All posts tagged ‘Newspapers’

Apple is expected to announce a new subscription plan for newspapers that will give publishers access for the first time to subscriber information,  Mercury News reports, citing unnamed sources.

The reported concession by Apple would make the process opt-in — meaning that (for example) you could, as a subscriber to a New York Times app, choose to let Apple share your details with the newspaper. But Apple would not by default.

It’s a small but important step in the right direction for publishers, which have not yet set up flocked to iPad despite widespread belief (or hope) that the Apple tablet will be a significant creative and revenue platform for print media. Part of the slow adoption is due to the platform being very new, and unavailable to most developers before it was launched April 3, and part is the 30 percent fee Apple charges for app sales.

But arguably the biggest impediment, according to publishers, is the fact that Apple “owns” the customer relationship, making it difficult to provide potential advertisers with crucial demographic data, and to reach out directly to readers for a host of marketing reasons.

There’s gold in those apps, for those who can mine it. The WSJ’s and Financial Times’ iPad apps reportedly sold strongly well this summer. And following strong sales of Wired Magazine’s iOS app and other positive indicators, the managing director of Conde Nast UK (Conde Nast is the publisher of Wired.com), declared on Wednesday that 15 years from now, 30 to 40 percent of this publisher’s sales revenue will originate on app platforms such as the iPad.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• IPad Apps Could Put Apple in Charge of the News
• Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets
• Apple’s Tablet Could Be Print Industry’s Lifeboat
• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• Wired iPad App Sells 24000 Copies in First 24 Hours
• Wired Reader on the iPad
• Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition Goes Live
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration

Photo: Flickr/mightykenny

In 1938, Hugh Cudlipp changed the world by publishing a picture of a topless model in a newspaper called The Sunday Pictorial.

From this point onward, the recipe for British tabloid journalism was fixed: strident politics, celebrity coverage and sexual titillation. Variations on the theme have sustained the tabloids’ role in popular culture and electoral politics for the past 80 years.

It’s been an extraordinary run. But is it coming to an end? The news that the five tabloids owned by Trinity Mirror — including The Daily Mirror — will soon make one-quarter of their journalists redundant suggests that if the end is not yet nigh, it’s certainly drawing closer.

Truth be told, the bundle of delights assembled by Hugh Cudlipp has been disintegrating for some time.

Political coverage — shrill or otherwise — was always something of a fig leaf. Declining circulations, voter apathy, TV debates and the rise of social media have eroded the tabloids’ ability to deliver votes. There’s little point in continuing to pretend that political coverage matters.

Titillation? The Page 3 girls made their debut in The Sun in 1970. Today, compared with what the web has to offer, Jo from Essex and Amy from Sheffield look as quaint as the saucy seaside postcards of an earlier era.

Only one element of Cudlipp’s original recipe — celebrity coverage — retains its appeal. Happily, the demented intensity of celebrity coverage also reflects the presence of a real commercial imperative: the entertainment industry’s need to shift units in an era of audience fragmentation.

The teaser for Apple’s press event, “Come see our latest creation,” has a double meaning. Content creators, not gadget freaks, will be the biggest target of Apple’s Wednesday press conference.

Although most of the speculation has centered on a tablet device that will likely be announced at the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs probably has bigger plans in mind. (Click for live coverage of the Apple event, which starts 10 a.m. Pacific time on Jan. 27.)

Apple’s goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content — in addition to offering a new avenue for content producers to make money. That platform will likely be far broader than just a tablet device, and will extend to every device or computer that iTunes touches.

HTML5 and iTunes will form the centerpieces of Apple’s new content strategy. The new iTunes content will not be packaged as apps sold through the App Store, though Apple will likely provide a tablet app for displaying new content created with this new platform, and developers will still be free to create apps.

Instead, HTML content will be presented similar to the way iTunes currently presents enhanced music and video content, according to a technologist with close ties to Apple.

“The focus is going to be on content creation and participation,” the source told Wired.com. “If the tablet is going to be an answer to things like the Kindle, which are purely about consumption, what you’re going to see is Apple is going to be full-blown about creation.”

Our source said he inferred the arrival of an iTunes-based book platform based on a combination of knowledge from Apple and his own analysis of news reports.

If this is indeed Apple’s strategy, the platform could go well beyond mere e-books and embrace all content based on web standards.

By creating a business platform for content producers, Apple would be recycling a winning strategy for its iPhone’s App Store: the genius of crowdsourcing. Apple opened up a software development kit to third-party developers to code for the iPhone and sell their apps through the iTunes App Store. The result? 100,000 apps and counting, a lucrative industry worth over $1 billion, and a 30 percent cut for Apple with each sale.

Apple has sold more than 6 billion songs through iTunes, and the software comes bundled with all new Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard computers. That means publishers who sell through iTunes have access to an enormous potential market.
Continue Reading “Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets” »

Five of the world’s major periodical publishers have joined forces to port print magazines and newspapers onto digital devices with enough print mojo to entice people to pay print-like prices for digital content — and to provide advertisers with a rich multimedia environment in which to pitch those readers. The consortium, whose formation was an open secret, is comprised of Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time and was formally announced on Tuesday (disclosure: Condé Nast publishes Wired Magazine and Wired.com).

The group hopes to create digital standards that will allow a wide variety of devices to display the articles properly while allowing each publication to retain its own “distinctive look and feel,” according to the announcement.

“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops,” said the initiative’s interim managing director John Squires in a statement. “Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform.”

The challenge is to transpose the somewhat intangible, Gestalt experience of reading a magazine or newspaper onto the emerging platform of portable tablets, which would sport crisp, multi-touch screens. In (mostly) theory these portable computers would provide a stable platform for compelling content — editorial and advertising. They represent the next generation of e-readers, which currently do impulse buying and gray-scale text great, and nothing else particularly well.

The problem is that consumers are abandoning print and have been conditioned to cough up exactly nothing for most digital content. As any newspaper and magazine executive can tell you, reclaiming this business isn’t simply a matter of shoveling content onto the web, or onto an open mobile standard — strategies that have been in play for a dozen years.

As a practical matter, much of this initiative centers around portable tablets real and imagined; the highly-anticipated Apple tablet falls into that latter category although Condé Nast has acknowledged that its prototypical digital magazine was designed with this non-existent product in mind. Other initiatives run the gamut from the creation of new paywalls (a favorite topic of consortium member News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch) to some sort of pay-for-lots-but-not-for-everything model, like Steve Brill’s Journalism Online venture.

The five founding members invited other publishers to join the as-yet-unnamed venture on Tuesday, in return for a share of revenue from content sales and advertisements in digital periodicals. The consortium will begin by offering magazine and newspaper articles, and possibly expand later to include “books, comic books, blogs and other media.”

These publishers hope advertisers will embrace their “innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium.” Hardware manufacturers, software developers and retailers also stand to benefit if the idea takes off, because it will give people another reason to buy or upgrade to new devices, such as the rumored Apple Tablet.

Still, questions remain. Will people pay for digital articles in order to have them forever on the devices of their choice, the way some do with their favorite albums or movies? After all, magazines and newspapers are not printed in hardcover. The publishers also face stiff competition, of course, from even themselves — in the form of free advertiser-supported online content that would presumably be available via web browsers on the same devices to which these publishers hope to publish premium-ized but similar content.

Nonetheless, if they manage to create a new form of media that sits somewhere between a website and a stack of processed trees, charge the right price for it and make it easy to access, they just might be able to pull yesterday’s rabbit out of tomorrow’s hat.

The five participating publishers own the following periodicals:

Continue Reading “Publishing Powerhouses Unite to Sell Digital Periodicals” »

News Corp has rattled its saber in Google’s direction for months, as chairman Rupert Murdoch accused the company of “stealing stories” by posting links and short article excerpts on its search engine. Now, he appears ready to strike, by pulling his company’s news articles from Google and putting them on Microsoft search engines instead, in return for payment.

A little piece of code in each article would make articles from News Corp publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and several international titles visible only to search engines that pay. According to the Financial Times (subscription required), Google’s rival Microsoft intends to do exactly that.

In the short term, this could be disastrous to News Corp’s publications.

Google doesn’t need the news — or, to be more precise, it doesn’t need any specific news source. If bloggers have taught the world anything, it’s that one journalist’s facts can become the basis of another journalist’s story. (Case in point: This article is a follow-up to the Financial Times article and includes similar information, albeit with another layer of analysis.) If the Wall Street Journal becomes invisible to Google, people who go there to find the news will simply click on articles from other publications that cover the same story.

In order for Murdoch’s plan to succeed, a critical mass of larger news publishers will need to join this effort, as Microsoft is apparently asking them to do. (Neither News Corp nor Microsoft is commenting on this story.) Although highly unlikely, Google could join Microsoft in paying for the right to list these “premium” news articles if not doing so means losing access to a large chunk of current events.

More likely, Google will refuse to pay and news consumers will prefer to access whatever news Google offers for free rather than switching to Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see whatever articles Microsoft paid to index. The end result: a sort of reverse ghetto, in which established news outlets are confined to websites run by their Microsoft paymasters, while publications that allow any search engine to surface their content become more popular. Trying to save mainstream news publications in this way could ultimately hurt them.

The dream outcome for Murdoch would create separate playing fields for established and unestablished news organizations, with the former receiving payments for merely having their stories listed and the latter available for free, as things stand now. One Financial Times source said the deal “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them,” so news publishers could, in theory, earn more for their content under the plan.

In Murdoch’s world, this is exactly how things should work, but we don’t live in Murdoch’s world anymore.

The road between point A (forcing Google users to ignore News Corp articles) and point B (forcing Google and other search engines to pay for the right to excerpt from and link to news stories) is rocky or perhaps even nonexistent.

See Also:

• News Corp May Charge For Web News, Blasts Amazon Over Kindle Terms
  
• Murdoch To Google: I Must Block You (Wait For It …)
• Wall Street Journal Takes Paywall Fight to Mobiles
• MySpace Traffic Drop Costs News Corp About $100 Million
  
• Hands On With Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing, But No Boom
  
• Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! – Update
• Bing Rings Up Good First Week
• Microsoft Aims Search Guns at Google With ‘Bing’: Advertising Age
  
• Bing Snags Small Gain From Google

Photo: Flickr/allaboutgeorge

The news media has a bad case of going-out-of-business blues, what with classified ads decamped to Craigslist, readers ditching print subscriptions for the web and falling (though often still healthy) profit margins leading to massive newsroom cuts.

In fact, the internet may have been so successful at out newsing newspapers that soon large U.S. cities may not have a daily paper, at least not one printed on dead trees.

Now, Free Press, an advocacy group created to fight media consolidation, thinks the internet and profit-focused media consolidation has dealt enough of a blow to journalism that the government needs a National Journalism Strategy. In a 48-page report (.pdf) released Tuesday, the group called for a congressional commission to study how to save journalism, which the group called “critical infrastructure” for democracy.

“Saving journalism and shoring up democracy’s very foundations will require the right application of innovative technology, policy reform and public resources,” the report says.

The group’s prescriptions range from a $50 million government R&D fund for journalism innovation to new, less profit-driven ownership models for journalistic enterprises. Looking at examples like NPR, the BBC and the National Endowment for the Arts, the group calls for more federal funds (an additional $1 billion) to be invested in journalism — noting that currently the feds spend only $1.35 per citizen on public media $400 million, compared to more than $80 per person in England.

Other proposals include a Journalism Jobs program similar to AmeriCorps, a new “Federal Writers Project” that would employ laid-off hacks (just as the Works Progress Administration did in the Great Depression) and federal matching funds for foundation grants that seed online journalism startups. Newspapers might benefit, the group suggests, from different kinds of ownership — such as being turned into non-profits, low-profits (L3C), citizen-owned entities or even municipally-owned papers.

It’s an ambitious plan, but it’s not clear whether how or whether it would work. Moreover, its not clear whether the nation has much appetite for subsidizing journalism, when there’s plenty of filler, vitriol and even an decent amount of real information to be found on cable, online and in print.

The group writes “This crisis is a golden opportunity for creating new alternatives. And if true public service journalism emerges from the wreckage, then indeed, there may be a silver lining.”

One can only hope — regardless of whether or not federal dollars are involved.

See Also:

• Christian Science Monitor Goes All in on the Web
• Tribune Co. Files for Bankruptcy Protection
• Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds …
• New York Times Kills Times File, Launches New Local Site …
• Media Death March: LATimes to Cut 150 Editorial Jobs

So now we have a Kindle in large and extra large sizes but the response to the new device among journalists, especially those with hopes of magic bullet that will save newspapers, has been mostly small minded.

A near universal chorus of doubt has greeted the new device. Much of it has good reason to be unimpressed. The Kindle DX doesn’t do much more than the original Kindle device but it comes at stiffer $489 price. That larger screen is a convenient fig leaf to cover a number of small sins. First, Amazon is using it and the greater memory to justify the bigger price. They’re also unveiling a “native PDF reader,” which should have been in the first version, because the screen can now handle the larger format layouts.

Wednesday’s press conference was all about text books and newspapers — including a mysterious plan for The New York Times to subsidize devices in exchange for longer term subscription commitments. Somewhere in his content-free speech, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger qualified the offer by suggesting the paper would concentrate its efforts in places where “home delivery is not available.” And that would be where, exactly?

All in all, pretty disappointing, right? Peter Kafka and Om Malik certainly think so. And Henry Blodget works you through the numbers on why Sulzberger isn’t pushing to move subscribers to the e-ink platform. They all make valid points: The newspaper business can’t transform itself overnight from an advertising-based business to a fee-based business.

But ad revenue isn’t going to come back. The dirty secret of digital distribution whether on the web or over wireless is that advertisers can see how little response they’re getting for their money. Internet ad rates are pushing all ad rates down and that is what’s killing newspapers. Advertisers are abandoning them, not readers.

While Sulzberger and the Washington Post and every other newspaper fights that battle, there is another overlooked opportunity that mating a first-class newspaper with the Kindle — which, sadly, isn’t what was on offer today — would provide. Moving reading off the web and onto a wireless device makes it possible for newspapers to create exclusive content that would provide incremental revenue.

Think of the Kindle as a newspaper’s version of the DVD. When DVD sales took off, they gave Hollywood a respite from a relentless erosion of the industry’s economics. Here was a place studios could make money — and keep it. And for a number of years, the DVD was a veritable Guernsey of cash.

Sulzberger hinted at what the Times already has as a secret weapon. “Thank you, Amazon.com,” Sulzberger said at the end of his speech after mentioning a dozen reporter’s names, “Thank you Jeff, for helping to boost book sales.”

Video streams from newspaper web sites increased dramatically last year, a bit of good news for an industry struggling to keep afloat by finding ways of making more money online.

In a recent report using data analyzed data from 187 newspaper partner websites, Brightcove, which works with around 30 major newspaper publishers, says monthly uploads were up from 186 videos in 2007 to an average of 638 videos in 2008. On top of that, total videos uploaded skyrocketed 1,500 percent in 2008.

The report also shows a 35 percent quarter over quarter growth in video streams, and a 700 percent increase in player loads for 2008, which means that more papers are integrating video throughout their sites.

“We don’t see online video as the salvation for the print industry or print newspapers, but we see it as a positive indicator,” says Josh Hawkins, director of corporate communications at Brightcove. “Video can really be a catalyst for broader monetization opportunities.”

Some of Brightcove’s bigger clients include Cox Newspapers, Freedom Communications, Hearst Communications, Media News Group, New York Times Co. and New York Times Regional Newspapers, Tribune Total Media and Washington Post.

While overall ad spending for papers is hurting in light of the recession, eMarketer predicts about a 45 percent increase in online video spending for 2009.

James Zisk, product and development manager for video and media at Freedom Interactive, says aside from instream ads, videos increase click through rates and raise brand awareness.

Continue Reading “Online Video Surge May Be One Life Jacket for Sinking Newspapers” »

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer publishes its last dead-tree edition Tuesday, the latest newspaper to succumb to the harsh realities of an internet economy where delivering bits is an increasingly inefficient way of delivering the news.

News of the P-I’s decision to publish online-only was telegraphed for weeks, and it follows the decision of the Rocky Mountain News to shutter completely, the Christian Science Monitor to publish online only starting next month and deep concessions by staff at another Hearst newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, to keep that newspaper afloat.

The owners put the newspaper up for sale on Jan. 9 and said they would shut it down if a buyer did not step forward. With a daily circulation of 117,000 the Seattle P-I is the largest daily to cease paper publication. The Christian Science Monitor is in 50k territory.

"Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time," editor and publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroom Monday morning. "But the bloodline will live on."

Some 140 people will be laid off, the competing Seattle Times reported, as only 20 to 25 employees will be needed to operate the surviving website. The two papers had been working under a "joint operating agreement" — sharing all production, distribution and marketing resources, but with separate news divisions — since 1983. The P-I began its life in 1863.

Some 21,000 people in the newspaper business have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2008, many victims of a recession which exacerbated the already unfriendly economics of the newspaper business: It depends on classifieds (increasing owned by Craigslist) and car and real estate ads (sectors especially hard hit). Add that to the unrelenting cost of maintaining a print operation and overland distribution as well as servicing debt, and it is not a winning proposition.

But the failure has been cultural as well, with executives failing to see or heed or believe the signs of a revolution and unable to adapt quickly enough  to a readership which no longer needs newspapers to keep up with the news. Often newspapers do little more than put the paper online — the definition of "shovelware" — while not even linking to stories on other sites.

In a release Heart Newspapers President Steven Swartz appeared to appreciate the distinction. The P-I web site, he said, "isn’t a newspaper online — it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information website at its core."

He continued: "The web is first and foremost a community platform, so we’ll be featuring new columns from prominent Seattle residents, more than 150 reader blogs, community databases and photo galleries.
We’ll also be linking to the great work of other Web sites and blogs in the community."

So, is this a rebirth or a last-ditch attempt to salvage something? As a once major-city daily that is now competing as a pure digital publication with a newspaper — the Seattle Times — the Pacific Northwest city has become a laboratory of sorts that is sure to be closely watched by newspapers and media critics everywhere.

Photo: John C Abell via flickr/Wired.com — Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle is also in dire straits, preparing to lay off 150 workers and eliminate some benefits.

See Also:

• Media Death March: Newspaper Ads Tumble
• Media Death March: Worst Year Ever for Newspapers?
• Media Death March: Gannett to Cut 1000 Jobs, McClatchy Implements
• Media Death March: The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper
• Media Death March: Orange County Register Outsources to India
• Media Death March: Piling on the Nupes

The UK newspaper and website, the Guardian, has announced a new open API which will give third-party sites access to all the content the newspaper produces, both in print and online — over a million articles going back to 1999.

The Guardian’s new open approach comes on the heals of a similar move by the New York Times and seems to point toward a new kind of approach to online news — give away your content and send the advertising with it.

The idea behind the API is that the Guardian will be able to reach more readers without having to develop additional content. In the Guardian’s case the terms of use for the API mean that ads will come along with the content — more readers looking at more ads means more revenue.

It’s hardly a new idea — Google and countless others do very similar things with APIs — but the newspaper industry has been slow to accept that giving full access to content might be a viable business plan.

Continue Reading “The Guardian Opens Up With New Developer API” »