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)