Search results matching tag 'Telegraph'

Life in the clickstream: the future of journalism

255762 — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Everyone who works online and has anything to do with publishing should be reading this. A report out today that attempts to map the carnage in publishing and take a guess at the future. Full of good nuggets.

With nods to both the Guardian's Emily Bell ("We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media") and Roy Greenslade ("Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die") the starting point and the narrative of the Future of Journalism report produced by the Media Alliance in Australia is the declining fortunes of print and the challenges that disruptive technologies bring in the Australian, UK and US markets.

The starring names of this story are all there as papers like the The Christian Science Monitor fold, as others like the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and CNN rise to the challenge.

No one is immune and while no one is sure exactly what the solutions are, people do know that one thing's for sure: that news media has fundamentally changed and that publishing has to adapt to "the economic and technological landscape".

The companies that will survive and prosper will be those that remember and nurture their core business, which also have the journalists on board who are equipped with the skills to flourish in the new landscape. For the journalists, it is the ones with those skills who will prosper. Hopefully.

The investment question is as important as the question of what content we actually produce.

The report asks a lot of questions about content (it is after all what we do) and provides some answers: where are people going online and what are people doing? It looks at the kinds of content they are consuming and what that tells us.

There are some really good case studies here which offer a pick 'n' mix smorgasbord of options for publishers to choose from and experiment with. Not everything is going to work.

It takes a brief look at CNN's IReport mini-site devoted to user-generated content, which has been a real success for CNN. The news giant has learned well to adapt and ride the Web 2.0 wave like the best. Its success with UGC and other experiments like Twitter offer a lot.

It takes a look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "where quotas rule".

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution restructured in 2007, targeted older reporters and editors for redundancy and divided those left into two main sections: news and information, with about 170 journalists who break news; and enterprise, with about 50 staff concentrating on features and investigations.

It then imposed controversial quotas on reporters: 60 pieces a year for narrative and profile writers, and 12 for investigative reporters.

The UK is well represented in this report and The Daily Telegraph is billed as the original "newsroom of the future". There is a quote from the paper's digital editor Edward Roussel who is worth repeating with his line that the new era calls for a new type of reporter, with the attributes of a wire journalist or a sports reporter.

"If you imagine the way a football reporter works, filing grabs every few minutes and then turning the whole thing into a story very quickly after the end of the game, that is the way our reporters work now when filing for online."

Roussel is also a believer (and really who isn't) in Jeff Jarvis's belief that success lies in premium content and that we must all live by this maxim: "Do what you do best and link to the rest".

Johnston Press' The Lancashire Evening Post and its "converged newsroom" is here with its newsroom seen as a model as to what regional newspapers can do. Its newsroom has evolved to use Sony HD video cameras, Edirol digital recorders, Soundslide for galleries and Avid Pro Express for editing videos. The Post, and its 65 editorial staff, blossomed into lep.co.uk.

Online content is discussed at every conference. Lep.co.uk publishes stories continuously and most stories appear online first. "We have the market to ourselves as a regional newspaper, so we can control our content, which is a bit different to our national papers," says Post's deputy editor, Mike Hill.

The convergence of journalism and data is looked at in EveryBlock.com. This site is the brainchild of former Washington Post journalist Adrian Holovaty. Working for the Post in Chicago, he set up chicagocrime.org to analyse daily crime reports from the Chicago Police Department’s website and reorganised the information so people could see what was happening in their neighbourhood. Now with Everyblock no matter where you live you can see what's happening with on your block - it is local news at the micro level and another example of the rise of community sites. Database-inspired journalism is much bigger in the US, but offers untapped opportunities here and elsewhere.

Bloggers on steroids/the rise of community journalism- the community model is seen as the way forward by some and a red herring by others. The report looks at in the journalist-free news operation: Examiner.com.

Examiner.com is owned and run by the Clarity Media Group in Denver, Colorado, and also runs freesheets in cities including San Francisco, Washington and Baltimore. It is owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz and run by former AOL executive Michael Sherrod. The group has domain names for hyperlocal sites in 70 US cities and has officially launched in beta in San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, and Seattle (all markets where the paid for print titles are risk and folding like the San Francisco Chronicle and the late Seattle Post Intelligencer). Almost following the scent of print death.

The idea behind Examiner.com is pure citizen journalism with contributions from examiners paid by numbers of page views and advertising clicks (not unlike the model used by Nick Denton at Gawker Media). The pay starts at $2.50 for every thousand page views and, according to TechCrunch, the median income is $25 a month. Not exactly a future career.

"We are building a community of Examiners to focus on specific topics ranging from sports to tourism to local politics," a post on the website said recently. "Examiners are local experts who have a voice, knowledge and an opinion. Think of an Examiner like a blogger on steroids."

And so to The Washington Post, which has long been seen as a pioneer. The report looks at some of the Post's work on video, which again offers a lot of ideas. The speed and focus is impressive.

Jim Brady, Washingtonpost.com executive editor, says his team were poor relations in the pecking order until recently, but that has all changed.

Brady said the Post had introduced comprehensive training and all reporters could shoot video, which – he said – was "the hot thing now".

"We have a political blogger out there who has a camera mounted on his computer and when a big story breaks he will do the 60 seconds on what this means, and he will push a button on his computer, send it to our computer guys and 10 minutes later there will be a video of him up there reacting to Teddy Kennedy having a brain tumour … it is totally crappy video, it is a webcam, but it gets it out there.

Brady adds: "Production values are not everything – communicating simple information is what matters. You might get 10,000 video streams for something that took 90 seconds to make."

The Washingtonpost.com has six dedicated video journalists who make everything from documentary-style stories to three minute campaign reports. They are part of a team of about 100 dedicated online journalists who prepare copy from the print operation, moderate blogs, produce video and podcasts and produce original stories.

Niche for news junkies. Here the report quotes the American Journalism Review's Philip Meyer who recently envisaged a “smaller, less frequently published version, packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies, that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product".

That sounds like a description of a news magazine as much as it does a newspaper. The model is the same - as long as what you offer is the best in your field representing premium value to advertisers then you will find a market.

Ownership and partnerships are looked at as the report concludes. Both hot topics. Will US newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times become grand old charitable trusts?

What new partners do we need to find, and does this mean looking in areas where you may not have looked before as being 'frenemies' becomes the new norm as companies join rivals in joint ventures, each contributing what they do best.

This report comes in the same week that the World Association of Newspapers had its conference (issued this: Newspaper Circulation Grows Despite Economic Downturn) and both see reasons to be optimistic as they look to the future where many models, new and old, look like they will co-exist. This will doubtless mean that a lot less trees will be needed.

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Mobile banners – really?

693284 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:18:00 GMT

News arrives that CNET, the Telegraph and Trinity Mirror have signed up to Nokia’s Media Network – so advertisers can add them to the list of sites on which their mobile banners can appear. But, should they bother?

Nokia claims that click-through rates average 10% on the network but, having seen mobile banners in situ and tried to navigate around mobile sites on a regular basis, I can’t help thinking that won’t last for long.

Most mobile banners are for mobile content – games, screensavers, ringtones, nudie pictures etc. That’s because that’s all you can really buy through your phone. They are thus a natural click for mobile users. They also tend to dominate, yet blend into, the existing content on mobile web sites in a way online banners really don’t, which helps the click-through rates. And as more services come to mobile, especially with pay-per-call being more commonly exploited, then ad space on mobile sites will be more sought after by traditional advertisers, and rightly so.

But, it won’t be long before the decline sets in. As more advertisers arrive, the more likely it is that less value will be delivered behind the click. That will help us to develop our mobile banner blind-spot. Meanwhile, mobile usage will see that the amount of inventory available goes up by at least as much as demand. All that means that the value of banners will decline just as it has online. On big horizontal sites like MSN and Facebook, they go for 30p a thousand – that’s approaching free.

So, for a while, mobile banners will generate good cash for media owners as advertisers try it out. But, once their agencies get round to doing the numbers, something won’t add up and commoditisation will hit the mobile sector too. Maybe then, while all that plays out, we should be focusing more attention on where lasting value is likely to be.

Search has shown us how ‘advertising’ really works on the web – and it’s not really advertising. We look for things, it offers links to those things. That some of those links are paid for is neither here nor there – in fact, when you consider the investment in SEO, they’re all paid for.

The same thinking has to apply to mobile – to deliver monetisable services not advertising messages – and that’s why I’d think hard before I bought a load of mobile ad banners, even from Nokia.

Wheatcroft plays digital Canute

255762 — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:54:30 GMT

Some reports suggest that one of the reasons behind Patience Wheatcroft's exit from her job as editor of the Sunday Telegraph was her attitude towards the paper's digital revolution.

Wheatcroft is said to have been antagonistic towards the Telegraph’s digital revolution, which has been led by Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis.

She was apparently against her staff working on the paper's seven-day web operation and "virtually" no-one on the Sunday had taken part in the Telegraph's successful podcasts either, according to the Evening Standard.

The Guardian reported on a meeting that took place this morning where incoming editor, Ian MacGregor - who joins from Lewis' team at the Daily - addressed staff .

The meeting was apparently also attended by Lewis, now editor-in-chief of the two titles, and Richard Ellis, the executive director of editorial of the Telegraph Media Group. Wheatcroft was briefly praised at the meeting and the reason given for her departure at the meeting was "strategic" differences.

"That was taken to mean a failure to embrace the internet," the insider told the Guardian.

While there is sure to be more to her departure from the Telegraph Group, it seems almost madness that in 2007 a newspaper editor could play the role of some King Canute, trying to resist the tide and oppose digital progress as newspaper sales shrink and newspaper editors flex there digital muscles.

The Sunday Telegraph is far from immune to this. Its six-month average figure was down by 2.57% year on year to 656,234 copies.

The Guardian for many years led the way digitally. The Times has since caught up and the Telegraph has come on in great leaps and bounds.

Telegraph Media Group gained the highest number of shortlisted entries in this year's AOP awards, with 11, including four for My Telegraph, closely followed by Guardian News & Media’s nine shortlisted entries,

In the most recent sent of digital ABCs, Telegraph.co.uk posted 9m unique users in July, almost a 2m jump on its figures from June. It also narrowly beat Times Online with 78m page impressions.

However, the Guardian Unlimited network, covering www.guardian.co.uk and observer.co.uk, is still the one to beat. It held onto its commanding position, receiving 16.1m unique users in July, a jump of around 1.5m from the month before. Its page impressions totalled 157m, while its unique users listed from the UK only totalled 5.9m or 37% of total UK unique users.

Slow down for online newspapers grows

255762 — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:18:00 GMT

After the New York Times last week, more evidence that the lifeline of online advertising is not looking as strong as it once was, with more newspaper firms saying growth is slowing

It was reported last week after the New York Times Company warned that online advertising growth this year won't be as strong as the 30% it had projected.

Since then Tribune Company, which is in the process of being sold to Chicago real estate billionaire Sam Zell in a deal worth $8.2bn has also said that the growth rate for first-quarter interactive revenue was sharply lower than a year earlier. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, which earlier in the week announced around 150 jobs at the LA Times with 70 of those in the news room. The story was posted on the newspaper's website.

Gannett, which owns Newsquest in the UK and USA Today, has also said online revenue growth slowed in the first quarter from a year earlier.

The Wall Street Journal quoted the chief executive of Washington Post's online arm, Caroline Little, as saying growth was "slowing slightly across the board but is still very healthy" while Journal publisher Dow Jones reported 30% growth in online ad revenue in the first quarter, up from 26% a year earlier. However, Dow Jones website has a different model and is subscription only.

The WSJ quoted analysts saying that the falls in online revenues at the NY Times and Tribune reflect a broader trend.

"We absolutely see slower growth coming," says Kip Cassino, vice-president of research at Borrell Associates, a media-research firm. "Generally, newspapers tend to believe things that have been good are going to get better. And that's not always the case."

It is expected that the growth rate in online ad spending in newspapers will likely fall to a percentage in the low 20s this year from 28% last year. Coupled with the decline in classified advertising, it's not good news at all.

Then there is the fact that advertisers are looking elsewhere from traditional news sites, which was a trend that began with blogs. Last week, social-networking site MySpace added a news feature and is boosting its ad-sales efforts.

According to Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy: "Advertisers are getting less scared of blogs and newsgroups and now are beginning to take money away from the traditional newspapers' sites."

Newspapers need to attract new advertisers and sources of income online. Part of that is coming with moves into TV and radio type production, with UK papers, The Times, Telegraph and Guardian Unlimited as active as anyone.

They need more than that, however, particularly as search marketing continues to rise - but sadly for newspaper that market is owned by Google and Yahoo!. Newspapers are tying up deals with search engines, like Hearst Corp, MediaNews Group, and McClatchey signing a broad advertising deal with Yahoo!, but there is a worry that this only takes more power away from them and gives it to the search engines. The search engines already have the content (not their content of course, but it turns out that it is not content that is king, but other people's content if you are Yahoo! or Google).

No wonder that Sir Martin Sorrell said on Friday that the search giant is a long term enemy.

Telegraph poles

255762 — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:42:22 GMT

Simon Waldman, The Guardian's digital media chief, has hit back at the Telegraph's number one website claim.

He tackles the whole web auditing business in detail and if you were ever a little shaky on what exactly means (and why it matters) what then you should be reading it.

His piece comes in response to the claim that the Telegraph started talking up late last year in a £300,000 ad campaign created by Clemmow Hornby Inge. If you've sat on a Tube recently you've probably found it hard to miss the ads from the Telegraph Group proclaiming that, according to figures from internet monitor Hitwise, Telegraph.co.uk had the most amount of visitors of any quality UK newspaper website between July and September 2006.

Of course, anyone who knows even very little about web stats knows that Hitwise figures are not quoted by publishers when it comes to auditing their websites or selling advertising on them.

However, the problem is that because there are multiple currencies in use it’s confusing and allows people like the Telegraph to come out and say "We're number one (according to someone or other)".

So why are the Telegraph using them you ask? It’s a good question. If you're not the number one or even number two, er, or even number three newspaper (ouch) and someone shows someone within your organisation figures showing you're suddenly an all-conquering number one, then I think someone, who really shouldn't be allowed to, starts making stupid decisions – resulting in £300k ad campaigns.

The campaign has clearly irked a number of people because complaints have been made to the Advertising Standards Authority about the Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website claim.

You might wonder how the Telegraph managed it, when in November the ABC Electronic had Guardian Unlimited with 13,841,182 users, followed by the Times Online with 9,028,963 and The Sun Online 7,578,042. Telegraph.co.uk had 6,374,362.

Going from 4th to 1st would be something of an achievement. Who knows maybe the silver surfers, (no not the Marvel one) have suddenly gone web crazy, allowing the Telegraph to soar.

Waldman writes: "Initially, I thought this was just a marketing wheeze - just to put themselves back in the frame. But word gets back that they really believe it. There has been a complaint to the ASA (not from me, I should add), and ultimately it will be their call whether this is legal, honest and decent etc. But, in the meantime, I think it probably makes most sense to have a look at the figures in a bit of detail here and let people make their own mind up.

"And yes before I get going, the big question is does it matter anyway? But I’ll get to that at the end."

Read the rest of Simon's piece here.