Sep 13th, 2006 | Reimagination, Social Media | No Comments
Ross Mayfield of Socialtext — a company that helps create “wikis” — has a post on the blog of Telegraph news editor Shane Richmond (who is on vacation) about how a newspaper can help develop a community online. Here’s an excerpt:
Newspapers have a tremendous opportunity to host and extend the communities they serve. By now, most have taken the baby steps of offering RSS feeds, enabling journalists to blog and reconsidering costwalls. This lets them tap into the conversational networks that may intersect their communities. It is important to be tapped into these networks, but this is just staying on par with the industry, and shouldn’t be confused with engaging their core community.
If you are open to sharing control to create value, the economics favour you. Social software, especially because of the leverage provided by open source, isn’t a significant expense. If you can foster community, participants have a propensity to contribute what you used to call content (and they may simply call conversations).
Sep 11th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Chris Anderson, the Wired editor who wrote the book “The Long Tail” — about how content on the Internet has a longer life than in traditional media, was interviewed by the Press-Gazette in Britain recently, and talked a little about online media outlets and the Long Tail concept. There are some excerpts on the Online Journalism blog, and the full interview is here. Here’s a sample of his thoughts on subscription sites:
“There are some who require you to log in; there are some that require you to pay for content. Our sense is that if you do that, you will get some revenues, but you will not be part of the conversation. You will not have access to that extraordinary word-of-mouth effect out there in the wide-open world.”
Sep 11th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
In a recent post, Editors Weblog has a summary of some of the changes that the Telegraph is undertaking with its new digital-paper integration effort code-named “byte”. The post is here. An excerpt:
– Journalists that work in the new offices will receive five days of multimedia training including audio and video
– News will be focused through different media depending on the time of day, a strategy which the paper calls “touchpoints”; for example, people tend to read text in the morning, watch video at lunch, listen to audio in the afternoon and look for lifestyle features in the evening
Sep 8th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
The Press Gazette has a look at what the Telegraph plans with its new newsroom, which is described thus:
The “revolutionary” system is based around a hub layout, with a round table at the centre — where the editor and 11 section heads will sit. The 11 sections — sport, business, pictures, home news etc — will then fan out from the central hub. Each team will be responsible for production not just of the broadsheet news pages, but of digital products too, containing text, audio and video. The job title ‘sub-editor’ will disappear; instead ‘production journalists’ will work on various platforms. The company also expects to recruit some specialist video journalists.
A four-month pilot system, testing the new process at the Victoria office, has 39 people working on it using a smaller-scale version of the hub, producing dummies of the broadsheet newspaper as well as various other digital products. These include “click and carry” pages — fully interactive pdf files that contain video and audio elements when viewed online, but which can also be printed out on A3 or A4 pages to be read as a traditional print product.
Sep 8th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Last month, Business 2.0 magazine had a great look at the New York Times and some of its new digital moves. If you didn’t see it, the piece is here. Here’s an excerpt:
Amid uninspiring second-quarter results in which the company’s revenue and profit were basically flat from the same period a year earlier, Internet revenue soared from $49 million to $66 million. Radiating pride, Nisenholtz declares, “We’re really in an amazing position…. We’re in the best shape we’ve ever been in.”
Nisenholtz’s optimism is not just fired by the numbers. For more than a decade, since he left Ameritech and joined the Times, no one has pushed harder for the company to embrace the Web and all its possibilities. The resistance he met was often stiff. But now the Times is emerging as arguably the most Web-savvy newspaper outfit in America.
