Tag Archives: poynter online

Need a great story? New online database claims to have it

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Poynter.org introduces the latest resource for editors short on news – iNeedaGreatStory.com, claiming it offers “well-reported, well-told, well-illustrated content”.

The site sells stories, infographics and videos which claim to be “100-percent original”, pitching themselves as providing value journalism as opposed to a “content mill”.

In a world flooded with “free” stories optimized to fit marketers’ commercial agendas, it’s difficult for editors to find content they can rely on. But with iNeedaGreatStory.com, editors now have access to a searchable database of thousands of reliable, high-quality stories, infographics and videos. Simply put, iNeedaGreatStory.com makes life easier for editors everywhere – editors at newspapers and websites, editors of company newsletters, editors who don’t even know they’re editors but are charged with finding content for a specific purpose. That’s value they can’t get from a content mill.

The stories are written by an editorial team from Content That Works.

See the full post here…

Journalism Online paid content system gets first user with obits paywall

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Paid content system Journalism Online has its first user, reports Poynter. Lancaster Online, website for the Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era titles in the US, will use the micropayments platform to paywall its obituaries from today.

Readers outside of Lancaster County will be free to view up to seven obits, after which they will have to pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

Journalism Online was set up by former US newspaper executives Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery in June last year and received investment from News Corp last month.

Lancaster Online’s obituary pay scheme would “not amount to enough to reverse the fortunes of our newsroom, in and of itself”, admits the site’s editor of content development Ernie Schreiber. “But it might be a model for the next steps in how we meter other content (…) And it might pay for a few reporters.”

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell criticises certain elements of the move, including the fact that Lancaster Online is simply moving established content behind a paywall and not offering anything new to incentivise would-be customers:

One area where Lancaster falls short: providing customers with significant new value to persuade them to spend money today for something they got yesterday for free. How many more obit subscriptions might LancasterOnline sell, in other words, if it were to bundle customized obit newsletters as part of its monthly or annual fee?

Research suggests however that there is a healthy market for obituaries within the Lancaster Online readership. According to Schreiber, more than five per cent of the 47.4 million pages viewed the previous year were obituaries, and 100,000 readers outside of the county accessed an obituary page over that year.

Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz said Lancaster’s launch of the Journalism Online system will be followed by “many other launches over the summer”.

He claimed that the most popular “will be metered access to a website as a whole rather than a focus on a particular area of content”.

Full story at this link…

Poynter Online: Washington Post’s new ‘WebCom’ comment system

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Washingtonpost.com has developed a new commenting interface, ‘WebCom,’ that displays comments in a web – based on which ones are most-liked by readers and create the most discussion, Patrick Thornton reports at Poynter Online.

“Some commenting systems allow users to vote comments up or down. Some let users respond directly to each other and display the threads of discussions. But on most sites, comments are presented in the same basic way: chronological or reverse-chronological lists. Those lists don’t do much to help users find the best comments, especially when hundreds of people have responded to a single post.”

Full post at this link…

Patrick Thornton describes WebCom in the video below: