Digital Deliverance on GODE

Vin Crosbie agrees with the Reg's review of the Guardian and Observer digital editions (see below), citing in particular the fact that, unlike NewsStand digeds, you don't need to download any software. He's impressed that we did the work in-house, and says that GODE "is as sophisticated as anything produced by [third-[party] vendors". Cheers! Also says that Waldo has some interesting things to say "about the linked fate of print and Web editions" in a forthcoming Digital Deliverance report.
(From Digital Deliverance)

Alexa ranks GU 16th most popular news site on the web

Alexa publishes rankings of most popular sites, by category (the definitions being their own), of users of the Alexa toolbar. The Guardian comes in at number 16 - the fourth most popular newspaper site after the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today. The top 25 are: 1, CNN; 2, My Yahoo!; 3, BBC News; 4, The Weather Channel; 5, New York Times; 6, Google News; 7, Drudge Report; 8, MSNBC; 9, Fox News; 10, Washington Post; 11, USA Today; 12, Yahoo Weather; 13, CNN Money; 14, ABC News; 15, Reuters; 16, Guardian Unlimited; 17, MSN Money (CNBC); 18, WeatherBug; 19, Internet.Com; 20, AccuWeather; 21, Forbes; 22, San Francisco Chronicle; 23, New York Post; 24; Weather Underground; 25 LA Times.
(From E-Media Tidbits)

Ranking stories on your site

Adrian Holovaty says "it'd be useful if news sites made stories' importance more obvious", comparing online news sites with newspapers. Online, "stories sit alone, in templated obscurity, with no hint of how much more or less newsworthy they are than every other story". In print, the design conventions and page ordering communicate the significance. He recommends that online we assign importance values to each story, perhaps using a ranking number.

But in a printed newspaper, a story is only important in relation to the other stories around it: i.e. a decision is made entirely within the context of that day's news for that day's section. Furthermore, what some see as a problem for newspapers -- that they are merely a snapshot in time -- actually works in their favour: stories don't have to be reassessed for significance in perpetuity: the judgement is only necessary in the context of a single day in history. This isn't true online: you either have to cast your archive as something totally wedded to the time at which each item within it appeared (something to which most news sites are averse), or you have to constantly update the significance ranking of your archived stories. If you don't do this you run the risk of appearing inconsistent in your treatment of a given subject -- or worse, being embarrassed by leaving something as low-ranking that turns out to be huge.
(From Adrian Holovaty)

OmniWeb 5

Omni Group have announced their new browser, OmniWeb 5, which is due to go beta at the start of February. As predicted (following the release of Safari) they're now focusing entirely on user interface. I was particularly taken by the workspaces feature. We have talked about using scripts to record and "play back" sets of URLs, sizes and positions for browser windows (e.g. for desk editors who always want the same four tickers open). The feature is built into the application here (hopefully with assignable keyboard shortcuts). I also liked "site preferences" and the use of the drawer device for "tab" thumbnails. I'm not sure the shortcuts feature is all the way there yet: I'd like something akin to Launchbar, where shortcuts are learnt rather than defined. Dunno what they're doing with RSS. The main problem with OmniWeb in the past has been speed, but it now uses Safari's zippy WebCore (albeit an earlier version). Some discussion on MacSlash.
(From MacSlash)

US news audience: November

The Nielsen/Netratings United States audience figures for news sites for November place 8 newspaper groups (they count Gannett and USA Today separately) in the top 20 most viewed.

Organisation	Unique audience	Time per person
1. CNN	19.8 million	28min 32sec
2. MSNBC	19.7 million	18min 37sec
3. Yahoo! News	16.7 million	25min 50sec
4. AOL News	15.3 million	39min 51sec
5. Gannett Newspapers	8.7 million	15min 27sec
6. New York Times	8.7 million	35min 29sec
7. Tribune Newspapers	8.0 million	13min 20sec
8. Knight Ridder	7.8 million	12min 58sec
9. Internet Broadcasting Systems	7.5 million	15min 15sec
10. ABCNews	7.4 million	13min 21sec
11. USA Today	6.0 million	15min 44sec
12. Washington Post	5.2 million	19min 26sec
13. Hearst Newspapers	4.4 million	15min 39sec
14. Fox News	4.3 million	31min 25sec
15. Associated Press	4.2 million	5min 19sec
16. CBS	4.1 million	7min 24sec
17. BBC	3.7 million	8min 50sec
18. MSN Slate	3.6 million	9min 48sec
19. Advance Internet	3.6 million	16min 30sec
20. Time Magazine	3.5 million	4min 15sec

(From Editor & Publisher)

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)