Saturday, March 6

A Cover Ad That Mimics a Newspaper’s Front Page

The Los Angeles Times on Friday blended "editorial content with advertising” testing "the accepted limits on where ads can be published and how they can blur the boundary with news."
An image from the film Alice in Wonderland "occupies most of the paper’s cover page, superimposed over what looks like the usual, sober front page."

The top editor and several of his deputies "vigorously opposed the ad before it was published, but they were overruled by the paper’s business executives... it mirrors a common practice online of having an ad cover part or all of a Web site’s home page for a few seconds. “It’s taking a concept that we normally apply to new media and reimagining it to a concept in a newspaper,” he said.

Read more in the New York Times.

Thursday, March 4

Charging For Hulu Comes With Problems

"Hulu's days as a free online video site could be ending soon... If Hulu charges for a TV show or movie, the viewer could simply watch it over the air live, be more consistent about recording it to view later or catch the program for free through a video-on-demand service offered by cable TV and other providers... The paid-video market is already crowded with rivals such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes, Amazon.com Inc.’s Unbox and Netflix Inc.’s online delivery of movies."

Read more from the Associated Press.

2009 Was Worst Year for Newspapers in Decades

According to the Newspaper Association of America advertising revenue fell 27.2 percent in 2009, or more than $10 billion, from 2008 – which was, at the time, the industry’s worst year since the Depression. Since 2000, classified revenue is down by more than two-thirds.

Online ad revenue fell 11.8 percent last year, though some publishers say that it is growing again in 2010. Internet ads accounted for 10 percent of all newspaper ad revenue.

Read more at the New York Times.

FT to papers: Readers will pay for quality journalism

Can newspapers which have spent years giving away their content free online now start charging for it? The Financial Times has seen a 43% rise over the last year in the number of people subscribing to its online service. There are now 126,000 subscribers paying a minimum of £180 a year. Anonymous visitors to the site can just see headlines and read one article per month, those who register but don't pay are allowed 10 articles a month, and then there are the paying customers who get everything, including an iPhone app.

What's interesting is that the middle group, those who register but don't pay, are still proving lucrative because they have given some very basic information such as their job title and that's enough to allow the FT to run a targeted advertising and marketing operation with high yields.

Read more at the BBC.

Monday, March 1

Video Games Tied to Aggression

A new review of 130 studies "strongly suggests" playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts and behavior and decreases empathy. A study at the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University did a statistical analysis of studies on more than 130,000 gamers from elementary school age to college in the USA, Europe and Japan. Details are in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

An associate professor at Texas A&M International University complains the analysis "contains numerous flaws," which he says result in "overestimating the influence" of violent games on aggression. He says neighborhood quality, parents' domestic violence and exposure to violent TV or video games "were not predictive of youth violence and aggression."

Read more at USA Today

Report Shows Americans 'Graze' News

More than 9-out-of-10 Americans get their news from multiple platforms – Internet, newspapers, TV, or cell phones, according a new Pew report. The deputy director for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a release, "Americans have become news grazers both on and offline – but within limits. They generally don't have one favorite Web site but also don't search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."

About 57 percent of people rely on two to five Web sites for news, and only 35 percent have a favorite, Pew found. About 59 percent get their news from a combination of offline and online sources. Only 7 percent use a single media platform, and those people are most likely to use the Internet or local TV news. About 33 percent of respondents said they access news on their cell phones.

About 72 percent of people said they read the news because they like talking about it with other people, while 69 percent said knowing what is going on in the world is a social or civic obligation.

A person's age, political party, and ideology all affected their personal preference for a particular online news source.

Read More at PC Mag.

ABC News sees a Digital Future

ABC News is wrestling with what to do as it cuts 25% of its 1,400-person staff and halves its ranks of bureau correspondents, replacing them with two dozen digital journalists. Network executives say smaller cameras and laptop editing software offer them a lifeline as they struggle to contain costs. Instead of relying on different people to produce, report, shoot and edit stories, one or two people with the right equipment can handle those tasks. CNN has four such reporters working around the country, and Fox News uses solitary reporter-producers in remote places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. NBC News estimates that 20% of the network's on-air stories are digitally produced.

Some veteran broadcasters are skeptical that digital journalists, burdened by so many duties, can effectively cover a story.

Read more at the LA Times.

Internet is now third most popular source of news

The Internet has passed newspapers to becomes the third most popular news platform, according to the latest Pew Research Center report. That puts it just behind local and national television outlets.

Most online news surfers rely on just a handful of sites while 35 percent have a favorite site they visit for news. 57 percent get news from just two to five websites. 37 percent of Internet users have participated in the news-making process or reacted to news by commenting on stories and giving feedback.

Read more at The Hill.

Sunday, February 28

Magazine Web sites: Making Money and Slack Editing

Only one-out-of-three magazines say their Web sites make money, according to a survey by the Columbia Journalism Review. More than half the magazines put their entire print editions online free. Four percent put all or almost all print content behind a paywall, and 10 percent put some of it behind a paywall.

But profitability and paywall did not appear to be tightly linked. About 49 percent of unprofitable Web sites gave away all of their content, and 65 percent of profitable Web sites did the same.

Copy-editing requirements online were less stringent than those in print at 48 percent of the magazines. And 11 percent did not copy-edit online-only articles at all.

Read more at the New York Times.

Condé Nast Is Preparing iPad Versions of Some of Its Top Magazines

Condé Nast’s plans for Apple's tablet computer includes iPad versions are Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour. Its iPhone application for GQ has sold more than 15,000 copies of the January issue and almost 7,000 of the December issue.

Condé Nast plans to test different prices, types of advertising and approaches to digitizing the magazines for several months before wrapping up the experiment in the fall, according to the New York Times. “

Read more at the New York Times.