Oct 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.
As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.
Aug 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As plenty of others are reporting elsewhere, the New York Times has launched the public version of its MyTimes customizable home page, which has been in beta for almost a year now. I tried it out when it first launched and I confess my reaction was very similar to some of the other responses out there — in other words, the new offering has some not bad features, but nothing that’s going to alter the fabric of the Web or cause the earth to stop rotating.
I think one of the most interesting features is the ability to check out — and add the RSS feeds for — some of the sites that New York Times reporters and columnists like to go to. I confess I haven’t really spent much time on the site since I checked it out initially, but the last time I looked they hadn’t done much apart from letting you add feeds from NYT writers and add tabs specific to each of your favourite authors.
My friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t very impressed with the site, and I share his lack of enthusiasm. While it’s not a bad offering, I wonder why the Times bothered with MyTimes when there are others offering much the same features. I assume they’re hoping faithful readers will gravitate to the site because of their love for the brand, but I’m not sure that’s true. If I were them, I would have spent a bit more time trying to make it unique.
Jul 25th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The New York Times Co. released its financial results for the latest quarter Wednesday (PaidContent has a good overview), and it was pretty much the same picture as in previous quarters, but painted with a newer brush: advertising revenue is growing online, but nowhere near fast enough to make up for the downturn in newspaper ad revenue. As a result, ad revenues overall were down 5.7 per cent over the same quarter the previous year, despite a growth in Internet revenue of 27 per cent, including an online ad revenue increase of 22 per cent. This is a story that my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has told before and will likely be told again.
Jun 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Time magazine managed to land an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch (maybe it was by promising him the cover and a cover line like “The Last Tycoon”), and — as is typical for the blunt-spoken Australian — he holds nothing back. While some of the reporters for the illustrious Wall Street Journal took some unauthorized time off to protest Murdoch’s acquisition of the paper, the billionaire came out with jewels like this:
– “They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it — that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!”
– “The price of the Journal,” says Murdoch, “is $60 plus vitriol.”
– “When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,” he jokes late one night, “we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.”
and finally:
– “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts.
And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”
Classic Murdoch. Kevin Maney says in Portfolio magazine that he hopes Murdoch starts a bidding war for journalists.
May 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
This has to be the single weirdest journalism story I’ve come across in weeks — and yet at the same time, it makes a kind of terrible, brilliant sense: A news website that covers the city of Pasadena has hired two writers in India to cover the city council in that California town, despite the fact that they are thousands of miles away and have likely never been to Pasadena. James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired one reporter who lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year, and another who works in Bangalore for $7,200. He will send them copy and have them edit and write it and then file it to him working in Pasadena.
“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.
And these aren’t just Indian workers that Macpherson is trying to turn into journalists. One of the reporters that responded to his Craigslist ad is a former student at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The L.A. Times story notes that Pasadena city council broadcasts its meetings on the Web, and since India is 12.5 hours ahead of LA, the new journalists will be able to file reports while their boss sleeps.
Terrible? Brilliant? Stupid? Perhaps a little of all three. As Editor & Publisher notes, Reuters already has staffers in India rewriting press releases. My friend Neil Sanderson has more.
