Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal

WSJ offers New Yorkers $200 to talk about their iPads

The Wall Street Journal is inviting users of its iPad app to share their views on the device – and they are offering $200 for their time.

According to an email published by the Business Insider, the news organisation sent out invitations to New York users to take part in group discussions running from 16-17 August

But it looks like all the spaces may already have been snapped up:

Now the bad news: the slots have already been filled, or at least that’s what we were told after completing a quick survey gauging our eligibility. It’s also possible they just don’t want us.

See the full post here…

Wired: New York print war is really about digital future

There has been plenty of excited coverage of the playground spat between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times started by the Journal’s move into general interest metro coverage. The Journal’s news section, Greater New York, launched yesterday, and the Times war committee responded quickly with a memo to subscribers reminding them just how great the paper’s New York section is, and has been for so much longer than the Journal’s johnny-come-lately.

Harold Evans has taken up a ring-side seat at the Daily Beast to take score as the bout progresses over the week.

So far the whole thing seems, unsurprisingly, to have revolved about print, but Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk claims the war is “really about digital”.

The spat appears to be about local New York coverage, but really, it’s about both organizations’ digital future (…) By cutting ad rates and suddenly going after the same non-financial local stories as the Times, Murdoch is waging a good, old-fashioned newspaper war in the traditional sense. But the spoils this time will be the hearts and minds of a digital audience faced with far more choices than consumers of print.

Full story at this link…

ReadWriteWeb: WSJ shares location-based news with Foursquare users

The Wall Street Journal has followed in the Financial Times’ footsteps by teaming up with Foursquare. As part of a new focus on New York City, FourSquare users who ‘check in’ to a location around the city will receive a link from the Journal relating to that location.

Some media observers have been critical of the partnership, focusing on the addition of a few new WSJ-related badges that Foursquare users can now add to their collection. That might seem like an underwhelming feature for a media giant like the Journal to add, but the addition of location-specific, hard news stories as tips is a very intriguing experiment that could point to a big new future for news. It also looks like a lot of fun.

Full story at this link…

New York Magazine: Weigh-in for New York Times and Wall Street Journal

The launch of the Wall Street Journal’s New York edition is just around the corner, and Rupert Murdoch is going after the Grey Lady as tenaciously as his massive advertising cuts suggest. But as the playground rivalry heats up and first blows are traded, New York magazine highlights just how much more of a heavyweight contender the Times is in terms of personnel:

Here’s a list of the reporters we know will be devoted, at least part-time, to working on the Journal‘s new New York section. After each, we’ve listed the reporters that cover the same beat for the Times. As you can see, in nearly every beat, the Times already has two reporters in place for each one of the Journal‘s.

The magazine’s full comparative list must make intimidating reading for the Journal reporters heading into the ring, but, as Greenslade points out in his post, the NY Times Company has no way near the resources of News Corp, and the Journal’s New York edition could expand significantly yet.

Full story at this link…

iPad news: would you pay more?




The Wall Street Journal have announced that they will charge $17.99 for their iPad edition. As reported by FishbowlNY, a subscription to both the online and print version of the Journal costs $2.69 a week, or roughly $10.76 a month. And yet, the paper wants to hike that cost up 67 per cent for a subscription to the iPad edition alone.

The move raises questions about the comparable value of print and digital editions. More specifically, of print, online, and what we might call enhanced digital editions, like those being designed for the iPad format.

Given that online news content is largely free (although the Journal’s is not), but print news content is largely charged for, we might automatically value digital editions less, and assume that they will cost less. In announcing that its much-publicised iPad edition will probably be cheaper than its print magazine, Wired magazine has followed this way of thinking.

But does the potential of the iPad to offer an enhanced experience of multimedia content, interactivity and social sharing, not to mention the device’s status as a groundbreaking way of delivering news, in turn offer publishers an opportunity to value it higher than the print product? Or, in the case of the Journal, a subscription to both print and online?



image by curious lee

Did NY Times’ blog culture lead to incident of plagiarism?

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a critical (well-linked) analysis of events leading to reporter Zachery Kouwe’s resignation from the title last month.

As previously noted on this blog, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson complained to the New York Times over a particular article of Kouwe’s, on the NY Times’ DealBook blog. The NY Times investigated and found other examples of copied passages.

In Hoyt’s piece, which I recommend reading in full, he asks whether the “the culture of DealBook” had led to subsequent events:

How did his serial plagiarism happen and go undetected for so long? Why were warning signs overlooked? Was there anything at fault in the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked? And, now that the investigation is complete, what about a full accounting to readers?

He also suggests:

At a time when cut-and-paste technology enables plagiarism, when news and information on the web are treated as commodities, these are conversations worth having throughout the Times building.

But over on his Reuters blog, Felix Salmon, whilst praising the public editor’s critique, raises another issue: the New York Times’ unwillingness to link out.

…[I]s there something inherent to the culture of blogging which breeds a degree of carelessness ill suited to a venerable newspaper?

(…)

The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course.

Finally, you can read Kouwe’s own comments about how the misdeed occurred: he told the New York Observer how he would throw others’ material into WordPress, intending to re-write it later. From the NY Observer interview:

Mr. Kouwe says he has never fabricated a story, nor has he knowingly plagiarized. “Basically, there was a minor news story and I thought we needed to have a presence for it on the blog,” he said, referring to DealBook. “In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents.”

“I’ll go back and rewrite everything,” he continued. “I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there. I think that’s what probably happened.”

Talking Biz News: Dow Jones restructuring

Talking Biz News has a memo from Dow Jones & Co. president Todd Larsen, outlining how employees will be organised in its corporate restructuring, with  five separate business groups – separating Wall Street Journal print and digital:

  • The Wall Street Journal in print
  • The Wall Street Journal Digital Network
  • Dow Jones Financial Markets (includes Newswires and products geared to financial professionals)
  • Dow Jones Corporate Markets (includes Factiva and products geared to corporate markets)
  • Dow Jones Indexes

Full post at this link…

(Hat-tip: the revived Editor & Publisher)

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NYTimes.com: Dow Jones reorganisation

News Corp owned Dow Jones & Company is to dismantle the division between The Wall Street Journal and its consumer media group, reports Associated Press, on NYTimes.com.

Dow Jones’s consumer media group, a segment that included The Journal and Barron’s, is being combined with the company’s enterprise media group, which includes the Dow Jones Newswires, the Dow Jones stock indexes and the business research service Factiva.

Full story at this link…

MarketWatch.com: Page views for reporters don’t cover costs

This from 8 December, but the detail of this US post on news value is worth a read, if you haven’t picked it up before. In its last section it raises some “grim conclusions” for reporters. Aptly, it’s from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

“If news websites give away their content, they must earn their revenues through advertising. A mainstream, general-interest news site typically earns around 2 cents in advertising revenue per page view,” writes Brett Arends.

(…)

“They [reporters] will have to live on the page views their stories generate, and the most they can earn is around 2 cents per story viewed. After factoring in the overhead for running a professional news organization – editors, managers, offices, technology, benefits, support and the like – they’ll probably be lucky to earn 1.5 cents.

“Someone hoping to earn, say, $40,000 a year as a professional journalist is probably going to need to generate around 2.7 million page views a year to do so. Assuming he or she works five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that’s nearly 11,000 page views a day.”

“Someone hoping to earn, say, $100,000 a year will need to generate about 27,000 page views a day.”

Full post at this link…

NYTimes.com: Two years on at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal

The New York Times’ David Carr takes a look at the Wall Street Journal, two years after the paper was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Under Murdoch, it’s ’tilting rightward’ with a broadening array of news content he says.

“[U]nder Mr. Murdoch’s leadership, the newspaper is no longer anchored by those deep dives into the boardrooms of American business with quaint stippled portraits, opting instead for a much broader template of breaking general interest news articles with a particular interest in politics and big splashy photos.”

Full post at this link…