One thought for the New Year

As we end the New Year,Reporters without frontiers reminds us that

76 journalists killed (60 in 2008)
33 journalists kidnapped
573 journalists arrested
1456 physically assaulted
570 media censored
157 journalists fled their countries
1 blogger died in prison
151 bloggers and cyber-dissidents arrested
61 physically assaulted
60 countries affected by online censorship

A weather proposal

It's doing the rounds but I thought that I would still put it up on the blog.

Weather Channel meteorologist Kim Perez is surprised on air recently when her boyfriend showed up to propose.

A world of connectivity

Some visions of a media and information future in 2020 in this morning's Independent.

Julian Baggini's article predicts people

more connected than ever, accessing video, music, mail (the "e" soon became redundant), the web, books, news (with no distinction between papers, websites or television) and magazines whenever they liked, wherever they liked. Time-travellers from 2009 would have found the constant flow of information overwhelming. But somehow, the people of the day learnt to adapt and manage all this. A recent study had shown that 95 per cent of all the information read on mobile electronic devices was merely scanned, with the brain barely processing any of it.

"Broadcasters have never had to manage distribution themselves before"

How profitable will video on demand be for content producers as free internet catch-up services move into the living room?

This morning's FT asks that question as the BBC's project cnavas has now got approval from the BBC Trust to go ahead.

According to Futuresource Consulting

one in five flat-panel TVs shipped in Europe next year will be ready to connect to the internet straight out of the box.

and

With iPlayer already available on several set-top boxes and games consoles, soon millions more households will be watching VoD on the screen for which it was originally intended - but delivered over the internet, not an aerial.

Yet according to Michael Cormish, chief executive of Blinkbox, an independent VoD service.

"Broadcasters have never had to manage distribution [themselves] before," he says. "VoD is an attempt by the broadcasters to selfdistribute and that is the reason why they will find it tough. It is not a skillset they have required . . . Most will end up spending a multiple of their initial budgets to try to compete, or simply exit."

Whether broadcasters will have to start charging for the service will become a moot point but it may be the only way to effectively subsidise the content

Are the noughties the death of popular music?

One thing that this decade may well be defined by is that it marked the end of 50 years of growth in popular music.

I doubt whether this decade will be remembered in future years for having a musical sound and I would be very surprised if today's artists will be reforming for their ageing fans in 2030.

The noughties have seen the crushing of the economic model of recording,selling and distributing content for profit.Bands now have to rely for the most part on live performance and merchantising to get any real financial return on their talents.

Many will blame the internet for these trends but really it must be seen as a shift in society in much the same way that other parts of the media have been hit by the mutltitude of choice that we as consumers have and our short attention spans.

Don't write off print advertising just yet

According to a survey seen by the Times,print advertising is more than twice as effective as television advertising for large retailers.

The survey of 26 large retailers found that

Every £1 spent on print advertisements yields £5 in revenue, compared with £2.15 for television and £3.44 for online advertising,

Print is very good for targeting specific audiences and getting eyeballs on key products,” said Joel Dawson, head of online marketing at Boots. “But the smarter businesses are integrating digital advertising into the planning process.”

Ht-Joanna Geary

How to make $18k from two shitty photos

For a lesson in how to deal with the media or perhaps not how to deal with the media,take a look at Gawker's commentary on the fate of Jasper Schuringa,the North West airlines hero who literally put out the flames as Flight 253 approached Detroit

Schurnga sold the "TV Rights" of the first of his two photos to CNN for $10K.
The "print rights" went to the Post for $5K.
Later, Schuringa was paid upwards of $3K by ABC News for a second photo, which Schuringa tried to sell to other local news outlets for $5K, unsuccessfully.
Jasper Schuringa made at least $18,000 from two shitty, blurry photos.

I particularly like the analysis of his interview on CNN

it only gets good around 6:45, when Schuringa appears to be looking off-camera, trying to end the interview, and in doing so, preserving his product for further sale.

Ht-Martin Stabe

Save for technolgy the noughties will not be missed

A survey by Pew which came out just before Xmas voted the noughties the worst decade in 50 years only helped by the changes in technology that have occurred since the millenium.

Clear majorities see cell phones, the internet and e-mail as changes for the better, and most also view specific changes such as handheld internet devices and online shopping as beneficial trends. There is greater division of opinion, however, over whether social networking sites or internet blogs have been changes for the better or changes for the worse.

But overall the decade is seen as negative

the 9/11 terrorist attacks are seen as the most important event of the decade, with Barack Obama’s election as president a distant second – even among his political supporters.

Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

Latest Linkedin mobile app is released

I have come to Linkedin rather late but one of my new year projects is to build up my professional profile and contacts up using the site as a network forum.

I shall be helped in that by Linkedin latest upgrade to its I-phone app as reported here by Mashable.

Linkedin announced on their blog that

On the heels of the opening of our LinkedIn platform, this new version represents the next step in our efforts to bring LinkedIn to whereever you work. Professionals are increasingly mobile, and we believe that mobile business applications are better when they are built over a platform of your reputation & relationships. This app has been redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to help you keep your professional network in your hands, whenever and whereever you need them.

You Tube to the fore as Iran burns

The latest demonstrations in Iran are resulting in deaths tragically.

For some of the best round ups of the latest using social media especially You Tube-I heartily recommend Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish which is trawling the site for the latest You Tube videos and have been live blogging since Saturday night



In this one,a protestor raises a black helmet, a few protestors hold what appear to be photos of a bloody victim, and a protestor waves a green flag of victory.

In this video clip,as Khatami speaks, the thugs from the coup regime surround the meeting hall and chaos erupts.



And in this one,more clashes from the streets yesterday

Breeding like rabbits

What exactly is a social media expert?

According to this report at current rates twitter will be entirely over run by them in 3 years

In May 09 when we first used Tweepsearch to count of the Twitter bios of self-proclaimed social media gurus, experts, superstars and ninjas there were 4,487. A mere seven months later, we were shocked to see that there are now nearly 16.000. They are multiplying like rabbits.
She goes on to break out the 15,740 they found in the chart above.
This represents a 3.5x increase every 6 months. Projecting this growth forward means that there will be nearly 30m Social Media Experts etc on Twitter by this time in 2012, to add to the other disasters in that year (and 100m by mid 2013).

I have seen some tweets saying that if you weren't on twitter in 2007 then you are not a social media expert,the early adapters no doubt.However I fancy that this is simply an outbreak of social media snobbery.

But I am interested in what a social media expert is and what exactly qualifies somebody to say that(quickly checks twitter bio and no mention of socail media-good)

But

Social media to the fore in St Peter's Basilica

Social media once again to the fore this Xmas morning as You Tube provides some raw footage of the Pope as aawoman jumped the barriers in St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI as he walked down the main aisle to begin Christmas Eve Mass on Thursday.

Before you hit the festivities

For all freelancers out there,the Xmas break is the time to get those ideas in to editors

it's a doddle to get your ideas commissioned over the festive season

says James Brown,chief executive of media consultancy Black Ops writting at Media Guardian

In addition to being drunk and impressionable there's a good chance the heads of department will have already gone off on holidays and younger, more open-minded, staff looking to make an impression and recruit a new name might be in charge of commissioning. The start of the year is a great time to come up with some spurious "new trends" idea. If you've walked in off the street and are claiming that urban pole-vaulting is becoming massive and that balaclavas are going to be the look of 2010 then it's more likely to receive a receptive ear at this time of year.

E&P's newspaper trends

It is that time of the year when we look back at some of the developments in the industry and editor and publisher have done a good review of the newspaper industry in the last 12 months

Besides,especially in the states,the closures of many papers the big question for them has been

As newspapers' advertising-based business model started to let them down, one of the biggest questions of the year has been whether or not newspapers should start charging for their online content. So far, there has been a lot of talk but not much action.

But that wasn't the only trend

1.the idea of a journalist not using Twitter is verging on inconceivable.

2.Is Hyper local just hype or will it be the future?

3.Does a nonprofit business model have a significant place in the media landscape? and

4.Is there money in mobile or for that matter the E-reasder?

are all amongst the topics as well as the continued arguments about Google,

Like films-here's an APP

If you are a film buff especially for those made in the UK,then there is an APP for you as the advert says.

Kat Barns reports that

VisitBritain have announced a free British Film Location App for iPhone and iPod touch is now available from the App Store. The app allows iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and photograph the most iconic British film locations in cinematic history. It also shows the most famous film scenes on Google maps and allows users to search by film title.

and the demand is there,according toJustin Reid, Head of Online, VisitBritain

“The VisitBritain message is clear, wherever you are in Britain you are never far from a British film location. This app will give visitors the opportunity to recreate their favourite scenes from some of our most iconic British films,Users can take pictures on location or make their own short films posting them on Facebook, Twitter or any of their social networking pages. 2010 is going to be a massive year for film tourism to Britain and we are making sure our digital campaigning is at the forefront of these events.”

Hyperlocal-balancing justice with journalism

If hyperlocal becomes the trend of 2010 then one of the issues that it will have to grapple from a journalistic point of view is court reporting.

One of the criticisms of local papers at the moment is that the days of the journalist sitting in court all day are long since gone.

But it can be a minefield and as William Perrin writes

Ante-diluvian court processes combine with the minefield of contempt of court to make it tricky to write about local justice being done. As a local web publisher in an area with a long, tragic history of ASB with a sizable local audience I’d like daily court results and timetables posted to a courts website, preferably with an RSS feed. After all, you can go to the court and watch from the gallery or see the screens.

But he finds fault in this excerpt from a green paper earlier this year from the Ministry of Justice

It is clear that there needs to be a balance between providing communities with information on court outcomes, which is in the public domain, and the need to ensure that such information is not misused. This issue is particularly pertinent because of the power of the internet to collect and make available information from a wide range of sources, and the difficulties of regulating the way in which such information is stored and reused.

Icon AP photos of the Noughties

Some good pictures to remind us of the decade as its international regional photo editor, Odd Anderson presents a selection of his icon images.

They include chaotic scenes at the funeral of Yasser Arafat,the hooded Iraqi prisoner comforting his son behind barbed wire and George Bush pulling a face as he finds the door locked at a Beijing press conference

Check the images out here

Trust gives a go ahead to Canvas

It is good news that the BBC trust has given permission for Project Canvas to go ahead finally.

The project offers free-to-air broadcasts and internet content on television and is a joint venture between the BBC, ITV, BT Group, Five, Channel 4 and Carphone Warehouse.

Its end product will be a range of set-top boxes made available to access-on-demand TV services such as the iPlayer and ITVPlayer which will give users access to internet services such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr via their televisions.

The trust gave its provisional backing despite the objections of rival BSkyB, which says the BBC's involvement would distort the market.

Bush is back

He hasn't gone away just yet

The Huffington Post reports that

The George W. Bush Institute -- the "action- oriented think tank" that is part of Bush's Presidential Center -- will co-produce a public television show hosted by its executive director, Ambassador James Glassman, in a rare convergence of public broadcasting and a partisan research organization.

The show will b braodcast on America's PBS and two episodes of the show have already been filmed

Guardian soaring in the ABCe's

Yesterday's ABCe's saw the Guardian retain its place as the most viewed online newspaper site.

Over 35 million clicks in November,a 12.9 per cent increase on October’s 31.7m unique users ahead of Mail Online, which increased by 2.66 per cent to 31.3m users and . Telegraph.co.uk was third with 30.8m visitors, also up 2.66% on October.

The site was also top when it came to overseas traffic with with 20.4m non-UK visitors, followed by Mail Online (19.3m), Times Online (13.4m) and the Sun (11.3m).

Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News and Media said that

"We are thrilled with the November figures. October was a strong month for us, but the fact that the number of monthly unique users has risen by 13% in just a few weeks indicates that our online audiences are increasingly engaging with our content,"

adding

"Our world news and environment sections drove the most traffic to guardian.co.uk in November, with several stories on climate change – in particular the story about the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit – resonating with audiences around the globe."

The latest I -player stats

Some latest stats on the I-Player were released by the BBC yesterday

* A record 88.2 million requests in November

* Added to the 641 million requests served over January to October, that’s a total 729.2 million

* Most popular show: Top Gear series 13, episode 1 (1.67 million streams)

* Least popular: An October episode of Click, with 35,728

* Computers contribute 86 percent of iPlayer usage, despite being available on some 23 platforms (Project Canvas could change this)

* But usage mimics TV, most coming at 9pm

via Paid Content

Apps,swine flu and celebs top the Facebook charts

The top Facebook trends in the USA for 2009 have been revealed.

The Independent reports that facebook applications,FML ("F*** My Life"), swine flu and celebrity deaths are the top issues debated on the social network site along with

References to family members, movies, sports, health care, Twitter, Lady Gaga and religion

According to the facebook blog Facebook has announced that

Facebook has provided a platform for developers to create a number of hugely popular applications, and it is no surprise that people are talking about them. You could almost say that 2009 was the year of the farm in status updates. Since its emergence in June 2009, Farmville became the most talked-about application in status updates and now boasts over 72 million monthly active users. It wasn't alone. Farm Town also ranked highly, as did general discussions with the word "farm."

World map of social networks

I have just come across this World Map of Social networks courtesy of TechCrunch.

This is the second time this year that the Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world.

The last was in June of this year and once again it shows the rise of facebook.

90,000 jobs and 142 papers lost in the US

142 papers came to an end in the United States this year reports Alan Mutter,three times the level of 2008.

However

the toll seemed smaller than some observers expected.
There are three reasons for that, the residual monopoly power of the industry, the magic of the bankruptcy system and the irrepressible optimism of publishers.

Little comfort though to the more than 90,000 people who lost their jobs in the various print publishing industries in the last 12 months.

Hyerlocal hits India

Editor and Publisher report on the the Siasat Daily

The family-owned newspaper was founded exactly 60 years ago, and presents itself as "the most techno savvy Urdu newspaper" in the country. "Muslims are lagging in jobs, in education. We have to help our readers to feel more powerful, to be self-confident, as the illiteracy rate in our constituency is particularly high," comments news editor Amer Ali Khan

adding that

The most original endeavors, however, are Siasat's numerous extra-journalistic social activities, which encompass education (including computing, cooking classes and exam coaching) to health support, like the "Abid Ali Khan Eye Hospital", based in the old part of Hyderabad City. The publication was several times awarded - by Unesco among other - for its services to the community and in favor of girls education in particular.

This year's Christmas No 1 will be held up as yet another victory for social media in its war against traditions this year.

The facebook campiagn to prevent Simon Cowell's dominace of the charts ending in victory yesterday evening.

What does it actually mean though?

This from Robert Andrews at Paid Content

1. unlimited digital shelf space for archives can be restorative to long-ago out-of-print cultural artefacts - providing there is significant enough impetus

2. virality only requires a single seed to spread, as long as enough people share its sentiment

3. there is a large enough constituent in the UK frustrated at the lock on culture exerted by national talent contests

And in case you want to know what all the fuss is about

Flogging the family silver

The Independent's Stephen Glover no doubt gets his own back on the specualtion about his own paper by taking a look at the rumours concerning the Guardian from last week.

The Guardian may now be housed in fancy offices near Kings Cross, complete with their own theatre, but its spiritual home is Manchester.

he says

For him the significance is

all the greater if The Daily Telegraph, which broke the story, is correct in suggesting that the Manchester title might fetch less than £40m, though it was supposedly worth £200m several years ago

and adds that

GMG’s apparent willingness to flog off what was once thought of as the family silver suggests its management has woken up to the weakness of its position. Here is a company which by its own (possibly unwise) recent admission is losing £100,000 a day on The Guardian and The Observer, which we might round up to £40m a year. In such circumstances it has to consider selling anything

Harvesting the wisdom of the crowd

Some interesting comments from Mark Little about his decision to leave one of the plum jobs in Irish television journalism?

Mark,after seven years of presenting Prime Time appears disillusioned with television and other traditional media,

“More and more, as the media tries to survive financially, it is trying to seek out the lowest common denominator and find what people’s biases are and then appeal to them, and I found that distressing.”

But perhaps even more interesting is hsi thoughts for the future which came to frition as he saw the impact on social media during the Iranian elections and found that

I was getting information quicker on my couch in south Dublin than the reporter in her hotel room.”

from which came

the idea of starting a news organisation that extracts the “useful news” from the “useless noise” on the internet, as he puts it. “With the development of social platforms like You Tube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, people are talking and they’re having a conversation that is about current events. There’s a huge cloud of information on every single subject and a lot of it is generated much quicker than traditional news.”

Ht-Richard Sambrook

Tax avoidence for Google in the UK

Google is managing to avoid paying tax in Britain.

According to a story in this morning's Sunday Times,it did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year.

Instead

The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary.

It paid according to its Company House accounts,£141,519 which was tax on the interest generated by its cash pile in UK bank deposits.

So that's how Tiger did it

My suspicions were correct then.

Everyone has been asking how on earth Tiger Woods managed to keep his indescretions from the public eye?

The Guardian has the answer so it seems this morning as it reports on an alleged deal which the Wall Street Journal claims was made in August 2007

Representatives acting on behalf of Tiger Woods brokered a deal two years ago to bury a tabloid story of an extramarital affair, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. It said representatives for the golfer acted after the National Enquirer threatened to publish pictures of Woods taken in a parked car with Mindy Lawton, a Florida waitress.

What use is this "portal" if you don't have the internet

An interesting story from Scotland via Hold the Front Page which reports that

The editor of The Scotsman accused politicians of "doing their best to damage" the country's newspaper industry.
It followed a proposal from the Scottish Government that local authorities would no longer be obliged to publish public notices in print editions of newspapers.

The Scottish Parliament is

consulting on a change in the law to allow notices such as planning applications or road closures to be advertised on the internet.

and if approved

would allow councils to use a new public information notices portal, therefore saving local authorities millions of pounds, although it has been stressed they could still use other mediums if they so wished.

However this comment on the story sums it up

What use is this "portal" if you don't have the internet? It is a deliberate ploy to keep some sections of the community in the dark. The majority of the poor, the pensioners, those of us who have a life and don't spend all our time twittering... Typical politicians, you can't trust any of them.

An Orwellian nightmare?

A warning from the Gaurdian's Marina Hyde who uses her Saturday column to advise that

If Simon Cowell's idea succeeds, the UK will be one vast reality show with leaders too weak to resist his nightmarish referendums

Earlier this week the pop guru had suggested that the UK's political debates could take a leaf out of his top rated show

A "political X Factor", in which hot topics are voted on by members of the public in instant referendums? A red phone in the middle of a shiny floor studio, just daring No 10 to call and explain its position on the death penalty, or why lethal force is not always the right response to the theft of a DVD player? Once again, our thanks are due to Simon Cowell, the first post-sentient human – not for simply showing us the people we could be, but for planning a lucrative deal with ITV that will make it all happen.

I am not a celebrity but PLEASE get me out of here

Merry Xmas and watch your in- take

The latest mobile offering?

You can now track your alcohol consumption courtesy of the NHS and an I-Phone app.

James Glick at the Next Web reports that

With accurate unit calculations, feedback and FAQ it’s a neat and well formed application for dissecting your alcohol intake during a period when it can be a difficult to take stock of how much your drinking.
It’s the first foray into the iPhone application world for the NHS and hopefully not the last with the ever useful NHS Direct surely a potential app itself in the future.

Look around an airport lounge now. You'll see more people looking at their phones than holding newspapers

If mobile is going to be the next platform then media organisations need to start thinking about unique ways in which they can command the attention of the audience.

Over at Poynter online Steve Buttry takes an in depth look at the issue,(Ht-Judith Townend )and as he recalls

Look around an airport lounge now. You'll see more people looking at their phones than holding newspapers.

Here are some of his pointers

1.The mobile-first strategy needs to embrace new relationships with the community,

2.a crucial question will be whether mobile opportunities should be the responsibility of a separate operation focused exclusively on mobile or whether the full operation needs to share mobile responsibilities.

3.Journalists will need to change how they gather, process and distribute information.

4.In a mobile-first operation, design may be both a journalism function and a technology function, or it might be a separate area of the operation, combining both skills. However you organize, you need to make mobile service the priority of those involved in design.

5.Priorities need to be set to ensure that technology experts, whether part of a central IT staff or assigned to a department such as a newsroom, have the training and time to help other departments execute an effective mobile-first strategy.

6.Sales staffs need to listen to consumers and businesses and learn how to help businesses serve the mobile audience

But maybe his most poignant thought

An innovation doesn't have to be perfect to launch; in fact the cost of pursuing perfection can doom a project to failure. "Good enough" performance along traditional lines is sufficient for launch, if it is providing a distinct advantage over existing products in some new approach.

Journalist recounts suicide attacks

Over at the committee to protect journalists,Mohamed Olad Hassan, a reporter for the BBC and The Associated Press, and chairman of the Somali Foreign Correspondents Association, recounts his experience covering a deadly ceremony in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Olad narrowly escaped death after a suicide bomber killed at least 23 people on December 3 at the graduation ceremony at Hotel Shamo.


Three journalists were killed in the attack and Mohamed recounts a typical graduation scene

Proud parents beamed at their graduating loved ones, who were also sitting in the hall. Journalists, particularly the cameramen, were right in the front for a good view. People were making speeches, and we were taking notes, as usual.

Then,he says all this brightness turned to darkness.

All I remember is being covered in dust. Some debris apparently from the roof of the hall hit me and there was no light anywhere. I looked across and the young guy sitting next to me was dead. The seat he had been sitting on was mine. We had changed positions for one moment, when I had left momentarily to move my recorder nearer to the speakers. That’s when the explosion occurred. It was my luck not to be sitting in that chair.

Indy rumours of Russian sale

Yesterday it was Guardian speculation,today it's the turn of the Indy.

The FT carries a story that the Russian billionaire owner of the London Evening Standard is in advanced talks to buy the The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

According to the report

Alexander Lebedev has held intermittent talks over the past year with publisher Independent News & Media to buy its UK national newspapers. However, plans were put on hold over the summer as INM started wrangling with its lenders about the restructuring of its €1.3bn (£1.2bn, $1.9bn) debt pile.

3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words

Now here is some interesting information

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

Note-Information at work not included!!!!!!!!

Ht-Adrian Monck

Stop global warming-Don't buy the Express

It is about time that I ranted about the Express.This week has been a particularly good example of agenda attempting headlines with climate change denial top of its list.

Both Monday and today's paper have carried front page headlines as the Copenhagen conference is smeared.

Today sees the story that

UK climatologists “probably tampered with Russian-climate data” to produce a report submitted to world leaders at this week’s Copenhagen summit, it is claimed.
The Met Office’s study, which says the first decade of this century has been the warmest on record for 160 years, is being used to trumpet claims that man is causing global warming.

Whereas on Monday we had the news that

CAMPAIGNERS yesterday attempted to pour scorn on “tenuous” global warming theories by issuing a dossier detailing 100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made.

along with its printing of the complete 100 reasons

In between the news that

THE scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was rocked yesterday as a leading academic called it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud”.
Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going.

Now here's a thought-let's save the trees by not buying the Express-oops I forgot its sales are already crumbling

BBC inter active software charts transport fatalities

Christmas and New Year is always a dangerous time on the roads and this latest piece of interactive software via the BBC attempts to give you the license payer an incite in where not to drive.

It charts the years 1999 to 2008 using figures from the department of transport but only for those incidents where there was at least one fatality.

You can enter a postcode or police area to search.

I plugged in Greater Manchester which shows deaths in 2008 as 2,538,back at the start of the data it was 3,423 with the worst year 2003 with 3,508 deaths.

Click on the pointers and it will give the date,the fatality and the vehicles involved

Ht-JP Digital Digest

Guardian media latest

As I blogged earlier this morning,the Telegraph's story of the Scott Trust divesting itself of Guardian regional media seems to have satisfied the old adage that there is no smoke without fire

In a statement late this morning,the group said

”In line with its remit, GMG keeps its portfolio under review on an ongoing basis. There have been some exploratory talks regarding our regional media business.
“However, these are at a very early stage and it is not clear whether they will progress or what the outcome is likely to be.”

Whether those talks are with Trinity Mirror,it seems too early to tell

Watch this space

Rumours of Manchester Evening News sale

Manchester is all a buzz after this morning's story in the Telegraph that Guardian media group is considering selling the Manchester Evening News

According to the paper

GMG is considering the sale of GMG Regional Media, whose flagship publication is the Manchester Evening News, in a desperate attempt to save more than 100 job losses at its two national newspaper titles.

with a source claiming that

"GMG and The Scott Trust, which was set up to safeguard journalistic freedom and The Guardian's liberal values, has turned its back on its heartland to keep The Guardian afloat."

Rumours abound that Trinity Mirror is in the running.

As yet there is no comment from Guardian media

Humble pie in Wigan

I would have to agree with Jon Slattery's comments on this article in the Guardian this morning.

I was trying desperately to stifle a laugh on the bus as I read it.

How can you make a pie eating contest sound like cold war negotiations?

Try Martin Wainwright's interpretation

"The world pie-eating championships proved once again to be a controversy-strewn battleground today as the sole woman competitor stormed out and officials banned gravy after rumours of doping with cough mixture."

Boyle tops the You Tube charts

I really am not sure what this says about our society but Susan Boyle was the most popular You Tube video of 2009.

With over 120 million views her Britain's got talent audition finished a full 80 million above the second most watched,an American kid reflecting on his visit to the dentist.

As they said after the audition..."you weren't expecting that where you?

Source-Media Guardian

Bernanke is Time's man of the year

Following hot on the heels of Barack Obama,Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2009.

For those who don't know the name,he runs the US Federal bank and according to the magazine can be counted as one of the saviours of the world

Here is what they say

Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity — through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0. So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed's balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.

FT introduces new subscription service

The FT recognises the value of enhanced products for subscriptions as it offers a new premium rate for its readers today.

From today there will be an exclusive editor’s newsletter, a weekly FT Newsmine email service and full access to the electronic edition of the newspaper.

The Newsmine seems a particually good innovation.It extracts hidden nuggets from FT articles and provides a snapshot of global market-related data, trends and observations that may have been missed during the week.

According to Rob Grimshaw, MD of FT.com,

“Our FT.com premium subscribers are highly valued and we’re delighted to be able to roll out this exciting new package of benefits to them,
“Together with access to Lex, I am confident that we have an attractive range of services that will only increase the uptake of premium subscriptions and increase time spent by those readers enjoying FT content online.”

Miami Herald launches donation scheme

Is this the latest model for newspaper sustainability?

"If you value The Miami Herald's local news reporting and investigations, but prefer the convenience of the Internet, please consider a voluntary payment for the web news that matters to you,"

The Huffington Post reports that the Miami Herald is asking readers for donations and thus copying Wikipedia

Follow this LINK and you can donate to the paper

Latest Chinese clampdown on the net

More evidence of China's crackdown on individuals using the internet.

This morning's FT reports that

From Monday, people registering a domain name in China would have to present a company seal and a business licence, the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-backed body, said in a statement.

According to the paper

Officials said the measure was part of a campaign to rein in pornographic content, but bloggers and internet activists interpreted it as a broader attempt to enforce internet censorship more heavily. "If they really enforce this, we will have to register our sites outside China," said one blogger.

Blog Watch formed to monitor the Phillipines election

A group of 19 bloggers in the Phillipines are getting together to harness the power of the blog in reporting important election related-stories that may not receive as much attention from the country’s mainstream media.

Entitled Blog Watch,it is a project of Vibal Foundation and its news and features website Philippine Online Chronicles and aims to use new media to present a multiperspective, multimedia coverage of next year’s elections.

contributors are diverse, from a teenage student to a 61-year-old grandma. That is why they have very diverse opinions and that makes our commentaries really attractive to our readers because they want to make informed choices,”

Why I hope that the internet will be good for politics

Charlie Beckett reports from Demos and the reasons why he believes that the internet is good for politics.

1. It reduces the barriers to getting involved in political activism and political media - either independently or through political parties

2. It enables political parties or movements to mobilise support (eg Barrack Obama) much more efficiently

3. It allows political parties and activists to start to escape from mainstream media agenda setting

4. It allows much quicker and more open reform of political parties themselves

5. It allows Government to open itself up to the public and so become more transparent and therefore, both more democratic and efficient

I have just left a post in the comments section

I think that all the five points are valid but it worries me as to whether this is really happening in the world of politics.
The test will be next year’s election.I hope sincerely that the internet allows the majority of people to re connect with the political process and that we can have informed debate about our future options.
I think though that it will take more than a pure platform to do that.Politics needs to be seen as being transparent,democratic,open sourced for the internet to play an important role

Twitter releases its first premium product

So Twitter keeps to its world and begins the roll out of its "premium products".

The first is a device that allows companies to have multiple contributors to communicate from a single account.

Called quite simply contributor,this means that although the messages would still come from the company profile name, the author’s profile name would also feature in the byline.

Whether this is the way that revenue streams will arise is anybody's guess but I am certain that there will be a few companies that will want to experiment with this new tool.

This from twitter's development team

This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we'll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!

How patience in hyperlocal

What's the most important thing in building a local audience......?

Patience according to this report from Mark Briggs who attended last week's interactive local media conference in LA.

Patience is a virtue when building a local audience. Yelp COO Geoff Donaker said it takes 18-36 months for a new Yelp site to reach critical mass with reviews, even with staff “on the street” in every Yelp market. Yelp has nearly doubled its audience in the past year to about 11 million uniques per month.

Ht-Journalism.co.uk

Media companies win battle over sources

An important ruling in the European courts today concerning the protection of journalist's sources.

Back in 2001,the UK courts ruled that five media companies should hand over leaked documents outlining a possible bid by Interbrew, a Belgian brewing company, for South African Breweries.

The European court has now overturned that judgement saying that it violated the companies rights to freedom of expression

The five,the Independent, The Guardian, The Times,FT and Reuters,heard that that Interbrew’s interests in eliminating damage through dissemination of the information were “insufficient to outweigh the public interest in the protection of journalists’ sources”.

How maximising the net is the number one objective for an enterprise

As the online world and the destiny of a firm combine,the health of the matrix becomes paramount.

That's the conclusion of Kevin Kelly who wrote 10 years ago that:

Whereas once it was maximising the enterprise and the market place which ruled now

Maximizing the value of the net itself soon becomes the number one strategy for a firm. For instance, game companies will devote as much energy to promoting the platform--the tangle of users, game developers, and hardware manufacturers--as they do to their games. For unless their web thrives, they die. This represents a momentous change--a complete shift in orientation.

Furthermore it also involves feeding the network

During certain phases of growth, feeding the network is as important as feeding the firm. Some firms that already have large market shares (such as Intel, which owns 80% of the PC processor market) channel money, through minority investments, to younger firms whose success will strengthen the market for their products, directly or indirectly. They feed the web because it is good business.

Regionality and diverse revenue streams point to the future

Nieman Labs have just released a report looking at journalism nonprofits and asking whether the model can be sustainable.

It suggests that those focusing on regionality and with more diverse revenue steams stand a better chance of survival

Jim Barnett,as part of his graduate studies in nonprofit management at George Washington University believes he has discovered what may be two critical distinctions in a range of examples

First, the six nonprofits that served geographically defined communities — whether they be cities, states or regions — generally did a better job of diversifying their revenue sources than did those that attempted to speak to a national audience.

and secondly

there appeared to be some correlation between bigger budgets and greater diversity in revenues sources. This pattern suggested to me that there is a happy dynamic at work here — a virtuous cycle in which diversity of revenue helps create institutional heft that in turn attracts additional philanthropy in the form of major individual gifts and foundation grants.

Twitter asks did the earth move?

Twitter is being used by the US Geological Survey (USGS) to get instant public reaction to earthquakes.

This report from the BBC says that

The agency is trawling the messages to find out what people felt during a tremor - whether there was a lot of shaking in their area or not.
There are big spikes in Twitter traffic immediately following a quake and the USGS believes emergency responders might find the information useful.
It could help them assess very quickly the severity of a particular event.

However,

the survey stressed that the social networking tool would only ever supplement the existing scientific reporting systems which determine shake effects.

Guardian launches its mobile app

Is this the future and is this the business model?

£2.39 and apart from buying the app content is free, but there is am option left open for charging for some content and/or services.

Newspapers were complacent says Buffett

According to Warren Buffett,the newspaper industry has only itself to blame for its current problems.

Talking to Editor and Publisher,the business guru said

"It is so easy when you've got a wonderful business," Buffett told E&P during a recent interview. "Complacency is pretty easy and it is why they weren't looking over their shoulder at what was happening."

adding that

"When the Internet came along, you gave away your product for free and charged for it in another place [print]," he says. "I'm not positive what you would have done differently, but not figuring out some kind of business model was a mistake."

Shall I compare thee to a McDonald's sandwich?

On a bad day, American media is like the oft-spoofed 1980s ad for McDonalds' McDLT sandwich. Domestic issues go in one styrofoam box; international stories in another. In-depth international news, particularly in many local papers and broadcasts, is scarce. What there is often gets compressed to numbers: body counts from bombings, various GDPs, the rise and fall of international stock indexes. So people tune out. We can make simple changes, including providing more geographical and political context ... small but important items you can do in one printed sentence of copy.

says Multi media journalist Farai Chideya via the Huffington Post

For hyperlocal to work it must find a sustainable business model

I firmly believe that hyper local is the way forward for journalism to survive,but it,as with the rest of journalism needs to find a sustainable business model.

The problem that it has to solve is balancing the needs of the small targeted audience with those of those of the advertisers.One doesn't necessarily lead to the other

The secret words though are niche and connecting.A successfully targeted audience can provide income to advertisers for a relatively small cost.

So where does this go?

According to Paid Content

there’s even hints of a local business model emerging. But the delivery of quality post-code level news across most of the country still a long way off, and sustainable revenues and—dare we say it—profits are even further.

Sustainabilty of course is not just about profits,its about developing the business.Coming back to the advertising,as any salesman will tell you,it not just capturing the account,its cultivating it and maintaining it.The costs of maintaining revenues are often disproportionately high.

There is also the people cost.The single journalist running the site will need help.Yes in the initial stages crowd sourcing will work but people

a) will lose interest

b)will not continue to give something for nothing

Thus for it to be sustainable,it must have a succession plan,training local people in content as well as technological skills and/or looking at partnerships with other organisations

So a long way to go and as Paid content continues to say

In short, 2010 will not be the year of hyper local—these are the foothills, the beginnings of localised online publishing. But the signs are auspicious: increasing levels of online literacy and broadband connections mixed with more inevitable local newspaper closures mean it’s natural that readers—and advertisers—will shift to new outlets. Whether anyone will be making a real living from it—as a mainstream publisher or a start-up—seems unlikely in the near future…

News will be increasingly be produced by smaller, de-institutionalized organizations

Nieman Lab have put together a list of what they believe journalism will be fighting for next year and some of the issues that may or may not be resolved as we enter the second decade of the century.

1. “Bloggers” versus “journalists” is (really, really) over.

2Some information won’t be free, but probably not enough to save big news organizations. and 3.and probably of most interest to many journalists

The .

for as they point out

If “bloggers vs. journalists” is over, and if consumers won’t ever fully subsidize the costs of old-style news production, and if online journalism advertising won’t ever fully equal its pulp and airwaves predecessors, than the journalism will still get produced. It will just get produced differently, most likely by smaller news organizations focusing more on niche products. Indeed, I think this is the third takeaway from 2009. Omnibus is going away. Something different — something smaller– is taking its place.

RIP Editor and publisher

So Editor and Publisher is to cease publication after 125 years.

No doubt a victim rather like Press Gazette of the plethora of media bloggers around the world,nevertheless a great shame that an insititution is forced to close after all that time.

There may be some hope for its resurrection though as it itself reports that

The expressions of surprise and outpouring of strong support for E&P that have followed across the Web -- Editor & Publisher has even hit No. 4 as a Twitter trending topic -- raise the notion that the publication might yet continue in some form.

Tagging too far

Some very interesting comments from Newsquest's digital MD being reported by Press Gazette.

Roger Green was non too complimentary about local paper's attempts to engage with the community using online devices.

Speaking at AOP’s Micro-local Forum, he gave a candid assessment of how he believed online technologies were inefficiently used by local newspapers.
He mocked the unnecessary geo-tagging of stories where location did not play an important factor, suggesting it wasn’t necessary for stories about "the launch of a pet insurance policy" to be plotted in this manner. "I mean honestly, what’s the point of that?"

Social media overload

How many people think this?

I've got more connection than I often know what to do with — hundreds of friends, and friends of friends, and people I've never met who've become my virtual acquaintances on various social networking sites.

Social media overload perhaps is encroaching on our lives and as Martha Irvine says over at Editor and Publisher

Sure, it can be an efficient, effective way to communicate. But frankly, it also can make my head feel like it's going to explode. (As I type this, I try not to be distracted by the instant notifications from my e-mail account telling me that so-and-so and so-and-so are now "following" me on Twitter.)

Maybe time to redefine the boundries between social media and the rest of our lives?

Beeb under fire over HD picture quality

The BBC is under fire over the quality of its HD pictures.

This morning's Independent reports that it has lost its pin-sharp pictures.

The problem says the paper stems from the corporation

lowering the bitrate of its HD encoding technology from 16 megabytes to 9.7MB.

Furthermore

The BBC has been accused of stifling the criticism by closing user forums on its websites that contained negative comments from viewers. Forums that have been re-opened have been bombarded with fresh responses filling page after page. Viewers who claim they have been "fobbed off" have contacted the BBC Trust, demanding that it investigates the problem.

South Africa implements Geo taging for HIV treatment

A great example of the use of geo mapping techniques comes from South Africa where

Vodacom’s the Grid, South Africa’s first location-based mobile social network available to everyone who has a WAP-enabled cellphone, has mapped out close to 11 000 HIV-related support services covering prevention, treatment and support across South Africa.

According to the report from the country's media update

This initiative sees the Grid partnering with the HIV-911 programme – a comprehensive guide of HIV and AIDS related support services in South Africa. The main objective of the programme is to ensure that information about HIV support services are accessible to all South Africans. HIV-911 is funded by United States Agency for International Development / President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief through the Foundation for Professional Development.

The impending decline of twitter

“I believe that in two years the Twit­ter brand will be in the same posi­tion as the Netscape brand is in now: Twit­ter will be cred­ited with start­ing the rev­o­lu­tion, and paving the road for fol­low­ers. But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor posi­tion in the mar­ket with other play­ers tak­ing the lead or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist.”

The words of Yanvi Golan who doesn't believe that there is a long term future for twitter.

An early adapter overtaken by new entrants and eventually put out of its misery?

the blocks are being laid out, one by one – the building blocks for an open, distributed, decentralized Twitter-like experience, which is based on widely available and well known technologies instead of proprietary ones.

The future

A world where

personal branding is a lifestyle, managing micro communities is second nature and developing areas of specialist knowledge is essential for survival in what is a freelance work sphere where multiple revenue streams as a sole trader are the norm.

I couldn't agree more with Sarah Hartley's vision for the 2012 journalist but I wonder whether it applies just to journalism or many other professions?

The modern journalist's tools of trade

Just love Adam Tinworth's collection laid out in his Paris hotel room as he goes to report on two days of Le Web

New business paper launching in Manchester

Into an already crowded Manchester business market comes another publication in the New Year.

The Business Edge has been formed by practicing accountants, business advisers and tax specialists in order to assist businesses

to develop and grow as well as to help navigate through the jungle of red tape and government bureaucracy.

Membership will cost £449 per annum and as How Do reports

The initial print run of the 40-page paper will be 10,000, which will be distributed to the company's mailing list, newsagents and local “cash and carrys” in Cheetham Hill.

What's wrong with your snake?

Thanks to Hattie Garlick over at Comment Central who has come across the 10 strangest books in the English language.

It is over on a site called Weird Book Room and amongst its top ten titles, What's Wrong With My Snake? A User-Friendly Home Medical Reference Manual and Impeccable Birdfeeding: How to Discourage Scuffling, Hull-Dropping, Seed-Throwing, Unmentionable Nuisances and Vulgar Chatter at Your Birdfeeder.

German publishers fight back

Another case of the publishers fighting back.

FT Media reports that

Germany’s newspaper publishers are considering launching joint websites in which to sell articles – a move to defend themselves against search engines such as Google that have put newspaper sales under pressure by offering free news online.

and the report adds that

Some of the nation’s largest print houses – such as Axel Springer, M. DuMont Schauberg, Verlagsgruppe Georg Von Holtzbrinck and WAZ Mediengruppe – are in initial talks about how to sell content on the web.

A chance for media innovation

Simply putting content behind a paywall is not in itself the solution to the problems of the industry.

As Paid Content reports the comments of the Times Media’s digital development head Hector Arthur who says

The Times must meet the “commercial necessity” to innovate before raising the paywall next year,

He adds

We’ve been focusing on what will that mean for the reader. .. and what will that mean for our journalism.” Within that, he’s emphasising presentation: “It’s important to innovate around how you deliver.

Why magazines are spot on with search

Magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping “are doing well” from Google and Yahoo, the companies most often accused of devaluing publishers’ content.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reporting from New York for the FT tells us why

a rigorous approach to tagging its articles for search engine optimisation. If you type “hairstyles” or “gifts for women” into a Google search bar, a Marie Claire article should be among the first results served up.

What is new media?

Many people hate the term new media.What exactly is new media,what's its business model and when did old become old?

Greg Marx agrees as he reports that

Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei has been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board went out of its way to cast the move as part of the Pulitzers’ growing (and welcome) acceptance of “new media.”

Well as he says it's new,it's media and it has been a success and it was on the Web from the paper’s inception, and it has always cultivated high-metabolism reporting that matched the Web’s bottomless appetite for content.

But the way that Politico produces much of its content—by paying reporters who scurry around interviewing people—is decidedly old-fashioned

I suppose new media means a web presence,it means using social media tools to enhance content,but which media doesn't in this age?

Censorship kills

Thanks to Charlie Beckett who draws my attention to the defamation map.

It comes courtesy of Article 19,the global campaign for freedom of expression which

fights for all hostages of censorship, defends dissenting voices that have been muzzled, and campaigns against laws and practices that silence.

Despite social media content is still king

The tools of social media are all well and good but the real issue is providing the content to attract the target audience.

It is especially true for the business audience and as Bristol Editor says

One of the ways social media can win for businesses is by placing their content at the very heart of their marketing. We all know that audiences, including Google, value content and regularly uploaded fresh content above all else. The content dominates the relevance and positioning.

Of course whatever the business model might be telling us at the moment,content is not cheap and as he continues

Effective, quality, timely content integrated across a range of social media platforms represents one of the most powerful ways our clients can gain attention online, win engagement from a number of different sources and sites, as well as providing a cost-effective, multi-channel distribution method for their marketing content.

Oceans no barrier for the Iranian authorities

It seems that even Iranians living abroad who go online to critisise their country's regime are under attack.

As the Wall Street journal reports

Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the "Green Movement," is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists.

and consequently the heat is being turned up on those use the medium of the internet

Dozens of individuals in the U.S. and Europe who criticized Iran on Facebook or Twitter said their relatives back in Iran were questioned or temporarily detained because of their postings. About three dozen individuals interviewed said that, when traveling this summer back to Iran, they were questioned about whether they hold a foreign passport, whether they possess Facebook accounts and why they were visiting Iran. The questioning, they said, took place at passport control upon their arrival at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Ht-Suw and Kevin Charman-Anderson

The triumph of hope over experience

A vast audience that cannot be tapped.

That's the conclusion of John Naughton writing in yesterday's Observer.He is referring to the achievement of Facebook in getting 350 million registered users and the problem of creating a business model out of it

The truth is that investing in social networking represents the triumph of hope over experience. The optimism comes from a feeling that it's impossible to gather, say, 350 million people in one place and not somehow make money. In the real world, one would charge them admission and sell them hot dogs and overpriced T-shirts. But that doesn't work in cyberspace. If Facebook started to charge for membership, its population would dwindle to the number of people who think that its services are worth paying for – probably not that many.

Research shows 2010 will see big investment in social media

A recent survey have indicated that business is preparing to invest a lot more in social media.

A survey of more than 1,100 companies carried out in September 2009 by Econsultancy produced in association with bigmouthmedia found that that an overwhelming majority of companies (86%) surveyed plan to spend more money on social media in 2010, and a further 13% are planning to keep the same level of budget.

In addition

* Almost two-­thirds (64%) of companies say they have experimented with social media but have not done much.

* Micro-­blogging (i.e. Twitter) is now the most widely adopted social media tactic, used by 78% of company respondents.

* Just under half of companies (46%) are not yet using reputation or buzz monitoring tools to understand what is being said about their brand.

* Nearly a third of respondents (31%) are not spending any of their budget on social media.

* There is a mixed view of the benefits of Twitter, with almost a third of respondents (31%) saying that there are tremendous opportunities available.

* The biggest barrier to better social media engagement for companies surveyed is the lack of resources (54%).

Ht-Mark Comerford

Twitter on the turn

This chart which is Business Insider's chart of the week asks whether the social media company may have turned the corner.

Interesting? Possibly as it shows that November sees a fall in newly registered users but one swallow doesn't bring a summer

Publishers attempt to get back control of content

According to today's Sunday Times,five of the world’s biggest publishers are preparing to launch a joint venture this week aimed at regaining control of their content on the new generation of online reading devices.

Dominic Rushe reports for the paper that

News Corp, publisher of The Sunday Times, has joined Time Inc, Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith in the venture. Between them they publish titles such as Cosmopolitan, Time, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
With a new generation of electronic readers about to hit the market, the publishers are keen to gain a tighter hold on their content.

That question-how do you measure social media?

How do you measure the impact of social media?

Some say it is very difficult,nigh on impossible but David Berkowitz reckons there are a hundred ways and just to prove the point he lists them out

Here are the first 10

1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts

2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions

3. Shift in buzz over time

4. Buzz by time of day / daypart

5. Seasonality of buzz

6. Competitive buzz

7. Buzz by category / topic

8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)

9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)

10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)

Google hypocrisy in play over Adsense

According to Mark Cuban,Google is unquestionably the best at selling advertising on line.

So he asks

why isn’t Google taking advantage of this unique opportunity ? Why not just offer a specially tailored version of AdSense for Newspapers ? They do what they do, create content. You do what you do, generate content and sell ads ?

and the reason

Google hypocrisy in play. This argument is no different than the same argument they made with Youtube and the music and film industries. All those movies, tv shows, music videos on Youtube were GREAT PROMOTION. The music and movie industries shouldnt blame Google if they don’t know how to monetize all the billions of views and impressions Google and Youtube provided the content industry.

Ht-Adrian Monck

Google offers an online dictionary

Google has had a great deal of exposure in the press and the blogosphere this week but some good news and publicity for it in the Indy this morning.

It has

quietly rolled out an online dictionary offering the meanings of words in more than two dozen languages.

The dictionary service offered definitions of words in 28 languages and to translate terms from or into English.

New look for Reuters

According to this morning's FT,Reuters is about to announce an overhaul of its website

in an effort to showcase a wider range of content from the former Thomson Corp professional businesses.

says the paper

"This is designed to be an ad-supported property, but as we introduce a greater range of content we will be looking for a range of different business models." The new site will highlight "dashboards" of data from across the group's divisions.

Freelancers asked to pay for being paid promptly

If true,Gawker have discovered that Time have opened up a fantastic new market: charging its freelancers for the privilege of being paid for their work in a timely fashion.

According to the US site

A tipster forwarded us an e-mail that Time Inc. freelancers got this week from JPMorgan, which administers the company's invoicing. Under the cheery subject heading "Time Inc - Accelerate payments at year end!", it outlined the company's PayMeNow program, whereby you can speed up payment of your invoice for a fee, kind of like when you get a payday loan at the check cashing place down on the corner so you can afford to buy lottery tickets for the week.

Digital divide and Wikipedia

Whilst crowdsourcing works wonders in places where there are plenty of educated earners,it falls down in places that underperform.

One such area is Africa,as Marginal Revolution notes

Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

via the Guardian

Could not resist this photo

I whipped my camera out of my bag in Manchester earlier this week-too late to capture the pigeons swooping down but hopefully capturing the moment.

Should Labour really worry about the Sun's Tory support?

We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects.

That is the conclusion of this paper,the effect of newspaper entry and exit on electoral politics.

Produced by three American academics,it looks at American daily papers from 1869-2004,it finds that newspapers can have a robust effect on turnout but that there was little or no evidence of partizan newspapers affecting shares of the vote.

Neither did the study find anty correlation between the affects on incumbents in roles either helping or hindering them.

The results they say are consistent with the model that says that newspapers affect the political process mainly by providing information.Where there is little information,there is a lower turnout in the political process.

Ht-Chris Dillow

Fox attracts the largest audience for Obama's Afghnaistan speech

It appears that over in America,politicians can still command large TV audiences.

The figures out for Barack Obama's speech at Westpoint academy when he announced future policy in Afghanistan reached over 40m people.

The strange thing being,or perhaps not so strange was that it was Fox news that got the highest ratings attracting over 4.55 million of those viewers, more than CNN and MSNBC combined.

The irony being that that was the station that the Obama regime attempted to freeze out earlier in the year.

Remember this from Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Own the platform protect the content

Has Paul Bradshaw come up with one solution to the problem of paying for journalism?

Writing on his blog,Paul suggests that

offering universal wifi could present a real opportunity for publishers to recapture some of the qualities that made their print products so successful.

His rational?

Firstly that they will own the platform and therefore

would allow publishers to re-establish a stronger negotiating position when it comes to selling local advertising

However

2.The mobile qualities of wifi make it particularly easy to sell geo-targeted advertising. If you have a built-in search engine you could also do a Google and serve up relevant ads based on a combination of their search and location.

3.. If the internet has taught publishers one thing it should be this: your profitability relied on your ability to sell a platform based on reliable quality content.

Are paywalls really a good idea?

With paywalls comimg back onto the agenda with a bang this week,it is worth reading this post from Steve Yelvington who explains why he believes it is not a good idea.

This is a not a graph that your typical Web metrics system offers up without a struggle, but if you can force it to reveal this data, it's eye-opening. I first pulled this sort of curve out of a Tacoda system half a dozen years ago, and it changed a lot of my thinking.
On the left side, you have awesome reach, both in-market and (as previously discussed) out-of-market. As you get better with SEO techniques, that spike gets even higher.
Most of those visitors come once or twice, probably following a link from a search engine or another website. They're looking for something very specific. They find it (or not) and leave.

Plenty of life in newspapers yet

Northern Echo editor Peter Barron believes that there is plenty of life still left in newspapers.

Hold the front page reports that Barron,taking part in a debate about the future of the regional press staged at London’s City University said that,

We are obviously facing a digital future, but I still think newspapers have a future for at least 10-15 years."

Writing on his blog he continued

A paper like The Northern Echo still has a healthy, loyal readership and it is attracting more and more readers to its website.
Advertising is well down on a year ago, thanks to the recession, but showing signs of improvement - fingers crossed that the economy goes the right way.