Read the “Future of Newspapers” transcript from Charlie Rose’s show on February 11 at this link…
It features: Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal; Mort Zuckerman, owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and the editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report; and Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute (formerly the editor of Time magazine.)
The US’ National Press Club (NPC) is to allow ‘citizen journalists’ to become members through a partnership with cit-j site Helium.com.
The doors aren’t completely open: only the top contributors to the site – those that have earned a five-star rating for their body of work – will be able to apply for membership. However, reaching out to new kinds of media is a big gesture for an established, traditional journalism institution.
Helium’s ratings system will allow the NPC to effectively take on only the most ‘professional’ of the site’s citizen contributors. This could have a two-way impact, as Mark Ranalli, president and CEO of Helium, suggests in a release: “With their [the NPC’s] involvement, we believe we can elevate the stature, awareness and quality of citizen journalism.”
The New York Times‘ mobile site saw a 600 per cent growth in traffic last year, according to Janet Robinson, president and CEO of The New York Times company, who announced the group’s latest earnings report.
The site recorded almost 10 million monthly page views, Robinson said, and is now attracting ‘a strong roster of blue chip advertisers’.
Robinson added that the company as a whole had seen a 22 per cent growth in digital revenues over the same period – an increase of 8 per cent from the previous year – with these now accounting for around 10 per cent of the company’s total revenues for 2007.
To view the whole announcement, see this transcript courtesy of Seeking Alpha.