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MTC09: Moritz Wuttke – Don’t rely on Google and develop your own AdSense

September 29th, 2009 | 1 Comment | Posted by in Advertising, Events

Publishers shouldn’t automatically give over everything to Google, said Moritz Wuttke, founder of NextMediaInitiatives, based in Switzerland and China, at a WAN-IFRA industry gathering today.

Wuttke, who advises media and advertising companies how to earn revenue online, suggested that newspaper publishers make advertisers work far too hard when it comes to buying adverts. It should be possible within three clicks, he said.

The New York Times’ self-service advertising model was a good development, but much more needed to be done by organisations, he said.

Who has tried to develop their own AdSense? Wuttke didn’t suggest that newspapers develop their own technology, but look to services outside of Google, he said. “Google is not bad – use them but don’t be abused,” he said. If Google offers to host everything for free, think twice, he advised.

“Work with Ad Clicks,” he said. “Start your own contextual advertising.”

Using evidence from Asia, he showed where profits were being made: the Chinese instant messaging service for example: QQ IM with its 70 per cent profit margin.

Newspaper site advertising needs to be more flexible, he said. Understand that 15 seconds might be too long for a user to watch a advertising video – five seconds might even be too long, he added. “The best thing is to meet user groups and find out what is annoying,” he said.

Finally, he said: “Don’t fire the young guys. Hire the young guys – who will even work for free. Suck their brains. Empower them.”

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#FollowJourn: @NeilDurham/deputy editor

September 29th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Recommended journalists

#FollowJourn: Neil Durham

Who? Deputy editor of GP and Independent Nurse

What? Currently deputy editor of  GP, a weekly newspaper for UK family doctors and Independent Nurse, a leading magazine for primary care and community nurses which is published twice a month. Both are publications of Haymarket Medical Media.

Where? @NeilDurham on Twitter.

Contact? neil.durham [at] haymarket.com

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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The Jobless Journalist: Week five – Temporarily re-employed

September 29th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Job losses, Jobs

This is the fifth post in a series from an anonymous UK-based journalist recently made redundant. To follow the series, you can subscribe to this feed.

Six weeks after being made redundant from a staff post on a consumer magazine I’ve managed to secure some online shifts at a national newspaper.

I don’t consider myself permanently employed as it’s casual work, although it’s a huge relief to be earning again.

Shift work is a double-edged sword: you’ll never do a normal nine-to-five and there’s no guarantee of work, but you have greater flexibility to pursue other freelance work and time to keep up the job applications.

Casual shifts aren’t generally advertised. I got the gig through a friend who already worked at the paper and put me in touch with the managing editor. I sent in my CV and then hounded her every day for two weeks before she agreed to see me.

Mind you, constant harassment alone won’t get you through the door – you’ll need experience of using content management systems if you’re looking to work online or reporting experience for writing shifts.

You have to be prepared to work nights and weekends as these are the shifts that are unpopular and therefore available. As you prove yourself, it’s likely that you’ll be given a few day shifts.

Days involve more writing as you’re taking agency copy and re-writing and subbing it before publishing to the web.  You’ll need to keep your wits about you when it comes to legal issues as copy is usually subbed after the story goes live.

Nights are about uploading staff copy, so there’s less writing. They are also relentless.

Despite this, I’d thoroughly recommend taking up shift work. Not only are you earning, you’re also gaining experience.

Working for the online section of a national newspaper teaches you invaluable lessons in writing for the web, subbing, linking and dealing with reader comments. It will look great on your CV too.

A lot of my fellow shift workers also do casual work for other newspapers and you soon find there’s a circuit for this kind of work.

You could do worse than cold-calling a news desk and tracking down the relevant editor to see if they have any shifts going, but be warned: you will need relevant experience in the field as you have to hit the ground running.

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DocumentCloud still looking for more collaborators; will build on Amazon Web Services

Last week we reported on DocumentCloud’s new partner, Thomson Reuters and its long list of ‘beta-testers’ including one from the UK – the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) based at City University, London.

To re-cap, DocumentCloud is a an open-source platform to make data more easily accessible, pointing users to documents hosted elsewhere, similar to a card cataloguing system or search engine. Only in rare circumstances will DocumentCloud serve the documents itself.

We asked one of its founders, Scott Klein, about the next steps for the project, a winner of the Knight News Challenge 2009.
cloudcrowd.jpg_resized_300_240.jpeg

So why use Thomson Reuter’s OpenCalais?

[SK]“OpenCalais will, as documents are entering our system, find ‘entities’ (people, places, organisations) in them and hand them back to our servers as machine-readable swath of information, which we’ll store and index, and make available for people to query. The process will happen in real-time, and will be a big part of how we relate documents to each other.”

Will you look to partner other large organisations like Thomson Reuters?

“Yes, definitely. We intend to rely heavily on Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure – namely, their Elastic Computing Cloud and Elastic Block Store services, and Amazon has been very enthusiastic about working with us.

“As for other partners, we have a wish list of companies and technologies we think would work well with DocumentCloud. But we’re also happy to talk to anybody who is interested in contributing technology. We don’t imagine that we have all the answers or that we have to invent everything that goes into this.”

What’s next in the development / collaboration pipeline?

“[As reported by Journalism.co.uk] A few weeks ago, we released under an open-source license a major component of our document processing system, an easy-to-use parallel-processing framework for Ruby on Rails called CloudCrowd. Next we’ll start tackling other big components, such as the hosting infrastructure and user interface.”

Will you be hiring any more staff – we see you’ve appointed your lead programmer?

“Yes, we’re on the hunt for some contract staff to work on building out our infrastructure, and on our visual design/user experience.”

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Follow the Labour Party Conference #Twinge: live updates here tonight (20.15 BST)

September 28th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Events, Social media and blogging

If you won’t be in Brighton’s Grand tonight for the Twitter debate hosted by Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, then follow the live stream below.

You TWEET if you want to: the web is for opposition, not for governing:

20.15 – 21.45pm: Debate organised by Channel 4 and Fishburn Hedges: Rt Hon Ed Balls MP, Rt Hon Ben Bradshaw MP, Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Rt Hon Caroline Flint MP, Sadiq Khan MP, Kerry McCarthy MP, Tom Watson MP, Stella Creasy (PPC, Walthamstow), Alex Hilton (Blogger) and Google spokesperson (tba).

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#FollowJourn @charlesarthur/technology editor

September 28th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Recommended journalists

#FollowJourn: Charles Arthur

Who? Technology editor at the Guardian.

What? Arthur was previously technology editor at the Independent, writing about technology, science and the environment before going freelance. Now he edits the Guardian’s weekly technology supplement and site. 

Where? @charlesarthur and www.charlesarthur.com

Contact? Via Twitter or his blog.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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George Ayittey: ‘Freedom of expression was not invented by the West’

On a recent BBC World Service programme ‘The Forum’, Ghanaian-American economist George Ayittey shared his 60 second idea to change the world – part of the show at this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0048s8s (September 20, 2009). He is @ayittey on Twitter.

“[T]he UN should expel those countries that do not respect freedom of expression, which is Article 19 of the UN Human Rights charter.”

The Committee to Protect Bloggers have supplied this full transcript:

“I would like everyone to write the following on postcards and send to governments around the world.

“Freedom of expression and of thought was not invented by the West.  It has existed in traditional societies – even primitive ones – for centuries. Human progress would not have been possible without it.

“I’m saying this as a black African from Ghana because today around the world, we have ‘educated’ barbarians who want to suppress this freedom by arresting and jailing dissidents, writers, journalists and those they disagree with. In fact, the UN should expel those countries that do not respect freedom of expression, which is Article 19 of the UN Human Rights charter.

“When everyone has written this thought on postcards and sent them, they should also put them on POSTERS and hang them up in market places, in windows, on the sides of buildings everywhere. So that around the world will be the unmistakable visual reminder of the freedom everywhere.”


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Will Time Warner sell Time magazine?

September 28th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Editors' pick, Magazines

Reuters is reporting, originally via BusinessWeek, that Time Warner Inc  will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category – according to Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder.

“Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they’re just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks,” said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group during a roundtable discussion at the USC Annenberg School for Communications.

Meanwhile, Peter Kafka of All Things Digital suggests that Crawford might not be right:

“[H]ere’s the thing: The body language from Time Warner executives in recent months makes me think they intend to keep at least part of their magazine business in the family. More than body language, actually: ‘Time Warner without People? I can’t imagine it,’ one well-placed Time Warner official told me recently.”

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SMH.com.au: News Corp in ‘second phase’ of paid-for content plan

September 28th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Newspapers, Online Journalism

The Sydney Morning Herald has obtained an email to News Corp online staff, from the company’s digital chief executive, Richard Freudenstein, indicating that paid-for content plans, as announced by Murdoch in August, were now in a ‘second phase’.

“The key points from Mr Freudenstein’s communique to News Digital Media (NDM) staff were that the company was reassured by the research it had conducted and that it was proceeding to the next round of development.

“‘News has conducted some audience research here in Australia and in the UK and US, which gives us confidence that, if we get the product and delivery system right, people will happily pay for news content online, on their computer, mobile, e-reader or other device,’ Mr Freudenstein told staff. ‘Here in Sydney we are about to move into the second phase of the project.’”

Full post at this link…

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AP Polanski memo published as news story: still live

September 28th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by in Editors' pick, Online Journalism

At the time of writing, this is still live – a published Associated Press story that looks rather more like an internal memo. ‘OK, can you do some more probing?’ is quite an unusual intro.

It can be seen on Google hosted news (published 19 hours ago) and Forbes.com. Twitter users have spotted but the AP hasn’t removed it yet – maybe it’s playing it cool. NB: Google’s SideWiki can be put to good use here, if you feel inclined to point out the error…

apswiss2

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