Search results matching tags 'digital' and 'Blogging'

Geo IP Advertising System

2575552 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:45:51 GMT

Can anybody please recommend a Geo IP advertising system that I can look at.

Thanks.

How can newspapers make money on the web?

255762 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Ex-Washington post digital chief, Caroline Little, has been talking in Amsterdam having a stab at answering the question about how newspapers can make money online. It is a tough question with no easy answers, but her advice is quite right when she says the winners are going to be those people trying new stuff.

Speaking at the World Digital Publishing Conference in Amsterdam, Little, who advises The Guardian in the US, started by saying that despite impressive gains in audience and advertisers, newspaper websites do not produce revenue comparable to that of print newspapers despite their enviable reach.

Sad truth all those quite excellent websites, with video, and community do not pull in the cash. It makes an unhappy coupling as in this climate print circulations are shrinking and investment rising in digital – but without the rewards.

Little, who spoke at the AOP 2007 conference, cited the New York Times and The Washington Post, which are at the top of the heap in terms of their percentage of online revenue as part of overall revenue but it is still not enough and there is no ready-made solution.

That said Little has tips that are worth remembering and apply not only to newspapers, but to any online publishing business and chief among those is that while news websites share the same journalistic values as the newspapers the web is a different medium with different rules and that means trying new things. Here she adds a great piece of advice – not everything will work so do not be afraid to fail because as she puts it "fear of failure can be debilitating".

Little's four areas digital growth:

Multimedia storytelling

For a newspaper, storytelling options have long been limited to text, photography and graphics. The rise of the Web has added a number of new tools to this equation: video, audio, photo galleries, panoramic photos, blogs, etc. Now, we can approach a story with a different mindset, one that says, "what's the best way to tell this story?"

Database journalism

One often hears about the web's endless news hole. The endless news hole, of course, is largely a myth. You can only publish as much good journalism as you can produce, and that takes skilled reporters and editors. And most papers have fewer reporters and editors than it did a few years ago. But what that endless storage space is perfect for is databases that can useful to your readers. Washingtonpost.com has been very active in this area. For example, congressional voting database going back to 1991 and a searchable list of U.S. war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reader engagement.

Here are a few things you need to know about your readers: some of them act like jerks, many of them won¹t like the journalism you produce, and the angrier ones tend to be more active. But the upside is huge. When given a chance to participate in the conversation, readers come back. A lot.

Distribution (as key as content)

In this new world of media fragmentation, media companies cannot control the format in which readers consume our journalism. That's scary, but also a huge opportunity. We now have the chance to get our journalism in front of readers while they're driving via audio podcast or radio, while they¹re watching their televisions via set-top boxes or video podcasts, or while they¹re standing on a street corner looking for a restaurant via cell phone or iPod. And we can push journalism to them via RSS, email newsletters and widgets.

Turning back the digital tide

255762 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:59:00 GMT

The editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has had a historical brainwave. Bizarrely, against all received wisdom and sense, he wants to publish in the paper first. Forget the web, he says, we need to save new content for the newspaper. Unsurprisingly this has sparked a huge barrage of criticism.

You have to feel for the editor in question, Michael Leary, after he announced what he called his "Inquirer first" policy.

He wasn't just talking about one or two stories, but a lot in a memo sent to staff:

"Colleagues - Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won't post those stories online until they're in print."

There seems a bit of an us versus them thing going on with the paper and the website philly.com, as Leary goes on in his memo to say "we'll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we'll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand".

There is worse to come. While many are madly embracing blogging and the opportunities it offers for breaking news, developing stories and so much more, Leary, who maybe has King Canute's play book, insists that now blogger journalists at the paper cannot go willy nilly blogging until they have consulted editors:

"For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson".

Maybe his brain took a holiday. Maybe someone told him the web wasn't going to last. Who knows, but bloggers were pretty much united in their derision.

Jeff Jarvis could hardly contain himself and put it as starkly as possible. He did not hold fire:

"You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You're setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves."

Another blogger, Steve Outing, had this to say: "But this is an argument that has been decided (or so I thought), so it's disheartening to see a major newspaper go backward."

Who knows what Leary thinks of all of this. He has not issued another memo. What we do know is this: in 1983 the paper was selling more than 500,000, in 1999 that figure was a little over 400,000 copies. Today that figure is around 334,509.

It comes, of course against a back drop of a really difficult time in the US newspaper industry as thousands of jobs are lost and pagination is cut.

Co-incidentally it is about what the Guardian now sells. Can you imagine it suddenly turning back the clock? Of course not, nor anyone else for that matter.

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