How newspapers can be profitable online...

... according to an NAA report. Apparently the World Association of Newspapers says that 38 per cent of us are in the black. Of course, calculating the profitability of second use is a pretty subjective thing.
(From Newspaper Association of America)

17,000 sign up for paid FT subscription

The FT has announced that 17,000 of its 2.8 million users have signed up for paid subscriptions since the FT introduced subscriber-only in May. It's not quite on the scale of the Wall Street Journal, which now has over 600,000 piad subscribers, but Marjorie Scardino described the rate of signup as "outstripping what we ewxpected".
(From MediaGuardian)

Deep linking update: "violation of EU law"

German newspaper Mainpost's ongoing battle with news search site Newsclub has led to a Munich ruling that deep linking by search engines violates the "Database Directive" of European Union law. "Legal experts believe that if the ruling is upheld, it could easily become a firm legal precedent across the European Union, drastically limiting the information that many European search engines are allowed to provide to their users."
(From Wired)

Nexpo review

Nexpo review from the NAA with summary of the new version of CCI NewsGate, a report on the launch of InCopy 2 and some U-turns from Modulo...
(From NAA TechNews)

Linuxworld falls in love with Xserve

Interesting article in Linuxworld arguing that the Linux community should embrace Mac users. Appropriates Moore's Law to the overall cost (hardware plus OS) of server systems. Xserve and Linux trounce Windows.
(From Linuxworld)

Media course students not interested in journalism

Depressing reading in a James Silver feature in The Times. The number of media studies places in British universities has gone up by 50 per cent in the past six years, but Silver found little or no interest in journalism or current affairs, and precious little general knowledge, in his New Media degree students. "Of nearly 60 students, only a couple had ever picked up a broadsheet." The article smacks of snobbishness at times, but it does illustrate the difference in quality between "dumping ground" media studies courses in some colleges, and the more serious journalism degrees that are taught at others. This follow-up report in EPN World Reporter seeks to distinguish them.
(From The Times)

What will replace the keyboard?

Wired questionnaire. Peter Skillman of Handspring: it'll get smaller but remain tactile. Jakob Nielsen: it'll shrink, then handwriting recognition will take over, then (2008 onwards) voice recognition will come good. David Gelerntner: Mirror Worlds (natch), a microphone and a joystick.
(From Wired)

Newspapers: gone in 2022?

Newspapers will exist only as a philanthropic venture within 20 years, according to Arnold Kling on Tech Central Station. He cites this NAA report and this data from the founder of American Demographics Magazine: "63% of households 25 to 34 years old bought any newspaper product in 1985. By 1995 that figure had slid to 56%. But by 2000 it was down to 35%." Not so!, says Sidney Goldberg (formerly of United Media). Electronic paper will save us!
(From Romenesko's Media News)

PDFs for voucher copies

Provision of voucher copies electronically using PDF is growing in popularity, according to Editor & Publisher. Both Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company in the US have recently signed up for MerlinOne's E-Sheets software. MerlinOne may soon be able to attach electronic invoices to the PDF.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Five new newspaper clients for Olive

Five more publishers have signed up for OliveSoft's ActivePaper electronic edition software. They are Forum Communications Group; Freedom Communications' Northwest Florida Group and Colorado papers; Oklahoma Publishing Company; The Reading Eagle; and WEHCO Communications.
(From Editor & Publisher)

QuarkXpress 5.01 released

Quark have released a free upgrade to XPress 5 that features various performance enhancements, improved spellchecking and hyphenation, and the facility to use an emergency key launch sequence to deal with problems with the painful License Administrator. But no Carbon.
(From MacCentral)

Web links on classified ads

El Mercurio has adopted the much-discussed idea of putting cross-references on print classified ads to allow readers to look up richer, more detailed versions of the ads on the paper's website.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Online presence: help or hindrance?

API profile of online newspaper users (1.2Mb PDF). "Online newspapers are the dominant online source of local news and are second only to printed newspapers as a primary source of local advertising . . . Compared to online audiences in general, online newspaper readers spend more hours and dollars online. But only 40%of all online users have ever visited an online newspaper, half don't use the Web for local news and most say they've never used the Internet to shop for homes or cars."
(From American Press Institute)

How easily is your software accommodated?

Essay by Zach Nies (former chief software architect, Quark; now part of Mark Lemmons's team at Creo) on software design and the principle that good interfaces should use natural metaphors. When designing Six Degrees the team followed the adage that "perfection is achieved when nothing more can be removed".
(From Creo / Six Degrees)

Worldwide web & local laws

Roundup of recent cases where local laws can get international organisations (eg, websites) into trouble, wherever the organisation may be based. Questions over jurisdiction in these matters remain unanswered. Interesting implications for copyright, libel and advertising regulations.
(From CNET news)

Jagwire in August?

Apple's OS X version 10.2, which was widely expected to be out in late September, may be ready for release in early August, according to CNET. Beta testing is apparently being wound up, and the latest builds feature interface tweaks, which suggests that the core work is now locked down.
(From CNET news)

More on Méthode

Editor & Publisher report giving more detail on EidosMedia's solution for the FT. The pagination end of the Méthode CMS will be either XPress, InDesign or EidsMedia's custom pagination system (to be announced shortly) and an XML editor Xsmile, which allows editors "to create and see stories in WYSIWYG mode". The whole lot will be based on cascading stylesheets. "Form and content are separate, and are only brought together when we render or output content, so we can apply different style sheets to the same content," says FT Publishing Editor William Dawkins. "The most important function is the single-copy principle." How to tackle geometry in a system where print appears to have come last in the design process is not explained.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Aggregators preferred to newspapers

Lycos's news-only search engine now indexes 3,000 news sites every minute, making it the most up to date non-wires news seeker on the web. Google's news search, though better presented, clocks in at a paltry 100 sites per hour or better. According to Forrester Research, people prefer the portals to newspaper sites to get news: their search found that 42% of internet users read news online at least once a month - but just one in four visit newspaper sites.
(From Lycos)

Little growth in news consumption

Research by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press suggests that news consumption is not significantly being increased despite the internet. In the past tw o years the number of respondants who said that they go online for news at least three times a week has only gone up by 2% (to 25%). Meanwhile the number who said that they read a newspaper the previous day went down by 6% (to 41%). "It seems that the universe for news consumers is finite and doesn't seem to be growing."
(From Editor & Publisher)

Electronic paper update

Nice little report on what Xerox (aka Gyricon) and E Ink are doing with electronic paper. E Ink has already demonstrated displays that are half the thickness of a credit card. Roll on rollable...
(From Business Week)