“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
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Outing: Media should charge for iPad apps
Media organizations are “leaving money on the table” if they are not charging for their iPad apps, says Steve Outing. After a month with an iPad, he writes that he likely would have paid for any of the news apps he uses, as long as they were sold as permanent apps, not individual stand-alone editions as Time magazine originally was. “This approach completely misunderstands the device,” he writes. “First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted.”
Assuming the app is a one-time download that can contain multiple issues of a publication, Outing suggests that it’s worth paying for if the experience surpasses that of using the news org’s website.
“Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing.”
Source: Poynter.org
Assuming the app is a one-time download that can contain multiple issues of a publication, Outing suggests that it’s worth paying for if the experience surpasses that of using the news org’s website.
“Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing.”
Source: Poynter.org
iPad news apps lack accessibility and usability
Apple’s iPad and iOS come with several built-in accessibility features that make the iPad relatively easy for disabled people to use. Unfortunately, many news applications were not built to take advantage of these accessibility features, rendering the apps ultimately useless for people who are disabled.
VoiceOver is the crown jewel of the iOS accessibility features (the operating system behind the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), and it gives the entire operating system and every application access to screen-reading technology.
Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconson-Madison, said in a phone call that iOS is the only mobile operating system to come with a built-in screen reader, and that this technology often costs hundreds of dollars or more on other computing platforms.
Testing out apps for accessibility
For this technology to work, apps must be built with accessibility in mind. I downloaded and tested several news apps with this and other accessibility features turned on and found The Daily, The Economist, The New York Times, Wired and USA Today apps to be unusable, and incapable of reading everything that their applications present with these features turned on.
VoiceOver allows users to tap the screen and a voice will let them know what they have selected. Tap a folder, and a voice reads the name of the folder. Tap an application and the same happens. Tap a button in an application or a text box, and theoretically the same should happen. Once users have found what they want, they double tap to select it. In VoiceOver mode, double tap functions as a single tap normally does.
In my testing, some of the icons and text were selectable, while others were not. I was unable to get any of the news apps to select and read the body of the text for me. The Economist does have audio versions of its articles that can be selected by tapping a button, and they work well. But they don’t follow the normal pattern of accessibility. Nonetheless, The Economist iPad app has built-in text-zooming and audio versions of articles, which is more than a lot of other news apps offer.
Oscar Grut, managing director of digital editions, said The Economist is beginning an accessibility review of its iPad and iPhone applications. As part of its review, it’s bringing in qualified consultants who can help identify accessibility issues for different types of impairment. The end goal is to make the iPad and iPhone applications more accessible to wider audiences., Grut told me.
Need for a back button, bigger text
In the course of my testing with VoiceOver on, I was completely disoriented several times and had to tap the home key to go back to the home screen and start over. And I could see what I was doing the whole time. One of the issues that causes disorientation is the lack of a back button or searchability within some of these apps (Wired’s app is the prime offender of this).
Imagine using a news website. You click a few links. Now you want to get back to where you were before, but there’s no back button. Clicking something and being shot to a different section into the Wired app without the ability to go back can be disorienting for someone with perfect eyesight. Using the VoiceOver technology on apps without a back button or breadcrumb trail when you’re blind? Forget about it.
“The lack of a back button is pretty egregious, as is the lack of search,” Raluca Budiu, user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group, said via email. “Especially since the iPad screen is so much bigger than the screens of mobile phones and there’s plenty of space for incorporating these in the interface.”
There are some users who are visually impaired, but not so much that they need everything read to them. For these users, the ability to enlarge text sizes is critical. Some applications, such as Wired’s, do not allow text to be enlarged at all, while others, such as The New York Times’, USA Today’s and The Economist’s, offer a variety of text sizes.
“That is just plain not a good idea,” Vanderheiden said about not allowing text to be enlarged. “There is a huge portion of your readership that is going to have issues with that small text.”
Budiu said one issue that many applications have is that even when they allow the article body text to be enlarged, they don’t enlarge the headline, captions or navigational pages. The New York Times and Economist apps suffer from this issue, while the USA Today app enlarges all text on a page. None of the applications, however, allowed the navigational pages to be enlarged.
All of these applications also work with iOS’s built-in zooming feature, which magnifies everything on screen up to five times. After a certain point, though, the text starts to look pixelated.
iOS also has pinch to zoom, which is a feature built not just for accessibility; it does allow users to use two fingers to zoom in on text, photos and interface items. While this works beautifully on nytimes.com, it doesn’t work at all in The Times’ iPad app and worked in The Economist app for article text only.
One of the biggest accessibility issues with The Daily — something that able-bodied people would struggle with, too — is the need to rotate the orientation of The Daily to discover new features and content. It’s not intuitive, and it requires that a user hold the iPad in order for it to work properly. (I often rest the iPad on my lap while reading). People aren’t accustomed to rotating their computer screens or newspapers to discover new features.
“Often companies think that their app needs to have some cool, unique design element in order to be successful and are ready to sacrifice usability or accessibility for that,” Budiu said. “Unfortunately, fun depletes — that fancy carousel or that unique widget is going be less fun the second time the app is used, and even annoying by the fifth time.”
Grut said the carousel used in The Economist iPhone app has proved to be an accessibility issue, and it’s being rethought.
“It doesn’t work for the visually impaired,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure it works for everyone.”
Developing best practices to make apps more accessible
Vanderheiden said content creators may be intentionally creating applications with inaccessible text because of copyright infringement fears. Some content creators hope that by making it harder to select and access text they’ll be able to cut down on piracy. But will making a product harder to use really make a company more money?
“I really think they’re doing a lot of things out of fear, and if they would just slip over to another model they could thrive,” Vanderheiden said. “I mean iTunes doesn’t copy protect its songs anymore, but it’s just so damn convenient to just buy them.”
Budiu, however, says he doesn’t think these accessibility and usability issues were a conscious oversight. Rather, he believes that many companies and developers are not aware of best practices for usability. Vanderheiden thinks this is part of the issue, too, and said print-driven companies and developers may not think about making products for the disabled.
The good news for users is that all of these organizations, with the exception of the iPad-only The Daily, have websites that work great with the iPad’s accessible, built-in browser Safari. Budiu said her ideal news app would be “an app that is not about the app but about the news.”
An app all about the news, she said, would enable as many people as possible to use it and enjoy it.
Source: Poynter.org
VoiceOver is the crown jewel of the iOS accessibility features (the operating system behind the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), and it gives the entire operating system and every application access to screen-reading technology.
Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconson-Madison, said in a phone call that iOS is the only mobile operating system to come with a built-in screen reader, and that this technology often costs hundreds of dollars or more on other computing platforms.
Testing out apps for accessibility
For this technology to work, apps must be built with accessibility in mind. I downloaded and tested several news apps with this and other accessibility features turned on and found The Daily, The Economist, The New York Times, Wired and USA Today apps to be unusable, and incapable of reading everything that their applications present with these features turned on.
VoiceOver allows users to tap the screen and a voice will let them know what they have selected. Tap a folder, and a voice reads the name of the folder. Tap an application and the same happens. Tap a button in an application or a text box, and theoretically the same should happen. Once users have found what they want, they double tap to select it. In VoiceOver mode, double tap functions as a single tap normally does.
In my testing, some of the icons and text were selectable, while others were not. I was unable to get any of the news apps to select and read the body of the text for me. The Economist does have audio versions of its articles that can be selected by tapping a button, and they work well. But they don’t follow the normal pattern of accessibility. Nonetheless, The Economist iPad app has built-in text-zooming and audio versions of articles, which is more than a lot of other news apps offer.
Oscar Grut, managing director of digital editions, said The Economist is beginning an accessibility review of its iPad and iPhone applications. As part of its review, it’s bringing in qualified consultants who can help identify accessibility issues for different types of impairment. The end goal is to make the iPad and iPhone applications more accessible to wider audiences., Grut told me.
Need for a back button, bigger text
In the course of my testing with VoiceOver on, I was completely disoriented several times and had to tap the home key to go back to the home screen and start over. And I could see what I was doing the whole time. One of the issues that causes disorientation is the lack of a back button or searchability within some of these apps (Wired’s app is the prime offender of this).
Imagine using a news website. You click a few links. Now you want to get back to where you were before, but there’s no back button. Clicking something and being shot to a different section into the Wired app without the ability to go back can be disorienting for someone with perfect eyesight. Using the VoiceOver technology on apps without a back button or breadcrumb trail when you’re blind? Forget about it.
“The lack of a back button is pretty egregious, as is the lack of search,” Raluca Budiu, user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group, said via email. “Especially since the iPad screen is so much bigger than the screens of mobile phones and there’s plenty of space for incorporating these in the interface.”
There are some users who are visually impaired, but not so much that they need everything read to them. For these users, the ability to enlarge text sizes is critical. Some applications, such as Wired’s, do not allow text to be enlarged at all, while others, such as The New York Times’, USA Today’s and The Economist’s, offer a variety of text sizes.
“That is just plain not a good idea,” Vanderheiden said about not allowing text to be enlarged. “There is a huge portion of your readership that is going to have issues with that small text.”
Budiu said one issue that many applications have is that even when they allow the article body text to be enlarged, they don’t enlarge the headline, captions or navigational pages. The New York Times and Economist apps suffer from this issue, while the USA Today app enlarges all text on a page. None of the applications, however, allowed the navigational pages to be enlarged.
All of these applications also work with iOS’s built-in zooming feature, which magnifies everything on screen up to five times. After a certain point, though, the text starts to look pixelated.
iOS also has pinch to zoom, which is a feature built not just for accessibility; it does allow users to use two fingers to zoom in on text, photos and interface items. While this works beautifully on nytimes.com, it doesn’t work at all in The Times’ iPad app and worked in The Economist app for article text only.
One of the biggest accessibility issues with The Daily — something that able-bodied people would struggle with, too — is the need to rotate the orientation of The Daily to discover new features and content. It’s not intuitive, and it requires that a user hold the iPad in order for it to work properly. (I often rest the iPad on my lap while reading). People aren’t accustomed to rotating their computer screens or newspapers to discover new features.
“Often companies think that their app needs to have some cool, unique design element in order to be successful and are ready to sacrifice usability or accessibility for that,” Budiu said. “Unfortunately, fun depletes — that fancy carousel or that unique widget is going be less fun the second time the app is used, and even annoying by the fifth time.”
Grut said the carousel used in The Economist iPhone app has proved to be an accessibility issue, and it’s being rethought.
“It doesn’t work for the visually impaired,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure it works for everyone.”
Developing best practices to make apps more accessible
Vanderheiden said content creators may be intentionally creating applications with inaccessible text because of copyright infringement fears. Some content creators hope that by making it harder to select and access text they’ll be able to cut down on piracy. But will making a product harder to use really make a company more money?
“I really think they’re doing a lot of things out of fear, and if they would just slip over to another model they could thrive,” Vanderheiden said. “I mean iTunes doesn’t copy protect its songs anymore, but it’s just so damn convenient to just buy them.”
Budiu, however, says he doesn’t think these accessibility and usability issues were a conscious oversight. Rather, he believes that many companies and developers are not aware of best practices for usability. Vanderheiden thinks this is part of the issue, too, and said print-driven companies and developers may not think about making products for the disabled.
The good news for users is that all of these organizations, with the exception of the iPad-only The Daily, have websites that work great with the iPad’s accessible, built-in browser Safari. Budiu said her ideal news app would be “an app that is not about the app but about the news.”
An app all about the news, she said, would enable as many people as possible to use it and enjoy it.
Source: Poynter.org
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
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
BBDO/Proximity Once Again Propels Berita Harian’s Image
The New Straits Times Press Group has launched a new brand campaign for Berita Harian developed by BBDO/Proximity, seeing a revamp of Berita Harian with enhanced design, the renaming of lifestyle section Berita Dua to Rona, refreshed editorial content and a new campaign line “BH mewarnai hari anda”.
The campaign is expected to augment Berita Harian’s image and increase readership amongst all Malaysians who are conversant in Bahasa Malaysia. The new look will project Berita Harian’s renewed image as the Malaysian newspaper that enriches knowledge and stimulating mind, is friendly, inclusive and open-minded, reliable and firm in opinion.
In 2010, the Nielsen Media Index reported a readership of 1.2 million for Berita Harian. The newspaper appeals to households between the ages of 25 and 34 years with and average monthly income of above RM5,000.
“Berita Harian has always delivered breaking news and rigorous reporting to its readers. With this campaign we are looking to engage a wider audience of Bahasa Malaysia-speaking Malaysians who not only value insightful journalism and firm, open-minded opinions, but also constantly looking for information to enrich their knowledge via an inclusive news source,” said the New Straits Times Press Group’s Marketing Director, Zuraida Mohamad.
BBDO/Proximity Malaysia’s Executive Creative Director Richmond Walker added, “We’re very excited to be working with NSTP again on their other Malay title. With much greater purchasing power, the Malaysian consumer has become far more discerning.”
The Berita Harian campaign comes hot on the heels of Harian Metro’s “Biar Betul” campaign launched in March that was crafted by BBDO/Proximity. “Biar Betul” reiterated Harian Metro’s No. 1 position as the most widely circulated and read Malay language daily in Malaysia with a formidable presence in print, television, outdoor, digital and social media. Apart from the print, outdoor and broadcast ads, the campaign generated a total media value of RM3.8 million.
Source: Adoimagazine.com
The campaign is expected to augment Berita Harian’s image and increase readership amongst all Malaysians who are conversant in Bahasa Malaysia. The new look will project Berita Harian’s renewed image as the Malaysian newspaper that enriches knowledge and stimulating mind, is friendly, inclusive and open-minded, reliable and firm in opinion.
In 2010, the Nielsen Media Index reported a readership of 1.2 million for Berita Harian. The newspaper appeals to households between the ages of 25 and 34 years with and average monthly income of above RM5,000.
“Berita Harian has always delivered breaking news and rigorous reporting to its readers. With this campaign we are looking to engage a wider audience of Bahasa Malaysia-speaking Malaysians who not only value insightful journalism and firm, open-minded opinions, but also constantly looking for information to enrich their knowledge via an inclusive news source,” said the New Straits Times Press Group’s Marketing Director, Zuraida Mohamad.
BBDO/Proximity Malaysia’s Executive Creative Director Richmond Walker added, “We’re very excited to be working with NSTP again on their other Malay title. With much greater purchasing power, the Malaysian consumer has become far more discerning.”
The Berita Harian campaign comes hot on the heels of Harian Metro’s “Biar Betul” campaign launched in March that was crafted by BBDO/Proximity. “Biar Betul” reiterated Harian Metro’s No. 1 position as the most widely circulated and read Malay language daily in Malaysia with a formidable presence in print, television, outdoor, digital and social media. Apart from the print, outdoor and broadcast ads, the campaign generated a total media value of RM3.8 million.
Source: Adoimagazine.com
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
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
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Daily Is Interesting, But Is It the Future of Newspapers?
THERE’S been a lot of pre-launch interest in Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper” The Daily. This is partly because the News Corp. founder is known for making ambitious bets on new technology — even if they don’t always work out, as he found with MySpace — and also because Apple was a key partner, and used the News app to launch its new subscription model for content (it costs 99 cents a week or $39 for a year).
So does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things, particularly around sharing content. And much of it, apart from some bells and whistles, consists of fairly humdrum day-old stories that you might read in, well…a regular old printed newspaper.
The first clue to what you get with The Daily, as more than one person has noted, is in the name itself. It is published more or less just like a regular newspaper, in the sense that the bulk of the content is produced and then published to the app once a day. Although News Corp. made a point of noting at its launch event that the app will be updated throughout the day as news breaks, there was no sign of that happening while I used it for most of the day on Wednesday, and that was while riots were still breaking out in Cairo.
Even though Twitter content appeared in a box in one of the stories (a profile of Rihanna) and had live links, the actual tweets themselves were almost 12 hours old — even after the app updated itself and said it was downloading a new version of the paper.
It’s like a newspaper…but on the iPad!
The result is that you get something that feels very much like a newspaper, with stories about things that happened yesterday. And while you can share stories via Facebook and Twitter, none of the pieces contain any links to anything on the web, making the app feel very much like similar apps from print publications like the New York Times, Esquire and Wired — disconnected from the Internet in a lot of ways. There are live links in Twitter streams in stories (particularly the customizable sports section, which lets you follow teams), and there is a small section of links called “What We’re Reading,” but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of linking going on at all.
There’s also no way to contact the writers or interact with them in any way, as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg noted, apart from posting a comment (which you can also do via audio, an unusual choice).
The general web user can’t get to any articles on The Daily’s website. But when you share a link to a story in the Daily via Facebook or Twitter, people can click through and read it on the site — a “social media passthrough” that the New York Times is also reportedly building into its upcoming web paywall. But with The Daily, when you click through to read the piece, you get what amounts to a screenshot of the app page — an image, rather than text. With some stories, you also get a large warning, complete with a big exclamation mark, that says the story is “missing content available only in The Daily iPad app.”
All of that aside, the biggest issue with The Daily is that even when you share a story, there is little that might encourage anyone to cough up the money to subscribe (a Columbia Journalism Review editor called it “a general-interest publication that is not generally interesting” and added that “great design will not trump lackluster content”). In the inaugural version, there were a couple of features that were worth reading, but they didn’t add much to similar stories that have appeared elsewhere for free. And a surprising amount of what appeared in the app — once you got past all the videos, most of which were devoted to advertising, and the interactive Sudoku and crossword puzzles — was run-of-the-mill news briefs that you might see in any newspaper such as USA Today.
If the content is ho-hum, what are users paying for?
Much of the pre-launch promotion of The Daily suggested that it was going to focus on the content in a way that many newspapers don’t, and that the $30 million or so Rupert Murdoch was spending on the project indicated there would be a higher level of quality. But while the app is well designed and the articles and photos are nice to look at, there isn’t a whole lot on the content side that makes it any better than newspapers that can already be read for free — and whose links can be shared and read without the bizarre restrictions that The Daily has invented to try and convince people to pay for it.
David Weidner of WSJ’s MarketWatch said that “the pricing is right,” and that $40 a year made more sense than $240 a year for the New York Times, and it’s true that the low price may get some to sign up — but the bigger question is, how many?
Source: nytimes.com
So does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things, particularly around sharing content. And much of it, apart from some bells and whistles, consists of fairly humdrum day-old stories that you might read in, well…a regular old printed newspaper.
The first clue to what you get with The Daily, as more than one person has noted, is in the name itself. It is published more or less just like a regular newspaper, in the sense that the bulk of the content is produced and then published to the app once a day. Although News Corp. made a point of noting at its launch event that the app will be updated throughout the day as news breaks, there was no sign of that happening while I used it for most of the day on Wednesday, and that was while riots were still breaking out in Cairo.
Even though Twitter content appeared in a box in one of the stories (a profile of Rihanna) and had live links, the actual tweets themselves were almost 12 hours old — even after the app updated itself and said it was downloading a new version of the paper.
It’s like a newspaper…but on the iPad!
The result is that you get something that feels very much like a newspaper, with stories about things that happened yesterday. And while you can share stories via Facebook and Twitter, none of the pieces contain any links to anything on the web, making the app feel very much like similar apps from print publications like the New York Times, Esquire and Wired — disconnected from the Internet in a lot of ways. There are live links in Twitter streams in stories (particularly the customizable sports section, which lets you follow teams), and there is a small section of links called “What We’re Reading,” but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of linking going on at all.
There’s also no way to contact the writers or interact with them in any way, as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg noted, apart from posting a comment (which you can also do via audio, an unusual choice).
The general web user can’t get to any articles on The Daily’s website. But when you share a link to a story in the Daily via Facebook or Twitter, people can click through and read it on the site — a “social media passthrough” that the New York Times is also reportedly building into its upcoming web paywall. But with The Daily, when you click through to read the piece, you get what amounts to a screenshot of the app page — an image, rather than text. With some stories, you also get a large warning, complete with a big exclamation mark, that says the story is “missing content available only in The Daily iPad app.”
All of that aside, the biggest issue with The Daily is that even when you share a story, there is little that might encourage anyone to cough up the money to subscribe (a Columbia Journalism Review editor called it “a general-interest publication that is not generally interesting” and added that “great design will not trump lackluster content”). In the inaugural version, there were a couple of features that were worth reading, but they didn’t add much to similar stories that have appeared elsewhere for free. And a surprising amount of what appeared in the app — once you got past all the videos, most of which were devoted to advertising, and the interactive Sudoku and crossword puzzles — was run-of-the-mill news briefs that you might see in any newspaper such as USA Today.
If the content is ho-hum, what are users paying for?
Much of the pre-launch promotion of The Daily suggested that it was going to focus on the content in a way that many newspapers don’t, and that the $30 million or so Rupert Murdoch was spending on the project indicated there would be a higher level of quality. But while the app is well designed and the articles and photos are nice to look at, there isn’t a whole lot on the content side that makes it any better than newspapers that can already be read for free — and whose links can be shared and read without the bizarre restrictions that The Daily has invented to try and convince people to pay for it.
David Weidner of WSJ’s MarketWatch said that “the pricing is right,” and that $40 a year made more sense than $240 a year for the New York Times, and it’s true that the low price may get some to sign up — but the bigger question is, how many?
Source: nytimes.com
Is News Corp.'s iPad Daily a Killer App?
News Corp. (NWS) has launched its iPad newspaper dubbed the Daily and the effort will be closely watched. The Daily is either the rebirth of the newspaper or another overfunded launch like Conde Nast Portfolio.
Screenshots: The Daily launch
Of course, the Daily could turn out to be something in between. The big point here is that the fate of the Daily will be determined in months and years from now. In fact, the subscriptions will tell the tale over time. One day of hype doesn’t make a new paradigm for traditional media.
Add it up and we have no idea whether the Daily is the moment for traditional media or just another effort fumbling toward mobile app ecstasy.
As I noted in my Kindle Single, 2011 is the year of media subscriptions. The rub is we don’t know whether consumers will go along for the ride. It’s quite possible that 2011 will merely be the year of trying to do media subscriptions. Simply put, the New York Times (NYT) pay wall and the Daily will be closely watched efforts.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan, who has been watching this space for a long time, outlined the ledger for News Corp.’s Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s pet project. Here’s the breakdown.
Pros:
* News Corp. has the resources to differentiate the Daily. If News Corp. can meld newspaper, cable, studio and Internet assets the Daily could sing. Indeed, the presentation outlining the Daily was heavy on the video.
* Apple is a great ally. Apple’s support for subscriptions in iTunes is quite the enabler.
* News Corp. is playing offense, which is a good thing.
* Subscribing to a daily publication makes more sense on the iPad and 99 cents a week—$39.99 for a year—won’t break the bank.
Cons:
* It’s going to take time for consumers to accept an iPad newspaper. Sure, early adopters will check it out. Then what?
* Early hype doesn’t turn into market share, revenue or cash flow instantly.
* Apple is controlling. Rest assured that News Corp. and Apple will clash down the road over apps and subscriptions. That fact could chill the market for other iPad publishers.
* Ads will matter. Subscriptions alone won’t support the Daily alone, but will carry the day initially. What will the ad picture look like and how will the details be handled with News Corp. and Apple?
Source: seekingalpha.com
Screenshots: The Daily launch
Of course, the Daily could turn out to be something in between. The big point here is that the fate of the Daily will be determined in months and years from now. In fact, the subscriptions will tell the tale over time. One day of hype doesn’t make a new paradigm for traditional media.
Add it up and we have no idea whether the Daily is the moment for traditional media or just another effort fumbling toward mobile app ecstasy.
As I noted in my Kindle Single, 2011 is the year of media subscriptions. The rub is we don’t know whether consumers will go along for the ride. It’s quite possible that 2011 will merely be the year of trying to do media subscriptions. Simply put, the New York Times (NYT) pay wall and the Daily will be closely watched efforts.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan, who has been watching this space for a long time, outlined the ledger for News Corp.’s Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s pet project. Here’s the breakdown.
Pros:
* News Corp. has the resources to differentiate the Daily. If News Corp. can meld newspaper, cable, studio and Internet assets the Daily could sing. Indeed, the presentation outlining the Daily was heavy on the video.
* Apple is a great ally. Apple’s support for subscriptions in iTunes is quite the enabler.
* News Corp. is playing offense, which is a good thing.
* Subscribing to a daily publication makes more sense on the iPad and 99 cents a week—$39.99 for a year—won’t break the bank.
Cons:
* It’s going to take time for consumers to accept an iPad newspaper. Sure, early adopters will check it out. Then what?
* Early hype doesn’t turn into market share, revenue or cash flow instantly.
* Apple is controlling. Rest assured that News Corp. and Apple will clash down the road over apps and subscriptions. That fact could chill the market for other iPad publishers.
* Ads will matter. Subscriptions alone won’t support the Daily alone, but will carry the day initially. What will the ad picture look like and how will the details be handled with News Corp. and Apple?
Source: seekingalpha.com
Sunday, November 21, 2010
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
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
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Proof that newspapers have a future
Dyson at Large
Message for all doom-mongers: if printed newspapers are supposedly in a dying fly position, how come I'm thumbing through a 236-page weekly right now?'Leave our cats alone' on page seven, an 11-year-old pictured pleading for yobs to stop throwing bricks at a colony of feral cats; 'Mind numbing tragedy' on pages eight and nine, a spread of reports on church-going Jean Laithwaite who shot her husband as he slept before committing suicide; 'TV's Stephen visits city to mourn friend' on page 11, telling how comedian Stephen Fry had twittered about his stay in Chester; and 'Firms plead guilty over fatal fireball' on page 21, reporting the inquiry into the death of a worker killed by exploding aerosols in a local factory. Sex ad rating: a poor four out of ten. 'Mistress Dawn' and 'Top Totty' were just two of twenty adverts on page 109 of the classified book that I reckon might have been offering something more than a head massage.
Message for all doom-mongers: if printed newspapers are supposedly in a dying fly position, how come I'm thumbing through a 236-page weekly right now?
Yes, you heard that right, the 236-page edition of the Chester Chronicle, dated 21 October 2010.
So huge, in fact, that the presses have to print the paper in two lots, both stapled, the first 'main book' made up of 112-pages, the second 'Classified' section containing 128-pages.
The latter was mainly a local house-buyers' bible, the first 103 pages packed to the rafters with property ads from 33 estate agents across Cheshire, more traditional sales, services, agriculture and motoring classifieds appearing from page 105 to 128.
These had to be carried over to the main book, with two pages of Public Notices, a page worth of BMDs, an eight-page 'Recruitment' section, two pages of entertainments and a four-page pull-out of reader holidays.
On top of this healthy revenue from classifieds, there were 96 display ads squeezed in throughout that main book, proudly showing that that in and around Chester the printed newspaper is alive and kicking.
As far as content is concerned, personally I preferred the page three lead to the choice of splash, although I'm sure experienced editor Eric Langton knows what his readers want.
He decided on 'REVEALED: £7M MARKET OFF THE WALL' for page one, unveiling plans for a new market hall linked by a footbridge to the historic city walls.
Langton is probably right, as we all know shoppers and market traders are among the most fervent of local newspaper addicts.
But I did like the page three tale, temptingly headlined: 'I will kidnap your baby, shoot your family and burn your house down.'
This was a report from Chester Crown Court, telling how a teenager with a grudge used Facebook to land the brother of his girlfriend in police custody before his cruel fraud was discovered.
Other stories that caught my eye on a first perusal included:
In total, there were well over 450 individual reads in 74 pages of news, features and sport, including a six-page 'Celebrations' section, 10 pages of 'The Guide' covering entertainments, three pages of 'Community News' in six-point, four pages of business and eight pages of sport.
Not bad value for the Trinity Mirror-owned Chronicle with a cover price of 77p.
Like everywhere else, of course, recession-hit readers in Cheshire have been watching the pennies, and so there was a -7.5pc decrease in readers to 20,224 according to the Latest ABCs
But I still want to see Bob Satchwell waving a copy of this weighty title in the air when he introduces the session on the future of printed newspapers at the Society of Editors' Conference in Glasgow on Monday.
For within it lies proof that newspapers – if their custodians take a little more care of them – have a future that will extend far beyond the latest inane predictions.
Source: Holdthefrontpage.com
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