Tag Archives: PoynterOnline

Digital ad revenue up 30 per cent at Wall Street Journal

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The Wall Street Journal’s latest revenue statistics, detailed in a staff memo from Dow Jones & Company CEO Les Hinton (published on PoynterOnline), show an increase in digital ad revenue of more than 29 per cent.

According to the figures, the publication has recorded year-on-year growth across all platforms in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2011.

Print and online revenues for the publication are reportedly up by more than 17 per cent on the previous year’s figures for the same period, while total print advertising revenue increased by more than 21 per cent.

Print circulation revenue was also reportedly up more than 9 percent, or 13 per cent when including digital.

But while in his memo Hinton makes a comparison to competitor the New York Times Company’s release of revenue statistics last week, paidContent clarifies the potential differences of each in its own report on the figures.

Hinton specifically refers to the New York Times Company’s own figures “as a basis of comparison.” He pointed out that the NYTCo forecast last week that online ad sales would be up 14 percent for the quarter, while print ad revenue would be down five percent. It’s worth noting, however, that those figures include the NYTCo as a whole, while the figures Hinton cites for his company seem to refer only to the performance of the Wall Street Journal.

Poligraft: the transparency tool set to make investigative journalism easier

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The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new tool – Poligraft – to encourage greater transparency of public figures and assist journalists in providing the extra details behind stories.

By scanning news articles, press releases or blog posts, which can be submitted to the program by inserting the URL or pasting the entire article, the technology can then pick out people or organisations and identify the financial or political links between them.

Discussing the impact of this technology, Megan Taylor writes on PoynterOnline that it is a simple yet powerful tool for the news industry.

Anyone can use this, but it could be especially powerful in the hands of hands of journalists, bloggers, and others reporting or analyzing the news. It would take hours to look these things up by hand, and many people don’t know how to find or use the information.

Journalists could paste in their copy to do a quick check for connections they might have missed. Bloggers could run Poligraft on a series of political stories to reveal the web of contributions leading to a bill. All this information is public record, but it’s never easy to dig through. What is possible when investigative journalism is made just a little bit easier?

See a video below from the Sunshine Foundation posted on Youtube explaining how the technology works:

Hatip: Editorsweblog

Could technology actually be a gateway to long-form journalism?

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There’s a useful post on PoynterOnline this week in which author Mallary Jean Tenore details some of the best tools and technologies available which support the future of long-form journalism on the web.

These include Nate Weiner’s Read It Later, which can “save, share and organize URLs”. He explains that this means users can return to the whole article offline at their own leisure, rather than simply bookmarking the URL.

“Read It Later is essentially the article’s second chance. It actually improves the likelihood that the article will be seen,” Weiner said via e-mail. “If any article is there, the user put it there. And in order for a user to have put it there, they would have to have visited the publisher’s site.”

Other examples include Marco Arment’s Instapaper, which not only saves web pages but also creates RSS feeds of saved stories and an ‘Editor’s Picks’ feature based on the most bookmarked content and Twitter account @LongReads, created by Mark Armstrong, for a constant stream of long-form journalism examples.

See her full post here…

Is the local coffee shop the new newsroom?

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Could the local coffee shop become the new newsroom for local reporters?

According to Mallary Tenore at PoynterOnline, journalists operating out of coffee shops in the US have been finding stories and making contacts like never before, as they quite literally integrate themselves within their community patch.

Many editors consider their best reporters the ones they never see — because they’re out in the community. Fisher at The Washington Post said the reporters who worked out of coffee shops for the day found sources and stories they may not have otherwise come across.

Rather than keeping reporters at their office desks, it appears that editors who let a journalist’s quick ‘cuppa’ seep into an all-day pursuit will reap the rewards. Journalism.co.uk reported in June how Freehold InJersey (FinJ) had moved its newsroom to a local cafe. They hoped this would invite stronger links between the community news site and its local readers. They even provide a free computer for readers to use.

See the full post at his link…