Property Week journalist takes top prize at PTC New Talent Awards

Nick Johnstone of UBM title Property Week has claimed the top award at the Periodicals Training Council’s inaugural New Talent Awards.

Johnstone was handed the grand prix 2012 at a ceremony in London last night (February 1).

He was also named new business features journalist of the year.

This year the PTC changed its award scheme, expanding “to reflect the range of roles across the publishing sector”, it explained in a release.

The awards recognised the “most promising student journalists of the year”, with the undergraduate title going to Stacey Bartlett from the University of Central Lancashire and Rakesh Ramchurn from City University named in the postgraduate category.

Immediate Media Co, the company formed in October from the amalgamation of BBC Magazines, Origin Publishing and Magicalia, was the biggest winner on the night, taking home three awards.

Winners of the PTC New Talent Awards 2012

• Grand Prix 2012: Nick Johnstone, Property Week, United Business Media
• New Publisher of the Year: Martin Stahel, Immediate Media Co.
• New Ad Manager of the Year: Ossie Bayram, Hearst Magazines UK
• New Business News Journalist of the Year: Carl Brown, Inside Housing, Ocean Media Group
• New Business Features Journalist of the Year: Nick Johnstone, Property Week, United Business Media
• New Editor of the Year: Tom Cullen, ShortList Media
• New Consumer Specialist/Customer Journalist of the Year: Louise Ridley, Immediate Media Co.
• New Designer of the Year: Elliott Web, Q Magazine, Bauer Media
• New Consumer Journalist of the Year: Amy Grier, ShortList Media
• New Sales Executive of the Year: Courtney Maggs-Jones, JLD Media
• New Classified Sales Executive of the Year: Sereena Gill, IPC Media
• New Section Editor of the Year: Zoe Smeaton, Chemist+Druggist, UBM Medica
• New Marketing Executive of the Year: Caroline Motson, Immediate Media Co
• New Direct Marketing Executive of the Year: Elizabeth Telford, Newsquest Special Media
• Most Promising Student Journalist of the Year (Undergraduate): Stacey Bartlett, the University of Central Lancashire
• Most Promising Student Journalist of the Year (Postgraduate): Rakesh Ramchurn, City University, London

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Wired.com gets playful with cow clicking interactive

Wired.com has published a feature about tongue-in-cheek gaming, adding a playful twist by turning the article into a game.

In a feature called the curse of Cow Clicker: How a cheeky satire became a videogame hit, Wired.com reports on how a “cow-clicking game” (FarmVille), inspired another cow clicking game (Cow Clicker), by adding a cow clicking element to the feature – perhaps a first in digital storytelling.

Every time a reader clicks on the word “cow” – repeated 97 times within the feature – a graphic of a cow appears, with the “cownter” keeping track of how many cows have been clicked on. The cows in fact obscure the text therefore making it more difficult to read the article.

Readers can also click on the graphical cows to send them to their Facebook friends.

The feature is intended to “echo the theme” of the Cow Clicker Facebook game discussed in the feature, Shannon Perkins editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com told Journalism.co.uk. “It’s an intentionally trivial experience obscuring a more content rich experience,” he said.

Cow Clicker was created by Ian Bogost, a game developer, academic and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at play. The game, which peaked at 56,000 players, was inspired by popular Facebook game FarmVille.

The Wired.com featured includes an interview with Bogost.

… This thought popped into my head,” Bogost says: “Games like FarmVille are cow clickers. You click on a cow, and that’s all you do. I remember thinking at the time that it felt like a one-liner, the kind of thing you would tweet. I just put it in the back of my mind.”

He developed Cow Clicker with “transparently stupid prizes—bronze, silver, and golden udders and cowbells—that people could win only by amassing an outlandish number of points. (A golden cowbell, for instance, requires 100,000 clicks.)”

On one level, this was all part of the act. Bogost was inhabiting the persona of a manipulative game designer, and therefore it made sense to pull every dirty trick he could to make the game as sticky and addictive as possible. But as he grew into the role, he got a genuine thrill from his creation’s popularity. Instead of addressing a few hundred participants at a conference, he was sharing his perspective with tens of thousands of players, many of whom checked in several times a day.

• Shannon Perkins, editor of interactives at Wired.com, who is behind this interactive will be speaking on newsgames at news:rewired. Also presenting in the session is Bobby Schweizer, Ian Bogost’s co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at play.

• For a day of inspirational ideas in journalism sign up to attend news:rewired – media in motion. It is being held at MSN HQ, London on 3 February 2012.

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Guardian: American Vogue launches £1,000-a-year archive paywall

American Vogue is making its archive of every image in its 119 year history available online, according to the Guardian.

The library – searchable by image, designer, date, model and brand – will come with a hefty pricetag of $1,575 (£1,015)-a-year.

The Guardian says it could be a valuable resource, despite the cost, explaining it promises to reduce search time “that might have taken weeks of painstaking research using paper archives”.

The archive is being marketed as a business-to-business resource, aimed at design professionals. A limited version, the extent of which is not yet clear, will be made available to Vogue’s subcribers in 2012.

The strategic importance of the move goes beyond the revenue the paywall will deliver. “This is Condé Nast waving a flag about what the Vogue brand could be,” says Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders Analysis. “What they are saying is: Vogue is absolutely the authoritative player in this field. There aren’t many magazine brands that could line up behind this and copy what they’ve done. That’s one of the points Vogue is making.”

The article goes on to say that some feel the £1,000-a-year fee is too high, whereas “some are in full support of the subscription fee”.

“The moral outrage people feel about being asked to pay for content is misguided. Actually, I’m surprised the price is so low,” comments Chris Sanderson, co-founder of trend forecasting consultancy the Future Laboratory. “The archive is clearly being marketed to creative professionals. The searchability gives it real value, because you have the ability to drill down into content and locate exactly what you need.

The Guardian’s full article is here: Vogue launches online archive of every American issue in its 119-year history.

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Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks

Six million apps of magazines published by Future Publishing have been downloaded since the launch of Apple’s Newsstand six weeks ago.

In the first month since launch, the magazine publishing company, which has apps of 65 UK titles, made $1 million in the increased business, Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of iPad and tablet editions at Future Publishing, told Journalism.co.uk in a podcast on how Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry.

Newsstand, which launched on 12 October when Apple released iOS 5, is an iPhone and iPad home screen app that acts as a direct portal into a new magazine and news publication section of the iTunes App Store.

Future, like other publishing companies, has appealed to customers by offering free downloads of particular back issues, with iPhone and iPad users responding by downloading five million free editions.

Goldsmith said initial statistics are encouraging with 40 per cent of sales being made up of subscriptions rather than individual editions.

Other publishers are also reporting an increased impact. Daryl Rayner, managing director of Exact Editions, which works with publishers to create digital editions, reported “very pleasing results” with 15-30 per cent of subscriptions taken out on an annual basis rather than as 30-day subscriptions and renewals at 85-88 per cent.

Chris Talintyre, head of direct and digital marketing at Factory Media, which publishes 27 websites and 19 magazines, reported more than 850,000 downloads and initial sales data for October showing a month-on-month increase of 150 per cent since Newsstand’s launch.

Goldsmith said Newsstand is “absolutely intrinsic to the future of Future Publishing,” which yesterday reported a £19 million loss, largely because of a slump in print in the US.

Future said that its UK operations had been “resilient” overall, with revenues falling just 2 per cent.

US losses were “partially offset” by growth in digital revenues, which saw a 25 per cent hike.

Goldsmith illustrated how the iPad and Newsstand is changing the magazine market with the example of Comic Heroes, a special edition, bi-monthly magazine. On the physical news stand “it does okay”, he said, but “it’s a special edition and no one expects it to do marvellously”

But on Newsstand things are different.

It’s our second biggest page turning, flat app. It has gone through the roof because it is a brand that means different things to a different device. And that means we will invest in the title in terms of IP, in terms of staffing, in terms of marketing, in a way that we previously probably wouldn’t have invested in to that extent.

Is it going to revolutionise our business? It could do, it could well do.

I think the next 12 months are gong to be very, very interesting indeed.

Click here to hear more statistics and how Newsstand is revolutionising magazine publishing.

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#jpod: How Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry

In this podcast, Journalism.co.uk’s technology correspondent Sarah Marshall looks at the impact of Apple’s Newsstand on the magazine publishing industry since it launched six weeks ago on 12 October.

This jpod includes interviews with Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of iPad and tablet editions, Future Publishing; Daryl Rayner, managing director of Exact Editions and Chris Talintyre, head of direct and digital marketing at Factory Media, and includes download statistics from the three companies.

Podcast: Download

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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Economist launches World in 2012 iPad app

The Economist has today announced the release of an iPad version of “The World in 2012 from the Economist: Editor’s Highlights”, based on the annual magazine which features predictions, graphs and charts for the coming year.

In a release, the Economist said the app, which is sponsored by BMW, features “select articles from this year’s edition, videos from around the world and specially curated snapshots of people, events, landmarks and data are all included in the first-ever World in…highlights application.”

The featured articles focus on a variety of topics ranging from the areas of technology still up for grabs, the power of sharing and the change in China’s leadership.  The videos include an extract of an interview with Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, as well as interviews with people from New York, Beijing and London on the coming year.  The application also contains a feature on 12 people to watch in 2012, a month-by-month selection of events in 2012, a snapshot of 12 titbits to look out for in the year ahead and a collection of charts, graphs and data.

Daniel Franklin, editor of The World in 2012 said in the release:

This digital introduction makes it clear to new readers why the publication has become so popular over the past quarter century.

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The Week magazine gets a ‘companion site’ to the print edition

The Week now has a “companion site” to its weekly magazine, which carries a round-up of news, comment and analysis, with the re-branding of the First Post, a news site already owned by the the magazine’s publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd.

The re-branded site has a “golden rule” that copy published in the print edition will not appear on the Week’s website, Nigel Horne, editor of the First Post and now of the Week online told Journalism.co.uk

We provide a daily news service that is not unlike the stuff we used to do at the First Post but nuanced and massaged into the Week daily.

The re-branded site, which launched yesterday (26 October), plans to publish around 25 stories a day and aims to provide readers of the weekly title a chance to “dip in during the week” to read their style of content and “original reporting”.

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Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing

Apple’s new Newsstand app resulted in two million digital downloads of Future Publishing titles in the first four days, resulting in consumer spending well in excess of normal monthly revenues, the magazine publisher has said in a release.

Newsstand, which provides iPhone and iPad users who have updated their devices to iOS 5, released last week (12 October), with a dedicated portal to download magazines from the App Store, “creates an amazing opportunity for publishers”, Future UK’s CEO Mark Wood said.

Future Publishing, which has titles including .net, Procycling and Digital Camera, released 55 digital magazines to Newsstand on the day of launch. It has since released more and now has 65 UK and US digital magazines available, some free and some paid-for.

Wood added:

We plan to include more sampler issues in every magazine container in coming weeks, as well as uploading high price-point bookazines and premium one-shot titles.

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Paperboy app: Take a photo of newspaper article to find the digital edition

An app which uses image recognition technology to allow a reader to take a photo of a newspaper or magazine story on an iPhone or Android phone and use it to search for the digital article will be launched for UK titles next month.

Kooaba, the company behind the Paperboy app, has partnered with NewspaperDirect to enable print to digital linking for 2,000 titles worldwide. Around 50 UK titles are available digitally via NewspaperDirect and are therefore likely to be the publications available via the app. The full list includes the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and Daily Mail, plus regional newspapers such as the Kentish Gazette, Birmingham Mail and Evening Standard.

In addition to taking a photo on a phone and using image recognition on the text to find the digital article, newspapers can also print a link which app users can snap to lead them to additional multimedia content, such as video.

The roll-out of the ability to find digital from print using the Paperboy app has started with this list of newspapers based in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is planning add UK titles in November.

The Kooaba blog explains how the technology works.

Paperboy connects printed media to the digital world with one click: All the application’s powerful image recognition technology needs is a photo taken by a smartphone camera of an article or page in a newspaper or magazine. Paperboy then matches the photo to the images in Kooaba’s sizeable library of printed media or identifies that page or article from NewspaperDirect’s inventory of over 2,000 same-day, digital newspapers replicas. Users can then share, email or archive the electronic version on the go, anywhere, anytime or explore related information like videos, images or links to selected topics. Paperboy automatically finds URLs on pages of print publications. In some publications, exclusive Paperboy content is for pages with the Shutter icon.

This video gives examples of how readers could find it useful, such as taking a photo of a recipe to locate the digital version, which could then be saved to Evernote or shared via Twitter.

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Future PLC ‘considering options’ for US division

Magazine publisher Future has said it is “considering a wider range of strategic options” for its US division in light of “challenging” conditions for the business.

In pre-close trading update the publisher said its position in the US “is significantly more challenging” than the UK. In July Future announced plans to “accelerate the transition of Future US into a primarily digital business”.

But this week, in a report preceding full-year earnings in November, the group said trading conditions in the US “reflecting ongoing weakness and decreasing visibility at newsstand” means the board is now considering a wider range of strategic options. PaidContent reports that the language used suggests the company “now may look to sell its business there”.

The publisher also confirmed that 10 per cent of its workforce has been cut in the UK and worldwide, which equals around 100 jobs, as part of its restructure to focus on digital and print efficiencies.

The company also claims in the latest report that the trends identified in its Interim Management Statement, published in July, have continued.

Revenues for the twelve months ending 30 September 2011 are expected to be down 6 per cent on last year, in constant currency.  The Board remains comfortable with market expectations of results for 2011, subject only to any period-end adjustment required in relation to US newsstand returns, beyond those already announced and incorporated into fourth quarter estimates.

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