Paid content update: Financial Times

FT.Com has published more details about its paid subscription plans. "Subscription-only features will include the full Lex column; top columnists such as Martin Wolf, Peter Martin and Lucy Kellaway; web pages devoted to specific industries; and all articles more than seven days old." There will be two levels of subscription: the first, at $110 per year, will include all editorial content written for both the paper and the website, plus "the opportunity to read and print important pages of the newspaper". The second level, costing $300, will also include a database on 18,000 companies, plus the past five year's worth of FT Profile archive. FT.com has 2.7m unique users, according to ABCe figures.
(From Financial Times)

Google Answers

Google is beta-ing its take on the internet research community concept: Google Answers. The idea is that you submit a question for 50 cents and say how much you think the answer is worth to you (between $4 and $50). Two communities of researchers then try to answer the question. The first community consists of volunteer logged in users who get to try to answer your question just to prove how clever they are. The second community consists of "experts": if you choose to "buy" an expert's research skills, you pay him or her the value of the question (provided you get an answer). Google takes a 25% cut.
(From Google)

Circulation spike is over

The newspaper circulation boost following September 11 seems to have been erased, writes Editor & Publisher's Lucia Moses in a review of the figures currently being published by many papers in the US. The Newspaper Association of America predicts that overall, figures will show a trend of no growth or even a drop of 0.5%.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Future looks good on paper

New York Magazine's Michael Wolff mulls over changes in the New York press world in recent weeks — the WSJ redesign, the launch of the New York Sun and new sections in the NYT — and concludes that focusing on newsprint is not only in fashion, but a sound business strategy.
(From New York Magazine)

Quark not yet carbonised "because OSX isn't ready"

Quark's Glen Turpin has repeated the company's claim that "technical limitations" in OSX are at the root of Quark failure to carbonise XPress, despite the fact that all the other principal Macintosh applications are now running happily in Apple's year-old operating system. Printing is the main culprit. Joel Friedman of Heidelberg is similarly unenthusiastic about OSX, although his main complaint is simply that it isn't being used, rather than that it can't be. Some good comments on this article on Slashdot.
(From Newsfactor)

Coursey falls in love with Mac

ZDNet's Executive Editor Jim Coursey, a "Windows-dependent technology columnist" spent the past three month trying out life on a Mac. It was supposed to be a one-month trial, but Coursey stuck with the iMac and admits that "I ... don't want to give it up. It's a whole lot more fun than my Windows machine ... Mac, enhanced by OS X, has a level of simplicity and transparency in operation that allows it to get out of the way and just let me work. That's something Windows never does."
(From ZDNet)

Le Monde launches paid online edition

Le Monde has launched a paid-for subscriber edition online costing 5 euros per month. Subscribers get limited access to the archive, wires and pictures, PDF versions of the paper, a news ticker and some personalisation and research tools such as checklists and an online file system. Click on "édition abonnés" on the front page for the Flash demo.
(From Poynter's E-Media Tidbits)

Times Co goes public about CCI

The New York Times Company has finally announced its deal with CCI to install NewsDesk at the Times, the Boston Globe and the Telegram & Gazette. Implementation is scheduled to begin this year. The plan is to use LayoutChamp on most pages but InDesign on the more designed bits such as section fronts. No mention is made of InCopy at present. CCI will of course work hard to integrate NewsDesk with InDesign but clearly they've already given up on a single layout platform or true H&J.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Google top 10s are self-affirming

Interesting article on K5 noting that, with the release of Google APIs, the practice of Google Bombing may be exacerbated inadvertently by "Google Boxes", ie, engines that list top sites on subject X via Google. "Remember that Google uses links as votes, which in turn determine relevancy. By embedding these Google Boxes sites are creating recursive link structures. In other words, sites are querying Google to find the most authoritative links on a topic and then creating links to the results, which in turns makes them authoritative. The rating system is essentially feeding itself." However, sites such as blogdex avoid this by using a redirect. Perhaps Google should insist that Google API users set redirects...
(From Kuro5hin)

Blogging: "antidote to the liberal monotone"

Rightwinger Norah Vincent, "a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank set up after Sept 11 to study terrorism", observes that the big names in blogland lean to the right, and induces from this that this is a response to "the left's carefully combed and bowdlerized opus of ideals served up daily on the gray pages of nearly every big-city newspaper". And that's why so many of these papers are complaining about it. (Actually the complaints tend to focus on the self-indulgence and lack of editorial review of this medium, rather than the political bias.) According to Vincent, weblogs "provide a healthy criticism of the liberal establishment's hopelessly arrogant monotone", quoting James Lileks: "The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation." Perhaps the real difference is that some sort of conversation takes place before a newspaper chooses to publish an opinion. And it's interesting to note that the article attacks the very newspaper it is published in. Doesn't that rather undermine Vincent's premise?
(From Los Angeles Times)

FT starts a blog

The Financial Times's Silicon Valley commentator Louise Kehoe has joined the blogging plague with an weblog examining use of information technology in the corporate sector. It's of the commentary, rather than portal variety, so (unlike on this site) you at least get something original...
(From FT.com)

Express slashes price

Richard Desmond has chopped the cover price of the ailing Daily Express from 35p to 20p, of the Saturday Express from 50p to 25p, and of the Sunday Express from £1 to 50p. Desmon says the promotion will continue "indefinitely", whatever that means. The Express circulation has gone down by 10% to 883,000 in the past year. Associated say they have no plans to enter into a price war.
(From Media Guardian)

Integration means efficiency

Integrated systems are providing news organisations with all manner of new opportunities to leverage information, writes Meg Campbell in Editor & Publisher — and not just in editorial and production. A single information schema can allow a classified rep to offer an advertiser a subscription. Quality CRM finally becomes a real possibility. Systems can produce standardised reports and analysis across departments.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Convergence: coherence or homogenisation?

Online Journalism Review's JD Lasica reviews moves by various US news groups to unify their means of producing online content — and to unify the presentation of that content. Using shared content management systems and standardised designs, news organisations are speedily accessing and delivering stories across multiple regions and media. However, for the user, such "digital news networks can mean deeper and better news coverage — or a sterile, homogenized product lacking soul, personality or purpose. When it comes to this flavor of chain convergence, execution is everything."
(From Online Journalism Review)

Crash course in copyright

The University of Texas has published a neat little guide to copyright (US law), explaining fair use, digital copyright etc. They also have a tutorial and nice little libel checklist — again, pertaining to US libel law. It's cute.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Le Monde to carry NYT section

Le Monde is to carry 12 pages of articles from the New York Times every Saturday. The section will be in English.
(From Editor & Publisher)

NYT and WSJ go head to head

The New York Times is launching its first new section in four years: a competitor to the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal section. Both focus on weekend holidays and real estate. The launch coincides with the $225 million redesign to the WSJ (April 9) and moves by both papers to beef up midweek offerings in national editions to attract more national advertising. Given that the Journal's average reader is over 50 and male, the redesign — which is likely to resemble the WSJ Europe — is targeted to attract a younger readership. WSJ total circulation: 1,780,000. NYT: 1,109,00.
(From Editor & Publisher)