Europe leads on cross-media publishing

Review of the Ifra show from Editor and Publisher. Argues that European developers are showing the way for new cross-media publishing solutions. "No less than five Spanish companies -- Ailink, Protec, Quasar, SchlumbergerSema, and Seinet -- will compete with northern Europe's established giants and their equally attractive Italian counterparts to court the world's newspapers." Media tech consultant Bill Rosenblatt, who recognises that American publishers are far more conservative than Europeans when it comes to news tech investment, observes also that European vendors "have the better technologies".
(From Editor & Publisher)

Quark gets SOAPy

Quark has upgraded its Digital Media System to improve access to, and administration of, assets within the system. Also added to DMS is a "Web Site Manager" and a SOAP framework, indicating that Fred Ebrahimi has jumped on the web services bandwagon; "WebCopyDesk", which is fairly self-explanatory; CRM tools; some workflow automation tools; and finally the "QuarkDMS Workflow Engine". This is described by Macword as as allowing publishers to "design and execute workflow processes, track projects, and define custom graphical workflow templates to control how work flows between people throughout the enterprise. This solution includes prioritization, editing, scheduling and production-orientated tasks."
(From Macworld UK)

German ABC to count digital editions

Katja Riefler notes on E-Media Tidbits that IVW, the German equivalent of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, is likely to decide to recognise some newspaper digital editions as paid circulation. The proposed model is such that digital circulation will be counted as a distinct figure to print circulation rather than a component of it.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Pfeiffer on XPress X

Andreas Pfeiffer on the forthcoming timing showdown between Apple machines booting in OSX only (Jan 2003) and Quark's forthcoming X-only release of XPress (probably Q2 2003). He notes that businesses would prefer to migrate OS and application environments at different times, but they may well be forced to change both at the same time. The article is pretty much verbatim what he argued in his recent eWeek report, albeit more management summary. Conclusion: what people really want is an XPress 4.x that runs both in OS9 and OSX -- so they have control over their upgrade migration.
(From Pfeiffer Reports)

Telegraph sales drop below 1 million

The Daily Telegraph circulation has dropped below 1 million for the first time in eight years following the paper's move to reduce discount sales and free copies. Like the Guardian and the Independent, the Telegraph recently raised its price by 5 pence to 55p.
(From Media Guardian)

PA moves north

As anticipated, the Press Association has announced that it will shortly move part of its Victoria operation to Howden, east Yorkshire, where PA's contract publishing outfit is based. There will also be a number of redundancies. The departments affected will include the website and Teletext operations, plus some people in PA's IT department. The TV and radio listings teams will remain in situ.
(From Media Guardian)

200 newspapers now have digital editions

Vin Crosbie on Tidbits notes that a Digital Dots/Ifra survey has concluded that European newspapers believe that digital editions -- ie, online representations of the newspaper as printed, often in PDF form -- will be commercially viable within this decade. And Crosbie's consultancy firm Digital Deliverance concludes that nearly 200 dailies -- mostly in Europe and Asia -- are now producing digital editions.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Nine newspapers in top 20 US news sites

August's Nielsen NetRatings figures for US news sites still show a healthy newspaper presence. The figures below also show the average monthly time spent at a site by consumer.

	Unique visitors	Time per person
CNN General News	18.6 million	24 mins 37 secs
MSNBC	17.4 million	28 mins 11 secs
Yahoo! News	15.2 million	20 mins 48 secs
New York Times	11 million	34 mins 13 secs
USA Today	9.4 million	12 mins 05 secs
ABC News	9.1 million	12 mins 16 secs
Gannett	7.6 million	15 mins 00 secs
Washington Post	5.5 million	20 mins 37 secs
Time Magazine	5.4 million	06 mins 40 secs
IBS	5.3 million	17 mins 03 secs
MSN Slate	5 million	11 mins 21 secs
Hearst	3.8 million	28 mins 08 secs
Fox News	3 million	34 mins 56 secs
LA Times	2.3 million	15 mins 21 secs
New York Post	2 million	16 mins 06 secs
Cox Newspapers	2 million	21 mins 01 secs
AOL News	2 million	08 mins 32 secs
Belo	1.9 million	19 mins 17 secs
Associated Press	1.9 million	06 mins 00 secs
Drudge Report	1.7 million	37 mins 41 secs

(From Editor & Publisher)

OSX is boosting InDesign

The current Apple/Adobe promotion (shipping InDesign free with new PowerMacs), coupled with Quark's likely failure to release an OSX version of XPress prior to Apple shipping OSX-only hardware, is giving a real boost to Adobe's attempt to make inroads into Quark's market share, according to market analysts.
(From C:Net)

Mac will only run OS X + Classic from January

Apple announced at Seybold that hardware release from January 2003 onwards will only boot into OSX. Pre-OS X applications (such as QuarkXPress) will only run in the Classic environment. And if they don't work in Classic, they won't work at all
(From Apple)

URLs in letter cross-refs

Steve Outing has echoed one of my personal hobbyhorses in E-Media Tidbits: print URLs of original stories on letters (and corrects & clarifications). Two points: 1, you'd have to use a service like TinyURL to provide nice, short URLs that people can type (unlike our Vignette monstrosities); 2, if you run cross-refs in Corrections and Clarifications, how does this affect the policy pertaining to the original story online? Do you append the correction to the bottom? Do you correct the story? How do you tackle repeated corrections? And what of those cases where you're legally obligated to remove the story altgether?
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Do not pass Go

Playing computer games - both in public and in private - has been outlawed in Greece. I'm moving there.
(From Kuro5hin)

Progress with microdisplays

Ohio State University has been conducting some tests with a bunch of new "near-eye displays" - eye glasses with built-in computer monitors that can carry as much information as a full-size computer screen. A bit daft in the office, but could be useful for the hack on the move (and in many non-media applications). No sign yet when these things might make it to market, but they seem to be ironing out some of the nasty side-effects ("headache, eyestrain, sore or irritated eyes, blurry vision, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, neck ache, backache")...
(From Science Daily)

A plan for spam

Essay by Paul Graham on how he uses a Bayesian statistical approach to decide whether an email is or is not spam. The method filters each user's email based on the correspondence (both spam and non-spam) that that user receives - so words that some would regard as spammy, but that others would not, are judged in context to the user's usual correspondence. Graham's filter lets through fewer than 5 spams per 1,000 messages, with zero false positives. A good lesson here for commercial spam filters?
(From Tidbits)

Are web shells changing journalism?

Interesting (well, I thought it was interesting) essay on web shells in OJR. Web shells are the navigation surrounding a story, linking to related data, resource, sidebars, backgrounders, archived stories etc. Delivering a good web shell takes you straight to the keyword/autonomy/etc debate about how you identify the context of a story. I have a problem with keywords because the context of a story changes over time: simply chucking a story about Imran Khan in the "cricket" folder might have seemed OK 20 years ago, but that story could now have an entirely different relevance now. The question with web shells is: do you build them from the story (very labour intensive: do you keep going back through your archive and putting new links to old stories?) or from the subject (restrictive: 50 stories in a subject folder X won't necessarily fit when the subject "evolves" into Y). Then there's the question of context over time: should you "snapshot" the web shell around an archived story to show the context as it stood at the time; or should you always show what you reckon to be the context now, rather than then?
(From Online Journalism Review)