Slate.fr, which is the US online magazine Slate’s French edition, had its beta edition on Tuesday, the Editors Weblog reports.
Editors Weblog picks out comments made by co-founder Johan Hufnagel in an interview with Le Figaro about the launch.
An illustrative feature on why local television stations in the US face a fuzzy future. “Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture,” WSJ comments.
“Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.”
“The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been quietly sharing content for nearly two weeks, exchanging daily budgets and trading even the most high-profile stories,” Editor&Publisher reports.
It’s ‘the latest example of the ever-growing trend of newspapers with no common ownership or JOA trading news,’ according to E&P.
UPDATE: A video intro from the petition’s creator TJ Sullivan calling for drastic action by the industry and Journalism.co.uk finds out more from Sullivan himself.
An online petition has been set up calling on US newspapers and the Associated Press to shutdown their websites to non-paying subscribers for a week (July 4-10) and make original news content .
The petition, which currently has 120 signatures, wants to highlight ‘the threat posed to democracy by the loss of professionally staffed and ethically bound American newspapers’.
It is not, the blurb points out, an endorsement of any paid-for access model.
The likelihood of any newspapers heeding this call….? We’ll be speaking to the petition’s organiser to find out their motivation. One signature comes from ‘Ostrich with head in sand’, an unusual moniker.
(Though perhaps Gannett might not be so against it – the publisher could organise its week of unpaid work to fit these dates)
The Bivings Group‘s recently released Bivings Report of the top 10 US newspaper sites in 2008 consisted of:
The study, which picks the list based on usability, design and web features of the US’ 100 largest newspapers, is purposefully limited to covering US-based, newspaper sites.
But as one commenter on the Bivings blog says, ‘No Mention of any of MY best news sites’ – he then goes on to list his own top 10, including Huffington Post and EveryBlock (which another commenter then takes as the Bivings’ list).
Is comparing like-for-like really that useful – newspapers aren’t just competing with each other – or other mainstream news organisations – anymore. What the Bivings Group rates the sites on may be completely different from the readers’ criteria – particularly if these comments are anything to go by.
It reminds me of this Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study from 2007, which found a different news agenda on UGC sites than mainstream platforms (e.g the agenda decided by journalists).
Users’ online agendas are different (and that’s not to say news organisations should completely adhere to UGC inspired schedules – that’s a debate for another day) and influenced by a plethora of different online sources. As such their expectations of newspaper sites will be shaped by the other tools and information websites they use. Ranking newspaper websites against each other won’t deliver the kind of comparisons that these sites can take away and use.
An admittedly unscientific poll of US newspaper journalists made redundant between 1997 and 2007 suggests only 6 per cent have found other newspaper jobs.
It was a bid to help the US’s ailing newspaper industry: Buy A Newspaper Day. It had a Facebook group and everything. Unfortunately, 19,397 people said they weren’t attending. Charity endeavours aside, out of interest, how many Journalism.co.uk readers bought a newspaper yesterday? Vote below:
“Never on Monday – or Tuesday, or Wednesday: how newspapers redefine ‘daily'”: With a look back to an interview with Sam Zell in November, Dr Mario R Garcia does a round-up of the shifting definition of ‘daily’ for newspapers in the US.
Over at the Knight Digital Media Center, journalist Michele McLellan takes a look at Everyblock’s decision to publish the open source code for the application that powers its ‘micro news’ engines in 11 U.S. cities. She recommends that news organisations and entrepreneurs take note.
A group of US newspaper executives have formed the Newspaper Project – a campaign ‘to fight back against the misrepresentation of newspapers and their continuing importance to the public’, according to E&P.
The project will run a series of print and online ads for the campaign from today.