NYT invests more in NewsStand

The New York Times appears to be confident that its NewsStand initiative is a goer: they've upped their stake in NewsStand to 14% and put their circulation head on the NewStand board. They are now quoting 2,800 subscribers, of which 20% are from the New York area. Perhaps the other 80% are journalists.
(From Editor & Publisher)

CIA website breaks own cookie policy

D'oh! The CIA's Electronic Reading Room website appears to violate US federal privacy guidelines and even the CIA's own privacy policy, according to an NGO called Public Information Research. Despite the use of cookies, the CIA says here that "The Central Intelligence Agency Web site does NOT use the "cookies" that some Web sites use to gather and store information about your visits to their sites."
(From Washington Post WashTech)

Recruitment ads are migrating to web

The research firm IDC says that United States newspaper recruitment advertising revenue fell by 35% last year, whereas online job sides saw an increase of 38% in the same period. Monster.com is now one of the most successful companies online, and appears to have benefited from the recession as advertiser move their business from expensive print to cheap web. An analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter estimated that 10% of US recruitment advertising is now online, and that this will increase to 25% within three years.
(From New York Times)

Good news for online news

OJR has launched a new section titled The Future of News in its redesigned website. The redesign is a big improvement, incidentally. The first essay in the section is titled After the Meltdown and is a good summary of the new sense of cautious optimism prevailing in online news organisations. "Amid all the clamor and clatter about viable business models, there remains this simple, unalterable fact: Users want us."
(From Online Journalism Review)

Cautious optimism over advertising recovery

Big media organisations such as AOL Time Warner and News Corp are voicing their hopes that the advertising recession is coming to an end. Leland Westerfield, an analyst for UBS Warburg, reported that "the cyclical recovery appears to be under way sooner than expected", and predicted a 0.7 per cent increase in US advertising spend this year. Others are less optimistic but there is consensus that 2002 will be far less painful that 2001.
(From Yahoo! Finance)

East Valley Tribune uses Olive

Arizona's East Valley Tribune has launched an electronic edition using Olive Software's ActivePaper Daily engine. The paper has been running adverts online using Olive since November, but has now put the whole paper online. The paper is currently running the paper as a free trial here.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Irish Times to begin charging

Ireland.com, the website of the Irish Times is to begin charging for "premium content" from May. "Premium content" includes most Irish Times content, breaking news and the archive. Price to be in the region of 100 euros per month. Ireland.com currently has about 1.5 million unique users. Meanwhile AP observes that online subscription is starting to make an impact.
(From Revolution)

Will they pay? Won't they? tennis

Wired reports that a Jupiter Media Metrix study suggests that "70 per cent of adults ... can't understand why anyone would pay for any online content". D'oh!
(From Wired)

Integration is more about culture than tech

Ideas Magazine's Vin Crosbie observes that while newspaper readers are increasingly treating different media as no more than different points of access to a single content provider, and while newspapers are endeavouring to promote that "same brand, different outputs" concept, the organisations themselves have done little to restructure according to those principles. "Most print editions that are downloadable online or transmitted to hotels, resorts, offices, and automatically printing vending machines are operated by print production and circulation staff. But New Media staff runs the Web sites, mobile phone, and PDA editions. And those two staffs have little involvement with each other ... Convergence won't become a reality for the newspaper industry until the staffs that produce them converge."
(From Digital Deliverance)

Times joins charging charge

The Times has announced that it will begin charging overseas users for access to its online content, and will extend the scope of its paid-for content to include law reports and a special World Cup section. The Times already charges for its crossword and archive, and requires registration to view any content, anywhere. The Times plans to use an interesting micropayment system via users' mobile phone bills. Some online publishers have expressed doubts over the accuracy of technology used to distinguish domestic from overseas readers. Meanwhile, Steve Outing continues to argue here that we need "some sort of central service that allows consumers to purchase "packages" of content access — so they aren't nickeled and dimed to death by individual paid sites."
(From Media Guardian)

NewsStand for magazines

Zinio is for magazines what NewsStand is for newspapers. You can download a demo (PC only) here. It was showcased at last month's DEMO conference and was highlighted in this Editor & Publisher review.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Longhorn to use database file system

The next release of Microsoft Windows is likely to include file system based on SQL Server technology. It should make for far better searching and file retrieval. But every application will need to be rewritten to work with it.
(From CNET News.Com)

Email after Enron

Following Andersen's unsuccessful attempts to remove documents related to their audit work for Enron, Jim Carroll considers the legal and technological issues pertaining to a form of correspondence that is almost impossible to erase without trace. Furthermore, "e-mail is particularly risky when it comes to legal issues, since people will say things in e-mail that they might not normally put on paper. There's an informality with e-mail that can often be misconstrued in a legal situation."
(From Canoe Tech News)

NYT teams up with education website

The New York Times has gone into allience with education publisher McGraw-Hill to put a NYT news feed to students using McGraw-Hill's Higher Education Online Learning Center websites. The hope is to raise interest in the Times amongst the student population.
(From Silicon Alley News)

Tribune requires registration

The Chicago Tribune Internet Edition has become the latest news organisation to requre user registration. Many newspapers in the United States are using obligatory registration to make their websites more attractive to advertisers (c.f. this earlier Editor & Publisher report).
(From Editor & Publisher)

Signing up for subscriptions

The Washington Post predicts that "this may go down in internet history as the year millions of people started paying for online content", while Michael Rogers on MSNBC reckons that "Internet news will begin to be sufficiently compelling and integral to users’ lives that they will be willing to pay something for it" — whether that be money, details about themselves to allow targeted advertising, or some combination of both.
(From I Want Media)

Community search engine

Researchers at Princeton have created a search engine that looks solely at all the links on a webpage and builds up networks of "social groups" based on these links. The resulting groups tend to illustrate communities of common interest. It may even prove a way to identify emergent trends.
(From Nature)

Copyright treaty "will encourage online publishing"

The World Intellectual Property Organisation's international copyright treaty comes into effect today. WIPO's director general, Kamil Idris, argued that the new rules will encourage copyright owners to put their work online because their enforcement rights are now much more clear. However, civil liberties organisations have countered that the new rules will restrict freedom of speech and expression.
(From Financial Times)

How to blow up Google

Appropriately enough, Blogdex, the blog of blogs, took me to an article on the power of blogs and their influence on Google. It turns out that blogs can be used to make a "Google Bomb", whereby keywords in referring pages can boost the rating of a site that may not even contain those keywords. The inventor of the term, Adam Mathes, lobbed the first Google Bomb by referring to his friend Andy Pressman's website with the words "talentless hack". A year later the site comes Number 1 in a google search for "talentless hack".
(From Corante)

News Corp says there is no way to profit from web publishing

Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corporation, argued that there was "no viable business model" for the internet at the Financial Times New Media and Broadcasting conference. News Corp websites will be run merely as promotional vehicles for the print publications.
(From Financial Times)

Germans win e-paper race

Katja Riefler observers on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits that electronic edition distribution is not just being monopolised by Olive and NewsStand. Several German newspapers, eg, Rhein Zeitung, developed their own technologies in 2001. "More than 1,000 of [Rhein Zeitung's] 8,700 original subscribers have converted to a paid subcription in the first month, although you can only buy the e-paper as an add-on to the printed edition as yet. The price varies from 2 Euro to 5 Euro a month."
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Trinity Mirror posts £11.3m loss

The Media Earnings Watch on FT.com keeps track of company reports by media earners. Trinity Mirror last week posted a loss of $16m and said that the advertising market has remained "tough" in 2002.
(From FT.com News)

Online input good for newspaper classified

Report by the Advanced Interactive Media group argues that allowing advertisers to buy and input classified ads online is good news: it reduces costs, generates new revenue (both in attracting new customers and encouraging existing customers to spend more), and improves customer service. Not surprisingly the study was sponsored by a company that provides an online classified input service. Download report (800K pdf).
(From AIM)

Don't get complacent

Journalist Dale Peskin argues that newspapers shouldn't get too smug about the dot com crash, and that new media could spell the end for newsprint. His reasons: (1) Everyone is a journalist. Hacks are no longer uniquely qualified to inform. Communities and networks can be much more effective than one-directional broadcasting of information. (2) Consumers place a low value on online newspapers. Newspapers provide information - but people want entertainment nowadays. "News organizations thrive — or fail — on their ability to create experiential stories, and their ability to create products and services that evoke emotion." And newspapers may not be best qualified to do this. (3) Content is not king. "The capability to connect consumers — one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many — is more valued than the capability to produce content." (4) The Internet is rendering newspapers obsolete. "Two emerging economies provide models for growth and a future. A service-based economy enables access to a variety of paid-for services delivered through electronic networks. An attention-based economy enables news companies to create a new kind of wealth based on their capacity to extend their brands and their stories."
(From American Press Institute)

Charge for your most valuable assets

Discussion on New Media Age about the implications for the UK newspaper industry of the FT's decision last week to charge for an area of its website. "It's been widely rumoured that Guardian Unlimited will be introducing some kind of subscription services before too long. If that happens we will see if the market for paid-for services is unlimited or not. "
(From New Media Age)

The bad guys always use Windows...

Article on Wired reinforcing the cliche that in TV and Hollywood dramas, the good guys always use Macs and the bad guys use Windows. In the series 24 the standard model applied - except there were two disconcerting exceptions. One goodie starting using a Dell PC; and worse, a Mac user started to look like a traitor. However, to the relief of Mac lovers, the Dell user turned out to be the traitor. "The producers of 24 pooh-poohed the idea of any connection between computing platform and moral fiber." Who're they trying to kid? Amusing discussion (and pictures) on Metafilter.
(From Wired)

It's for you!

MIT have invented an "Audio Spotlight" that projects a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it. The technology could be very useful in fields from entertainment (eg, no more squabbles over what to listen to on the car stereo) to military (to confuse or inflict pain on enemies).
(From Wired)

Webhead goldfish

Frequent web users end up with an online attention span of about nine seconds - the same as that of a goldfish. The impulse to move on to the next choice means we lose the ability to concentrate, Ted Selker of the MIT told the BBC. The answer, Selker argues, is to give yourself goals and not to "be pushed around by the most exciting words in a never ending sea of information."
(From BBC Sci/Tech)

Another web-supports-print study

Media Week features yet another report suggesting that online success supports print circulation rather than eats into it. "The study, by Starcom Motive, says that "on average, titles with websites attracting more than 100,000 monthly unique users enjoyed a sales increase of 5.4% between 1999 and 2001. Meanwhile, papers without a strong website saw print sales fall on average by 3.5%." The reason? "Good newspaper websites help shore up sales ... by building brand equity. The better the site, the greater the stature afforded to the brand." The study saw no correlation between circulation and advertising spend.
(From Media Week)