The Financial Times has reported that the BBC has officially partnered with AudioBoo to post sound clips from programmes onto its website.

BBC journalists have been using AudioBoo since shortly after its launch in 2009 and the Radio 4 Today programme has providing catch-up audio for some time, getting around 20,000 listens to the 24 “boos” it posts each week, the FT states.

According to the article, the deal will “result in a series of branded BBC channels using AudioBoo, which the BBC hopes will broaden its audience reach worldwide”.

The FT states:

The decision to back such a small home-grown technology company is also a big step for the BBC, which has until now limited its official media partnerships to larger companies, such as Facebook and Twitter.

AudioBoo allows users to record and share up to three minutes of audio using the iPhone app or website. It also offers paid subscriptions for those who want to record and share longer interviews and sounds.

After launching in 2009, London-based AudioBoo gathered a loyal following of journalists and well-known personalities such as Stephen Fry who gave the platform an early boost.

AudioBoo founder and CEO Mark Rock told the FT that the BBC deal “took 18 months and 38 meetings to complete, because it was the first time a large media outlet had given official sanction to his business”.

• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use iPhone Audioboo app to catch short audio clips
• How to record audio interviews using Facebook’s new video option
• Audio reporting tool Audioboo experiments with paid-for account for ITV
• App of the week for journalists – TinyVox, for recording and sharing audio notes
• App of the week for journalists: SkyRecorder, for recording Skype calls on iPhone/iPad

Picture by Lane Hartwell [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

I caught up with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at the Financial Times’ digital media conference to find out more about his views on how journalists should – or shouldn’t – be using Wikipedia.

He said while “generally speaking we always recommend journalists shouldn’t necessarily cite Wikipedia”, he advised reporters to use it as a “starting point” and then search out community discussions and what they “want to know”.

He added that he is pleased with the “stamp of approval” when news outlets link to Wikipedia.

Listen to the audio below in which he also explains the licences used by Wikipedia, such as for the use of images.

• #ftmedia12: Jimmy Wales on the power of Wikipedia’s free access ethos
• Tool of the week for journalists: Thinglink, for interactive images
• Mashable: Wikipedia’s new editorial layer
• Associated Press: Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia
• PIXSTA develops ‘image-to-image’ search engine

Sean Dempsey/PA

The Financial Times is reporting that the launch of a Sunday newspaper “to replace the News of the World” has been delayed due to the arrests of News International journalists at the weekend.

On Saturday (28 January), four current and former Sun journalists were arrested by officers working on Operation Elveden, the Met team looking into illegal payments to police.

The FT reports that a launch date of 29 April had “been set in stone”. Journalism.co.uk heard late on Friday, the day before the arrests, that the launch date had been brought forward.

The insiders said that managers of News International had decided that the adverse publicity surrounding the arrests and the suspension of the four journalists while police inquiries were going on would hamper any possible launch of a new title, which earlier reports said would be called the Sun on Sunday.

The article includes a comment from anonymous insiders, plus an interview with former chief reporter at the News of the World Neville Thurlbeck.

Mr Thurlbeck said that an internal group, the management and standards committee, set up at the direction of Rupert Murdoch to co-operate with a police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, had handed over so much material that it had lost control of the situation.

“The staff [of the Sun] have lost trust in their own management because they [the MSC] don’t believe that they know what is contained in the material that the police now have.”

The FT adds that News International declined to comment.

The full Financial Times article is at this link [part-paywall].

• News International to launch Sunday version of the Sun on 29 April, sources say
• Neville Thurlbeck reinforces idea of ‘wilful blindness’ at News International
• Neville Thurlbeck swaps journalism for PR with new role
• MediaWeek: How long can News International hide its ABCe figures?
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 11-17 February

A part-paywall will go up on a number of news sites in Slovenia on Monday (16 January), following a group paywall model first introduced in Slovakia by Piano Media.

In this week’s podcast Journalism.co.uk technology correspondent Sarah Marshall speaks to Tomas Bella, the CEO of Piano Media; Frédéric Filloux, managing director for digital operations at French newspaper business Les Echo, who, until recently, was also managing director of ePresse, a consortium of French publishers; and François Nel, founding director of the journalism leaders programme at the University of Central Lancashire and co-founder of the Digital Editors’ Network, an academic who has carried out extensive research on how publishers can make money online.

Filloux talks about the digital kiosk set up by ePresse and outlines his theory shared on his Monday Note newsletter that the Financial Times and New York Times are encouraging readers to take out a digital subscription by raising the price of their print editions.

Journalism.co.uk’s next news:rewired event will feature a panel debate on paid-content models. See the agenda, list of speakers and list of delegates. Tickets are £130+VAT and can been booked using the ticket page. There are just a handful of tickets left so book now to avoid disappointment.

You can hear all our podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

• MondayNote: Sarkozy’s news prescription – ‘a band-aid to an ailing industry’
• #news2011: Paywalls – ‘the solution is going to be unique and individual’
• #newsrw: Who’s attending our digital journalism event?
• Making data work for you: one week till media140′s dataconomy event
• #jpod in depth: Discussing the press self-regulation question after #soe11

Apple has pulled the Financial Times’ native iPad and iPhone apps from the iTunes App Store after updating its terms which state in-app subscriptions must be paid through the store, reports paidContent.

The FT launched a web-based app in June which allows the publisher to avoid paying Apple a 30 per cent cut of it’s app revenue and to gather its own audience data.

This article on paidContent states:

It is a blow to the FT, whose apps had processed subscription transactions independently. Last year, 10 percent of its new digital subscriptions were taken out on iPads. But the publisher says its model is premised on owning data about customers that goes through along with transactions. This was more important to it than Apple’s 30 percent take, CEO John Ridding told [Robert Andrews] recently.

The FT’s web app, which was described as a ‘wake-up call’ to publishers, saw 150,000 uses in the first 10 days before the part-paywall went up, in line with the FT’s other digital platforms.

• Reuters: FT resisting Apple’s efforts to channel subs through App Store
• European publishers to hold meeting over Apple’s proposed subscriptions change
• Reuters: Yudu launches service to help publishers evade Apple subscription cut
• iPad or why pad? Mixed messages for UK news publishers
• #mobilemedia11: Ten facts on mobile media – phones and tablets

A study by the Financial Times and web effectiveness experts Bowen Craggs has found many corporate websites fail to provide journalists with information and serve the media in a useful and effective way – which is often not in the company’s favour in terms of generating positive press coverage.

The study finds “many press offices simply do not see the online medium as an important” and this article (part paywall) in the FT theorises that this could be as many press officers are former journalists who left the industry before the advent of online and social media.

The FT Bowen Craggs Index looks at:

How well a site caters to four areas of journalistic enquiry: the news release service and archiving; the ready availability of good quality contact information; the range of background about the company and its industry; and the provision of publication quality imagery.

News release service

The FT article states journalists “do not want to be spoon fed”:

Give them a ready-made story, and they will either ignore it, or look for a way to put a different twist on it (not necessarily in the company’s favour). The last thing they want is to write the same story as other people. What they do want is leads, which explains the keenness with which they have taken to Twitter. Companies need to understand Twitter – both to feed journalists leads and to get early warning that a nasty news storm is about to blow in.

Contact information and background about the company and its industry

The FT article states:

[Journalists] tend to be in a hurry, and impatient. Their inclination is often to pick up the phone rather than trawl a site. Companies can make themselves unpopular by failing to make press contacts easy to find.

Provision of images

The study found that “one of the most significant trends this year comes from the image library metric”:

The big move forward is the increasing use of Flickr as a complementary library: see for example Nestlé and Novartis.

A remarkable number of companies do not provide an image library at all – almost a quarter of the companies in the Index, including most of the Chinese companies but also a slew of banks – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Santander, Westpac and more. Why? If you do not provide images yourselves, media organisations will surely go to your rivals or to a library.

German company Siemans comes out on top and is heralded as an example of best practice of serving the media. It has an index of 28. An example of a lower score is Johnson and Johnson with an index of nine.

• Country Life makes 100-year picture archive available online
• Innovations in Journalism – Newsvetter – taking the pain out of press releases
• William Reed moves into vertical search
• Case study blogs: back-to-front journalism or wider perspective?
• Innovations in Journalism – Fromdistance

The Financial Times paywall will go up on its new web-based app this week, which has so far reported encouraging stats with 150,000 hits during the first 10 days, during which time users have not been required to login.

“We’re seeing a strong conversion from the existing subscriber base who are using the iPad app and we’re also seeing a large cohort of new users as well,” Steve Pinches, group product manager for FT.com told Journalism.co.uk.

The new web-based iPad and iPhone app was launched on 7 June and is downloaded by the user clicking on the URL app.ft.com. It has received a great deal of attention from media organisations considering investing in native iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry apps.

Advantages of web-based apps include flexibility: HTML5, the language the FT app is written in, has the potential to be used across different devices, reducing the cost and time spent in developing separate apps in different languages. The new web app bypasses Apple’s App Store and therefore avoids the FT losing a 30 per cent cut.

Pinches explained the FT will be prioritising development of the web-based app. Indeed the home screen to the new app states the FT is “encouraging our readers to switch immediately to the new FT web app”.

“It’s not that we are diametrically opposed to being in apps stores. It’s just that it makes a lot more sense for us to develop things in a web-based framework,” Pinches said.

“We have a business model that we’ve spent a lot of time investing in, which we feel is great for users because it gives them access across multiple platforms and whenever we evaluate any channel, we have to make sure it meets the basic criteria for us to be able to run our business as we do.”

As the web app can be used by both iPhones and iPads, it is easier to maintain than two separate natives. It also offers various new features for iPhone users, including video and images, which were not available in the native iPhone app.

Asked if there will be a point when they will remove the native from the App Store, Pinches said: “We’re still in discussions with Apple and that’s being handled by our MD”, and described talks as “amicable”.

Unlike the iPad app which was built by a company in Colorado called Wall Street On Demand, the new app was built by London-based Assanka, which also built the FT’s Android app, predominantly using HTML5.

“They built the Android app, that was their first HTML5 app so it’s been a pretty steep learning curve.”

“The next plan is to roll that code out into the big screen Android, the small screen Android, the [BlackBerry] PlayBook and webOS,” Pinches said.

That may manifest itself as a web-based app compatible with other platforms or more native apps, Pinches explained.

“We always want to keep the two options open: being able to launch as a web app or a native app or both.”

Related content:

FT looks to bypass Apple charges with new web-based iPad app

Nearly half of FT online subscribers accessing content via mobile

• FT web app has been used 1m times
• Web apps v native apps v mobile sites: a guide
• Flurry: Mobile app use overtakes web browsing in US
• Twitter launches HTML5 app for iPad
• App of the week for journalists – Pro HDR, for better photos (without an iPhone 4S)

The Financial Times’ new web-based app has been viewed 150,000 times since its launch 10 days ago, which includes 100,000 hits in the first week of launch, the FT said in a media release today.

The FT is the first major news publisher to launch this type of HTML5 hybrid app, which can be viewed across a number of different smartphone and tablet devices.

Steve Pinches, FT group product head, said the app has received very positive feedback.

“Comments include recognition of the technical capabilities of the app and being at the cutting edge of technology. Users have also expressed appreciation for the improved speed of the app and look and feel enhancements when using on the iPhone.”

He explained where the app is heading.

“We will take a two-fold approach to improvements to the app. Firstly we will focus on adding new content to the existing app, including special reports, newspaper graphics and the ability to save articles for later. Secondly we will develop the app for other devices including Honeycomb, Samsung and BlackBerry Playbook.

“Our next priority is releasing the app for Android devices, both large and small screen. Following that we will work on an FT web app for BlackBerry Playbook.”

Initial analysis shows the ‘Companies’ section of the web-app is the most popular, followed by the Life and Arts section, which makes up around 10 per cent of consumption overall. Other popular features include Markets Data, World, Markets and Lex.

“Interestingly, we are seeing much more leisure-type usage, with user peaks early morning, evening and around lunch time. This suggests that as well as a core tool for use during the business day, like FT.com on a desktop, the app is an accessory being used on the way to and from work and planning for the day ahead.”

• Telegraph: Review of reviews of new BlackBerry PlayBook
• FT.com gets go ahead for iPad app
• WSJ.com: Google plans digital newsstand for Android users
• Paywall rises on FT’s ‘flexible’ iPad and iPhone web app
• Editors Weblog: LA Times: blogs for politics, news for celebrities

The Independent reports on the 10th anniversary of the Financial Times’ metered paywall going up.

For a decade the FT has allowed readers to access a limited number of articles for free before payment is required, a similar paywall model to that adopted by the New York Times last week. The FT has notched up 210,000 digital subscribers, each paying at least £250 for a year’s access.

[Managing director of FT.com Rob] Grimshaw points to the price of an FT digital subscription in the US – at $389 (£241), it is costlier than a subscription to the newspaper – as evidence of the growing value of digital content to the consumer.

Yet the view that online journalism should be free still largely prevails. Grimshaw is mystified: “There seems to be a real nervousness and lack of confidence amongst publishers about the lack of value of their content. The free content evangelism movement has not helped, neither has giving away content for free over a 10-year period.”

But as a couple of the comments on the article point out, the FT is a specialist publication and both companies and individuals are willing to pay for valued digital content.

The Independent’s full article is at this link

• Sydney Morning Herald: The Australian to reveal paywall details this week
• Rob Grimshaw on the paywall backlash
• ‘We don’t see this as a paywall’, says Express and Star
• iPad news: would you pay more?
• Times and Sunday Times will be paywalled from June – £1 a day

The Financial Times has launched a new subscription-only website focusing on Brazil’s finance, government and industry.

Brazil Confidential provides research and analysis of trends in the Brazilian market, Media Business reports.

• NYTimes.com: Brazilian journalists want goal-line reporting
• FT.com: Brazil’s ‘tabloid revolution’
• HuffingtonPost: Brazil’s ‘booming’ newspaper industry
• Twitter’s Local Trends
• Makeover for the Telegraph business pages

Good news for the Financial Times journalists who faced redundancy if they did not return to China, on half their salaries.

The management has changed its mind, following the FT chapel’s threat that its members would ballot on industrial action if the FT Chinese journalists were not allowed to stay.

We reported on the National Union of Journalists’ outrage over the affair on 12 February. The latest update comes from NUJ Active (we expect a fuller NUJ statement soon):

The immediate defence by journalists at the Financial Times of Chinese colleagues threatened with redundancy by management has brought complete victory. The FT chapel demanded unanimously that the redundancy threat be lifted from their four colleagues on the FTChinese website, and warned that otherwise FT journalists might ballot on industrial action. So management did as it was told.

Update: and here’s the fuller NUJ statement:

Two of the four Chinese journalists are British citizens, and they all work on terms and conditions inferior to other journalists at the Financial Times. The newspaper had decided that the specialist group of Chinese journalists at the paper had to return to China on half their current salaries or else accept redundancy.

The NUJ chapel voted unanimously at a capacity meeting: “We condemn the outrageous treatment of journalists on FTChinese. We demand no redundancies on FTChinese and that the journalists be placed on the same terms and conditions as the rest of FT editorial We will ballot for industrial action if these demands are not met.”

“We are pleased that our employer has realised just how unfair and unacceptable were its proposals for our Chinese colleagues. We look forward to talking with management about securing the future of our Chinese journalists at the Financial Times on proper terms and conditions,” said David Crouch, the father of chapel.

“Financial Times management has had the good sense to reconsider an unacceptable decision. Our FT Chapel is to be congratulated on its speedy and determined resistance to a management error which was entirely unacceptable to the culture of the diverse media culture of the NUJ,” said NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear.

• FT Chinese staff threatened with redundancies
• Motions from Manchester: “This chapel declares it has no confidence in the Scott Trust”
• RBI staff vote against further industrial action
• NUJ: Journalists demand ‘immediate talks’ as 22 jobs face cut at Media Wales
• MediaGuardian: NUJ ballot suspended at Telegraph

The Linked and Open Data conversation is extremely relevant for news telling and I’m hoping this week’s Linked Data meetup – Web of Data – will introduce me to some new ideas which could be used effectively in journalism. There’s some incredibly inspiring stuff going on outside traditional newsrooms, but some media organisations have also been building some fantastic interactive features on their sites, which allow users to customise the way they view and consume data.

Last month at the first official UK Future of News Group meeting, the Financial Times deputy interactive editor, Cynthia O’Murchu, shared some  inspiring ways of news storytelling. She later sent me a list of inspirational links, which I’ll share with you here.

O’Murchu believes that data visualisations can add so much value to a story, and allow more user control, too. The great thing about various data visualisations was that “you allow people to choose their story”, she said. Here are some of the visualisations she flagged up in particular:

[Note: for FT.com articles, you will need to register or subscribe to receive full access after a limited number of views]

This Financial Times feature from 2007 mapped the different factors affecting food prices around the world: export restrictions, price measures, civil unrest, trade balances and inflation. Additional text boxes, brought up by clicking on a certain location, give additional information.

Another feature brought together video and slide shows that explain why food prices are rising.

It was about presenting things in a comprehensible way for users to understand, said O’Murchu.

She flagged up how the New York Times had  used geolocal information to show what people were talking about on Twitter (see below, for example).

O’Murchu urged the room of journalists to go and play with data tools: “If you’re inclined to do a type of story telling, just do it!”

Some of the other interactive packages at the FT:

• One of O’Murchu’s own, ‘The Pensions Crisis’ (May 2009) – experts advise on dilemmas faced by savers, companies and governments.
• ‘Trading places: Migration in the crisis’ (August 2009). Audio and video slide shows examining which migrants were hit hardest in the economic downturn.

Data visualisations:

• ‘Shrinking Titans’ (February 2009): a visualisation showing the scale of Obama’s proposed pay caps for the executives of large companies.
• ‘Oil and gas chief executives: are they worth it?’ (November 2009): graphic allowing users to view different information about chief executives’ compensation packages.
• ‘The decade for global banks’ (March 2009) An interactive allowing users to see how different banks fared from 1999 -2009.
• ‘How different groups spend their day’ on NYTimes.com (July 2009): a rather beautiful interactive graph showing chunks of time spent on various activities by different groups, with time of day along the X axis. Accompanying news story at this link.
• Guardian.co.uk (September 2008): De Menezies shooting with CCTV videos labelled, with angle, on tube station map.
• International Monetary Fund (IMF) Data Mapper, looking at real GDP growth, by country and over time.

She also showed examples of applications that helped users customise information, to help with a particular problem:

• Is it better to rent or buy? An interactive calculator over at the New York Times, for comparing the cost of renting or buying property.

O’Murchu also mentioned the non-profit information site Gapminder. In this video, Gapminder’s Hans Rosling shows users how countries have developed since 1809, based on individual life expectancy and income. [You can see another Rosling video here, 'Let my dataset change your mindset'].

O’Murchu also recommends taking a look at these links, for further inspiration:

• Interactive Narratives site

• NPPA monthly multimedia winners

• Wall Street Journal interactives

• Society of News Design

• Meryl.net list of 175+ data visualisation resources

• NYTinnovation.com

• Mindy McAdams’ blog

• Chartporn.org

• Flowingdata.com

And finally, for even more examples of interactive graphics:

• If you’re registered or subscribed to the FT.com site you can browse through all their interactive graphics at this link…
• The Guardian’s bank of interactive features can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/interactive
• The New York Times’ full multimedia content (interactive features on the right). Check them out quickly before the paywall goes up next year.
• 10,000words.net by Mark Luckie, now multimedia producer for California Watch, flags up clever interactives.
• Times Labs is showcasing ways to use data at this link.
• David McCandless’ new book, ‘Information is Beautiful’, was published this month.  He shares excellent visualisations here: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

What are your favourites? Add them in the comments below…

• NYTimes.com: New York Times presents its ‘Innovation Portfolio’
• Guardian’s phone hacking interactive: ‘The growing web’
• Visual.ly – a new tool to create data visualisations
• NYTimes.com slide shows generate 7 per cent of page views
• Thomson Reuters creates site for deal makers

Last August, amidst all the speculation over the Observer’s future, we reported how academics and business figures were threatening to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday newspaper, following the decision to axe Simon Caulkin’s Observer Management column. Guardian News and Media never re-instated Caulkin and a letter of complaint from nearly 100 leading authors and academics went unpublished.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Observer did not later report how the Work Foundation had named Caulkin columnist of the year at the end of January. As noted by Private Eye in its latest issue (1255): “Newspapers usually trumpet awards their writers win. But the Observer and the Guardian were strangely silent…”

Philip Whiteley, management author, blogger and editor of the Human Capital Forum, who spearheaded the Caulkin complaint, has now launched a new campaign: for more effective coverage of management in UK media.

“It is also a reaction to the feeble coverage of the Kraft-Cadbury merger in mainstream newspapers in which business journalists repeatedly refused to put any tough questions to the Kraft or Cadbury leadership on the very high risks and integration costs that mega-mergers involve,” he said.

Whiteley believes that in reporting the Kraft-Cadbury merger, journalists focused on finances and the offer price rather than management challenges.

“The error common to the banks and the Kraft-Cadbury affair is to imagine that the management task, even though it is responsible for delivering the vast bulk of the returns from investment strategies of banking employees, or take-over activity respectively, is still bizarrely regarded as a junior matter, not front-page material,” Whiteley argued in a recent blog post, criticising both the Financial Times’ and the Telegraph’s coverage.

The new management project will collect blogs and other web news sections and launch a ‘blog of blogs’ – “a summary from the management blogosphere”.

Whiteley will circulate this to the Human Capital Forum’s database (16,000 subscribers) on a monthly basis, with the possibility of extending that to the databases of all participants.

“The aim is to provide more critical coverage of governance and management in the public and private sectors,” Whiteley said.

He cited a comment left on his blog, as another prompt for the new network:

“There was a time when papers like the FT and others had the expertise and inclination to dispel the myths of uttered corporate statements. Alas, no longer. The institutions that were supposed to be ever vigilant and fearless are now content to simply cover the passing parade. One has to read the right blogs and the right books to get any sense of objective insight into what’s going on. A real shame.”

Human Capital Forum has listed some online management resources here: http://www.humancapitalforum.com/links/index.php

• City A.M.: Capital Ideas group makes bid for Observer
• Journalism Daily: Academics boycott Observer, theblogpaper’s launch and AOP conference
• Guardian appoints roles in new editorial ‘pods’
• Academics threaten Observer boycott: the letters in full
• JLPF: Tweets from the Digital Editors Network and Journalism Leaders Forum

The Sunday Times reports that Hugo Dixon is in ‘advanced talks’ to sell Breakingviews.com to Thomson Reuters – for a reported £10 million.

Dixon, former Lex editor at the Financial Times, co-founded the online financial analysis site in 1999 and could receive £2.7 million if the deal goes through. The other founder, Jonathan Ford, left in 2007 and has no remaining shares, according to the Sunday Times.

Full story at this link…

(via paidContent:UK)

• MediaGuardian: Hugo Dixon on Breakingviews – and the FT
• paidContent:UK: Shiny maintains 30 active blogs despite staff lay-off
• The Shiny Media story: what’s going on?
• MediaGuardian: No integration for Times and Sunday Times, says John Witherow
• Is CNN about to buy Mashable?

The Financial Times reports on a Brazilian appetite for tabloids, bucking the general trend for declining newspaper circulations:

“Super Notícia is at the vanguard of Brazil’s tabloid revolution. Five years ago, the country’s tabloids sold just 400,000 copies day. Today, they sell 1,500,000. São Paulo, the capital, has several, including two free dailies. Sales of Extra, another tabloid, have grown by 17.96 per cent in the past year to 284,892 copies daily.”

Full story at this link…

• Lone Star defies downward trend in revised ABC results
• MediaGuardian: Metro expands distribution
• paidContent:UK: Newsagents see 14 per cent decline in newspaper revenue over a decade
• Press Gazette: MEN shifts part-paid, part-free strategy
• MinOnline: GQ sells just 365 copies of iPad edition