newspapers

Many journalists working for traditional media are reticent about joining the digital revolution, but there is little doubt that social media has helped build a more cohesive and supportive traditional journo community. Here are five ways in which Facebook has bolstered the solidarity of those still working for ‘the old order’: Emotional support In the movies and in real life too, many newsrooms once came custom-fitted with a dingy whiskey-soaked bar across the road where journalists in scruffy old leather jackets would ...

The Oriella PR network, an alliance of 17 communications agencies in 20 countries around the world, has recently concluded its third annual survey of journalists. This year the survey was expanded beyond Western Europe to Eastern Europe, the US and Brazil. More than 770 journalists in 21 countries responded. Here are some key findings: Nearly half of the respondents (46 percent) to this year’s study said they are expected to produce more content than before. One in three (30 percent) are working longer hours. Nearly ...

Newspaper paywalls have been criticised by many people in geek communities across the world and also by popular journalism bloggers such as Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen -- but they follow the best practices of "Freemium" business models used by thousands of tech startups. Freemium has been a successful strategy used by many tech companies. Please see: Emergence Capital: Profitable Lessons From Freemium Business Models - SVW. And: Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp Freemium is ...

A recent story in AdAge, entitled "The 'Craigslist Effect’ Spreads to Content as Free Work Fills Supply”, is getting quite a lot of attention. If you’re pathologically allergic to reading any more of these “OMFG! New Media is SOOOOO going to kick Traditional Media’s ASS because now we can totally CROWDSOURCE everything from awesome writers who do it for the LOVE of it” stories, stop reading now and head over to cracked.com for something worthwhile. If you hate these kind of stories ...

Apps developers are rushing to mobile en masse yet there is another large market, says Joseph Puopolo, director of marketing at OPENapps, and it's web site applications. "Web site owners need apps for all sorts of functions, such as ticketing, etc. We are offering a marketplace for such apps and a platform that allows those apps to be used on all types of web sites without requiring special plugins." OPENapps moves beyond the "widget" concept in that it uses a site's CSS ...

Google has been quietly testing a new paywall system for publishers it is calling “Newspass”. According to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Google has been piloting the service with publishers in Italy. The search giant will apparently launch "an integrated payment system" allowing users to buy news content with just "one click". Newspass would allow publishers to use a single infrastructure for Web, mobile and tablet computers to monetise their content. Importantly, La Repubblica reports that consumers will have a single log-in across ...

Every year hundreds of journalism graduates enter the market looking for work, and these are bad times to find a job in the newspaper business. Newspapers are seeing falls annually in advertising and subscriber revenues. With most of their content, or at least similar content, available on the web for free, why even bother buying or subscribing to a newspaper these days? It is clear: newspapers are going the way of the Rotary Phone, and they are in desperate need ...

Demotix is a London-based, award-winning "citizen journalism" website and photo agency. The site has around 15 000 members in 190 countries who contribute content on a daily basis. More than 200 media outlets around the world receive their daily feed. One of the founders, Turi Munthe, writes for Memeburn about how the site approaches, manages and makes a business out of user generated content: Most people are passive observers and readers, and most people don't like creating content. Creating content is ...

For print newspapers to survive and possibly flourish as digital businesses, some new rules are needed. And they are not necessarily the ones they taught you at journalism school. 1. Stop treating your staff like they work in a factory. Traditionally, newspapers have employed skilled knowledge workers and made them function within rigid hierarchies to produce text on a production line. Right now though, you want your reporters to be interacting with others in the story-building process. You want to be ...

Did you know that the first printed books in England would leave a blank rectangle at the beginning of a chapter so that an illuminated capital letter could be written in? It's a great example of a hybrid publishing system, and we can see the same, although in different forms, as publishers transition to an online model. This example, and other aspects of publishing's evolution over millennia, can be found in an excellent article based on a presentation by Guardian.co.uk Information Architect ...