Monthly Archives: May 2010

paidContent:UK: FT print sunset or Abu Dhabi sunrise?

The Financial Times parent company Pearson has distanced itself from comments made on Tuesday by its director of global content standards Madi Solomon that the newspaper was “already pulling back” from print (read full PC report here). Solomon said he could see the FT stopping most of its printing within five years.

Pearson has now told paidContent:UK that it has no plans to scale back print operations and has opened a print site in Abu Dhabi this year with plans to commence printing in India soon.

Full story at this link…

Nieman Journalism Lab: ‘Empowering citizens through public media’

Nieman Journalism Lab is posting a selection of videos (those most relevant to the future of news) from a series of weekly discussions at the Berkman Center for Internet at Society.

The latest features Ellen Goodman and Jake Shapiro on ‘Empowering citizens through public media’.

See the previous two at the following links and look out further posts.

David Weinberger: How information became the “dominant metaphor” of contemporary intellectual life

Jure Leskovec: How memes move, heartbeat-like, through the news

Wired gets ‘wired’ with Adobe for iPad edition

The US edition of Wired magazine has launched its iPad app in characteristic fashion with its June edition, priced at $4.99. Writes editor-in-chief Chris Anderson:

The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us. Let’s just say the medium is not always the message.

Except that now it is. I’m delighted to announce that Wired’s first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.

The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics.

Most interestingly, the magazine’s iPad edition has been in development for a year and will use new publishing technology from Adobe which will allow the title to create both the print magazine and its digital edition using the same system.

There is no finish line. Wired Magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.

Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition Goes Live | Magazine.

BNET: Demand Media signs up more US newspapers

Demand Media has signed a deal with Hearst Newspapers, which will see content from Demand appear on the real estate sections of the San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle websites.

Demand’s model uses an extensive network of freelancers to produces vast amounts of multimedia content to fit search engine queries and answer ‘how to’ questions. Pay per article is low for contributors, but as BNET suggests the temptation for newspapers to get more content for less for their sites will be strong.

Full story at this link…

OWNI: Hacks/hackers founder on lessons from technology for journalists

Interview with Burt Herman, one of the founders of Hacks/Hackers, in which he discusses the origins of the group, which tries to bring journalists and technologists together.

Everyone can be a reporter when news happens, sending Tweets, and uploading photos and video from smartphones. But journalists are still needed to help make sense of it all, and technology can help them cope with this massive wave of information. Also, computer scientists are learning so much about how people interact with technology, and we should be applying those lessons to journalism.

Full post at this link…

Robert Fisk: ‘Journalists have become prisoners of the language of power’

From a speech given by Robert Fisk, The Independent’s Middle East correspondent, to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23:

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Fisk goes on to discuss the words and narratives inherited by journalists when reporting on conflict and war, and how this affects the media’s ability to challenge those in power if it is speaking the same language.

Full text of speech 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.

Independent integrates article comments with Twitter and Facebook

The Independent has installed a new commenting system on its website in the shape of Disqus – the same as we use on Journalism.co.uk no less.

The system allows users to login to leave a comment using a Disqus profile, but also, and more importantly, with their Twitter username and password, Facebook login or OpenId identification.

With the Twitter and Facebook logins there’s also the option to share your article comment via these sites.

Jack Riley, digital media editor at the Independent, explains in a blog post that the new system has been trialled on the site’s sport section for the past week and has improved the level of “constructive debate”.

We’re encouraging people to use credentials linked to their personal profiles not just because openness and accountability are great, fundamental things which underpin good journalism as well as good commenting (and why should the two be different?), but also because by introducing accountability into the equation, we’re hoping the tone and standard of the comments will go up (…) It’s about first of all letting people authenticate their commenting using systems with which they’re already familiar (in Facebook’s case, that’s 400 million people worldwide and counting), and secondly, it’s about restoring your trust in our comments section, so that some of the really great submissions we get on there rise to the top, the bad sink to the bottom, and the ugly – the spam and abuse that are an inevitable adjunct of any commenting system – don’t appear at all.