Martin Moore Blog: Newspaper closures October 20, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentMartin Moore offers some historical context to Emily Bell's scenario of potential newspaper closures:
"The last major period of contraction occurred between the two World Wars when, as the first Royal Commission on the Press found, just under 25% of daily and Sunday papers closed:
‘Between 31st December 1921, and 31st December 1948, the number of general daily and Sunday newspapers published in England, Wales, and Scotland fell from 169 to 128’ (1st Royal Commission on the Press, p.73).
The Commission decided this was not a serious cause for concern, nor was the 25% reduction in the national daily press. Only if it was part of a long term trend did they feel we should be worried:
‘We do not therefore see cause for alarm in the decrease of the number of national morning newspapers from 12 in 1921 to 9 in 1948 – [although any further decrease could be worrying]' (Royal Commission, p.88)."
Newspaper bosses blast BBC over local websites – Times Online October 17, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentMore on this continuing turf war, which touches on competition, private vs public, newspapers vs broadcaster(s) — not to mention who's got the money (and will?) for such investment. NB The BBC Trust has yet to formally approve the plans. More arguments to follow, no doubt.
"Two of Britain's newspaper bosses lined up to attack Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, for saying that "nobody can be satisfied" with the quality of the country's local and regional press.
Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, owner of the Liverpool Echo, and Tim Bowdler, the chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Yorkshire Post, said that his remarks implied that he had prejudged a review of BBC plans to expand its local websites."
Local newspapers must be 'information provider of choice' online, says industry panel — Journalism.co.uk October 17, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentLaura Oliver on the Journalism Leaders Forum at UCLAN:
"becoming an information hub could also help address the problem of advertising, as the 'revenue base [of newspapers] is eroding along with the newspaper's grip on its audience'.
"The general concept of ad-supported news isn't broken… it's the fact that we’re not building the audiences that the advertising community wants us to provide," said [Steve] Yelvington. […]
Offering a UK perspective, Simon Reynolds, editorial director at the Lancashire Evening Post, said the notion of a local newspaper as an information portal was 'nothing new', but that the delivery mechanisms for this information had changed.
"I do believe we have to extend our reach away from news and become a more sophisticated portal," he said.
"The press need to understand where the new revenues are going to come from and build a business model on that. We must make ourselves invaluable."
Xark!: 10 reasons why newspapers won't reinvent news October 17, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farDan Conover's list includes:
"5. Newspapers don't "own" enough creative technological expertise […] to constitute a viable tech infrastructure. Instead, most newspaper payrolls are bloated with pluralities of resentful Luddites who struggle with the complexities of e-mail. […]
6. Inertia, uncertainty and toxic paralysis rule most newspaper companies […]
7… Web ads are still merely "upsell" throw-ins to print-advertising contracts at many papers. It's practical short-term tactics vs. long-term business strategy. …
8. n 2008, all meaningful political discourse — the essential element of social currency — takes place on the Web…
9. The connection between quality and profitability has been broken irreparably. Boosting short-term profits by cutting quality is obviously a losing strategy, and the recent wave of newspaper layoffs and buyouts only exacerbated the trend. Editors will admit this privately, but the public already knows."
Times and Tribune have biggest reach on Twitter October 16, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentNew York Times and Chicago Tribune head the list of most-followed newspaper accounts.
"Erica Smith’s impressive list of newspapers that use Twitter includes an snapshot of the most followed newspaper accounts. Running that list through the newish twInfluence site shows that organizations can reach a large number of Twitterers even with a small number of followers."
Timely use for FT cuttings, in the cause of art and vanity October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : National newspapers , add a commentFinanciers have been commissioning nude portraits of their wives made from collages of newspaper clippings telling the stories of their own financial conquests.
Story ingredients: newspaper cuttings, banking crisis, artist, £15,000, recycling — and vanity. This comes from an entertaining story in today’s Sunday Times about new uses for old copies of the Financial Times. Topically, one portrait’s subject is the wife of Iceland’s president. She declares:
I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.
There must be some out there, somewhere.
And finally:
David Yarrow, founder of Clareville Capital, a hedge fund, commissioned a naked portrait of himself to hang in his weekend cottage in Devon.
He said: “What good use of the newspapers. She put the FT cuttings about me in some very naughty parts. It makes a good present for people but maybe they will never want to read the FT again. I am glad to see the price of her work is going up. I might have to flog mine. I might need to.”
Does online-only news narrow readers’ understanding? | The Australian October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThat’s what an Australian ad/comms agency suggests, drawing on its survey of 200 people:
“…by using online as an exclusive source of news people are starting to consume more information but — and this is the important point — across fewer topic areas. […]
…as consumers of news we’re becoming increasingly intelligent or knowledgeable about very niche topic areas, but from an overall perspective, our understanding of world and national events is a bit more superficial. […]
…70.1 per cent claimed that the internet allows them to avoid news topics that are not of interest. […]
…online news readers are not typically venturing outside the same few topics or information areas — 59.9 per cent tend to read information from the same sections.[…] However, 62.7 per cent of people claim that when they buy a paper they often read articles that they hadn’t intended to.”
Roy Greenslade: Journalists cannot be blamed for newspaper industry's decline | Media | guardian.co.uk October 3, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a comment"We British journalists do tend to believe that American journalism is boring and unreadable. But the interesting fact – FACT – is that the declining sales and declining profits of US and UK newspapers are roughly similar in scale despite the differences between their journalism and our journalism. Here's Farhi again:
"The problem has little to do with the reporting, packaging and selling of information. It's much bigger than that. The gravest threats include the flight of classified advertisers, the deterioration of retail advertising and the indebtedness of newspaper owners.And then he moves on to the digital revolution's major effect on the business:
"The real revelation of the internet is not what it has done to newspaper readership – it has in fact expanded it – but how it has sapped newspapers' economic lifeblood. The most serious erosion has occurred in classified advertising, which once made up more than 40% of a newspaper's revenues and more than half its profits."
Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia? | Martin Stabe October 2, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentMartin Stabe summarises key points from Making Online News, a collection of academic articles edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo: "The article is essential reading for any newsroom manager. A CMS with poor backend usability will engender bad practices as journalists cut corners while striving for immediacy or some other ideal. The same is true of a brilliant CMS delivered with badly-executed templates that journalists can’t fix.
Never mind the cool stuff we’d all like to be trying — if the CMS makes it difficult (or is designed to discourage) the basic things we ought to be doing — like creating inline links in stories — time-pressed journalists simply won’t do it. In other words, the technology begins to determine content.
Worse, I suspect badly-designed CMS backends engender resistance to the online medium among print journalists by leading them to assume that all this digital stuff must be frightfully complicated."
The economics of moving from print to online: lose one hundred, get back eight | Monday Note October 2, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentFrédéric Filloux, an editor with Norwegian group Schibsted, on how the numbers don't (yet?) add up for online newspapers: "In the world’s biggest market (the US), if the goal is the online equivalent of a daily newspaper, no independent, pure player, general news website is able to achieve even half of the break-even revenue required to just stay afloat. Only big news brands, powered by (still) immense newsrooms are able to pull in decent audiences (remember, we are talking of audience goals able to support a newsroom set at a fifth of big newspaper’s)."