Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Here she looks at use of open-source software, Drupal, on Danish news sites. Continue reading
Trinity Mirror, publisher of over 340 newspapers and websites in the UK, has announced that it will look to cut costs by £7m, after the company announced flat revenues and falling profits in its regional newspaper division.
The Press Gazette says Trinity achieved 13m in cost savings in 2007 and said it hoped to increase this to £20m by the end of this year after announcing a below-inflation increase in overall like-for-like revenues – up 1.6 per cent to £932.3m. Operating profit rose 3.6 per cent to £186.1m.
Next month’s edition of the Journalist – the magazine of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) – will be available only as a pdf from the union’s website.
The experiment is a chance to see which format members prefer, an announcement in this month’s edition explained.
But this is also a cost-saving strategy, as, according to the union, postage and packaging account for 60 per cent of the cost of the Journalist, which costs the NUJ in excess of £200,000 a year to produce.
Members will receive an email alert about the special edition, which will be available for download from March 17.
The TUC says media professionals work unpaid overtime worth nearly £300 million a year.
Writing int he Guardian, John Plunkett say if you are a journalist, PR, photographer or work in broadcasting, then you are 50 per cent more likely to work overtime for free.
The founder of one of America’s largest regional news networks is to launch a website dedicated to international news.
Philip Balboni, who established the New England Cable News (NECN) in the US, will resign from his post as NECN president in March to launch Global News Enterprises in early 2009.
The site aims to have correspondents in nearly 70 countries, a press release from NECN said.
According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, $7 million (around £3.5 million) has been raised to fund the news site.
“The world in every respect is globalizing, and we’re being swept up in it with the economy, our lives, our leisure times, our children’s education. And the American people are not being well-served by our media. The moment is right for this,” Balboni told the Tribune.
A video from French citizen journalism website Citizenside is expected to generate €100,000 (£75,285) of revenue after being sold to Paris Match, the Editors Weblog reports, with a commission rate of between 50 and 75 per cent going to the amateur creator.
The footage from Citizenside, which recently signed a partnership with Agence France-Presse, was of the newsworthy former Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel signing a statement at a police station, according to the report.
Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at US company Gatehouse Media, has laid down a personal gauntlet to ‘non-wired journalists’ to encourage them to be more active online.
Listing the full details on his personal blog, Owens is offering a $100 Amazon voucher (around £50) to the first journalist to complete his internet assault course. The currently unofficiated hack must, amongst other things satisfy the following criteria:
Financial incentives aside, Owen’s ten-step plan is straightforward and low-cost – a simple way to nudge even the most reluctant editorial staff into action.
Last week we were treated to a brief glimpse of screen grabs of the new version of Scotman.com.
Present version:
New beta version:
It’s worth a look again now that it’s nearing the end of its beta development phase and especially as it is now sending email out to its subscribers about its improvements, changes and impending launch.
The redesign has placed greater emphasis on multimedia – more video upfront although not much more than that- and expanded the level of navigation from the homepage by increasing the number of tabs across the top.
The paper has also introduced a most popular stories feature to the revamp.
The left side of the page is now ad-heavy with the great number of links directly below that as eyeballs seem to be endlessly attracted to the left side of web pages.
There are also significantly more links on the page, yet is seems less cluttered as the site has adopted a wider format.
The front-page video opens in a pop up box, rather than playing in the page. Often an annoyance to users and not conducive to viewing, as test at the BBC found out.
On the news pages the comments system seems to have disappeared from the bottom of news stories, replaced by a series of book marking tools that allows the user to easily share through Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit and Stumble Upon.
The new site will ask all users to register before they are able to leave comments on this and other JP sites.
Registering will also open up a user’s ability to personalise their home page (so the site blurb claims).
However, none of that functionality seems to exist on the site yet, most likely because it’s still in the beta phase.
The Scotsman has also added enhanced site search where none was immediately apparent previously. The search offer up a tabbed selection of results of news, web and blog results – promising you’d think.
But all the blogs currently listed are from Johnston Press’s own Blogstoday.co.uk platform, which can best be described as clunky and limited.
Web search returns a series of what looks like sponsored ads, no links to stories, when generic terms like ‘football’ are used. The term ‘Rangers’ again brings up adds for eBay, Ask and credit cards.
My name as a phrase “Oliver Luft” brought no results, a final search for “Kenny Miller” brings an odd set of websites as results, very few weighed in favour of the Scottish international footballer, as you’d perhaps expect.
Again, these may be just teething problems ahead of the full launch (although other JP sites seem to run the same search system with similar results).
If all the missing and frankly odd elements are just teething problems then why show it off to the readership at this stage?
For a newly redeveloped site, it seems a little old fashioned. The level of interactivity on offer and how the site sits with the broader web seems a little basic.
Where is the linking to other sources from news stories, and fostering of online communities? Why does that PA ticker on the home page still have UK-wide news?
Not being a Scotsman I consulted with those living and having lived North of the boarder to gauge opinions.
The general consensus is that if this is more-or-less the finished product then the Scotsman seems to have missed a trick to really turn itself into the natural dedicated Scottish online news destination.
The fact that users still have to subscribe for near £30 a year to get the sites premium content, also still rankles with some.
The BBC offers relatively little online that is Scottish-focused; treating it like more like an English region on the web than a separate country, and The Herald seems to have been through turmoil which has stunted its ambitions online.
Against that backdrop the Scotsman could have really made a big splash with this relaunch. It still may do yet if it builds on these new incremental improvements.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) has launched a service called Global News Agenda – an editorial resource, essentially a searchable diary list, of newsworthy events in 2008.
AFP claims it’s a world’s first, compiled by its 2,400 reporter across the planet
The claims:
But it’s only available in English and costs £145 for a password to the online edition.
You can also – and I can’t understand this really – get a printed edition. How would you keep it updated? Write in the margin? Do they send you extra pages through the year?
Earlier this month Sky News launched a competition offering £10,000 in prize money for developers to come up with new and novel uses of its RSS feeds.
Text, images and video are all covered in RSS and hoping for a innovative use of its feeds the news provider has put no limit on what developers can potentially come up with.
The competition closes this Friday and those with the best ideas will be asked to attend a ‘Dragons’ Den-style Judgment Day at the Sky News studios on Thursday 20th December.’
According to the terms and conditions of the competition:
“Sky will select approximately ten contributions whose applications show the most potential, from the points of view of design, usability, innovation and originality, to be deployed into a live environment, and could most successfully distribute Sky News content via new methods, web or otherwise.”
Aside from reward of actually developing a useful application for these feeds, Sky News plans to give at least £1,000 to the winner and at least £200 to each finalist.
However, in return Sky News will take quite a bit:
“Sky will keep details of, and retain a licence to use the Contribution of each Finalist, whether or not that Finalist is selected to be the Winner or a Runner-Up. Sky will require each Finalist, and, if a Finalist is under 18, a parent or guardian, to sign a separate agreement confirming Sky’s rights to use the Contribution.
3.2 All Finalists agree that the copyright (if any) and all other rights, title and interest, in and in respect of their Contribution, will be licensed by the Finalist to Sky as follows:
(a) Sky shall have an exclusive royalty free worldwide license in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution for a period of 3 months from the date of the submission of the Contribution by the Finalist;
(b) after that 3 month period, Sky shall have a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license in perpetuity in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution.
All Finalists must agree that no payment (other than Prizes where awarded) shall be due to them nor shall they make a claim for any further payment against Sky or its licensees or assigns in respect of the license of such rights.”
Nothing particularly new in this, the approach is fairly typical of other commercial/creative competitions, Channel 4 is pretty much setting the same conditions for its own RSS widget competition.
So the position is a news company owned by a billionaire is asking for someone else to design it a cutting edge technological development, for it to use for free, forever.
But Dragon’s Den is all about entrepreneurs striking deals to make long-term money with their ideas, isn’t it?
Has Sky not missed a trick to apply the ethos of the competition to the prize?
If it really wants to be seen as a cutting edge company could Sky News have experimented with a little ad-share from traffic to the site from these new applications (if it’s possible to work this out)?
The same with Channel 4?
Collaborative production is the founding ethos of social media – YouTube and Flickr are nothing without their communities.
Similarly Facebook, for which the technological contributions of its members and partners is paramount. But at the moment, on the whole it’s done for free.
So why not also share about the cash created by these partnerships? After all, if you had a bit of video Sky News wanted, they would pay you for it. Why not for the delivery mechanism too?