The original Politico story:

“Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive ‘salon’ at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to ‘those powerful few’ – Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.”

Full story at this link…

And also read about it here:

• The Atlantic: ‘Should journalists be entertainers?’

• Washington Post: ‘Post Co. Cancels Corporate Dinners: Journalistic Boundaries Brought Into Question’

• WashingtonMonthly.com: ‘Wash. Post selling access?’

A video from Politico showing the Whitehouse press secretary Robert Gibbs answering a question about the ‘salon’:

• Why are news providers on Facebook?
• Reuters: Washington Post closes US bureaux
• The Atlantic: The hackers who keep the Washington Post running
• Yahoo and Politico to offer inside view of Democrat and Republican conventions
• Yahoo News: Politico to launch new website and expand staff

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch is now convinced that ‘it is possible to charge for content’ online given the success of paid-for business news on the Wall Street Journal, he said last night.

Any pay model would be tested on one of the group’s stronger titles, he added.

Murdoch also described Newsgroup’s interest in developing its own e-reading or digital paper device.

At the FIPP World Magazine Congress this week Guardian Media Group’s Carolyn McCall suggested Guardian.co.uk could also start charging for specialist areas of the site.

Full post at this link…

• FIPP 09: Fears ahead for magazines – what concerns those at the top?
• Fitz & Jen: US Print Council defends newspapers with environmental campaign
• FIPP 09: Audio: Keynote from Google’s Matt Brittin
• Could the Monday MediaGuardian section go online-only?
• FT.com: Guardian considered six different pay models

“I insist that we are going to have to end up charging for our content wherever we can,” said Roberto Civita, CEO and chairman of Brazilian magazine publisher Abril, today.

“The more segmented the more we’ll be able to do this, the less segmented the less.”

Civita wasn’t the first publisher at this year’s FIPP World Magazine Congress: yesterday Guardian Media Group’s Carolyn McCall said charging for specific sections of Guardian.co.uk was a consideration.

He also echoed comments made earlier in the day by Google’s UK MD, Matt Brittin, who said publishers could learn from the e-commerce industry.

Magazine brands should be ideally placed to do this, for example, by placing direct links to buy on advertisements, he said.

Civita was adamant that magazines will continue and that the industry shouldn’t get hung up on what platform this happens on (“I really don’t think it makes any difference if we’re talking about paper or the new e-papers”) – it’s the quality of the product that matters

Fellow panellist Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines in the US, added to her Conde Nast’s counterpart’s remarks about the importance of brand.

“Strong brands will be brands going out into the future. Strong brand, strong advertising, strong editorial,” she said, adding that Hearst brands should be at the centre with spokes from them crossing into e-commerce, merchandising, and other media revenues, like TV spin-off ‘Running in Heels’.

So – print’s going to survive and while online will grow (and e-readers too) – where does that leave digital content?

Both Black and Civita agree: magazines’ digital offerings should be differentiated from what else is available in their sector online.

“We must continue to emphasise the things that have made our magazines what they are today: remained tuned to interests and characteristics of our readers (…) maintain our integrity and ethical principles which are the cornerstone of our greatest asset, our credibility,” said Civita.

And – one parting thought from panel chair Lord Heseltine, chairman of Haymarket – the two platforms must work together:

“The pure-play people have got to keep promoting their product. If we have a brand we have a natural promotion vehicle. I’ve seen examples where pure-play people have launched very successful sites, much more successful than ours, but it’s only been a matter of time before we caught them.”

• Hearst to close four magazine websites?
• Folio: 115 predictions for the media and magazines in 2010
• FIPP 09: Lévy’s forecast gloomy but print magazines still important for luxury brands, says Gucci Group media director
• FT.com: US magazines planning digital store
• Guardian: Pluck picks up Hearst website deal

At today’s FIPP World Magazine Congress Google’s UK MD Matt Brittin told publishers to use real-time data to monitor consumer trends and looking to the world of e-commerce for examples.

Listen to the full audio of Brittin’s address below:

• FIPP 09: Downturn is the conference buzzword – but is the mag industry facing up to it?
• #soe09: Google doesn’t need newspapers – but do newspapers need it?
• FIPP 09: Charging for content or e-commerce – how will mags make money?
• #soe09: Following the Society of Editors conference 2009
• Almighty Link: What would it look like if news organisations blocked Google?

Journalists at Grazia are experimenting with a host of real-time reporting tools and techniques, the magazine’s editor-in-chief explained at today’s FIPP World Magazine Congress.

Jane Bruton told delegates of her excitement that reporters were twittering live updates from fashion shows and filing web copy from events.

“We can talk to our readers on a minute-by-minute basis. We get instant feedback if we want to test out a story for our magazine – we can go online, we can go on Twitter,” said Bruton.

“Our fashion teams now – rather than sitting and taking notes – they’re Twittering from the front row, they’re running to the car, typing up instant web reports.

“The readers love it because they’re seeing everything through our eyes.”

Certain elements of the magazine are now web-first, for example, the pictures from the Style Hunter section, which attract hundreds of comments a week from readers.

“They [readers] feel involved, feel closer to the brand and feel closer to us as personalities. We’ve never been afraid of exposing the inner workings of the magazine,” said Bruton, who said the same exposure had been created offline when the magazine spent a week operating in a shopping centre.

“In the current climate the fact that people relate to our personalities and trust our brand is really crucial.”

For fellow panelist and GQ editor Dylan Jones, the key to online success is capturing the same luxury of the print magazine online, he said.

Being online has not changed the editorial stance of the magazine, which has remained central to the design of the website: “I think we’ve cracked it,” he added.

Read: BBC Good Food editorial director Gillian Carter on why the web hasn’t affected print sales.

• Fashion retailers branch out into online magazines
• BBC to launch online ‘ethical fashion’ magazine
• MediaWeek to go online-only; 18 Brand Media editorial jobs cut
• New look for IPC’s Look magazine
• Editor&Publisher: New York Times creates ‘instant op-ed’ feature online

Yesterday, the first panel at the 37th FIPP World Magazine Congress, which looked at the economic situation for the magazine market, had acknowledged e-readers as significant, but not as a direct threat and a show of hands from the audience indicated their limited uptake.

In fact, despite gloomy advertising revenue predictions, time was devoted to preserving and celebrating print, and pointing out that magazines did not necessarily face the same catastrophic fate as their newspaper counterparts. Much was made of the ‘feel’ of the printed product by several of the speakers, for instance.

But magazines are investing in digital editions – so what do they look like?

In yesterday’s session entitled ‘Digital Editions: Opportunity or Blind Alley?’ President (Europe and Latin America) of Zinio Global, Joan Solà, emphasised the importance of structural change, ‘a major change, moving from analogue into digital’: “If the publishing industry adopts the right measures to make structural change to industry, it will avoid getting caught in the middle of the ropes,” he said.

We’re moving from a system with a big ‘logistic cost,’ he said. “We all know that paper, printing and distribution has an impact, an environmental impact. In the US 35 million trees have to be cut down each year.”

We ‘move to a new scheme in which content can be delivered in new forms,’ Solà said.

Kevin Madden, publishing director for digital publishing at Dennis Publishing, is not convinced a digital product will replace the role of magazines:

“Ultimately the web is a dipping medium, but I don’t ascribe any loyalty to the sites I visit.”

Publishers should cater for this ‘dipping audience’, whilst also providing a ‘feast’ for those who want it, he said.

Managing director at Menzies Digital, Sarah Clegg outlined her vision for the digital product, in her case, as she has told Journalism.co.uk in the past – includes digital editions of 140 magazine titles, with a look to e-paper developments for the future.

“Slowly the tide is turning,” she began. “In a lot of cases we [the digital product] are still the outcast,” she said. But, she emphasised, ‘the media landscape has changed, and it’s changing at the rights of knots’.

‘How are you tapping into that child of today – who is reading electronic media?’ she asked, using as an example her 13 year old niece, who picks up a range of digital tools on a daily basis.

“We know consumer habits are changing, people are choosing when they want to consume and when they want to consume. Everybody is after their instant fix,” she said.

“These aren’t questions anymore: there’s a market to take advantage of,” she added.

“They present an opportunity, along with economic necessity. We must find a place in the digital publishing model – I don’t think we’ve had our day,” she said.

Clegg wants to see lower prices for the digital product and more cooperation from publishers. She was aggrieved she said, to discover that having negotiated a 25 per cent discount for digital subscriptions, the publisher had offered a 60 per cent reduction on the print edition.

Another annoyance is that on one of their publications, it takes eight clicks to get through to digital edition, she said.

“Publishers should adapt and cater for the consumer – it [the digital edition] is not for everyone but it’s for someone,” she said.

“I think we’re heading towards a golden era for publishing,” she added, optimistically.

Following Clegg, Mark Payton, digital editorial director for Haymarket Consumer Media, described how his company has a contract with Menzies Digital and he’s ‘very keen for it to work.’

Recent digital innovations at Haymarket include:

• The entire Gramophone magazine archive launched online – from 1923 to today.

• PR Week is to soon launch a subscriber-only online edition.

• Autosport launched a tiny flash page turner, which received ten per cent of the site’s traffic during the weeks that it ran.

“I no longer have colleagues around talking about web 2.0 – it has become the web,” Payton said.

• Future reports 6m app downloads in six weeks
• iPad news: would you pay more?
• Apple’s Newsstand results in 2m downloads for Future Publishing
• NME to produce a free online version of its magazine
• Empire and Nursing Times take online prizes at BSME Awards

There aren’t enough ad dollars on the planet for everyone, Stevie Spring, chief executive of Future, said, in her opening remarks for yesterday’s session at the 37th FIPP World Magazine Congress that looked at ‘what advertisers want’.

Magazines are ‘all having to fight much much harder to grow our share of media spend,’ she added. So, she asked, just ‘what the hell’ did advertisers want from magazines?

Nikolas Talonpoika, worldwide media director for the Gucci Group said that he thinks online will see a decrease in advertising spend from the luxury sector.

Magazines are still the most important part of the Gucci Group’s print advertising spend, Talonpoika told delegates.

While acknowledging that this year is tough and ‘lots of titles will disappear this year, Talonpoika was optimistic for the role that print magazines will continue to play.

Unilever’s CMO, Simon Clift said that for his company the ‘lion’s share’ of advertising is in television, and only 13 per cent of its overall advertising budget is spent in print – but said the magazines accounted for 90 per cent of that print spend.

Clift said that his company – which, with its £41 billion turnover, is seeing three quarters of its growth in developing and emerging markets – is thinking about different ways to promote its products via print.

For example, one Greek newspaper was once printed entirely on aromatised paper for one particular washing product campaign.

Clift said that consumers were not beginning to ‘define the agenda’ and that Unilever was looking for new ways to promote brands via editorial or advertorial content.

Clift argued that these methods ‘can build integrity rather than compromise it,’ he argued. Joking that advertising was something editors have to put up with, he said advertisers don’t want to see a publication damaged by the advertising. ‘A successful parasite doesn’t kill its host,’ he quipped.

It was about creating interesting content, he said ‘whether it comes from an editor or an advertiser’ “When those things [editorial and advertising] are parallel it magnifies and develops our message,” he said.

Dove is the Unilever brand which is most advertised in magazines, and a product which is an example of a cross-media promotion: online, in magazines and on television.

In the previous session, Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO of the Publicis Groupe, spoke of the world ‘the ad agencies have to live in now, where a couple of words on a search engine page is sometimes considered by our client as more effective than a wonderful TV spot.’

Newspapers and magazines could not expect to retain their share in the advertising market, despite analysts’ more optimistic predictions for 2011, he said.

“We have to change and we do change each day. You have to adapt yourself to this new world,” he said.

“It’s not yet time for obituaries,” he claimed. “I’m a little bit shocked when I see print media forever discussing their own death,”

“Please always remember the small guy in the digital world – Bill Gates. He repeated loud and clear ‘content is king’ (…) and you [the magazine industry] own it.’”

“Would you go as often on the internet, if you could not find newspapers and your favourite magazines online?” he asked. “I don’t think print media is dead, quite the contrary,” Lévy added.

“Think what semantic can do when combined with marketing. Now is time to innovate.”

“You have to look at this as an opportunity to leverage new opportunities with the strength of your brand and your audiences,” he said.

• Online advertising spend tops £4bn after 12.8% rise
• Reuters: Print advertising downturn ending, says WSJ’s Thomson
• Forbes.com: US advertisers will spend more on digital than print in 2010
• FIPP 09: E-readers and digital editions: what’s the future for magazines online?
• WAN 2008: Print and online newspapers on the rise

As reported over on the Journalism.co.uk main site, leading industry figures shared their hopes for the magazine market at the FIPP World Magazine Congress 2009 this morning.

But they were hopes in the context of an economic downturn. William Kerr, chairman of board for the Meredith Group joked that ‘being 12 per cent down is the new up’. 

Each of the panel looking at ‘riding the storm’ shared their fears for the magazine industry:

• Carolyn McCall, chief executive, Guardian Media Group: is worried that the industry would ‘not make structural change quickly enough’.

• William Kerr said that his main fear was that the ‘best and brightest [candidates] had migrated to other areas’ for employment. 

• Aroon Purie, editor-in-chief and chairman of the India Today Group said he was worried about the ‘magazinification’ of newspapers in terms of content and design: it is a ‘threat to magazines, as newspapers go in that direction,’ he said. 

• John Smith, chief executive of BBC Worldwide, said his main concern was the dominance of Google as an online sign-post. it was a ‘dangerous’ situation he said, to have all the power in one company. Google’s 63.7 per cent grasp on search traffic made it necessary for other companies to enter the territory, he said.  

• FIPP 09: Downturn is the conference buzzword – but is the mag industry facing up to it?
• Former PPA chair Helen Alexander wins Marcus Morris Award
• FT.com: Archant boss John Fry finalising contract with Johnston Press
• Sunday Times: David Montgomery steps down as Mecom executive chairman
• PA Group appoints James Murdoch as non-executive director

“The key ‘whistleblower’ in the Bernard Madoff fraud case, Harry Markopolos, testified today [Feb 4 2009] before Congress, alleging among other things that he approached the Wall Street Journal on the story more than three years ago, and the newspaper ultimately did nothing,” Editor&Publisher reports.

Full story at this link…

• Poynter Online: Limitations of automated news tweets
• TheDailyBeast: Ex-WSJ assistant publisher on paid online content – myths and facts
• Wall Street Journal: New York Times to start charging for online in January
• Talking Biz News: Dow Jones restructuring
• FT.com: ‘Web pact’ for Microsoft and News Corp?

US Congress is close to passing legislation that would allow more time for arranging an agreement to help save the emerging internet radio market from a rise in copyright royalty rates.

• AsiaMedia (via EJC): Radio services go offline in Singapore
• SIIA conference: Copyright needs standard tagging system, says Dow Jones director
• New German law may impose fees on aggregated content use
• Union seeks ‘substantial’ above-inflation pay rise for BBC staff
• allmediascotland: Scottish government drops plans to remove public notices from newspapers

As reported in Press Gazette, the NUJ’s General Secretary, Jeremy Dear, used his appearance on Monday at the the TUC Congress Conference 2008 to call for a motion against the erosion of journalists’ civil liberties and media freedom in Britain.

In a follow-up, the NUJ yesterday released this video, ‘Press Freedom: Collateral Damage’ by Jason N Parkinson : nine minutes of film documenting the treatment of journalists by police.

The film highlights a number of incidents in which the NUJ feel the police unnecessarily obstructed reporters and photographers.

The NUJ motion identified the cases of Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have both risked jail because of the legal requirement to reveal confidential information from sources. In his speech to the Congress, Dear also referred to Sally Murrer, a journalist who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source.

“Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance,” Jeremy Dear said in the NUJ’s statement.  “Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown,” he said.

Members of the TUC conference unanimously backed the NUJ’s motion on Monday. The NUJ statement, with more excerpts from Dear’s speech, can be read here.

• BBC must not hand over material from demo, says NUJ
• NUJ speaks out against Met Police ‘heavy-handedness’ at Greek Embassy Protests
• NUJ condemns Jeremy Hunt’s delay in BSkyB bid decision
• NUJ membership cost rises
• Politico: Amid WikiLeaks battle, Clinton to assert US support for internet freedom

According to Tomas Brunegård, chairman of the Swedish Newspaper Publishers Association, Sweden is enjoying an online advertising market of 15 per cent of overall spend – the “highest percentage in the world” (do you know better?)

Despite its small population, Sweden has a healthy and innovative news publishing industry, online and in print. Hear more from Tomas in his speech during the opening ceremony of the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Gothenberg, Sweden today:

• WAN 2008: The imminent demise of print is “sheer nonsense’
• AOP: ‘This is no time for vanity publishing’ – full audio of Sly Bailey’s speech
• WAN Amsterdam: Print should be an ‘island in the chaos’
• WAN 08: Disparities between pay of web and print journalists – a problem all over the world for integrating newsrooms
• #wef11: ‘Publishers need to focus on quality journalism on all platforms’

Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, nailed his colours firmly to the print mast in his speech at the opening ceremony of the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden:

• WAN 2008: Sweden claims highest share of advertising spend online
• #WANIndia2009: Audio – Google’s David Drummond on working with publishers
• Independent News and Media is no ‘digital ostrich’ says O’Reilly
• WAN 2008: Stop fixating on young readers, O’Reilly tells newspaper industry
• Guardian.co.uk: WAN 2008: The struggle to secure freedom of the press

Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.

In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.

Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.

Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.

The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.

So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.

The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.

And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.

For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.

Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.

What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.

One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.

We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.

As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.

We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.

• Channel 4 News embeds video in news stories
• BBC to launch online ‘ethical fashion’ magazine
• Google launches audio search feature
• News videos as ringtones?
• Reflections on the life of a videojournalist

The launch of the world’s first ‘newspaper’ telephone by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) was part of a plan to establish it as a recognised platform for news, DN’s head of mobile told an industry forum today.

DN launched the phone in partnership with Nokia and Nordic mobile service provider Telnor in December to give users instant access to the paper’s online content, Johan Brandt told the digital media roundtable at the World Newspaper Congress.

“We did this because we had three challenges [with mobile]. We had to get people to realise we had a pretty good mobile site. Many people just didn’t know that they could find news from the mobile internet, not enough people were aware of it as a channel,” he said.

“Secondly, one of the big barriers was that it’s difficult to browse the internet with a mobile, there are too many clicks… and third was ‘what does it cost to serve?’. Mobile providers charge users by megabyte. But what is a megabyte? Is it an article or a mobile TV episode. People don’t know what it’s going to cost them.”

In order to promote the newspaper portal, he added, it was important that the phone allowed users to assess DN’s mobile service in a single click and surf those web pages without incurring charges for downloading data.

The service, he added, is now attracting 50,000 unique users per month – up more than 40 per cent from last year – but there remained significant factors hampering the development of the mobile phone as an established platform to deliver news and on which newspapers can make significant revenue.

He identified a lack of standardised technology and measurement across the mobile market as the primary drawback to significant growth.

“There are no standards on the mobile market, it’s unnecessarily difficult and hard for the developers to create model services. I want to see growth from the walled garden model to a more open environment,” he said.

“Secondly, there is a lack of standards when it comes to advertising and measurement. There are different ad formats for different mobile sites. The market is fragmented and this makes advertisers frustrated and it also dwarves the mobile market’s potential in the short term.

“As a result of this there is a lack of strategic integration of marketing across mobile and other platforms for advertisers.

“There are too many pricing models for our advertisers to learn and in Sweden there are no valid or integrated tools for measurement, there are just no standards.”

In addition to this, he said, it was difficult for consumers to establish the cost of accessing data on phones and that it could prove to be a deterrent to use.

“In Sweden there are several hundred mobile phone subscriptions, with different prices for surfing. How can the user really know which subscription to get and what it costs to surf when it’s paid for by megabyte?

“I think there should be flat fees for time spent, that would make cost more predictable [for users].”

• #WANIndia2009: There’s gold in them there mobiles – don’t blow it, says Martha Stone
• #soe09: Hyperlocal, mobile and experimentation for newspapers, say Brittin and Newland
• Ofcom report: 30 stats on smartphones and internet use
• Innovations in Journalism: vtap – driving the ‘video-anywhere revolution’
• Eight lessons for publishers from comScore’s new report on mobile