Tag Archives: online content

Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads

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Beet TV’s Andy Plesser, writes that the Washington Post was long a pioneer in online content,

“[and] … registered the biggest percentage jump on Election Day, compared to the previous Tuesday, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million unique visitors”

So, CNN were the real winners of the day with a 400 per cent traffic spike for the site.

Here, CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien speaks to Beet TV about reporting from the exit polls, and the changes she has witnessed in web reporting over the past 12 years.

National Geographic is embracing user-generated content with photo and music sharing

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In an interview with Beet TV, the senior VP, for online content and development at National Geographic, Rob Covey, said that user generated content plays a central role in the publication’s multimedia coverage.

Press agency Deadline reaps online rewards

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“The simple fact was that we had no need of a website. It would have cost thousands of pounds to produce and wouldn’t have made an iota of difference to our business supplying the daily newspapers,” said Scott Douglas, founder of Deadline Press & Picture Agency.

But since setting up a YouTube channel for the agency’s video content and launching a WordPress blog featuring articles in May, Deadline’s online content has shown strong traffic growth.

The site made it into WordPress’ list of the 100 fastest growing blog sites on the platform at 94.

The blog has recorded 21,743 page impressions across 117 posts, while Deadline News TV has attracted 40,221 views for 40 videos as of August 5.

The agency has implemented a solution, harnessing the power of third-party websites, which is low cost, but high impact

“Our blog site immediately plugged a gap by allowing us to showcase our work every day – and reach an audience who may not otherwise see it. Our journalists and photographers still put in the old fashioned legwork to get pictures and stories. It can be frustrating when those are not picked up by the daily newspapers,” said Lauren Crooks, news editor with Deadline.

“Now we can ensure our stories, pictures and video reports will always find an audience.”

WAN 2008: ‘Newspaper phone’ launch to build audience awareness of mobile services + barriers to development of newspaper’s mobile platforms

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The launch of the world’s first ‘newspaper’ telephone by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) was part of a plan to establish it as a recognised platform for news, DN’s head of mobile told an industry forum today.

DN launched the phone in partnership with Nokia and Nordic mobile service provider Telnor in December to give users instant access to the paper’s online content, Johan Brandt told the digital media roundtable at the World Newspaper Congress.

“We did this because we had three challenges [with mobile]. We had to get people to realise we had a pretty good mobile site. Many people just didn’t know that they could find news from the mobile internet, not enough people were aware of it as a channel,” he said.

“Secondly, one of the big barriers was that it’s difficult to browse the internet with a mobile, there are too many clicks… and third was ‘what does it cost to serve?’. Mobile providers charge users by megabyte. But what is a megabyte? Is it an article or a mobile TV episode. People don’t know what it’s going to cost them.”

In order to promote the newspaper portal, he added, it was important that the phone allowed users to assess DN’s mobile service in a single click and surf those web pages without incurring charges for downloading data.

The service, he added, is now attracting 50,000 unique users per month – up more than 40 per cent from last year – but there remained significant factors hampering the development of the mobile phone as an established platform to deliver news and on which newspapers can make significant revenue.

He identified a lack of standardised technology and measurement across the mobile market as the primary drawback to significant growth.

“There are no standards on the mobile market, it’s unnecessarily difficult and hard for the developers to create model services. I want to see growth from the walled garden model to a more open environment,” he said.

“Secondly, there is a lack of standards when it comes to advertising and measurement. There are different ad formats for different mobile sites. The market is fragmented and this makes advertisers frustrated and it also dwarves the mobile market’s potential in the short term.

“As a result of this there is a lack of strategic integration of marketing across mobile and other platforms for advertisers.

“There are too many pricing models for our advertisers to learn and in Sweden there are no valid or integrated tools for measurement, there are just no standards.”

In addition to this, he said, it was difficult for consumers to establish the cost of accessing data on phones and that it could prove to be a deterrent to use.

“In Sweden there are several hundred mobile phone subscriptions, with different prices for surfing. How can the user really know which subscription to get and what it costs to surf when it’s paid for by megabyte?

“I think there should be flat fees for time spent, that would make cost more predictable [for users].”

OUT-LAW.com: complaints about online content and ads outstrip TV and newspapers, says ASA

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The annual report from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has suggested that the number of complaints made to the body about online advertising is for the first time higher than those relating to TV or newspapers.

ASA received 2,980 complaints about the internet in 2007, though 72 per cent of these related to content and as such fell outside of the authority’s jurisdiction.

“Interestingly, these complaints are almost entirely about truth, accuracy, misleadingness, and availability – the ‘meat and drink’ of the ASA’s daily work on print and broadcast ads,” said Chris Smith, chairman of ASA.

“We hope for an early outcome to the detailed discussions under way within the industry, led by the Advertising Association, on the development of ways to ensure continued responsibility in advertising in new media settings.”

Eric Schmidt – Google resistance to ACAP based on technology

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google’s resistance to using ACAP is based on ‘wanting to control’ publishers information, insisting that it is strictly a technology issues.

Speaking to iTWire, Schmidt said: “ACAP is a standard proposed by a set of people who are trying to solve the problem [of communicating content access permissions]. We have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. At present it does not fit with the way our systems operate.”

According to iTWire, Schmidt went on to deny that Google’s reluctance so far to use the rights and permissions technology was because Google wanted as few barriers as possible between online content and its search engines. “It is not that we don’t want them to be able to control their information.”

Schmidt made his comments after a tit-for-tat exchange last week in which Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of World Association of Newspaper and ACAP CEO, reacted strongly to claims made by a senior Google executive that the search engine believed ACAP was an unnecessary system and that its function could be fulfilled by existing web standards.

ITV News responds to criticism of vlogging experiment

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Last week we reported on ITV News’ video blogs from its correspondents in the field and suggested that the tone and style of the posts were too similar to traditional broadcast news formats.

Ian Rumsey, head of output for ITV News, sent us this response, which lays out the reasons behind the experiment:

We’ve been experimenting with vlogs for some time and our correspondents and presenters are now providing an added dimension to our online content.

I don’t quite understand what you mean by a ‘traditional piece of broadcast news’.

These vlogs are far from traditional broadcast news. They’re rougher, edgier, sometimes more opinionated and don’t cover the same territory as our news pieces.

Earlier this year, we had Juliet Bremner showing us round the canteen and shower block in Basra. That’s far from traditional and a long way from the story she delivered for our on-air programmes.

Of course, they’re presenter driven – the whole idea is that they are not a report but a piece of behind-the-scenes filming that features the lives and conditions of our correspondents on location.

The launch of the News at Ten has seen an even greater premium placed upon eyewitness reports made by our top correspondents in the UK and right around the globe. To work in tandem with that on-air strategy, our web content taps into our location reporting – with a difference.

The stories we’re sent from location – whether in the UK or in far-away destinations – are polished, highly produced, edited pieces of reportage for television news.

So, to offer that added value we’ve asked our reporters to turn the camera, to show viewers what the locations they visit are really like, to talk to them in greater depth about the people, the places they encounter, to share the anecdotes and impressions they take away with them when they leave. The story behind getting the story.

The lives our news teams lead and the jobs they do are exciting and unpredictable, and I think we can let people in on what it’s like to really be there with them.

I think if you watched the on-air pieces that went across the week, you’d know that there was plenty of muck and bullets flying around. Clearly they provide the content for our news stories. Our vlogs reflect something different. We’re not going to ask someone to do a vlog for the web while they’re in the middle of a ‘blood and guts’ situation.

Finally, ITV News runs a very lean newsgathering operation – at home and abroad. What may seem like ‘millions of people’ to the uninitiated eye is actually a very small team compared to the plethora of staff the BBC is able to send on major stories.

@BtPW: Golden age for mobile news sites is ending – well, in Japan

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It’s hard to feel sorry for a newspaper company that boasts sales of eight million for its morning and four million for its evening editions, so when Atsushi Sato took to the stage at the Beyond the Printed Word conference, in Dublin today, to say that his company’s mobile sites were suffering and that newspaper circulations were down, there weren’t too many tears shed.

Sato, deputy manager of the digital division of Japan’s Asahi Shimbum newspaper company, told delegates that the Golden Age for mobile news sites, in Japan, was on the way out.

Most of delegates are still waiting for mobile news in their respective markets to move out of the primeval swamp and climb into a clattering carriage marked ‘destination: the Gold Age of Mobile News’, so it was something of a surprise to hear that the problems that rancour some in Europe and are keep their mobile operations down to a very minimum are the very same reasons, according to Sato, that the Japanese Golden Age is coming to an end.

And what’s the problem? Why the mobile operators.

Sato said that the machinations of shifting price tariffs amongst the three mobile companies that run the Japanese market – NTT Docomo (53 per cent market share), VIDDI (30 per cent) and Softbank (17 per cent) had caused many Japanese to switch operators and thus break the subscriptions through which they pay for access to mobile news sites.

He added that operators had been developing free content portals, which had been deflecting more and more traffic away from the paid-for services, and operators were also, effectively, blocking links to his paid-for sites with their portals.

The reticence of young people to pay for online content and people viewing free web pages designed for PC viewing on mobiles was also adding to the problems.

Sato did, however, outline the strategy that has brought Asahi such great success. The first mobile site, Asahi NikkanSports, was launched in 1999. It now boasts 700,000 to 800,000 subscribers.

The company’s strategy was to then spin similar satellite sites off the successful site, using its own content and that gleaned through partnerships, then link and promote from the original.

So spawned – amongst others – Asahi Lifeline news, for emergency and traffic news, using 15-second video stories, Nikkan Geino for entertainment news and a site dedicated to supplying electronic books and comics.

Asahi Shimbum operates 12 mobile websites, he added, with around one million subscribers paying monthly for access to one of the sites – with each site being run by a staff of six.

This contributes to the digital division of Asahi Shimbum making $33 (US) per year – a whopping one per cent of total company sales.

Oh, how the other delegates yearned for his millions-of-mobile-dollars problems…

Guardian seeks professional content tagger

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The Guardian is advertising for a keyword manager to look after the labelling of its online content and ‘ensure that it is consistent with the needs of the reader and the editorial values of the Guardian and Observer’.

As we reported from last week’s AOP conference, Meg Pickard, head of communities at Guardian Unlimited, stressed the growing importance of keywords and said that the Guardian wanted to extend its use of keywords to provide more opportunities for user curation on the site.

According to the listing, which Martin Stabe kindly pointed out, the ideal candidate will be a journalist with a particular interest in archiving and a keen editorial sense, who can work across a variety of media.

Better still – encourage journalists/editors to incorporate this keywording practice into their daily routine?