The Christian Science Monitor is to become the first national US paper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, as a result of the financial pressure on the industry.
The AP is breaking ‘more than news’ this election: some of the ‘most eyebrow-raising stories’ this presidential-election cycle have come from ‘the stodgy old AP’, Jay Newton-Small reports.
According to industry estimates of data that the Audit Bureau of Circulations is releasing today, most of the large US newspapers saw a drop in print circulation in the six months through to September.
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The Tribune Company has given notice to the Associated Press that the group’s nine daily US newspapers intend to drop the AP news service – it is the first major newspaper chain to do so since the AP announced plans for new rates.
According to a press release from the Associated Press (AP), the agency will embark on its first continuous, live video news coverage on US election night, November 4.
The Big Issue: Election Results stream will feature a host of AP reports and will be streamed from 7pm (EST) on the agency’s online video network.
The stream will include views from 10 non-journalists, representing the electorate, who have been selected from AP’s collaboration with Yahoo to track the changing attitudes of 2,000 American voters during the presidential campaigns.
“We recognize that this is a once in a quarter century election,” said Michael Oreskes, AP managing editor for US News.
“Through the course of the year we have dug deeply into the dynamics of race and gender and economic fears that are suffusing the electorate. Our pre-election AP-Yahoo! News poll assessing the impact of racial attitudes on the electorate is being cited as the prime source on the issue this year. We plan to carry this work into our preparations for election night.”
YouTube is teaming up with the US’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to broadcast user-generated clips of video from around polling stations on election day.
In the Beet.tv interview below, Steve Grove, head of news and politics at the site, said Video Your Vote will compile the largest video library in history of what takes place in the election on November 4.
The software engineering company behind Sky News’ recent online revamp, Daylife, has launched a new product aimed at online news publishers.
Sky used Daylife’s products to create topic pages of related multimedia content called ‘in depth’ pages.
The new Daylife Enterprise API will similarly let publishers re-purpose blog posts, text, data and audio-visual content in new ways online.
How does it do this? The service will collect this content and then create feeds which the publisher can put to use a variety of ways – as per their request.
For example – the Enterprise API was trialled by the Washington Post to create picture galleries from the Beijing Olympics – searchable by sport and country – and to accompany its US presidential campaign coverage.
Daylife took all the incoming photos from Post photographers around these subjects and made them available to the paper as an API, ready for use to create new pages on its website.
Utilising existing content in this way can be a success in terms of web traffic – making sites a more attractive prospect for advertisers, says Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand.
As part of the product, publishers can make these content feeds open to the public and third-party developers – a feature which Shardanand hopes will lead to more collaboration on news content between publishers and users.
“In terms of e-commerce and advertising there’s been so much innovation in the last 10 years online, in comparison there’s not been so much in news,” he told Journalism.co.uk.
“How do you innovate if you don’t do software? I don’t know what the next best concept is but a service like ours can be shared.”
Publishers should not dismiss outsourcing this work, says Shardanand, after all it’s not their job and with the amount of content they have available would be extremely time consuming – the company has over 200 machines running to process the content. It’s not for free, but licences are decided on a customer-by-customer basis.
Instead, he told us, the aim is to get the most value out of the content that publishers are already producing for both online and other editions – such as the photos taken by WaPo staff – by doing the backend work for them.
Crucial to the success of the project will be the say that publishers have over what is done with their content – something which Shardanand is keenly aware of.
“These have to be content portals that are still customised and match your brand and voice,” he says.
“It wouldn’t work if the editors couldn’t do exactly what they want. Advertisers wouldn’t value it either.”
US TV broadcaster NBC is to roll out a series of nine local news sites this month.
The sites will be ‘less an extension of our TV stations and more of an online destination for the latest local news, information and entertainment,’ says the broadcaster’s president.
A look at the practice of hyperlinking content by the mainstream news sites in the US: news organisations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors, ‘acting in effect like aggregators’.