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…
[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…
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,…
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,…
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.…
Nielsen//Netratings reports that during March eight of the top 20 news Web sites or ‘groups’ in the U.S. were affiliated with newspapers. Yet isn’t this like reporting that eight of the top 20 dining spots were affiliated with restaurants? Why this news?…
I’m today watching the live webcast from the University of Texas‘ 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. The first panel, Online Journalism in Asia, Europe and Latin America What is different and how does it compare with the U.S.?, featured speakers from…
I’m glad to see that New York Times Digital‘s operating profit during the previous three months was (US) $8.4 million — an annualized yield of $34.6 million in profit. Why am I only now happy when NYTD has been reporting ‘profitability’ for…
A publishing sector that could greatly benefit by switching from print to online is corporate communications. I had an interesting discussion today with the corporate communications editor of Akzo Nobel in the Netherlands. This 64,500-person pharmaceutical & chemicals company will soon switch…
Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak, who covers advertising and media forecasting, seems perplex at how expenditures on newspaper advertising can grow while newspaper readership declines: A post by fellow Jup blogger David Card got me thinking more about advertising’s supposed axiom: the…
Here is a bad way in which the news media industry is different than other industries: It rejects innovations from a sector that so ably aids other major industries and moreover has conditioned that sector to be reticent to it. This ignored…
My report and analysis about the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s State of the News Media 2004 study is now available at Online Journalism Review. Also, Earl Wilkinson, executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association and one of the few visionaries…
This week, I’ve been hearing a lot of traditional media executives say that if you allow consumers to customize their own media, then ‘each consumer will become isolated in his own world.’ Wake up! Each consumer has always been isolated in his…
Last week, I said that I’d become radically dissident inside the newspaper industry. My friend, Steve Outing, commented about this in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits: But “radically dissident”? Given the hype to this, I was expecting a far more radical view. I mostly…
Although we last week mentioned that some Knight Ridder newspaper executives told us that Knight Ridder Digital planned to to charge for site access once it had finished implementing consumer registration, KRD spokesperson Amy Dalton tell us this isn’t true, that KRD…
We’re watching the launch of Topix.net, news site whose robots scrape thousands of American news media sites and aggregate and categorize the content for easy browsing by locality. We were initially skeptical of the venture, but have been impressed by what we’ve…
We’re hearing from executives at Knight Ridder newspapers that once Knight Ridder Digital has finished implementing consumer registration at their Web sites, KRD next plans to charge for site access. The newspaper executives we’ve spoken with say this is what they are…
“If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.” — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) “All faults may be forgiven of him who has…
Speaking of advertising (see below), the marketing chief of one of the largest consumer products companies in the world today told the Advertising Agency Association of America’s annual conference that: “All marketing should be permission marketing,” he said. “When we think of…
When publishers wants more data about online consumers but many consumers don’t want to disclose data, a technological arms race results. Now that many online publications are requiring that consumers register before reading, it shouldn’t be surprising that some online consumers are…
We’re receiving a relatively large amount of Web traffic from the University of Missouri this month, most of it visiting an article we wrote for the November 2001 edition of IDEAS magazine (the journal of the International Newspaper Marketing Association).The subject of…
News Site(source: Nielsen//Netratings) Unique Audience (000) Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss) CNN 19,970 0:32:17 MSNBC 19,629 0:18:10 Yahoo! News 18,134 0:27:30 AOL News 15,027 0:40:09 Gannett 9,685 0:13:24 NYTimes.com 9,549 0:37:21 Knight Ridder Digital 8,171 0:13:29 IBS 8,124 0:13:34 Tribune Newspapers 7,755 0:14:54…
We’re big fans of Jim Chisholm who is the strategy advisor to the World Association of Newspapers and the director of its Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project. But only today did we discover online his presentation (1.5-megabyte PowerPoint download) to…
During the past 10 days, we’ve been taking time away from consulting and also from posting here. Instead, we’ve been working on two new projects: A report about paid online content (which we plan to publish next month); And a report about…
Online Journalism Review includes my perspectives in its Look Back at 2003, and What’s on the Horizon for the Online News Universe. It’s an excellent article by Mark Glaser and requires no corrections. Glaser wisely omitted a sentence (in italics below) in…
We like to closely examine the financial results of New York Times Digital as a bellwether of American online publishing. Most American newspapers’ Web sites should now be earning a profit, seven to ten years after they began publishing online; however, very…
Today is my tenth anniversary (3,650 days) of working full-time in online publishing. “
Yesterday, we wrote about the Daily Mail of London commencing online publishing a decade after the opening of the Internet to the public. Netimperative today has an thoughtful analysis of the Daily Mail’s wait. Netimperative thinks the Daily Mail’s long wait was…
Japan Media Review interviews Hirotsugo Koike, the editor-in-chief of Nikkei Net Interactive, the electronic publishing division of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the world’s largest (3 million print circulation) daily financial newspaper. “I personally am very concerned about the tendency among young people in…
A decade after the Internet was opened to the public, the Daily Mail of London will begin publishing online. The Media Guardian quotes Murdoch MacLennan, Group Managing Director of Associated Newspapers Ltd, which owns the 2.4 million daily print circulation newspaper, as…
The unsigned editorial, Ending the Pollyana Party Line on Circulation: Time to Drop the Excuses, in the November 10th edition of Editor & Publisher magazine bears much more attention and discussion than it received in the newspaper industry — even among people…
For several years, we’ve been advocating that ‘convergence’ isn’t media companies combining their print and broadcast newsrooms — that’s multimedia, not convergence. True convergence is the convergence of print and of online into a single product. Not multiple products (newsprint, Web, broadcast,…
EditorAndPublisher.com today has a nice feature interview with George Dratelis, the Ottaway Newspapers (a Dow Jones & Co. subsidiary) corporate Internet marketing director. Two highlights: “I find it amazing that some newspapers are foregoing the growth opportunities all together and moving into…
Dave Morgan, founder of more than one major online advertising technology company, offers online publishers some sage advice today in the first of a two-part column at ClickZ.com. I’ll give away only four of the nine cogent points that his first part…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…