Tag Archives: silicon alley insider

Business Insider: Chart of the Day – 24% of US newspapers don’t use digital delivery platforms

Courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider’s ‘Business Insider’, a chart showing that 24 per cent of US newspapers do not use any digital delivery platforms to spread their online content.

“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers ‘provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,’ via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to ‘check all that apply.'”

24 per cent of all respondents answered ‘None at this time’.

Business Insider post at this link…

Silicon Alley Insider: Should web stats lead editorial decisions?

An interesting follow-up on an article earlier this week by the New York Observer, which looked at how the New York Times’ home page ‘gets made’.

In the piece, the Times’ digital news editor Jim Roberts said the site’s editors do not rely upon web traffic stats to decide what goes on the homepage.

Silicon Alley Insider disputes this – reporters don’t necessarily need to be aware of the traffic their stories get, it says, but web editors must pay attention to the clicks:

  • “It’s the main way readers can show what kinds of stories they care about.
  • “The New York Times is a deeply-in-debt, for-profit enterprise that needs to grow its traffic online in order to survive. Web editors should not pretend that it doesn’t matter how many ad impressions the Times serves each day.”

Full post at this link…

What’s the right balance?

Silicon Alley Insider: Subscriptions only work for porn, says Huffington

“Unless you’re selling porn – especially weird porn – I would not go the subscription route,” Ariana Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, told the All Things D conference last week.

In the video below with the Washington Post’s Katharine Weymouth, Huffington also talks about the development of HuffPo: half of the site’s traffic now comes from non-political stories; the last round of funding is going into the investigative journalism fund, local verticals and expansion; the site is breaking even.

Full story at this link…

CNN takes control of CNNbrk Twitter account with nearly 1m followers

CNN has confirmed to Silicon Alley Insider that it has now taken control of @CNNbrk – the Twitter account started independently of the news organisation, which now has close to 1 million followers.

According to the report, CNN has been working with its founder James Cox for more than two years.

“This is no-brainer for CNN, and we hope they paid Cox a lot of money for the account he’s nurtured. By adding more stories to the feed — and links to CNN’s site – CNN.com could generate hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per day. (CNN isn’t sure if it’s going to add links in the near-term.),” writes Dan Frommer on Silicon Alley Insider.

BusinessInsider.com: New York Times newsroom layoffs ‘looming’

Silicon Valley Insider editor, Nicholas Carlson, comments on the possibility of cuts at the New York Times [Thursday April 2].

“The New York Times says it will lay off 70 people from its newsroom if employees who belong to the Newspaper Guild don’t agree to take pay cuts.

“We expect the Guild, which met with Times management yesterday [Wednesday], to make all the necessary concessions.”

Full story at this link…

BusinessInsider.com: 27 publishers look at advertising banner alternatives

“27 publishers with a reach of about 109 million unique visitors per month – that’s 66 per cent of the total US internet audience – have agreed to try one of three new online ad formats sometime before July,” reports the Silicon Alley Insider.

This post gives examples of what one of those advertising formats could look like and the full list of publishers. Full post at this link…

Silicon Alley Insider: CNBC bans ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ for challenging reporter

Dan Lyons, the blogger behind the ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ blog, has allegedly been banned from appearing on CNBC after calling out one of the channel’s reporters for his coverage of Steve Jobs’ health problems.

Full story at this link…

Covering media job cuts – staff facing redundancy speak online

Having set up a timeline dedicated to reporting on the sweeping job cuts affecting both senior and junior journalists alike, a trend is emerging for laid-off staff to use blogs, Twitter and other online sites and tools to capture their redundancy.

Reports such as Martin Gee’s set of Flickr images from his last day at the San Jose Mercury give a highly individual picture of how these cuts are being felt on a personal level beyond the redundancy figures and prediction stats.

In the summer, the Columbia Journalism Review started its ‘Parting Thoughts’ series, posting responses from journalists leaving the industry or facing redundancy.

At the Gannett Blog, former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins crowdsourced a blogpost of lay-offs by the publisher, listed by newspaper area – at time of writing redundancies at 72 of Gannett’s 85 US titles affected by the company’s latest round of job cuts were accounted for in Hopkins’ post.

In an open blog post last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of web application design and events agency Carsonified, used the company’s blog to share his thoughts about staff cuts and give the reasons for making them.

Carson went on to give tips for companies looking to recession-proof their business (points that some commenters on the post argue are common sense no matter what the economic situation).

The Spokesman-Review has used its Daily Briefing blog to cover staff leaving in an equally personal and open way. News of senior staff exiting the paper, such as editor Steve Smith and assistant managing editor Carla Savalli, was broken on the blog and posts have also been penned by outgoing journalists, including Thuy Dzuong:

“Folks, it’s been fun but The layoff list for non-managers has been finalized, and I’m on it.”

Last week Silicon Alley Insider built a ‘real time’-style page to cover lay-offs at parent company Yahoo, updating it as new info came in.

(UPDATE – The Rocky Mountain News has launched iwantmyrocky.com to canvas support for the newspaper)

Despite the sad circumstances, the way in which journalists and media workers are facing redundancy in these examples shows a real engagement with online tools. A personal picture of what is happening to the industry is being documented for future reference by these staff members expressing themselves so openly (and perhaps significantly being ‘allowed’ to express themselves by their past/present employers).

What is more, while they may not hold the answers to the problems currently faced by the media industry, they shed light on how these issues are perceived and felt on the frontline. Something which employers should read and learn from.

Real-time job cuts with a live Yhoo from Silicon Alley Insider

Silicon Alley Insider, who admit they could be included in a downsize, have this handy feature for tracking the Yahoo job cuts as they happen.

It’s a live y’hoo to Yahoo employees, as more announcments are made. It brings together blog posts, Tweets and memos in the same way they covered the AOL layoffs last year.