links for 2010-03-03

  • Kevin: Martin Langeveld at the Nieman Journalism Lab has an excellent roundup of US newspaper group quarterly filings and dives into what the figures means.
  • Kevin: Karl Schneider, the head of editorial development at B2B publisher RBI, has some excellent comments to make about "conversational journalism" and UGC. In terms of UGC, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. In terms of "conversational journalism", he said that "that journalists need to move away from producing and distributing content to engaging in conversations with users and working off the back of their ideas/thoughts to create content that is useful and interesting to that ’community’ around a subject". Excellent points.
  • Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent.co.uk gives an excellent quick breakdown of the proposed cuts at the BBC websites. I used to work at the BBC News website, and it's unclear whether the 25% cuts will affect it or if this is just a cull of the wide ranging web properties that the BBC has. About the only specific change I can find for the News website is "BBC News Online focusing its specialist analysis and interpretation on a generalist, not specialist, audience".
  • Kevin: An excellent post by Joel Spolsky about blogging at businesses. He talks about one of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they blog, which is talking solely about their business. Instead of blogging about the minutiae of your business, he suggests that you follow the advice of Kathy Sierra. "To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company."
  • Kevin: There has recently been a lot of quite heated discussion about smartphone market share. Nokia still holds the lead by far in terms of handset volume when compared to Apple's iPhone. However, as this graphic shows, in terms of the mobile browser market share, handset volume only tells part of that story. The iPhone dominates in North America, grabbing an 86% mobile browser share in Canada home to RIM of Blackberry fame. Another surprise for me is how the iPhone dominates mobile browsing in Japan. This is the home of NTT Docomo which was miles ahead in terms of mobile data. The iPhone/iPod touch has 75% of the mobile browser market with Docomo trailing with only 6%. In the developing world, Opera and Nokia dominate. Fascinating bit of research.
  • Kevin: This is the question that all news sites are asking in 2010: Will people pay? And if so, what will they pay for? You can see the strategy of my soon-to-be former day job, The Guardian. Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger says that he believes that as some news sites charge for content that readers will flock to free sites. He's not ready to "risk damaging his paper's "journalistic potential'" .