NYTimes.com: The Sugar Inc. ‘little media empire’

The New York Times takes a look at Lisa and Brian Sugar’s ‘little media empire,’ Sugar Inc., composed of 12 blogs, 11 million readers a month and advertisers such as Chanel and Sony.

“In 2007, Sugar, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and has 105 employees, acquired ShopStyle, an e-commerce site. Today it brings in half of Sugar’s revenue. At ShopStyle, shoppers can browse online retailers’ selections, and Sugar gets paid when they click through to a retailer or make a purchase.”

Full story at this link…

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‘Why is aged news better than real news?’ The Daily Show visits the New York Times

The Daily Show is let loose in the New York Times building. It’s very funny.

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FT’s Gapper’s response to Guardian’s Emily Bell’s response to John Gapper’s ‘cut-and-pasting’ (or aggregating) comment

John Gapper’s column on FT.com asks whether it is time for the Ochs-Sulzberger family to sell the New York Times. No, Gapper says: “They would be crazy to cap their run of poorly timed transactions by selling in the trough of the recession, amid mayhem in the industry.”

As part of the commentary he also makes this claim:

“Meanwhile, it [the New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”

Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian.co.uk responds in the comments: “It is a pity an interesting piece was spoiled by such a sloppy and inaccurate piece of reporting,” she says. We have reproduced an extract from her lengthy comment below (yes, cut and pasted):

“John, in your column you asset [sic] that the Guardian has grown its online audience primarily by aggregating and cutting and pasting other people’s stories. This is demonstrably not true. If you look at our site on any given day (www.guardian.co.uk), you will I am sure find stories which are either from a wire feed (rather as the FT uses) or which reporters have picked up from other sources, again as does the BBC, FT, Times , even sometime the hallowed NYT. But this is not the core of what we do and it is certainly not how we have grown our audience…”

“(…)We have built our traffic on a higher investment in original multimedia journalism than most if not all of our peers. We have an active policy NOT to routinely aggregate high-grossing showbusiness, celebrity or ‘weird’ stories from elsewhere, which is common practice among some newspaper websites.”

And Gapper quickly responds (Journalism.co.uk wonders what is happening to journalism: shouldn’t they be in the pub by now on a Friday evening?):

“In fact, I don’t assert that. What I wrote was:

“”Meanwhile, it [the NYT] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”

“So I am comparing the Guardian’s ratio with that of the NYT, not claiming that the Guardian contains more aggregated than original content. I do not believe the latter, and would not write it.”

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It’s Hyperlocal™, says HelloMetro.com

As part of a release announcing the recruitment of 17 content editors across its network of local news and information site, HelloMetro.com has also declared that it has trademarked Hyperlocal™.

“With this new distinction, the company continues its quest to provide the most up-to-date local and Hyperlocal™ information for its users,” the release states.

In the UK a trademarked should not, according to the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), are not registrable if they:

• describe your goods or services or any characteristics of them, for example, marks which show the quality, quantity, purpose, value or geographical origin of your goods or services;
• have become customary in your line of trade;
• are not distinctive

Things may be different in the US (am still looking for a definitive, easy-to-read guide of TMs), but surely the UK criteria of not being ‘customary in your line of trade’ should come in here? Hyperlocal has passed into common media parlance – see this morning’s news of the New York Times’ local project.

Plus – is the phrase already trademarked in the US? and what’s the point?

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Tweets from the New York Times’ hack day #timesopen

Some great comments coming out of the New York Times’ hack day, Times Open. Follow the twitter chatter below:

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All the news that’s fit to paste…

For some Friday fun, how’s about NYTimes wallpaper at $1,000 a roll?

Artist A.J. Bocchino has created the design using Times headlines from 1990-2005.

“I collect headlines from the New York Times and use them as data for systems that generate complex networks and forms. The headlines are organized chronologically and color-coded according to subject. Global, national, and local events generate a continuous stream of news from which color patterns emerge,” says Bocchino in the description of the work at WallpaperLab.

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NYTimes.com: Ideas for beleaguered newspapers

The New York Times lines up eight pundits including Craig Newmark of Craigslist to provide some ammunition for the battle newspapers currently face.

Read the full blog post at this link…

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NBC and Outside.in match EveryBlock and NYTimes partnership

It’s all about microlocal/ultralocal/hyperlocal news – or whatever you want to call it – this week with a political news partnership for the New York Times and street-by-street news service EveryBlock.

The two sites have formed a data partnership, with info from the Times’ Represent catalogue of local elected representatives feed into EB’s mapped, postcode-searchable New York site.

Local news aggregation service outside.in has signed a similar deal with NBC ’s local media network and built 650 ‘neighbourhood news pages’ as part of NBC’s ‘Local Only’ sites.

The pages, which cover nine cities, will feature news and ‘conversation’ (for this read blogs, Twitter and other social media buzz around a topic) aggregated by neighbourhood, a press release said.

A blog post on outside.in explains the benefits of the deal:

The beauty of these Neighborhood News Pages is that they really serve all of the key audiences:

• Consumers get more personalized and targeted news. What’s happening down the street from them.
• Advertisers can target their buys to a more specific audience that’s not just IP targeted, but actually engaged in content withing specific geographic boundaries; and
• NBC gets high quality hyperlocal editorial pages that cost a fraction of what it costs to build a ‘traditional’ editorial page and they actually are a great fit for Consumers and Advertisers

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NYTimes release: New York Times and GateHouse settle out of court in linking case

The New York Times and GateHouse Media have settled their legal case out of court.

GateHouse Media had raised the action against the Times for links found on Boston.com to its local website network.

Full release at this link…

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Video: NYTimes’ Ann Derry on going multimedia – video is key

Beet TV interviewed Ann Derry, the New York Times’ head of television editorial operations. Derry talked about the new video player and ‘trends in the demand for video’ at NYTimes.com

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