Tag Archives: United States

Howard Owens offers guide (and prize) for ‘non-wired’ journos

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Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at US company Gatehouse Media, has laid down a personal gauntlet to ‘non-wired journalists’ to encourage them to be more active online.

Listing the full details on his personal blog, Owens is offering a $100 Amazon voucher (around £50) to the first journalist to complete his internet assault course. The currently unofficiated hack must, amongst other things satisfy the following criteria:

  • Get a small digital camera and start uploading photos and making videos
  • Join a social networking site
  • Learn to Twitter
  • Use social bookmarking
  • Set-up a blog

Financial incentives aside, Owen’s ten-step plan is straightforward and low-cost – a simple way to nudge even the most reluctant editorial staff into action.

God, no? Is it list and predictions time already?

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Yes, it’s that time again, the season of favourites lists, bests of, highlights of 2007, and rough guesses of what may happen in the coming 12 months.

I’ve brought together the few lists I have managed to find in between crazed bouts of gorging my way through East Sussex’s entire supply of mince pies and crapulent afternoons spent selecting the wine for the Christmas party (finally decided on Blue Nun – half bottles).

For what it’s worth, my predictions for the next 12 months are a pocket-sized Second Life for the Asian market, Google car insurance and marriage counselling by April and some kind of Granny app for Facebook so you can check on the vital signs of elderly relatives.

Citizen journalist videos through op-ed pages of NYTimes.com

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Later this week videos created by citizen journalists that look at issues surrounding the upcoming presidential primaries, in the US, will be available alongside professional work through the op-ed pages of NYTimes.com, according to Beet.tv.

Talking to Beet, Cynthina Farrar, producer with Purplestates.tv (and Yale researcher scholar), explained how non-professional reporters working with her new company put together nearly a dozen pieces for the Times.

(Video of her interview in the news section.)

Purplestates.tv is also running the videos through Facebook and will build applications for its videos to run through Open Social, Farrar added.

The news as niche

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In an interview with Damon Kiesow, online editor of US local the Nashua Telegraph, about the Telegraph’s use of Twitter to deliver breaking news, Kiesow explained the paper’s strategy for targetting a wider audience as niche content for niche interest groups.

While he admitted that any audience gain from one Twitter feed might be incremental, targetting several niche markets through such services could be a low-risk and low-cost way for regional news groups to extend their reach. As Kiesow points out, the content for these audiences might not have to be new content, but selectively repackaged and delivered.

The niche strategy should be tailored to the reader in terms of content and how it’s offered. Set-up in this way, Kiesow says, the potential is there for your site to give a reader the single most important piece of information they will hear that day – a positive goal for any news site.

Providing these services and types of focused content allows the Telegraph to move away from the idea of a newspaper website as an online reproduction of the print product and beyond reaching out to just the readers of the offline edition.

As Alan Mutter points out in his blog post on breaking news formats on local news websites:

While the print product remains the primary business at newspaper companies, their websites are strategically important not only for their long-term revenue potential but also because of their immediate power to engage readers and, most importantly, non-readers.

Mutter’s post, which analyses a local newspaper’s coverage of a public shooting in Omaha, points out that to provide breaking news coverage, a strategy to deal with such events online should already be in place. The Nashua Telegraph has developed just such a strategy and is expanding this effective and efficient model across its different news channels. Relocating was a huge step for me. Finding the right real estate was challenging, but setting up my webmail with a new internet provider was surprisingly easy. This move has taught me a lot about starting anew in a different place.

The site’s audience receives content throughout the day – offering breaking and ‘new’ news on a continuous cycle. A cycle created and maintained by a news organisation that, according to Kiesow, doesn’t have enough staff to write headlines for the website, but has innovated around these logistical limitations to find a solution capable of handling not only niche content but also breaking local news.

Innovative journalism/technology development projects in the US and UK

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This post is Journalism.co.uk’s contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is being hosted by Scribblesheet.

So much has happened in the last 12-months in the online news area we thought it was about time to focus a little attention on some of the projects and processes looking to drive the next step of innovative ways of getting news to the public.

Quite simply, we just want to draw attention to two development projects – one either side of the Atlantic – which aim to meld journalism and technology and find new and unique ways of engaging an audience.

It’s no surprise that both these projects are being run by – or in conjunction with – forward thinking academic institutions.

The UK project is, appropriately enough, called Meld. It’s being run this week by UCLAN department of journalism, under the watchful eye of fellow contributor to the Carnival Andy Dickinson.

Teams of of journalists, creative technologists/interaction designers volunteered to be brought together for a week of hot-housing ideas which would then be pitched to industry partners – Sky News, Johnston Press (JP) and Haymarket Media.

Each partner set a slightly different brief for the teams:

Sky News wants to ‘grow its unique users and page impressions (especially unique users) by offering a variety of original news related content’.

JP wants to ‘enhance our relationship with our readers and expand the local audience for our range of news and data websites.

While Haymarket wanted a rich media offering to serve a traveling baby boomer audience, something that appealed to a new men’s market or a Web 3.0 offering to blend ‘source and social’.

Based on these briefs, the industry bods provide feedback on the ideas – IP developed at the workshop is owned by the teams, each of which would be expected to negotiate their own terms should any commercial relationship develop with the industry partners.

The project is about pure innovation, trying to develop great ideas that benefit the industry and consumer, not innovation cosseted by the sometimes limiting effect of industry-led development where cost worries often cut innovation and failure of a single idea can be seen as failure of innovation, per se.

This snippet of Matt Marsh (taken from the Meld Blog) sums up the spirit of innovative thinking bursting over at the project.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKxGbbGEO7c]

The second project is similar, it’s a project being run as part of the graduate programme at CUNY, this time under the eye of Jeff Jarvis (Jeff has already documented part of the process).

Students on the first wave of the entrepreneurial journalism course spent last week pitching their ideas to a dozen jurors drawn from New York’s stellar media community.

A five minute pitch followed by seven minutes of questions from the jurors offered the chance to walk away with as much as $45,000 seed much for an innovative journalism project.

The course was set up with a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

The students developed projects including a hyper-local site for a Brooklyn neighbourhood, innovative uses of Ning to create specialist social networks, blog search engines using Google’s custom search technology and several project – personal finance for young people, a service to match school athletes with colleges – that questioned weather they could survive just for Facebook (Judge Saul Hansell has posted a fairly full piece about the nature of the individual projects).

A few project were awarded grants from the jurors to develop their ideas further, notably a project to get the public angle on what follow up stories reporters should follow.

The overriding importance of this and the Meld project is that it gives the opportunity to develop left-field ideas which get inside the mind of those that would benefit by using it, rather than just owning it.

These ideas aren’t just providing the next cash cows for big media, they are writing a new language for journalism, creating new platforms for the principles of good practice to be carried forward into this new century.

That is both novel and revolutionary.

Outsourcing newspaper interaction – on Topix

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Topix has just struck a deal to run the forums of MediaNews Group in the US, which owns 61 newspapers including the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

If Topix’s claim is genuine (and I have no reason to doubt it) that it gets over 80,000 comments a day – three million people posting more than 18 million comments since it launched its forums little under two years ago – then there seems to be obvious and compelling reasons for the union.

Marry what Topix does best with the local audience/trust that MediaNews papers have and you’re on to a winner surely?

Topix boasts again: IndyStar.com and Sun-Sentinel.com have each surpassed one million forum posts since Topix started running them.

In interview yesterday with Journalism.co.uk Yoosk consulting editor Nick Ryan said that traditional media was failing to shift from the old top-down approach online because it’s not getting involved nearly enough in user-interaction.

So all good with this move? Not all, according to Howard Owens:

“Media News signing a deal to turn over commenting functions to Topix is just dumb beyond belief

“Ironically, Media News owns the Denver Post, which of late has been doing a fantastic job of trying to become the hub of community conversation, both through its main news site and its innovative neighbours site.

“Those efforts are completely incompatible, as I see it, with the Topix business model, which Chris Tolles is quite blunt about: “We’re aiming to be the number one local news site on the web …”

“There can be only one number one, and if it’s Topix, it ain’t your newspaper.com.”

Owens adds that local should be a vertical, in the way fashion and travel are, and that the local paper should ‘own’ that space, dominating it across all platforms in a way other major brands dominate verticals, rather than letting another company get the best out of the paper’s good relationship with its audience.

Will widgets revolutionise content online?

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At yesterday’s AOP forum on widgets, plenty of examples were given as to how these applications are used by content providers, but few answers were given on their impact in terms of audience numbers.

Brand controller at ITV consumer, Richard Waterworth, explained the channel’s creation of Facebook applications to promote ITV2 show ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, but admitted when questioned that quantifying the contribution these kind of widgets make to audience growth is not yet possible.

“It’s absolutely still true that the power of cross-promotion from ITV on air eclipses all this other activity… the way that Facebook works and these widgets work are not comparable in terms of numbers, but what it’s about is building momentum in certain points of a campaign,” he said.

There is scope then for online news providers to use widgets to build buzz about sections on their sites or current projects – just as US sites Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com have done.

But with metrics for widgets in their infancy it is unclear when or how these applications could become real audience drivers for news websites rather than just flashy marketing toys.

According to Ivan Pope, founder of Snipperoo, sites including news sites looking to widgetise will have to accept that it is a give and take process:

“In order to aggregate you have to disaggregate something… you have to blow up all your content into small fragments and widgetise everything you’ve got and make it available for people to reaggregate into their own view.

“The era of websites which are controlled by a central entity is coming to an end… people want to be in control of where they exist.”

Such widgetisation of content would be a concern for news providers wanting to track where their content ends up and where their audience comes from. This could cause problems for news sites developing widgets for the mobile web, as David Ashbrook, senior research engineer for Vodafone’s devices team, explains in the clip below:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/davidashcroft.mp3]

To iron out these problems more deals are needed between content providers and with mobile networks – events that could lead to, as Snipperoo’s Pope suggests, the fragmentation of the internet and websites as we know it.

@BtPW: Golden age for mobile news sites is ending – well, in Japan

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It’s hard to feel sorry for a newspaper company that boasts sales of eight million for its morning and four million for its evening editions, so when Atsushi Sato took to the stage at the Beyond the Printed Word conference, in Dublin today, to say that his company’s mobile sites were suffering and that newspaper circulations were down, there weren’t too many tears shed.

Sato, deputy manager of the digital division of Japan’s Asahi Shimbum newspaper company, told delegates that the Golden Age for mobile news sites, in Japan, was on the way out.

Most of delegates are still waiting for mobile news in their respective markets to move out of the primeval swamp and climb into a clattering carriage marked ‘destination: the Gold Age of Mobile News’, so it was something of a surprise to hear that the problems that rancour some in Europe and are keep their mobile operations down to a very minimum are the very same reasons, according to Sato, that the Japanese Golden Age is coming to an end.

And what’s the problem? Why the mobile operators.

Sato said that the machinations of shifting price tariffs amongst the three mobile companies that run the Japanese market – NTT Docomo (53 per cent market share), VIDDI (30 per cent) and Softbank (17 per cent) had caused many Japanese to switch operators and thus break the subscriptions through which they pay for access to mobile news sites.

He added that operators had been developing free content portals, which had been deflecting more and more traffic away from the paid-for services, and operators were also, effectively, blocking links to his paid-for sites with their portals.

The reticence of young people to pay for online content and people viewing free web pages designed for PC viewing on mobiles was also adding to the problems.

Sato did, however, outline the strategy that has brought Asahi such great success. The first mobile site, Asahi NikkanSports, was launched in 1999. It now boasts 700,000 to 800,000 subscribers.

The company’s strategy was to then spin similar satellite sites off the successful site, using its own content and that gleaned through partnerships, then link and promote from the original.

So spawned – amongst others – Asahi Lifeline news, for emergency and traffic news, using 15-second video stories, Nikkan Geino for entertainment news and a site dedicated to supplying electronic books and comics.

Asahi Shimbum operates 12 mobile websites, he added, with around one million subscribers paying monthly for access to one of the sites – with each site being run by a staff of six.

This contributes to the digital division of Asahi Shimbum making $33 (US) per year – a whopping one per cent of total company sales.

Oh, how the other delegates yearned for his millions-of-mobile-dollars problems…

UK regional newspaper picks up US acclaim

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The online offering from Wolverhampton’s Express & Star has caught the eye of Matt Mullenweg – founding developer of blogging software WordPress.

On his blog Mullenweg has pointed out that every article and feature of the Express & Star’s site is powered by WordPress.

“They now take the crown from NY Times for having the best URLs of a news site,” writes Mullenweg.

Such favourable comparisons don’t come along every day. Thanks to Chris Leggett, electronic editor for MNA digital, the digital arm of the Midlands News Association behind the Express & Star website, for passing this on.