Feb 27th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
From Howard Owens comes a link to a hilarious post by Amy Gahran at the Poynter Online site (where she edits the E-Media Tidbits feature). In it, she tries to describe this new information-delivery technology called a “news-paper” to her skeptical husband:
“Check it out,” I said, “It’s a different kind of news delivery technology. It’s called a news-paper.”
“How does it work?” he asked.
“They have giant printers in Denver that print up thousands of these every day with news that was current as of something called ‘press time,’ and then they truck them out to towns, divide the truckloads into cars, and drop them on subscribers’ doorstep.
“You paid for this?…” he frowned, shaking his head. “How do you search it?”
“It’s not really searchable, but it’s scannable. See, you can open up the pages wide and see lots of stories.”
“Looks like mostly ads.”
Hilarious. And yet, kind of sobering too. At least by the end, Amy’s husband grudgingly admits that “at least the screen resolution is decent.”
Feb 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
From Cory at Lost Remote comes a link to what has to be one of the most creative — and elaborate — classified ads ever, which the Roanoke Times newspaper from Roanoke, Virginia put up as part of its search for an editor. If you have even a few minutes to spare, you really should check it out. And be sure to click on all the links in the toolbar at the bottom — it’s worth it. In fact, it makes me want to work there.
Feb 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word.
Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism blog says that his hometown newspaper in Bolton is one of those that seems to be struggling with the whole concept. In fact, Paul says its efforts are “the worst attempt at online video I’ve seen so far.” And Kurt Anderson has a piece at New York magazine in which he writes about some of the video work that the New York Times has been doing — including film critic David Carr’s Oscar blog Carpetbagger. He also mentions David Pogue’s tech videos, which I have to confess I find exceptionally irritating. But maybe that’s just me.
“In the online archives of U.S. papers are thousands of videos, among them dozens of exceptional short docs, more like miniature Frontlines or public-radio-with-pictures than like network-news segments, available anytime. This is video-journalism-on-demand.”
In other recent newspaper video news, the New York Times just announced that it is going to dip its toes into the “user-generated content” field by allowing couples who want to be featured in the wedding announcements to send in video talking about how they met, or a clip from their wedding. Fittingly enough, an NYT staffer describes the effort in a Google video interview, and says that the paper decided to do it as a way of experimenting with video.
Update:
In a followup post, Paul says he came across some video at the Eastern Daily Press website that fits his definition of really well-done video content.
Feb 20th, 2007 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From a site called Springwise comes news of a new “open-source media” effort in Denmark. A free paper called Nyhedsavisen has given bloggers and other “citizen journalists” the ability to make it onto the front page of the paper’s website at Avisen.dk, where their stories appear beside articles written by the newspaper’s regular staff.
As the Springwise story puts it, “pros and amateurs compete for top positions in the most read and most debated sections.” If they want to become “Læserskribenter” (which translates as “reader-writers”), users create a profile and set up a blog, then write about whatever they choose. The pieces that make it to the front page are chosen on the basis of popularity.
So far no plans to compensate any of the “citizen journalists” for their efforts, according to Springwise — which points to a list at Trendspotting of the open-source media projects that do compensate their contributors, including several that specialize in photos (such as Scoopt.com), as well as the South African Reporter site, run by one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, which is a wholly user-produced site that pays “reporters” whose stories make it to the front page.
Feb 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
The International Herald-Tribune — a paper that could probably use some disrupting of its own, from what I’ve heard — has a piece about a Norwegian newspaper that seems to have succeeded in carving out a business online. According to the story, Schibsted is an Oslo-based newspaper publisher that saw its earnings climb by almost 30 per cent in the fourth quarter, thanks largely to its online operations, which one analyst says could account for about 60 per cent of the company’s earnings next year.
Bharat Anand, a professor at Harvard Business School who is writing a case study on the company, says that:
“There’s clearly something quite special here… There’s no question they managed this transition earlier than a lot of newspaper companies, and they’re in a better position as a result.”
According to the story (which Stowe Boyd has also mentioned in a recent post), Schibsted started investing in new media way back in 1995, and continued to do so even during the dot-com bust. It is now the biggest Internet media player in Norway and in Sweden, has expanded into new markets like France and Spain by starting free newspapers (under the name 20 Minutes) and launching high profit-margin classified-ad businesses like Finn.no
The newspaper company, which publishes the tabloid paper Verdens Gang and the higher-brow newspaper Aftenposten, also started launching online sites even though they threatened to cannibalize their existing assets. Schibsted’s CEO says that the company “changed from a defensive stance at the beginning of the Internet age to a very offensive one.” Some analysts have said that the publisher was able to shift gears so quickly in part because several senior managers did not come from a newspaper background.
Update:
Lucas Grindley notes that the 20-per-cent of revenue figure in the IHT article conflicts with the data on the Schibsted site, where it says online accounts for 20 per cent of profits — which is somewhat less impressive, but still noteworthy.
