Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » energy

Online news network VillageSoup in print expansion

Laura Oliver — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:11:01 +0000

Village NetMedia, which owns community news network VillageSoup, has purchased six weekly local newspapers from the Courier Publications series in Maine, USA.

Several of the sites will be merged with the existing VillageSoup sites, which serve the Knox and Waldo areas, a release from the publisher said.

In addition, new VillageSoup sites will be set up as companion sites for two of the newly acquired locals.

VillageSoup, which was set up 10 years ago, combines local news reporting with an online forum to create a ‘virtual town hall’.

Around 26 jobs will be lost as part of the takeover.

“VillageSoup integrates a highly interactive website with traditional print, and is the future for small town media. This purchase allows us to expand our reach and breathe new life and energy into these papers, all for the benefit of readers and advertisers,” Richard M. Anderson, co-founder of VillageSoup, said.

“Our approach helps transition traditional community newspaper companies into community host companies, and that’s the future for the industry.”

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WAN 08: Disparities between pay of web and print journalists – a problem all over the world for integrating newsrooms

Oliver Luft — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:47:34 +0000

Integrating newsrooms isn’t just a matter of putting all you desks in a spoke and fulcrum formation and projecting the web traffic figures on the wall.

The small matter of how you remunerate journalists expected to work both for print and web is an issue for newspapers across the globe.

It’s an issue that the Guardian and Telegraph, to name just two in the UK, have been wrestling with as they bring their divergent print and online editions closer together.

International editors sitting on a panel looking at whether integrated newsrooms are really working at the World Editors Forum, today in Goteborg, Sweden, admitted to a similar set of problems.

Jim Roberts, editor of digital news at the New York Times, told delegates that the Times’ own integration plans were hampered by the different contracts and lower pay web journalists were receiving compared to their print colleagues.

Roberts is overseeing the introduction of a ‘horizontal’ news production system where each separate news department has web producers embedded with them to encourage multimedia content production, oversee publication.

The Times is trying to spread multimedia, video, podcasts and interactive features across all its news verticals – even to the point where the Times is reverse publishing blog content as columns into the printed edition of the newspaper.

This drive for web content has also brought a renewed thirst to keep the newspaper print edition fresh, as Roberts said ‘to redirect this energy back into print’.

But as staff are now expected to work for both web and print, the different contracts they work under has led to union wrangles. WSJ.com managing editor Almar Latour and Javier Moreno, editor-in-chief of El Pais, Spain, agreed that they faced similar contractual problems on their integration projects.

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CNET launches industries site BNET

Laura Oliver — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:46:14 +0000

No, it’s not a typo – CNET has moved up the alphabet to introduce BNET, a new website featuring original and syndicated news, analysis and blogs on industry sectors including health care, energy and financial services.

BNET Australia and BNET UK have also been rolled out, Reuters reports.

“You look at a lot of the content that’s available, it still predominantly lives in trade journal articles. And then there’s a lot of content that’s sort of housed behind subscription firewalls. And so, consequently, it’s very fragmented,” Greg Mason, CNET’s senior vice president of the business media group, says in the Reuters report.

“There are good online newsletters that cover specific industries, but they’re sort of hit-or-miss.”

Will the new site be friend or foe to B2B publishers?

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Innovations in Journalism – ReportingOn

Oliver Luft — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:59:24 +0000

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

I’m Ryan Sholin, I work at GateHouse Media in the US, I’m a graduate student at San Jose State University working on a degree in Mass Communications, and I’ve been blogging at ryansholin.com for three years now, mostly about the future of newspapers and journalism education.

The idea for ReportingOn came to me as I saw more and more tools for journalists to share what they were reading, but very few to share what they were writing.

I’m all for aggregating links and social bookmarking – I use Google Reader, Delicious, and even Twitter as my filters for the onslaught of information and news out there on the Web – but I saw two key connections left to be made.

The first connection links reporters with a common beat to one another. If I’m reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in Silicon Valley, and you’re reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in Boston, we could mutually benefit from sharing angles and ideas.

The second connection links readers with beat reporters. If readers find themselves wishing for more reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in general, there should be a place to express that.

So I call ReportingOn “the backchannel for your beat.”

This isn’t about the craft of journalism – this is about the nuts and bolts of finding angles, sources, and data to bolster local news reporting.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Sometimes in newsrooms, we find ourselves isolated from the rest of the journalism world. Our local peers are often the competition. When we meet up with colleagues from out of town, it’s at conferences or email lists or websites based on methods and craft, but rarely actual reporting.

ReportingOn will give journalists an easy way to connect with others working the same beat across the state or across the continent.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

Oh, there’s more to come.

What’s live right now is a simple script that ties into Twitter. Anyone with a Twitter ID can send a tweet to reportingon (@reportingon in Twitter parlance) and it will show up at reportingon.com and in the reportingon Twitter stream.

The next step will be a site, most likely built in Drupal, where any journalist can sign up and post short updates that answer the question “What are you reporting on?”

The fun part is surfacing the replies in a way that makes it easy to find your peers. The taxonomy system in a CMS like Drupal makes it simple to surface, for example, all the posts about alternative energy.

So imagine a site where the front page has a few lists: recent posts, recent topics, and popular topics.

The ‘popular topics’ list might have entries like: “231 journalists are reporting on alternative energy”. Clicking on 231 gets you a list of the journalists; clicking on alternative energy takes you to the page where everything posted about alternative energy is aggregated.

A second piece of the site will allow “readers” to vote on what topics they would like to see more … reporting on.

Once the site is built and users are showing up, I could see adding a Facebook application that would let users display recent posts from the topic of their choice on their Facebook profile.

4) Why are you doing this?

I saw a need to connect reporters to each other. So much local news lacks context, lacks a clear idea of where a local event fits into a larger trend, whether we’re talking about drunken driving or school funding or foreclosures.

Twitter has been a big inspiration, as well. I’ve been impressed at how casual, public conversation can be packed with information and benefit to anyone willing to ask questions and give answers freely.

Plus, I’m planning to launch the next stage of ReportingOn as a part of the requirements to finish my graduate degree.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Absolutely nothing.

6) How will you make it pay?

This is a non-profit endeavour as far as I’m concerned. That said, I’m actively looking for grants to help with server costs, advertising, and promotion.

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