GODE reviewed by The Register

The Guardian and Observer Digital Editions are reviewed today by Kieren McCarthy in The Register. Some quotes: "It's extremely good. The navigation is surprisingly easy ... the graphic gives you an excellent view of the actual page; the click-on aspect works extremely well, and it is all very fast and efficient." Aww, shucks... "The only one annoying thing is that the graphic of the page makes it impossible to read the smaller headlines of the page - something that is oddly distracting". Darn, that one. McCarthy compares GODE with the rival products used by the Times, Telegraph, and FT, plus NewsStand's product. And says "overall the Guardian is easily the winner. Plus, because it has developed the software in-house and it runs off the editorial system, [GNL] doesn't have to pay hefty fees to a third party to produce it". I love this man! The article continues with a reasonable critique of the normal (and our) digital edition subscription model, and a general summary of the question of why anyone would want to produce them.
(From The Register)

LA Times on digital editions

Pulitzer winner and media critic David Shaw says that NewsStand and PressDisplay's digital edition products are "a big step in the right direction" to allay his misgivings ("I miss ... the tactile sensation ... the serendipity ... [and] the context") about accessing his paper online when he can't get a print edition. It's not the best-researched piece of journalism ever -- e.g. it fails to mention the existence of other digital edition services; it inaccurately reports that PressDisplay started on December 15 (even I was aware of it by November 20) -- but it does have some useful facts and figures -- e.g. that the New York Times has 4,000 NewsStand subscribers (a figure I'm not entirely sure they wanted publicised) -- and some good descriptions of the two products' subscription models.
(From Romenesko)

NYT's most forwarded articles

The New York Times publishes a list of which articles are most being forwarded to other people using nytimes.com's "E-Mail This Article" tool. It has now republished a selection from the 100 most popular for the whole of 2003 -- providing an interesting taster of what people were concerned with this year.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

NewspaperDirect distributes 100,000 newspapers per month

Article in the Toronto Star about what they call digital newspapers and I call on-demand newspapers. Really, neither term is very good. "Digital newspapers" doesn't say much -- aren't they all produced digitally these days? -- and is easily mistaken for "digital editions" (which are themselves a bit hard to pin down). "On demand" can be inaccurate, because many are downloaded automatically or even printed in predetermined numbers.

The problem is that these products -- roughly speaking, newspapers produced for big web offset press sites but that are also made available (generally as PDF) over the internet for very small-scale printing, usually by third-party vendors -- are being categorised in a way that will increasingly become meaningless:
1, the file format and the means of distribution is by no means unique to "digital newspapers".
2, the on-demandness is, as I've already said, unnecessary.
3, the difference between "digital newspaper" (electronically distributed but read as hard copy) and "digital edition" (read either online or downloaded and printed out) is pretty blurred: most "digital edition" providers allow you to print hard copy in much the same format as a "digital newspaper" (albeit without stitching); and the introduction of PressDisplay positions the biggest "digital newspaper" provider in the "digital edition" market. So the only real distinguishing features lie at the the point of access: in the ownership of the accessing device (vendor or customer), and in purchasing method ("point of sale" or subscription). And even these distinctions will become blurred as the world gets more wireless and as devices get more various.

Anyway, this article has a decent description of NewspaperDirect's business model. And for now, NewspaperDirect think there is a distinction: they say that digital edition provider NewsStand "competes with NewspaperDirect online, but not in print".
(From TheStar.com)

New Year resolutions etc

Editor & Publisher lists some resolutions from members of the US online news industry. The principal goals: "dayparting, campaign coverage, make money". Meanwhile PaidContent's Roundup of the Roundups is worth a browse.
(From Editor & Publisher)

"PowerPoint makes you dumb"

Nice little item about Edward Tufte's anti-PowerPoint paper, "The cognitive style of PowerPoint". I haven't yet read the original pamphlet, but I imagine much of the sentiment was covered in Tufte's Wired piece, "PowerPoint is evil". The latter is worth a read if only for the wonderful standfirst, "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely". Anyway, in the NYT Clive Thompson observes that, following the Shuttle Columbia tragedy, NASA found itself to be too reliant on PowerPoint slideware presentations to get complex information across -- including risk assessments of possible Shuttle wing damage. Thompson also reckons that PowerPoint helped Colin Powell make his case to the UN that Iraq possessed WMDs -- and concludes: "Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it." Meanwhile David Byrne makes art with PowerPoint (Yahoo! News).
(From New York Times)

Term war

Which is going to win in 2004: "participatory content" (currently scoring a lowly 240 on Google but I keep seeing it this week), or "participatory journalism" (currently way ahead with 5,150)? Are you for PC or PJ?

NAA predicts 4% ad growth next year

The Newspaper Association of America estimates a 4.1 per cent rise in US newspaper advertising spending next year. The main area of growth is predicted to be classified, thanks to increased recruitment.
(From Washington Post)

Top 10 web design mistakes of 2003

Jakob N's annual whinge -- always worth reading.
(From UseIt.com)

XPress 6.1 nearing release

According to Think Secret we are just days away from a dot upgrade to QuarkXPress 6. If so we would have the astonishing scenario of Quark upgrading a product in something approaching the timescale they originally suggested. In November Quark indicated the XPress 6.1 would be available "in the near future". If it comes out in the next couple of weeks it's pretty much on time in my book...
(From Think Secret)

"Apple's come a long way; so can we"

I was bound to like this one. After lauding Apple's successful "high spirit" and risk-taking, Chris Heisel says: "Everyone says the end of newspapers is near. We’re antiquated, we can’t do anything right. We’ve got quality issues and a dwindling audience. They said the same thing about Apple ... I challenge the newspaper industry — let’s be Apple, not Dell." His recipe for 2004: 1, Take risks ("innovate, not duplicate"); 2, Focus on quality ("make quality out value proposition and our product differential"); 3, Make money, the right way ("no one said being a good company and making money are mutually exclusive").
(From Heisel.org)

ABC to begin digital edition testing

Following last week's decision to list digital edition readership figures, the UK Audit Bureau of Circulation is to undertake a programme of digital edition user testing with various magazine groups in early 2004. The aim is to test the similarity between print and digital editions. The move is seen as aa step towards persuading advertisers that digital edition readers should be included in headline circulation counts.
(From New Media Age)

Our readers are our readers

Think piece from Dave Morgan of "audience management company" Tacoda repeating the argument that news organisations should try harder to recognise that their readership in different media as being a single target, "the enterprises's total marketable audience". "Just as important as understanding how news site audiences differ (between print and web etc) is to understand how they are similar so that they can be sold as a larger package to advertisers."
(From Editor & Publisher)

OJR's 2003 roundup

Mark Glaser does a pundit poll assessing online journalism's big themes of 2003 -- inclufing blogs. Iraq, broadband, paid content, and advertising -- and giving predictions for 2004 -- more blogs, participatory journalism, politics, RSS, and more paid content.
(From Online Journalism Review)

Vin Crosbie has seen the future ...

Allegedly. And it's full of definite articles.
(From Digital Deliverance)

BlackBerry by AirPort

BlackBerry users: RIM are planning to have wi-fi capabilities of the product in place by early next year.
(From CNET News)

New middlebrow Sunday

Via the Observer, news of a new Sunday paper scheduled for launch next year. Life On Sunday aims for an initial circulation of 150,000. If the paper remains in profit after four or five years, the holding company, Life Newspaper, claims that further profits will be given to charitable causes.
(From MediaGuardian)

Tabloidisation update: IHT on Times

The IHT's take on the Times's tabloid move. A couple of quotes: "The move by the left-leaning Independent, meanwhile, could put pressure on its main broadsheet rival, the much bigger Guardian, which says it is also considering a tabloid. 'Obviously, all options are open, and we're watching with interest,' said Shaun Williams, director of corporate affairs for GNL" ... "Fifteen to 20 extra journalists were working to put out the compact Times".
(From International Herald Tribune)

"Intent over content"

Rafat Ali's recent speech (PowerPoint) on key trends in digital media.
(From Paid Content)

Indy circulation soars to 240,000

The Independent's circulation bosst since it went tabloid seems to be gaining ground rather than dropping away after a honeymoon period. It has added a further 5,000 readers to its circulation in the past month. The gains made by the tabloid Times (believed to be 20,000 a day so far and rising) haven't yet made it into the ABC figures. The Times has almost doubled its print run of tabloid copies from 80,000 to 150,000.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Phone barcode readers

The trouble with those consumer barcode readers (for printed media consumers to access web material) was that (a) you had to supply them to your customers and (b) you had to expect them to have them with them all the time. But you don't have to worry about that with mobile phones. And mobies with cameras can do the job of reading barcodes now. The Semacode Project aims to allow phone users to "scan" printed material in the real world and then to have the phone's browser taken to the URL. Neomedia's Paperclick applications do something similar. Now, with a bit of bluetooth or infrared you should be able to transfer the URLs to view on a desktop computer if you want to.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Free digital NYT in Mickey D's

More from Digital Deliverance: in a cross-promotion between wifi supplier Wayport, the New York Times and NewsStand, copies of the NYT will be made available for download in 800 Wayport wifi sites including 680 hotels and 100-odd McDonald's restaurants in the United States. Given the (terrifyingly massive) size of NewsStand downloads it's a pretty good deal for the venues.
(From Digital Deliverance)

Paid content update: Irish Times

Digital Deliverance notes Ireland.com's gradual retreat from a 100% paid content model. Their 1 per cent subscription takeup doesn't make up for the loss of advertising revenue caused by the huge drop in readership, so more content is going free. Similarly the Jersulam Post is freeing up more content.
(From Digital Deliverance)

Internet now 10% of Euro media consumption

The web (at 10%) has now overtaken the magazine (8%) in the European media usage charts. The newspaper continues its decline, clocking 13%. Top is TV (41%); radio comes second at (28%). Of online users, 83% said they used the internet for email. Only 56% used it for news.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Quotes in online news

An interesting example of the limitations of conventional web news design, and a proposed solution. Observing that some readers tend to skim articles just for the quotations (because they're interesting, they provide human angles, they condense opinion, they bypass editorialising, etc), Adrian Holovaty proposes that webpages have features to highlight quotations by (automatically it is hoped) tagging the quoted bits so that they can be shown in their own style. 'Course, in print media we already have a quotation emphasis system. It's called the pull quote. But yikes! It turns out that this quote tag already exists in HTML (Internet Explorer excepted, of course)! But Holovaty takes the idea further and suggests that these tagged items could be parsed and indexed so that a reader could see, for example, "all today's quotes" as an alterntive index, or "all quotes by X". Trouble with the latter is, much as the quote identification could be automated, catching the attributions might be trickier. But it's a sweet idea.
(From Holovaty.com)

More speculation about Apple tablets

I've not read Robert Cringely before. He can write. He latches on to the recent excitement about 802.15.3 -- short range, high bandwidth wireless networking to the merely moderately geeky; super remote control to real people -- and speculates that it's coming soon to an Apple tablet near you.
(From Haddock)

Reader's editor and online communities

Interesting think piece by Jay Rosen about how, as readers start to identify newspapers' online presences as being the newspaper, and meanwhile those newspapers try to foster online communities and encourage readers to provide more feedback to articles online, the role of the "reader's editor"/"public editor"/"ombudsman" should perhaps be rethought. Rosen suggests that the reader's editor should run a weblog that points to articles and collates comment (including his own) on those articles.
(From PressThink)

Times in tabloid ad row

To the relief of all the pundits, the "inevitable" has finally happened and advertisers have started making a fuss about the obligation to provide two formats of their ads to newspapers running parallel broadsheet and tabloid editions. The Indy volunteered to pay the cost of producing two versions, but The Times refused.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

GODE trial "for four weeks"

It appears that the Guardian and Observer Digital Edition beta trial will last four weeks. That takes us to December 18 or thereabouts.
(From DotJournalism)

Online classified is cannibalising print

... says the OPA.
(From Media Daily News )

Print easier to drop than other media

The Pew Internet and American Life Project's report, "Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States", finds that the majority of the US populace would find it easier to give up their favourite newspaper than to give up other media ("computers, the internet, mobile phones, email, television).
(From E-Media Tidbits)

US ad spending up (a little)

The Newspaper Association of America reckons newspaper ad spending in the US crept up 1.5 per cent to $10.9 billion in Q3. However, classified is still on a downward trend (down 0.5% overall), particularly job ads (down 10.7%).
(From Editor & Publisher)

IE to include popup blocker

Following various debates about GODE's use of popups (and some browsers' inability to distinguish legit popups from those served by advertising) comes the news that Microsoft has indicated that it will include a blocker in the next version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP. An analyst estimates that as many as 20 per cent of web users have already installed some form of anti-pop-up software.
(From CNET News)

The past and future of product convergence

Little potted history of print, web, and digital editions from Digital Deliverance, with a rousing call in particular to newspaper web operations to see digital editions as something to participate in (and thereby improve), not to feel threatened by. The Guardian and Observer digital editions get a nod here too (well spotted, Vin Crosbie), which is nice given the cross-functional makeup of our project team. Has the usual (but that doesn't mean wrong) recommendations for where to go from here: fully leveraging PDF's functionality; openness to many reading devices; tabloidisation; introducing good commercial models, etc. Vin's prediction: "By 2010, newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters ... will be able to publish a single digital edition that can be used on the Web, in print, and on portable devices and e-paper, and that will feature the advantages of both Web sites and newsprint. This convergence has already begun."
(From Digital Deliverance)

News's Les Hinton on tabloidisation

Interesting (and unusually broad-minded for a News exec) comments from News International executive chariman Les Hinton about moving to tabloid from the broadsheet format. He observes that one UK broadsheet (the Guardian or Telegraph) may choose to make a virtue of staying broadsheet so that this becomes a USP. News is going to be aggressive with retailers and give 18p per copy of the Times sold (rather than the current 12.5p) in shops stocking the tabloid version.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Times goes tabloid

The Times is joining the Indy in publishing a tabloid alternative in the London area as of Wednesday November 26.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Creo Tokens at MacExpo

If you're going to MacExpo, take a look at Tokens on the Creo stand -- and say hello to Lori. Tokens has won a "best of show" award.
(From Creo)

Towards a single newsroom

Examples of newspapers who have moved their web staff into the print newsroom. (Interesting display of prejudice here: what I mean is that the web and print staff have moved into a single newsroom together.)
(From Online Journalism Review)

Guardian digital edition - from Guardian Newspapers

OK, beta is now accessible. The Observer too, of course. Hope you like it. Comments/bugs/feedback to beta.feedback@guardian.co.uk, not me!
(From Yours truly)

Guardian digital edition - from NewspaperDirect

Pressplay is NewspaperDirect's advancement of its B2B digital newspaper service: a website allowing the public to download pages of numerous worldwide newspapers. Today's Guardian (international edition) is available, but you'll have to pay. I haven't checked yet but it would be interesting to see how fast these pages become available after transmission to NewspaperDirect. (The site says "minutes after they are published".)
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Newspaper registration service under threat

The Royal Mail is planning to cut the newspaper registration service, used by regional UK newspapers to mail their products at a reduced rate. Each week about 100,000 newspapers are delivered using this service -- which has been in place for 150-odd years. The Newspaper Society is now protesting the plan.
(From Hold The Front Page)

Introducing Peppercoin

Can this MIT spinoff micropayment technology succeed where others have failed? Apparently it's easier to use and -- significantly -- it's cheaper to process. And it was codesigned by one of the inventors of RSA -- the encryption system that allows web credit card transactions -- so it has a pretty impressive pedigree.
(From MIT Technology Review)

Bill Joy interview

Last time he was in Wired it was an international cultural event, so it's gotta be worth a look. Some noteworthy bits: computers have gotten 25 times better, but software hasn't; with a good desktop such as a G5 "a database becomes a data structure"; "Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed"; "open source doesn't assist the initial creative act"; Windows is "of absolutely no technical interest"; "SARS was just a TV story about a bunch of people wearing masks"; "When Moore's law ceases to be true, maybe around 2014 - that would be a good time to retire"; "a Hippocratic Oath for scientists would be useful"; "Clean water would do more to alleviate disease than high tech medicine".
(From Wired)

Who's going to buy the Telegraph?

Following Conrad Black's fall ... the candidates currently are: 1, Associated; 2, Richard Desmond; 3, the Barclay brothers; 4, the Washington Post. Up for grabs (possibly) are the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Tribune president: paid content will be ubiquitous

For the ONA conference in Chicago keynote, Tribune Publishing's Jack Fuller said that "everyone will move, at least in part, to a model paid by the reader". He emphasised adaptability and understanding young readers as the priorities for online publishers.
(From Online News Association)

Sony in Japanese ebook venture

Sony and 14 publishing companies are planning an ebook rental service for launch next spring in Japan. One of the planned readers will use E Ink's electronic paper technology. No readers will have comms features: all will require download via PC.
(From EE Times)

WSJ counts paying subs on ABC

Following ABC USA's rule change in July, the Wall Street Journal has included some of its paying online subscribers on this month's circulation figures. The effective boost is 16 per cent. The move has sparked excitement elsewhere.
(From Online Journalism Review)

Times to launch weekly business mag

Some of the secret moves in Times HQ are not size-related. Apparently they've got the go-ahead for a weekly business supplement positioned somewhere between the FT and the Economist.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Email vs RSS spat goes on

"When someone states that one application ... will kill another ... buzz flocks like flies to his statement. It's good publicity, but nonetheless his statement is the type of material to which flies tend to flock."
(From Digital Deliverance)

Indy to take tabloid nationwide

INM has announced that it intends to complete its move to distribute a tabloid version of the Independent nationwide by the beginning of 2004. "Our target is a minimum increase in sales of 50,000," said CEO Ivan Fallon.
(From Financial Times)

Convergence defined

From OJR's extract of Rich Gordon's contribution to Digital Journalism.
(From Online Journalism Review)

Digital editions: usability, popularity, etc

Online NewsHour gets voxpops on how digital editions are picking up. On E-Media Tidbits Katja Riefler reports that a study by the University of Trier concluded that digeds are perceived, unsurprisingly, as halfway houses or bridges between the printed paper and the web. More (if you can read German).
(From Online NewsHour)

Spam is turning brits off

Research from the iSociety project at the Work Foundation has found that 25 per cent surveyed respondants say that spam has made them cut back on their email usage. 70 per cent say spam makes the online experience "annoying". Apparently all this is slowing adoption of broadband.
(From Online Publishing News)

Perseus study on blogging

Apparently 91 per cent of bloggers are aged 13-29, and more than 50 per cent are teenagers. Fifty-six per cent are women. Old codgers like me are bucking the trend.
(From eMarketer)

Manasco and Siegel on InCopy direct sales

Editor & Publisher on Adobe's new strategy of selling InCopy direct to customers. Chad Siegel says it's good news for small publishers and -- with the Bridge plugins -- provides entry-level file locking, status, check in/out, etc. The move is a step in the right direction but Adobe should really be brave enough to distribute the product like they did with Acrobat Reader. They'll never make money out of InCopy, so they should give it away to encourage people to buy the stuff it integrates with.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Shake-up at the Telegraph

In addition to changing the Daily Telegraph's editor, the Telegraph Group is undergoing a substantial shake-up of its board. Former new media division head Hugo Drayton replaces Jeremy Deedes as manging director, and former deputy editor of the Sundary Telegraph Kim Fletcher becomes "editorial director". There are a number of other changes both to roles and those performing them.
(From MediaGuardian)

Adobe licenses Opera

Adobe has licensed Opera's HTML rendering engine for use within Adobe applications. A spokeswoman for Opera focused on Adobe's interest in Opera's small-screen rendering technology, which reformats HTML to fit on multiple devices etc. The most immediately obvious application would be for rendering HTML within web applications such as GoLive, however, the ability to properly render stylesheeted HTML within a creative application suggests all sorts of other possibilities. For example, instead of "Galley View" and "Layout View" in a text editor, how about "Galley View", "Print Layout View", "Webpage Layout View", "Tablet View", etc? Opera's press release is here.
(From MacCentral)

Bruce Chizen interview

Given that Adobe and Apple are the two primary vendors in our editorial system project, we have an interest in their relationship. In this interview with Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen he insists that the relationship is "a great one".
(From CNet)

IDC: tablet PCs will take off

Actually, the article headline indicates that they are taking off, but it's hardly persuasive. What was perhaps noteworthy was that IDC predicts that by 2007 these devices -- which are more obviously suited for digital newspapers than palmtops -- will represent 20 per cent of the portable PC market.
(From Wired)

InCopy CS will be sold direct to customers

As part of today's Creative Suite announcement, Adobe has announced that the text editor InCopy (which includes the CS monicker but isn't part of the CS box set) will henceforth be available for purchase directly from Adobe. Previously it has only been sold through a systems integrator. Estimated street price is $249.
(From Adobe)

OPA's report is misleading - Crosbie

Digital Deliverance's Vin Crosbie reckons the Online Publishers Association's latest report on paid content -- which suggests healthy growth -- is highly misleading due to inappropriate methodology. Crosbie lambasts the OPA for stretching the definition of publishers' paid content -- for example, including B2B reports, subscription directories, help lines, personal growth services, greeting card services, music streaming, games, dating services and centrefold pinups. He feels that the OPA's members are just saying what they want to hear.
(From Digital Deliverance)

Guardian vs Independent OS debate

This is so lame it's almost sweet. Guardian Computer Editor Jack Schofield takes swipe at Apple. His counterpart at Indy, Charles Arthur, retaliates in equally tragic manner. The two then argue about "having a life". Ye gods! Thank you photographer Nick Miners for observing on "the particularly high standard of intellectual debate". Now, answers on a postcard: am I equally rubbish for (a) finding this at all interesting, and (b) feeling that it was worth communicating to anyone with a pulse? Oh, dammit, an ego spat is always worth laughing at.
(From Onlineblog)

Fleet Street no more

Reuters' planned decampment to Canary Wharf marks the last departure of The News from the Street of Adventure...
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

E-paper update: electrowetting

Philips reckon that the future of e-paper is totally liquid. The usual model for e-paper "ink" -- as used by E Ink -- is called "electrocphoresis" and involves lifting particles up in a liquid to make them visible. Philips's method -- electrowetting -- has the coloured matter in liquid form: a liquid within a liquid. What this all means is that it's much faster -- fast enough to deal with moving images. And they might even have a 1 inch prototype by the end of the year.
(From BBC News)

Indy officially announces tabloid

Hardly news to anyone, but here's the Indy's official announcement. From September 30 the Independent will run in both tabloid and broadsheet format (initially) in the M25 area. The run will start at 85,000 copies in each format. The smaller version will include "every story, every columnist, every picture, every feature". As expected they will be plugging the "commuter convenience" line, but they are also suggesting that they do not plan to drop the broadsheet format altogether -- instead, they wil offer a choice. MediaGuardian's report here.
(From The Independent)

"Guardian turns magpie"

This has been around for ages, but I've only just read it. It's e-consultancy's take on the new GU paid services and the forthcoming "Digital Edition" (that's Jigsaw, folks). They like the digital edition policy -- saying that as something that is new, unique, and premium if fills many of the principal criteria for introducing chargeable services. They're sanguine about the Wrap, Ad-Free, and Informer changes. And they think that in tandem with the introduction of registration it all looks something like a strategy.
(From e-consultancy.com)

Ending didactic journalism...

More on OhmyNews, the South Korean news site that caught my eye in February. The Japan Media Review notes that the number of "citizen reporters" writing for the site has now grown to nearly 27,000. About a million people visit the site each day. This article is an interview with its founder, Oh Yeon-Ho.
(From Online Journalism Review)

Spam update: opt in vs opt out - MPs to the rescue!

Derek Wyatt, chairman of the House of Commons Associate Party Internet Group, is flying to Washington to try to persuade the US government that the EU's anti-spam directive ("opt in") is better than the US's proposed legislation ("opt out"). The EU position requires a company to get permission from a user to send adverts to them. The US position favours advertisers (i.e. spammers): it requires the user to request that a company cease sending them messages. Here's Derek's website.
(From Washington Post)

Allan Siegal appointed NYT standards editor

Assistant managing editor Allan M Siegal, who fronted the New York Times's investigation into the Jayson Blair debacle, has been appointed to the new position of standards editor following recommendations made by his investigation.
(From Associated Press)

News design: web and print

Phil Nesbitt, formerly of the American Press Institute and Society for News Design, on changes in newspaper's print design compared with corresponding websites. He notes some interesting developments where design features that have been dropped in print have subsequently been adopted online. Not sure I understand what "exquisitely complex in its simplicity" means, but it's a nice overview.
(From API Media Center)

Independent eyes tabloid switch

The Independent is planning to publish its final (M25) edition as a tabloid. There is speculation that the move may take place as soon as the end of the month. If successful the product would go nationwide. The FT report on the same subject observes that INM "had originally hoped to launch a "European-sized" broadsheet, one that was sized between a traditional UK broadsheet and a tabloid. But printing restrictions in the UK made the endeavour too costly".
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Editor and Publisher goes monthly

Billing it as "an exciting new era", E&P has announced that it will move from weekly to monthly. The website will be "significantly enhanced". The print edition will be larger and be more comment and feature based. They argue, reasonably enough, that the monthly print/hourly web format is actually a better way to be more timely than publishing focused on a weekly turnaround.
(From Editor & Publisher)

"QPS on OS X by Q1 2004" - Quark

Quark's published roadmap for "Quark Publishing System Classic" (i.e. the QPS we know and love) now has dates attached: "The QPS Classic development plan includes full support for QuarkXPress 6 and QuarkCopyDesk 3 on Mac OS X, Windows 2000, and Windows XP as well as QuarkDispatch Server on Mac OS X. A version of QPS Classic that is entirely based on Mac OS X and takes advantage of all of the new features of QuarkXPress 6 will be available by Q1 2004."
(From Quark)

Picdar's Media Mogul RNE

Picdar have released a cheaper regional newspaper edition of their Media Mogul asset management system. It's called Media Mogul RNE.
(From Electronic Publishing Magazine)

Emily Bell on OJR

Pretty estensive interview about GU, its relationship with the papers, and The Future. "What happens here is that we do have a very high level of contact between the staff here and the staff on the paper. Increasingly, newspaper journalists are not dismissive of the Web and they want to find out about the Web and are quite interested in what we're doing. We're just another department of the paper in some ways." ... "The Guardian has one opportunity to make inroads into America and this is it. If we don't do it now, then in 10 years time we probably won't be able to afford to, or that opportunity won't be open to us."
(From OJR)

On SOBIG and RSS

Steve Outing's latest Stop the Presses: "end of email" (at least, as a publishing tool), so put your faith in RSS.
(From Editor & Publisher)

BBC News Style Book

The BBC have a very simple, new style guide here. It's an excellent introduction to good style in reporting and is full of entertaining examples of the opposite. Nice.
(From BBC News)

Times Online hits profitability

Following its introduction of paid subscriptions for overseas readers, The Times Online has announced that it has gone into profit for the first time.
(From New Media Zero)

Blatner on InDesign 2 vs XPress 6

"... To be sure, many features in XPress still run faster than InDesign on any given computer -- for instance, navigating from page to page or importing MS Word documents. However, some XPress features now run significantly more slowly than InDesign, such as exporting PDF files and formatting tables ... In general, you'll be more efficient in InDesign when creating design- and type-rich documents and more efficient in XPress when you need to knock out basic documents with a lot of pages..."
(From Creative Pro)

QPS Enterprise "by Q1 2004"

Quark's Jurgen Kurz announced that the enterprise version of Quark Publishing System -- which will presumably run with XPress 6.0 -- will be released by the first quarter of next year. He also said that more than 500 commercial XTensions are now available for XPress 6.0 and that in future Quark's product upgrades would be more frequent: "I can assure you we're going to come out with a major revision (to XPress) every 14-18 months."
(From Macworld UK)

GU's paid services

Someone's not too impressed with GNL's announcement of various new paid services. I don't quite understand what the writer, Martin Conaghan, is saying -- he seems to suggest that people will stop using GU (which remains free) because they have heard that the site also provides subscriber products. His main line of argument is that charging for content will not pay for the cost of the website. Fine: that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it if you're already footing that bill. He should read Emily Bell's explanation of the changes (here), which makes it clear that GNL is committed to a free GU. Anyway, it was the following rather throwaway paragraph at the end that interested me: "If they invested an integrated publication system that doubles for the newspaper and the website, they would tackle one of their major infrastructure costs -- and the method of subscription has to be a lot more subtle than asking someone to simply cough up their credit card details in exchange for no banner ads."
(From Google)

Name that system...

Everybody on the editorial project seems to call its goal by a different name. OPS, EPS, NGES, APS, TPS ... I decided this was all getting too personal and thought that what we really needed was a nice, objective, computer generated project name.
(From More Foma)

Winer watching watch

Scott Rosenberg in Salon on the spat between Dave Winer and Dive Into Mark's Mark Pilgrim. Pilgrim's site includes a Winer Watcher that document's Winer's many alterations to the content of his blog. Winer wants him to stop. Rosenberg feels that Winer's method of public self-editing is just a different form of journalism to that practiced by those of us steeped in more traditional media, and that it may be entirely appropriate to blogging. He doesn't, however, explore why Winer himself is unhappy to see this new method in practice. Furthermore there is little analysis of the legal implications of this public method.
(From Salon)

Wash Post to launch free tabloid

The Washington Post has announced that it will launch a free tabloid newspaper in August. The one-section paper, The Express, will feature short wire stories and entertainment news -- the usual "Metro" format (in the European sense of the word). The aim is to attrcat younger readers and to protect the WP against potential competition.
(From Newspaper Association of America)

GNL now "One of Them"

Now that we've introduced paid services, we have won the dubious honour of our own section on the PaidContent.org website ...
(From PaidContent.org)

GNL announces paid services -- including Project Jigsaw

We've finally come out about the raft of paid services we've been working to introduce. We went live with the new subscription system on Tuesday and announced the following paid services: 1, The Wrap and The Informer become chargeable on July 30; 2, Media Briefing will also become chargeable "later in the year"; 3, MediaGuardian.co.uk will become registration only (but still free) in the Autumn; 4, the Guardian/Observer Digital Edition will be launched soon(!); 5, "Ads Free" is on its way... The announcement is dicussed variously: BBC News, The Register, E-Media Tidbits, PaidContent.org, Web User News ...
(From The Guardian)

CCI and Saxotech integrate

CCI and Saxotech have announced a partnership wherein they will integrate the former's Newsdesk print editorial system with the latter's Publicus online publishing/content management system. Information will be shared between the two systems using NewsML.
(From Editor & Publisher)

The American Guardian

You didn't hear it here first...
(From New York Metro)

Pfeiffer on XPress 6, InDesign

Now that we've come out about going over to InDesign/InCopy, some more on the old debate: Andreas Pfeiffer, while conceding "many publishers around the world would probably be very happy to go on using QuarkXPress 3.x or 4.x for the rest of their lives were they given a chance", reckons that there will be a big takeup of Quark XPress 6.0. He suspends judgment.
(From Pfeiffer Report)

WoodWing announces development partnership with GNL

In tandem with Apple's and Adobe's announcements that Guardian Newspapers Ltd are to develop an editorial system using Adobe's InDesign and InCopy on Apple's Macintosh OS X, WoodWing software have announced their partnership with us in developing this system.
(From WoodWing)

NewsStand partners with Adobe, improves reader

NewsStand have announced a partnership with Adobe to allow it to build its own PDF engine into its NewsStand Reader product. It will also uses Adobe libraries to enhance its content production technologies. Meanwhile, its has advised subscribers that its new reader, 2.0, already has many new features: "(1) one click zoom-in and zoom-out for smooth, fast reading; (2) intuitive scrolling with "hand" functionality to see what you want to see; (3) pen enabled for annotating important items and working crossword puzzles; (4) no need to install Internet Explorer or Acrobat; (5) true-to-life page turning - just like the real thing! (6) many other surprises to make reading easier." Their original reader was so lame that I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times.
(From Digital Deliverance)

Kill duck before serving

Nice, whimsical little essay about corrections in newspapers.
(From Slate)

End of standalone Internet Explorer

Microsoft is talking about dropping Internet Explorer on the Macintosh platform. They are citing Safari as the excuse, but the development is most likely part of a move to do away with IE altogether as a standalone application and to roll it into the next version of Windows (aka Longhorn, thereby compelling people to upgrade to new versions of Windows in order to gain access to patches to the browser. Should go down well with the hardware manufacturers (given that buying a new computer is probably the easiest way to upgrade an MS operating system).
(From CNET Tech News)

Quark 6.0 released

Quark have finally released QuarkXPress 6.0, the OS X-compatible upgrade of XPress 3.32, erm, 4.1, erm, 5.0 ... Only five years after Apple announced it was developing a new operating system, one of the Macintosh's most important third-party products has caught up. What's it got? Um, PDF export (yeah, OK, that does come with the operating system), "projects" (groups of layouts sharing assets such as style sheets, content, etc), a full resolution preview (like everyone else) that only works if you register your copy, extended web design support, some new output features, and a couple of other bits and bobs. Unsurprisingly, the Apple web site is totally dominated by the news.
(From Quark)

Digital edition update: OJR

JD Lasica on OJR speculates about the value of digital editions, and questions the motives. He suggests they are a means by which people can roll back free web content, or a way to begin charging for web content, or a way to hike circulation (albeit only under ABC USA's criteria). Lasica reckons that 90 newspapers worldwide are now doing it (I'd guess that three times as many are. American news organisations -- and universities -- tend to be rather short sited.) The fear, as expressed by E-Media Tidbits contributor Adrian Holovaty, is that "such a user-unfriendly dud of a product " may threaten the quality of conventional web news output from newspapers. However, another Tidbits regular, Vin Crosbie, reckons (rightly) that the technology has great potential for use in a wider range of devices than is the norm at present. Page has a reasonable summary of relevant links.
(From Online Journalism Review)

NYT Blair debacle reveals suspicion of technology

Interesting essay on the Jayson Blair affair focusing on the NYT's "undercurrent of alarm about the dangers of technology" betrayed by their investigation. "The tone of The Times article reveals a nagging institutional anxiety about the tools of Jayson Blair's trickery, but Blair's story is a story of bad reporting and deplorable ethics, not a cautionary tale about technology." The paper has announced that it is forming a committee to examine its editing system, in part to assess whether it should change in light of technological advances.
(From kuro5hin.org )

Google to hive off blog results

Google is likely to exclude weblogs from its default search results and instead put them in a separate tab. Good to get rid of all the vanity, but I'd still like to see the most referred-to items in my first results. Tricky.
(From The Register)

Further E Ink publicity

More on E Ink. The same old stuff, this time getting PR in Nature.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Corel use SVG

Corel have released Smart Graphics Studio, which creates graphics written in the structured SVG format. SVG, which is XML-based, is much more open and machine-readable than Flash, its vector graphics rival. It has not, however, been adopted widely beyond Adobe, its creators. Smart Graphics Studio also supports XSLT, thereby providing lots of options for dynamic and data-driven graphic imagery.
(From CNet News.Com)

At last! An iTunes store whinge!

Jack must have been sweating for the past two days, but he has found someone who is being nasty about Apple's new music service. The Register's Andrew "Troll" Orlowski lays into Jobs for the current track selection, as if it were in some way significant. Of some significance, however, is his catalog of DRM-related problems starting to come to light. My problems with the iTunes store: 1. No purchases outside US for now. 2. File quality is not high enough. 3. In three days I haven't once got the damn thing to work. Apple should have been prepared for the initial spike.
(From Onlineblog)

Gates talks up online newspapers

At the annual Newspaper Association of America conference, Bill Gates talked about the technologies that he saw changing online newspapers, both for consumer and provider. The usual rich media stuff featured, plus there was some stuff about OneNote, Microsoft's onscreen handwriting recognition technology that is due to feature in the next version of Office.
(From Editor & Publisher)

War brings news traffic spike

The BBC World Service's news site saw huge spike in the number of unique United States visitors in March: there were 5.3 million visitors, compared with 2 million for April. Al-Jazeera went from 79,000 in February to 1 million, despite all the denial of service attacks. The gains were proportionally greater than those for US news websites.
(From ZDNet)

Six Degrees: "simple rules, smart app"

Nice to see that Mark Lemmons et al's Six Degrees weblog is echoing my "Smart Dumb, not Dumb Smart" mantra. If I remember rightly I may have nicked the phrase from Mark in the first place, back in 1999 when he took a look at Compositor. The principle that the intelligent stuff should be upstream -- i.e. in the realm of the human content creator -- has been fundamental to our notion of GNL's editorial system for the past five years.
(From Six Degrees Weblog)

Apple user interface stuff

Geeky bit: good (albeit occasionally illiterate) report on matters related to the rumoured introduction of "piles" to the next dot release of Macintosh OSX ("Panther"). Piles, an adjunct to the desktop metaphor that support "casual organization of information" were invented by Apple back in 1992. Piles would work in conjunction with real-time indexing of metadata about all files in a file system -- a subject close to the sadder parts of my heart. Stuff going on in the "file/database" arena in Windows too. Article has some good links, e.g. Bruce Tognazzini lamenting the way Apple failed to capitalise effectively on their decade head start in user interface design. Tog's best suggestion: a return key on the left side of the keyboard. So badly needed it's ridiculous. Some good stuff about Gestures (c.f. the only good idea in Minority Report). There's a free Gestures haxie available here.
(From The Register)

Online newspapers head towards profit

In a decent report on print media vs web media, Asia Times finds that the gradually increasing profitability of newspapers' ventures online is attributable to massively increased traffic and consumer behaviour, plus technological advances in advertising. Consumer orientated discussion on Slashdot.
(From Asia Times)

Update on QuarkXPress 6 features

Quark has released more details about its forthcoming QuarkXPress 6. New bits include options to select layers at printout (talk to me about this) and "a new Synchronized Text feature [that] lets users share content between layouts in a QuarkXPress 6 project. When synchronized text is edited in one place, corresponding text elsewhere in the project will be changed simultaneously" and "it uses the industry-standard Xerces engine to parse XML, which provides more robust XML support and enhanced error handling".
(From MacNN)

LA Times sacks Iraq photographer after modification

The LA Times has today published an explanation (not an apology) of its policy-breaking publication of a digitally altered photograph on Monday. The picture combined two separate images of a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians. The paper says that it was unaware that the photographer had combined the images prior to transmission and that he has been sacked.
(From LA Times)

San Seriffe is "all time number 2 April fool hoax"

The Museum of Hoaxes rates the Guardian's cherished San Seriffe supplement of 1977 at number 2 in its "Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaes of All Time". The BBC's great Spaghetti Harvest hoax rightly grabs number 1. The Museum notes something I hadn't noticed: in the Guardian's subsequent April Fool's references to San Seriffe, "each time it reappeared the island had changed location. It began in the Indian Ocean, moved to the South China Sea, and ended up in the North Atlantic". The Taco Liberty Bell gets number 4. The "Biblical value of Pi" gets in at 8; Guinness Mean Time is 23.
(From Museum of Hoaxes)

North Europeans prefer newsprint to web versions

Europeans are less loyal to particular newspapers online compared to the print market, according to Forrester Research. "Some 66 per cent of online Guardian readers visit its online site, but 19 per cent also visit The Sun's site -- a newspaper that only seven per cent of them read offline."
(From Europemedia )

ABC considers change to circulation reporting

The United States version of the Audit Bureau of Circulation is considering requireing daily newspapers to report their average circulation for each separate day of the week, rather than the curent method, which provides averages for weekdays and for weekend days. The move could be harmful for papers that are strong on particular days of the week, bring up their overall average.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Al Gore appointed to Apple board

Apple has appointed former US vice president Al Gore to the company's board of directors. "I have been particularly impressed with the new Mac OS X operating system" says Al, who is also a "senior advisor" for Google. Apparently he's a big time Final Cut Pro dude. Gore is infamous in the net community after telling CNN "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet". This was widely reported as "Gore claims he invented internet".
(From Apple)

Guardian joins IAB council

The Guardian has joined the Interactive Advertising Bureau's leadership council. It is expected to develop best practices for integrating markeing campaigns across multiple media.
(From Brand Republic)

Internet Censorship Explorer

The University of Toronto's Internet Censorship Explorer looks at the world from behind national or organisational firewalls and shows what you get if you type in a given URL from inside. For example, you won't get through to www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/ if you're in Saudi Arabia. The project includes a summary of the kind of censorship being exercised by each country (e.g. Myanmar: Opposition Websites; Pornography; Jordan: News) and what technologies are being used to achieve it.
(From Wired)

US news customers turn to foreign news organisations

Wired reports how non-American news websites are seeing vast increases in traffic from readers in the US. Guardian Unlimited is given as a prime example: in January 49 per cent of GU's 1.3 million unique visitors came from the Americas. "While news websites in general saw a 3 percent increase in traffic between December 2002 and January 2003, the Guardian saw a 10 percent increase in visitors," says Nielsen/NetRatings's Richard Goosey. At the same time CNN saw a slight decrease in traffic.
(From Wired)

Everyone's a photojournalist

Steve Outing's latest Stop the Presses is on digital cameras and "photophones" and recent moves by news sites such as the BBC, Dallas Morning News, and the Providence Journal to invite readers to submit photographs for publication online. What does it mean for picture editing? A point to bear in mind: the lunatics didn't take over the asylum when textual communication went digital.
(From Editor & Publisher)

That Memo: did GNL's publishing system provoke an international crisis?

The Register's take on the furore following the Observer's publication of the "dirty tricks" email last week. The Register wants to know why we would retype an email. They provide various possible explanations. One of them: "We're not sure what kind of computer system the Observer uses, but we know that its sister paper, the Guardian, at least used to run on an electronic publishing system from hell where sometimes retyping really was the quickest way to get something into the system. ('You've got it on a Mac disk? A what disk?')".
Here's Stephen Pritchard's Reader's Editor piece.
(From The Register)

BBC ramps up mobile content

The BBC is about to relaunch its WAP site and is drawing up guidelines for how it will work with third party SMS providers to deliver SMS content, according to New Media Age. The moves come part of a big review of the Beeb's mobile strategy.
(From New Media Age)

Sansui installs big InDesign site in Kerala (reg required)

The Malaya Manorama is installing a 300-seat InDesign production system made by Sansui. The publisher produces magazines and books in addition to a 50(!)-edition newspaper. The system is heavily integrated with Lotus Notes. Versioning and archiving is managed by and SQL database. All stories are tagged with NewsML, which is routed to the website's Vignette content management system. The output system is PDF based. (This story is printed in the current Seybold Report.)
(From Seybold Report)

The Economist's gloomy survey of newspaper business

The Economist's analysis of the British newspaper industry makes miserable reading. It notes that overall newspaper readership has dropped by a fifth since 1990, and that newspapers' share of advertising spend across media has dropped from 21 per cent in 1985 to 19 per cent in 2001. It observes, "most troubling of all", that young people don't buy newspapers: the number of readers under 24 has shrunk by a third since 1990 -- a significantly higher drop than in older readers. It cites that news consumption habits have changed (as, by the way, has our ability to concentrate) from "sitting down to a good read" to "news-grazing". The only papers retaining a youthful readership don't carry news: the Desmond bracket.
(From The Economist)

CV thievery

Recruitment sites such as Monster make significant revenue out of their CV databases. However, posting your details online can leave you open to ID thieves who can get hold of your email addresses etc. They've even been known to post fake jobs and tell applicants to submit credit card details, social security numbers etc.
(From Wired)

Internet traffic will continue to double yearly

The amount of data transmitted over the internet will continue to double annually for at least the next five years, according to research by IDC. Traffic will increase from 180 petabits (that's 180,000,000,000,000,000 bits) per year in 2002 to 5,175 petabits in 2007.
(From Macworld)

$1.3 billion spent on online content in US in 2002

US consumers spent $1.3 billion for subscription services online in 2002, a 49 per cent rise in the market, according to a study commissioned by the Online Publishers Association. Most of it wasn't on news, of course. Online dating sites were the big winners, accounting for $302 million. Micropayment grew by 707 per cent, but still only accounted for less than 1 per cent of the total revenue.
(From CNet News.com)

Pearson "won't sell FT"

Dame Marjorie Scardino has vowed not to sell the loss-making Financial Times. "It is one of [Pearson's] greatest brands," she said. "We want to invest in the FT."
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

76 XPress 6 screengrabs

ThinkSecret have compiled 76 screen shots of the OS X-friendly QuarkXPress 6.0 beta. Not much to report: looks like a Carbonised version of 4.1 plus the various HTML/XML tools introduced with avenue.quark and 5.0. There are one or two additions (such as "New Project", layer locking, bleed settings) that have been widely discussed elsewhere.
(From ThinkSecret)

Newspapers "will be free within 10 years"

As the San Francisco Examiner fires most of its editorial staff and becomes a freesheet, tabloid publishers predict that "within 10 years most of the newspapers in the United States will be free".
(From I Want Media)

South Korea elects "Internet President"

Interesting story from Jonathan Watts in today's Graun about the "rise of the webocracy" in "the most online country in the world". Tomorrow Roh Moo-hyun, the "world's first internet president" is inaugurated. He claims to know HTML. What interested me was that the Korean news website OhmyNews is reckoned to be as influential or more so than any newspaper in the country. It is therefore "arguably the world's most domestically powerful news site, which has built up almost as big a readership and as fearsome a reputation for moving public opinion as the Sun [in the UK]"
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Monster US breaks several records

In January the US version of TMP's recruitment site Monster broke its records for number of CVs submitted (a million), unique visitors (20 million), and unique visits (a vast 55.8 million). In total 13.9% of the entire US online population went to Monster at least once and it was the 22nd most visited website overall. Job postings went up 20% in that month. Much of the success was thanks to Monster's 30-second advert during the Super Bowl.
(From Yahoo! News)

Execute applescripts from a Sony Ericsson phone

Completely off topic, and unforgivably geekish, but I'm excited on a Monday morning and that's a bloody rare thing. So... This little haxie lets you execute AppleScripts on a bluetooth-enabled Mac from a Sony Ericsson T68i (or an Ericsson T68). It comes packaged with commands to control PowerPoint, Keynote, iTunes and iDVD Player -- all very sensible candidates for a free remote controller -- but will let you execute any AppleScript, or even executes simply by detecting your presence (or losing it). I'll just rush home and get mine to turn the kettle on as I climb the stairs to my flat...
(From VersionTracker)

Max Gandey on BBC News redesign

Max Gadney, head of design at BBC News Interactive, on the site's fat (but light) new redesign. They've gone for scheduling and promoting the more tabloid stuff, plus a more sensible consistency to the audio-visual stuff. Interestingly, they are stressing that "the individual journalist will have more responsibility for producing the whole package, including bespoke multimedia and interaction opportunities for the user". They're also talking about "multi-platform authoring"... As for the visual design, I'm not sure I can focus on three equal-weight columns myself, especially when they're not much stronger than the index. But it does cram more into the first scroll depth.
(From Online Journalism Review)

Word spikes and the zeitgeist

Interesting little piece in New Scientist about a bunch of Cornell scientists who have developed some algorithms to track the frequency of words in documents in order to identify social trends. Lots of crossover with the stuff Cameron Marlow (the bloke behind blogdex) showed me in MIT a couple of years back, and with the work that Noll's brother does; plus a hint that Google's PageRank algorithms also use word frequency spikes for Google News.
Word frequency trends -- especially when used in conjunction with the clustering ideas Noll talks about (c.f. the idea of a search for "Challenger" coming up with different results grouped by coincidence of other words: boxing, tanks, space) -- must be a far better way of finding related content, and of establishing relationships, than absolute "snapshot" keywords, Autonomy, etc.
(From New Scientist)

Friedman tells the US to grow up

The New York Times's Thomas L Friedman, one of the world's most important political commentators, has been arguing strongly in favour of war on Iraq, and has been highly critical of what he sees as hypocrisy on the part of "the Europeans". But in this op-ed he is vitriolic about the Bush administration's immature and isolationist attitude to international relations. "The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy ... Two years of their gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America's arguments. Too many people today no longer accept America's strength as a good thing. That is a bad thing." Surprisingly, Tony Blair gets a letoff as the only "adult" on the UN Security Council.
(From New York Times)

K4 gets updated

SoftCare have announced an update to their decent K4 publishing system, which uses InDesign, InCopy and a database. The changes -- user groups and assignments, layout and article templates, improved queries, status colours, geometry updates, etc -- all make the system even more QPS-like. Funny that everyone seems to want to make another QPS ... except Quark.
(From SoftCare)

Zurich fest wearing shades

Steve Outing's summary of the International Publishing Zurich report: 1. A business model will emerge for online news operations that works, and makes money. 2. The industry will fairly quickly begin to tap its revenue potential. (Sites are current tapping only 20%-30% of their revenue opportunities, the group estimated.) 3. Media-company top management ranks will see a swift change, with traditionalists replaced by executives who understand how the Internet fits into the big picture. 4. Advertising will remain the dominant online revenue source, with paid content supplementary. 5. Most pure paid-content models on the Web will be shown to be failures. 6. Better integration of print and online will finally take shape. How jolly! Report summarised by the authors (including Waldo!) here.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Neil Budde casts doubt on subscription model

The founder of Wall Street Journal Online has started a media consulting firm, Neil Budde Group. In an interview with Rafat Ali on Paid Content Org he says that there is no right model for making money out of online publishing. Different strokes for different folks and all that. Rushing into the now fashionable subscription model could be "as bad for some people as starting off with the free model was back then".
(From Romenesko)

Oracle teams up with UK gov

Gulp. Oracle has announced that it is going to supply the UK government with software in an "enterprise licensing agreement" of a similar kind to that provided to the US government ... and to the state of California last year -- the latter deal turned into a debacle and concluded with a lot of legal mudslinging.
(From CNET News.com)

Digital edition companies talk tablets

Digital edition software companies NewsStand, Olive, and Zinio talk about the tablet market. Zinio's tablet reader is already bundled in with with Microsoft's tablet version of its XP operating system. Meanwhile Adobe says it's working hard with newspaper publishing system vendors to automate content repurposing for tablets and similar devices. And others are putting their names behind the Kent format and conversion templates to provide this service -- not much use for modular designed newspapers.
(From Editor & Publisher)

The relative value of life

Excellent study into the reporting of tragedy by Libby Brooks in today's Guardian. It's not a new subject but it's a lot more reasoned and researched than the usual "numbers vs drama vs prejudice" argument. The key question of how "we negotiate ... our distribution of empathy" is put to -- and dealt with intelligently by -- editors, philosophers and political analysts.
(From The Guardian)

Internet "now more important than TV" -- UCLA

A study by the University of California at Los Angeles found that 61% of Americans consider the Internet to be "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, compared with 50% for television, 40% for radio and 29% for magazines. However, the number of users who trust what they read online has gone down in the past year from 58% to 53%.
(From CNN.com)

E-paper year zero

Another feature on the increasing rivalry between E Ink and Gyricon, the two principal E-paper startups. The Boston Globe's Scott Kirsner reckons that this is make or break year.
(From Boston Globe)

NYT to provide supplement for Politiken

Denmark's Politiken will run a weekly New York Times supplement from March 2. The supplement will be produced by NYT News Service staff in New York. The NYT runs a similar service in Le Monde, in the Asian Age, and various papers in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Dummy of Desmond's new London freesheet

Media Guardian has got its hands on a dummy of Richard Desmond's forthcoming new London freesheet. The titlepiece says "Evening Mail" but inside it's called "London: PM". The front page looks awful, but is probably a leak spoiler. The rest predictably borrows heavily from the Standard and Metro. Plus there's a fair helping of celeb gossip mag content, too.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Alton joins PCC

As Roger's recent missives make clear, journalistic standards are a top priority for the Obs editor. And lo, he has joined the Press Complaints Commission, replacing Sundary Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson, who stood down last year. Acting chairman Robert Pinker says Rog will bring a "robust common sense to our work". Otherwise, as they say, what's the er, point.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Content vs distribution

Hot on the heels of the biggest merger posting the biggest loss, revived debate on whether content or distribution is king. George Mannes in reports on some analysts swinging recently back to distribution.
(From I Want Media)

AOL Time Warner $100bn loss

Biggest annual loss in corporation history. Ted Turner finally stands down. And Steve Case in stupid v-sign photo op.
(From Washington Post)

Quark reclaims QPS development

Quark and Modulo have announced that Quark will "resume responsibility for QPS". Quark took responsibility for development of QPS in July 2002. Now it has taken QPS back entirely. Modulo "will continue to provide support and system integration services to its customers, and honour its existing service and support contracts", which sounds a lot like it is being wound up. Juergen Kurz says that development has already begun on QPS 2.2, "which will be compatible with QuarkXPress 5, and we're on track for release next quarter". The plan continues to support two flavours of QPS -- one based on QuarkDMS and a SQL Server database, and the other sticking to the old Dispatch model.
(From Quark)

New York Times profits up 45%

The New York Times Company has posted a 45% increase in profits in Q4 last year. The NYT increased ad revenues by 21.8% in December -- mostly from large corporation sin telecoms, entertainment, books and healthcare sectors. Total earnings in the quarter were £107.5m compared with £74m for December 2001. The news appeared to boost Pearson shares. NYT Co. has been rumoured to be interested in buying the Financial Times from Pearson.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Paid content and the invisible web

This week's Stop the Presses focuses on the problem with paid content on news sites being unavailable to search engines. Outing has been getting increasingly anxious about this issue and the growth of the "Invisible Web" -- the information on the internet that isn't seen by the major search engines. The options? Either to provide access to paid content to the likes of Google, so the content can appear in search results; or to provide free summaries of every premium story, so that summary at least is seen by all. Both options raise questions about how such stories should be presented by search engines -- should they be separated out from free content? Should they be "tagged" -- and about the issue of payment in general, and referral fees in particular.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Apple blamed again for Quark's failings

Par-for-the-course summation of industry anxieties concerning Apple's attempts to sell OS X-only Macintoshes. Compares Microsoft's continued support for 1996-flavour NT (due to end this year) with Apple's more aggressive 3-year cutoff marker. Associated's Alan Marshall says it's all too soon. As usual the crunch issue is the absence of an OS X-native QuarkXPress. XPress 6.0 has, allegedly, been seeded for beta testing. Some hints from Glen Turpin on CopyDesk: "QuarkCopyDesk will also be upgraded to run on OS X, Turpin said. But Quark has yet to determine whether its Quark Publishing System server offering, QuarkDispatch, will be upgraded."
(From Newspapers and Technology)

Registration doesn't hurt

Editor & Publisher survey concludes that the newspaper websites that have moved to enforced registration haven't really suffered great losses to their audience figures.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Washington Post stories in WSJ Europe/Asia

The Washington Post has made a deal with Dow Jones to run WP stories in the Wall Street Journal Europe and the Wall Street Journal Asia. The move follows the New York Times's buyout of the International Herald Tribune.
(From Washington Post)

Gillmor on "We Media"

Dan Gillmor on a subject the online journalism community loves to chatter about almost more than any other: collaboration with the audience. It takes many forms: from the hysteria over weblogs to the obsession with some naive concept of "community". Gillmor is using the phrase "We Media": "Journalism is evolving away from its lecture mode -- here's the news, and you buy it or you don't -- to include a conversation ... our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves." Gillmor is right of course, and transparency is hardly a bad thing, but hoping for an information democracy is fanciful. Self-selecting communities -- consisting of the bolshiest, best resourced chunks of a potential audience -- are hardly authoritative by definition.
(From Columbia Journalism Review)

IHT move marks "integrated NYT report"

Article by the New York Times's David Kirkpatrick in the International Herald Tribune marking the first issue under the sole ownership of the NYT. Coverage from other papers such as the Washington Post will be reduced. The IHT's executive editor, Howell Raines, says the company is moving toward "a kind of integrated New York Times report that is carried in a variety of media, including the International Herald Tribune". This will have a big impact on the way the company works: "Our journalistic clock will change. We will be a more 24-hour news-gathering organisation." Forrie corries will be expected to meet local deadlines in addition to those of the NYT, and all staff may have to file multiple versions of stories to meet serial deadlines for different time zones (e.g. Paris for IHT, New York for NYT). Furthermore nytimes.com will eventually draw on IHT content to provide 24-hour coverage.
(From International Herald Tribune)