The E&P Pub: Seattle Times’ new hyperlocal partners

As part of the Networked Journalism pilot project, by American University’s J-Lab and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, local news partners for the Seattle Times have been announced this week:

“The four local producers and web sites partnering with The Seattle Times are: Tracy Record, who runs West Seattle Blog and White Center Now; Kate Bergman, who runs Next Door Media, which includes My Ballard, PhinneyWood, Queen Anne View, Magnolia Voice and Freemont Universe; Justin Carder, who runs Capitol Hill Seattle and helped create Neighborlogs, which is the platform for several neighborhood sites in Seattle; and Amber Campbell, who runs the Rainier Valley Post.”

Full story at this link…

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Reasons to be cheerful? Seattle paper, Roanoke Times and magazine publishers turning a profit

In addition to reporting on plummeting profits for some newspaper groups, Journalism.co.uk thought it was about time we shared some better news or at least some examples of titles that aren’t making a loss.

1. As the city’s only surviving daily newspaper since the decline of the Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times posted a rise in daily circulation of around 30 per cent for June. According to the New York Times, publisher Frank Blethen says the title is operating ‘in the black’ on a month-to-month basis now.
2. “We are a profitable, debt-free enterprise,” says Debbi Meade, publisher of the US’ Roanoke Times, in this letter to readers.
3. New figures from the US’ Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) suggest that 12 titles managed to attract more ad pages in the first six months of this year than in comparison to the same period in 2008. Newsweek looks at which titles are managing to buck the trend in this way.

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Has ditching print edition damaged Post-Intelligencer’s web traffic?

Following on from last week’s City University study, which suggested that traffic drops when a news title goes online-only, Editor&Publisher reports on a decrease in unique users to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since it abandoned its print run.

The site was not among the US’ top 30 newspaper websites last month, according to data from Nielsen Online and posted a 23 per cent year-on-year drop in unique users.

It’s local counterpart and former online collaborator before it went online-only, the Seattle times, posted a 70 per cent year-on-year gain in unique users last month to its own website – recording 2.2 million.

However, according to a spokesman for the Seattle PI’s owners, in an article on the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Nielsen data is flawed and internal data suggets the site actually showed a 10 per cent growth in year-on-year traffic last month.

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Affleck on the media: will ‘State of Play’ be the last film set in a newspaper?

‘State of Play’ is on the publicity circuit, a film – based on a BBC series – which follows events in a fictional newspaper, the Washington Globe.

“The film’s fictitious Washington Globe, like its real-life counterparts, is struggling for survival, and within its walls are plenty of internal battles. Old-school reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) resents the intrusion of young blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) into his investigation of a murder seemingly connected to a local congressman (Ben Affleck),” reports the Seattle Times.

Ben Affleck has shared his thoughts on the demise of the print industry with a group of journalists.

His lengthy comments can be found at Hitfix and over at Collider.com and About.com.

HitFix reports:

“”I think this is the last movie that will be set in a newspaper. I don’t know how this movie will be perceived, but I do believe that people will look back and say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the movie that came out right around the time the internet destroyed newspapers’,” Affleck appropriately tells a room of online journalists at the “State of Play” junket. “I don’t think the verdict is in on what that means or what’s going to happen or what the integrity is of one institution versus the other.”

Poynter’s Romenesko has also picked up on his comments about the Boston Globe: “”I was definitely shocked to hear about the Globe,” says Ben Affleck. “I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful newsgathering operation is going out of business.”"

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