Tag Archives: online activities

FT.com: Reader’s Digest looking to overhaul sites but won’t charge for online content

FT.com reports on the latest developments at Reader’s Digest, whose US arm recently sought bankruptcy protection.

The publication is looking to overhaul its global online activities:

“‘We were the Google News of the 1920s. We were the original aggregator,’ said Jonathan Hills, the newly promoted general manager of readersdigest.com.

(…)

“Reader’s Digest is not looking to charge for content online, he said. The new design will instead rely on a business model combining higher-quality advertising units and sales of books, CDs and other products.”

Full story at this link…

DutchNews.nl: RBI to grow online income by 50 per cent in three years

An internal document from Reed Business Information, publisher of Estates Gazette and New Scientist, says the company wants to grow its revenue from online activities by 50 per cent within three years.

Full DutchNews.nl story at this link…

According to a Dow Jones report on the document, the publisher specifically wants to raise the sale of online publications by 50 per cent in three years.

The division also needs additional cost cutting and an end to duplication of costs, chief executive Keith Jones said in the memo to staff.

Earlier this year RBI’s parent company Reed Elsevier announced the sale of several US magazine titles; in April RBI announced plans for 50 redundancies in the UK – you can see a full timeline of recent events at the company at this link.

US elections: the best of the rest on the web

For those that have been under a rock/on Mars for the last year, the next President of the United States will be decided tonight, giving news organisations another opportunity to flaunt their interactive, live reporting and user-generated wares as the votes unfold.

We’ve already covered Sky News’ election coverage and BBC News’ live online plans, but here’s our round-up of some of the best projects out there – open up twenty browser tabs, sit back and enjoy:

  • NYTimes.com: the paper has set up a political ‘word train’ visualising how readers are feeling. It’ll update with new answers every 30 minutes (thanks to @matthewbuckland for the link). Elsewhere the site’s homepage is dominated by election coverage, with plenty of images and video – making use of the new video player – and a pop-up results widget.
  • Twitter Vote Report: the microblogging tool has been harnessed by a network of volunteers to map voters’ experiences at the polls. Tweets tagged with waiting times (e.g. #wait 120 for a 120 minute delay) are plotted creating a rapidly updating map of problems. Could be a great service for local newspapers in the states to provide:

  • Yahoo: created a one-stop shop, US election microsite drawing together all of its features, including forums, Yahoo Answers, AP and Politico stories and aggregated content from external news sites, a Flickr stream of photos and options to set up news alerts on the candidates.
  • Hubdub: the just-for-fun news prediction site is carrying an election forecast map, which it claims is based on ’51 underlying prediction markets that respond in real-time to breaking news’. Users can view forecasts state-by-state to help them decided where to place their Hubdub dollars when predicting the outcome of questions such as ‘Who will win the 2008 US Presidential Election?’ and ‘What will be the margin of victory in the state of Ohio?’

That’s not enough, I hear you cry. You want more? Well, over at paidContent:UK, Robert Andrews has wrapped up the online coverage from the UK’s newspapers, while Online Journalism Blog chieftain Paul Bradshaw has an extensive list of online activities.

This is only the tip of the iceberg – any other great coverage, tools or websites that need a mention, let us know below.