pundits and the publishing industry were already heralding the tablet as the platform that would save the industry from declining readership and dropping revenue.
The iPad’s high-res display, large screen, digital delivery and interactive capabilities were lauded as the next generation of tools that print publishers could use to woo their readers back into the fold.
Now, six months after the iPad’s launch, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at which newspapers have taken advantage of the digital platform, and the state of the market today.
We recently tested the apps ourselves and spoke with content creators and industry experts to get an overview of where newspaper iPad apps are — and where they might be headed in the future.

Adopting a New Way to Consume News
In order for the general public to consume their daily news on a tablet device, they have to own one. Although great things are promised for the consumer tablet, recent data from ABI Research suggests that at the current rate of sales, such devices won’t reach what’s considered “mass-market penetration” until 2013.
However, there are enough devices out there to make app building worthwhile. Apple sold 3 million iPads within 80 days of the product’s release in the U.S., with the most recent sales figures (dating back from July)coming in at 3.27 million sold.
Wall Street analysts Bernstein Research suggest that the iPad is enjoying the fastest adoption rate of a consumer electronics gadget ever — even overtaking the DVD player and Apple stable-mate the iPhone .
Forecasters at the Harrison Group found that 13% of all American consumers showed “interest” in buying a tablet device between now and next September, with potential sales of up to 15 million units. In fact, some reports suggest that the iPad’s popularity could affect PC and laptop sales figures as consumers opt for the touchscreen tablet over a new netbook or upgrading an old PC.
As far as the wider market goes, Apple is far from the only player. RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, the Android -based Samsung Galaxy Tab, and HP’s PalmPad are just a few of the alternatives due soon on competing operating systems.
And the good news for content creators on the tablet platform is that consumers are hungry. The Harrison Group survey found that tablet users spend nearly 75% more time reading newspapers and newspaper articles, and 25% more time reading books.
Those surveyed were apparently so convinced by the digital delivery and form factor, that 81% of tablet owners believe that it is inevitable that all forms of publications will eventually be produced almost exclusively in a digital format.

Establishing Pricing and Attracting Readers
So what is the current state of the newspaper app market for the iPad? Six months after the iPad’s launch, more than 900 apps populate the “News ” category in the App Store in both the U.S. and the UK. News is a broad category, however, and it includes feed readers, other types of content aggregators, websites’ iPad apps, and even magazine apps.
The number of actual dedicated newspaper iPad apps is low — surprisingly low if you consider how the platform was heralded as the savior of the industry. In the U.S. the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are the main options, along with a recently released “complete” version of The New York Times’ app. As far as big names in the UK market goes, The Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Express and The Sun offer apps, while The Telegraph is currently dipping its toe into the water with an Audi-backed app.
Out of those options, only the USA Today, The New York Times and a trial version of The Telegraph apps are free. The others require payment to either download or access full content, making them a “personal choice luxury” rather than a must-have download, considering how many free options exist. (It should be noted that while The New York Times app is currently free, you will need an account to access all of the content once the paywall goes up in January 2011).
So why is this the case? Surely struggling publishing companies would do well to attract as many users to their apps as possible in order to increase brand loyalty and make money from mobile advertising.
Paul Gillin, a social marketing consultant and author of the Newspaper Death Watch blog suggests that, in time, apps could be a “significant revenue stream” as the platform grows. He says that newspaper companies are wary of falling into the same trap they did when free online versions of their papers debuted, making it hard for a pay structure to be introduced at a later date.
This assertion is backed up by data from the Association of Online Publishers “Content & Trends Census 2010.” The census revealed that apps are seen as “the most significant route for mobile Internet revenue opportunities,” according to the UK publishing companies (not limited to newspapers) that took part. In fact, 61% expect to see significant revenue from subscription services, compared to 55% via sponsorship and 46% via in-app advertising.
The same AOP research also reveals that while 16% of online publishers currently have paid-for iPad apps, another 60% are planning to introduce one in the next 12 months.
“Publishers are establishing pricing from the start,” says Tim Cain, head of research and insight at the AOP.
“iPad apps are being seen differently [than] mobile apps. It’s thought that people value them differently and will be prepared to pay.”

Readers Respond to Subscriptions and Pay Up
So just how many people are prepared to pay, and how many are using the apps? Different companies have different policies on revealing their download figures and are generally even more secretive about subscription stats.
We can, however, note a few choice numbers. The WSJ for iPad has been downloaded more than 650,000 times since its launch and has “thousands” of paying subscribers. The FT’s iPad Edition option has seen 400,000 downloads and is credited for driving 10% of all FT digital subscriptions since its launch. Meanwhile, USA Today’s free app has had a slightly higher download figure of over a million.
If companies are guarded about download stats and subscription figures, they are even more guarded about how those relate to revenue. This is not the case for the Financial Times, however, as Ben Hughes, the paper’s deputy chief executive recently revealed to The Guardian that its iPad app’s 400,000 subscribers have helped the app reach £1 million (approximately $1.5 million) in advertising revenue since May.
And previous reports note that in-app iAds are fetching as much as five times the price of online advertising, with click-through rates reported to be significantly higher (15% versus 0.10% in a recent NYTM campaign from JPMorgan Chase & Co) on the tablet device than a website.

News Organizations Harness the iPad’s Possibilities
These stats show that consumers are obviously downloading and using these apps, but which consumers? Are the papers cannibalizing their own print and online audiences with shiny new apps? Or are the App Store offerings opening up a different market to the titles?
“The iPad definitely provides a valuable platform for newspapers to engage their readers in a new way and, in many cases, to appeal to a different set of readers,” says Dena Levitz, manager of digital strategies for the Newspaper Association of America. “Mobile is going to be a growth area going forward, and tablets are one exciting subset of that larger trend.”
The Dow Jones & Company’s senior director of corporate communications Ashley S.Huston says the Wall Street Journal’s plan is to offer content wherever readers are. “We know that readers consume news and information on multiple devices … The iPad app complements our existing print and digital offerings with an experience created specifically for the iPad.”
USA Today, meanwhile, notes the obvious portability the platform offers, making it a good choice for those away from home. Matt Jones, vice president of mobile strategy and operations for Gannett/USA Today tells us: “Our target is the early and middle stage tech adopter, frequent traveler and general news/sports/entertainment enthusiast.”
Despite the comprehensive content in the Financial Times iPad Edition, the publishers view the app as a “companion product,” and notes the value of easy global distribution in places where it’s more difficult to distribute a print copy, according to Steve Pinches, lead product development manager at FT.com.
So far we’ve only considered national titles. Regional newspapers, arguably the hardest-hit markets, could take advantage of the iPad’s potential too, like UK publishing company KOS Media did with its free Kent News for iPad, which was released in August.
The company is not releasing its download stats, so we have no way of knowing how popular the launch has been, or if, as KOS Media claimed at launch, it has offered “huge advantages” to iPad owners.
With national publications seeing an increase in click-through rates on its in-app advertisements, it would make sense then that location-based advertising might see similar success. And that success could be replicated by local papers. They should view the tablet platform as the potential savior it was initially billed as.

Newspapers Must Adapt Again to New Technology
After looking at a variety of newspaper iPad apps, our main complaint — and we’re generalizing across the entire market — is that they don’t take enough advantage of the iPad’s wowing capabilities.
This view is shared to a certain extent by Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing for the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. He is organizing the RJI National iPad News Survey “to better understand how people are consuming news on the iPad and readers’ expectations for news apps.”
“I’ve long believed that utilitarian tablets like the iPad would evolve into the 21st century equivalent of the printing press; and, as such, would be vital to the digital transformation of newspapers and magazines,” says Fidler.
Fidler says that newspaper iPad apps need to offer a new visual format that blends the “relaxed reading modality of print with the dynamic interactive modality of online media.” It should be differentiated from print and online editions and offer tablet-specific content — all things he doesn’t think most apps are doing very well.
The solution could be found in a new “hybrid newspaper app” suggests Fidler, in which “automated sections with continuously updated news stories and more visually rich magazine-like sections created by editors and designers could coexist.” The Reynolds Journalism Institute is experimenting with exactly that kind of new publishing model.
The NAA also acknowledges the need for newspapers to “differentiate” content, and digital strategist Levitz says that consumers read longer-form content on the iPad, and they really enjoy the high quality of the visual images on the screen. She thinks newspapers can thrive in the tablet space if they take advantage of the device’s capabilities.
So is the future of print to be found in touch-screens? In the immediate future it certainly seems that publishing companies are going to be jumping on the app wagon, but how many of them will go the distance is questionable. You’ve got to think that targeted papers such as the WSJ, or the FT for business types, or geographically relevant titles have got the brightest future in the app market because they offer something that can’t be found via generic news feeds or readers.
“I would expect to see the iPad and the dozens of competing products planned for this year providing revenue for newspapers either through subscriptions or advertising sponsorships,” says Levitz. “Still, we expect tablet apps will be one part of a broad portfolio of products which will continue to include print products in some form, web-based products and other emerging products. Newspapers will continue to be the dominant local sales and content franchises reaching a range of audience segments through multiple media channels.”
The new sparkle of the iPad will keep the newspaper app market buoyant only for so long, and unless Fidler’s “hybrid newspaper app” advice is heeded, consumers will grow tired of the app-ified newspaper just as they have grown tired of previous formats before that. Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin has a grim take on the future.
“Will tablets save the mainstream publishing industries as we know them?” he asks. “No. There is still a lot of pain to come as publishers wind down their print operations over the next 10 to 15 years. However, tablets could present a source of some circulation revenue growth that helps ease the pain somewhat while that transition occurs.”
So, with more and more ways to consume free news content, is the traditional newspaper’s time up, regardless of platform? Or is the tablet the shot in the arm that the industry needs to really innovate and grab consumer’s interest once again? Have your say in the comments below.

Source: Mashable

Readers in a dilemma: newspapers or untrustworthy Internet?

Based on a recent report of research carried out by the Center for the Digital Future at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, consumers seem not to be sure of their preferences.
Only 56% of Internet users ranked newspapers as an important source of information, with an even lower 29% viewing papers as a source of entertainment. 18% withdrew their newspaper subscriptions because "they now get the same or related content online."
When asked what they would do if the print edition of their newspaper stopped, a significant 59% said they would go with the online edition, 37% said they would move on to the print edition of another newspaper, and 22% admitted that they would not miss the print edition of their paper.
With the above statistics, it is somewhat surprising that 61% of these same users find "only half or less of online information is reliable," with 14% believing that "only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable." Only 46% have some degree trust in the Internet, with 9% having no trust whatsoever.
In a twist previously explored by Sfnblog, 49% of internet users admitted to using sites such as Twitter, with only 0% willing to pay for the service. "Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future.
"Where are people going to find news and information they trust, in a world with a dwindling number of print publications and an ever-expanding number of online publications?" Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times asked, before answering, in summary of the figures above, that "readers have not yet figured out the answer to that." Can newspapers persuade readers that their online versions are trustworthy?

Source: 2010 Digital Future Report, The New York Times

An open letter on the value of Design

Like many of our colleagues, we read with concern this week’s announcement of Gannett’s plans for regional hubs to build pages for many of their newspapers. This plan is similar to others that have sought to template publications and centralize parts of the creative and production process, or, in some extreme cases, eliminate design and graphics departments.
We all are looking for ways to eliminate inefficiencies to ensure a future for newspapers. However, as leaders of the Society for News Design, we would like to challenge some assumptions at the core of this (and similar) plans, as well as offer some ideas to consider at this critical time — a time when there is a need for relevancy, re-invention and creative solutions.

Beyond layout: Design thinking

This is not merely an aesthetic consideration — but also one of product value and usefulness. If one considers the sole value of design to be making pieces fit on pages, an “assembly line” solution may seem attractive. However, architecting publications to meet reader needs is something more complicated, nuanced and essential.
We see design as identifying and understanding user needs and business requirements, conceptualizing solutions and crafting products that directly address those needs.
Good designers are really visual editors who have a mastery of information graphics, storytelling and story layering forms, illustration, photo editing, typography, use of color as a navigational tool, which are used to achieve these goals. If designers are used solely as decorators or mechanical paginators, their publications are not leveraging their full value.
This is an industry that has been change-resistant and fiercely protective of the status quo. We are at a critical moment. Now is the time to embrace innovators in all roles – not abandon them in favor of homogenization. We would caution our colleagues against promoting a creative “brain drain” in our industry at a time when innovation is so critical to our survival.
Effective designers make the complex easier to understand. We organize and prioritize information and make it accessible. We are early adopters of technology and therefore valuable teachers, developers and inventors. We have been at the forefront of newspapers’ major innovations in printing and new platform development. It is our responsibility to be relevant – and valuable – in our newsrooms, but we need to retain a place at the table.
We are vital in story design. The danger of excessive templating is that it eliminates the conversation about what is the most appropriate form for the story to take, in terms of serving the reader with as much information as possible in the clearest, most memorable way. This is what alternative storytelling achieves, and media companies that have embraced this approach have seen proven gains with readers in terms of how they are received. There is enormous potential here, but it requires intelligent design.
Therefore, creativity should be a driver – not a casualty – of the publication evolution. News designers are uniquely qualified to fulfill the promise of collaboration and innovation needed in this environment. Tim Brown, the CEO and president of IDEO, often talks about the relationship between business strategy and design: In order to do a better job of developing, communicating and pursuing a strategy, you need to learn to think like a designer.

The value of proximity and local-ness

Certainly, there is a place for templating and streamlining. In that context, for pure production, Gannett’s moves may make some sense. Yes, newspapers could centralize or semi-automate some routine functions to drive down those costs. If done correctly, this could free resources to concentrate on content creation and more challenging design issues. While some parts of the paper should be done more quickly, others need to be architected more carefully to maximize impact and understanding.
This is where we see a potential gap.
First, the capacity for front-end design thinking appears to be absent in this equation. At our best, reporters, photographers, graphics reporters, editors and designers collaborate to create effective, cohesive stories. We know from industry research that readers are drawn to stories with visual components and spend more time with them. If we separate the collaborative parties, the planning and reporting at the core of visual journalism will be hampered. Front-end collaboration and shaping becomes much more difficult with this remote communication paradigm.
Second, there’s a high danger of detachment from the needs of readers, who look to us to prioritize and curate information for them. Without a firm understanding of the communities we serve, it seems inevitable that these publications will be compromised. If our information is not seen as authoritative and unique, we lose our diminishing competitive advantage in the crowded information marketplace, where many things are free.
And, we fear for the survival of the “magic” – the surprises that delight readers. When it’s working correctly, design takes our best offerings and tunes them into a final outcome worth more than the sum of the parts. Imagine for a moment how different last week’s much-celebrated Cleveland Plain Dealer front page about LeBron James’ departure might have been were it produced hundreds or thousands of miles away, by a staff tasked with deadlining dozens of other publications — simultaneously.

Multi-platform publishing

While we agree that simplifying the assembly of the newspaper can be part of a smart strategy, if we want to work in many media, we need smart ways to direct content to many platforms. We look at it this way: The media is the message; the design is the messenger.
Newspapers at last have begun to learn: A print report posted online does not make for a very successful website. And yet, don’t newspapers’ multimedia strategies ultimately depend on scaling content from one set of reporters across platforms?
In a Web-first world, reporters need to be focused on efficient, economical information delivery. As their partners, they need print designers who can shape, augment, elevate and craft their material to create rich, vibrant newspapers. That’s a collaborative process, not simple assembly. It frees reporting resources to focus on time-sensitive, template-driven formats like the phone and the Web, while allowing their newspapers to deliver analysis and design in print.
Achieving the efficiencies of a single content center probably requires more, not fewer, designers. As we continue to compete for our readers’ attention with multiple channels, it is easy to make the case that our essential roles as information architects and shepherds of user experiences have never been more important.
And, while we are concerned about corporate decision making, we also know the onus is on designers to broaden their skill sets, to embrace digital and to prove their own worth as journalists. Coupled with the centralization trend have been drastic cuts in training. We urge Gannett and all media companies to restore training as a vital component of newsroom culture, so that forward-thinking organizations such as SND can help create a robust future of journalistic innovation.

Sincerely,

Kris Viesselman
President, Society for News Design
Managing Editor and Creative Director, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Stephen Komives
Executive Director, Society for News Design

Source: SND

Century-old Brazilian daily to move entirely online

The Rio de Janeiro-based Jornal do Brasil will stop circulating its 119-year-old print edition and appear only online, O Globo reports. The paper’s owner, Nelson Tanure, says he will set the date for the changeover this week.
Before deciding to end the print edition, Tanure tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the newspaper as it is mired in debt and circulation has fallen to 17,000 during the week and 22,000 on Sundays. According to Globo, the attitude among Jornal’s 180 employees – including 60 journalists – is one of sadness and anxiety.
The current paper has fallen far from its storied past, when it was known for its quality coverage of significant news issues and its memorable editions. One of its most famous is from December 14, 1968, when the military government closed Congress and Jornal do Brasil evaded censors by publishing a “weather report” on its front page, saying the temperature was “suffocating.”

Source: Knight Center for Journalism

Readers are willing to pay to get access to the best news websites

The way that the British read news online appears likely to change greatly over the coming years. As The Times and The Sunday Times prepare to charge readers for the online editions of their newspapers, the titles point to growing evidence that Britain is more willing to spend money online than almost any other nation.
It is argued that, with news sites now accounting for 3 per cent of the time that we spend online, charging for content represents a natural step for the press and publishing industry.
Nearly 16 million people in Britain visited a mainstream newspaper website in February. Figures from the market researchers UKOM/Nielsen show that a quarter of those users have already paid to access news online or would be willing to do so. A third even said that they would be willing to pay for web content that they had already paid for offline, if it was substantially better than what was on offer free.
As is the case in the music industry, the move toward paid-for services reflects the rapid increase in the time that we spend online and the content we now consume.
Alex Burmaster, an analyst with Nielsen, said that only a few years ago the thought of buying holidays or clothes online was anathema to most people. The rapid increase over recent years in the availability of broadband, however, has combined with an improvement in the quality of online products and services to create a “perfect storm”, whereby people have become dependent on the internet.
The introduction of the iPad this week could do to publishing what the iPod did to music and transfer another part of our lives online. The ability to refresh newspaper pages while on the move could capture the imagination of a British public that has already proved more open to online services than in other countries. Very few nations spend more time online than Britain.
“It’s permeated everything we do. There’s no part of daily life that hasn’t changed,” Mr Burmaster said.
British internet users are also more likely to spend money online, with usage of large online retailers such as Tesco.com and Amazon up nearly 50 per cent over the past three years.
That British internet users are spending an increasing amount of time and money online is thanks to the massive increase in the availability of high-speed broadband in the past decade.
Only six years ago Britain was something of a broadband laggard in global terms, but the country has quickly caught up, and overtaken, other countries. Yet the big concern for Britain’s increasingly digital population is that of being left behind. A survey by Ookia suggests that British networks are already straining under the pressure of increased internet usage. It ranks Britain’s broadband speeds as only the 33rd fastest in the world.
BT has just started work on the country’s new network and expects to have connected two thirds of the population to superfast broadband by 2015. However, it is mostly doing no more than plugging the new network into the local exchange, as opposed to directly into the customer’s house, meaning that the speed available will still be a fraction of that in countries such as South Korea and Japan.

Source: TimesOnline

Facebook beats newspapers in Arab world

There are now more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers, according to research by Dubai-based Spot On Public Relations.

It finds there are more than 15m subscribers to the social networking site while the total number of newspaper copies in Arabic, English and French is just under 14m.

The survey of 17 countries showed that the largest number of Facebook members are in Egypt, with 3.5m users, followed by conservative Saudi Arabia.

The findings should come as no surprise because the majority of the region's more than 300m people is young and internet use is on the rise.

Sources: SpotOn PR/BBC/CyberJournalist

Europe's newspaper industry must transform itself

Senior newspaper executives from around the world are meeting in Barcelona this week to discuss the future of print media. Experts agree that high quality and multimedia elements will ensure the newspaper's survival.

The Internet age has revolutionized the way people interact with media. But it has also sparked the demise of the printed newspaper.
In the United States, a number of regional papers have folded in the past two years. Others, such as the renowned Christian Science Monitor, have resorted to a weekly print issue and are otherwise "only" available online.
In Europe, however, newspaper publishers are looking for a more integrated approach, said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers' Council.
"We are in the most amazing state of transition from print to online right now," Wade said. "The challenge is to make sure that the interest in the content we're producing, no matter how it's distributed, is sufficient to continue financing that content." She said this could also involve paying for online content.
Wade said she did not believe that newspapers would die off in Europe, as is the case in the US.
"I think the difference between the US and Europe is that there's a more deep-seated cultural tradition in newspapers here and I think it would be harder to brush that away," Wade said.
Hans Joachim Fuhrmann, spokesman for the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers BDZV, agreed.
"The newspaper-reading culture here is completely different than in the US," Fuhrmann said. "We also have a much stronger regional concentration."
Volker Wolff, a professor at the University of Mainz's Journalism Seminar, said he thinks change will come.
"Of course, newspapers are going to die off here in Germany, too," Wolff said.

Change is necessary

Industry experts agree, though, that things have to change in the newspaper sector.
"Here in Germany, but also all over the western world, we are in a transformation process regarding the classical printed newspaper," Fuhrmann said. "Newspapers have to transform themselves into multimedia companies."
According to Wolff, newspapers should not try to compete directly with online content.
"Newspapers can't write the same things you find on the Internet," Wolff said. "They have to concentrate on regional information and also on background stories. The future of newspapers lies in qualitative valuable stories, like those magazines previously covered."
But this will have a corresponding price tag.
"For those which survive, it's going to be expensive," Wolff said. High-quality newspapers will cost more.

Question of the right solutions

Though newspapers are suffering, Wade said one shouldn't underestimate the amount of newspapers read.
According to figures by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), print newspapers attract more than 1.7 billion readers a day worldwide.
"Gavin O'Reilly, WAN's chairman, once said that more adults read a newspaper every day than eat a Big Mac every year," Wade said. "So though there may be a long term decline in percentage terms in newspaper consumption, there are nevertheless a growing number of people who have an appetite for reading news, comment and debate from trusted brands, from fact-based journalism."
WAN is convinced that dailies have a future.
"Print continues to be the main revenue generator for newspapers and it will continue to be for a long time," WAN spokesman Larry Kilman told news agency AFP. He said WAN believed that solutions existed to enable media companies to combine the paper and screen to be profitable.
A WAN conference on the power of print media vis-a-vis the Internet, especially at this time of economic crisis, is currently on in Barcelona until Thursday.

A new generation of newspaper readers

The integration of online elements and interactive features can attract younger readers, in particular, to a newspaper's site.
"The illness of non-reading has hit Germany just as much as other countries," Wolff said. This was particularly the case with the younger generation.
"In India, newspapers are a status symbol: if you can read, you have a newspaper," Wolff said. "Here in old Europe it's the same problem everywhere: an aging population, non-reading youth, a drop in advertising sales, dwindling markets."
But the German government is trying to get more people interested in newspapers and last year launched a national initiative for print media. It aims to increase public awareness of the importance of print media as a key political medium and is particularly geared towards promoting media competency among young readers.
Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Bernd Neumann, said, despite the enormous growth of electronic media, newspapers and magazines are still the key political media in German society.
"Whoever wants to get a reliable and multi-sided picture of fundamental political and societal issues remains dependent on the printed word," Neumann said at the initiative's annual meeting earlier this month.
According to Neumann, the printed word in particular encouraged democratic cohesion.
"As opposed to the Internet, it directs awareness to that which is important to everyone – independent of whether it is of personal interest for an individual or not," Neumann said.
But, he said that print and online media don't have to exclude each other, but rather be complementary.
"Whoever reads newspapers and magazines acquires the possibility to deal critically with Internet offers and profit more consciously from information sources," Neumann said.
Children and teenagers should, therefore, learn to differentiate between media, whether digital or classic, he said.

Source: dw-world.de

The Future is ChicagoNow

It's been eminently fashionable to bash Sam Zell for his gutting of Tribune Co., and with good reason—a copy of the Baltimore Sun I saw recently looked about as substantial as a cocktail napkin, and that was before the Sun's latest newsroom layoffs. The chain's other papers aren't much better, by all reports.
But Zell's minions have also been doing more innovation than a lot of their counterparts in the industry, fiddling with everything from radical redesigns to ambitious hyperlocal networks. And now Tribune seems ready to unleash its most interesting experiment in reinvention yet: ChicagoNow.
It's a little hard to see exactly what ChicagoNow is up to—the beta site is still very much a work in progress, with a launch promised in a few weeks. But there are strong hints available if you click around the site, and a very promising—even thrilling—description of what's coming in a promotional video here. The ChicagoNow staff is blogging about its progress, too.
At its core, ChicagoNow appears to be an effort to create a new kind of local site by aggregating and curating local bloggers, staff material and other content, with a heavy sprinkling of social features, mobile options and other goodies. The video called it "HuffingtonPost meets Facebook for Chicago," which may be a bit strong, but it's a healthy ambition. This is the sort of source-neutral, smartly curated, aggregation-heavy, social-savvy, distribution-prolific local site that every news organization should be doing. It's what Web-centric companies like HuffingtonPost (which already has its own local Chicago blog/aggregation site) do naturally.
It remains to be seen how ChicagoNow will grow from its sketchy beta—the initial hints of content are good, but it needs an interface, and a good one is shown in a teaser graphic on the home page, reproduced here—but the Zellots are taking a huge step in the right direction. Finally, at long last, something very different than just pasting the newspaper on a screen. (It sure beats weird, timid, token efforts like the NY Times' new "social media editor." Wow. Bold.)
ChicagoNow is probably too late to the game to really help Tribune, alas, given the crappy economics of the newspaper business these days. But at least one of the big publishers is trying something radical, visionary and out of the box. It's about damn time. Everybody else in the industry should be following the development of ChicagoNow closely—and scrambling like crazy to get their own curated, aggregated, social sites ready for their markets.
In other words, it's the obvious way to go, the kind of thing people like Jeff Jarvis and I have advocated for years—do what you do best and link to the rest, as Jeff aptly puts it. Phil Anschutz's Examiner.com is quietly building cookie-cutter curated, aggregated sites around the country, and the NBC-owned TV stations are doing the same. But as far as I know, Tribune is the first major newspaper company to take this overdue leap into the future in a major way in its home market—the market it knows best and in which it can bring its expertise and power to bear for readers (and advertisers). Kudos to them.

Source: recoveringjournalist.typepad.com

Tucson Paper to Stop Printing Saturday

ARIZONA'S oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Tucson Citizen, will publish its final print edition Saturday after its owner failed to find a buyer.
Kate Marymont, Gannett’s vice president for news, told the newspaper’s staff on Friday that The Citizen would continue with a Web edition providing commentary and opinion, but no news or sports coverage. She said the paper’s 60 employees would know by the end of Friday if they would be laid off, kept on short term or be hired long term.
The 138-year-old paper had a circulation about 17,000 today. The Citizen has a joint operating agreement with Lee Enterprises, which publishes the competing Arizona Daily Star.
Because of the agreement, the Arizona attorney general’s office filed a complaint Friday in federal court seeking to halt the closing. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Terry Goddard said the complaint was filed in Tucson shortly before court closed, and a motion for a temporary restraining order also was filed.
Robert J. Dickey, president of Gannett’s community publishing division, said that a Tucson Citizen editorial weekly would run in The Star.

Source: nytimes.com