Tag Archives: online advertising

Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the Media report 2009 – ‘the bleakest yet’

Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its State of the Media report and – unsurprisingly – the annual evaluation of the US media scene makes for particularly depressing reading this time around.

As the report points out, the problems created by growing online audiences for legacy news organisations have been excerbated by a simultaneous economic collapse.

“Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder,” reads the report.

The report in full, including individual sections on magazines, newspapers, online, local TV and network TV, can be read at this link, but below are some key findings:

Newspapers

In numbers:

  • One in five journalists who were employed by a newspaper in 2001 have gone
  • Around 5,000 professional newspaper jobs are suggested to have been lost in 2008
  • Last year, publicly traded newspaper stocks lost 83 per cent of their remaining value, having already dropped by 43 per cent between 2005-7

On survival:

  • Many US newspapers are planning a geographical retreat in circulation to cut costs
  • Plans to go online-only may not save as much money as hoped, the report suggests:

“Papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and, although the numbers vary by paper, the cost of printing and delivering the printed newspaper averages 40% of costs. For now, it doesn’t add up to sacrifice potentially 90% of revenues to save 40% of costs.”

  • What newspapers will survive and what structural differences to these survivors have, asks the report. Will print still be a part of these news brands?
  • The death of the newspaper industry is not imminent, adds the study, as on the whole US newspapers were profitable in 2008

Hope for the future?

  • Alternative news operations and websites have continued to grow in number, BUT the scale of these is still small and they lack profitability
  • Newspapers have improved over the last year in adapting to new trends and building partnerships

Online

  • Insufficient innovation in online advertising
  • When it comes to alternative, online news start-ups and distribution models, ‘[T]here has been little honest assessment of economic sustainability’, says the research
  • Yahoo news continues to dominant as main news source online – its newspaper advertising partnership and human-based news editing are particular assets, suggests the report

Special analysis of citizen media and new journalism ventures is also offered in the report. Contributor to the newspaper section of the report, Danna L. Walker, blogs here; while the Columbia Journalism Review has created a ‘guess the year of the report’ quiz game.

BusinessInsider.com: 27 publishers look at advertising banner alternatives

“27 publishers with a reach of about 109 million unique visitors per month – that’s 66 per cent of the total US internet audience – have agreed to try one of three new online ad formats sometime before July,” reports the Silicon Alley Insider.

This post gives examples of what one of those advertising formats could look like and the full list of publishers. Full post at this link…

IHT: Italian newspapers in online advertising alliance

RCS MediaGroup and Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso will form an online ad consortium, the Premium Publisher Network, co-ordinating ‘performance-related advertising’ (e.g. charges based on traffic stats) for the groups.

Full story at this link…

MediaGuardian: Jeff Jarvis on LA Times covering entire payroll through online advertising

“Note well this moment in the history – and I do mean history – of newspapers: the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Russ Stanton, said the paper’s online advertising revenue is now sufficient to cover the Times’s entire editorial payroll, print and online,” begins Jarvis. Full story….

Online video site, Masher.com, now live

This week saw the beta launch of Masher.com, a site which allows you to mash together the content of different videos, and use a free BBC archive of generic content. It was originally developed by the BBC Motion Gallery, a press release said.

Masher.com’s chairman, Neil Fenton said, in the release, that for content owners, “Masher offers a completely new way for users to engage with their content, in which those users don’t just consume content online passively but become both producer and consumer in an application that is highly engaging and allows for the maximization of online advertising and sponsorship revenues.”

Blog08: Journalism versus hearth blogging

Not your average panel with Tim Overdiek, deputy editor in chief at NOS news; Clo Willaerts, marketing manager for Sanoma Magazines Belgium; Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog; and Piet Bakker, professor at the Hogeschool Utrecht.

The journalism/blogging panel aims to answer questions gathered via de Nieuwe Reporter, one of the largest Dutch journalism blogs.

Tim Overdiek from NOS News shares that over a hundred NOS colleagues from a total of 400 have contributed to weblogs.nos.nl. Only forty employees are active bloggers but a hundred contributions in the form of either comments or blog posts is a certainly good number.

He remarks that professional journalists often don’t see bloggers as collaborators but as a form of contribution, as something they can use. There is no direct participation. The participating journalism that Dan Gillmor refers to is not happening in the Netherlands, according to Overdiek.

We’re currently moving beyond blogs, and the practice of blogging has gone beyond the medium of the blog and has partly and moved to Twitter for example. There is a whole world to gain for bloggers and also for organisations to actively set out to get people blogging.

It is interesting to note that during one of the previous sessions Tim Overdiek sent out a tweet to remind himself to create a 101 Teletekst Twitterfeed asap.

Teletekst is the Dutch equivalent of the BBC Ceefax and the 101 page is the standard page for news headlines. It is interesting to see how one of the most popular ways to keep up with the news is going to be syndicated on Twitter in the near future. The NOS is focusing on embracing the new social media and sees syndicating existing content on different platforms as the next step.

The question that was selected from the Nieuwe Reporter was a rather odd choice since there was a lot of discussion about the relevance and phrasing of the question in the comments (in Dutch). Unfortunately the question also eventually drived the discussion nowhere:

Imagine there would be a stock exchange for newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, weblogs, and other media. Which stocks would you buy when taking the next five years in account?

Tim Overdiek: Buy stocks in NOS, we have great outlets, we have different platforms such as mobile TV, blogging and Twitter. The NOS media department is pretty tech savvy. However, he advises not to bet on just one company because there are too many interesting things going on in different places.

Piet Bakker would buy stocks in magazines because the problem with blogging and internet is that to monetize it is quite difficult.

Paul Bradshaw would also buy stocks in magazines because all of the advertising on the internet pretty much goes to Google. Offline and online advertising are not on the same level yet and on top of that magazines have a lot of muscle. Bradshaw thinks that they will buy out successful blogs. Newspapers are also trying to be more like magazines which shows the bright future of magazines but they don’t see it quite yet. casinochan signup

Journalists should work with bloggers on a level playing field. He [Bradshaw] mentions the example of a newspaper that recently recruited 40 bloggers but it’s not a top down relationship with one main editor that makes all the decisions. He sees this as a good way forward because journalists and bloggers should treat each other like citizens.

This post originally appeared on Anne Helmond’s blog.

Reuters: UK online ads up 21 per cent despite fall in overall ad market

The UK internet advertising spend is up 21 per cent, although the overall advertising market went down. The Internet Advertising Bureau said yesterday that expenditure on the web went up to 1.68 billion pounds ($2.95 billion) in the first six months of the year, while the total advertising market was down 0.7 percent year on year.