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.
Sep 8th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Catching up on some links I meant to post over the summer, the Economist had a piece about how newspapers aren’t doing as much to remake themselves and adapt to life with the Web and new media as they should be. The subtitle is “Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded.” Here’s an excerpt:
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.
Sep 8th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | 1 Comment
A friend passed on this link, which is to an article at The Bivings Report website on things newspapers can do to improve the interactivity of their websites. The site gets its name from a report that surveyed the major U.S. papers and what they are doing in terms of the web — the report is described here and you can download the full thing here. Interestingly, 80 out of 100 papers had blogs and 63 of that 80 allowed comments. A little over 75 per cent of the papers surveyed had RSS feeds, although they were partial (i.e. not the full text of articles). The suggestions include offering full-text articles in RSS, partnering with local bloggers and getting rid of registration.
