Talk at this year’s Publishing Expo is rapidly taking on a back-to-basics theme, with some big names at this morning’s keynote session suggesting the industry took its eye off the ball and forgot about content.

With BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas in the chair, Neil Thackray from the Media Briefing, consultant Dominic Jacquesson and designer Jeremy Leslie from Magculture.com attempted to thrash out where the industry is going, and whether it’s in the right direction.

Jacquesson opened up with a summary of a report he’s just compiled for the Media Briefing.

“This shows that most of your readers will own a smartphone or tablet by 2015,” he told the crowd crammed into the session. Mobile apps, he said, were here to stay, with app downloads set to hit the 24 billion mark by 2013.

What’s also vital, Jacquesson said, is “the simple pay environment” that Apple has created.

Facebook was also a major feature of the discussion. It’s set to be a predominantly mobile app-based service by 2012 and, with the average user spending one-and-a-half hours a day on it, “it is your major competitor said Jacquesson. He takes the view that circulations of print publications will halve in five years, with time spent on mobile devices eating into media consumption time.

Neil Thackray followed up by warning that it was wrong “to be seduced by the beauty and wonder of the iPad“. He said consumers would “get used to it” and so “we shouldn’t just spit out a magazine as an iPad app.” He urged the industry to “go back to first principles and ask ‘what can we produce that readers find interesting or useful. Then provide them with a suite of applications to enable them to engage with what you produce.”

Jeremy Leslie agreed. “Don’t forget to ask ‘why?’,” he said. “What is your audience? What do you want to give them? What is the best way of doing it?” he also took issue with Jacquesson’s view that time spent on social media eats in to traditional media consumption, using the example of his 15-year-old son who “organises his life on Facebook and watches TV at the same time”.

There was some discussion of the Daily when Thackray chipped in with the comment that “we need to do things that are simple, not complicated.” The Daily was “bloody complicated” he said. Leslie added that it was “too generic. You need a tone of voice in what you say and in your design.”

Thackray asked “Why do we think we can do what we did in traditional media on new devices?” His advice was to “go out and find out about all the different things that can be done with a smartphone or tablet app.” Jacquesson agred, saying: “If the print circulation is going down, the right solution cannot be to build an app version of the print product.”

But he also said: “Successful apps have been a continuation of a strategy already in place.” He used the example of Autotrader, which developed an app on top of its existing offer which used location services to put buyers in touch with dealers and offer them the chance to contact them in return for a slice of the completed deal.

Leslie closed on an optimistic note, talking of “natural readjustment” in a industry “where too many mags were chasing too few readers”.

“Even if the number of mags does fall 50 per cent, there are still 25 per cent more mags than there were 20 years ago.”

This may seem blasé, but Leslie’s point was echoed by the panel. Future success will be in innovation and quality content, rather than in simply embracing whatever technology comes along.

Image by curious lee on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

• Eight lessons for publishers from comScore’s new report on mobile
• #PPAconf: ‘Let’s make sure we do the paid content thing well’
• FT web app has been used 1m times
• #WEFHamburg: Danish newspaper showcases the iPad app built on a shoestring budget
• Wired.com: 26 per cent of Wired mobile traffic now from iPad

Last month former Journalism.co.uk reporter Judith Townend conducted a survey into UK independent online publishers’ experience of media law.

It’s worth reading the findings from 71 respondents in full, especially the answers from participants on how they get legal advice and help. For independent sites (or those with a staff of fewer than 10) the reasons behind setting up the site have a strong influence on how they handle with legal complaints, as one publisher explained:

One publisher said a potentially tricky problem went away without any response on their part, after they were contacted by a company that had been the subject of a user’s comment on the site: “Chose to play dead and not respond to [the email] and wait and see… [we] would have removed item if legally threatened – not close enough to our own cause to be worth a big fight. Have heard no more though.”

For those writing for a campaigning purpose or who are highly critical of others in their writing, legal issues aren’t going to deter them from continuing their fight, it seems. For others, libel, copyright and other issues haven’t yet been a problem because their subject matter or publishing style hasn’t yet caused these conflicts.

Many others use a network of peers and through social media to source legal pointers and advice, often avoiding costly fees. But there’s a sense from respondents that this ad hoc approach, while useful, may not stand greater legal stress or develop as quickly as a publisher’s own needs.

Full survey results are available on Meeja Law at this link…

• Legal safety questions for bloggers
• Online news as trustworthy as print for majority of readers, survey claims
• Call for responses to survey on PR ‘spamming’
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to write scripts for radio news
• MediaGuardian: Media companies are less likely to fight libel cases to the end

Writing on the Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw shares key points from the internet section of Ofcom’s latest report on The Communications Market 2010, analysing the implications of each for online publishers.

1: Mobile is genuinely significant: 23 per cent of UK users now access the web on mobile phones (but 27 per cent still have no access to the web on any device).

Implication: We should be thinking about mobile as another medium, with different generic qualities to print, broadcast or web, and different consumption and distribution patterns.

Full post at this link

• Eight lessons for publishers from comScore’s new report on mobile
• Ofcom report: 30 stats on smartphones and internet use
• BBC News launches ‘responsive’ site as 26% of hits come from mobile
• Mashable: Online overtakes print as main news source
• BBC in mobile news push

Interesting blog from the Online Journalism Review site, about the dangers to online publishers if internet service providers (ISPs) adapt pricing models based on usage.

According to the author Robert Niles, “the next great battle in the journalism industry will be the Battle of Bandwidth”.

Internet Service Providers clearly don’t want to continue offering a one-price-buys-everything option. ISPs have shown that they favor a pricing model where certain users have to pay more to use more bandwidth. While there’s some logical appeal to the idea of making the heaviest users of the Internet pay the most for their use, metered traffic online creates profound challenges for online content producers.

He concludes his blog with a plea to online publishers to support calls for the government to subsidise increased bandwidth for all.

Access to bandwidth is the issue that will nurture, or kill, online news and information businesses in the years to come. If you’re publishing online, you need to fight for your access to bandwidth – and your potential audience’s access to it, as well.

See the full article here…

• Glam Media launches video service
• AP: Malaysian authorities arrest top blogger after anti-government comments
• FT.com: Digital chiefs challenge House of Lords digital economy bill amendment
• Google introduces option for five-a-day free click limit
• #wef11: ‘News industry is in the vortex of a fast changing world’

The ever-helpful 10,000 Words blog has easy solutions to web production’s most common problems’ – from embedding audio to posting documents. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Digital content director for the Mirror Group Matt Kelly is well-known for his provocative speeches – see his talk to the World Association of Newspapers’ annual congress in December in which he said online newspapers had prostituted themselves online and treated SEO as “the be-all and end-all of online publishing”, devaluing readers in the process.

We’ll be reporting his remarks in full shortly from today’s Westminster Media Forum event ‘The Future of News Media’ (as well as Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow’s optimistic note for journalists), including what he told Journalism.co.uk about Mirror.co.uk’s plans for more niches building on its Mirror Football and 3am.

But for starters:

• “The general news business is dead. If all you have to peddle is general news, then rest in peace.”
• “Newspapers aren’t in the sharp news game; we haven’t been for some time. We are in the audience business.”
• “Thirty million customers [online] and no profit isn’t what I’d call a business.”
• “Publishers need to re-establish in our online businesses that sense of value, brand and uniqueness that we have taken so much trouble to do in print.”
• “The newspaper industry is far from blameless in this situation [free content online]“

More to follow…

• Express & Star using Qik for football reports
• MirrorFootball.co.uk: Bringing Liverpool fans a better result
• New football email from the Times gets hackles up @ Guardian’s Fiver
• NMK: ‘What happens to newspapers?’ – place your bets, please
• Marketing magazine: Will Mirror newspapers be next to put up paywalls?

Journalism.co.uk has pledged its support to the Libel Reform Campaign, run by Index on Censorship, Sense About Science and English PEN to overhaul current legislation, bringing in a new bill that caps libel case fees for lawyers and addresses the impact of online publishing on libel.

Freedom to criticise and question, in strong terms and without malice, is the cornerstone of argument and debate, whether in scholarly journals, on websites, in newspapers or elsewhere. Our current libel laws inhibit debate and stifle free expression. They discourage writers from tackling important subjects and thereby deny us the right to read about them.

Our pledge:

As a small, online publisher, we are acutely aware of the ‘chilling effect’ that current libel legislation and the excessive cost of libel trials in the UK can have on freedom of expression and journalism. We support the Libel Reform Campaign and the changes it proposes, which advocate journalists’ right to criticise and question those in power and positions of influence.

The petition can be signed at this link.

Some of the listed supporters:

• Index on Censorship: Conservatives pledge support to libel reform campaign
• Press Gazette: Libel reform and FOI on LibCon agenda
• Jack of Kent: Could Lester’s libel reform bill fail to launch?
• William Bennett on libel reform: ‘The real crux of the problem is not the law but the excessive costs of deploying it’
• Shadow justice minister says libel reform issue would be a ‘priority’ for a Tory government

On Friday Journalism.co.uk took part in a live Q&A  hosted by the The Guardian’s careers section, allowing new and experienced journalists the opportunity to ask industry professionals for advice on conquering the world of online journalism.

The multimedia panel on hand to answer questions were:

Paul Gallagher, head of online editorial, Manchester Evening News
Laura-Jane Filotrani, site editor, Guardian Careers
Sarah Hartley, digital editor, The Guardian
Alison Gow, executive editor, digital, Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post
Laura Oliver, senior reporter, Journalism. co.uk
Madeline Bennett, editor of technology news sites V3.co.uk and The Inquirer
Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer in online journalism, Birmingham City University
John Hand, duty editor, UK desk BBC News website
Alison White, community moderator, The Guardian

Here’s our round-up of the best advice from Friday’s event on how to make it as a successful online journalist in the digital age. You can also read the panel’s responses in full on the online journalism Q&A page on Guardian.co.uk.

Jump to:

• What is the best subject to study to help me break into journalism?
• But what if I can’t afford to go to university?
• What skills do I need to be an online journalist?
• How can I make the transition to online?”

What is the best subject to study to help me break into journalism?

[asked by Matt, who is studying English literature and language at college and asked if going on to study an English degree would help him prepare for a career in journalism]

John Hand: “I’m often asked which is the best subject to study at university and the answer is really that there is no particularly bad choice. The best newsroom has a good mix of people with different knowledge areas – for example, I think every editor in the country would love to have someone with the in-depth health knowledge of a medical degree on their team. Of course, any degree course that allows you to develop your writing and analytical skills (I always think history is a clever choice) would be better than most.

“The most important thing is to get some vocational training. Many editors themselves initially came through NCTJ courses (http://www.nctj.com/) so would respect those, but there are also many media organisations that offer their own in-house (or even external) training. If you want to get into news journalism, the key question to ask of any training scheme is how good their law course is.”

Sarah Hartley: “Grab as much work experience as you can throughout your uni years. Who knows what the economic climate will be like when you graduate but it may well be that you can find an employer who will put you through a block release course or similar. New schemes for apprenticeships, internships and such are bound to come through in that time.”

Madeline Bennett: “Has your college got a student newspaper or website? If so, volunteering to write for that would be a good starting point and showcase for your work. If not, why not start one? This is also the case for when you go to uni, student papers can be a great place to launch your journalism career.”

But what if I can’t afford to go to university?

[Forum user Dan Holloway asked: how does someone who has no choice but carry on a full-time job to make ends meet go about switching careers to online journalism?]

Alison White: “My advice would be to perhaps take some evening classes in journalism if possible – while I was at uni I did a 10-week course, one evening a week, about freelancing and a two-day course about getting into journalism. Or how about some work experience? Newspapers and other organisations are less well-staffed at weekends, I’m sure they’d appreciate some help with uploading content or other duties. Once you’ve got to know some people you can always keep in touch in the hope they might point you towards job opportunities or further work experience.”

Madeline Bennett: “Look for courses that focus on online journalism or multimedia skills, there might be some weekend or evening classes available that you can do to support your NCTJ. Also these courses are a good place to meet people who can help you get your first job in journalism, as they’ll often be run by current working journalists.”

Laura Oliver: “Start experimenting – if you can find the time outside of work to run a blog, contribute to other websites, you’ll learn a great deal about the basics of online publishing. Contact sites and other blogs that interest you and offer postings. Look at successful bloggers and think about what they are doing that makes them influential/profitable. Here are a couple of posts that might help too regarding building an online brand as a journalist:

“http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/08/17/adam-westbrook-6×6-branding-for-freelance-journalists/

“http://www.journalism.co.uk/5/articles/534896.php“

What skills do I need to be an online journalist?

[Forum user Dean Best asked: what are the top online-specific skills I should attain to improve my online skills and better my chances of moving up the ladder?]

Laura-Jane Filotrani: “To be able to demonstrate a passion for digital – by this I mean that you are active online; you use the net; you have a profile online; you use and understand community; you are excited by being able to reach people using the internet; you want to find out the latest developments.”

Alison White: “A good knowledge of SEO and the importance of linking to others and providing ‘added value’ to the reader; i.e. give them the story but perhaps with a link to a video, an online petition, a Facebook page etc. News to me seems more of a package now rather than a traditional delivery.”

Paul Bradshaw:

“1. Understand how RSS works and how that can improve your newsgathering, production and distribution. I cover a little of that in this post:

“http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/04/21/rss-social-media-passive-aggressive-newsgathering-a-model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-part-2-addendum/

“2. Engage with online communities around your specialist area, help them, provide valuable information and contacts, and then when you need help on something, they’ll be there for you in return. It will also build a distribution network for your content.

“3. Possibly hardest, but force yourself to experiment and make mistakes with all sorts of media. If you can make yourself entertaining as well as informative then that can really work very well.”

How can I make the transition to online journalism?

['Malini' asked: how do I go about breaking into the field of online journalism? And why would anyone pay and retain a writer when they can easily get so much content for free?]

Paul Bradshaw: “Use free writing to build a reputation and contacts; and sell the valuable stuff that you generate from that. Ultimately you should aim to become reliable enough for them to want to hire you when they are hiring.”

Sarah Hartley: “Writers have always provided free content – be it letters to the editor, local band reviews, poetry or whatever, so being online will only further the opportunity for that sort of exposure and that can only be a good thing for diversity and choice.”

Paul Gallagher: “I have taught myself some coding skills like HTML and I believe it does help a lot to have some technical knowledge, not necessarily because you will need them in the job but because it really helps to be able to communicate well with the programmers and developers in your company.”

• Event: Guardian.co.uk live Q&A on online journalism
• Entrepreneurial journalism – how Newcastle University is shaping up
• #aopforum: Live coverage on microlocal media discussion
• Headlines and Deadlines: How journalism students can make the most of work experience
• Stephen Quinn on mobile journalism

“Reading a newspaper on a street corner might be seen as banal. What’s becoming just as banal is producing news on that street corner,” Pat Kane, co-founder of the Sunday Herald and author of ‘The Play ethic’, said in his opener at today’s Media140 conference.

The growth of social media and online publishing is showing ‘just how quotidian and everyday the practice of journalism becomes in this everyday environment’, he added.

Speaking at the microblogging and journalism event, Kane said there are some key reasons/benefits for journalists using social media tools:

• Beat reporting

• Early warning system– communities decide what’s the news. “Twitter’s the canary in the coal mine – Overlap with trad journalism

• Real-time content

• Traceable sources/interviewees/leads – “How much better can journalism practice be in a civic space?” asked Kane. Social media can be ‘an enrichment of a classic journalistic process’.

• Can you help? – asking readers for tips, feedback etc
  

• As a promotional tool

• An expertise archive – “Used to be called desk research, now it’s handheld device responsiveness.”

But asks Kane:

“How distributive and collaborative are journalists prepared to be?”

“To what extent might the Darwinian acid that new media is throwing onto organisations transform them?

• #media140 – Choice of multiple business models as traditional press ‘dies off’
• #journalistconf: Best practice examples of social media use in journalism
• #followjourn @zseward – Zach Seward/social media editor
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – social media filtering
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – find the human angle

An impractical suggestion for newspapers made in a letter to the Mansfield News Journal:

“Why can’t newspapers have this practice [online publishing] discontinued, and then they can go back to the old-fashioned way of publishing their paper and regain their subscribers and advertisers?”

Followed by a more legitimate concern about the relationship between online newspapers and democracy:

“If newspapers are forced to stop publishing, there won’t be any information to be placed on the internet.”

While there would still be information from a range of sources if newspapers were taken out of the picture, how would the quality of this information be perceived by the reader, such as the writer of this letter?

Full letter at this link…

• Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons: ‘Don’t bail out newspapers – let them die and get out of the way’
• AsiaMedia (via EJC): Radio services go offline in Singapore
• Globe and Mail: Secret Service personnel remove writer Brenda Lee from near Air Force One
• Clay Shirky: The old model’s broken – don’t try to replace it
• Journalism in Africa: Kenyan government seeks guidelines on anonymous sources

A week with particularly brutal cuts across UK regional media, but news of a new digital appointment comes from Trinity Mirror this morning:

Richard Ayers has been appointed regional web publishing director for Trinity Mirror Regionals.

“In this key position Richard will work closely with the regional teams across the division to implement digital best practice and develop content and online services to drive usage, audience and online revenues across the regional network,” a release from the group said.

“Richard has a first class background in online publishing and I am delighted to welcome him to the team,” said Chris Bunyan, digital director of Trinity Mirror Regionals.

“The audience for our regional sites has increased by over 30 per cent year-on-year to around 5.5 milllon users a month. Richard’s experience and expertise will strengthen our digital team and will ensure we continue to deliver and drive compelling online user experiences for this growing audience across our regional websites,” Bunyan said, in the release.

Ayers career includes ten years at BBC News online, in ‘a number of senior digital roles;’ he was ‘portal director’ for Tiscali.co.uk, and more recently he was the managing director of a digital production agency, Magic Lantern.

The Trinity Mirror release also announced that Shaun Collins has been appointed as digital recruitment director, a role which sees him focus on ‘driving digital recruitment products and their performance’.

• Media Release: David Fordham named Newspaper Society president
• Trinity Mirror digital recruitment head Andy Baker leaves for Friends Reunited
• Trinity Mirror’s north east editorial director to leave after 22 years
• GMG sells regional media business to Trinity Mirror for £44.8m
• Jay Rosen @ Journalism Leaders Forum: UK newspapers two years behind US in audience interaction

Jason Preston compares online and print publishing models and concludes that the only way the old model will work online is if the cost structure of online publishing is changed, so that technology no longer allows free or cheap means for publishing to all.

“There are two ways to adapt to the situation: you can accept the new economics, or you can try to re-work the technology so that it conforms to the old rules of economics: scarcity… Fighting progress is a fool’s game,” Preston writes. Full story…

See also NiemanJournalismLab: “Why it’s so hard to move print revenue online: The loss of scarcity“

• Audio: Regional newspapers compete with football clubs online
• Marc Reeves: Journalism’s old guard – ‘fighting the same battles with the same weapons’
• Voluntary redundancies as Future Publishing focuses on digital
• Imagine Publishing launches user-focused gaming site
• Publishing 2.0: When a newspaper stops publishing in print, what happens to the advertising dollars?

Inspired by three online news items (David Carr on NYTimes.com; Gawker’s Nick Denton / Jonah Bloom of AdAge), John Duncan argues on Garcia International that the ‘recession is (ultimately) good for online publishing.’

“There comes a time for most orthodoxies when they just plain run out of doxy,” he writes…”The biggest mistake newspapers made in the internet era was to devalue content by dishing it out for free.”

His point is perhaps clearest in his final paragraph:

“What we are learning now is that a user of a free product does not have remotely the same value as a customer of a paying one.”

Full story…

• Radio 4 Today: ‘Crisis in the economics of media industry’
• Editors Weblog: French government considering ‘Google tax’
• Journalism Iconoclast: Journalists should rethink the newsroom
• Andrew Keen: ‘The internet will devour newspapers’
• Media release: BBC announces launch of web-connected TV product

“Even if it is a desperate last throw of the dice, what does a paper have to lose if it tries it? Not that I’d want to see papers disappear from their communities, but if it’s a choice between online-only news and no news at all,” writes Andrews.

• paidContent.org: Nice try Newport, but charging system won’t work, says Brady
• Arianna Huffington on the desperation of Journalism 2009
• FT.com: Threat to democracy by papers’ travails exaggerated
• Berkeley Daily Planet launches ‘Fund for Local Reporting’
• Paper.li adds Facebook to social newspaper function

Online publishing: When choosing a content management system or blogging software, make sure it can include headlines in the article page’s URL. It is more memorable than strings of numbers and good for search engine optimisation too. Tipster: Laura Oliver

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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