NewsNow ditches Telegraph, Guardian and Daily Mirror December 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Journalism, Newspapers.Tags: Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, NewsNow, The Guardian
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*Breaking* UK news aggregator NewsNow is pulling links to many of the UK’s biggest national newspapers after failure to reach agreement with The Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited (the NLA).
The NLA had threatened NewsNow with legal action if it did not change the way it does business or cease from linking altogether.
The aggregator’s managing director Struan Bartlett said: “We strongly feel that to accept the NLA’s terms would set a dangerous precedent restricting our customers’ ability to conduct their business freely.
“We see this as a ‘slippery slope’ towards any free-to-access website demanding licence fees from any organisation for circulating or clicking on links.”
Newspaper titles that NewsNow is to pull from its subscription service include The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. NLA member publications will remain available via NewsNow’s free website.
For the background to this story see:
iPhone Apps Emerge As Possible Paid Solution October 1, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Magazines, Newspapers, Publishing models.Tags: Apple, iPhone, Spectator, The Guardian
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The Spectator and the Guardian have seen the future of charging online – and it’s the Apple iPhone.
According to reports this week both are planning iPhone apps which will make their content available to mobile users on a pay-as-you go basis.
The Spectator will be the first out the traps with a ”miniaturised, page-turning, iPhone version of the real thing“. It will cost 59 pence on an issue-by-issue basis, or £2.39 a month.
paidContent.org, meanwhile, reports that the company that owns it, Guardian News & Media, has a content app of its own “in the pipeline“.
The details are sketchy but the Guardian’s digital director Emily Bell was quoted saying:
It’s still in development, but we are working on an app which I can’t give you too much more detail on at the moment, although we are likely to charge.
Micro and one-off payments have always been more likely to succeed on mobile phones where you’re just a click away from adding a few pence to your operator bill.
That ease of use doesn’t guarantee success, of course, and doesn’t get us much closer to a paid solution for the much far, non-mobile web.
Related:
- Why Moleskine Is The Model For Newspaper Survival
- Scarcity, Abundance And The Misapprehension Of Online Advertising
- Poll Shocker: Newspaper Readers Still Not Willing To Pay Online
Telegraph PM, Premature RIP For DIY PDF? September 21, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers.Tags: Daily Telegraph, The Guardian
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Call it serendipity or call it procrastination, every so often a browse through the internet in the name of research throws up something that makes you stop and think.
Late last week, it was this screenshot on the right.
Telegraph PM was launched in September 2006 as a downloadable afternoon edition of the Daily Telegraph.
A newspaper in PDF form, it was ‘published’ at 4pm each weekday with a further update at 5.30pm. It ran to 10 pages, made up of news, business, sport, entertainment, crosswords and – very 2006, this – a sudoku puzzle.
On launch, the Telegraph described it as:
Our commitment to being at the cutting edge of the new-media age.
Which sounds a little strange three years on.
Internet-enabled smartphones, WiFi and 3G dongles for your laptop have made the printable take-away seem like an unnecessary indulgence. Why print when you can surf?
Telegraph PM was quietly dropped in January 2008.
In fact the downloadable PDF still lives on – and any Telegraph reader missing the ‘old’ form need only hold their nose, make their way across to the Guardian site, and print a copy of G24.
Perhaps G24 is still used in large numbers, maybe the overheads are small enough to sustain the remaining hardcore, or maybe the Guardian’s digital bosses have forgotten it exists.
Another alternative? Perhaps this is the future of print. Transfer the production costs to the user – or more likely the office HP LaserJet – and, hey presto the DIY PDF gives you the best of both worlds: the tangible value of print for the marginal cost of internet publishing.
‘No Branding Or Devotion – Only Utility.’ September 8, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers, Publishing models.Tags: New York Times, Rupert Murdoch, The Guardian, The Observer
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So wrote Peter Preston in his weekly ‘Press and Broadcasting’ column for the Observer.
The piece by the former Guardian editor is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about the future of newspapers in an online world.
Why? Because he challenges a key assumption about success online – namely the importance of the willy-waving “I’ve got more unique users than you” position.
Taking figures from the United States (“because Nielsen collects them with continuous, detailed authority”), Preston looks at the amount of time American web users spend online in the company of newspaper websites.
And it’s not a pretty picture: the average visitor devotes just 38 minutes and 24 seconds a month on one, or more likely more than one, newspaper site.
And remember only one third of the US universe of users visits a newspaper site at all.
As Preston points out this means ”the average New York Times print reader spends roughly as long with his paper a day as the average NYT net user spends online in a month”. For the record, that’s 29 minutes 57 seconds.
Preston argues that this lack of face time is a reflection of user mode when surfing – clicking through in pursuit of some fact or picture: “no brand or devotion: only utility”.
If these site visit times don’t strike you as too bad, consider how you would make money from them. In Preston’s words:
What price nine minutes and nine seconds over a month for average visiting time to the New York Post site Rupert Murdoch hopes to charge for? (Not much of a revenue stream at 19 seconds a day!)
Related:
- The Future Of Newspapers, It’s In The Bag
- The Wire’s David Simon: ‘Newspapers Must Go Behind Paywall’
- Free is just another cover price
- What if the business model for news ain’t broke?
A Year In The Life Of Newspapers August 12, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers.Tags: Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times
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Two weeks of news-, laptop- and (thanks to my own incompetence) mobile-free living, I return with too many emails to contemplate and far too many items in my RSS reader to countenance.
But somehow this found its way into my consciousness. Made by my The Media Blog colleague Will Sturgeon, it charts the decline of newspaper circulation over a 12 month period – in a minute (well one minute, three second) video.
How The Guardian’s Crowdsourcing Experiment Ran Out Of Steam July 27, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Crowdsourcing.Tags: Crowdsourcing, The Guardian
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This morning, news of a crowdsourcing success. This afternoon, a high-profile example seemingly a little stuck in the mud.
Six weeks ago the Guardian invited its readers to help it trawl through hundreds of thousands of expense claim documents released (in redacted form) by Parliament.
Within three days 20,000 people had helped classify 160,000 pages. The paper was rightly proud of its crowdsourcing experiment and splashed the news across the front page of its Monday print edition.
But now it seems user involvement has slowed to a trickle.
These are the bare facts:
We have 458,832 pages of documents. 23,185 of you have reviewed 201,587 of them. Only 257,245 to go…
By my reckoning, around 500 documents were processed last week. At this rate, we’ll be nearing 2020 before the project is complete.
This is not to say the experiment has failed but the paper does need to work out how it ties up some loose ends. If it cannot re-energise the crowd, that is.
Related:
- Is That The Sound Of The Crowd? Just Maybe.
- Crowdsourcing 1920s-Style
- What MPs’ expenses tells us about the clash between new and old media
- The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and BBC: Lessons in Crowdsourcing
- BBC Goes Crowdsourcing To Save The NHS
Putting The Guardian Into The MediaGuardian 100 July 13, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.Tags: Apple, Daily Telegraph, Facebook, Google, Guido Fawkes, Huffington Post, Hulu, Microsoft, Moo.com, Spotify, The Guardian, Twitter
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So to the annual MediaGuardian 100. I guess the clue is in the name. The paper likes to slice and dice entrants in its power list – under 40s, top 10 fallers, top 10 women, you know the kind of thing.
How’s this for size?
1. Carolyn McCall, chief executive, Guardian Media Group
2. Alan Rushbridger, editor, the Guardian
3. Stephen Fry, presenter, writer, actor (and former Guardian Weekend magazine columnist)
4. David Mitchell, actor, writer, presenter (and current Observer columnist)
5. Armando Iannucci, writer, director, producer, performer (and former Observer columnist)
6. Emily Bell, director of digital content, Guardian News & Media
At least they had the good grace to put Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the paper responsible for the biggest newspaper story of the year, at number 10, a full 25 places above Carolyn McCall.
Elsewhere, here’s one for the digerati – the Top 10 Purely Digital:
1. Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google
2. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple
3. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
4. Evan Williams, Twitter
5. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
6. Jason Kilar, Hulu
7. Daniel Ek, Spotify
8. Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
9. Paul Staines, Guido Fawkes blog
10. Richard Moross, moo.com
The Guardian, News Of The World And The Other Side Of Scoops July 9, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.Tags: News of the World, Nick Davies, The Guardian, The Investigations Fund
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A rather familiar voice on the radio at 7.10 this morning.
Nick Davies – investigative journalist, author of Flat Earth News and co-founder of the recently announced The Investigations Fund – was talking to Evan Davis about the Guardian exclusive that’s splashed across most of the other (non-News International) papers today.
Davies was detailing his story which alleges among other things:
• News of the World bugging led to £700,000 payout to PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor
• Sun editor Rebekah Wade and Conservative communications chief Andy Coulson – both ex-NoW editors – involved
• News International chairman Les Hinton told MPs reporter jailed for phone-hacking was one-off case
Many of those cited have launched vigorous defences, not least Andy Coulson who is David Cameron’s spin meister.
So what does this tale tell us?
At once it shows that investigative journalism is alive and well (The Guardian method) and also in a state of crisis (the alleged News of the World method).
But it also tells us that newspapers are incredibly proprietorial about their exclusives.
Sure, the Davies investigation emerged last night and led Channel 4 News among others, but by then it was firmly a Guardian story. The paper and its journalists had done the leg work so why shouldn’t they reap the benefits?
And for three hours this morning, the Today Programme was (rightly) slapping the back of a rival news organisation.
But as I’ve argued before, the need for the a scoop – built into the media DNA – is at odds with collaborative investigations. Or at least it can be. This is no value judgement, just a fact of newspaper life.
In short that’s one of the biggest challenges for initiatives like The Investigations Fund and Help Me Investigate.
Good luck to both.
Related:
Is The Investigations Fund A Solution To The Crisis in Journalism?
Old Media Doesn’t Die: Daily Telegraph, Guardian And MPs’ Expenses June 26, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.Tags: Daily Telegraph, The Guardian
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A quick plug for my new column for those nice people at Journalism.co.uk.
First up, an assessment of the old and new media coverage of MPs’ expenses a week on from the heavily redacted Parliamentary disclosure.
In essence I argue that these occasionally bitchy arguments between proponents of ‘proper’ journalism and those who champion collaborative journalism are largely bogus:
Nothing demonstrates the laziness of the ‘winners and losers’ legend more than the domestic news story of the year – MPs’ expenses. Here we have seen the best of old and new media, one feeding off the other.
Anyway, you can read it for yourselves here.
This should turn into a regular gig, a weekly look at where media and technology meet. Next week? Who knows. Have a good weekend.
The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and BBC: Lessons in Crowdsourcing June 19, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.Tags: BBC, Crowdsourcing, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian
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I began the week reflecting on the BBC’s initiative asking radio listeners to come up with pain-free ways the NHS could save money.
The week ends with an army of Guardian readers sorting and classifying 700,000+ MPs’ expenses documents.
Two examples of old media embracing crowdsourcing and it will be interesting to see how both fair.
From the outside, the Guardian feels inherently more switched on to the potential of outsourcing some of its journalism to the crowd. (more…)
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