Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Murdoch to keep WSJ access fees
Via Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, Rupert Murdoch has backtracked on plans to open up the Wall Street Journal’s paid-for content. In fact, subscribers can expect to pay more for it:
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, Murdoch said his plans for the newly-acquired publication still involved expanding the audience for general news.
But the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which concluded its takeover of Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones last month, indicated that WSJ.com users would probably have to pay more for content that remained behind the subscription wall.
“We’re sort of dividing it up. Those things you can get more or less as a commodity on different sites about finance, that will certainly be free at the Wall Street Journal,” he added.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/25/digitalmedia.rupertmurdoch?gusrc=rss&feed=media
Google to buy New York Times?
Via John Ellis at RealClearMarkets, is Google about to buy The New York Times?
What’s in it for Google? Well, for one thing, it’s cheap. Sell off the New England properties and the real cost is $3 billion. That’s not much money to buy one of the premier brands of the information age. It also comes with some excellent real estate, which further reduces the risk. And happily enough, it will probably get cheaper in the coming months. So the price is definitely right.
Second, Google is embarking on an ambitious mobile platform. It is buying wireless spectrum and will soon introduce Google Mobile. In so doing, it is entering into an arena where the established players have hired (almost) every lobbyist and (almost) every law firm with expertise in telecommunications in Washington, DC and in virtually every state capital. Owning the New York Times would level that playing field in one fell swoop.
This would also fit in with John Battelle’s idea that Google is making a play for the second click.
And while it’s not in the same league as Google, let’s not forget that the NYT Company acquired About.com in March 2005, which (according to their own info) is ‘a top 10 content site‘.
And speaking of content, Google would also be buying the highly respected New York Times Syndicate and News Service, giving it tremendous reach outside of the US.
More: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/01/might_google_buy_the_new_york.html
Google search experiments
Fancy taking Google’s experimental search for a spin?
Alternative views, keyword suggestions, keyboard shortcuts, left-hand search navigation, right-hand contextual search navigation…anyone remember how Google started out?
Web publishing: Just do it!
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/
UK print brands attract growing overseas audience
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.
The darker side of citizen journalism
Via Mother Jones, citizen journalism gets a bad press:
…the newspaper industry’s embrace of “citizen journalism” has a downside. Reader-submitted content rarely gets vetted by editors. In the same month as Getz’s Wal-Mart post, the Democrat published a story by a retirement home’s development director about the complex’s great new golf course—without disclosing her job—and a woman wrote an article about a boy who’d organized a cancer charity event without noting that she’s his mom. This may sound like small-time stuff, but it exemplifies the self-defeating side effects of newspapers’ new strategy for survival.
More: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/01/stop-the-presses.html
