Is interactivity the equivalent of holding a conversation with your readers or is interactivity you letting your readers play multimedia games to learn? We think the answer is what Jeff Jarvis, president & creative director of Advance.net said in reaction yesterday to…
Tribune Company President Jack Fuller‘s keynote yesterday at the Online News Association annual conference contained two remarks of note: First, he remarked that his company has spent US$600 million (net of revenues!) developing online services for Tribune’s newspapers and broadcast stations. Although…
Flights cancelled out of New York City due to near hurricane strength winds, we yesterday took the 13-hour drive to Chicago, where we ‘re now at the Online News Association‘s annual conference. Attendence is around 250, WiFi has been provided, and dozen…
We thank Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome, who today is attempting to clear up Digital Deliverance’s “deep misunderstandings of the RSS feed and its accomplaying blog technology.” He has been leading a charge that publishers should abandon e-mail publishing in exchange for RSS…
Last month, we noted that Penthouse Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. had lamented, “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media” and that he admitted that there may no longer be a future for magazines such as Penthouse” and that his bankruptcy…
A fellow member of the Online News Association mentions that the phrases online news and online publishing won’t make much sense in an increasingly wireless world. Speaking of which, Anil de Melo charts how mobile phones are evolving into ‘advanced human communication…
A topic we’ll be exploring later this week at the Online News Association’s annual conference is how to get consumers to read electronic publications more often, more fully, and for more time. We’ve frequently been using the audience overview section of The…
The second part of our article examining the feasibility of paid subscription blogging was published today by JupiterMedia’s ClickZ.com. It also features the opinions of Hylton Jolliffe of Corante, Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits, Henry Copeland of Pressflex and…
Later this week, we’ll be attending two online journalism conferences: The Online News Association‘s annual conference and a Storytelling and New Technology conference at the Medill School of Journalism, both events held in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. The ONA is an…
Many print circulation executives still claim that their periodicals shouldn’t be published online for free because that will cannibalize their circulation. However, many years of surveys have showed that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, the fallacy of their claim betrays an even darker truth:…
There are search engines for Web page, search engines for quotes, but no search engines for jokes.
Should a newspaper be allowed to include its Web site’s paying subscribers among its count of print circulation? In a remarkably wimpy decision earlier this week, the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulation has allowed The Wall Street Journal to do exactly that.…
Barnes & Noble today announced plans to pay US$115 million for the 25 percent of BarnesAndNoble.com that it doesn’t already own and to turn that publicly held online operation into a private subsidiary. That news might be perceived due to failures in…
With but a precious few profitable exceptions, most online periodicals today exists either simply to keep their New Medium directors and Web producers employed or else as loss-leading defenses against further erosion of their printed periodicals’ classified advertising revenues. To that it…
Online Journalism Review‘s lead story today is a first-person account by Albuquerque Journal Assistant Managing Editor (for production technology and new media innovations) Donn Friedman about why his newspaper’s Web site switched from free to paid access. After reading it, we posted…
The Walt Disney Internet Group has contracted with Summus, Inc., a North Carolina developer of wireless multimedia applications, to provide Disney’s ABC News and ESPN subsidiaries’ content to users of some the non-GSM wireless networks in the US. Summus’ press release says…
FastCompany.com features a transcript of the mobile marketing panel yesterday at the Ad:Tech conference in NYC. Did you know that approximately 30 million Americans are using text messaging? That 150 million US mobile phones can receive text messages? Or that 80% of…
At the beginning of this month, the European Union’s ‘ban on spam’ directive (PDF format) took effect: ‘Cookies’ and other invisible tracking devices that can collect information on Internet users may be utilised only if the user is given clear information about…
We thank the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for quoting us in Selling Content on the Internet: It
A mountaineer who takes cover during a storm or avalanche doesn’t feel a great sense of accomplishment when he returns to where he last was in his ascent. Although it’s great to survive, it’s not really progress. That was my feeling too…
If you think the new hires on your Web staff are getting younger each year (which actually means you’re getting older), fear not. As they get apparently younger, too young to be drinking Coca-Cola® or Red Bull® energy drinks, the beverage industry…
We plan to skip the WAN/IFRA/FIPP conference this week in Rome and attend the micropayments conference on Monday in Manhattan (see previous item for outlines of both). The newspaper industry has never developed any theoretical framework about either what and how it…
Two notable conferences are being held during the next three working days: The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP), and IFRA (the joint International Newpaper Colour Association and F
Do you publish e-mail address on your Web site? For years, we’ve been suggesting that webmasters encode those addresses in JavaScript to prevent spammers’ robots from capturing and spamming those addresses. The only problem with this solution is that not all Web…
Because this Web page is written using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is formatted for three columns, and CSS doesn’t always display three columns in all Web browsers, we’ve been getting reports (particularly from AOL users) that some of this page’s columns overlap.…
As New Medium consultants to Playboy Enterprises during the mid-1990s, we would never have suggested the following computerized photographic exercise: Digital artist Jason Salavan has digitally averaged four decades of Playboy magazine centerfolds and produced composite portraits of each of those decades’…
A badly kept secret is that U.S. newspapers have been trying to disguise their shrinking circulation by increasing the numbers of ‘bulk’ circulation that they drop off unsolicited in hotels, or have advertisers purchase, or drop off at schools under the failed…
Two weeks ago, we noted PaidContent.org’s report that UK Internet Advertising Bureau Chairman Richard Eyre‘s speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers Association’s annual awards banquet was practically a cry for merger between the IAB and the AOP. Mike Butcher, deputy…
Backtracking this site’s own referrer logs, we discovered the above named site, which describes itself as ‘A public radio and television strategic investment initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’. The site contains consultants’ reports, newslinks, and other resources investigating what…
There’s a good story today on the front page of The New York Times about how otherwise reputable companies become ‘white collar’ spammers by purchasing and using lists of consumers’ e-mail addresses. If you’ve provided your persona demographic information and registered to…
Newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers are merely creating a few amateur guest columnists. That’s not ‘participatory journalism’. What is will be unveiled next Monday by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Called iCAN, the BBC Interactive‘s participatory journalism program lets any…
We thank the students in Strategic Communication Research I at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism (‘MoJo‘) for their time this morning. For those whose questions we didn’t answer in person, we’ll answer you this coming week by e-mail.
Here is the text of my speech today at Exploring Freedom of Expression in a Digital World, the 2nd Annual Fall Symposium of the University of Missouri’s Center for the Digital Globe. It equated 100 years ago to today, provided examples of the revolution underway in communications, defined the New Medium and how it functions, and outlined some consequences that this New Medium will have on credibility & responsibility in civic affairs.
As we earlier this month mentioned, a U.S. television network has asked us to review for accuracy some of the facts it plans to report in a forthcoming program on digital newspaper editions. One problem the producer is having is that one…
On Thursday afternoon, we’ll be speaking about Credibility & Responsibility in an Age of the Individual’s Media at the University of Missouri’s Center for the Digital Globe. CDiG is holding its 2nd Annual Fall Symposium, entitled Exploring Freedom of Expression in a…
CyberAtlas today provides us with the following update on mobile content access: Instat/MDR expects the number of worldwide wireless Internet subscribers will have risen from 74 million at the end of 2001 to more than 320 million by the end of 2006.…
Brian Peddle of SavedByZero.org discusses possible ways to track readers of Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. It certainly won’t beat an e-mail subscriber list and e-mail open/clickthrough tracking as ways to know who reads your content.
The US company known as Mazingo (Please note: not the UK company by the same name, so below), which offered magazine and broadcasters multimedia content to owners of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) has closed. The one year-old, San Francisco company’s Web site…
Professor Jay Rosen of New York University’s School of Journalism offers some interesting and contrarian thoughts about blogging & journalism.
The New York Times is now offering almost every of daily news stories and some daily photos to users of Verizon’s mobile phones. Mobile subscribers can also use their handsets to e-mail NYT articles to friends and save NYT photos for use…
We received an e-mailed press release from Newsstand.com this morning, suggesting that, “When searching for the perfect gift for friends, family and business associates this holiday season, NewsStand Inc. suggests purchasing digital edition subscriptions of newspapers and magazines.” That’s not a bad…
InsightExpress found that 85 percent of the 1,500 U.S. online consumers it interviewed disagree with the Direct Marketing Association’s various pro-marketing definitions of spam: 43 percent agreed that “Any unsolicited e-mail message, commercial or ogtherwise, is spam.” Another 18 percent agreed that…
Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org a few days ago pointed us to a good essay by John Blossom, entitled Pencil Sharpening: Why Paid Content Struggles to Define Meaningful Price Points. We agree with what Blossom writes, notably about how publishers are wrongly pricing…
We’re now in the tenth year of publishing periodicals via the Internet. Most major newspapers and magazines have been doing so for at least sixth years. But, despite all that time, they are still ‘searching for the business model’ for profitably publishing…
Coincidental to the subject of whether the Financial Times has been “proving that people will pay for valuable content” (see our previous item for the source of that quote), Mitch Ratcliffe speculates that the FT‘s newly expanded deals with Yahoo! Finance and…
Emily Bell of Guardian Online won The UK Association of Online Publishers‘s best Consumer Editor Award and David Molony of Emap Media’s TotalTele.com won the best Business Editor Award. The Web site of the Financial Times won 2003 AOP Chairman’s Award for…
A study by the Radicati Group consultants believes that wireless e-mail will increase US corporate employees’ productivity, giving them 55 minutes extra working time per day this year and up to 80 minutes per day by 2007. eMarketer provides a briefing about…
Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org report that UK Internet Advertising Bureau Chairman Richard Eyre‘s speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers Association last night was practically a cry for merger: ” If I may say this in a spirit of shared emphasis…
Maxim, Blender, and Stuff magazines have launched mobile phone portals to distribute their branded ringtones, sound effects, images, games, and applications. The mobile wireless portals (for example, Maxim‘s) feature content such as Beyonce’s Crazy in Love and Justin Timberlake‘s Senorita set as…
The first mobile phone call was made 20 years ago today. It was the first of trillions. And it was made to Alexander Graham Bell‘s grandson.