Is the paywall coming to the NYT?

According to the Telegraph this morning,the New York Times is on the verge of introducing the dreaded paywall.

They are thinking of a scheme similar to the FT whereby a reader registers,and gets a certain amount of articles for free before having to pay for additional content.

The newspaper is expected to announce the introduction of a so-called "pay wall" before the much-rumoured launch of Apple's new tablet computer, which is thought to be specially designed for easy newspaper reading, on January 27.
Sources close to Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of The New York Times, said the paper would make a decision on charging within the next few days.

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.”

FT investigating allegations of advertising paying for editorial

The Financial Times is investigating allegations that advertisers have paid for articles to be printed as editorial in its FT Business specialist magazine publishing division.reports Media Guardian this morning.

It follows a letter sent by the NUJ which the paper says contained the following

"It has come to our attention that reporters, many of them members of the National Union of Journalists, are often asked to write 'advertorials' which pass off as genuine editorial features,"

Tips for that exclusive online community

There is a great analysis of the FT's Long Room by Roland Legrand, over at Media Shift.

Entitled the Velvet Rope Approach to an Online Community,perhaps it makes sense to cut down on quantity, and create an exclusive members-only structure.

That is what the Long room has done and New York-based Alphaville editor Paul Murphy explains some of the thinking behind it:

It is "an exclusive comment and analysis arena, where finance professionals are invited to share their research and offer thoughts on the work of others." It is free to join, if you can get through the vetting process to be accepted.

"We are a blog and we acknowledge that people are promiscuous,So we tell them what to read elsewhere if they have half an hour of spare time, and we tell them what they should read in the FT. Being financial professionals, it's a navigational service. We allow them to sample."

and as to why it works?

"It's a very light structure, especially compared to a newspaper, which typically requires a massive industrial process,The Long Room also enables the Financial Times to gather important insight about its readers. This information helps the paper sell itself -

Why the FT's sales are falling

Guido has his own reasons behind the fall in sales of the FT:

The paper now sells more copies overseas than in the UK – which may explain its fanatically europhile stance. Whereas the core UK readership is from the eurosceptic City and business community, the overseas readership is euo-establishment. Increasingly commuters to the Square Mile are turning to City AM if they are casual consumers of financial news or, if they are need-to-know types, the revamped and strengthened Wall Street Journal.

As Iain Dale also reminds us

Iain Martin's new blog on the WSJ site is fast becoming unmissable. He has launched a one man campaign to hold the Financial Times to account for its apparent anti-Tory bias.

FT's next stage of digital transition

Andy Dickinson has drawn my attention to a leaking of details of a reorganisation of the FT newsroom.

The document states that

The priority for the organisation is to tilt the workflow towards the online content and to streamline the newspaper process.

In a question and answer document presumably for employees it says that

Despite the changes made at the company back in 2006,the world has not stood still and that catering for the online customer is now a priority.

The plan is for no more redundancies from those announced in Jan and in response to questions about whether this will mean an increased workload for journalists,the paper says that there will be some contraction on the print side with second edition pages being reduced.

As to the vexed question on subbing the document says that

we do need to move away from treating copy editing as a single demarcating in the traditional newspaper process.ie that subbing is done as far up the process as possible

FT launches a next generation news aggregator

I have just been checking out the latest digital initiative from the FT.

It is called Newssift and is essentially a news aggregator service.

Interesting though that the usual FT brand of pink is nowhere to be seen.

The site says that

Newssift streamlines the process of search and search refinement to help users become more informed. Moving beyond simple keyword search, Newssift offers search based on meaning, relationships and business themes. Content is aggregated and annotated by editors to ensure relevant and deep analysis of global business news. Newssift allows you to know before you go.

adding that it is

A next generation vertical search tool, searches are based on meaning and relationships, moving beyond traditional keyword search.

Pearson results show the demand for quality financial journalism

There are some encouraging signs for the top end of the journalism business with the release of Pearson's preliminary results this morning.

The group's website reports that

The Financial Times Group continued to achieve good growth - in particular at Interactive Data and Mergermarket - but FT Publishing saw a decline in advertising revenues (which now account for 4% of Pearson's sales).

The FT website saw growth of 9 per cent year on year and register users increased from approximately 150,000 at the end of 2007 to 966,000 by the end of last year.

Ft to target the Chinese investor

I blogged yesterday about the theory that paid online content would be viable as long as it provides a differentiated product.

Financial information must be top of the list for that particular type of information and the FT announces this morning that it is to luanch a new subscription only site aimed at Chinese investors.

According to Paid Content

The new publication is in keeping with the UK business paper’s focus on offering more premium digital content. And since world markets are continuing to flail, China still looks like a comparatively solid place to invest.

Some are not happy with the FT redesign

Over at the Guardian Andrew Brown is not very happy with the new design at FT.COM

The financial crisis is grim enough without the Financial Times panicking; yet last week the paper committed the worst online redesign I have ever seen

so no mincing of words there

The greatest crime according to Andrew is

The front page of the FT's site used to be a tightly designed space, with the main stories in about 10-point type and a sidebar containing anything up to 30 links that allowed you to explore the rest of the paper. There would be 15 or 20 stories immediately available. This was a lot of information. People who read the FT are assumed to be capable of processing lots of information.
The front page of the website this morning has something like a fifth of the number of words on it. The font size has nearly doubled, and the leading - the blank space between the lines - has grown even more. There are perhaps a fifth as many links visible as in the old design