West meets east: Silicon Valley accelerator to tackle the future of journalism. “We have a similar mission to public media and good journalism outlets, but this isn’t just about saving public media or saving journalism. It’s about building a place for entrepreneurs to build something that makes people more informed and empowered,” Ford said in an interview Monday.
In other words, Ford is taking the spirit of innovation so ingrained in Silicon Valley and applying that to public information values often associated with outlets like The New York Times or Frontline, and the “future of journalism” conversation so often heard on the East Coast amid its glut of media companies. Your startup might not have much to do with public radio or publishing, but you might still be a fit for Matter, which launched in San Francisco Monday. In other words, Ford wants to find the next Evan Williams and Biz Stone back when they were hanging out and coming up with an idea that would change the media world forever, when their idea for Twitter was brand new. Or David Karp and Tumblr. Rossel bascule à son tour dans l'internet payant. Can Mark Thompson save the New York Times? - Press - Media. The British executive has come very far, of course, in the intervening years (and, by the by, he long ago apologised to the hapless employee for the biting, which he said was horseplay, hugely misinterpreted).
But as he sets sail for the US, and his new challenges, it seems he may yet again have to bare his teeth. With revenues falling, The New York Times looks in need of the same brand of cost-cutting that Mr Thompson brought to the Beeb. Mr Thompson was announced late on Tuesday as the new chief executive of The New York Times Company, a post he will take up in November, a few weeks after he hands over the reins at the BBC to George Entwistle.
For watchers of the US newspaper scene, the appointment of a man steeped in news broadcasting, and with no print experience whatsoever on his CV, looks a leftfield appointment to run the Gray Lady. Yet there are more similarities between the BBC and The New York Times than might appear on the surface. What's the story? The BBC The New York Times. Espagne: des milliers de journalistes sans emploi à cause de la crise. C'est "la situation la plus grave jamais traversée par le journalisme (espagnol) dans toute son histoire", se désole Elsa Gonzalez, présidente de la Fédération des associations de journalistes d'Espagne (Fape). Depuis 2008, 6.234 journalistes ont perdu leur poste, 57 médias ont été fermés et 23 plans sociaux ont été menés, selon cette organisation qui regroupe plus de 21.000 professionnels.
"Ce dernier trimestre, les chiffres sont alarmants et l'horizon est sombre", ajoute Elsa Gonzalez. Dernières victimes en date: rien de moins que les deux plus grands journaux du pays, El Mundo et El País. Le premier, qui a déjà communiqué ses plans aux syndicats, va supprimer "au moins 195 postes", soit le départ d'"un journaliste sur trois", explique Fernando Cano, rédacteur en chef du site spécialisé sur les médias, Le second, qui prépare un plan social, "fera quelque chose de semblable", estime-t-il.
La précarité en plus La publicité en crise elle aussi. Journatic CEO: We are creating a better future for journalism. The Chicago Tribune recently laid off many of the reporters and editors who produced its hyper-local editions, and announced that it was outsourcing those functions to a startup called Journatic — a move that drew criticism from those who saw the company as a Demand Media-style “content farm,” replacing journalists with algorithms and poorly-paid freelancers. In an interview with GigaOM, however, Journatic CEO Brian Timpone said that not only is his model more efficient than that of a newspaper, but it can actually help produce better journalism. Timpone — who got his start as a journalist working for TV stations and broadcast affiliates in Duluth, Minnesota and Springfield, Illinois and at one time owned several community newspapers — said he got the idea for what became Journatic after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, when he started a content-management service for newspapers (Timpone also runs a data-driven real estate service called Blockshopper).
The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world. By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid this week, more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites. More than a dozen dailies in Europe are charging, led by Finland’s Sanoma (see “Sanoma’s Big Bundled Success”), Axel Springer, and News Corp.’s Times of London. It looks like more than a dozen in Germany alone may be charging by year’s end. In Asia, the powerful Singapore Press Holdings is first out of the gate, with other dailies there planning to follow. Suddenly it’s paywalls all around the world. Charging for digital access is a nuanced question.
Let’s look at the newsonomics of an increasing paywalled world. While the Times is a fledgling pay model success, we can’t say, broadly, that paywall models are widely successful. The Washington Post, Recast for a Digital Future. Quel business model pour la presse en ligne ? A Groupon for Newspapers. Newspapers, in danger of having their advertising lunch eaten by Groupon and its ilk, have teamed up to form an online deals platform. Eight publishing and media companies are launching the common digital shopping platform, called Find n Save. The eight are Advance Digital, A.H. Belo, Cox Media Group, Gannett, Hearst Corp., MediaNews Group, McClatchy, and The Washington Post Co.
The consortium, set to be announced today, is expected to roll out Find n Save’s online ad products across its members’ 200-plus newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, Arizona Republic, and The Miami Herald. Newspapers have been racing to catch up for a while with the likes of Groupon and its copycats, including tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, which have been slapping deal-finder services on their websites. “It’s an industry movement to embrace a single advertising platform,” Tippie said. News agencies must evolve or meet extinction | Anthony DeRosa. Imagine you’re a reporter and you suddenly witness a major news event occurring right before your eyes.
Do you snap it to the wire, file a story to your website, or tweet it out to your followers? If you’re at the AP, you damn well better not choose the latter. In a perfect world, you’d want to do all the above, though your employer is going to likely want you to do the first two before you tweet. Today, Reuters is a lot more than just a wire service. We’ve built — and are continuing to build — what we think is the world’s greatest news website, in the form of Reuters.com, and part of that is providing our readers with reliable and timely news, information, opinion and analysis.
An extension of that website is the information we post on our social media accounts, at Google+, Twitter and on Facebook. We’re not just reporting our own news there, but have become a beacon for all news, being as comprehensive as possible so readers come to us first for all they need to know. Spéciale dernière : La presse n’est plus à vendre - Web 1,2,3ElectronLibre. The newsonomics of Anton Chekhov. I was first struck by this Chekhov quotation in the theater program: “Russians glory in the past, hate the present, and fear the future.”
It’s not easy to find that exact quote on the web, but it certainly sums up much of the playwright’s work and his assessment of the national character into which he was born in 1860. That thought also seems to say too something about news industry today. Those halcyon days of monopoly dailies weren’t as wonderful as the rose-colored rearview memories recall. The present is an unending struggle — the near future, at least, looking as bad or worse than today. 2012 budgeting, still in full swing at many newspaper companies, is too much like a medical examiner’s exercise. What I hear: Dailies are budgeting down from mid-single digits to as high as low double-digits in print advertising for 2012, compared to 2011. Even execs as veteran as Belo CEO Robert Decherd, are moved to incredulity to describe where we stand. It is hard to imagine more decline.
Personalised news: Your digital paper, sir. Facts, fiction and friction over the state of free daily newspapers | Media. Has the much vaunted free newspaper model run into the sand? That's the view of Christoph Riess, chief executive of the the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). During his update on world press trends at last week's Vienna congress, he said the "main decline" in newsprint concerned free titles. "For free dailies, the hype is over," he said, arguing that the number of free newspaper titles across the world has decreased. Though the closures were particularly pronounced in eastern Europe, because titles there were not economically sustainable, free newspapers took a big hit in 2010 elsewhere too.
According to the survey quoted by Riess, there was a drop in total distribution to 24m copies last year compared to a high of around 34m in 2008. Riess said: "In many cities, too many free titles were launched. But the Dutch-based monitor of free newspapers, Piet Bakker, takes issue with Riess's claims and the statistics he cites. Sources: Newspaper Innovation/WAN-IFRA. Nonprofit news sites need to act more like digital businesses. By Mayur Patel and Michele McLellan: In the emerging landscape of non-profit news, good journalism is not enough.
Even with generous foundation support, high-quality reporting alone will not create an organization that can sustain its ability to produce news in the public interest. Instead, successful news organizations – even the nonprofit ones - have to act like digital businesses, making revenue experimentation, entrepreneurship and community engagement important pieces of the mix. Understanding how to create social and economic value and how to adapt and innovate are just as important as good content. The new study we just completed, “Getting Local,” offers a detailed look at some of the country’s leading online local nonprofit news ventures, providing data on how they are generating revenue, engaging users and cultivating donors. While none of the sites profiled has developed a clear business model yet, some of the key ingredients needed for success are becoming increasingly apparent: WSJ Gets Personal With Gravity. The Wall Street Journal quietly enabled a personalization feature today (or at least this is the first time I’ve noticed it).
Articles are now automatically sorted based on what they think you’ll like to read. It’s powered by Los Angeles based startup Gravity. If you’re not familiar with Gravity – it was founded in 2008 by three former MySpace executives and has gone through many iterations. Originally the company was a site where people could chat with others about topics of interest. Then they turned the engine they created to determine people’s interest graph and planned on helping other sites personalize content. CEO Amit Kapur, formerly the COO of MySpace, wrote a guest blog post on TechCrunch last year talking about his vision around the future of personalization. It turns out that sites want this feature.
That didn’t happen apparently (and I have no idea where things stand with TechCrunch and Gravity). There’s more here on the Gravity site about the partnership. Like this: Monday Note. Is the app economy killing online publishers? — Mobile Technology News. WSJ pushes further into video with free app | MediaFile. The Wall Street Journal has launched a new video application “WSJ Live” that pulls from the content from its stable of live programming. WSJ Live is another push from the Journal into video programming — which represents some of its most valuable advertising inventory, said Alisa Bowen, general manager of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Ad inventory on the video network has been sold out and WSJ Live is free to watch on WSJ.com.
That is part of the reason that the Journal plans to keep WSJ Live free of charge, unlike some of its other content, but that could change in the future, Bowen said. Six advertisers have signed up for the sponsorship of the app: Aetna, AT&T, Citi Simplicity, Cognizant, FedEx, and Fidelity. The Journal has been one of the longest running newspapers in the U.S. to charge for online content, a hybrid model that allows readers to access some content for free. (A video from Digits follows:) Americans spend just a fraction of online time with news compared to social media. News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites. Apart from the specific business issues feeding those travails — sinking traffic and profits at both — they provided yet another lesson of the Internet age: as news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information.
AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch last year for a reported $30 million was an acknowledgement that scale, once the grail of the Web, can be a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the kind of audiences advertisers want. Last year, Yahoo hired writers who had a made a name for themselves at smaller sites — including Mark Lisanti, Courtney Reimer and Will Leitch — for the same reasons. But it is difficult to successfully transplant insurgent energy into a vast conglomerate, because the big blog tends to consume or destroy whatever it is fed. Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in Web behavior.