'Online journalism must change. Otherwise shovelware will bury it'

"Neilsen/Netratings and Comscore Media Metrix agree that the average visitor to an American daily newspaper website visits only three time per month and read less than 20 pages and spends less than 30 minutes there during that month. According to the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, the average reader of a printed newspaper reads it three times per week, and read more than 20 pages and spends nearly 30 minutes each time."
(From Digital Deliverance LLC)

Latest E Ink press releases

10-inch flexible display delivering 600x800 pixels at 100 pixels per inch. "As thin and flexible as construction paper".
12-bit colour flexible display suitable for mass production. 400x300 pixels at 83 pixels per inch.
(From E Ink)

Digital edition update: Times and NewspaperDirect

Demo here. I still find the SmartEdition user interface irritating and unpredictable.
(From Yahoo! Financial News)

Washington Post on strengths and weaknesses of print and online news

Hardly world-shattering but shows recognition of how other media are impacting on the writing style in newspapers. More interesting is the online chat with E Ink's Russ Wilcox and readers. In it (for example) Frank Ahrens of the Post says of the future of the newsprint Post, "it seems inconceivable that it will be a place for breaking news. Therefore, it seems to me that it might take on the character of what a newsweekly like Time is now--longer pieces, more analysis, maybe projects, big displays of graphics and photos that wouldn't look as good on the Web. If this is true, it seems to me the circulation will drop radically, but you might be able to charge a premium for the product, say $1 or so a copy, because it's information you're not getting anywhere else."
(From The Washington Post)

GU ranks at No 6 in Google News stats

Someone has made a rather more sophisticated version of the GoogleScrape tool I got David to write a few years back. Rather than just using frequency to determine aranking this tool also takes account of the importance (their definition) of a story and of when it made it onto Google News. Interestingly (perhaps), Guardian Unlimited comes in in exactly the same position now as it did then, although it now sits above the Beeb rather than below.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Christian Schwartz on evolution of Guardian Egyptian

(From Typeradio)

'Electronic paper' getting much cheaper

Not strictly the high-contrast, high-readability 'e-paper' technology but still very exciting since the number of potential applications is pretty close to limitless. Never thought I'd link to Stuff Magazine, but they do have a picture of, er, the stuff. From ARNnet: "The displays can obtain their energy from printable batteries, which are already available, according to Siemens. But since these batteries lasted only for a few months, the miniature display technology was only feasible for merchandise with high turnover rates or short-use durations, Siemens said. Another local energy source could be printed antennas that receive pulses from a transmitter in the shelf and convert the pulses into electricity, the manufacturer said."
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

New York Times "considering" format change

Following the Wall Street Journal's announcement that its US edition will slim its width from 15in (381mm) to 12in (305mm), the New York Times reports that it was "considering going to a smaller width, but had not made a decision". The Washington Post is already 12in wide and nearly 23in tall - slightly narrower and considerably taller than a berliner (roughly 12.4in wide, 18.5in tall).
The WSJ is also moving to a 5-column grid, will run fewer turn stories, and will print less six-point data. "The paper will move more information to its Web site, allowing the print version to highlight the analyses and exclusive news that Journal editors say their readers value most." Sensible stuff.
(From New York Times)

Post-berliner ABC figures

The Guardian's ABC for September show an average sale of 404,187. This period covers the first 10 (pre-redesign) days of the month. The figure for August was 341,968, meaning September represented an 18% increase month-on-month. Full ABCs here; summary in the Press Gazette here.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Sindy goes tabloid October 16

"Ivan Fallon ... said the move had been deferred while the daily paper focused on the threat from the new-look Guardian. 'We didn't want to launch it before because we were devoting our resources to the daily.'"
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Last Saturday was Guardian's biggest sale ever

And sales look set to be averaging at 60,000 a day higher than they were before the redesign.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

19m bloggers ...

... and, according to a Guardian/ICM poll, one in three 14- to 21-year-olds in the UK have their own blog or website. At what point does the number of publishers outnumber the number of readers?
(From Technology Review)

Circulation of main UK newspapers has dropped by 9m in 10 years

MediaWeek feature summarises what papers have tried to do about it.
(From Media Week)

"Implicature is far more binary online"

Wonderful description from Lloyd - employing a whole new set of terminology - of the eternal problem where content goes online and is accessible in ways that bypass the context provided by the source (print) vehicle. Because it's not possible to access a specific piece of content directly and uniquely in a medium such a newspaper, any reasonably sophisticated newspaper reader cannot avoid aborbing some information about the environment of a piece of content. This contextual information will inform their understanding of that content itself. Attitude, signposting, weighting, diversity of opinion, seriousness, tone, and linguistic convention are not conveyed too richly by your average RSS reader.

Content online can of course provide a huge degree of context, but it is predominantly external context (how the piece relates to the rest of the world) rather than internal (how the piece relates to the rest of the content provider's output). Which brings me back to my favourite subject: footnotes. There is a connection here: to what extent should a piece stand up by itself? To what extent do you risk upsetting its readability by trying to explain its relationship to other content, and/or the meaning of terminology used therein? We can't spend all our time saying "we're only saying this because such-and-such" lest everything end up like the 400-word "trial continues" article I so despise. So, to deliver the context of a terse update/a controversial opinion piece/etc we perhaps need to establish some conventions for accompanying each piece with some contextual/explanatory material: be it bibliography, lexicon, chronological trail, or even "balance". The challenge is how to make this part of the piece but without overwhelming it. Inline links don't cut it on their own.
(From Lloyd@work)