Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal

NMK: ‘What happens to newspapers?’ – place your bets, please

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Rounding off last night’s discussion panel hosted by New Media Knowledge on the future of the newspaper industry, panelists were asked what or who they would put their money on for success and survival over the next few years.

Martin Stabe, media blogger, former new media editor of Press Gazette and online editor of Retail Week, plumped for niche and expert content:

“I would bet on anyone who can create unique, high quality content. I’d bet on the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal – those corners of more generalist publications that become more expert,” he said.

Newspapers need to have ‘the ability to compete with all the freely produced expert content that is sometimes better than what is produced by the professionals’, he added.

Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian.co.uk, agreed that niche coverage could help newspapers compete with the blogosphere.

“In areas where blogs are working really well, mainstream media has two options: to raise its game and start covering those niches better; or it can get out and as Jeff Jarvis says, ‘do what you do best, and link to the rest’,” said McIntosh

“Those are two areas where mainstream media can move forward but it’s about acknowledging that this world exists.”

Assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, Justin Williams said trusted brands and content areas such as finance, politics and certain sports are best placed to survive.

“Brands that are trusted and valued no matter how they are produced, those brands will still be here in 10 years time. You’re looking at areas like finance, politics, certain kinds of sport, where we still thrive. During the financial crisis most of us have turned to established news outlets,” said Williams.

“We’re positioned in those markets already, if we can hone in on what’s important to our readers and deliver it in a smart way, then we [newspapers] can be here in 10 years time.”

NMK: Telegraph uses Dipity in aggregation first

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Speaking at New Media Knowledge’s (NMK) ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event last night, Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, drew the audience’s attention to a new aggregation feature being used in Telegraph.co.uk’s recently relaunched finance channel.

A timeline of the current global recession has been created using free third-party tool Dipity. The timeline, which can also be viewed as a map, flipbook or list, aggregates both Telegraph content and items – predominantly news articles – from other titles.

Aggregating from external sources, which in this instance include the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and CNN Money, is a first for the site, Williams said.

WSJ online video training for reporters

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And another for your watching pleasure. This comes from Blip TV: a brief interview with the Wall Street Journal’s deputy managing editor Alan Murray, on the WSJ’s 25-30 videos a day, the majority of which are produced by the paper’s reporters.

Kelsey Blodget, associate producer writes:

“As part of a strategy to integrate online video with the reporting, The Journal trains reporters on a regular basis in New York and San Francisco to use Sony HDR-HC9 cameras.”

Gawker alleges computer cut-backs for WSJ.com staff

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So Boris might give out Blackberries (well, ‘blackberry-type gizmos’) to Olympics spectators in 2012, but over in the States Wall Street Journal journalists are finding that their technology allowance is being cut back.

Or so this ‘internal memo’ on Gawker.com would have us believe. Is it for real? Apparently, all WSJ news staff have been told that a new money-saving measure is in place: ‘at its core is the concept of “one person/one machine.’

“If you are an office-based editor, you’ll get a new desktop. If you are a reporter or editor who travels on assignment, you’ll get a new laptop with a docking station, keyboard and monitor for office use.”

That’s what the alleged internal memo reads. Comments below the Gawker article are sceptical: surely the typos in the memo are a bigger story than the computer cuts, writes ‘drunkexpatworker’.

Hmmm. Authentic or not? It seems an odd kind of prank if not: it wasn’t that funny.

Online media consumption up by seven per cent, as a result of financial strife

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Yesterday, Beet TV flagged up that a record number of users seeking online media information led to a seven per cent spike in traffic for Akamai, the delivery network which carries the internet flow for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and other news sites.

The current economic turmoil, hurricanes and the presidential campaign has helped boost the need for online information. At their peak, Akamai were registering 3.7 million requests per minute.

The spike follows a trend for online news sites doing well in times of financial strife: last month site traffic ‘exploded’ at the FT.com, as a result of the drop in share prices.

The need for information was felt on Wall Street, coinciding with a redesign of the Wall Street Journal Online. “Monday set an all time record of two million visitors”, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high.  “These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million,” she said.

The irony is that financial disaster, hurricanes and presidential elections seem to be a good thing for the world of online media.

Forbes.com opinion channel gets a makeover

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Forbes.com/opinions has had a makeover, as of today. Under the control of new opinions channel editor, Tunku Varadarajan, no time has been wasted in having a bit of an autumn clean. Particularly significant is the introduction of an array of high-profile new columnists.

Here’s a run-down of the changes:

  • Four main topic categories: Business and Economics, Foreign Affairs and Defence, Culture and Society, and Politics.
  • 16 new columnists will be writing weekly columns for the channel, including author Reihan Salam, economists Brian Wesbury and Bob Stein, former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson and Quentin Letts (from the UK).
  • Book reviews every Monday and Thursday, on all subjects, as well as daily essays and commentaries.
  • Forbes.com Editor Paul Maidment’s will produce a weekly video “Notes on the News” about international politics and business.
  • Forbes magazine Publisher Rich Karlgaards’s daily blog “Digital Rules” will still run, in addition to a new video blog “Talk Back” about the business world.

Varadarajan was previously contributing editor at the Financial Times, where he wrote opinion pieces, arts and culture essays and book reviews. Before that, he was at the Wall Street Journal for seven years – most recently as Assistant Managing Editor.

He gives fuller run-down of all the changes here.

What’s new in the WSJ.com redesign

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The Wall Street Journal set its revamped site live today, so here’s a breakdown of what’s changed and what’s new:

New

  • Journal Community – a social networking feature for the site’s paying subscribers, which lets them comment on articles, ‘ask the expert’ and join topic-based networks and discussion groups
  • Subscriber-only sections marked with a key icon and available for preview by non-subscribers
  • Newsreel – a scrolling, horizontal panel topping article pages, which links to other top stories. (Seems to be on most US stories at the moment, as shown in the picture below)
  • New video player and slideshow viewer
  • A new WSJ.com mobile reader for the Blackberry
  • New management section – available to subscribers only

Changes

  • Expanded content across its What’s News, Heard on the Street, small business, technology, US and world news, politics, personal finance and lifestyle sections
  • Improved navigation – including horizontal menu bar across all pages
  • Redesigned article pages to support more multimedia content and provide ‘related analysis’

Paying subscribers to the site, which WSJ claims have risen to more than 1 million, will also have increased access to the site’s archive.

The Inquisitr: ‘Arrington on journalism is like Britney Spears on parenting’, says Swisher

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At this week’s Demo Conference renowned Wall Street Journal technology columnist Kara Swisher attacked Tech Crunch’s founder Michael Arrington: ‘being lectured in journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney Spears’.