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Innovations in Journalism – Pownce.com

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Each week we give technology developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are are working on. This week it’s file sharing site Pownce.

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 1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi, I’m Leah Culver, co-founder of Pownce.

Pownce is a social messaging website where members can send messages, files, links, and events to their friends.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
A journalist could use Pownce to distribute a link to a story and get feedback. It’s a great way to gather information and share ideas.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There are plenty more features on the way including a more complete API and a new way to view links and files.

4) Why are you doing this?
We started Pownce as a better way to share stuff on the web. We were very frustrated with the current methods for sharing files and decided that we could do better.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It is free to use, but if you’d like to share very large files you can purchase a pro account for $20 a year.

6) How will you make it pay?
Right now we make money by selling advertising and pro accounts.

International news website planned by US media veteran

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The founder of one of America’s largest regional news networks is to launch a website dedicated to international news.

Philip Balboni, who established the New England Cable News (NECN) in the US, will resign from his post as NECN president in March to launch Global News Enterprises in early 2009.

The site aims to have correspondents in nearly 70 countries, a press release from NECN said.

According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, $7 million (around £3.5 million) has been raised to fund the news site.

“The world in every respect is globalizing, and we’re being swept up in it with the economy, our lives, our leisure times, our children’s education. And the American people are not being well-served by our media. The moment is right for this,” Balboni told the Tribune.

Myfootballwriter.com: a lesson in going online

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This blog post is part of the Carnival of Journalism hosted, this month, by Adrian Monck’s blog

In May, Rick Waghorn, founder of sports news website myfootballwriter.com, is hoping to attend a Las Vegas awards ceremony and hear whether his plans for sports news sites in the US will receive $2 million as part of the Knight News Challenge.

Yet, before the potential glitz and glamour of Vegas, myfootballwriter.com will compete in the EDF Energy East of England media awards (award ceremony: Whipsnade Zoo).

The site is in the running for the Website of the Year award and comes up against the site of Waghorn’s former employer, the Norwich Evening News, who after 14 years handed Waghorn a redundancy package and the financial – and personal – impetus to go it alone online.

Having started as a sports news site dedicated to Norwich City FC, myfootballwriter.com has since spawned an Ipswich Town site and in a recent recruitment drive attracted more than 70 young journalists to apply for reporting positions on new sites.

While the eveningnews24 site should be applauded for investing in its online operations, that myfootballwriter is competing directly against it is a case study in favour of the changing shape of the industry.

The site has used its online-only status – with no backing from a print product such as the Norwich Evening News or the same size editorial team – to its advantage: rolling deadlines mean rolling news coverage, while being dedicated to one locality and subject allows for more in-depth analysis and reporting.

What is more, Waghorn says he is still ‘a footsoldier’, attending matches and press conferences, filing reports and chasing transfer rumours. At the same time he can develop and innovate with the site – as he is doing with the plans to move into the US and the development of a locally-focused advertising system.

Waghorn stresses that he has by no means ‘cracked it’, yet what he has achieved so far should be used as an aspirational model by both his former paymasters at Archant and the rest of the print media in their attempts to ‘crack’ the online medium.

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.

Gawker to pay bloggers based on page views they generate

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Valleywag has a good couple of pieces about Gawker supreme Nick Denton’s decision to pay staff on his leading blogs according to how many page views their posts register.

Gawker writers will be paid a set monthly fee with additional payments:

According to Valleywag a memo sent to staff said:

“Each site will be assigned a pageview rate. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus.”

The scheme already runs on Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer. A salary of $2,000 per month on a page view rate of $5 would need to generate north of 400,000 page views each month to begin earning bonus.

What’s the Drudge Report worth?

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How do you put a value on something so closely aligned with an individual, which really has very little to it?

The Drudge Report would be worth next to nothing without Matt Drudge. If you wanted to buy the site you’d pretty much have to by him too.

Once you’ve got over that little hump, how would you even begin to put a value on it? Before you even got to how much you should pay for it, first you’d have to make an assessment of what you’d be paying for.

Portfolio has looked at several different ways to value the business and come to a series of valuations, which basically reflect the malaise that is valuing online publishing businesses.

It assessed Drudge in terms of eyeballs on the page – comparing it with a value paid for Slate in 2004 of roughly $4 per visitor – and come up with a $5.3M price tag. It also reached a valuation based on potential advertising revenue and concluded that this could be between $9.6M to $14.4M in relation to a supposed 60 million monthly pageviews.

The third valuation was based on a supposed figure Drudge himself might call for. Portfolio says:

“Drudge’s advertising agency recently claimed that the site enjoys 360 million monthly pageviews and 10 million unique visitors a month. That might lead Drudge to conclude that the site is worth anywhere from $40 million (using unique visitors) to $86.4 million (using ad revenue from pageviews).”

The bottom line figure, that which Portfolio thinks you might get it for had you the money and you could convince him to keep his nose to grindstone, $10M to $20M – then only if he’s prepared to sell.

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.

@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…

Knight News Challenge names community news project as winner

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The MediaShift Idea Lab blog – a 36-strong group blog – has won a series of grants from US-based journalism foundation, the Knight Foundation.

Each year the foundation awards up to $5 million ‘to individuals who innovate community news using digital technology’, as part of its annual News Challenge competition.

Each member of the ‘lab’ won a grant to help fund a startup idea or blog on a topic related to reshaping community news.

The Idea Lab will then be used as a forum for the bloggers to share their experiences.

According to a press release from the foundation, projects which will feature on the lab include:

  • The Playing the News project – a news simulation environment letting citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers;
  • Seven academic ‘think tanks’ at US universities to evolve solutions to digital news problems;
  • A scheme with MTV to put a ‘Knight Mobile Youth Journalist’ in every US state, who will create cideo news reports for distribution on mobile phones.