Fancy asking Eric Schmidt about the future of online news?
Here’s your chance: TimesOnline is seeking questions to put to the chairman and chief executive of Google for a feature to be published on Friday October 2.
Web development editor at the Times, Joanna Geary, just tweeted that there have already been ten pleas for a job so far…
In an interview with the Guardian, BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, said that executives are considering the part- privatisation of the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Thompson also said that the provision of free BBC online news was ‘utterly non-negotiable’. “I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it,” he told the Guardian.
A quick round-up of the weekend and Monday morning comment on the fate of the londonpaper:
“thelondonpaper is closing – with a pre-tax loss of £12.9m last financial year on £14.1m turnover. Maybe if they’d sorted out their SEO strategy, they’d have got more website visitors and sold more adverts?”
“Let’s assume, then, that when James Murdoch says he’s concentrating on his ‘core’ responsibilities henceforth, he means no more fishing in Metro ponds. That phase is gone. News International has retired hurt. But what does this mean for London itself, apart from much less waste paper?”
“Free newspapers funded by advertising are a volatile business model in any downturn, let alone a recession. While freesheets are unlikely to disappear altogether, in closing the London Paper the Murdochs have underlined their belief that charging for news is the way forward.”
“[T]he supposedly invincible media mogul has raised the white flag. He is closing thelondonpaper. In my view, of course, he should never have launched it in the first place. It was an expensive distraction that contributed little or nothing to good journalism.”
“News International’s decision to close its only freesheet highlights the newspaper industry’s move towards charging for content in print and online and away from the focus on ‘free’, which gave us the London Lite, Metro, thelondonpaper and City AM, the morning business paper.”
and from last week:
“[The decision] shows just how much the axis of publishing has shifted: just as proprietors are growing weary of readers enjoying their online news for free, there is not nearly the same confidence in the free print model there was three years ago and publishers are reverting to ways of maximising user revenue in all media instead of giving it away for nothing. And, more fundamentally for News International, London’s free newspaper war was just costing too much.”
Martin Belam neatly illustrates the scarceness of scarcity when it comes to news online.
If in the charging for online news debate an ‘iTunes for news’ model is introduced, what are the factors that will push up the price and make people pay, he asks.
Fascinating project (found via @amonck):
“MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.
“We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire online news spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.”
Kevin Anderson has a nice round-up of US Wired’s editor Chris Anderson’s recent trip to the Guardian’s office, during which the author of soon to be released book ‘Free’, gave his views on charging for online news.
Publishers will need to grow their offerings and should look at building communities around content, according to Chris Anderson.
“One of Wired’s sister publications at Condé Nast, Golf Digest, is thinking about creating a club tied to the magazine. Members could get exclusive lessons or discounted access to courses. Thinking out loud, Anderson said: ‘If Wired was a club, what would that entail?’,” reports PDA.
Anderson also believes people are more likely to pay for relevance than quality.
Gina Chen suggests that newspapers embrace two ideas: the mass audience is dead; and the product of newspaper websites is not news.
“Imagine if a newspaper’s web site didn’t look like a news web site at all. Instead, when you entered the site, you faced a question: What do you want to do? (I’m picturing it almost like Facebook’s ‘What’s on Your Mind?’)”
Yesterday’s InfoValet conference (‘From Gatekeeper to Information Valet: Work Plans for Sustaining Journalism’) at DC’s George Washington University had a great line-up of speakers debating the future of journalism in the online age, news aggregation, crowdsourcing and what’s next for the news media industry.
One particular announcement of note: the launch of Circlabs – a technology company building a new service to finance online news.
Writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld, one of the project’s founders, describes the need for a new approach:
“More Americans now say they get most of their national and international news from the Web rather than from printed newspapers. Yet news publishers, and particularly publishers of the kind of essential journalism that’s necessary to sustain a democracy, enjoy a relatively small share of total Web traffic.
“Although no clear strategies have emerged for news publishers to thrive in an online-only environment, CircLabs believes that the right technology can play a key role in improving the market share of news content and increasing the Web revenue of news publishers.”
The first stage will be a product called Circulate. Details are scant at the moment, but it’s expected to be available in beta from the end of the summer and fully launched by the end of this year.
“Circulate addresses two critical publisher needs: (1) the need to attract, both locally and nationally, a strong and loyal online readership, and (2) the need to monetize that audience, both directly through the sale of premium content and indirectly through high-value, targeted and interactive advertising.
“Circulate will meet these needs of publishers and allow journalists to thrive in their roles as gatherers and curators of news and information. At the same time, Circulate will provide consumers with a new, post-search way to discover the news and connections they need. Circulate will serve all publishers of online news, ranging from newspapers to local news blogs. Circulate requires little or no technical integration on the part of publishers.”
There are plenty of videos of the day’s discussions on the event’s UStream site – though the player below should provide most of the links:
Round-up of Danny Sullivan’s, editor of Search Engine Land, tips for new online news organisations on SEO. Including: creating standing pages for popular ongoing stories and issues; and discovering relevant search terms and keywords linking to your site.
Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel.
‘Meta-reading’:
“There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It’s much more recent than that,” he said. People only ten years younger – he is in his 30s – consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk.
The interns in the office (‘who play a hugely important role: they’re regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do’) read slightly differently, he said.
“They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am.”
“Essentially, they process information differently. It’s a ‘meta-reading’. It’s not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they’re getting,” he says.
It’s a ‘degree of sophistication,’ he said, ‘which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news’.
“This is something I had to learn. They’re constantly reading two things: what the information is, and who’s saying it – and it’s completely part of the story. Just as when I was doing history A-Level [you were taught to ask] ‘which is the source, who’s the source, why are they saying it?'”
“They get it. I think they are learning it as they are consuming it.”
Entering an era of ‘social knowledge’:
Munthe also believes that we are moving into an era of ‘social knowledge’.
For a long time, he said, theorists grappled with the dilemmas of post-structuralism and post-modernism, where the absolutes of the earlier part of the 20th century were abandoned. But they were not sure how to answer questions about society and ‘truth’, without returning to those absolutes, he said.
Now, with the advent of the web, a ‘social knowledge’ is emerging, via the spread of online information and idea-sharing, which Munthe believes is ‘the real founding for how we understand ideas,’ he explained.
“People read as sophisticatedly as they do because they’re know they’re getting their news from George, or from Johnny, or from Jack Lean or whoever it is.”
But, Journalism.co.uk asked, doesn’t that exclude a huge number of people who aren’t participating online? Munthe maintained not.
“I have a feeling that this meta-reading is not elitist,” Munthe answered. His real concern, he said, is the ‘radicalisation’ of online news. “If you’re the kind of person who is only ever going to watch Fox News, who is ‘properly rightist’, there’s no need for you to encounter any view but your own,” he says.
Journalism.co.uk reported live from the Voices Online Blogging conference 2009. Follow @journalism_live on Twitter for updates from media events.