Some great advice here from News Designs on what works best for maps and infographics in newspaper print editions. The post covers:
Earlier this week we reported on Rwanda’s regulatory body the Media High Council ordering the closure of newspapers and radio stations they felt were operating “illegally”. Now Azerbaijan has produced a ‘blacklist’ of publications it feels violates rules governing journalism “behaviour”.
According to the SFN blog, the Azerbaijan’s Press Council today released the latest edition of the annual list of “racketeer” newspapers and journals – this year totalling 77 – which they claim have breached the Journalists’ Professional Behavior Rules and should be investigated. The blog quotes council chairman Aflutun Amashov:
This list is a tool for public condemnation of the press, which ignore the professional principles, publish materials, affecting the honor and dignity of people, slander, and commit other such illegal actions.
The Italian Federation of Newspaper Editors (FIEG) has launched an advertising campaign to encourage people to read the country’s newspapers and magazines, according to the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.
The ads, which have started to appear in the press and the radio, remind potential readers that dailies “are the best way not to not remain speechless.” The campaign aims to explain that reading, “makes the difference in terms of broadening and deepening one’s knowledge, discovering new things, and building critical consciousness,” the FIEG stated in a press release.
Just last week Journalism.co.uk reported on a petition by Italian online journalists and bloggers against the country’s proposed Wiretapping Bill, which included a clause that they felt would “kill” the blogging community.
The New York Times Company has reported operating profit for the second-quarter rose to $60.8 million from $23.5 million in the same period the previous year, excluding some special items. The figures show the first increase in quarterly revenue since 2007, as a growth in digital advertising halted decline in print advertising.
The company NYT statement also showed that second-quarter revenue had risen to $589.6 million from $584.5 million one year ago. However, net income dropped to $32 million from $39 million year-over-year.
Digital advertising revenue rose 21 per cent, making up 26 per cent of total ad revenue compared to 22 per cent the year before. They also reported that print advertising has improved, from a 12.3 per cent downturn in the previous quarter, to six per cent.
The company also gained a 3.2 per cent rise in circulation revenue, put down to higher subscription and newsstand prices for both the Times and the Globe.
Wages in the US newspaper industry fell 1.42 per cent on average last year, according to new figures from the Inland Press Association, which surveyed more than 400 newspapers and their pay data.
Pay for entry-level and experienced reporters fell between one and two per cent, while editors’ salaries fell by 4.6 per cent. Creative directors working online faced the biggest decline at 7.4 per cent.
And it’s up – the long awaited News International paywall for the new Times and Sunday Times websites has gone up today. This is the screen you get when you try to go beyond the sites’ homepages – thetimes.co.uk and sundaytimes.co.uk. It’s interesting to see what’s not included in the £1 day pass option: email bulletins, mobile access and daily puzzles.
What the web and world is saying about it:
Interesting round-up from Techdirt on how newspaper companies and titles report on their own paywall plans. The post follows news that US company Gannett, which owns a number of regional US newspapers and the UK’s Newsquest group, is beginning a paywall experiment.
Argues Mike Masnick for Techdirt:
They give misleading headlines, they pretend that paywalls are some huge journalistic advance (rather than just a business model choice – and one that’s been tried and failed a bunch), and most importantly, they all totally bury the lede, and don’t bring up the paywall until many paragraphs into the article.
(…)
What we’re seeing is the implicit realization that these newspapers know a paywall won’t work. If it was something their audience wanted, they would be upfront and honest about it. Or if they had a good rationale for the decision they would be upfront and honest about it. Instead they have to be misleading, defensive and hide the important point. Quite an “experiment” by Gannett…
Related reading: From news:rewired – the nouveau niche, the Times’ Tom Whitwell, Reed Business Information’s Karl Schneider and MSN UK’s Alastair Bruce on the future of paid-for news.
Data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, turned into an interactive graphic by paidContent:UK, suggests that the Drudge Report and BBC News are two of the top traffic drivers to UK commercial newspaper websites.
The BBC News site referred 1,992,425 unique users to the papers’ websites in April, according to the figures.
Google dominates the search referrals list, directing 39,694,597 unique users to the sites. While Twitter is yet to make the top 10 of sites referring traffic to newspapers, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg are all up there.
News journalists may have faced criticism for churnalism in recent years, but imagine the same newspaper carrying the same news for decades, read by hundreds, seen by millions?
The High Definite has a great collection of images of just such a paper: a prop in films and US TV shows that replicates the same fake newspaper produced by the Earl Hays Press.
[T]he prop comes from a small newspaper prop company called the Earl Hays Press in Sun Valley, Calif. Started in 1915, Earl Hays is one of the oldest newspaper prop companies, and the paper in question was first printed in the 1960s (note the top-hat ad on the lower left) (…) The front is blank and can be customised, but the inside and back page are always identical.
Some bleak reading for the printed side of the newspaper business, but some more encouraging points to takeaway for online news from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Future of News and the Internet report:
But concludes the report:
[L]arge country-by-country and title-by-title differences and the data currently do not lend themselves to make the case for “the death of the newspaper”, in particular if non-OECD countries and potential positive effects of the economic recovery are taken into account.