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Media links of the day
Gawker Media’s director of editorial operations Scott Kidder was not impressed whenAdWeek’s website prompted him to share a story before he had read it. "Is there anything more desperate a publisher can do? Gross,” he wrote on his blog. But Nieman Lab now explains that this request to share the story was the result of a bug with Google Consumer Surveys, rather than a policy by AdWeek.
Nieman Lab also reports that MTV has partnered with a group of news organisations to create a news game, intended to interest young people in the upcoming US presidential elections. MTV has launched a beta version of the game, named Fantasy Election ’12, with the help of a grant from Knight Foundation, the article states.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple compares the way that different news outlets retracted a bogus story about a jilted dentist in Poland pulling out her ex-boyfriend’s teeth. He ranks the results from most to least transparent.
Sir Michael Lyons, former chairman of the BBC Trust, has said that the BBC should widen its search for a new director general to look beyond the internal candidates that have already applied, reports the Guardian.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Media links of the day
Gawker Media’s director of editorial operations Scott Kidder was not impressed when Adweek’s website prompted him to share a story before he had read it. Is there anything more desperate a publisher can do? Gross,” he wrote on his blog. But Nieman Lab now explains that this request to share the story was the result of a bug with Google Consumer Surveys, rather than a policy by AdWeek.
Nieman Lab also reports that MTV has partnered with a group of news organisations to create a news game, intended to interest young people in the upcoming US presidential elections. MTV has launched a beta version of the game, named Fantasy Election ’12, with the help of a grant from Knight Foundation, says the article.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple compares the way that different news outlets retracted a bogus story about a jilted dentist in Poland pulling out her ex-boyfriend’s teeth. He ranks the results from most to least transparent.
Sir Michael Lyons, former chairman of the BBC Trust, has said that the BBC should widen its search for a new director general to look beyond the internal candidates that have already applied, reports the Guardian.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Race to cover the Olympics
Olympic athletes are not the only ones making ambitions preparations for this summer’s games. The BBC outlined its plans for covering the Olympics in a statement yesterday, promising to provide 2,500 hours of live Olympic coverage, up from the 1,500 hours that the BBC produced at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
“We will be bringing live coverage of every Olympic Sport from every venue, both through a combination of BBC One and BBC Three and up to 24 simultaneous streams live online on PC, mobile, tablet or connected TV. These services will be complemented by coverage on Radio 5 live, mobile and tablet, while the majority of cable and satellite viewers will be able to access the 24 channels on their providers’ platform through the BBC Red Button,” said Roger Mosey, BBC director of London 2012.
The broadcaster promises that these will also be the “first truly ‘Digital Olympics’ ”, with coverage across four new media platforms, as well as TV and radio. The BBC has developed a mobile browser site and mobile app for Olympic news, and it touts the “enhanced and interactive video experience” that bbc.co.uk/sport users will receive during the Games. This includes 24 live video streams, HD live video coverage, live statistics and data, and dedicated pages for each individual sport, venue, athlete and country. The mobile video company LiveU also announced yesterday that the BBC would expand its use of LiveU’s LU60 uplink solution to enhance its coverage of the games.
The Guardian points out that the 24 streamed channels represent four times the number that the BBC has used in the past to broadcast the Wimbledon tennis championships. The paper also reports that some of the most important Olympic events, including the men’s 100 meter final, will be broadcast in 3D and in “super high definition” at certain venues.
In addition to providing cross-platform coverage, the BBC is also making an effort to fix coverage of the games in the heart of local communities. The broadcaster writes that it will use its network of BBC Big Screens across UK cities to create 22 “live sites,” where people can sit and watch the events.
Across the channel, Agence Press France announced that it would be sending 180 journalists to cover the London games, including 12 teams of video reporters, which will produce more than 1,000 videos in six different languages. As Press Gazette reported, the agency aims to provide 2,000 photos a day, and between 400 and 500 text stories.
The Olympic organising committee is dialling up its own media presence via digital channels. Alex Balfour, the head of new media for the London committee organising the 2012 Games, spoke at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference last month, where he pointed out that this year’s Games were taking place in a vastly different media landscape compared to the 2008 event, thanks to increased access to the Internet and to social media. Adapting to this new environment, the Olympics have already generated a significant online audience, with 4.3 million users registered to the official London 2012 website, and half a million people following the official @London2012 Twitter account.
New media will also change the way this summer's Games are reported by allowing athletes to become broadcasters themselves. “What will be new for an event of this scale is that athletes will be active on social media,” said Balfour at DME12, “It will be fascinating because it will give people insight into the athletes.”
Sources: BBC, Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union, Press Gazette, The Guardian, WAN-IFRA
Circulation growth to outstrip ad losses at The New York Times in 2014?
Are things looking good for The New York Times?
Peter Kafka writes for All Things D that, according to Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, the Times’ circulation growth may start balancing out its advertising losses by the middle of 2014.
Venkateshwar’s prediction suggests that the Times’ paywall, which boasts 450,000 subscribers, is starting to pay off. More than that, it may be seen as a vindication of the Times’ digital strategy, which drew criticism after the paper posted a year-on-year decline in digital advertising revenue last month.
When the drop was announced, paidContent noted that, even though Times’ subscription revenue increased by 9.7% from the previous year, the results were “worrisome for a news industry staking its future on digital revenue.”
Now Venkateshwar’s prediction illuminates the Time’s digital strategy and Kafka suggests that it throws new light on the Times’ decision in March to reduce the number of free articles that readers could view for free before hitting the paper’s paywall from 20 to 10. “The Times would sure like to accelerate Venkateshwar’s timeline, and that’s probably not going to happen by fixing its ad problem. Meanwhile, the paper seems relatively confident that raising the pay wall equals marketing the pay wall. And the nice thing about the system the paper has built is that if it doesn’t work, it can fiddle with the controls some more,” he writes.
However, paywalls have still plenty of vocal critics. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote in an article last week that, while a putting up a paywall may help a newspaper patch up declining ad revenue, “it isn’t even remotely forward-looking or adaptive. In other words, it does nothing to help a paper adapt to the web and to changing market conditions.” Ingram continues “To me, it makes more sense to try and figure out how to take advantage of the Web in order to provide something that the current market is likely to value, instead of focusing on how to squeeze as much as possible out of a declining market.”
But the number of newspapers operating paywalls is continuing to rise, and one of Canada’s largest newspapers, The Globe and Mail, announced last week that it will be putting one up. The next couple of years will be crucial in establishing whether they are the right choice.
Sources: All Things D, paidContent, GigaOm, Reuters
Media links of the day
Former News International CEO and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks is to be charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The Guardian reports that Brooks is one of six individuals who will be charged over allegations that they tried to hide documents and computers from police officers who were investigating phone hacking.
The Huffington Post, CNN and Mediaite all reported on a Tweet sent from a account in the name of North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, without realising that it was a spoof, reports Poynter. The article links to Poynter’s own advice on best practices for verifying information from social media.
Mathew Ingram argues in an article for GigaOm that Twitter is edging closer to becoming a media company, after it announced on Monday that it will be launching a weekly curated email, and released a job advert last week for the role of “sports producer”.
ProPublica has announced a reshuffle of its staff, which will take effect next year. Current Editor-in-Chief Paul Steiger will become executive chairman of the organisation, Stephen Engelberg will take over as editor-in-chief and General Manager Richard Tofel will become president.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Media links of the day
Former News International CEO and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks is to be charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The Guardian reports that Brooks is one of six individuals who will be charged over allegations that they tried to hide documents and computers from police officers who were investigating phone hacking.
The Huffington Post, CNN and Mediaite all reported on a Tweet sent from a account in the name of North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, without realising that it was a spoof, reports Poynter. The article links to Poynter’s own advice on best practices for verifying information from social media.
Mathew Ingram argues in an article for GigaOm that Twitter is edging closer to becoming a media company, after it announced on Monday that it will be launching a weekly curated email, and released a job advert last week for the role of “sports producer.”
ProPublica has announced a reshuffle of its staff, which will take effect next year. Current Editor-in-Chief Paul Steiger will become executive chairman of the organisation, Stephen Engelberg will take over as editor-in-chief and General Manager Richard Tofel will become president.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Mobile isn’t the future, it’s the present
“That future took a very long time to arrive, but finally it seems to be here,” writes the Guardian’s lead information architect Martin Belam in an article about mobile news.
He should know. Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller revealed at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference last month that during the past two years, the Guardian’s mobile audience has grown by a whopping 737%.
With the mobile age well and truly upon us, Belam discusses what two British broadcasters have done to create digital news products that are fully adapted to the new devices and new user habits.
First of all, he looks at ITV’s new mobile, web and tablet products, launched in March. As William Owen, who works for the company that designed the new products, explains, these new offerings were built to be entirely adapted to the digital environment. “We set out to create a digitally native news service, something made for the web and mobile that left behind the Guttenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation', ‘liveblogging,’ and ‘galleries’,” writes Owen.
The result is a live-stream of content with lots of short-form video, as well as big photographs and some text. Radically, the new design doesn’t just include ITV/ITN content, but also aggregates material from across the web. The format also allows users to filter content to follow individual stories.
Belam is not entirely convinced by the new ITV offering for mobile. “The stark, minimal front page on a small screen is not much more than a logo and a few headlines, and I think the impact of news is lessened, especially with human interest stories, without images,” he writes. Even so, he acknowledges the new design is “a radical approach to delivering digital news, which leaves behind a lot of the baggage that usually comes with being a traditional news publisher.”
Belam says ITV’s design is also “responsive” i.e. it adapts to the size and shape of the device it’s being viewed on. The same is true, writes Belam, of the BBC’s new mobile web application, which likewise changes depending where it is being viewed. The BBC’s Chris Russell explains the idea in a blogpost: “Basically, you come to our website, we do the hard work… before delivering a page in the best shape and size, with the most 'features', that your device can support.”
Again, Belam is not entirely convinced. He cites a Tumblr post by Alex Morris, who argues that users should be able to choose the format that they see web apps in. By giving users a choice, he suggests, users will be able to choose which content they want to view, and adapt to external factors, like different levels of bandwidth.
As these questions are being debated, one thing is certain: this is an important discussion. As the BBC’s Russell notes, “In an average week, the BBC News mobile websites and apps are visited by around 9.7m users worldwide on mobile and tablet devices. That represents about 26% of the total traffic to BBC News Online.”
This share seems set to grow. A recent article in Forbes quotes, CEO Tim Cook, who says "through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones."
Questions about mobile design aren’t for the future, they’re for right now.
Sources: Guardian, WAN-IFRA, Made by Many, Alex Morris Tumblr, Forbes
Image via Flickr
SFN Report: Carbon footprint - digital vs print
Publishers have spent a long time considering the financial implications of moving from print to digital. But there’s also another important question to consider: what is the environmental impact of the switch?
A new SFN report is being put together, which will examine this issue in detail. The project will present summaries of six studies into the environmental impact of different news channels, and will address difficulties in the ways that these impacts are measured.
Featuring tables, illustrations and graphs, the report will compare the carbon footprint generated by various means of publishing, and will also look into the environmental effect of business meetings at publishing companies. The project is being conducted in cooperation with WAN-IFRA’s Growing Green initiative, which promotes and investigates environmentally friendly publishing practices.
The report will be edited by Malin Picha, who worked as editor for various magazines and newspapers in Sweden, before becoming a project manager at the Swedish Media Publishers’ Association. After first researching the development of electronic paper and e-readers in Sweden, Picha later shifted her focus to more environmental projects. She is currently writing her licentiate thesis in media technology with focus on environmental impacts.
Work started on this new report in May and it will be ready for publication in time for WAN-IFRA’s World Newspaper Congress this September in Kiev. Here at SFN, we will keep you updated with its progress
Front covers: still front page news?
Have front covers lost their edge? As more and more news migrates online, it would be easy to think they might have.
When it comes to online news, not only is there no fixed “front cover” on most newspaper websites - which are updated throughout the day. The news that goes on a newspaper’s homepage is also not necessarily what pulls in the audience.
“Seventy-five percent of uniques are coming from external sources, only 25 percent are coming to the homepage,” said Google’s head of news products Richard Gingras, in a recent discussion about online journalism at the Paley Center’s international council of media executives, quoted by paidContent
As a consequence, the virility of certain stories on social media, rather than their appearance on the front page of the paper, is arguably what is determining the news agenda. A recent infographic feature on Mashable implied that traffic to news sites from social media platforms has increased by 57% since 2009, and suggested that over 50% of American’s have learned about breaking news through social media, rather than from a traditional news source. Of course there is a difference between spreading breaking news, and determining which news is important, but arguably, social media is now becoming the forum for both. Do these changes mean that page 1 has lost its role in setting the news agenda?
For more on this story, please see our sister publication www.editorsweblog.org
Media links of the day
The Big Issue, a magazine founded to help the homeless, publishes its 1,000th issue today, reports Journalism.co.uk. The article quotes John Bird, one of the publication’s founders, who says that this milestone makes him feel “ a mix of joy and discomfort, largely because we've achieved a lot, but we've still got more work to do."
Poynter provides some handy tips about using audio more effectively in multimedia stories. Among other things, the article advises journalists to use sound to provide extra detail for stories, and suggests that they use layers of audio to create a richer listening experience.
Nieman Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance compares the video games industry and the journalism industry – and looks at how the growth of the internet has disrupted both. LaFrance argues that he way that the games industry has adapted to the change has a lot to teach publishers.
Enrique Peña Nieto, one of Mexico’s presidential candidates is said to have paid journalists for coverage, writes Roy Greenslade for The Guardian. Greenslade states that, according to two recent articles in the Mexican press, Peña Nieto is said to have paid journalists around £1.5m for “mentions”.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Media links of the day
The Big Issue, a magazine founded to help the homeless, publishes its 1,000th issue today, reports Journalism.co.uk. The article quotes John Bird, one of the publication’s founders, who says that this milestone makes him feel “a mix of joy and discomfort, largely because we've achieved a lot, but we've still got more work to do."
Poynter provides some handy tips about using audio more effectively in multimedia stories. Among other things, the article advises journalists to use sound to provide extra detail for stories, and suggests that they use layers of audio to create a richer listening experience.
Nieman Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance compares the video games industry and the journalism industry – and looks at how the growth of the internet has disrupted both. LaFrance argues that he way that the games industry has adapted to the change has a lot to teach publishers.
Enrique Peña Nieto, one of Mexico’s presidential candidates is said to have paid journalists for coverage, writes Roy Greenslade for The Guardian. Greenslade states that, according to two recent articles in the Mexican press, Peña Nieto is said to have paid journalists around £1.5m for “mentions”.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Front covers: still front page news?
Have front covers lost their edge? As more and more news migrates online, it would be easy to think they might have.
When it comes to online news, not only is there no fixed “front cover” on most newspaper websites - which are updated throughout the day. The news that goes on a newspaper’s homepage is also not necessarily what pulls in the audience.
“Seventy-five percent of uniques are coming from external sources, only 25 percent are coming to the homepage,” said Google’s head of news products Richard Gingras, in a recent discussion about online journalism at the Paley Center’s international council of media executives, quoted by paidContent
As a consequence, the virility of certain stories on social media, rather than their appearance on the front page of the paper, is arguably what is determining the news agenda. A recent infographic feature on Mashable implied that traffic to news sites from social media platforms has increased by 57% since 2009, and suggested that over 50% of American’s have learned about breaking news through social media, rather than from a traditional news source. Of course there is a difference between spreading breaking news, and determining which news is important, but arguably, social media is now becoming the forum for both. Do these changes mean that page 1 has lost its role in setting the news agenda?
Perhaps this is true for daily newspapers. But a few recent stories have shown that magazine front covers are still very much capable of making a splash. The first is the cover of Time Magazine, which shows a 26-year-old mother breast-feeding her almost four-year-old son. The image, which as Poynter points out was only loosely connected to the content of the lead story, has generated a massive response. Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted to more than 2 million followers that the cover was “exploitive and extreme." Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett called the cover “a really cheap shot” when she appeared on the talk show “Morning Joe”, as the New York Post reports. Forbes published an article asking “Will Time's Breastfeeding Cover Be Bad For Business?” And Gawker, choosing not to beat around the bush, published a story titled “Mom Puts Boob in Preschooler’s Mouth on Cover of Time”. All of this discussion is despite the fact that the article itself is behind a paywall, and is presumably not accessible to plenty of the people who are talking about it.
Newsweek magazine’s latest cover has also generated coverage. Leading into an article about the US President’s endorsement of gay marriage, written by political blogger Andrew Sullivan, the cover shows Obama wearing with a rainbow-colour halo with the headline “The First Gay President”. The image prompted comments from The Huffington Post, The Hill, Gawker, Politico and NYDailyNews, which discuss Sullivan’s writing and compare the headline to Toni Morrison’s famous description of Bill Clinton as “the first black president”.
Both covers show that, although the way we access the news has changed, magazine covers still have an important role to play in sparking debate and conversation. Keith Kelly at the New York Post quotes Time’s Editor-In-Chief Rick Stengel, who says, “you want people to be having that conversation. The idea of all magazine covers is to get people to pay attention to what is inside.” When it comes to this week's magazine covers, it looks like it's mission accomplished.
Sources: PaidContent, Mashable, Time, Gawker (1) (2), Forbes, The Huffington Post, Politico, The Hill, New York Post
What they were saying at the Newsroom Summit
It's a wrap -- the 11th annual Newsroom Summit came to an end in Hamburg on Friday after examing the major issues of concern to editors everywhere. Here are some of the things they were saying at the World Editors Forum event:
“Never before have we had access to so much information and never before have the possibilities been so limitless for doing journalism."
Paul Lewis, Special Projects Editor, The Guardian, United Kingdom
“We are in the right spot and the right time with the right tools, and it is up to use not to screw it up,” he said. “We were taken by surprise by the internet. We were not taken by surprise this time.”
Tomas Brunegard, CEO, Stampen Group, Sweden
“Getting the story right, and ethically right, is more important than getting a short-term scoop. We suffer from a lack of trust, and this as implications for the entire industry.”
Erik Bjerager, President, World Editors Forum
"I'm interested in long-term survival – if people don't pay, we don't get paid. Should content be paid for? We believe this in the non-digital world. Why should it be different in the digital world?"
Knut Englemann, Editor, Wall Street Journal Germany
“Paid content on digital platforms is not a fashion or fluke, it is a core strategic issue for the future.”
Dietmar Schantin, Founder, Institute for Media Strategies, Austria
“As a journalist, I want to get out there and reach as many people as I can. Why are so many people thinking that only paid-for content is valuable?"
Mathias Müller von Blumencron, Editor-in-Chief, Der Spiegel, Germany
“Every new person you bring into the newsroom should be to do a job you’ve never had before.”
Anette Novak, former Editor, Norran, Sweden, Board Member World Editors Forum
“At home, our journalists were using digital media, but as soon as they came into the newsroom, they were print journalists. We had to convince them that other people were using digital media too.”
Pierre Mauchamp, Deputy Editor-in-chief, La Voix du Nord, France
“Cultural change isn’t something that happens in months, it happens in years.”
Henry Bouvier, Video Co-ordinator, Agence France-Presse, France
“In the 20th century, there were two pillars of revenues for the press – circulation and advertising. In the 21st century, a third pillar is needed – licensing the re-use of newspaper content.”
Margaret Boribon, Secretary General, Copiepresse, Belgium
"Why is it that, despite all the problems of integrating newsrooms, we are having the narrative that if you are not yet merged now, you will be?”
Wolfgang Blau, Editor, Zeit Online, Germany
Keep an eye out for the conference Executive Report, coming soon.
Upcoming WEF events:
Boost digital in the newsroom Study Tour to London, Paris and Berlin, 20-24 May.
Annual World Editors Forum conference, Kiev, Ukraine, 2-5 September.
Media links of the day
The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s biggest newspapers, is erecting a metered paywall in the style of the New York Times in an attempt to boost revenue, reports Reuters. The article also mentions that the paper’s staff is being asked to take unpaid holiday over the summer, in order to cut costs.
Former News of the World editor and News International CEO Rebekah Brooks appeared before the Leveson Inquiry today. The Guardian has comprehensive coverage on its blog.
Andrew Beaujon at Poynter discuses Time’s controversial cover featuring a young mother breast-feeding her son, who is almost four years old. Beaujon argues that the image has stimulated the “conversation” that newsweeklies are looking for.
An article in Nieman Lab examines how Internet memes are used as a form of dissent in China.
For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.
Former Público journalists form a cooperative and make a bid for publico.es
Last February, the print edition of the left-leaning Spanish daily Público was closed down, after its bankrupt parent company Mediapubli failed to come up with enough funds to maintain it. Now a group of Público’s former journalists have formed a co-operative, and want to buy up the paper’s still-functioning website publico.es.
Working through the co-operative “Cooperativa Integral Catalana”, these former journalists aim to purchase publico.es, and to launch a new, weekly print edition of the paper. If this plan works, “other channels and formats have not been ruled out, once these first two are consolidated,” says the group, which promotes its cause under the name “Más Público”.
The co-operative has now made an offer to the commercial court, which is handling the sale of publico.es, to buy the site for a total of 240,000 euros. Although the former editor of Público, Trini Deiros, told El Mundo “our offer has been evaluated very positively by the bankruptcy administers,” the group will not know whether their bid has been successful until May 22, the deadline for the court’s decision.
At the beginning of April, the former Público journalists began appealing to the general public to support their project financially though the crowd-funding site Verkami. They have now met their target of raising 30,000 euros on this platform – the largest amount ever raised through this site in Spain, according to Deiros, quoted by El Mundo.
Más Público explains on its website that it intends to build a co-operative of “workers and users” to support Público through different kinds of membership. Members who are “workers”, “subscribers”, “users” and “collaborators”, will contribute different amounts of money, and who will shape the publication’s output in various ways, states the group’s website maspublico.org.
Más Público writes on its fund-raising page that, even if its plans to buy publico.es itself are not successful, it will not abandon its project. “If at some point we are denied the chance to buy publico.es, we will continue with this project to form a cooperative of journalists and readers and create a media outlet that is democratic and for the people,” states the article. “If this is the case,” it adds, “we will re-direct the money that has been collected into a new publication with the same philosophy and the same team, but a different name.”
According to its website, Mâs Público calculates that, if its plans to buy publico.es succeed, it will need to reach 5,000 print and 5,000 digital subscribers in order to be economically viable. These funds, along with advertising from the digital and print editions of the paper, will be enough to support a staff of around 60, the group calculates.
Even before the sale of publico.es is closed, the former Público journalists have already got together to produce a print product. This Saturday, reports El Mundo, the cooperative is putting out a “self-financed” edition of a newspaper, which will have a print run on 16,000 copies and will be distributed for free in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia. The paper will cover topics including education, health and unrest in the Arab World, and will be put together by the cooperative’s roughly 30 members, according to El Mundo.
Sources: sfnblog, El Mundo, Prnoticias (1) (2), maspublico.org, verkami
Dealing with the enemies of change
Do you enjoy your job? Do you think you’re doing the right thing? Do you have a purpose?
Those are the questions media companies should be asking its employees if they want to succeed in a rapidly changing media environment.
Tomas Brunegård, CEO of Sweden’s Stampen Group, puts an inspiring finish on the 11th annual Newsroom Summit with a look at the big issues facing news media as they cope with changes that impact the industry’s ability to fulfil its central role in democratic society.
He points out how the media can help transform regions, as it has done in the Arab Spring. “There is a major democratic movement going on around the world, and this is one of the changes we are seeing: the power of media.”
He also says the rapid pace of technological change, particular the “tornado” of mobile growth, is a positive development for news media.
“We are in the right spot and the right time with the right tools, and it is up to us not to screw it up,” he says. “We were taken by surprise by the internet. We were not taken by surprise this time.”
Mr Brunegard identifies several “enemies” of change that media companies need to discuss openly and deal with.
One is credibility, and the image the industry has with government and the public. “We need to deal with this, because it locks us into a position which has an impact on our ability to work freely,” he said.
Another is, “We are so scared about the future and where revenues come from that we jump into any partnerships that are there. I’ll just say, ‘Apple,’ ‘Google,’ and ‘Facebook’ and you know what we mean.”
Still another is failing to face the reality that power is shifting to consumers and individuals.
A lack of self-confidence is also an enemy of change. “There is a doom-and-gloom mentality out there. Sometimes we feel it’s like it is Jurassic Park we’re working in – and we’re not. The attitude from us as leaders in the newspaper industry is so important.”
But perhaps the biggest enemy is failure to counter the natural human instinct to stick with the familiar and resist change. Motivation is the antidote, he says – ensuring that people have autonomy, are given the opportunity to excel, and have a purpose in their work.
“It’s all about attitude, it’s between the shoulders,” Mr Brunegard concludes. “We can change. We can change together, and we can change at a much faster pace than we have in the past.”
“We can make a difference in the future. We can change society.”
Digital news cooperatives
Meinolf Ellers, Founder and MD of Germany’s dpa infocom, discusses how news agencies and newspapers can work together to cut costs.
The main challenges in the modern newsroom are that there are now more platforms and channels, which lead to more complexity.
“We need more and better customized content, but at the same time we are forced to reduce costs,” Ellers says.
The key to moving forward, he says, is using the strict reporter/editor principle: media-neutral news reporting and multi-channel publishing.
In doing this, Ellers says that metadata, structure planning and real-time workflows are essential.
“Newspapers are becoming local news agencies,” Meinolf Ellers, Founder and MD of Germany’s dpa infocom.
“We have to talk about metadata, and I know for editors this is witchcraft, but it’s the only way,” he says.
Metadata is already being produced, he says – it’s just not being used regularly enough by newspapers. For example, once a digital photo is rendered, the metadata is carried through all the processes, all the channels.
“In the end, it’s about increasing efficiency,” he says.
Reciprocity key to social media success
Who owns the social media relationship?
“It isn’t Facebook, it isn’t Twitter, and it isn’t you,” says Francois Nel, Founding Director of the Journalism Leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K.
“Relationships are established, maintained, even dissolved. They aren’t owned, not by anyone, and they depend on reciprocity,” he says.
In a presentation at the annual Newsroom Summit on “the alchemy of social business model innovation,” Mr Nel compares the performance of two of the U.K.'s most successful media companies online: the Mail and the Guardian.
He notes that while both enjoy exponentially growing audiences in the digital sphere, the Mail is highly profitable and the Guardian is loss-making. He attributes that to the companies' different approaches to online content.
While the Mail keeps digital and print separate – even allowing different content to be created and published on digital platforms – the Guardian largely uses its digital platforms as a substitute for the print edition, he says.
“With the Mail, we see a strategy where the digital channels supplement the papers,” he says. “At the Guardian, the digital channels substitute the paper.”
Measuring social media success
Why is social media important? That is the question posed by Lukas Maixner, GM and co-founder of Socialbakers, a social media and digital analytics company with customers in more than 60 countries. There are two main answers: communities and traffic.
Mr Maixner says his company helps other companies measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Social media websites are mostly based on recommendations – rather than search results, he says. “If it comes from social, users are more likely to stay.”
Media companies should also find out the most engaging types of posts – such as links, photos, video, etc.
RollUp Media: making niche content pay?
Hearing that niche sites are the future of online news is nothing new. “Write to people’s passion, and they will gobble up just about anything,” was one of the survival tips that news site designer Stijn Debrouwere gave to publishers in a recent blog post about the state of modern journalism. “MacRumors and many other niche sites do this,” he observed.
However, an article published by paidContent yesterday suggested that, while they might be popular, many of these niche sites have trouble actually making money. “We noticed digital publishers, especially in Europe, were struggling to build digital businesses,” former Brightcove vice president Rags Gupta told paidContent.
To address this problem, former executives from DoubleClick, Demand Media and BrightCove have created a start-up named RollUp Media, and which aims to help niche online publishers monetize their content, says the article.
“Niche sites may have websites, blogs and a Twitter presence but they don’t know much about SEO and monetisation,” states Gupta. He tells paidContent, “We have built a platform that covers all aspects of content: creation, distribution and monetisation.”
The article notes that the specifics of the service that RollUp Media will offer are still not clear, but suggests that they will offer technology solutions to help small digital publishers improve their SEO. The company has already bought up a technology firm named FeedTrace, which automatically aggregates niche content from Twitter, and it is using the technology to run the gossip and parenting sites InstantPulp and ParentPulp.
Given that there are still no details about exactly how RollUp media will help specialist content producers online, it’s still difficult to judge whether or not they will be a success. But like the decision by fashion blogger Frockwriter to launch a metered paywall around her blog, the company could represent an interesting step in the search for ways to monetise niche online content.
Sources: stdout.be, paidContent, sfnblog
