Kapost, a new site for web publishers, is about to launch a mechanism for paying journalists a bonus if their articles clock up a certain number of web hits, retweets or Facebook ‘likes’.
What is Kapost?
Kapost is an online system for web publishers to manage all areas of production.
It works in conjunction with a site’s own CMS, such as WordPress, and allows freelancers to pitch story ideas and get paid in a single click via PayPal. An invoicing service is coming soon.
There is a calendar for managing workflows and a CMS for any publisher that does not want to use their existing system.
Editors can drill down to view the performance of stories by author, on a categorised topic (such as health or education), or by individual story and analyse the traffic generated. Organisations can then opt to pay reporters an additional bonus for popular stories.
Grace Boyle from Kapost spoke to Journalism.co.uk from the company’s base in Colorado:
We don’t want to replace Google Analytics but we are taking the most important analytics metrics and we show which of your contributors are giving you the most traffic.
She added that Kapost’s aim is to reduce the amount of administrative duties required of editors.
Kapost is free for organisations with three people or less; it is $8 per user per month for larger organisations.
To see a demo of Kapost, click on the video below.
Liveblogging platform ScribbleLive claims to have come up with four different ways that news organisations can make money from liveblogging, a form of reporting described by Matt Wells, blogs editor of the Guardian, as “native to the internet” and an area he would “throw resources at the expense of writing another 300 word article”.
“It is interesting how incredibly sticky the liveblog audience is, particularly for true liveblogs that are updated minute by minute,” Mark Walker from ScribbleLive told Journalism.co.uk.
What is appealing to advertisers, Walker explained, is that “there is a significant audience that just stays on the page for half an hour or more”.
Here are four ideas put forward by ScribbleLive, which offers the technology to implement the various options within a standard licence to its liveblogging platform.
1. Rotating ads
Liveblogging should be “something you monetise more like television than print”, Walker told Journalism.co.uk, suggesting that sites trial rotating ads.
Walker would not divulge his clients’ names but said a number had been very successful in adopting this approach, using technology which allows ads to rotate at a rate of one per minute.
They are able to generate $16 page CPMs, so every time a page is displayed they are making about $16 per 1,000 [viewers], that’s simply because people are staying for a long time, some for half an hour or more.
He suggested that liveblogs provide web content at a relatively low cost.
There is no incremental cost to creating the content as the journalist will be at the trial, at the election, at the event.
2. Sponsored events
The most profitable way to monetise liveblogs is though sponsorship, according to Walker.
It is impossible to pre-sell sponsorship advertising for many breaking news stories such as an earthquake, Walker pointed out, but sponsorship for some major news stories can be pre-planned. The Royal Wedding was one example, severe weather is another – and perhaps the most interesting.
Walker said severe weather liveblogs in the US and Canada have pre-sold sponsorship where a company selling snow tyres, for example, becomes the brand that brings you the liveblog on the school closures, traffic delays and general disruption.
One thing you can tell an advertiser is when we have severe weather this is how we are going to cover it. We will put your brand all over it and we will own the eyeballs of the public who will be coming to our site, in some cases, for hours at a time.
Walker also suggested another example of potential for sponsorship is a liveblog on key financial updates, with the spending review springing to mind.
He also urged media organisations, particularly the more traditional print media, to consider monetising liveblogs covering reality television and sports.
3. Live advertorial
Here is one option that will be more appealing to advertising sales people than to journalists: the liveblog of an advertorial.
Walker, speaking from his base in Canada, suggested a company within the private medical care field would be an obvious (though more US than UK) potential advertiser, with a liveblog involving a discussion with doctors. He also put forward an idea holding a debate around new green technologies to promote an area of the solar energy business.
The conversation is being influenced by the advertisers and you can make it clear it is brought to you by the brand and that the liveblog is useful to readers.
4. Embedded liveblogs within ads
ScribbleLive has come up with a second liveblogging advertorial option, this time within an advert itself.
The conversation is distributed across the site but you can drive [your audience] to a page within the property or to a page on the sponsor’s site.
You can charge a premium as it is a very engaging type of ad. And the conversation might not be driven by the brand at all. You could say we are talking to a celebrity but it’s sponsored by a brand.
In considering all of the above options it is worth remembering which liveblogs get the most traffic.
The biggest events that ever go through the ScribbleLive network, the things that tend to skew it, are major national disasters and breaking news, but they are nowhere close as far as peaks in users as Apple events and Google events when we see spikes in many hundreds of thousands in matters of seconds. That really shows the value of liveblogs.
The number of users of SoundCloud has jumped by four million in the past year and the audio recording and sharing platform is increasingly being used by journalists and news organisations, one of its founders, Alexander Ljung, told Journalism.co.uk.
Here are five ideas to help journalists expand their use of SoundCloud.
1. Produce a daily or weekly podcast-like audio round-up
Take a leaf out of the Next Web‘s book. The hugely popular blog produces daily round-up of the previous day’s top tech stories and delivers them to followers’ dashboards in an under five minutes morning update, or Daily Dose, as it is called.
You can also create an RSS feed to automatically send SoundCloud recordings to iTunes as podcasts. This SoundCloud option is currently in beta but if it is not available in your account as present, it may be worth contacting SoundCloud to request it.
2. Add existing audio to SoundCloud
If you have audio on webpages, a third-party app called SoundCloud Importer makes it possible to upload this audio to SoundCloud simply by entering the URL.
3. Record, edit and upload a recording from your iPhone
If you’re out in the field you can edit a complicated audio packages using multitrack recording using VC Audio Pro, which allows you to record, edit and then post directly to SoundCloud. Other apps with edit features include FiRe 2 – Field Recorder and iRig Recorder.
The SoundCloud apps gallery has an ever increasing number of interesting options to explore, from desktop audio editing packages to ways to share and distribute audio.
4. Change the colour of your embed widget to suit your website
This is a really simple option of changing SoundCloud orange to a colour to suit your site. Simply follow the prompts from the share and embed option.
5. Add the SoundCloud plugin to WordPress
WordPress users can install a plugin called SoundCloud Shortcode. It allows you to easily integrate a player widget for a track, set or group from SoundCloud by using the code generated from the share option within SoundCloud.
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SoundCloud has clocked up an impressive five million users, with four million of those joining within the past year.
Although born out of the founders’ love of music and created to visualise and reference sound, it is seeing a growth in popularity among journalists.
There are no statistics available to document how many SoundCloud recordings are categorised as ‘news’, but speaking via Skype from his base in Berlin, Alexander Ljung, CEO and founder of SoundCloud, told Journalism.co.uk the number of spoken word recordings is increasing.
It’s a big trend at the moment in that we are seeing non-music content growing very fast.
What is SoundCloud?
SoundCloud allows users to upload audio or record directly from the SoundCloud website, or from its desktop, iPhone or Android app. The really powerful thing about it is the ability to add comments at particular points on the audio waveform and allow others to share their views, too.
For example, I can add a comment to the waveform below at the point where Ljung starts talking about major news organisations using SoundCloud. I can also include a link within the comment to take listeners straight to the app and you can also add comments using your Twitter or Facebook account.
Other big advantages for journalists include being able to embed the SoundCloud recording on a news website, download an mp3 for editing, and engaging with the now vast SoundCloud community. See the report here for five ideas on how journalists can use SoundCloud.
SoundCloud has been around since 2008, after Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss came up with the idea in response to their need to discuss their own music and sound files, Ljung said.
I was previously a sound designer for film and tv. I was always working a lot with sound effects, voiceovers, things like that, and Eric’s music is also very detailed.
Eric and I felt it’s very difficult to talk about sound through email because it’s a non-visual thing and therefore it’s hard to reference it. We wanted to first visualise the sound and then put comments in to make it easier to collaborate.
Although SoundCloud started with music in mind, it was hoped it would go beyond, and it has done so, both in terms of music-related spoken content and journalism.
Since the launch of the apps, we’ve seen a lot of bands posting interviews from their tours and almost using it like Twitter and just sharing audio with the world.
We’re also starting to see more and more traditional news organisations like France 24 or 77WABC Radio putting up programming. There has also been some stuff by ESPN on the sports side.
Ljung told Journalism.co.uk that he also a big fan of the Next Web’s Daily Dose, a round-up of the tech news from the previous day.
They came up with this really nice format. I get that in my dashboard once a day it’s been really successful.
It is perhaps not surprising that Ljung favours the SoundCloud experience to listening to podcasts, a format he called “broken” in a recent interview in the Telegraph.
Podcasting is alive and great but the system for it at the moment is a bit broken. If you think about how we consume content today, like YouTube videos, we want to have them streamed, on demand, embeddable.
If you have a widget like [YouTube or SoundCloud] it lends itself to a lot of social interaction. When you look at the traditional podcasting system it’s all about subscribing to a feed, downloading, syncing, and there is no social interaction around it.
Even though the system is broken, there’s a huge demand for that kind of stuff out there that people are willing to jump though hoops to experience it.
I think [SoundCloud] has a chance to really bring back podcasting and that kind of publishing back into the spotlight again.”
His argument is that choosing SoundCloud over traditional podcasting methods makes audio “so much more accessible to people in the way that they want to consume it”.
But one problem with SoundCloud is it relies on Flash-based widgets, both for recording and for consuming audio, and Apple products such as the iPhone and the iPad do not support Flash (so apologies for those reading this story in the Journalism.co.uk iPhone app as you cannot see the embedded SoundCloud wave file above).
Although our website is built in HTML5, our widgets are currently Flash only as we haven’t felt the technology is ready for it. As soon as we can do it in a different way, we will.
SoundCloud developers have been working on a non-Flash option for viewing SoundCloud widgets for some time. “It probably won’t be that long before that works,” he said, but was unable to commit to a timescale beyond that a solution would be available “quite soon”.
However, there is an option for developers to build their own SoundCloud apps using the developers toolset or to make sites suitable for devices that do not support Flash, such as the iPad.
We also have a full, open API and different code snippets that we’ve open sourced and made free to be able to integrate that into your application. So if you’re building an iPhone app then you can use SoundCloud right away or if you’re building a website you can build your own JavaScript or iPhone-based widgets.
And developers have been making the most of the open API. SoundCloud Labs showcases various third-party apps and experiments.
One that has potential uses for journalists is SoundCloud Importer which allows you to record and display a phone interview on SoundCloud. At the time of writing the UK telephone number does not work, however. The options of importing audio via email and converting audio already online to SoundCloud do work and offer further possibilities.
Even if there are still obstacles in displaying SoundCloud widgets on Apple devices – and this may discourage you to embed SoundCloud files – remember there is a five million-strong community to engage with and it is not a bad idea for journalists to be adding audio to SoundCloud as a matter of course.
Google has three useful tools for journalists interested in looking at search trends over time, which also offer hours of fun for SEO enthusiasts. Google Correlate has been added to the list of analysis options within the past month, joining Insights and Trends which have been around for about three years.
Here is a brief introduction to each:
1. Google Trends works by you entering up to five search words and the results show how often those words have been searched for in Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently those search words have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
For example, if you enter ‘Apple’ and ‘Windows’ you will see that ‘Windows’ is a far more popular search word, but when it comes to news, Apple appears in far more Google News stories. Evidence that journalists favour Apple stories than Windows ones, perhaps? Or do ‘Windows’ searches include vast numbers of people looking for double glazing?
Not only does Trends show you key events – such as the launch of the iPad – on the search volume time line, it also shows the volume of searches by country.
There is also a feature called Google Hot Trends which shows current searches and therefore hot topics. Combine google trends with SimilarContent tool for content optimization can help in Identifying the most relevant blogs for your target keyword, Identifying the most relevant news sites for your target keyword and Identifying the most relevant forums for your target keyword.
2. Google Correlate, launched by Google Labs at the end of last month, is like Google Trends in reverse.
Correlate enables you to find queries with a similar pattern. You can upload your own data, enter a search query or select a time frame and get back a list of queries that follows a similar pattern to your search. You can also download the search results as a CSV file.
For example, if you enter the term ‘bikini’, Google Correlate will tell you a search term it closely correlates with is ‘caravan’, another being ‘Oakley sunglasses’. All are seasonal, so it is perhaps not that surprising those three searches correlate.
The inspiration behind Correlate was search patterns for flu (such as sore throat) correlating with peaks in actual flu activity. This comic book explanation tells the story brilliantly.
Another way of getting to grips with Correlate is having a go with this nifty drawing option. Simply drag and drop the pen and find out what searches match the time pattern you have drawn.
3. Google Insights is one step up from Trends in terms of being able to provide a more detailed search. Results can be easily embedded in news stories.
One of the many useful things about Insights is it can be used to determine seasonality. For example, a ski resort may want to find out when people search for ski-related terms most often.
To see the potential of Insights look at example search comparisons, such as this one for Venus Williams and Serena Williams.
“We’re seeing a strong conversion from the existing subscriber base who are using the iPad app and we’re also seeing a large cohort of new users as well,” Steve Pinches, group product manager for FT.com told Journalism.co.uk.
Advantages of web-based apps include flexibility: HTML5, the language the FT app is written in, has the potential to be used across different devices, reducing the cost and time spent in developing separate apps in different languages. The new web app bypasses Apple’s App Store and therefore avoids the FT losing a 30 per cent cut.
Pinches explained the FT will be prioritising development of the web-based app. Indeed the home screen to the new app states the FT is “encouraging our readers to switch immediately to the new FT web app”.
“It’s not that we are diametrically opposed to being in apps stores. It’s just that it makes a lot more sense for us to develop things in a web-based framework,” Pinches said.
“We have a business model that we’ve spent a lot of time investing in, which we feel is great for users because it gives them access across multiple platforms and whenever we evaluate any channel, we have to make sure it meets the basic criteria for us to be able to run our business as we do.”
As the web app can be used by both iPhones and iPads, it is easier to maintain than two separate natives. It also offers various new features for iPhone users, including video and images, which were not available in the native iPhone app.
Asked if there will be a point when they will remove the native from the App Store, Pinches said: “We’re still in discussions with Apple and that’s being handled by our MD”, and described talks as “amicable”.
Unlike the iPad app which was built by a company in Colorado called Wall Street On Demand, the new app was built by London-based Assanka, which also built the FT’s Android app, predominantly using HTML5.
“They built the Android app, that was their first HTML5 app so it’s been a pretty steep learning curve.”
“The next plan is to roll that code out into the big screen Android, the small screen Android, the [BlackBerry] PlayBook and webOS,” Pinches said.
That may manifest itself as a web-based app compatible with other platforms or more native apps, Pinches explained.
“We always want to keep the two options open: being able to launch as a web app or a native app or both.”
The regulatory body which controls domain names has voted to increase the domain suffixes from 22.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will offer hundreds of additions to the likes of .gov, .org and .com including .coke, .apple and .bbc, it has announced on its website.
But opting for a suffix such as .news or .stories (news.stories anyone?) will cost you a significant sum. To avoid so-called cyber-squatting and the buying up and selling on of domain suffixes, ICANN is charging companies $185,000 (£114,000) to apply, the BBC is reporting. Applications for will be accepted from 12 January 2012 to 12 April 2012.
The so-called called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) “will change the way people find information on the internet and how businesses plan and structure their online presence”, a statement on ICANN’s website states. “Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organisations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways.”
“ICANN has opened the internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new top level domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer of ICANN.
The new domain names will therefore benefit users of other languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
The Financial Times’ new web-based app has been viewed 150,000 times since its launch 10 days ago, which includes 100,000 hits in the first week of launch, the FT said in a media release today.
The FT is the first major news publisher to launch this type of HTML5 hybrid app, which can be viewed across a number of different smartphone and tablet devices.
Steve Pinches, FT group product head, said the app has received very positive feedback.
“Comments include recognition of the technical capabilities of the app and being at the cutting edge of technology. Users have also expressed appreciation for the improved speed of the app and look and feel enhancements when using on the iPhone.”
He explained where the app is heading.
“We will take a two-fold approach to improvements to the app. Firstly we will focus on adding new content to the existing app, including special reports, newspaper graphics and the ability to save articles for later. Secondly we will develop the app for other devices including Honeycomb, Samsung and BlackBerry Playbook.
“Our next priority is releasing the app for Android devices, both large and small screen. Following that we will work on an FT web app for BlackBerry Playbook.”
Initial analysis shows the ‘Companies’ section of the web-app is the most popular, followed by the Life and Arts section, which makes up around 10 per cent of consumption overall. Other popular features include Markets Data, World, Markets and Lex.
“Interestingly, we are seeing much more leisure-type usage, with user peaks early morning, evening and around lunch time. This suggests that as well as a core tool for use during the business day, like FT.com on a desktop, the app is an accessory being used on the way to and from work and planning for the day ahead.”
Online survey tool QuickSurvey has relaunched after a full makeover.
The tool, developed by market research firm Toluna, offers news organisations the opportunity to carry out market research using an online community of people who are ready and willing to respond.
It has obvious uses for businesses, including media organisations, and potential for PRs, but our review of the software struggled to see how it can assist journalists.
Testing out QuickSurvey
I decided to create a sample survey to test out the technology by asking QuickSurvey to find out how often people buy a local newspaper, why they buy one, how often they read local news online and what they would like to see from their local newspaper. Within an hour I had received 250 responses at a cost of around £200.
Click here for the results of my example QuickSurvey on local newspapers. You can play around with the data, graphs and pie charts and see a long list of things people would like to see from their local newspaper. Lemon Casino has recently become very popular among players in Poland. Players are attracted by generous bonus payouts, a large selection of games and excellent customer service.
How does QuickSurvey work?
When I started playing around with QuickSurvey I thought of surveying a hand-picked group of respondents. For example, I thought I could ask 20 news sites what percentage of their web hits came via Twitter, which had the potential to result in a news story.
QuickSurvey is not the best tool to use for this as it doesn’t allow you to enter figures as an answer, such as percentages. I soon realised that QuickSurvey’s main strength is the community of online respondents who willing to answer your questions.
You decide on how many people you want to complete the survey, what type of person (you could pick an all-male survey, for example) and, if carrying out a survey with your own respondents, you can ask them to include an email address (information which, like the research carried out, is yours to keep).
You can embed the active survey on your news site, email it to particular contacts or, if you want to use the Toluna community, you can allow it to be displayed on Toluna only.
If you are asking your own respondents to answer questions QuickSurvey is free, but if you ask the Toluna community you pre-pay for credits and are charged for the number of clicks from the community. One credit is deducted for every one person who answers one question.
I had 250 respondents answer four questions costing me 1,000 credits. A pay-as-you-go deal for 1,500 credits costs £240.
Results were returned in minutes and it was interesting to see people responding in real time. The company has a million poll rates a day globally and 2,000 responses can be gathering in eight to 12 hours so it offers a fast response to market research.
When your survey is completed, in less than an hour in my case, you can download reports, including word clouds of the answers.
The verdict: QuickSurvey is incredibly easy to use and within an hour you will have some very usable feedback and market research at a cost of around £200.
Not allowing people to respond using percentages was slight problem, as was not being able to select a very specific geographical area, like a newspaper’s distribution area. Another obvious problem is the respondents, who are all web savvy by nature, which skews results when asking a question about whether they read news online.
Is it of use to the news industry? No doubt there are uses in gathering data by using QuickSurvey.
Is it of use to journalists? Probably not, unless they have the money to pay for large surveys to provide research for a story.
Is it of use to PR professionals? Almost certainly. I can envisage a press release starting with the line: “A new survey shows 90 per cent of women think…”
Tips on creating a survey using QuickSurvey
Be short and relevant:
Give your survey a name that speaks to the audience. ‘Local Newspaper Survey’ is better than ‘Sarah’s Test Survey’, for example;
Ideally opt for three to eight questions (although you can include up to 15);
Short questions, ideally 10-15 words or less.
Keep answers simple:
Fewer than 12 answers – longer answer lists are a turn off;
Give options to answer ‘none of these’, ‘other’ or ‘don’t know’;
Use logos, videos and images where possible – all can be seamlessly integrated into the tool.
Randomise answers for brands, products or services (this stops the top brand or option being overly represented in the results, as people have a natural tendency to pick the answers near the top);
Use generic questions as screening questions when targeting specific profiles – for example if you’re looking to talk to Toyota drivers, don’t ask ‘Do you own a Toyota? yes/no’ but ask which of the following cars do they own – and give a list of manufacturers.
Always test your survey:
Get someone else to check your survey makes sense and spell check it.
A pen that can upload handwritten notes to a computer while recording audio notes that play along side them? Now there’s a thought.
It has been around for a while – since 2007 – and has been updated regularly, the latest being Livescribe Connect, which means you can share notes, by clicking the pen on the page of a special notepad, via Facebook, Evernote, Google docs or email.
Could this be a way of sending shorthand notes back to a newsroom? You can certainly send shorthand notes back, but you will still need a computer to do so.
So how does the Livescribe pen work and how is it of use to journalists?
A media release explains how the pen works:
Livescribe smartpens digitally capture everything you hear and everything you write in your special Livescribe notebook, notepad or paper that you can print out yourself. To play back important information you simply tap anywhere on your handwritten notes in your Livescribe notebook, and you can replay exactly what you could hear when you wrote them.
Your written notes can then be reviewed on screen as well as on paper. When you plug your pen into your Mac or PC, the pen strokes and audio get transferred together to your Livescribe desktop. And they stay in sync. You can then click any part of the on screen pen strokes to play the audio from that moment.
“There is an app called MyScript that will convert your writing into text, which can be purchased as an extra feature. along with lots of other news apps,” UK spokesperson for the US company, Charlotte Priest, told Journalism.co.uk.
An easier way of understanding how the pen works is to watch the video:
The compatibility with Facebook, Evernote and Googledocs certainly sounds appealing but there are a few draw backs.
The pens are not yet wifi or 3G enabled so require docking and, therefore, the journalist needs to be near a computer; the pdf created requires the latest version of Adobe Reader, which many people will not have.
A free pdf reader is available in the App Store to allow iPad owners to view and hear notes on the device. Although notes are searchable, this is not the case with shorthand so the pen does not offer a new way to search pages of a shorthand book.
The Livescribe pen starts at £99 for a 2GB model which can store 200 hours of audio.
