GeorgeHopkin.com

Via Press Gazette comes news that Britons spend £76 million on newspapers and mags every week:

British households spend a total of £76m on newspapers and magazines every week – the equivalent of £1.37 per person in the country per week.

People over 65 and those in Northern Ireland spend the most on them according to the latest Family Spending Survey, which shows that in 2006 the average British household spent £2 a week on newspapers and £1 on magazines, 0.65 per cent of households’ weekly spending.

The £3 average is up slightly from 2001/2 when families spent an average of £2.90 down from 2003/4 and 2004/5 when the figure was £3.10.

More: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=40100&c=1

(Not sure what ‘dead trees’ have to do with this? Wikipedia has a few lines on this here.)

Via the Telegraph, social networking site Bebo finds itself at the centre of a media storm:

Detectives fear a bizarre suicide craze is sweeping through teenagers in a small town fuelled by chat on social networking sites after seven friends took their own lives.

As well as the deaths during the last 12 months, several more have attempted suicide and police fear they are being driven by a desire to achieve prestige by having a memorial website set up in their name.

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/23/nsuicide123.xml

In fairness to Bebo, they do offer some ‘fun animations‘ for youngsters using the site, along with a bunch of links to teaching materials, how-to guides, advice for parents, etc.

Via Publishing2.0, Scott Karp writes on the fundamental difference between print and web journalism:

I realized that the problem isn’t just a lack of understanding about blogging, or social networking…The problem is, framed more broadly, an inability to understand what I like to call “web-native publishing” — but let’s just call it web publishing, because complexity is the root cause problem here.

The fundamental [difference] between print publishing and web publishing is that print distribution is a linear process, while web-native publishing is dynamic and non-linear, particularly when publishing on a web-native CMS like a blog.

…it’s not about understanding one format, it’s about understanding the WEB. It’s about understanding that putting content on the web isn’t just putting content on a page, same as a printed page — it’s putting content on the NETWORK. It’s understanding that, unlike print publishing where subscriptions control distribution, on the web PEOPLE and LINKS control distribution.

Lots more: http://publishing2.com/2008/01/21/the-only-way-for-journalists-to-understand-the-web-is-to-use-it/

comScore reports that the UK’s national newspapers are attracting an increasing number of international readers, with visits to DailyMail.co.uk from users overseas up 153 per cent from a year ago and nearly 60 per cent of visits to BBC sites originating from outside the UK.

The Daily Mail had the highest proportion of international visitors, with 69 percent of its 7.6 million visitors originating from outside the U.K.  The BBC attracted 59 percent of its audience internationally, while the Telegraph (57 percent) and the Guardian Media Group (56 percent) also drew more than half their respective audiences from outside the U.K. Only two of the ten sites studied, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and ITV Sites, had less than a quarter of their traffic originate internationally.

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2011

Via Journalism.co.uk, the Guardian is looking to monetise its podcasts:

The Guardian is planning to launch adverts in its podcasts later this year. Speaking at a Radio Academyevent on podcasting, Matt Wells, head of audio for Guardian Unlimited, said the media group was developing software to allow the sale of ’spot ads’ in Guardian podcasts.

Some Guardian podcast stats from the report:

Last month the site recorded 1.5 million downloads across all of its podcasts, Wells said, with 15-20,000 downloads of the Media Talk podcast over a week and 80-100,000 weekly downloads of its Football Weekly show.

More: http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/530933.php

Via (JP-owned) Scotsman.com, news of the UK’s shiny new super computer, including a short video tour to give you some idea of the scale involved in this project:

Meet Hector, the most advanced supercomputer in the United Kingdom and a machine that can perform no fewer than 63 trillion calculations every second. Based at Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility, Hector, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resources, will be used by researchers at the cutting edge of their fields.

Professor Arthur Trew, director of the computing centre where Hector is beavering away, said:

“Hector has a performance of around 50 to 60 million million calculations per second. It’s necessary to have that speed because many of the problems it will investigate are very complex – from trying to study the earth’s climate, to better aircraft, to new drugs. The current UK national facility is called HPCX and is run by Edinburgh. Hector is four times faster.”

More: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Inside-the-lifesaving-60m-supercomputer.3671386.jp

Via netimperative comes BT Total Broadband’s list of the UK’s favourite websites:

Best Books Website – www.amazon.com

Best Celebrity Website – www.holymoly.co.uk

Best Cookery Website – www.bbcgoodfood.com

Best Electrical Website – www.amazon.com

Best Environmental Website – www.greenpeace.org.uk

Best Fashion Website – www.next.co.uk

Best Food Website – www.tesco.com

Best Gardening Website – www.gardenersworld.com

Best Homes Website – www.rightmove.co.uk

Best Kids Website – www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies

Best Local Government Website – www.manchester.gov.uk

Best News Website – www.bbc.co.uk

Best Online Retailer – www.amazon.com

Best Search Website – www.google.com

Best Travel Website – www.lastminute.com

Best Video Website – www.play.com

Best Wedding Website – www.confetti.co.uk

More: http://www.netimperative.com/news/2008/january/14/bt-reveals-nations-favourite-websites

Via Folio magazine, US mags are buying into web and digital projects in a big way:

Magazines announcing digital initiatives—video, content sharing partnerships, integrated marketing, social networking and anything other buzzy product related to Web 2.0—increased by more than 33 percent in 2007, according to year-end data by the Magazine Publishers of America scheduled to be released later this morning.

More: http://www.foliomag.com/2008/magazine-digital-initiatives-33-percent-2007

Via the Gurdian’s tech section, it looks like rumours of the internet’s death at the hands of video overload may be a little premature:

BT is boosting Britain’s attempt to remain at the top of the global broadband market with plans to install a network at Ebbsfleet in Kent that offers speeds 20 times faster than the average UK household connection. The company hopes its deployment of the UK’s fastest ever residential network, at the development of 10,000 new homes, will be a crucial testbed as the government, regulator Ofcom and industry come to decide how to upgrade the country’s broadband network.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/btgroupbusiness.internet?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Via Venturebeat.com, social networking is still VERY big business:

Gaia Online, the virtual world for teens, siad media conglomerate Time Warner has invested an undisclosed amount in the company. San Jose, Calif.’s Gaia says it has nearly three million monthly users. It also has a growing population of users on Bebo, who sign into the Gaia OMG application and play a miniature version of the virtual world (see [Venturebeat’s] article from earlier today).

More: http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/08/time-warner-invests-in-teen-virtual-world-gaia-online/

And via Niall Kennedy’s blog, you wouldn’t want to pay Google’s electricty bill:

Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReducejobs spread across its massive computing clusters. The average MapReduce job ran across approximately 400 machines in September 2007, crunching approximately 11,000 machine years in a single month. These are just some of the facts about the search giant’s computational processing infrastructure revealed in an ACM paper by Google Fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.

More: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html

Via Mad.co.uk comes news of Dennis Publishing’s acquisition of current affairs pure play thefirstpost.co.uk

Dennis Publishing cheif exec James Tye said:

“An online current affairs property is the perfect complement to The Week for our advertisers and the www.thefirstpost.co.uk will also be invaluable for widening the subscription audience of the title, both here and in the US. It also underlines our commitment to be a true 21st century publisher, reaching audiences whatever the platform.”

Full story: http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/News/Articlex/902d857f87ca44628c5a0961610113a1/Dennis-Publishing-buys-TheFirstPostcouk.html

Great story by The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade about digital integration at The Telgraph, Times and Financial Times.

Includes an appropriate nod to the regionals:

“Regional newspapers, as so often, have been in the forefront of this cultural change. Their reporters and subeditors have been embracing multi-platform journalism for several years. The nationals have been slower off the mark, but - as you can see from the following examples - they are forging ahead now.”

And one for those who are still reluctant to embrace the web:

“…it is also clear that integration has stimulated journalists to become inventive. Once it was the journalist geeks among us who had to goad reluctant colleagues to change their attitudes, to learn the new way of doing things. Now journalists are realising that integration is not only proving much less painless than expected, it is releasing them from the straitjacket of the single 24-hour deadline.”

Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/07/pressandpublishing.digitalmedia