Could a "Mobile first" strategy work for your newsroom?

Here’s a little experiment – next time you’re commuting on a train or bus, or waiting for a flight, look at your fellow travellers. How many are reading newspapers? Now how many are fiddling with their mobile phones?

Steve Buttry of Poynter Online would argue it’s probably more of them and this is one of the reasons that led him to call for a mobile-first news strategy.

Since writing that first article, he’s now devised an actual plan on how a mobile-orientated newsroom could operate. Those toying with iPhone apps and SMS subscriptions may want to pay attention.

Says Buttry: “A successful mobile-first strategy will require effective work by reporters, photojournalists, designers, technologists, sales and marketing people, and management.”

So far, so obvious.

But he adds: “The mobile-first strategy needs to embrace new relationships with the community”, as described in his blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

“That principle,” he says, “is fundamental to mobile-first success.”

What then follows is an incredibly detailed breakdown of each aspect of the mobile news strategy, broken down into Reporting, Writing and Photojournalism, Design, Technology, Sales and Marketing, Leadership and Training.

For example journalists, he argues, need to become fluent in metadata, giving the mobile phone the context of the story so it knows what to give the user when and where.

As for the moneymen, Buttry advises them that any service needs not to be too intrusive, especially location-based advertising, lest the audience devise ways of turning it off.

He also suggests that organisations must be careful not to use just a single mobile tool, such as a mobile website or iPhone application, and therefore miss opportunities such as local business sponsorship for breaking news alerts or e-newsletters.

Even if “mobile first” isn’t for your newsroom, there is certainly enough here to enhance whatever use you do want to make of mobile technology.

2010 - what will it hold for you?

Christmas is coming, the goose is on a credit-crunch inflicted diet and as the journalism world licks it wounds from this year's squabbles, many are starting to look what next year is set to bring.

Firstly, Patrick Smith brings a tale of caution on PaidContent – if you thought hyperlocal news was going to be your big thing of 2010, you may want to have a quick re-think.

He reports that whilst the promise for hyperlocal’s place in UK news is there, the boundless optimism is not in doubt and there’s even hints of a local business model emerging, the delivery of quality post-code level news across most of the country still a long way off, and sustainable revenues and—dare we say it—profits are even further.

He also says how unless the ifs and maybes surrounding the use of hyperlocal models do not turn into certainties the Digital Britain project won’t be up and running till 2012 and that includes any role that public money would play.

So, he says, 2010 will not be hyperlocal’s year. But, he counters, the signs are auspicious: increasing levels of online literacy and broadband connections mixed with more inevitable local newspaper closures mean it’s natural that readers—and advertisers—will shift to new outlets.

Next, acknowledging that talking about journalism and its future is the “lifeblood of Academia”, there’s a nice piece by Harvard’s Nieman Lab writer C.W. Anderson on what we have learnt from 2009 and what new squabbles will arise in the new year.

The article jokes how bloggers and journalists seem to have finally made peace and accepted their perceived war is over; that we realise not all content will be free but the new business models may not be enough to counter the financial losses many news organisations have suffered; and that, because of this, journalism will be produced in a different way – by smaller, niche publications.

Instead, our attentions will turn to the kind of politics facilitated by the digital world and the policies and laws that will govern this world (and whilst the focus of the article is on the US, it is still relevant to the UK as the government faces up to a growing campaign to reform libel law, something it has been considering because of the impact of the internet).

It also talks of the type of networks that might emerge in the new “media ecosystem” – that we may see that it is large media companies that have diversified and created a local branding – and how journalism schools will need to adapt as the industry itself mutates.

It also talks about what the increased use of a semantic web may have for the future of news in a world of Demand Media and computational journalism. Big questions indeed but something new to think about at least.

Finally, for any of those curious to know if the Manchester Evening News’ launch of an iPhone app was worth it – HoldtheFrontPage has the numbers.

They have reported that over 6,700 readers have downloaded the app to follow the latest updates from the paper.

This means that it has been downloaded at a rate of approximately 900 a week since its creation.

There are section for news and show business, among others, while fans of Manchester United and Manchester City can keep in touch with dedicated sections for the two teams.

Reuters straw poll reveals media execs (mostly) read free news

When Reuters reported that consumers would have to face up to the fact that the digital content they’d enjoyed for free would eventually come with a price tag, journalist Robert MacMillan asked media executives how they read their news.

He found that plenty of them – those, he reminds us, who are trying to find the ways to generate money from what they produce – still read free news.

Whilst they still pay for some of their news, he suggests that perhaps the “romance with free content” isn’t quite dead yet.

Below are the responses he included in his story, when he approached the execs at Reuters’ Global Media summit, which interestingly suggest that perhaps the execs aren't entirely ready to practice what they preach:

Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development at Google Inc (who, MacMillan notes, despite Google’s despised status among newspaper defenders, pays for some of his news):
“I read my news in a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Google News and The New York Times. I get my New York Times delivered to my house. I have it before I wake up. I scan through it. I get my newspapers in planes and whenever I have a sort of down moment, I am following CNN, the BBC, Reuters, TechCrunch and a whole lot of other relevant people at Twitter… If I have a free moment at my desk, I will go onto the Google News site to see what’s happening in the world. For some reason, I feel as informed as I used to be when I used to read two newspapers every morning.”

Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global:
“I may not read my local paper much anymore, but I never miss reading the Journal. Primarily because I want to know what I’m missing. I’m looking at it more like a student than a consumer. I need this information — I don’t want it, I need it.”

Andrew Barron, chief operating officer of Virgin Media:
Multiple sources: Internet, Blackberry… the Financial Times, The Times of London and the Daily Mail. He gets home delivery, but doesn’t read the papers until evening.

Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League:
“I start in the morning, first thing, like somebody in their mid 50s, by going through traditional newspapers. And then I go from there to online. Obviously because of the nature of our business, I get news flashes instantaneously through my Blackberry.”

Mark Greenberg, president and CEO of Epix:
“I have to admit, I still watch the evening news. I’m sort of an old-fashioned kind of guy, a dying breed, an avid reader of the Times and the Journal. I will admit, though, that when I travel, I take my Kindle with me, and I prefer to download it. So it’s been an interesting change for me as a person who always liked reading paper, to now all of a sudden the Kindle, which has changed how I read a newspaper.”

Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo North America (and an alumna of Knight Ridder, an extinct newspaper publisher):
“I’m a mixed-media consumer of news. I start every day on Yahoo, as you would expect, to get the highlights. I am a Kindle reader so I also, when I’m traveling, keep up through the Kindle. And I am a hard-core, old-fashioned newspaper reader on the weekends or when I’m on airplanes.”

(Via Cyberjournalist.net)

Thinking about paywalls? Read this first...

With the paywall debate having no end in sight, it is sometimes nice to step back and examine the lay of the land, particularly for regional and small publishers.

Having been accused by his most prolific critic as suggesting solutions that only work for large-scale, national publishers, and with a close friend finding himself the Managing Editor of a local newspaper in Montana, Steve Outing (pictured), of EditorandPublisher.com has done just that.

Whilst his tips come from US case studies there is still plenty there for panicking publishers to step away from the paywall, at least for a little longer.

He argues that a recent American Press Institute study demonstrates that paywalls only work in certain markets. One newspaper, he states, could maintain a paywall because it was the only paper in town. Another, though, couldn’t sustain the model due to competition from a local free website.

So what is the alternative? One suggestion, with his editor-friend in mind, is a five-point plan of generating revenue from the digital output whilst protecting the print product, particularly of use to those publishers who operate within tourist towns:

1. Offer paid subscriptions to the newspaper that also include free access to a digital-replica edition.

2. Offer paid digital-replica edition subscriptions that mimic the paper in electronic form, for those second-home owners in the area and others who want to keep up with...news and developments and prefer not to receive the print edition by mail when the news is several days old.

3. Continue to keep all your Web site content -- including locally produced news -- free to all. And yes, that includes print subscribers who might be tempted to save money, cancel the print edition, and rely on the free Web site.

4. Have your Web manager focus on better ad targeting, in order to identify out-of-area users as potential tourists interested in hotels, camping, excursions, etc. and show them relevant ads.

5. Most importantly, devise other reasons for paying print and/or digital subscribers to keep paying -- primarily by value-added online, digital, mobile and even physical extras not available to non-paying users of the Web site.

This is expanded for those who may not have such a tourist trade to include advice on finding other incentives for people to subscribe to your newspaper, such as a free breaking-news mobile service that would otherwise be charged for.

Outing will have to wait if his advice satisfies his critic but it is certainly worth a look by anyone who has a Google-sized headache from the paid-content debate.

Has Google caved to pressure from Murdoch?

Google have announced that newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through their site, reports the BBC.

This action follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

Users would now start to see a registration page if they click on more than five articles in a day.

"Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free," Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post.

"Now, we've updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing."

The BBC describes how Rupert Murdoch had earlier accused firms such as Google of profiting from journalism by generating advertising revenue by linking readers to newspaper articles.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones told the website that the concession was relatively minor but Mr Murdoch might see it as vindication of his decision to take on Google.

Cohen also stated in his blog post how, besides First Click Free, Google would also offer publishers the option where they would index and treat as “free” any preview pages that were made available to them – generally the headline and first few paragraphs.

He said that because the content would be identical to what a normal user would see, this would not breach Google’s strict “no cloaking” policy – where the page that a web crawler sees and indexes is different to the one seen by the end user.

WAN-IFRA launches World Newspapers Congress in India

Today sees the start of the 62nd World Newspaper Congress and 16th World Editors Forum in Hyderabad, India, hosted by WAN-IFRA.

Interestingly, the overall theme for the conference is 'Newspapers: A Multi-Media, Growth Business', something that may raise eyebrows of those watching their newsrooms struggle with plunging advertising revenues and shrinking circulation for their print products.

Naturally, how to tackle these hurdles is at the forefront of most of the keynote speeches and panel discussions.

Already, according to WAN’s own Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog, Are Stokstad (Norway), executive vice president at A-Pressen, suggested that e-readers now make it necessary for newspapers to build strategies that combines both the traditional newspaper and the business model for e-reading.

He described how large investments have been made to expand the opportunities for online newpapers. Social networking sites have become a large part of the generation of these new online papers.

"This past year 3,000 print pages originated in social media. Next year we hope to increase this number to 30,000," he told the conference.

Social networking sites create groups of people interested in similar topics and activities. Many online newspapers are targeting their articles towards these groups, increasing online readership.

Meanwhile Martha Stone (USA), director of Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Project (pictured), talked about the opportunities available to newspapers through mobile phone technology.

"Text message advertising has become one of the hottest new ways to advertise," she said.

Stone also explained how mobile phones have become more than a way to just communicate with others.

She described how phones are becoming more advanced and can now be used not only for talking and texting, but also for online searching, television, blogs, advertising, alerts, and much more.

World Digital Media Trends, created by the SFN project, conducts research each year to show the latest revenue and newspaper trends. This year's study was posted in June and predicts the continued growth of digital media.

The Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog will continue to bring full coverage of the conference, which will include discussions on Google featuring Kees Spaan, President of the Dutch Newspaper Publishers Association and Gavin O’Reilly, CEO of Independent News and Media as well as a presentation on what newspapers need to know for the digital future by Les Hinton, CEO of the Dow Jones newswire.

You can also follow the conference via the following Twitter feeds @NewspaperWorld and @WANindia2009, using the hashtag #WANindia09, or on Facebook at the conference page. There is also a dedicated congress blog.

Online Journalism round-up

Independent to charge for bulk printing

The Independent is living up to its name by trying a different approach in the battle to generate revenue.

The blog UpYourEgo has written how the newspaper is set to charge users for printing stories from their news site.

It describes how you get the choice of a ‘free print’ where you can make up to five copies using your home or office printer for free (with an ad).

You could also make an Instant print on your home printer with six or more copies from 25p to £1 per copy without ads.

You can get a quote for customised prints with your own logo for more than 100 copies on high quality paper.

Or you can have 50+ copies printed by them and sent to you within two business days, these cost 75p to £1.10 per copy – again with no adverts.

But, suggests the blog, the system from iCopyright which offers options for printing within a popup wouldn’t stop you just copying and pasting.

There are no paywalls, so on-screen content is still free and the newspaper will have to wait and see if this makes any difference to their finances.

But, as the blog says, it is different.

(via Martin Stabe)

New guidelines published on using UGC

Alfred Hermida’s Reportr blog has an interesting story on new guidelines that have been issued by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, in partnership with UNESCO on how to handle user generated content.

According to Hermida, apart from covering the usual issues such as quality and any legal questions, it has sought to press the idea of UGC promoting greater media democracy.

The advice, he says, focuses not just on how to handle UGC, but also on the issue of media and information literacy.

It argues that news organisations would benefit from promoting greater media literacy, by strengthening relationships with audiences and countering claims that UGC is just a way of getting free content.

NYT app for Blackberry

Finally, whilst developing an app for an iPhone may seem old hat now, Editor and Publisher has reported that the New York Times has developed an app for the latest models of Blackberry Smartphones.

With advertiser sponsorship by UPS, the app application formats content for optimal navigation and display on BlackBerry Smartphones, offers automatic synching and allows users to store articles directly to their devices for offline reading.

"Mobile continues to be a very popular way for Times readers to access our content," Marc Frons, The New York Times Co.'s chief technology officer/digital operations, said in a statement.

"With this new application for BlackBerry Smartphones, we are offering BlackBerry users with the latest models a faster, more dynamic and more personalized experience for reading up-to-the-minute news, analysis and opinion from NYTimes.com."

The app is available here.

Paywalls and Social Media at the Society of Editors 2009 conference

Could regional news sites charge too?

One theme that dominated the recent Society of Editors conference was how to make paid content work. Whilst national newspapers look at possible dates for setting up paywalls on their news sites, regional papers were also considering getting in on the act.

Holdthefrontpage has reported how Worcester News editor Kevin Ward asked the question as to whether regionals could ever charge for their content, at a seminar on the future of the industry.

In a discussion that featured both national and regional editors as well as head of Google UK Matt Brittin, Mr Ward put forward that regional news was a sufficiently “niche” product to make the charging model work successfully.

According to the website, Mr Ward told the conference: "What we produce is niche. Nobody else sits in our courts every day. Nobody else scrutinises our public bodies.”

Mr Ward continued by asking whether, as a result, regional papers had "more opportunity to charge for the web" than their national counterparts.

Mr Brittin responded by saying: "Looking for local news is one of the biggest activities online. There are big opportunities there."

The Times: Not "if" but "when"

The Guardian states how James Harding, the editor of the Times, gave the clearest indication yet of how News International is going to start charging for its journalism online.

Confirming that The Times will indeed start charging for content, he told the conference: "From spring of next year we will start charging for the digital edition of the Times. We're working on the exact pricing model, but we'd charge for a day's paper, for a 24-hour sign-up to the Times. We'll also establish a subscription price as well."

According to the Guardian he also warned against the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.

He said: "You have to be very careful with article-only economics," he said. "You will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka."

6,200 comments following transfer day coverage

Social media was another key area of discussion at the conference, according to reports on Holdthefrontpage. One editor who championed its use was Hull Daily Mail boss John Meehan, who described how their use of it to cover transfer deadline day for the local football team Hull City, led to an “avalance of interactivity.”

He stated how the paper’s use of live blogging functionality and social media, as part of their coverage, led to 6,200 comments from readers – one every five seconds.

"The immediacy of the web has made timed newspaper editions obsolete," Mr Meehan told the conference.

Holdthefront page reports how fellow panellist Martin Wright, associate editor of NWN Media which publishes the Leader in North Wales, said Twitter was now the tenth biggest referrer to its main website, leaderlive.co.uk.

Trinity Mirror head of multimedia David Higgerson said the Liverpool Echo had used Twitter to break the news of the result of the trial of the killers of Rhys Jones.

Online journalism news round-up

Is Video the solution to online advertising woes?

Good news from the States – news organisations there are seeing an increase in traffic and revenue from video advertising.

According to a report in the New York Times, highlighted by Betsey Reignsborough on editorsweblog, many publications and broadcasters are leaning more heavily on video reportage on their websites, creating more opportunities for advertisements.

Advertisers are becoming more willing to buy space on videos rather than just on static pages because of the increase in traffic as well as the ability to use dynamic advertising, reports Reignsborough.

Readers have indicated that they are more willing to click play on a video then read a whole article, she continues and sites are posting more video footage to keep up with the demand for video advertising space.

She cautions that there is controversy over "autoplay" - videos that begin playing automatically as soon as the web page has loaded – which means that a viewer did not press play and is not necessarily watching the video.

This, she says, tallies up totals of video streaming without legitimacy.

Students launch hyperlocal news site

Meanwhile holdthefrontpage has covered news that MA Online Journalism students at Birmingham City University have set up a new hyperlocal website focusing on news from around central Birmingham.

The multimedia site, Hashbrum.co.uk, features maps and slideshows in its coverage of the news.

Editor Andrew Brightwell told the website: "I think we see it as a way to learn about how online news can engage and be informed by its audience.

"So we're interested in experimenting in ways of finding, creating and presenting news. We've tried to have some fun with the way that we've covered stories.

"I can't say exactly how it will develop, but I hope it evolves a life of its own, in a sense.

"By this I mean that it'd be really successful if we feel that much of the news we're creating is being led and developed by the site's audience."

Top 50 Journo Blogs

Finally, the US website Journalism Journeyman has released a list of the 50 best journalism blogs.

The list has been divided into various categories, including citizen journalism, school-supported and new media focused. See if your favourites made the cut here.

Execs: Are your readers as loyal as you think?

If your readers can’t access your newspaper content online, don’t be so sure that they will come back to your print product.

That is the stark warning arising from a study by the American Press Institute on the attitudes of newspaper executives to digital content, highlighted by Professor Alfred Hermida on his Reportr.net blog.

According to Professor Hermida, the study (PDF) shows a shocking disconnect between the attitudes of executives and those of readers.

75% of execs thought that readers would return to the print product is they could not access the newspaper content online, in sharp contrast to only 30% of readers who said they would return to print.

68% of readers said they would actually go to other websites if their local newspaper website was no longer available.

The findings are all the more relevant, says Professor Hermida, given the current debate about locking content behind paywalls.

The API study found that nearly 60 percent of execs were considering charging for news, with 25% expected to start doing this in the next six months.

It also gave clear recommendations to execs considering putting content behind such a paywall, saying:

“For paid content to succeed, it must go well beyond repurposed print content and old models. Audiences are most likely to pay for unique content that is not available elsewhere for free. Fully paid blocks of repurposed local area newspaper content have not proven to be a significant revenue source for news websites that have tried this strategy.”

Professor Hermida argues that if a news organisation is going to consider charging for content, it needs to view it from the perspective of the audience.

The value of news and information is not determined by execs in a newsroom/boardroom, says Professor Hermida, rather, the value is determined by the audience.

Build your own iPhone app

With the Manchester Evening News launching its own iPhone app, other newspapers may be considering their own next move in attracting wider audiences.

A report by Business Week has highlighted how easy it now is to follow in the MEN's footsteps. For those who are tech-savvy, there are dozens of guides on how to create your own iPhone app on Youtube.

But what do you do if you're not so confident?

According to Business Week, there has been a new crop of services to help non-techies and those who may have concerns about quality, distribution and security of DIY methods, to create their very own iPhone app, no matter what business they're in.

Led by the likes of Swebapps.com and MyAppBuilder.com, they can help create the apps often in less time and for less money than it would for the company to develop the app from scratch.

Clients could create downloadable games, travel guides, quizzes, blog feeds and, as with the MEN, breaking news headlines, sometimes as simply as by plugging specs into online templates.

Business Week describes how the already expanding market for these apps is likely to grow at a faster pace. It states how the number of apps downloaded through the likes of the Apple App store and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Marketplace for Mobile may surge to 18.7 billion in 2014, from about 491 million at the end of 2008, according to consultant Ovum. That may result in sales of nealry £3.5 billion in 2014, up from over £222 million last year, Ovum says.

(via cybersoc.com)

Newspaper sites: The "patent, leather shoe" of advertising campaigns

Advertising managers look away now: a New York Times story has stated how newspaper sites may be overlooked as brands seek to increase their online advertising efficiency, according to a report on SFNBlog.com.

It describes how newspaper sites experienced a temporary boon when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer.

According to the report, Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site.

However, the company then tightened its aim and shifted money to cheaper ads from networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.

A further blow was dealt when digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA Beth Lange said that they would avoid newspaper sites in the future, when advertising more basic models, and rely on networks.

That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Lange.

The New York Times claims that this explains why newspaper sites are missing out on online advertising revenue even though internet advertising is increasing, describing the sites as the “patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear.”

These “shoes” include exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.

There is some hope for newspaper executives. McClatchy Newspapers (whose portfolio includes the Miami Herald) seems to be bucking the trend, experiencing a rise in revenue from online display ads which Christian A. Hendricks, vice president of interactive media at McClatchy, attributes to the rise to the company’s focus on online-only ads and its selling of local ads, rather than national brand campaigns.

The Times counters this however by explaining that one reason newspaper sites do not appear to be bouncing back as much as the overall Internet is price: after advertisers introduce their splashy campaigns on news sites, they can follow up with cheaper ads all over the Web.

If newspapers hope that online advertising will be the end of their financial woes, it seems they may need a new strategy.

The end of the road for paid content?

Bad news for struggling newspapers: nine out of ten UK consumers would never pay for online news, reports Press Gazette.

They highlight a survey of more than 2,000 consumers by Lightspeed Research which asked what content users wouldn’t be prepared to pay for online.

It found that 91 per cent of respondents would never pay for news online and 90 per cent would be unwilling to pay for news analysis.

This follows a Harris Interactive poll, commissioned last month by Paid Content, which found that just five per cent of readers were willing to pay for online news.

The survey, says the article, is yet further evidence against publishers, like Rupert Murdoch, who intend to start charging for access to their websites.

But, reports Press Gazette, News Corp claims to have conducted its own audience research in Australia, the UK and US, which gives it confidence that people will happily pay for news content across a range of digital devices.

Surprisingly, the Lightspeed survey found that it is the older age group that seems the most unwilling to pay for news content.

Of those aged 16 to 24, 86 per cent would never pay for news online, while in the 45 to 54 age sectors, 96 per cent said they would not pay, according to MediaWeek.

A business model for Twitter?

Champions of Twitter and its influence in public debate have had a lot to celebrate recently; the overturning of the Trafigura super-injunction and Jan Moir’s reputation being torn to shreds following her column on the death of Stephen Gately, for example.

But, as described in a blog article by Mark Potts, Twitter has another area of excellence – its ability to break news. Twitter, argues Potts, through its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers or news organisations.

Whilst many media organisations have attracted a large core of followers (such as the New York Times, with 1,995,199 followers), one feed that is keeping up with the “big guns” is a Twitter-only headline service Breaking News Online, that boasts over 1.3million followers.

Run by 19-year old Dutch entrepreneur Michael van Poppel, the Breaking News team scan the major news sites and use them alongside their own reporting to produce the feed.

What is particularly interesting about Breaking News notes Potts – besides its ability to hold its own alongside major news organisations – is that Poppel may have found a way to monetize Twitter. They have developed an iPhone app that sells for $1.99—plus a 99-cent-per-month subscription fee - to send followers the latest headlines.

It will be interesting to observe whether the company which prompted PaidContent to write: "Hey Media Company. Buy BNO News. Now. Really” will be able to make this particular business model work. The organisations that Potts succinctly describes as: “taking a backseat to a clever 19-year-old kid” will almost certainly be watching.

The "unheralded" benefits of paid-for content

With Rupert Murdoch describing some aggregators as "content kleptomaniacs" and with regional media organisations looking for potential business models for their hyperlocal journalism, the debate over paying for content continues to rage.

Dorian Benkoil at Poynter Online has provided an interesting argument for the benefits of charging for some content.

Recalling a calculation he made on the effects of making the Wall Street Journal free, he explains how by charging, the Journal (and other publications) can say to an advertiser that they have a "committed, consistent" audience. A free Journal, he calculates, would potentially result in a 60% drop in its ad rates.

Besides obvious benefits such as minimal production and distribution costs for digital subscriptions, he also looks at some of the "less intuitive" benefits, as described by Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Journal.

He says: "charging for online subscriptions can help increase the perceived value of the print subscriptions, spurring more sales. Presumably, the psychology of saying "this is worth money" works across media.

"Bundling print subscriptions with online can help sell both. Crovitz found after data analysis that WSJ readers preferred buying online and print as a package over buying one or the other separately for less.

"Selling print subscriptions online greatly decreases the cost of acquiring new subscribers. This makes perfect sense. When someone uses an online form and payments system, he or she doesn't require phone agents or mailings or other costly infrastructure to handle it.

"The cost of sales goes down, too. You don't have to pay as much for advertising if people reading your material online then click to subscribe."

Benkoil acknowledges that getting the mix right is tricky and publishers must consider the risks, such as driving away core audiences or losing valuable page-view statistics, and shouldn't "plunge in" to payment systems.

But he believes that with incremental experiments and continuous improvement it should be possible to create a digitally-based business model that bolsters the print product as well.

No More Free Ride for Aggregators?

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said today that search engines and others who use news content for free must pay up, Editor & Publisher reports via The Associated Press.

Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Tom Curley, the AP's chief executive, told the World Media Summit, attended by 300 media leaders in Beijing.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said.

"We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content," he added. "We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it."

Rupert Murdoch also told summit attendees that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.

Curley said earlier this week that the AP was considering selling news stories to some online customers exclusively for a certain period, perhaps half an hour.

The AP already plans to roll out a system, called a news registry, that will track its content online and detect unlicensed uses in ways that could help boost revenue for the not-for-profit news cooperative and its member newspapers.

Four Steps to the New News Organization

Local newspapers are in the best position to form the profitable "New News Organization" envisioned by Jeff Jarvis and his colleagues, Judy Sims, former vice president of digital media for the Toronto Star Media Group, writes for PaidContent.org.

Jarvis envisions a local news ecosystem that includes blogs, niche sites, non-profits -- plus a profitable news organization, capable of curating, aggregating audiences and producing original reporting.

Local newspapers are best positioned to do this because of their relationships with local advertisers, Sims suggests. "For small businesses, advertising is, was and always will be about return on investment. If the cash register doesn’t ring, the model won’t work. And metro newspapers know, understand and are trusted by local advertisers more than anyone else in their markets," she says.

Sims offers "four easy steps" for local newspapers seeking to become the New News Organization:

* Step 1: Create a separate organization. Put an online product person in charge of a small (at first) team that includes an online advertising sales person, an editor and a web developer -- and put them "in an office someplace far, far away from the print organization." This team, she writes, "will discover that the best business/editorial/advertising model is considerably different from what the print folks would come up with. And, it will very likely cannibalize the core business." Sims admits this is a "doozy" of a first step, but she feels it is necessary.

* Step 2: Build verticals. Local advertisers want audience and context. Sims urges an analysis of market data to identify categories with the greatest potential advertising revenue, such as homes, health, parenting and entertainment. "Use everything at your disposal to make these sites the ultimate online destinations in their subject-area for the residents of your city," she urges. They should combine news, resources links, data, business and event listings, and input from users, as well as advertising and shopping information.

* Step 3: Curate the ecosystem. Engage local bloggers and encourage experts to start new blogs to fill any gaps. For instance, ask an OB/GYN to write for the parenting site or an interior decorator for your homes site; in general, "make it easy for the passionate to be heard." In addition, Sims urges, news organizations should create widgets and other apps that allow other sites to publish their content. "The news media of the future is about distribution, not destination," she writes.

* Step 4: Create a Glam.com-style advertising network, using the ecosystem described above. Link extensively: Push traffic from the verticals to the blogs, and the blogs to the main news site, and the main news site to the verticals. And create packages around commercial content.

Pay to Read about the Play?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has begun charging users for "premium" online coverage of the city's professional American football team, the Vikings.

For $5.95 for three months (not quite a whole season), or $19.95 a year, subscribers to Access Vikings get additional "insider" information not available anywhere else. This includes:

* Chats with a reporter from inside the locker room after every game.

* The ability to ask well-known Vikings reporters "probing questions" before the game each week.

* "Insight and analysis" from the newspaper's Vikings columnists.

* Access to a blog by a former all-pro player, who will "blog his impressions of the season."

* Photo galleries of game images from Star-Tribune photographers.

The Star Tribune tried something similar seven years ago, Staci Kramer points out in a post on PaidContent.org. It didn't work -- but the price was higher in 2002, costing $4.95 for just one month's access then, $29.95 for the year. The newspaper shut the experiment down after attracting only around 1,000 subscribers.

"Put in fan perspective, the [2009] three-month pass is less than one beer at an NFL [National Football League] stadium; the annual subscription would be two or three beers," Kramer helpfully points out.

Publishers Turning to Mobile

Print publishers are extremely interested in mobile strategies for content distribution and advertising, according to a new survey by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, MediaDailyNews reports.

More than half the 375 print publishing executives surveyed said they are already distributing content via mobile devices. Among newspaper publishers, 58% said they have formatted their Web sites to make them mobile-friendly or have created dedicated mobile Web sites.

They expect the services to be financed through both subscription and advertising; so far, however, users have shown more interest than advertisers in mobile content, the survey found. Publishers also commonly report that mobile use drives traffic to their Web sites.

In addition, three-quarters either have a "smart phone" application already in production or plan to create one in the next two years.

The publishers widely expect print distribution to diminish, but not vanish, over the next decade.

'Tangible' Mobile Apps Will Sell, Outing Advises

News publishers expecting to make money online will need to figure out how to offer something tangible -- and mobile represents big-time opportunity, especially for phone applications, advises veteran digital media observer Steve Outing in his latest Stop the Presses column.

Outing has long believed that non-niche news content is better off being free, supported by advertising and other revenue streams. But after talking recently with two mobile gurus, he said, he realized that people seem to prefer to spend money on things they can "keep." A phone app may not be a physical thing, but it's there on your phone every time you turn it on, he writes. It's "yours."

Consider the iPhone, for which Apple CEO Steve Jobs boasted last week that 1.8 billion apps had been downloaded in just two years. An estimated 13% of those apps carry a price tag, according to a February 2009 presentation by Pinch Media; the figure is likely higher today.

For years, Outing points out, publishers had no trouble selling a physical product, the printed paper, which readers got to keep as long as they liked. Efforts to charge for the intangible online product, in contrast, have nearly all failed miserably.

Perhaps, he says, one of the main reasons is that when online news consumers were asked to pay for news, many felt that they weren't getting anything, because they received nothing tangible -- just information (most of which is free online anyway).

The same goes for general news content on mobile phones, Outing says. But, he added, "Fortunately, mobile phones now have something that people will buy: apps. And mobile is poised to become the next growth area for content publishers."

Publishers, he says, should create an iPhone app (followed by apps for other devices such as Blackberries) that offers a better news experience than viewing a website on a phone's browser, as well as other valuable features. And they should charge for it.

"Non-niche, non-unique digital news has no monetary value to most readers. News providers, if they are to make money directly from consumers in the online and mobile worlds, need to come up with non-ephemeral offerings," he says. "The key to getting paid for news in digital format is that what's being sold is not fleeting."

For instance, he suggests:

* Paid news memberships. With a membership to a news organization, you get something -- perhaps including a membership card (physical or digital) to be used repeatedly to get special privileges, such as discounts from advertisers or access to premium content.

* Access. Charging people to read the regular column from a star writer, for instance, may not work, as The New York Times discovered during its TimesSelect paid-subscription experiment. But publishers might take a hint from Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, who offers a paid "Premium Membership" Among 16 extra benefits, it includes special access to O'Reilly, including "preferred e-mail" that gets your message bumped to the front of the queue, and a weekly live chat during which Premium members get to ask O'Reilly questions.

* Special Web applications for PCs. If apps sell so well on mobile phones (albeit at generally low prices), news companies may want to consider selling applications for the PC that offer consumers an enhanced online news-reading experience. Readers get to "keep" the software.

More thoughts and ideas can be found in Outing's column, available free for a limited time.