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…
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…
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…
Alan Abbey, Internet Editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote us last week to say that his newspaper has backed off requiring that user (and use ‘cookies’) before they can see his site’s Lastest News, Editorials, Op-Ed, and Columnists Web pages. Although Abbey…
PaidContent.org features a transcript of the speech that Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave on Monday to the Royal Television Society: “What we are witnessing at the moment in the UK is, I believe, a tipping point. As…
Anyone who is following the controversy over whether or not the BBC should be allowed to compete online with commercial UK news organizations should find useful the UK government’s Department of Culture, Media, and Sport web page that offers downloadable (PDF format)…
Who gets the rights to offer downloads of a major American sport? The that sports’ league itself. Major League Baseball is offering downloads of this year’s US baseball quarterfinal and semifinal games, plus video clip of highlights from regular season games. Each…
The majority of print periodical publishers surveyed by GartnerG2 either foresee no change in the relationship between print and online or don’t know what the future holds. They aren’t optimistic about the future of online advertising as a means to increase revenue.…
In the current edition of the M.10 report, Ned Desmond, executive editor of Time Inc. Interactive, called offering free online content a “shabby proposition.” M.10 now gives response from CBS MarketWatch Founder and CEO Larry Kramer, Maxim Online General Manager Roger Munford,…
Columbia University Professor of Economics & Finance Eli Noam writes at FT.com: “For electronic media, transmission technology is destiny: it defines cost, content and business models. The costs of TV distribution over the internet are more than 40 times greater than the…
We’re making available from this site some of the essays about New Media that we’ve written for other sites. Below is a one we wrote for JupiterMedia’s ClickZ.com’s Publishing Free to Fee column. Originally published there on 18 June 2002, it explains the three criteria that sites should use when deciding to charge for content.
M.10 reports the contrast between UK and US magazine business models. The basic differences are that UK magazines have (1) less staff than US magazines and (2) operate under the control of a general manager who runs the magazine’s advertising, distribution, editorial…
Scott Moore, president of MSNBC.com tells MediaBistro.com why Slate and MSNBC won’t switch to a paid subscription business model and why he dislike the current Web site audience rating systems. Our analysis: He’s a bright guy who’s worked his way up through…
Pam Parker writes in the Internet Advertising Report that American advertisers intend to increase the amount of money their spending on ‘rich media’ (i.e., ads containing audio, video, JavaScript or Flash animations, etc.) online ads, but that they are still concerned about…
See this about that.
Here are Nielsen//Netratings figures for US average consumer home usage of the Internet last month: Number of Sessions/Visits per Month: 31 Number of Domains Visited per Month: 53 Time Spent per Month: 26 hrs. 15 mins. 23 sec. Average Time Spent per…
Our two recent posting about what really may have motived Editor & Publisher magazine to switch from weekly to monthly print publication led the magazine’s Publisher Chaz McKeown to e-mail us information to show that E&P is a very healthy and competitive…
SFGate News Director Vlae Kershner has an interesting quote in an Editor & Publisher‘s online interview. Asked why he opposes charging for access to his content: “Newspapers need to charge because they have high production costs and because if they don’t, advertisers…
The library at Drexel University in Philadelphia used to subscribe to fewer than 100 print journals from the Elsevier science unit of Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier. But it now subscribes online to some 1,500 Reed Elsevier tech journals, thanks to that publisher’s…
Jim Bannister, former executive VP of Time Warner’s New Media effort Entertaindom, is writing an excellent book about media and new technologies. We aren’t allowed to say more, but we’ve seen its drafts.
Media critic Tim Porter, who was editor of San Francisco Examiner under Hearst Corporation analyses and agrees with our analysis of why Editor & Publisher magazines is switching from monthly to weekly publication.
Does anyone else remember the scene in the movie, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, when a department store Santa Claus revolutionizes and enhances his store’s business by telling shoppers where to find desired merchandise at other stores, too? Online Journalism Review likewise features…
Navigating in New Media is much like flying an airplane. Unless you’re experienced with these media’s vagarities and business cycles, you tend to overreact and make problems worse. Porpoising is what pilots call those overreactions, which aim too high or too low,…
Because in January Editor & Publisher magazine will switch from weekly to monthly print publication and announced that it also would “significantly enhance” its Web site operation, it perhaps only natural for Web-based journalists to believe that the Web killed this weekly.…
How did the UK’s smallest national daily newspaper create the most successful UK newspaper Web site? Read this interview with Guardian Editor-in-Chief Emily Bell.
For more than eight years, Pathfinder.com has been the oxymoron of online publishing. Pathfinder and its parent company, AOL Time Warner (soon to be renamed Time Warner) are the poster children for Mass Media cluelessness about New Media. So, no one should…
Apparently denying its readers whatever ‘enhancements’ that publishing just annually would bring, Editor & Publisher magazine has announced that it will enhance its contents by switching from weekly to monthly publication, beginning in January. As much as we enjoy being buffetted by a good PR spin, E&P‘s is simply fatuous and underscores the magazine’s decline under ownership by VNU Media. Read our analysis, which compares E&P against one of its competitors and outlines why E&P has been failing under VNU’s mismanagement.
Our presentation on The Wireless World panel yesterday at the Seybold-Romano Future of Print Conference, is available for
Barnes & Noble.com today announced that, effective immediately, it will no longer sell electronic books. It told its customers that they have 90 days to download any eBooks that they’ve already purchased but not yet downloaded. “After December 9, 2003, eBook titles…
More than $25 billion in printing revenues have been lost to electronic competitors during the past three years, printing strategies consultant Keith Davidson told the Seybold-Romano Future of Print conference today. Moroever, 70% of the press industry’s disappeared during 1992-2000 due to…
Although the printing industry’s business has grown by 5% to 7% per annum for most of the past 20 years, that growth has permanently ended, according to Frank Romano, who holds the Roger K. Fawcett Distinguished Professor of Digital Publishing chair at…
Editor & Publisher Magazine this morning asked us to comment about (a) the merger of PowerOne Media, Inc., and Employment Specialists, L.L.C., owner of Employment Wizard and Careersite, and (b) PowerOne’s acquisition of employment voice technology company , The Center for American…
The Gannett Company’s AZCentral, Web site of the Arizona Republic newspaper and KPNX televisino in Phoenix, launched a user registration program earlier this week. The site’s Manager for Site Presentation/Audience Development Mike Coleman told Editor & Publisher magazine that it will require…
Anne Holland‘s ContentBiz today published the first of a two-part series, Buying & Selling Online Media Properties. Today it’s ‘Your Quick Guide Part I: Seller’s Side‘. Some details: Three times annual revenue is now a good benchmark —- down from 15 to…
On Monday, the Miami Herald profiled local resident Matt Drudge, who claims to earn US$1.2 million in advertising revenue from his Web site. Its ads are sold by Intermarkets, an agency that also sells banner for The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice,…
A ClickZ column today by David Cohen of the Universal McCann Interactive advertising agency tells how far off the target demographic many media Web sites ad campaigns hit. For examples: “One amazing thing we routinely find is the relatively low target composition…
Editor & Publisher magazine reports that Tom Curley, the former publisher of USAToday who is the new president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press (he’s following a Gannett senior executive career tradition), told newspaper publishers about what he calls “eAP”…
BBC World Service’s commentator Bill Thompson muses about why online advertising is so unmemorable. “I suspect nobody reading this will be able to recall a single web advert or campaign. They just don’t seem to stick in the mind.”
After Editor & Publisher Magazine’s Steve Outing wrote a Web site column today about how newspapers need to do more to attract college-aged readers, 22 year-old online newspaper whiz-kid Adrian Holovaty replied in his own blog that what newspapers really need to…
“Leading figures from the world’s online journalism community gathered in Barcelona this week for the ninth annual NetMedia conference on digital journalism,” Journalism.co.uk reported about last week’s NetMedia 2003 Conference in Barcelona. Around 200 journalists, students and publishing professionals from across Europe…
Broadsheet newspapers are large, much larger than handheld electronic devices such as Tablets PCs. So, won’t broadsheets be unreadable when shrunk onto those devices’ displays? No, what makes you assume that broadsheets will stay broad in the future? “I wouldn’t be surprised…
The ability to block pop-up and pop-under ads, integrate with Blogger, and automatically fill out frequently used forms are three new features that Google released today in a new beta version of its popular toolbar for Internet Explorer. Users who download the…
Newspaper Web sites are beginning to cause some cannibalization of print editions, according to Belden Associates‘ Spring 2003 survey of newspaper Web site users. Although Belden’s earlier quarterly surveys had reported that newspaper sites had no net affect on print subscriptions and…
For several years, the Associated Press and the Newspaper Association of America have each pondered whether or not to develop a standard registration scheme for American newspaper Web sites. A standard registration scheme would allow a consumer who registers to use one…
Business World of Ireland features a story about the woes of Ireland.com. Entitled Insecurity.com, the story is undated online but appears to have been written since February.
At the World Association of Newspaper Annual Congress in Dublin this week, the Albuquerque Journal was presented as an example of a successful paid-access newspaper Web site. Its editor Donn Friedman said that during the past two years the site has grown…
Mark Glaser of Online Journalism Review looks at local Weblogs (such as Gawker) and their city-guide and money making potentials. We’re quoted.
Our latest Publishing: Free to Fee? column examines the arithmetic necessary in making a decision to charge for an online archive or not.