How Gigaom Built a Media Business Around Free Content

Mediashift reporting:
Last month, Paul Walborsky stepped down after seven years as chief executive of Gigaom. During that time, the tech site grew enormously in traffic and revenue as it expanded its business beyond just advertising. Currently, about 60 percent of Gigaom’s revenues (estimated to be around $15 million annually) come from research and 25 percent from events. Advertising accounts for only about 15 percent of total revenues. Walborsky, who is 48, spoke with PBS MediaShift about the struggles of running an editorial-based business when competition is fierce and ad rates continue to slump.

Gabriel Kahn: In media, size matters. How does an operation like Gigaom, which averages about 6.5 million unique visitors a month, make a go of it?

Paul Walborsky: Media either has to be huge, at the BuzzFeed level, or small and intimate.
When we started, we looked at each other and said, “We’re never going to get to a 100 million uniques.” The type of content we write is more analytical. We can squeeze about 20 million page views a month out of our audience. If we tried to build an editorial business just based on advertising we’d never be able to pay our staff.
So chasing page views is a dead end?
Paul Walborsky: Our whole concept was not to serve you another page and make you click once more; it was to give you a good user experience. So by definition we had to have a different business model. I don’t think about creating page views. I think about creating long-term relationships with readers. If you have a long-term relationship, you do different things. You get them to come back. You serve them well. And you then try to upsell them more products and services...
...Paul Walborsky: Editorial is the focal point of our business model. This is where we create credibility. That is what keeps people coming back. Without our editorial content, without people writing things everyday that make readers feel smarter, we would not have a brand. We just choose not to monetize that content directly. We monetize it in different ways...
By this logic, when Gigaom uses space on a page to sell an ad, it almost represents a failure because the company itself should be able to find a better use for that same space.

Paul Walborsky: The situation in media is laughable. When we sell ad units, we are basically selling our reader relationship to someone who doesn’t care about it. The advertisers are selling a car or a trip to Vegas. If we could create enough products, we could use that space ourselves to sell that audience something that is actually meaningful to them.
That’s what we did with our research. Then other companies began doing the same.
We saw Politico Pro come out, then Business Insider came out with research....
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/10/how-gigaom-built-a-media-business-around-free-content/

The New York Times’ new app strategy seems lackluster at best — so what does it do now?

gigaom / Matthew Ingram reporting:
Among the other less-than-optimistic news from the New York Times in its quarterly earnings report earlier this week — the fall in revenue, continued slide in advertising income, and so on — the company also announced some numbers related to its new mobile apps, NYT Now and NYT Opinion. Unfortunately for the Times, the apps have so far failed to set the mobile world on fire. In fact, when looked at in relative terms, they have more or less disappeared without a trace.
As Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review and analyst Ken Doctor have described, the Times reported that it added a total of 32,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter — a number that includes all the people who signed up for digital access to the newspaper, as well as those who paid for NYT Now, NYT Opinion and Times Premier, a service that gives subscribers access to members-only discussions and other customized features.
The Times didn’t break out any specific numbers for the apps, but it did say that they and Times Premier accounted for the bulk of the 32,000 number, which for a major international media entity is a vanishingly small figure — even Chittum, who has been an unabashed fan of the NYT’s various paywall strategies, admitted that the company’s new offerings are “off to a poor start.” The NYT Now app doesn’t even show up in the list of top 1,000 apps for the iPhone, and is ranked fairly low in the media category as well...
...So what happens now? As Doctor points out, even with the paywall revenue, the Times is still taking on water faster than it can bail the boat: print-advertising revenue fell another 6.6 percent in the most recent quarter, and all of the digital growth barely managed to fill a fraction of that gap — $42 million in revenue from the paper’s digital-only products was a tenth of the Times‘ overall revenue of about $400 million, the bulk of which comes from print advertising.
...For my part, I think the Times might want to experiment with highly personal apps — either by offering high levels of customization for readers, or even by offering apps that are dedicated to a single NYT writer such as Nicholas Kristof: a kind of central portal for all that writer’s content, with customized levels of engagement for users...
http://gigaom.com/2014/07/31/the-new-york-times-new-app-strategy-seems-lackluster-at-best-so-what-does-it-do-now/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=465ad55d21-c:mdad:08-02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-465ad55d21-99152541

How the L.A. Times is redesigning for the mobile Web

Digiday reproting:
Newspapers lag far behind in the share of time spent on mobile devices. That’s a reality the Los Angeles Times is hoping to counter when it relaunches its site early Tuesday morning with mobile users top of mind.
“We know that there are readers who are coming to us increasingly on mobile,” said Emily Smith, svp of digital for the Times. “We’ve not yet reached the turning point where they are the majority, but that day will come soon. So we are absolutely getting ready for that moment. We knew that we had to rethink the experience on a mobile screen. We also knew we had to future-proof our platform, because we wanted to be available on all the new devices, regardless of what screen sites are coming out.”
Latimes.com, which was designed with help from Code & Theory, will be fully responsive when it goes live after midnight on May 6 — making it the latest publisher in the industry to pay more than lip service to being “mobile first.”
With people increasingly coming straight to articles through social sharing, the Times realized it needed to make article pages the new home page. So at the end of articles, readers will be given recommendations for content elsewhere on the site. That’s pretty standard, but readers also can view that content by just continuing to scroll without going to a new page, doing away with endless clicking.
A key feature is the visual browse, which lets readers search content by displaying stories by section in an image-based way. The feature reflects the visual nature of the way people are consuming news and content on mobiles and tablets....
Finally, the Times is trying to make it easier for people to share stories. A third, notable feature is the Sharelines. They’re prewritten summaries of articles that lie below each article. So if a reader wants to share an article on Facebook or Twitter, the tweet is written for them. Not bad — readers can sound intelligent without even reading the article.
http://digiday.com/publishers/l-times-redesigning-mobile-web/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=DD%20Daily_final

The Dutch revolution in journalism: all newspapers behind one paydike

Blendle is a small journalism startup from The Netherlands. Recently, we (two 27-year old founders) got all major newspapers and magazines in the country to start a revolutionary experiment. The Netherlands will be the first country in the world where all articles of all newspapers and all important magazines will be available in one web app, with one pay wall, where users will only have to pay for the articles they read. We think that unbundling of journalism is the Holy Grail in getting young people to pay for journalism again.

Within Blendle, users can see what articles their friends or interesting curators (celebrities, journalists, politicians, radio DJ’s) have shared from the paid sections of today’s newspapers and magazines, and which articles are trending on the platform. The app also enables anyone to share articles from Holland’s best journalists on Facebook and Twitter. No more signing up with different paywalls for every newspaper. Users pay with a single click, and only for the articles they read. New users get €2.50 for free, and can then top up their Blendle wallet.

Until now, it was not possible for Dutch consumers to search for premium content from newspapers and magazines. Blendle is the first paid search engine for newspapers and magazines in the country. If a user wants to follow everything about specific subjects — say, the situation in Crimea, or bitcoins, or their favorite author — they can set email alerts for those words.

Users always pay a price per article (set by the publisher), but are also able to refund their money if they don’t deem the article worthy after reading it (a fair use policy applies). It’s a pretty cool function that greatly increases the amount of money spent on journalism in the beta.https://medium.com/changing-journalism/a2031594e430

How digital weighs up against print for UK magazine circulations

journalism.co.uk reporting: The Audit Bureau for Circulation (ABC) has released the first ever combined print and digital figures for UK consumer magazines in 2013, based on the average number of sales for a digital edition of each issue.

The IPC Media title What's On TV ranked highest with a combined total circulation of 1,051,129, of which 1,571 were digital editions. Slimming World Magazine placed second with a combined circulation of 458,517 with 7,739 digital editions, while Glamour magazine placed third with a combined total of just over 415,000, supported by 4,778 digital editions.

In a press release accompanying the announcement, managing director of IPC advertising, Charlie Meredith, said: "We continue to expand and look for new ways to engage with our audiences and ensure that our brands are everywhere our consumers need and want them to be."

In terms of purely digital editions, ABC confirmed tech title T3 as the most widely read consumer magazine in terms of UK digital editions in 2013, with a reported figure of 22,319 average digital editions sold per issue, a year-on-year increase of exactly 100 per cent.

In previous reports, ABC had recorded the separate interactive editions and PDF 'page-turner' editions of each T3 issue under different metrics. This is the first report in which the figures have been combined.

The continental Europe edition of the Economist recorded the second highest number of digital edition sales, with just over 17,000, an increase of 47 percent from December 2012.
...The two titles to see the biggest year-on-year increase were motoring magazines from Haymarket Consumer Media.

Classic & Sports Car, which had seen its average digital sales drop to just 50 at the end of 2012, saw a year-on-year increase of over 2,000 per cent to 1,213.

Autosport, which had previously reported an average of only 134 digital sales per issue, recorded an average of 2,150 for 2013, an increase of 1,500 per cent.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-digital-weighs-up-against-print-for-uk-magazine-circulations/s2/a555858/

NBC News puts more emphasis on original digital video in its relaunch of NBCNews.com

Nieman Lab reporting:
Television networks are good at producing video for broadcast. They haven’t always proven good at producing video for the web and mobile devices. What works on a big screen at 6:30 p.m. isn’t the same as what works on an iPhone.
NBC News is expanding its efforts in the original digital video arena and trying to bridge that divide. “We wanted to build a site that doesn’t feel like TV content chopped up for the web, but born for the digital age,” said NBC News president Deborah Turness on a conference call on Tuesday.
The network relaunched its website today with the goal of merging its television programming more fluidly with digital production, while simultaneously creating content for a digital-only audience. Design updates are meant to give the site a cleaner, more elegant feel and encourage what NBCNews.com executive editor Greg Gittrich called “continuous consumption.” (It also looks like a site designed for small screens first: It’s responsive, it features tablet-friendly large tap targets, and it asks you to navigate via the increasingly ubiquitous hamburger button, even on desktop. Even though NBCNews.com is now separate from MSNBC.com, you can detect some shared design DNA.) In addition, a new NBC app will launch this week, running off the same API as the website, allowing for what developers hope will be a more seamless user experience.


http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/nbc-news-puts-more-emphasis-on-original-digital-video-in-its-relaunch-of-nbcnews-com/

The future of the feature: Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
When it comes to reading long form, the web can be an ugly, distracting place. It’s the reason why services like Instapaper and Pocket (née Read It Later) exist: to strip content of its context — noisy site designs, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements. But perhaps we’re moving into a new era where more of the web is clean and readable. Maybe the future of web publications will be beautiful enough that the reading experience is more enjoyable in its natural habitat.
This is how I felt, at least, when I came across ESPN.com’s “The Long Strange Trip of Dock Ellis,” a gorgeously designed feature about the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. It’s arguably one of baseball’s most colorful tales; this take on it is certainly one of the most ambitious web designs ever attempted by a traditional media company for a single article. The piece is generously adorned with accompanying visuals — photos of Ellis, memorabilia like trading cards, pull quotes, all moving and sliding while the reader scrolls. The reading experience is very comfortable on both desktop and tablet, thanks to a larger text size and generous amounts of white space. It’s feels like an experience instead of a block of words surrounded by the detritus of the web.
But at a time when news is increasingly consumed without context — stripped down in tablet readers or on mobile devices — and when templates have taken over news web design, what’s the point of dedicating design resources to online feature layouts? Why are outlets like ESPN, Pitchfork, and The Verge investing in bespoke design for articles?...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/11/the-future-of-the-feature-breaking-out-of-templates-to-build-customized-reading-experiences/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=58419386f4-DAILY_EMAIL&utm_medium=email

Digital First? Print First? Both Should Work Together

Mediashift reporting:
Let's learn a lesson from the past. When the news first started going digital, that is when it started appearing on the World Wide Web and print saw it as a competitor that would give the product away for free. The digital prophets saw a future in which free wouldn't matter, and said things along the lines of, "If we don't eat our young, someone else will." In many ways, we could say they were right -- or at least we can say we still don't know.
The O.C. Register is moving forward with a print-first strategy, even while the Journal Register Co. is moving forward with a digital-first effort. This may be a new twist on the old East Coast/West Coast rivalry, but the answer probably lies in the middle, and in a way most don't expect.
Think about what print has going for it and what digital has going for it. Both have a lot of advantages, and both don't need to work against each other any more than an eraser on a pencil works against the delete key on your laptop.

It's about the design

At right are the comparative sizes of several print formats and the common Apple-handled devices, the iPhone and the iPad.
Do you see what I see? The print canvases are massive in comparison to the digital canvas. Without batteries or retinal displays, the 150, 200, and 300 dpi resolutions are finer than any computer screen.
But we fill these giant design spaces primarily with columns and columns of gray text.
The digital side is continuously updated and fresh. It is interactive and responsive. The print side is anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to a week to a month old by the time it reaches a consumer's hands. It's static and unchanging.
...
Instead of holding to the convention that we write shorter for the web and longer in print, perhaps the really innovative strategy is to use the print product like outdoor advertising that drives people specifically to the stories they're interested in.

Leading together

Maybe it really isn't about print or digital first, but leading together, side by side. The mantra of the web has always been more powerful and successful when it is collaborate, not compete. Why compete with each other? Why should any product go first, when both can cross the finish line at the same time if they work together?
The smart answer isn't putting digital or print first, but to put design and usability first, using each product for what they do best and let them do it together.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/10/digital-first-print-first-both-should-work-together291.html

The USA Today Redesign: Too Little, Too Early?

Newsonomics reporting:
It’s hard to know what to make of the USA Today re-do. It touts itself as a re-imagining, which may be a bit hyperbolic. God only knows how much time people spent on the redesigned logo (must-read Romenesko on Gannett’s “Cool Balls” and their spiritual purpose). I think they could have saved a lot of time and money and shopped at Office Max. You can buy 1/2-inch Fluorescent Inventory Circle Labels online for only $6.49.  We’ve only seen the iPad and iPhone redesign versions so far — web version comes over the weekend  – but it’s underwhelming at this point, and reminds us that USA Today’s problems are way more than skin-deep ( I outlined those issues in June: “10 Snapshots on Larry Kramer’s USA Today”).
My guess: in a rush to do something to reverse the USAT’s flagging fortunes, Gannett and/or new publisher Larry Kramer decided to take one big public step. Change the look first — and then get to the deeper, underlying questions of identity, purpose, storytelling and content, all of  which are core issues with the aging product. (Yes, in the digital age, midlife crises start soon after you hit 30.) Looked at this way, the redesign is a platform. It’s a platform to do better content, to do state-of-the-art customization and to catch up with the video wave sweeping its peers (“The Newsonomics of Leapfrog Video“). Maybe, that’s what’s intended here, but here’s the rub. Tell everyone you’ve “re-imagined” the product, and they’ll try it out — again. If they arrive and still don’t feel newly compelled to come back, you’ll have a harder time getting them to come back for the next re-launch. Or, if there’s not a next relaunch, they may never find the storytelling improvements we believe Kramer and his people have planned.
Today, though, what do we find in the digital re-do, and let’s be clear, it’s the digital re-do, in the age of fast-declining newsprint, that matters most:

• Pictures. Lots of pictures, and given smaller-than-desktop screen, size, lots of unidentified thumbnails, too small to be intriguing. We know lots of video is planned, and again the still platform may soon get some legs.
• Graphics: On the left rail, the kinds of data and visualization that we’ve got to expect from USA Today. An appropriate Life snapsnot on the lower left of that page. Kramer has talked about customization — an absolute essential for weather, sports scores, travel, etc., but only the stock portfolio looks customizable at this point. Without customization, these widgets don’t do any more than what I can get in a hundred places. With it, they begin to combine my data in one place.
• Content: The lead story, as I write, is “Middle East protests spread to more countries.” Really? If USA Today zigs, less well, as everyone else in the news world zigs, what’s the point of coming here? The content looks like the same content USA Today has always done, minus the differentiating “we-ness” of its headlines, while sometimes annoying and easy to satirize, at least made it unique.http://newsonomics.com/the-usa-today-redesign-too-little-too-early/

How much will USA Today’s redesign help?

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:  USA Today unveiled its print redesign last Friday and its web redesign the following day, and it was much more than a mere touch-up. The paper’s new look (which is centered around simple, single-color circles as logos), was the subject of much mocking, including from Stephen Colbert, though Erik Wemple of The Washington Post told the blue-ball critics to give the redesign time.
Others had more substantive critiques: Charles Apple of the American Copy Editors Society said the redesign has been a great idea with great content, but horrible execution. Design consultant Mario Garcia liked the redesign overall as a colorful, contemporary look that still managed to make the paper more text-driven and conducive to long-form stories. He also gathered some opinions on USA Today’s influence on news design from several people in the industry.
USA Today’s website redesign was met with the approval of Poynter’s Julie Moos, who liked its emphasis on large images, horizontal scrolling orientation, navigation, and layering of information. Garcia talked to the redesign’s driver, Gannett’s David Payne, who noted that the redesign was about rethinking advertising as much as news, with a priority put on making multimedia ads more fully a part of the browsing experience. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland talked to the design firm that engineered the project about the influence of the iPad and the challenge of keeping the content uncluttered, and Business Insider also had a cool look at some of the other concepts USA Today was considering for its website.

Denver Post’s new iPad app ‘advances how news apps should look’

Poynter reporting: Design expert Mario Garcia has high praise for the new iPad app launched by Digital First Media’s Denver Post. “It advances how news apps should look like, it does not pretend to look like a newspaper … Bravo. … a news app appearing today does not need to remind us of the iconic newspaper look,” Garcia writes.


While that’s true, the app does carry over at least one old tradition from print — the comics.
“Comics have actually been a feature of our iPad platform since August 2011, and it’s consistently one of our top five sections,” Allen Klosowski, Digital First’s senior director of social media and mobile, told me by email. “We did have to clear separate licensing and integration hurdles, but it’s been worth it. We get a tremendous amount of positive feedback.”
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/183930/denver-posts-new-ipad-app-advances-how-news-apps-should-look

The new integration: newsroom and developers - #newsrw

Oneman and his blog reporting:
Raju Narisetti, Wall Street Journal Digital: If in 2012, if you're still talking about integrating print and digital, you're in deep, deep trouble. Good journalism matters - but experiencing that content matters even more. Good content is a table stake. everyone has to have it. Digital audiences will be even more promiscuous than they are now. They can experience other brands with the click of a finger, and through what is coming to them via social. And the only growth they're going to get from their businesses is from digital audiences. In 2012, the definition of a journalist must include bringing people to their journalism. What will enable that? The winners and losers will be separated at the intersection of content and technology...
,,,Joanna Geary, The Guardian: There is only one newsroom in The Guardian. The plan has always been to embrace the future platforms for the audience. You can't build a business model where the audiences are. The newsroom integrated in 2008 when they moved to Kings Place. This year they went truly digital first. The majority of the newsroom is dedicated to getting stories out on line. There's a slow stream - focused on producing up to 30% of the newspaper's content ahead of time. We get slightly excited by process change talking from print to digital. The process is great, but can really fall on their arse if you don't get a cultural change. There's a real need for an understanding in newsrooms about what developers do. That's a tough thing to crack. Bring eyeballs isn't enough anymore - they might not know it's our content. They might not care. We need to think of them as people and start building relationships with them. We have done well at bringing people to our content - but we have no idea why them come back...
http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2012/07/the_new_integration_newsroom_and_develop.html

In new ad downturn, subscription salvation for some, gold rush for others

paidcontent reporting:
By now, the world was supposed to have emerged from the worst of the global economic storm that dampened advertising dollars through 2008 and 2010. But lingering European concerns suggest the ad dip is back, according to several company earnings disclosures this week.
As it returns, some publishers are congratulating themselves on having erected their flood defences – building digital products that consumers, rather than advertisers, pay for. But others are riding an advertising wave that’s still growing, pushing them to shores of sustainability they are convinced are becoming visible.
Financial Times
FT Group reported for the last half-year: “Our advertising revenues declined, as expected, with growth online and in luxury and personal finance more than offset by declines in trade and recruitment. Advertising demand remains volatile and visibility poor.”
But, just as FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw forecast to paidContent in May, FT digital subscriptions have now surpassed print circulation for the first time, after growing 31 percent from last year to over 300,000. That gives the publisher, which has long committed to reducing its advertising reliance, welcome shelter.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/27/in-new-downturn-subscription-salvation-for-some-ad-gold-rush-for-others/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=5d9c3f36e4-_nb_DB_07-30-2012&utm_medium=email

New York Times Now Has More Than Half a Million Digital Subscribers

Mashable reporting:
The digital paywall The New York Times put into effect in March 2011 continues to gain traction. Approximately
532,000
509,000 people now subscribe, up 13% from the paywall’s one-year anniversary in mid-March, according to The New York Times Company’s second quarter earnings report, released Thursday.
The company contributes the uptick in circulation primarily to the latest tightening of its paywall. Non-subscribers can now only read 10 articles per month; during the first year, they were able to read 20 per month. Digital subscriptions cost between $15 and $35 per month.
The paywall’s growth, along with an increase in home-delivery and weekday single-copy prices, led to an 8% increase in circulation revenues for the quarter, which offset a continued decline in both print (-8%) and digital (-4%) advertising. The ad declines were led by declines in display and cost-per-click advertising at the About Group, which produces an ever-expanding catalog of guides on topics ranging from lawn care to magic tricks. Overall revenue growth was about 1% year-over-year.
http://mashable.com/2012/07/26/new-york-times-paywall-has-more-than-half-a-million-subscribers/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=c27f954a53-_nb_DB_07-27-2012&utm_medium=email

What the mainstream media could learn from BuzzFeed

gigaoma reporting:
f anyone inside most traditional media companies thinks about BuzzFeed at all, they probably see it as the site that posts “viral” photo galleries of kittens and other web ephemera — or possibly as the site that hired reporter Ben Smith away from Politico to head up its more serious side. But while it may have gone unnoticed by most, the BuzzFeed network has grown into a significant digital-media entity, and Smith’s hiring is just the latest example of the site’s broadening ambitions. Is there anything that mainstream media companies can learn from what it has done, apart from the fact that web users like pictures of cats? As it turns out, an internal memo to staff from co-founder Jonah Peretti has more than a few worthwhile lessons....
 A lot of media companies, both mainstream and otherwise, seem to be looking for whatever quick fix they can come up with to boost their pageviews or web traffic so that they can drive revenues from online advertising — but this kind of strategy inevitably suffers if it isn’t well thought out. It may look like BuzzFeed is just throwing together whatever will get clicks, but Peretti sees what the company is doing as part of a long-term plan to create a truly web-native media enterprise...
..In one section of the letter, Peretti talks about the principle of “respecting the reader,” which for BuzzFeed means not using pageview-pumping tactics like slideshows, and not cluttering up pages with SEO-friendly keywords or using headlines that misrepresent what is actually in the post. But what he’s really saying is that BuzzFeed isn’t just socially oriented because it makes for good traffic and that helps sell advertising (although that’s obviously the business model) — the site is social in the sense that everything it does is aimed at sharing information readers will enjoy, in a way they will enjoy it...
...We focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing. It sounds simple but it’s hard to do and it is the metric that aligns our company with our readers.
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/25/what-the-mainstream-media-could-learn-from-buzzfeed/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=d8ec521a49-c%3Amed+d%3A07-26&utm_medium=email

http://www.medievarlden.se/nyheter/2012/06/sa-blir-nya-aftonbladetse

Medivärlden reporting:dag lanserades Aftonbladets nya sajt som publik beta. De största förändringarna gäller inte utseendet utan det som ligger bakom, det som brukar kallas back end.
Men det är även stora visuella skillnader. Aftonbladet tar bort navigeringen i vänsterspalten och ersätter den med en nyhetsspalt.
En annan förändring är att alla blåa länkar är borttagna.
Till hösten kommer Aftonbladet att byta till den nya sajten.
Se den nya sajten på beta.aftonbladet.se
http://www.medievarlden.se/nyheter/2012/06/sa-blir-nya-aftonbladetse

Going 'digital first' requires reinvention, not merely a shift or transition

WanIfra reporting:
Everyone defines "digital first" a little bit differently, said Jim Brady, editor-in-chief at Digital First Media in the US, but what is important is that a switch to digital first involves real changes, not just rhetoric. Brady was speaking in Paris at a conference organized by the Online News Association and GESTE, a French online publishers group.
Going digital first is not a “shift” or a “transition:” it requires a reinvention of your operation, he said. And this can work, he emphasised. Under the leadership of CEO John Paton, the Journal Register Company (now part of Digital First Media) went from bankruptcy in 2009 to earnings of $41 million in 2010, and 30% of its revenue now comes from digital, up from 5%.
Digital First Media now runs the JRC and MediaNews Group: a total of 75 dailies and about 250 weeklies.
Brady pointed out that figures from Pew’s State of the News Media project show that, at least in the US, more and more people are accessing news online and it is extremely unlikely that the trend will reverse. Digital first is therefore the strategy for the future, he believes, and he warned about waiting until it’s too late to change course.
Brady stressed the often un-tapped potential of digital for news. “The newspaper used to be the best way we could present the news,” he said, “but now we can reach the consumer 24 hours a day wherever they are.” What’s more, the web is the first real “shape-shifter,” he continued, “it can be whatever you want it to be: a newspaper, a TV, a radio.” The web allows everybody to break out of their traditional silos.
The practicalities of going digital first at JRC/Digital First Media:
-       All of DFM’s newsrooms are staffed to start at 6am. “This means we have fewer people on the paper but we have to start the day when people wake up,” Brady said.
-       Stories are not held for print. “I never get a good answer to why people what to break in print,” he continued.
-       Journalists receive a good deal of training, and crucially, they are made to understand why they are doing it and how it can improve their work
-       What readers think is important. Brady emphasized the necessity to embrace the two-way nature of digital, and to make readers feel a true connection to the publication.
-       A story doesn’t have to include text, if a video or photos can tell it better. “We shoot about 1000 videos a week at JRC,” Brady said.
http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/06/01/going-digital-first-requires-reinvention-not-merely-a-shift-or-transition

New York Times turns readers into beta testers with Test Drive

NiemanJournlaismLab reporting:
The Times has released a new browser tool that will let readers test experimental features on NYTimes.com in real time. With Test Drive — available as a Chrome extension, a Firefox add-on, or as a simple bookmarklet — readers can test experimental web features the Times doesn’t think are yet ready for the big show.
The experimental features currently in Test Drive include NYT Accessible, which optimizes the site for visually-impaired readers, and TimesInstant, an article search that produces results while you type. Once Test Drive is installed, you can toggle the experimental features on or off at will.
These projects were created by the Times beta620 group and have already been available for testing on their site; Test Drive puts these ideas into on wrapper and lets the Times take them out of a static lab state and into a real world environment. The goal of beta620 is for developers, designers, and others to tinker with ideas that have the potential to enhance the Times online or through apps. (Times HQ is at 620 Eighth Avenue.)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/06/new-york-times-turns-readers-into-beta-testers-with-test-drive/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=8c99f2a243-_nb_DB_06-04-2012&utm_medium=email

Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

gigaoma reporting:
Google has a somewhat tense relationship with the traditional newspaper industry, since publishers like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch still believe it is depriving them of revenue by “stealing” their content and aggregating it at Google News. So you might think that Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras, would try to smooth over any ruffled feathers when talking about the future of news. He did the opposite in a recent talk at Harvard, however — comparing newspapers to old-fashioned internet portals like Yahoo, and suggesting that unless media companies can adapt to the Web rather than fighting it, they are likely doomed.
We weren’t at the Gingras event, which was hosted by the Nieman Foundation, but Matt Stempeck of MIT’s Center for Civic Media was there, and he live-blogged the entire thing on the Center’s website (his original notes are posted here). Although these are not direct quotes, we’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of the comments that Gingras made on a number of important topics, from the tradeoff inherent in paywalls to the distraction of iPad apps and the dangers of innovating too slowly.
On how newspapers got to where they are:

We look back at the 40 golden years of newspaper profitability as if things had been structured that way forever. But these four decades were triggered by an earlier media disruption: television. The rise of television advertising caused a contraction in the newspaper business, where major metropolitan markets went from supporting 4-5 newspapers to 1-2 papers. The limited number of remaining companies allowed monopolitistic pricing. This wealth was created by disruption, and what disruption gives, it taketh away.

...
On the iPad as the savior of journalism:

[The iPad is] a fatal distraction for media companies. Too many publishers looked at the tablet as the road home to their magazine format, subscription model, and expensive full-page ads. The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball...

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/12/googles-head-of-news-newspapers-are-the-new-yahoo/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives

Digital First reporting:
John Paton: Good evening.
I’m old media.
This is my 36th year as a newspaper man – apologies – my 36th year as a multi-platform news executive.
It’s a career I started as a copyboy on this same street about a dozen blocks east of here.
I was hired for taking a picture of a belly dancer fooling with a drunk columnist. I was given the job of a guy who had just been fired for being a drunk. And I ended my first night on the job, taking home – dead drunk – the guy who hired me.
In my career the only reprimand I have ever received – if you don’t count the odd suspension for insubordination – was about expenses, specifically it was about booze. It read: “You are no longer allowed to order an Armagnac, digestif or any other after dinner drink that is older than you are.”
This is commonly referred to as the Golden Era of journalism.
And now, like many of you, I am struggling hard to teach this old dog new tricks.
Struggling to accept that much of what we know is no longer valid.
And trying to come to grips with the fact that crappy newspaper executives are a bigger threat to journalism’s future than any changes wrought by the Internet.
All of us have been subjected to the annual spectacle of a gaggle of print publishers gathering on a panel – Doug Knight, our moderator this evening, has officiated over a couple of these – to declaim they are not dead yet.
It’s an embarrassing display played out time and time again at conferences where our industry heads look like aging ingénues at Stratford declaring they can still play Juliette. And nobody has the heart to break it to them.
Or worse still, mediocre journalists, wrapping themselves in the flag of long-form journalism, to deride the value of social media as a reporting tool. A tool they don’t understand or care to understand.
http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/old-dogs-new-tricks-and-crappy-newspaper-executives/