It’s been another bad six months for press freedom around the globe, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) concludes in a grim report released Saturday – writes E&P.
“Press freedom is under serious threat from many sources — gangs and corrupt officials in Latin America, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, conflicts in Africa, hostile governments in Asia, and from death threats and prosecutions in central Asia and Europe,” WAN said in its semi-annual review of press freedom.
The final words spoken at a lengthy round table discussion on press freedom at the the World Association of Newspapers 2008 conference here in Gothenburg, Sweden, were obvious but challenging: “There is no international standard of freedom of expression.”
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Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.
In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.
Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.
Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.
The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.
So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.
The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.
And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.
For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.
Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.
What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.
One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.
We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.
As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.
We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.
The launch of the world’s first ‘newspaper’ telephone by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) was part of a plan to establish it as a recognised platform for news, DN’s head of mobile told an industry forum today.
DN launched the phone in partnership with Nokia and Nordic mobile service provider Telnor in December to give users instant access to the paper’s online content, Johan Brandt told the digital media roundtable at the World Newspaper Congress.
“We did this because we had three challenges [with mobile]. We had to get people to realise we had a pretty good mobile site. Many people just didn’t know that they could find news from the mobile internet, not enough people were aware of it as a channel,” he said.
“Secondly, one of the big barriers was that it’s difficult to browse the internet with a mobile, there are too many clicks… and third was ‘what does it cost to serve?’. Mobile providers charge users by megabyte. But what is a megabyte? Is it an article or a mobile TV episode. People don’t know what it’s going to cost them.”
In order to promote the newspaper portal, he added, it was important that the phone allowed users to assess DN’s mobile service in a single click and surf those web pages without incurring charges for downloading data.
The service, he added, is now attracting 50,000 unique users per month – up more than 40 per cent from last year – but there remained significant factors hampering the development of the mobile phone as an established platform to deliver news and on which newspapers can make significant revenue.
He identified a lack of standardised technology and measurement across the mobile market as the primary drawback to significant growth.
“There are no standards on the mobile market, it’s unnecessarily difficult and hard for the developers to create model services. I want to see growth from the walled garden model to a more open environment,” he said.
“Secondly, there is a lack of standards when it comes to advertising and measurement. There are different ad formats for different mobile sites. The market is fragmented and this makes advertisers frustrated and it also dwarves the mobile market’s potential in the short term.
“As a result of this there is a lack of strategic integration of marketing across mobile and other platforms for advertisers.
“There are too many pricing models for our advertisers to learn and in Sweden there are no valid or integrated tools for measurement, there are just no standards.”
In addition to this, he said, it was difficult for consumers to establish the cost of accessing data on phones and that it could prove to be a deterrent to use.
“In Sweden there are several hundred mobile phone subscriptions, with different prices for surfing. How can the user really know which subscription to get and what it costs to surf when it’s paid for by megabyte?
“I think there should be flat fees for time spent, that would make cost more predictable [for users].”
The WAN president doesn’t seem smitten with the idea of multi-tasking journalists given this response to a question about converged journalism posed to him by Paul Horrocks, president of the SoE, during the Q&A on the opening night of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.
“I don’t think that’s the core competency of writers… we are wordsmiths, not video and cameramen…”
Full Extract:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/convergence.mp3]The WAN president and COO of Independent News and Media crunches the numbers of internet advertising while talking about how a fragmented mix of media may be the key to capturing the necessary market for newspapers prosper.
Global online advertising market worth 21 billion (pounds or dollars?) he says. 65 per cent in the hands of three companies, all the rest are scrabbling over a much smaller (admittedly) growing online share.
Full Extract:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/internetads.mp3]Gavin O’Reilly, chief operating officer of Independent News and Media and president of WAN, launched a stinging attack on senior media commentators in the UK while speaking at the Society of Editors meeting in Manchester.
Listen here to some of his concerns and other points of his speech:
Failings of media commentators: too much rhetoric, overly simplistic digital vs print approach…
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/oreillyone.mp3]Failures of US print papers, threat of reader apathy biggest threat not internet, real reasons for state of UK market – freesheets and enticements, search engines and ACAP…
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/oreillytwo.mp3]