Links

• Scorecard ‘09: UK’s Top Regional Papers Have Lost Half A Billion In Sales | paidContent:UK
  Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "Total annual revenue at just five of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups fell from £2.05 billion to £1.54 billion through 2009, according to our calculations now that the results are in. That’s £509.7 million wiped off our local publishers during the downturn year." They responded by cutting their staff by about a fifth, cutting 5,000 jobs.
  (tags: UK regionalpress 2009 business)
• How relevant is popular authority? | Zemanta Ltd.
  Kevin: This is interesting. I think a lot of people talk about 'quality' or 'relevance' but their systems are geared for 'popularity', which isn't necessarily the same thing. Zemanta (a very useful blogging tool by the way) canvassed their users about 'What is the most important to you when choosing relevant articles?' Relevancy, popularity, recenty, authority. (A pollster might accuse them of a bit of priming because related primes the responsdent to choose relevancy, but that's a quibble.) The results showed: "It seems that our users don’t care about popularity of the sources, care a bit about authority and recency, but really mostly care a lot about relevancy."
  (tags: blogging tools popularity relevance)
• There is an inverse relationship between level of anonymity and quality of conversation – (37signals)
  Kevin: 37signals looks at how conversation has changed on the site since they made changes to their sign up procedure to curb anonymity. Things have improved. Looking at what they have done, it doesn't seem that they have verified identity as much as trying to get people to provide a name. Maybe the speedbump was enough to increase the quality of conversation on the site.
  (tags: socialmedia identity anonymity)

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• Google’s Hal Varian to newspapers at FTC confab: “Experiment, experiment, experiment!” » Nieman Journalism Lab
  Kevin: This is a great summary of Google's economist-in-chief, Hal Varian's presentation on newspapers. There is so much good stuff packed in this presentation. I'll just highlight this one quote in terms of new devices for news consumption. Varian says: "The iPad, Kindle and other tablets introduce a “completely different ergonomics for accessing the news…so what I believe they’ll see is a merger of the TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper experience. You’ll have a device which will access all of the different medias. Give you a deeper — potentially deeper involvement with the news…So I would like to see this — this area develop and we’re doing what we can to help that happen"
  (tags: google newspapers journalism economics iPad mediaslate businessmodels)
• News after Newspapers: iPad strategies for publishers
  Kevin: Some great thoughts from Martin Langeveld on what the iPad means for publishers. He identifies lots of opportunitis, but he also identifies this threat that should make the blood run cold of any existing newspaper publisher. He believes that the iPad and mobile devices in general threatens pre-print inserts – these are ads from big retailers that are packaged separately and then blown into newspapers. Langeveld says that this is the last bastion of monopolistic pricing power for publishers. Knock this out from newsapapers, and the business has very few places to hide.
  (tags: ipad strategy tablet apple newspapers mobile journalism advertising)
• Is 2010 the Year Digital Will Eclipse Print Ad Spending? | Epicenter | Wired.com
  Kevin: Outsell in the US expects digital ad spending to eclipse print for the first time. The problem for publishers is that the digital budget is spread across a much wider range of players.
  (tags: digital advertising US trends)
• Poynter Online – Mobile Media
  Kevin: Damon Kiesow writes at Poynter Institute: "The New York Times is planning to offer its Book Review as a separate digital e-reader product, disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on the mobile devices, according to James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times." He made the comments at an afternoon session at the Digital Publishing Alliance and E-Reader Symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute.
  (tags: nytimes ipad newspapers ereader kindle mobile)
• Dumb Like a Fox : CJR
  Kevin: From the Columbia Journalism Review, Terry McDermot looks at Fox News. "The perceived problem is not that Fox’s straight news is relatively bias-free and its opinion programming overwhelmingly conservative. The problem is that the news portion is very small and the opinion portion very large. It would indeed be like a traditional newspaper opinion-news division if the ratios were reversed."
  (tags: FoxNews journalism analysis cabletelevision US CNN MSNBC)
• Multimedia aggregator Daylife to sell publishers cit-j images from Demotix
  Kevin: Laura Oliver reports: "Multimedia aggregator Daylife will now sell images from pro-am journalism site Demotix."
  (tags: aggregators pro-am journalism)
• Social Media Statistics February 2010 | UK & Worldwide | Clicky Media | Clicky Media
  Kevin: A blockbuster collection of global social media statistics from February 2010 sourced from Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, Forrester, Royal Pingdom. Facebook is by far and away the most popular social networking site. Social networks and forums rank second in terms of UK internet visits, trailing only visits to search engines. That statistic is interesting in and of itself. At 121.6%, visits to search engines in the UK is almost twice that of visits to news and media sites. Another gem in this list of statistics: "Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online."
  (tags: 2010 stats facebook global uk socialmedia searchengines twitter research traffic)

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• Zooming the news: Is Seadragon a new news interface? » Nieman Journalism Lab
  Kevin: Joshua Benton has a great blog post on new possibilities in terms of news site interfaces. There has been very little interface innovation in terms of news sites. Most of the work for the last five years on news sites have been about social functionality. I strongly agree with Benton's last point: "The main problem with contemporary news navigation is discovery, not depth."
  (tags: news journalism design discovery interface)
• Global Voices Online » SuperPower: BBC and Global Voices
  Kevin: Ivan Sigal of Global Voices writes about their collaboration with the BBC. He says: "Since then, we've seen mainstream media cover major conflicts such as Iran substantially through the eyes of citizen content. The idea that citizen journalism is somehow opposed to or in conflict with traditional journalism is now clearly past; it's evident that both exist in symbiotic relationship to one another, with many opportunities to collaborate on the creation of news, storytelling, and distribution of content.

  For two weeks, we will be exploring opportunities to put those collaborations into practice."
  Definitely one to watch.

  (tags: citizenjournalism media BBC GlobalVoices)
• BBC – The Editors: SuperPower: BBC and Global Voices
  Kevin: The BBC will be partnering with global blog network, Global Voices. During a special series on the internet, they will be linking to relevant posts on Global Voices and asking their regional editors "to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news", says Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News Website (and my former manager who got me into blogging in 2004).
  (tags: 2010 bbc blogging globalvoices citizenmedia participatory)
• Tindle looks local to bring in new revenue streams, with launch of four new titles – Editors Weblog
  Kevin: The Tindle Newspapers Group in the UK has launched four small-run (3000 copies) newspapers in London. Sir Ray Tindle believes strongly in the future of print. They will be selling affordable advertising to local businesses put off by the high prices in other newspapers. They reached their advertising goal four days ahead of schedule.
  (tags: local newspapers UK businessmodels advertising)

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• The Public Editor – Journalistic Shoplifting – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
  Kevin: The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, looks into instances of plagiarism by Zachery Kouwe, a blogger with the business blog Dealbook. Kouwe was caught lifting passages from other blogs and news sources. Quoting and linking is part of blog culture and is acceptable. However, lifting others writing shouldn't be a part of journalism or blogging, or any marriage of the two.
  (tags: journalism ethics blogging NYTimes)
• Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters
  Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters wades into the discussion about Zachery Kouwe, one of the journalists writing the Dealbook business blog at the New York Times. After complaints from Wall Street Journal and an internal investigation at the Times, Kouwe resigned. The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, said that "Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin".
  Salmon has a different take, and one that I agree with. He argues that far from adopting blogging culture, Kouwe didn't go far enough. "The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course."
  (tags: blogging journalism linking nytimes plagiarism ethics)
• Did NY Times’ blog culture lead to incident of plagiarism? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog
  Kevin: Juditgh Townend at Journalism.co.uk looks at whether the culture at the NYTimes DealBook led to plagiarism and the resignation of Zachery Kouwe. Judith does a great round up of the analysis by Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor, at the New York Times and other analysis from Felix Salmon at Reuters. Felix raises another issue for the NYTimes, and one that I tend to agree with. "The answer, in truth, is not that the NYT has gone too far down the bloggish rabbit hole, but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough." Quoting and linking is part of blogging, but if you take text not as a quote by passing it off as your own work and don't link, that indeed is plagiarism.
  (tags: blogging journalism ethics plagiarism nytimes)
• The Revenue Models of Location
  Kevin: I've been working on how location can easily be integrated into a journalism workflow since I geo-tagged pictures, Tweets and blog posts during the 2008 US election. While many commercial geo-location services have arrived, including Fire Eagle, Gowalla and Four Square, geo-location lags at news organisations. Juniper Research says that mobile location-based services will generate $12.7b in revenue by 2014. As we've seen with other technologies, location is moving from early adopters quickly to early mass adoption driven by social networking applications. The Next Web looks at some of the revenue streams that will drive location based services. Definitely one to read.
  (tags: foursquare location socialmedia gowalla research forecast)

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