Tag Archives: Newspapers

Local Newspaper Week: Mapping a week’s local news headlines

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It’s Local Newspaper Week this week – an event organised by the Newspaper Society to recognise the role of newspapers in local communities. This year’s focus is local independent journalism and holding public bodies to account.

To mark the week, we want to create a snapshot of a week’s headlines from local newspapers across the UK. We’ve kickstarted the map with a picture of Journalism.co.uk’s local newspaper the Argus in Brighton, but want your pictures of newspaper A-boards or headlines from where you are – whether you’re a journalist at that title or a local reader.

You can email the images to laura [at] journalism.co.uk; upload them to our Local Newspaper Week Flickr group at this link; or send them via Twitter using the hashtag #lnw to @journalismnews.

Please include where the photo was taken (village/town/city at least) so we can map it and your name if you want a mention.


View #lnw: Local Newspaper Week headlines map in a larger map

Shane Richmond: The value of reader comments to online newspapers

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Telegraph Media Group’s head of technology Shane Richmond weighs in on a debate about the value of comments left by readers on newspaper websites.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently suggested a turnaround in his view on reader comments: “I defended [newspaper] comments for years. But the problem is that comments are too often the voice of assholes.” He added in a blog post: “[C]omments are an insult because they come only after media think they’re done creating a product, which they then allow the public to react to.”

This prompted a response from Ilana Fox, who ran online communities for the Sun and Mail Online, disagreeing with Jarvis and arguing that the majority of people interacting with newspapers online aren’t “assholes” at all.

Richmond says both are right – his post is worth reading in full – and makes a particular point about the effect of journalists’ involvement in comment threads:

Jeff makes the point that inviting readers in after the fact is disrespectful, which is what leads to the unconstructive nature of much commenting. But I’ve noticed that engagement by journalists breeds a culture of respect. If journalists join the conversation, they are more likely to be respected by readers.

I don’t think the “true collaboration” that Jeff would like to see is a replacement for commenting. Many people are happy to comment and don’t want to do more. True collaboration builds on the work we’ve done so far. And it is a goal that many of us are working towards.

Full post at this link…

International survey of newspapers’ business strategy calls for executives

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Newspaper executives are being asked to complete a survey to provide a better understanding of how newspapers are reacting and changing their businesses to respond to ongoing changes to traditional news operations.

This is the second such survey carried out by The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the UK’s University of Central Lancashire and the Norwegian School of Management. The short World Newspaper Future & Change Study 2010 should take no more than 15 minutes to complete and will address how newspapers are adapting their businesses for digital and in response to ongoing international and localised financial pressures.

Last year, despite extremely challenging financial circumstances for many newspapers around the world during the financial downturn, the majority of the 657 respondents indicated that their companies were in innovation mode, creating new print and digital products and new businesses, such as insourced printing, training and events.

Respondents’ identities will remain confidential.

Mastering Multimedia: Improving video on newspaper websites

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Many newspaper-produced video stories are boring. The best stories have surprises sprinkled throughout the timeline, which helps keep the viewer engaged. This is mature storytelling that most newspaper video producers have failed to master.

Colin Mulvany offers some excellent advice on what newspaper publishers doing video can improve, including tips on storytelling, editing and the basics of subject matter.

Full post at this link…

On the same note, Seth Siditsky, assistant managing editor for visuals at New Jersey’s Star-Ledger paper and NJ.com website, tells Journalism.co.uk about how newspaper video is progressing in the US.

Advertising Age: US newspapers cut 109,500 jobs in past five years

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Advertising Age’s article from earlier this week on the difficulties faced by media advertising staff making the transition from selling print space to going digital is worth a read – not least for the statistics it offers on media job cuts in the US:

Between January 2005 and January 2010, newspapers eliminated 109,500 jobs and magazines shed 19,400, according to an Ad Age DataCenter analysis of Bureau of Labour Statistics’ jobs data. During that same period, jobs at internet media companies, portals and search engines grew by 18,300.

Full story at this link…

LA Times: The online-only Seattle-Post Intelligencer one year on

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The LA Times takes a look at the Seattle-Post Intelligencer a year after the 146-old US newspaper went only online-only and was reborn as SeattlePI.com:

[I]n the year since the Post-Intelligencer printed its last edition and laid off all but 20 of 160 employees, Guzman, Connelly and their co-workers have been unleashed to cover and link to just about whatever they want. Amateur journalists have been invited to join their ranks. Other media outlets have been thrown into the mix. A 146-year-old newspaper has been reborn as an internet-only news site that invites material from almost all comers.

Full story at this link…

TechCrunch: Newspapers have never made much money from news, says Google’s chief economist

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TechCrunch has a summary of a presentation by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, on the decline of newspaper advertising revenues.

“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on.” The problem is that on the web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.

Full post at this link…

Presentation below:

030910 Hal Varian FTC Preso

What’s the average cost of a news article?

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Media journalist Patrick Smith asks on this blog today How much is an article worth? His answer, as far as likely online readers are concerned, is very little.

This got me thinking. How much does a news article cost to produce? Journalism.co.uk is an online-only operation – a bootstrap operation as Kevin Anderson once called it – and obviously has much lower overheads than London-based national newsaper businesses. But if we could work out the cost-per-article for our own business, then that would at least provide a baseline guide to the likely costs to Murdoch et al.

Taking into account wages, expenses and a percentage of overall overheads (rent, bills etc), but discounting non-news-related administration, aggregation, tip of the days etc, we calculated the average cost of an article (feature, news story or blog post) to be around £37.00.

We have no intention of erecting a paywall around our news content, but if we were to, just to recoup that expenditure we would need 370 people to pay 10p each to read each article, or 3,700 to pay 1p each. In 2009, the average number of page views per article on our blog and main site was 440 (this includes all our aggregation posts, which probably skew the figure downwards slightly) but that means at current traffic levels we would need a model of 10p per article to be paid for by 84 per cent of our current readers.

Factoring in the much greater overheads of national newspaper publications, I would guess that the cost per article could be as much as 10 times the cost to us, perhaps around the £400 mark. I could be wildly off, and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has actually analysed this properly, but I think it is pretty obvious that there is a serious problem with the paywall model as a sole path to profitable news production.