You might think now is not the right economic climate in which to launch a new print title, but digital document management company Océ and founder of the Digital Newspaper Network, is taking its chances with a new venture, ‘niiu’.
The premise is that readers choose the content: niiu will publish different news and blog stories online and users select their favourites to go into a personalised paper, delivered to its subscribers daily. It’s a concept Océ has patented, it states.
The team thinks that print will attract its audience: “Even young people prefer to read on paper. With the niuu concept we bridge the gap betweek web and print,” said co-founder of niuu Wanja S. Oberhof, in a press release.
Berlin is the first market for niiu, but it plans to expand the concept to other places, such as Hamburg or Munich, he said.
Online-print precedent
Another example of online-to-print has been launched in beta by TheBlogPaper. Its idea is to publish blogs, photos and comments on the website and put the highest rated and most discussed content into a printed paper newspaper.
French site and publication Vendredi.info also publishes online material in print, but both these models produce one version, not individualised content.
As reported last week, the weekly Neath Guardian owned by Trinity Mirror is to close, and in its last issue, Simon Kelner, editor-in chief of the Independent and the Independent on Sunday reflects on his days at the newspaper.
“It seems inconceivable that a town whose people thrive on knowing what’s going on, who make it their business to know everyone else’s business, will have no town crier.
“Hard though it may be to believe in this multi-media age, but the Guardian once occupied a central role in the life of the town, and sold (yes, sold) upwards of 10,000 copies a week.”
A powerful plea from Roy Greenslade over at MediaGuardian today:
“Is anybody out there listening properly? Do enough people care? Are journalists themselves sticking their heads in the sand?
“We are not facing a momentous crisis in journalism. We are already in a crisis that is putting the central public service aspect of our role in jeopardy.”
In a follow-on from his column in the London Evening Standard in which he claimed there was possibility of charity funding to back public service reporting by the Press Association, he emphasises the need for speedy rescue measures.
And he’s enthusiastic about non-commercial models:
“The reason I’m in favour of not-for-profit journalism, whether funded by charity or, at arm’s length, by state bodies, is that it breaks the link with commercialism.
“That’s a vital first step in the reinvention of journalism. What we need is a preservation of the old until the new emerges. We cannot afford to let the old die before the new is in place.”
This week’s operation in Afghanistan to rescue New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell, during which a British soldier, Farrell’s Afghan translator (Sultan Munadi) and two civilians were killed, has provoked national debate in the UK:
“One senior Army source told the Daily Telegraph “When you look at the number of warnings this person had it makes you really wonder whether he was worth rescuing, whether it was worth the cost of a soldier’s life.” (Telegraph.co.uk)
Many of the commenters on news stories feel very strongly that it was wrong for a journalist’s actions to lead to such tragic consequences, as Jon Slattery noted on his blog yesterday. Further still: “Members of the Armed Forces have expressed anger that he [Farrell] ignored warnings not to visit the site of an air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers that killed scores of Taliban and innocent villagers,” the Telegraph reported. Others defend the role of journalists in Afghanistan: for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists.
This tragic incident also raised another issue, that of media silence. Today a special report by Joe Strupp on Editor&Publisher questions whether media blackouts are appropriate when reporters are kidnapped in war zones. It’s an excellent overview of recent events, that looks back at the case of another New York Times journalist, David Rohde – the paper managed to keep news of his kidnap off Wikipedia until his escape seven months later.
It’s a complex issue that Strupp raises in his E&P article:
“With Rohde’s escape, a major debate ignited in and out of the journalism community about how responsible the coordinated secret had been. Was this a breach of journalistic ethics, sitting on a story for so long mainly because a colleague was involved?”
Strupp quotes Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, who echoed claims of other critics, that the Times and similar news outlets would not do the same for a non-journalist: “Some people are in a position to implore the press for restraint better than others”.
It is a debate we need to have in the UK too: the London-based Frontline Club would be an ideal venue in which to hold a discussion with representatives from the UK foreign office, press freedom and safety organisations and news organisations raising the reasons for and against media blackouts. The practicalities of enforcement also need to be discussed. We understand that such an idea is in the pipeline, so we’ll keep you posted.
Please do share links to existing debate online.
In the meantime, here is a link to an item on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, featuring Frontline Club founder and cameraman (and former soldier) Vaughan Smith and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen discussing the Stephen Farrell case.
Guardian News and Media announced today that it will abandon the distribution of ‘bulks’.
GNM sold ‘bulk’ bundles of its papers to hotels and airlines for a nominal fee per copy to the businesses, but free to the readers. This sampling method was a way of tempting new readers towards the publications.
But bulk sales only contributed to a fraction of the Guardian and Observer’s overall sales figures compared to other newspaper groups, said a release from GNM.
“To a greater or lesser degree bulk sales are used by newspaper groups to prop up their ABC [Audit Bureau of Circulations] figure. Yet their credibility in the ad community is low and for those affected by the recent investigation into airline bulks that credibility has been undermined further,” Joe Clark, GNM director and general manager, newspapers, said in the release.
“We are abandoning this practice in order to present a clearer, more honest picture of our sales performance to advertisers and to reinforce the quality of our product to readers. The success of our subscription scheme has proved the value of rewarding loyal readers and prompted us to question the merit of subsidising a free copy for an occasional reader.
“In short dropping this traditional, and in our view, outmoded practice is a win-win move. We hope that others will follow our lead.”
“This so-called ‘sampling exercise’ was anything other than a way to ensure that, in a declining market, headline sales figures remained artificially high,” he wrote.
Over the past 10 years publishers have become increasingly aware that sampling had little effect on their sales.
As Greenslade reports: Trinity Mirror and Express Mirrors were the first to give up the practice, while News International never used bulks for its main titles, The Sun and News of the World, but did for The Times and The Sunday Times.
The Financial Times has also begun to lessen its use of bulks; whereas The Telegraph Media Group continues to use bulks to attract new readers, he adds. In addition The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have increased their reliance on bulks.
The Financial Times isn’t the only site reporting on the future of the Observer, which according to inside sources could cease publication in its current format.
“They [GNM] came up with a similar plan to close us down five years ago, and it was fought off. This time it seems to be couched in terms of saving The Guardian, so you have to think it is much more serious,” a ‘senior Observer journalist’ told the FT.
The all-party report led by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, has triggered a nationwide debate on issues of social mobility and whether social class divides can be overcome to provide equal career opportunities to all. Journalists found their profession branded ‘one of the most exclusive middle-class professions’. The industry was urged to provide financial support to interns from less wealthy backgrounds and adopt a best practice code.
Media organisations were accused of recruiting trainee journalists for internships for as long as one year, without payment, as a means of filling staffing gaps instead of providing appropriate training. The unpaid placements automatically filtered out students to only those who could afford the experience, usually middle class ones, or those willing to incur massive debts.
The National Union of Journalists immediately welcomed the outcomes of the report and heralded the best practice code for internships as ‘a first step in tackling bogus work experience‘. The union has been campaigning for years against exploitation of work experience placements, proposing the payment of a minimum wage to students on training. Speaking in a release issued earlier in the week, the NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said that the report ‘shows how the use of unpaid internships has undermined the diversity of our profession’. “Too many employers see internships as a way of getting work done for free, without any thought towards their responsibilities to provide would-be journalists with a learning opportunity.”
In his Guardian blog, Roy Greenslade talked about his humble beginnings as a working-class journalist, alongside others of the same social class at regional newspapers until he was struck by the class divide between the middle-class broadsheets and the working-class tabloids in Fleet Street. Although boundaries are now less obvious between the papers, higher tuition fees at universities meant education was dearer, and less accessible. As journalism became increasingly popular in the 1990s, degree holders were preferred over school-leavers, starting the unfair selection process which favoured the middle class.
A report in 2006 by the Sutton Trust [PDF at this link] showed that more than half of editorial posts at leading national newspapers had been educated at private schools, that is to say, middle class. As middle-class senior editors tend to appoint others like themselves, birds of a different, less privileged feather cannot find a way into the flock.
The Milburn report also pointed out that ‘qualification inflation’ is a barrier towards equal social opportunities. If once an academic degree or an MA were considered desirable for a career in journalism, some people, such as Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford, believe it is not the case any more as theoretical courses often do not provide the practical skills needed in a ‘real’ newsroom.
Degrees do not come cheap. Whereas a full-time MA at City University will set back an aspiring journalist by £8,000, a number of institutions offer NCTJ-accredited courses of much shorter length.
The Brighton Journalist Works, for instance, offers a 10-week fast-track course leading to a Certificate in Production Journalism for £3,600. Journalist Works MD Paula O’Shea, who set it up in April 2007 in The Argus’ Brighton offices, says the course is intense as it exposes students to as many hours as they would in an academic year on an MA, but graduates had landed jobs at The Argus, Johnston Press, Time Out, local TV stations and B2B magazines.
There is recourse for students who could not afford the fast-track course: “Our course is accredited by the Learning and Skills Council, so students can apply for a career development loan (www.direct.gov.uk) or the Journalism Diversity Fund (www.journalismdiverstityfund.co.uk),” says O’Shea.
A lack of diversity in news media could pose a problem for journalism, says Charlie Beckett, director of the journalism think-tank Polis. “If the news media is not diverse then it will not reflect the wider population,” he says in his blog.
“At a time of crisis in the industry and the wider economy, that is not a good thing economically, let alone politically.”
He applauds the agency for a ‘bold and imaginative’ move, which, he says, warrants public funding.
“Essentially, it will relieve newspaper editors of their current headaches in trying (and failing) to cover the whole local agenda. The nuts and bolts will be available to them. Instead, their reporters can get on with digging and delving,” he writes.
Interesting comments left on the post too, including one from Blackadder, who claims to be a former PA employee:
“To turn the PA into a fully-fledged public service will involve a root and branch upheaval of the current company, and that will never happen if profit is the watchword. They should not be given a penny of public money.”
The Independent has tried its hand at an interactive map plotting the challenges currently being faced, and those looming in the future, by the newspaper industry:
(Apologies if some of the argument bubbles are out of the frame – just drag on the arrows to bring them into view)
Good summary of the key issues using DebateGraph – the map draws on arguments from Jeff Jarvis, Roy Greenslade and Gavin O’Reilly amongst others. Some links to some prominent reports/blog posts/comment pieces expressing these arguments would be a great addition.
You can rate the arguments made and add new points after registering. As users rank ideas, the strongest and weakest arguments will be shown by the size of the arrows connecting them.
Australian newspapers aren’t finding it as tough as many of their US and UK counterparts, John Hartigan, the chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, claimed in a speech on Wednesday. Roy Greenslade picked up on the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper’s report that the nation’s print publications are ‘holding up well’.
But we feel he missed the best bit. As Crikey.com.au flagged up in its daily newsletter, there was something a little odd about a print headline in the paper on July 2 (helpfully highlighted here by Mumbrella.com.au – hat-tip @BlackAdder). This, courtesy of Crikey:
Also see Crikey’s comments on the speech / report here (registration required):
