Mirror Group Newspapers is planning to restructure its ad-sales team by merging print and online divisions.
The move would reflect similar mergers at other national newspapers. News Group and Telegraph Media Group has each set up cross-media groups for their titles.
According to Brand Republic, The Mirror initiative is being led by David Emin, director of advertising at the group, and Paul Head, head of digital.
The merge is expected to take place in June.
It’s almost a daily occurrence to hear about the perilous state of the news industry (remember AngryJournalist.com anyone?) so Praise Be and Hallelujah for Joe Murphy and his HappyJournalist blog.
Each week we give developers the opportunity to tell us why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on – this week Joe tells us about the site he developed to celebrate what’s good about working as a journalist.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Joe Murphy. I’m a reporter-turned-web designer-turned-web developer. My day job is as the senior developer for The Denver Post’s website. I build and maintain web apps, fix stuff, and do other tech-type-stuff.
In my hobby-time I build and maintain a handful of sites, apps and blogs … HappyJournalist is one of them.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Well, it’s not a particularly useful site. Fun, yes. Useful, no.
HappyJournalist is a lens on journalists who have something to say, like what they do, and feel comfortable typing and clicking the submit button on the blog.
Until we get to the point where the internet has tools to quantify and publish emotion-related information, HappyJournalist will be a semi-static repository of what was said by the folk who have something to say.
That ‘until’ is a big, big ‘until’.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I’ve been exploring that ‘What’s Next’ idea and have listed some other ideas (MildlyEnthusiasticJournalist.com and DrunkJournalist.com are my favourites, and a few people have contributed their own).
To make this interesting and forward thinking I’m considering pitching a new micro-format that describes emotions.
There’s no good way to aggregate or publish emotion-based information online yet. Seems like that’s a big gap in the web, don’t you think?
The internet’s gears turn because the robots and computers turn the gears, but it’s the humans that make the internet come alive and sparkle.
4) Why are you doing this?
Fun, conversation, curiosity. AngryJournalist started the dialogue, and it would be a shame to let this “I am a journalist and I have feelings” thread die after the first salvo.
5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s free, it will always be free.
6) How will you make it pay?
I won’t — it cost me 90 minutes and eight bucks to create this, so I don’t have a huge stake in getting that time or money back.
Some New York Times stories will be plotted geographically, in real time, on Google Earth.
“The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we’ve endeavoured to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news,” claims the Lat Long Blog – written by the Google Earth and mapping teams.
The map allows users overlay a NYT news layer so that when they to fly around the earth, relevant news for the place they are hovering over appears.
This is just the latest iteration in a growing obsession by large news businesses to get their news mapped. It isn’t a million miles away from Metacarta’s Geosearch News – a site mapping over 14000 daily news stories across the globe.
That map lets users specify a place-of-interest and returns mapped search results presented in order of relevance – as determined by a combination of keywords and the specified location.
Digital surfing magazine Drift has decided to switch to a printed format and its editor has said that he believes digital magazines have ‘had their day’.
Howard Swanwick told Press Gazette: ‘As a medium to put features in, they don’t work.’
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has released a detailed report about how he sees Apple quadrupling its 2008 sales and hitting the 45m figure he had previously predicted.
These are the key elements:
– Introducing a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months
– Offering a family of 2 to 3 iPhones – including lower-priced models selling for $200 to $300 – by Jan 2009 at the latest
– Entering new countries, effectively doubling the addressable market every year for the next two years
– Adding new features, such as games and remote purchases starting in June.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s live blogging with difference, with an interactive community, through CoveritLive.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Keith McSpurren, president of CoveritLive, which is what we call ‘live blogging 2.0’. It evolves live blogging from an interesting recap into an engaging event.
We have added interactivity features to live blogging, like polling questions and reader Q&A to involve the audience more.
We also made it simple for journalists to pull in rich multimedia (video, pictures, audio and even advertising) to create an event worth sticking around for.
Humbly, we think we are forging a new form of journalism.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
People look to journalists for information and perspective. We believe there are many instances where getting that as events unfold is better than after the event is over.
Instead of reading an article about The Oscars or a Q&A session in Parliament for a few minutes the next day, why not get running commentary in real time from your favourite writers?
Why not have the chance for readers to ask questions or add to the conversation or answer polling questions as well as draw upon the multimedia readily available on the web during the event?
These are all good ideas but the real benefit of CoveritLive to the journalist is that we believe we have made it possible to do all of this without the need for the IT department or any technical training.
The ease of implementation and use is really what gets writers excited when they first try it out.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
CoveritLive is the first piece of software in the world to focus on live blogging. This is an evolving form of journalism and we listen very carefully to our users to develop better features all the time.
For example, next week we will launch a feature we call ‘Panel Discussion’ which will allow writers to have up to ten other writers all in the same live blog. Great for Q&A sessions, particularly with people who are spread out around the world.
Imagine the foreign correspondent in Baghdad online with the political reporter and two guests…without needing anyone to ‘set it up’ for them.
Cobbling together other expensive technology can do this kind of thing but by making it easy to do, we expect these kinds of features to grow the field of live blog reporting.
In the same way cheap, easy to use blogging software created a new form of reporting, we hope to do this where ‘live and in-depth’ is important.
4) Why are you doing this?
CiL is a commercial venture so we most definitely have a profit motive. That said the idea came around because I felt (after watching far too much television and yelling at it) that “there is more to be said”.
We think, with the right software, journalists can make their coverage better or add to what I’m watching on television. Politics, sports, financial news, conferences and even education are all areas where easy to use, low cost software can help the people who cover it.
5) What does it cost to use it?
The software is free to use. This sometimes has an unintended impact where larger news organisations think, “It’s free. It must not be very good or be able to handle someone big like us.”
That could not be farther from the truth. It’s free because we are trying to lead the way with our users towards a new form of reporting. Putting price as a barrier to trial is not a good idea.
6) How will you make it pay?
We think our software creates significant opportunities for our users in terms of engaging their readers for long periods of time during a live blog.
Some recent data from an NFL football blog using CoveritLive demonstrates my point:
These kind of numbers create huge advertising opportunities for users interested in that type of thing.
We expect that value is worth paying for at some point once we have proven to be the software of choice in this new category.
Additionally, advertising supported software is a proven business model that will be more appropriate for micro-niche bloggers/writers who get the benefit of enterprise class software at no cost.
All this said, we are focused solely on being responsive to our users and growing usage. Revenue will follow good ideas.
Associated Newspaper’s financial news website This is Money is claiming to have hit a record readership last month.
Quoting internal traffic data, staff claim that nearly 1.2 million people used the site in March 2008, clicking on more than nine million pages.
Staff said the unique user figure (1,166,561) represents a 30 per cent year-on-year traffic rise and a month-on-month increase of nearly 20 per cent – with February see 978,000 visitors.
Andrew Oxlade, editor, told Journalism.co.uk: “The March to April period is crucial to financial websites as millions of savers make decisions about Isas before the end of the annual deadline on 5 April.
“We’re also seeing a surge of interest from people concerned about the health of banks and the safety of their savings. Vivasex.ch Borrowers are also worried about their ability to find a new mortgage deal and are hunting around for views on whether the value of their home will fall this year.”
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s Firefox archiving plugin WebMynd.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Patrick Buckley, one of three entrepreneurs from Cambridge and MIT who have a passion for helping people find the things they are looking for on the internet.
We make a Firefox browser plug-in called WebMynd. It creates your own personal internet archive that is searchable and visual. It is a way of extending your natural memory to include what you have seen online. You won’t ever lose track of a website again because it will be in your WebMynd.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
WebMynd is a great tool for anyone who does online research because it saves web pages as you see them, not just a link. The pages you see are indexed so you can use text search to find them again.
You don’t have to do any upfront tagging, bookmarking, organizing, cutting, pasting, or screen shots. This is especially useful for obscure webpages that may change, be taken down, or would be impossible to find again using Google (very obscure, behind paywalls or logins).
When you visit a website you get a personal copy of the page as it was when you saw it. Bookmarks fail in this regard because they only save a link to a page on the internet, link rot can ensue and the page may no longer exists the way you saw it. WebMynd saves an actual page and the content for you to see again.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We have many more ideas on how to improve the experience and we are literally releasing new features weekly.
We are working on a sharing element so that people can create collections of pages with their friends or colleagues, a “Collective Mynd” that people contribute websites to and which could be great for group research.
Another feature for journalists which we are about to complete and which will work with FireFox 3.0 when it is released, is a system to surf your internet archive offline.
Any page you have seen before can be viewed without an internet connection, great for looking up old internet references when you are on a plane or away from the internet.
4) Why are you doing this?
Because bookmarking and tagging are no longer good enough systems for finding what you have seen.
5) What does it cost to use it and how will you make it pay?
In the future we may offer a premium pay for service but for now it is completely fee.
Time Out has this week launched a new listings and entertainments news website in Kuala Lumpur and plans to launch a similar site in Hong Kong next month.
The online launches coincide with sister print title launches in the territories. Developments in Hong Kong will bring the total number of international Time Out web/print publications to 24 in 18 countries including Sydney, Kiev and New York.
Time Out, which also launched in Barcelona in January, plans seven further launches in 2008, including titles in Belgrade, Budapest, Bangkok and Jakarta.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s ‘next generation wire services’ for independent journalists from Reporterist.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Hemant Bhanoo. Reporterist is about bringing together journalists on a common platform where reporters can sell their pieces and editors can source reliable, quality work.
There is enough demand for original news content around the world that we believe this will grow into a next generation wire service for independent reporters.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
As a starting point, journalists can put up their work on our public portfolio. Right now we enable you to set up rules like “send my story (or story idea) to Editor A. If they don’t bite within 3 days, send it on to Editor B”.
You can specify different prices for each editor, and see if/when they have looked at your work.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
This is definitely not it. There’s a lot more to come, and it’ll hopefully evolve a lot faster as we bring on engineers to help us accelerate development.
A preview of some our features:
4) Why are you doing this?
I’m a big fan of public radio, and have been really moved by investigative/enterprise stories that I’ve heard. It scares me that there are fewer ways to earn a living actually doing investigative or enterprise reporting. Given today’s political climate, we need more people going out of their way to hunt down stories and bring them to the world.
When I found out how many good stories don’t actually see the light of day because journalists can’t find the right outlet or because they go stale while waiting for editors to take a look at them, I was taken aback.
I hope Reporterist will enable some of those important, untold stories to reach people.
5) What does it cost to use it?
We will take a percentage (10 per cent) of the transaction, though it’s free right now. There’s currently no listing fee – but we’ll charge one for large media (audio, video, pictures) once we fully roll out multimedia support.
6) How will you make it pay?
We can build a sustainable business from the transaction and listing fees. However, we plan to expand our offerings in various directions. We will also be building premium portfolios for journalists, and tools for news publishers that we will charge for.
Our core focus has been, and will be, on helping reward quality journalism.