Tag Archives: times

The Times and Sunday Times: What a paywall looks like

And it’s up – the long awaited News International paywall for the new Times and Sunday Times websites has gone up today. This is the screen you get when you try to go beyond the sites’ homepages – thetimes.co.uk and sundaytimes.co.uk. It’s interesting to see what’s not included in the £1 day pass option: email bulletins, mobile access and daily puzzles.

What the web and world is saying about it:

TheGame: How World Cup journalism works

The phone goes. It is the newsdesk. “We need you to go and find North Korean fans now,” comes the instruction. “There aren’t any,” I helpfully reply. “Don’t care. There must be at least one. Go and find him.”

Hmmm. I am in Soccer City, the North Koreans are at Ellis Park across the City. I have only a couple of hours to kick-off, no North Korean contact – but then, who has? – and no ideas, except for simply standing outside the ground and waiting for a North Korean to arrive. This is not time quibble because the message from the newsdesk is that this is a “must-have” story. Foreign correspondents in South Korea and Japan are filing dispatches and Jonathan Clayton, our correspondent in Johannesburg, has been stationed outside the team hotel. I have 800 words to write on the mysterious North Korean fans. Oh dear.

Times reporter Kevin Eason gives a great, first-hand account of tracking down stories – and North Korea fans – at the World Cup. It’s a story of shoe leather, pressure and a little bit of luck as a reward for doggedly chasing leads. Would be interesting to know if any World Cup reporters are using social media shoe leather too?

Full post at this link…

MediaGuardian: 20 more job cuts at Times as 40 take voluntary redundancy

The Times will make 20 compulsory redundancies after completing its voluntary redundancy scheme. Forty editorial staff took voluntary redundancy. Details of where further cuts will be made will be announced in 48 hours, according to the Guardian.

The Times recently launched a new website as part of plans to introduce a site-wide paywall later this month.

Full story at this link…

George Brock: ‘The judgement about The Times wall can’t be made for months’

Professor and head of journalism at City University London (and former Times international editor) George Brock muses on the implications of the Times’ forthcoming paywall, following the departure of the blogger BabyBarista. Despite the departure, the judgement about the Times paywall “can’t be made for months,” he warns.

…I still believe that that a way not yet invented will be found round the central dilemma of finding a financial base for journalism while allowing writers to connect to as wide a community as possible. But unless and until that happens, the outcome of the experiment just starting will turn on the reactions of a group of writers who are about to communicate with a smaller fan base.

Full post at this link…

Comment: Reaction to the new Times and Sunday Times websites

Having had a day to “browse and snack” on the new Sunday Times and Times websites, what’s the feedback so far? What’s the reaction to the new editorial layout, multimedia changes and approach to journalism behind a paywall?

Starting with those bloggers who were given a sneak preview of the sites the night before they went live:

Malcolm Coles on the Times:

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing (…) an article, for instance, with an information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant – it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

But, asks Coles, shouldn’t readers be allowed to subscribe to just one site with completely distinct sections and topics?

It strikes me that there is either sufficient distinction in the audience for the two brands that you let users subscribe to just one site; or the audiences cross over so much that you combine the two sites in one and think about what makes most sense from the user’s point of view.

Forcing people to subscribe to both sites but keeping them entirely separate, with no cross-linking, seems a bit odd.

Adam Westbrook on the experience of reading the Times and Sunday Times online:

Well, at first impressions I am not bowled over: black text on a white screen, size 12, serif font – just like every other news website out there (and even this blog!). A web page can be any colour and fully dynamic – a concept no major newsroom is yet to grasp.

Rory Cellan-Jones on how a smaller audience might offer a more engaged readership:

[T]he company is convinced that advertisers will find the smaller audience of committed readers more attractive than the 21 million promiscuous passers-by who flit through the free Times Online site each month at present. While there’s been plenty of sniping from the sidelines by News International’s rivals, I suspect they are all glad that someone is at least testing the waters.

Tim Fenton:

It’s a slick package, although whether well-bundled, good content is enough of a differentiator from everything on Google News remains to be seen. For me, the biggest surprise is that the Times is not planning a splashy ad campaign to launch the paywall – it is relying chiefly on promotion in the newspaper.

It’s a low-key – and very analogue – start to one of the biggest experiments in modern digital media.

Of those reviewing the sites today, TechCrunch Europe expands on concerns raised that the papers’ journalists will miss out on social media conversation around their work, with thoughts on what the paywall means for mobile and ecommerce developments:

I don’t know The Times’ development roadmap, but if it does not have an API for its content (I presume it won’t since the whole of the new sites will be paywalled and invisible to search engines) then there will be no opportunity to catch the Third Wave of social or indeed of mobile or commerce. The Times cannot possibly come up with all the ideas which will happen in the Third Wave, which is why third-party developers will be so important.

Will the Times and Sunday Times be taking themselves out of the social media conversation with paywalls that redirect deep links to a generic login page? (Interesting to note findings from a Pew Research Center study, which report that bloggers will share more links and stories produced by mainstream news organisations, Twitterers less so, suggesting there’s is still a reliance of the social media news world on traditional news outlets. Interesting also – digital director of Mirror Group Matt Kelly’s remarks last week about the importance of honing news sites to niches that their readers identify as the values of that particular paper or brand.)

Adam Tinworth provides food for thought on the issue with his post on the potential impact of a subscription wall on a site’s community:

People sharing what they think will be identifiable, and they will have paid an entrance fee to get in there. This is, in fact, a community model, just one that differs from the wide, inter-connected community model we’re used to on the open web.

I recall Lee Bryant saying at last year’s Social Media Influence conference that sometimes its the wall that defines the community. And that maxim will be tested on these sites.

Times and Sunday Times get new websites as Alton gets new job

We gave you a sneak preview of the Times’ new design a couple of weeks ago, but the new websites for The Times and Sunday Times have gone live today.

At the moment the homepage of each site is the only part freely available. Readers will have to sign up for an initial free trial, before a paywall comes down on both sites (£1 a day or £2 a week for access) in four weeks time.

Journalism.co.uk was given a talk through of the new site designs by their editorial teams last night, so we’ll be posting more details later, but for now see the homepages below or visit the sites which you can read about at this link.

Meanwhile former Observer and Independent editor Roger Alton is joining the Times as executive editor, according to this report from MediaGuardian.

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MediaGuardian: News International to cut 80 staff, as more digital execs leave Telegraph

Following yesterday’s news that the Times and Sunday Times are looking to cut 80 staff between them and editorial budgets by 10 per cent to stem sever daily losses of around £240,000, Times editor James Harding has told staff that all departments will be involved in cost-cutting to protect the future of its journalism:

In an email to staff, reports MediaGuardian, Harding says:

We are clearly in a period of galloping technological change and we need to ensure that we have the resources to invest so that we can lead the market in digital journalism (…) Today, we are starting a process to cut costs, reduce our losses and free up resources for the future of our journalism.

Full story at this link…

Meanwhile, Will Lewis’ departure from the Telegraph has been followed by exits for Chris Lloyd, deputy managing editor at Telegraph Media Group, and Rhidian Wynn Davies, consulting editor – both key executives in Lewis’ digital operation, Euston Partners.

Full story at this link…

#ge2010: Times experiments with news and polls tracker

As part of its election coverage the Times attempted to chart the relationship between the news agenda, represented by Times reports and articles, and the political parties’ perfomances in the polls.

It looks like this:

And works like this:

Each bubble in the above graph is a news story. Its size reflects the number of comments it received on our site, and its position (on the y axis) indicates the number of recommendations the story received. (The basic idea here is that, the higher and larger the bubble, the more ‘important’ the news story, assuming that larger, more important stories tend to get commented on and recommended more.) Colours show to which party a story relates. The lines show (depending on the tab) either Populus polling results, or the number of seats the parties were predicted to win during the campaign based on Ladbrokes odds, which are used elsewhere on the site.

Times and Sunday Times will be paywalled from June – £1 a day

More details for the Great Paywall of Wapping have been released:

Two new websites  www.thetimes.co.uk and www.thesundaytimes.co.uk are to launch in  May – free to registered users for a trial period until June.

Then, the content will be available for a charge of £1 (one day access) or £2 (a week’s subscription) – across both sites.

Seven-day subscribers to the Times and Sunday Times in print will also be given digital access.

“This is just the start. The Times and The Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach. We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive, News International, in a release.

BBC Radio 4 Today had Media Show host Steve Hewlett commenting on the plans (07:42). The audio is not yet up on its site but will be available at this link later this morning.