Tag Archives: us

Reflections of a Newsosaur: How one entrepreneurial journalist found success with her business niche

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Alan Mutter posts on an example of a successful entrepreneurial journalist: Michelle Leder set up her website Footnoted.org in 2003 from her home in New York state.

Business journalist Leder’s site is filled with leads and information gleaned from mining financial disclosures that publicly held companies in the US are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, explains Mutter.

While those turgid tidbits might bore ordinary mortals senseless, they represent valuable and actionable business intelligence that can help traders make or avoid losing millions.

Leder built her business model on selling subscriptions for premium content to hedge-fund managers – not from online advertising – and this week investor advisory service Morningstar bought her business for an undisclosed sum.

Full story at this link…

Pay cuts and Twitter policy leave Thomson Reuters facing union action in US

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Thomson Reuters in the US has been referred to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by the Newspaper Guild of New York for planned cutbacks to the pay packages of journalists and other workers that are members of the union.

The reduced payments work out at roughly 10 per cent per worker, says the Guild, which has been in contract negotiations with the agency for more than a year, in a release.

In June 2009, Boston’s Newspaper Guild made a similar charge and challenged a pending 23 per cent pay cut proposed by The New York Times. The two parties reached an agreement in July with the pay cut reduced, but Guild members were left fearful for their jobs after the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for approximately 170 employees was also agreed.

But in this instance Reuters isn’t only facing charges by the Guild over changes to pay: the agency has also been brought to task by the Guild for its social media policy, which bans employees from updating personal Twitter accounts with posts which, in the words of the company, ‘would damage the reputation of Reuters News or Thomas Reuters’.

As the statement from the Guild points out:

A union activist was “reminded” of the policy after responding to a senior manager’s call to “join the (Twitter) conversation on making Reuters the best place to work” with a tweet that said: “One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”

Forbes.com: Circulation revenue is more stable than paywalls, says Scripps senior VP

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“Based on our experience of publishing on the web for 15 years, paywalls don’t make sense,”says Mark Contreras, senior vice president for newspapers at US publisher E.W. Scripps Co and chairman of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).

In this Forbes.com interview, Contreras refers directly to Scripps’ own experiment with a paid for sports website in Knoxville: “When we took the paywall down, the traffic ballooned and so did its revenue.”

Instead, growing revenue from circulation is preferable and a return to the 1940s newspaper industry model of 60 per cent of revenue from advertising and 40 per cent from circulation is happening, he suggests.

Audience is up. Our subscriber churn has never been lower. Today we have the most stable circulation base we’ve ever had. It’s generating, on a per-unit basis, more than it has in a long time. In some cases double digits.

Full interview at this link…

(Hat tip to @jayrosen_nyu)

Poll: What social media is used by journalists in UK and Europe?

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The results of an extensive study by media communications intelligence firm Cision and George Washington University suggest that the use of social media sites and networks has become a fundamental part of US journalists’ research when working on stories.

“While this is a survey of North American journalists, we believe the findings mirror behaviour among journalists in the UK, more so than elsewhere in Europe,” says Falk Rehkopf, head of research for Cision Europe, about the study.

“There might be some lag in wider adoption, but media professionals are ahead of the curve when it comes to social media – such that, in many ways, Twitter can be thought of as a de facto social network for the UK media industry.”

As such, below is our own, though less extensive poll for journalists and editors working in the UK and Europe – what social media are you using?

Huffington Post: How Editor & Publisher lost its editor

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Greg Mitchell, former editor of industry title Editor & Publisher, explains how he was axed as part of a takeover deal by new owners of the magazine.

E&P was shuttered by former publisher Nielsen Company last month, but was resurrected last week by the Duncan McIntosh Company:

Mitchell is, understandably, highly critical of some of the changes that have already been made:

Now I was out, along with the great Joe Strupp, senior editor and staff writer. That meant that the magazine would lose the two staffers who had been responsible for roughly 80 per cent of the magazine’s news-making and traffic-driving ‘scoops’ over the past several years – at a time when web impact needs to be expanded.

(…) Much of the speculation about the ‘new’ E&P has been on the decision to focus on business and tech/press room issues. Many observers in recent days have warned that the ‘E’ will be largely taken out of E&P.

A microcosmic vision of wider industry struggles?

Full story at this link…

Daily Intel: New York Times to bring back pay wall?

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Update: New York Times confirms it will bring in new charging system from January 2011.

Having already pioneered and seemingly abandoned charging for its website, is the New York Times about to introduce a new pay wall or Financial Times style metering system for its website?

According to the Daily Intel, a new access model will be brought in within a matter of weeks. (Note that in November last year a pay wall decision for the times was also scheduled for “within weeks”, but didn’t emerge.)

Full story at this link…

On paidContent.org, James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, looks at how paid content on NYTimes.com might work and what the Times should be looking at when building a wall.

But, McQuivey adds:

Notice that this advice is directed to NYTimes.com and nobody else. Because there is no other newspaper that we believe can pull this off at this time, even though a majority of newspaper editors are considering it.

Fortune: Stratfor – an alternative journalism model?

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Except it’s not journalism:

George Friedman is not in the business of journalism. He wants to make that clear. But while traditional media organizations are on the decline, Stratfor, the Austin, Texas-based global intelligence company he started in 1996, is on the rise as readers look for alternatives to the ailing international sections of their daily papers.

(…) Stratfor’s big bet is that while news organisations may be declining, people still need to understand the news and they’ll be willing to pay for that analysis.

Full post at this link…

Big Journalism takes on big challenge

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Big Journalism is staking the claim that media is now at war with one another: Big Media versus Small Media; Old Media versus New Media; Left Media vs Right Media. You get the picture.

So writes the founder of new website Big Journalism, Andrew Breitbart, primary developer on the Huffington Post and publisher of a series of online news sites.

“If the media isn’t going to take the large clues of losing subscribers, dwindling viewers, thriving alternatives – perhaps something more aggressive will instigate a change for the better,” he adds.

“Even if you’re one of those awful, biased old-media types we seek to destroy, welcome to Big Journalism, where the spirit of free inquiry lives on.”

Just a few days old the site, which has a US focus at present, says it will take on journalism, reporters and bloggers alike in a “metaphorical war” against “pure hackery and media bias”.

If it lives up to these promises, it will certainly be a media site to watch in 2010.

Folio: Hearst develops web ads for printed pages

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Web ads will not be lost on articles printed out from websites thanks to a new development from Hearst Digital Media and Format Dynamics.

The CleanPrint service, which will be put into action on GoodHousekeeping.com and soon spread to Esquire and Cosmopolitan’s US websites, will provide new opportunities to advertisers:

[B]oth a “re-messaging” opportunity or a separate, contextual placement at the point of printout. Most often, using the “print” function on a web page to obtain a hardcopy eliminates the banner ads altogether.

In cases where new ads are created for printouts: “The ads only appear when the pages are printed, with the theory that users who print the page are inherently committed to the content.”

Full story at this link…

Paywall results in for Newsday as US newspapers see dip in traffic

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Some interesting takeaways from new traffic stats for US newspapers released by Nielsen this week and reported by Editor & Publisher.

Unique users to the Newsday website, which went behind a paywall in late October, decreased by 2.2 million in October 2009 to 1.7 million in November.

Elsewhere 16 of the top 30 newspapers in the figures posted a year-on-year drop in unique users – in part a result of the bumper traffic created by the presidential race in November 2008.

Unique users to the New York Times, USA Today and LA Times websites fell by more than 20 per cent year-on-year, according to the November stats. But the New York Times did record the highest number of unique users for the month at 16,635,000.

But the biggest winner by far in November was Tampa Bay Online, which saw a gigantic 354 per cent jump in unique users to 1,724,000.

Related reading: More on the average time spent on US newspaper websites in November