Eight lessons for publishers from comScore’s new report on mobile

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Mobile devices account for nearly 7 per cent of web browsing in the US, according to a new report by comScore.

In the UK it has been predicted that mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing in 2013.

Although the comScore study is based on US device use, it has lessons for UK publishers as they consider mobile-friendly websites, smartphone and tablet apps and the potential revenue from relatively new products such as iPad magazines.

Here are eight key facts for publishers from the latest comScore study on internet use on mobile devices:

1. Mobile devices account for 7 per cent of US web traffic

Around half of the US population uses the internet on a mobile device, which has increased by almost 20 per cent in the past year.

2. Two thirds of browsing on mobile devices takes place on phones; one third on tablets

Two thirds of the 6.8 per cent of mobile web traffic took place on phones during August; one third of that figure took place on tablets.

3. iPads account for nearly 98 per cent of US tablet market

iPads dominate among tablets in the US, accounting for 97.2 per cent of all web tablet traffic.

4. iPad web browsing has overtaken iPhone browsing

iPads have begun to overtake iPhones in being used for web browsing. iPad browsing accounts for 46.8 per cent of iOS internet use, 42.6 per cent takes place on iPhones.

5. People are increasingly using WiFi for mobile phone web browsing

The study found that more than one third of mobile phone web browsing took place via WiFi in August. Conversely, people are increasingly using tablets, which traditionally required a WiFi connection to access the internet, to connect via mobile broadband. In August, nearly 10 per cent of traffic from tablets occurred via a mobile network connection.

6. Nearly 60% of tablet owners use the devices to consume news

Three out of five tablet owners consume news on their tablets.

7. A quarter of those who read news on a tablet do so daily

One in four tablet users consume news on a tablet do so on a near-daily basis

8. iPhones and iPads dominate, nearly one third of mobile web users have an Android device and just 5 per cent use a BlackBerry

Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the mobile web browsing; Google Android just over 30 per cent, BlackBerry RIM just 5 per cent, and other platforms nearly 5 per cent.

In a release, Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile at comScore said the findings show an “explosion in digital media consumption”, labelling those in the use of connective devices as “digital omnivores”, consumers who access content through several touchpoints during the course of their daily digital lives.

He said:

In order to meet the needs of these consumers, advertisers and publishers must learn to navigate this new landscape so they develop cross-platform strategies to effectively engage their audiences.

There are 10 facts on the UK mobile market published in June here.

#wef11: ‘News industry is in the vortex of a fast changing world’

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Newspapers are “in a vortex of a fast changing world”, the new president of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers Jacob Mathew, who was elected in April, said today (Thursday, 13 October) as he opened the World Editors Forum in Vienna.

His speech focused on calling for greater press freedom and new business ideas. “Soaring costs are a challenge that we should meet with innovation”, he said.

He also touched on the issue of ethics in relation to the UK phone-hacking scandal, calling for self-regulation of the press to be maintained. The print media enjoys the highest credibility, he said, and while there have been calls for new legislation it was important to note that “increased government regulation is not the answer”.

The media would be better governed by a self regulatory mechanism which holds its journalists to account, he added.

Mathew also called on print publishers to join together in the battle to protect intellectual property rights.

It is time that the print publishers get together to strategize to prevent others from freeloading on their content. We need to monetise and not lose out.

Our industry is in the vortex of a fast changing world. The challenges and the opportunities are greater than ever before.

Follow the #wef11 hashtag on Twitter and @journalism_live for updates from the World Editors Forum in Vienna over the next few days.

MeejaLaw: Outgoing PCC chair takes a swipe at the Guardian

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Baroness Buscombe, outgoing chair of the Press Complaints Commission, singled out the Guardian during a talk at City University last night, accusing the paper of misquoting her “non-stop” for three years.

Responding to a question from Guardian data journalist James Ball about her comments on enforced regulation compliance, Buscombe demanded to know what he was going to tweet and repeatedly said “Have you got that Guardian?”

See a full report from media law blogger Judith Townend on Meeja Law at this link.

And a report from Jon Slattery here.

#wef11: ‘Publishers need to focus on quality journalism on all platforms’

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Opening the World Editors Forum in Vienna today, Dr Hans Gasser, president of Austrian Newspaper Association, paid tribute to the country’s newspaper market, calling on journalists to meet industry challenges with innovation.

This global summit meeting of publishers, CEOs and editors-in-chief in dialogue with distinguished experts of our industry is embedded in highly exciting times.

The agenda of the three days is characterised by the power of innovation, by the energy with which our industry faces up to the challenges, using the opportunities to transfer its core competances to use cross media offerings … to accomodate media users in their changed consumption behaviours.

He added that following the crisis on financial markets the journalists’ democratic function “is as important as ever”.

We need to increasingly focus on our quality-based strengths, using quality journalism on all platforms to offer people visible added value because only then will they be prepared to invest their time and money.

Closing with reference to Austria’s own market, Dr Gasser defined it as “extremely competitive” and despite its relatively small size “very innovative”.

By international standards we have high reaches and circulation numbers continue to be stable due to a high amount of subscriptions with a very strong regional focus and boasting a print market share of 55.6 per cent in advertisng and this depsite the ever increasing competition.

This is why the small country of Autria is one of the big newspaper and magazine countries of this world.

#wef11: Follow the World Editors Forum in Vienna

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Copyright: Reed Messe Wien/Christian Husar

For the rest of this week I will be reporting from the World Editors Forum in Vienna, covering the panel sessions, report presentations and debates which kick off today. This year’s conference will look at “the multiple facets of an editor’s job”, from businessman to community manager, and the ways to perform best in each role while maintaining good content.

The digital world of news is rapidly changing and the opportunities for newspapers, as well as the challenges that accompany them, are undergoing constant evolution. How can newspapers continue to fulfill their core mission of producing high quality journalism, and even improve on it, despite the myriad of new responsibilities of their editors?

Coverage of the event will be posted on Journalism.co.uk and the Editors’ Blog, and you can also follow my tweets on some of the sessions from @journalism_live.

See the full programme for the event here.

Paperboy app: Take a photo of newspaper article to find the digital edition

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An app which uses image recognition technology to allow a reader to take a photo of a newspaper or magazine story on an iPhone or Android phone and use it to search for the digital article will be launched for UK titles next month.

Kooaba, the company behind the Paperboy app, has partnered with NewspaperDirect to enable print to digital linking for 2,000 titles worldwide. Around 50 UK titles are available digitally via NewspaperDirect and are therefore likely to be the publications available via the app. The full list includes the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and Daily Mail, plus regional newspapers such as the Kentish Gazette, Birmingham Mail and Evening Standard.

In addition to taking a photo on a phone and using image recognition on the text to find the digital article, newspapers can also print a link which app users can snap to lead them to additional multimedia content, such as video.

The roll-out of the ability to find digital from print using the Paperboy app has started with this list of newspapers based in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is planning add UK titles in November.

The Kooaba blog explains how the technology works.

Paperboy connects printed media to the digital world with one click: All the application’s powerful image recognition technology needs is a photo taken by a smartphone camera of an article or page in a newspaper or magazine. Paperboy then matches the photo to the images in Kooaba’s sizeable library of printed media or identifies that page or article from NewspaperDirect’s inventory of over 2,000 same-day, digital newspapers replicas. Users can then share, email or archive the electronic version on the go, anywhere, anytime or explore related information like videos, images or links to selected topics. Paperboy automatically finds URLs on pages of print publications. In some publications, exclusive Paperboy content is for pages with the Shutter icon.

This video gives examples of how readers could find it useful, such as taking a photo of a recipe to locate the digital version, which could then be saved to Evernote or shared via Twitter.

Independent launches bold new masthead and dumps viewspaper in makeover

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The Indy has a bold new masthead to celebrate its 25th birthday. It certainly sticks out among all the other papers in the shop, which can be no bad thing for the relatively low-circulation title.

The new-look paper also comes with a new typeface and headline fonts.

The other big change is that the “Viewspaper”, a pullout comment section created by recently-departed editor Simon Kelner, has been ditched.

New editor Chris Blackhurst said:

We have decided to use the occasion of the paper’s 25th birthday for a makeover. The masthead is bolder – still ‘the Independent’, complete with eagle, but now more striking and harder to miss on the news stands.

The body typeface and headline fonts we use have been made more readable. The other, main alteration is that the Viewspaper has gone. We thought long and hard about this. Viewspaper was created to draw attention to the unrivalled quality of the Independent’s commentators.

We continue to take pride in this quality. But since taking over three months ago, I’ve become aware that the Viewspaper could be something of a ghetto, to be taken out and read later – but in truth, put on one side and, during a busy day, all too often forgotten.

He added that the aim was to create a “faster, more accessible and urgent paper, one that is easily navigated and that puts you in no doubt what The Independent stands for”.

 

 

Tool of the week for journalists – Codeacademy, for those who want to start to code

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Tool of the week: Codeacademy

What is it? Free tutorials in basic JavaScript

How is it of use to journalists?  The rise in data journalism, an interest in Hacks/Hackers meetups and collaboration between journalists and developers has led to many journalists to express a wish to start coding. But where to start?

Codeacademy is a learning tool that offers tutorials to get you started. So far there are only a couple of courses on the site but they are free and superbly designed.

The homepage gets you to begin entering a bit of JavaScript and you soon find yourself progressing though the tutorial. There is a progress bar to show you how much of the course you have completed and reward badges to give you the equivalent of the teacher’s gold star.

You might well find you quickly learn simple JavaScript that has a useful application for you as a journalist. For example, within the first five minutes you learn that writing “.length” at the end of a word or phrase gives you the character count. You can then open an editor (using Chrome from a Mac the command is ALT+CMD+J), paste the headline of a news story, add “.length” and you will have the character count of the headline.

 

Daily Mail takes after Werrity with dubious use of Fox business card

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It seems Adam Werrity isn’t the only one to have been caught using a business card he shouldn’t have. The Daily Mail, unable to obtain their own picture of Werrity’s now-infamous “Advisor to Rt. Hon. Liam Fox MP” card, simply scanned the Guardian’s. But this wasn’t a right-click-save-image-as off the Guardian website, some enterprising staffer at the Mail actually scanned it right off the newspaper. Brilliant.

The copy was spotted by blogger Tim Ireland, who made his discovery after about 10 seconds’ sleuthing. See his damning evidence from Mail Online below.

 

You can now add SoundCloud recordings to Storify

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Storify and SoundCloud have joined forces, enabling those curating social media to add recordings posted on the audio platform.

Users of Storify, which allows you to drag and drop content from social media, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube into stories, were already able to add AudioBoo recordings.

The addition of SoundCloud adds possibilities for journalists and those curating stories using Storify. Although the audio platform started out as a music sharing and commenting site, SoundCloud is increasingly used for spoken word.

The integration of SoundCloud in Storify provides a tactile experience in digital news consumption, particularly when using a tablet, and allows users to read and listen to stories, utilising SoundCloud’s visual commenting system to jump to a particular point in the interview or audio.

Journalism.co.uk added SoundCloud recordings in this Storify of news:rewired created on the day the audio platform was first enabled as a source. Both platforms were present at the conference, where Storify co-founder Xavier Damman (pictured above) suggested “journalists should be re-branded as information engineers” as they make sense of the noise of social media by filtering it into stories.

In order to add SoundCloud go to Storify / Settings (below your name icon in the top right hand corner) / Sources.