Video by the Press Association. Presenter Anna Botting (@annabotting)

This two year-old video shot by the Press Association helps explain the work of the Journalists’ Charity.

The charity usually raises money at high-profile dinners and speaker events, but now you have the chance to support your fellow journalists (and your future selves) in a much easier way.

Just a fiver (or more) will help speed me, Journalism.co.uk publisher and owner (@johncthompson) on my way on an epic 1400km solo and unsupported cycle from Brighton to Oslo, Norway on 8-19 June 2012 (see earlier blog post for full details).

My sponsorship page is here.

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Earlier this year, a US study claimed that becoming a journalist is the fifth worst career choice. As well as citing factors such as stress, industry outlook, income levels and general working environment for the ranking, the study quotes a reporter as saying the younger generation “doesn’t care about the news”.

This is against a background of continuing decline in public trust of communications professionals, no doubt exacerbated by the ongoing findings of the Leveson inquiry as it investigates the underbelly of journalism and politics.

Of course it’s not all bleak. In many ways, this is a time of renaissance for journalism as our ways of gathering and disseminating news proliferate online. And journalism will always offer rewards that outweigh the financial ones for the majority of us.

Nevertheless a life of low salary and high stress can take its toll, if not on you then for some of your colleagues. So why not do something small to help that collectively can amount to something big?

The Journalists’ Charity “started in 1864 when a group of parliamentary journalists met up in a London pub to set up a fund to help their colleagues and dependents who had fallen on hard times. In the days before state benefits, grants were made to meet the costs of providing some of the necessities of life”. The Victorian novelist Charles Dickens was a founder supporter.

These days it has widened its remit to include all journalists and is always ready to help them and their dependents with advice, grants and other forms of financial assistance. The Journalists’ Charity also runs a care home for journalists, Pickering House, in Dorking, Surrey as well as sheltered and extra care housing.

Given that most of our pensions are not going to add up to much, that’s quite a nice safety net isn’t it?

On 8 June I’m going to cycle solo and unsupported from Brighton (home of Journalism.co.uk) to Oslo, Norway to raise money for this under-appreciated charity. I will be cycling approximately 850 miles in 11 days, an average of 77 miles a day, cycling through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark.

You can do your bit by sponsoring a fiver or more on my sponsorship page and helping to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook etc.

Sponsors who do not wish to remain private will be rewarded with recognition and thanks on our @journalismnews Twitter channel (58k-plus followers) so that’s pretty decent exposure, especially if you sponsor on behalf of your media-related business.

And if you’re still not convinced that the Journalists’ Charity is a worthy cause, I will also be raising money for two cancer charities – alternative sponsor page here.

Journalism.co.uk owner John Thompson (@johncthompson), who will be cycling Brighton to Oslo in 11 days to raise money for the Journalists' Charity

The route I plan to cycle from Calais (once I have cycled to Dover and taken the ferry)

• Video: what the Journalists’ Charity does and how you can help
• ‘Twitchhiking’ freelancer Paul Smith completes journey
• Democracy site MySociety to receive $575,000 from US investment firm
• Italian newspaper joins Times safer cycling campaign
• Reporters Without Borders publishes details of 2010 financial aid

In the past year, the Big Issue has changed dramatically, regaining its reputation as a “magazine with teeth”, according to editor Paul McNamee.

Speaking at yesterday’s PPA conference in London, he said: “We are a very different magazine than we were a year ago and a radically different magazine from 24 months ago.”

The Big Issue has seen big changes since it teamed up with Dennis Publishing. With editorial now run from Glasgow and one national edition of the magazine, McNamee concentrated on  “the four Cs”, cover, content, columnists and community, to give the magazine some bite.

He told delegates: “The cover was the most important. [A bold cover] could attract a lot of attention and make a lot of noise.

“We had to find a way to find our own space again.”

Simplifying the cover’s design to one element, McNamee showed the delegates how the front page was markedly different to what it was before the magazine’s relaunch. He said: “[The cover has] one, single element to it every week that has power and impact and something to say.”

Along with enlisting footballer Joey Barton as a columnist and strengthening the magazine’s relationship with its vendors, McNamee said he believed the end product is something which will stand the test of time.

“We’ve been going for 21 years now – hopefully, we’ll be around for another few yet.”

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For its 100th issue, women’s magazine Stylist wanted to try something completely different.

In a risky move that eventually paid off, the magazine put out a call to its readers to supply the content. What followed was an issue which got to grips with exactly what the readers wanted in a way quite unlike anything which had done before.

Lisa Smosarski, Stylist’s editor-in-chief, told delegates at yesterday’s PPA conference: “Through this process, we got to know [the readers] better than we could have in any other way. We were absolutely delighted with the product in the end.”

Handing editorial decisions over to the readers was a daunting prospect, but one which inevitably paid off for the women’s magazine. Equally daunting was handing over the reins to celebrity chef Nigella Lawson for an edition which took eight months to put together, a time-scale almost unheard of in the world of publishing, Smosarski said.

“We hadn’t expected that she’d spend eight months working on this issue – at times we thought we’d absolutely lost the plot. But spending time means you get something that bit more special,” she said. The issue was a commercial success and the caramel-covered Nigella on the cover made national news.

Just as the 100th issue changed Stylist’s dynamic with their readers, the Nigella issue changed their dynamic with celebrities. Smosarski said: “We learnt that there would be a few projects throughout our year that we should spent that much time on.”

Branding themselves “Britain’s thinking women’s weekly”, Smorsarski explained how Stylist’s risk-taking will take them to the next level in the coming year. She said: “We’re pretty confident this is going to be our most important year yet.”

• #PPAconf: Why cover design matters for the Big Issue
• Hold the front page – women guest edit magazine
• Controversy over Time Magazine cover showing mutilated Afghan woman
• Media Guardian: Esquire’s electronic cover unveiled
• Brand Republic: Shortlist revenues give hope to free magazine market

Future Publishing has announced the launch of an iPad-only magazine to act as a second screen to the computer.

The term second screen generally relates to the use of a tablet or mobile in addition to a TV or other device.

Future’s new title, called How to Draw & Paint, is the latest in a line of Future publications to be launched without a print edition.

Previously released iPad-only titles include Teach Yourself Photoshop and the interactive editions of T3, Tap and Guitarist Deluxe.

The app magazine, which serves as a tutorial for those “using Photoshop for digital art”, utilises the interactivity of the tablet.

In a release, Tom Dennis, digital product editor for Future’s creative group, said:

We’ve taken a new approach to delivering tutorial content on iPad based on how digital artists use their tablets alongside their main computer.

Future has more than 70 titles in Apple’s Newsstand. The publisher said the release of the Newsstand portal in October resulted in six million app downloads in the first six weeks.

In November Mike Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of iPad and tablet editions at Future, told Journalism.co.uk in a podcast that Newsstand was “revolutionising the publishing industry”

How to Draw & Paint is available from on the App Store via a 90-day subscription priced £4.99.

• Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing
• Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks
• #jpod: How Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry
• Magazine publisher Imagine looks to iPads and iPhones with digital editions launch
• Wired gets ‘wired’ with Adobe for iPad edition

Consumer magazine publisher IPC Media has signed a partnership deal with an Indian publisher to launch a local version of NME online and in print.

www.nme.in will contain content tailored to the Indian music scene and a dedicated Indian edition of the magazine will follow.

NME publishing director Emily Hutchins said in a release:

“NME has a strong presence in India, but with such a vibrant music scene and such passionate music lovers it would be madness not to provide the country with their own edition of the magazine and 24/7 music news online. NME in India will be tailored to India’s favourite home-grown artists as well as featuring the very best from the UK and beyond. It’s a very exciting time for the NME brand.”

• Magazines move into Indian market – launches for GQ and Grazia
• YouTube moves into India
• Ground Report: What can US newspapers learn from India
• Online Journalism India: Moblogging is citizen journalism in India
• Independent: Reprint of Independent article leads to Indian newspaper editor’s arrest

A hyperlocal website in Essex has teamed up with regional newspaper publisher Archant to launch a print edition.

EverythingEppingForest.co.uk, which was founded in 2008 by local journalist David Jackman, will bring out the glossy monthly magazine from next month.

Printed by Archant, it will be delivered to 10,000 homes in the area and will include local community news and information, events and advertising.

In a statement published on the Everything Epping Forest website (not directly linkable – scroll down), Archant London commercial director Tony Little said: “We are delighted to have set up this partnership with David who is a much-respected local journalist, with important contacts in the local area.

“His success with Everything Epping Forest should be applauded and we are delighted to get involved with such a successful community-focused initiative.”

• Archant London restructures its senior editorial team
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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

• PTC New Journalist Awards 2008: And the winners are…
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• Guardian Student Media Awards 2011: shortlist announced
• NCTJ Awards shortlist announced
• Media Release: Guardian Student Media Awards open for entries

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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• Ten examples of games used to tell news stories
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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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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.

• Future Publishing launches iPad-only title as second screen to computer
• Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing
• #jpod: How Apple’s Newsstand is revolutionising the publishing industry
• Magazine publisher Imagine looks to iPads and iPhones with digital editions launch
• iPad news: would you pay more?

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.

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

• Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks
• #jpod – Celebrating Local Newspaper Week: Innovations in digital at the regionals
• #jpod in depth: Discussing the press self-regulation question after #soe11
• #jpod: How news organisations are using Pinterest
• #jpod – Paywalls: Helping readers over the fence

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.

• Economist launches apps for iPad and iPhone
• News numeracy: online tools for reporting numbers
• New York Times opens ‘Visualization Lab’ online
• YouTube videos now available in Google Maps
• Economist launches World in Figures iPhone app

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”.

• Birmingham Post News Blog: ‘Why the Post must go weekly’
• paidContent: News Corp’s ‘iPad paper’ the Daily to launch on 2 Feb
• CoverItLive launches branded option
• Sky News uses CoveritLive for Crewe by-election debate
• Media Week: China Daily to launch newspaper in UK

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.

• Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks
• Future Publishing launches iPad-only title as second screen to computer
• Magazine publisher Imagine looks to iPads and iPhones with digital editions launch
• ‘The tipping point is now’: BBC and Future outline mobile strategies at Publishing Expo
• NYTimes.com: Publishers to launch online magazine newsstand