During the past 30 months for JupiterMedia’s ClickZ online marketing information site, I’ve written 39 columns about charging for online content. Writing them has been fun. The $100 honorarium JupiterMedia has paid me for each has bought some nice dinners. But I’ll…
I spoke Saturday as the final speaker at the Associated Press Managing Editors annual conference, in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference’s subject that day’s was Newsrooms of the Future: Blueprints for Editors and Readers. Among the nine other speakers, Belden Associated President Sammy…
Earleir this month, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net wrote about the misconception about how widespead RSS syndication is among traditional online publishers. “Only 7% of the sources Topix.net crawls have XML feeds. I’d estimate that only a few hundreds of the top 3,000…
US Magazine later this month will launch a subscription SMS service for celebrity junkies, reports Technology Marketing magazine. US is targeting this service at educated, relatively affluent, North American women with an average age of 32 who live in metropolitan areas. Called…
The Guardian today reports that Daily Telegraph Managing Director Hugo Drayton has left that newspaper. There had been speculation that Drayton, who published the United Kingdom’s largest-circulation (one million) broadsheet newspaper, would last now that Hollinger International has sold the Telegraph Group…
My latest column for Jupitermedia’s marketing site ClickZ is online. It examines how the New England Journal of Medicine is publishing paid online content. My thanks to the quite competent Kent Anderson of NEJM and to my clients, the trustees of the…
By November 18th, I’ll have been consulting full-time to the online news industry for eight years. That work has taken me around the world several times and given me clients on four continents. I’m proud of it. I’m likewise proud that my…
ClickZ yesterday paraphrases me as saying the argument for growing audience through RSS is dubious. It’s an accurate paraphrase and the ClickZ article does report what I think. I want to fortify it. There is nothing wrong with RSS. Look, I publish…
Congratulations for the Gannett corporate staff for selecting — after more than three years of deliberations— an e-mail publishing vendor for USA Today and for all Gannett newspapers and TV stations in North America. Gannett’s ‘quick’ selection is significant for two reasons:…
A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a October 2002 lower court
I regret that I’ve cancelled my attendence and presentations this week at the Segon Seminari Internacional de Periodisme Digital (Second International Seminar of Digital Journalism) and at la Primera Fira de Mitjans Digitals dels Pa
Most chiefs of newspaper corporations like to think of themselves as princes of industry. However, they really are well-dressed frogs. Last month, Bertrand Pecquerie, Director of the World Editors Forum, related an analogy about the newspaper industry, as told by Michael Ringier,…
I?m returning to work this week after four weeks vacation. Before vacation, I had the pleasure to work with the trustees of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery , the 117 year-old monthly, peer-reviewed journal of American orthopedic surgeons. It had…
Claims that pressure from media companies forced the temporary shutdown of the controversial Bugmenot anti-registration site are utterly false, the site’s former hosting company told ClickZ. Bugmenot lets users share user IDs & passwords and therefore bypass compulsory registration at many many…
What if the crime of Breaking & Entering into your home were illegal only if the perpetrator wore a mask? Imagine if Breaking & Entering into your home were legal if the perpetrator didn’t wear a mask. Now imagine that we’re not…
The American Press Institute’s Cyberjournalist.net picked up our item last week about the woeful circulation of newspaper digital editions. Cyberjournalist’s lead sentence, although well-intentioned, made a conclusion that we didn’t: “In case there was any doubt that digital editions of newspapers were…
Two changes to report about news trade journals: The ownership of Folio: and Circulation Management magazines has changed. Both were wholly-owned by Primedia, a company that during the Internet Boom both overgorged on dot.coms (for example, purchasing About.com for spending USD800 million)…
Between 1999 and 2003, the time Britons spent online increased by eightfold, according to a report today in netimperative. Text messaging has increased fifteen-fold. People in the UK now spend more money on mobile phones than fixed-line telephony. By contrast, the growth…
SEE AN UPDATE TO THIS POSTING Here are a few circulation figures for some U.S. newspapers’ digital editions: USA Today – 900 self-reported (0.05 percent of the total weekday print circulation of 2,154,539). The New York Times – 3,172 ABC-audited (0.28 percent…
A Mobinet report says that 49% petrcent of mobile phone users worldwide have Internet access (eMarketer has a story about it). Mobile Internet access is 80 percent in Japan, 47 percent in Europe, and 37 percent in North America. Mobinet is a…
ClickZ.com today published the first of a two-part article I’ve written about the future of paid content. During the past two years at that site, I’ve written 36 columns about free-to-fee publishing, but none until now about what I firmly think the…
I’m in Lawrence, Kansas, today through Thursday for a two-day conference in which The World Company shows how it’s operating the successful LJWorld.com newspaper site, Lawrence.com community site, and KUSports.com site. The World Company operates the newspaper, a TV station, and the…
We’re pleased to have accepted some speaking engagements during the next ten months: September 23 — at the Segon Seminari Internacional de Periodisme Digital (Second International Seminar of Digital Journalism). The event is being organized by el Grup de Periodistes Digitals and…
Here’s another typical example (click the illustration above) of Google News‘ odd choices of news sources. It’s a snapshot from about 2000 hours UTC on 3 August 2004. Google chose the Chinese government news agency Xinhua as the most relevant source of…
Nielsen//NetRatings believes that usage of the Internet from homes actually shrunk worldwide during the past year. The auditing firm estimates that 3.5 million fewer people worldwide used the Internet at home from May 2004 to June 2004. In the U.S. alone, 3.6…
The TowerGroup research consultancy in Massachusetts forecasts that U.S. micropayments revenues will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2003 to 2009. e-Marketer today describes some of that forecast. The TowerGroup sees new microtransactive softwares and infrastructures being developed…
Anne Holland of ContentBiz alerted us to Copyscape, a site designed to show you who on the Internet might be publishing your content without your permission. Copyscape is currently in beta tests.
[UPDATE: Many of the Google’s senior engineers were attending the Search Engine World conference in San Jose, California when his posting appeared. Within ten days of this posting, Google appeared to have adjusted its news algorithm. Was that a coincidence or a…
“In case you missed any of these important stories, here are the Top 10 Most Read Articles from our Campaign 2004 section for the month of July (as of 11 a.m. ET, July 28).” So says the greeting on this e-mail from…
If you are aware of case studies about how professional scientific or medical journals have been able to increase their online revenues, please contact us. Last month, we queried the Online News listserv about that and received a few replies, but none…
Returned from a few weeks of holiday in the wilderness (literally), we
Last week, the Christian Science Monitor (an excellent, objective, and non-religious newspaper) published a story admitting what’s long been no secret within the American newspaper industry: it’s parent operation, the Christian Science Publishing Society (CSPS), which also publish the Christian Science Sentinel,…
No designer of Websites should be without the following: Ye Olde Lorem Ipsum Generator. That’s right! Now you too can have a site from which you can download pseudo-Latin textual placeholders in HTML format: Lorem ipsum quo ne posse hendrerit eloquentiam, wisi…
That’s online newspaper publishing pioneer Barry Paar’s lament last week at MediaSavvy. … They are desperately afraid of “aggregators” grabbing their headlines and treating them as wire services. Why are they afraid of aggregators? I understand the rationale, but it doesn’t really…
The three most significant years for the newspaper industry were 1609, 1812, and 1998. During 1609 in the city of Strasbourg, Johann Carolus began publishing Relation, the world’s first newspaper. A close rival for that historical honor was Avisa Relation oder Zeitung,…
My monthly Publishing: Free to Fee column publish today over at ClickZ.com is a re-examination of the premature dismissal of the future viability of micro-transactions as a mechanism for paid online content. I specifically focuse on Clay Shirky‘s influential dismissal of it.…
Ever want to do that? Join the club. George Simpson in MediaPost proposes some media industry-specific video games, in one of which you can. On a similar (if not so personal) note, we enjoyed veteran journalist Pye Chamberlayne‘s list of favorite links.
Many corporations and companies prohibit employees from installing outside software on company computers. That prohibition has long been a problem for digital editions that require users to install a such application such Newsstand, Inc., or Zinio. Newsstand responded today with iBrowse, its…
I keep telling publishers that electronic paper isn’t science fiction but science fact, technologiy that will go into commercial production this decade. I’m particular a fan of the rollable versions. For example, the picture above is of Polymer Vision B&W prototype demonstrated…
DoubleClick’s analysis of e-mail marketing opening rates, click-through rates, order size, and revenues per e-mail during the 1st Quarter of 2004 gives an excellent example of why we think that most newspapers and magazines have ‘missed the boat’ by concentrating on Website…
I am back at work after 20 days spent mostly on family business. Sorry about the interregnum.
The webcast of my panel, Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism, a week ago at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s and Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism’s Internet East & West: China and U.S. conference has been…
Am I the only veteran of online publishing to urge newspaper publishers to resist the seductive but devastating temptation to convert their sites from free to paid access? Not by a longshot. The latest to weigh in is Dave Morgan, founder of…
There’s a good story in Columbia Journalism Review about how the publisher of the Dallas Morning News wants to see a ‘revolution’ in his newsroom. He’s calling for tough investigative reporting, openness in the newroom, an end to complacency there. Will he…
Jack Shafer of Slate.com has a solid analysis of the digital editions produced by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and other American newspapers. His conclusion is that “these electronic editions [are] as comfortable as a fat man trapped…
According to a story in Editor & Publisher magazine, many newspapers that have suffered circulation declines are partly blaming it on recent bans on unsolicited telemarketing to consumers. That made my laugh. Although it is true that the fatalities on the H.M.S.…
CAN is an auxiliary verb in the English language. It is used to indicate ability. And that was the unintentional irony when the U.S. Congress passed into law the CAN SPAM Act six months ago. Although the legislators thought that the acronym…
Due to internal changes here at Digital Deliverance, transcontinental travel, some speaking engagements, influenza, and some unexpected new clients, I haven’t posted much here during the past week. After all, freely posting news & commentary here is of lesser importance than health,…
Today, I’m at The Internet East and West: How Digital Technology is Transforming China and the nitd States at the Univrsity of California at Berkeley. The first panel today, Revisiting Virtual Communities: the Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics, is underway. Susan…
Public Relations strategist Steve Rubel, who currently serves as Vice President of Client Services at CooperKatz & Company in New York City, has launched Micro Persuasion, a weblog that tracks how weblogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations.