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.
Life in Kent during the Second World War is the focus of a new digital archive poised to go online this autumn.
From September, visitors to Kent Online will be able to view thousands of articles and photographs published by the Kent Messenger during the war.
According to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, the archive will also have advertisements from the time and a search function enabling users to search by dates, places and names.
“The KM’s war pages provide a first-hand account of every day life as well as the remarkable courage and tenacity of the people in Medway and Kent who endured so much for so long,” said Ron Green, managing editor of the KM Group.
Meanwhile, web users who fancy a read of something a little older should take a look at a new online newspaper archive from the British Library.
The British Newspapers 1800-1900 digital archive houses over two million pages from local and national newspapers published during the course of the century.
The new Wolfram Alpha search engine has the potential to be an excellent tool for journalists -- but it's years away from becoming a game-changer, Paul Bradshaw writes.
Bradshaw highlights the "computational knowledge engine's" ability to search parts of the "hidden web" that most search engines don’t reach, such as databases, as well as its potential to provide quick answers to questions about relationships and facts better than Google.
However, at the moment, natural language questions work best if you're looking for very specific information about something well-known. For instance, Wolfram can tell you what year Charles Dickens was born, but it can’t turn that around to tell you what writers were born in that year, he said.
Particularly useful, Bradshaw adds, is the ability to compare things - "for example, The Guardian vs The Telegraph, or London, Birmingham and Manchester." It also is good at calculations of various sorts, from converting fuel use to fuel costs to figuring out the calories in your lunch.
Overall, he says, the tool can be a time saver, but there are drawbacks. For instance, while Google lets you intuitively evaluate the credibility of a source, it's unclear where the information provided by Wolfram is coming from or how accurate it is.
Bradshaw concludes that "Wolfram is an engine waiting for the world to catch up. The technology is enormously impressive - really, game-changingly important. But the material it has to work with is, currently, sparse."
Reaction to the beta version of the Google News Timeline, recently unveiled by Google Labs, has been generally positive, though critics say it still feels very much like a work in progress (which of course it is).
The new feature enables users to see news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and other information on a zoomable, graphical timeline. It looks to be especially useful for journalists seeking background on a story.
Among the feedback this week:
* "It really shows how news goes from being the first draft of history to become history." -- The Guardian
* "Got a deadline anytime in the next 24 hours? Then don't, for your own good, check out Google News Timeline. ... (It)looks to be the biggest, funnest time waster since we all spent hours exploring the globe with Google Earth." -- PC World
* "It offers interesting possibilities for exploring stories, especially older ones, that are largely hidden in newspaper and magazine archives. It is also a powerful way to view trends in culture and society or the careers of famous people." -- The New York Times
* "One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? ... Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing? Apparently not." -- Matthew Ingram of the Toronto Globe and Mail, writing on the Nieman Journalism Lab site.
Google Labs also has released a beta version of an application called Similar Images, which allows users to search for images using pictures rather than words.
How good is it? BBC News Magazine put it to the test by requesting, among other things, a match for a photo of John Prescott. The application promptly responded with photos of ... Renee Zellweger. Go figure.
The Financial Times has launched a new search service dedicated exclusively to business-related content.
Beta project Newssift differs from Google and other search engines as it trawls only material related to specific topics rather than searching the web as a whole – known as deep search.
Spokesman John Greenleaf said this aspect has helped the FT create “an exclusive content library”.
According to The Guardian’s PDA blog, the service also differs from mainstream search engines as it is based entirely on semantic search rather than keyword search.
This concentrates on meanings and relations between terms or concepts and so aims to produce more relevant search results and recommended articles of further interest.
It is also resistant to efforts by content providers to boost search rankings using search engine optimization tactics, claimed Greenleaf.
Visitors to the site can create their own search queries or use the existing options divided into categories such as organisation, place and person.
And the results page boasts a couple of interesting features with a Sentiment pie chart showing the proportion of positive/neutral/negative articles and a Sources pie chart displaying the share of content from newspapers, TV, news wires etc.
The search facility is free to use and is currently supported by display advertising.
The future of the press and television in the digital age is the subject of an in-depth study from the University of Oxford.
“What’s happening to our news” paints a picture of the current trends in the news media as a result of the digital revolution – such as the impact of search engines and search engine optimization.
Author Dr Andrew Currah also predicts bad news ahead for the industry if newspapers continue along this route, chasing “clickstream” audiences online and reducing expenditure on original news-gathering.
To this end, Currah concludes his extensive study by proffering some possible solutions to ensure a positive future for newspapers.
He suggests that the government could introduce “targeted tax breaks for public interest news publishing” to ensure the funds are there to support investigative journalism.
In addition, the University of Oxford lecturer recommends the government should also look to widen the scope for charitable organisations to fund news providers which concentrate on original news-gathering and reporting.
Currah also contends that some form of voluntary kitemark could help restore public trust in media products.
An edited extract of the report from Dr Currah can be found at guardian.co.uk and an email interview with the author on the issue of kitemarks can be seen on the Online Journalism Blog.
Top tips for getting the most out of Google News crawlers could help newspapers improve their articles’ rankings.
Coming straight from the horse’s mouth, the recommendations feature in a Google News blog post in answer to some of the most frequently asked questions from publishers.
And here are some of Google’s top tips:
*Make Publication Dates Known
According to Google, newspapers need to place the date and time of the news story in the HTML in order to enable the crawlers to access the information. *Tag Titles Correctly
“In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page.”
Plus, Google suggests it’s good practice to use the article’s title as the anchor text in any links to it.
*Follow Photo Formatting Rules
Images that are crawler-friendly are JPEG images of reasonable size, close to the actual article and with good descriptive captions accompanying them.
*Keep Press Releases Separate
Because Google News treats press releases differently from original articles, Google recommends keeping them in a section distinct from other content.
A ten-point guide to improving search engine results has been published by the Search Engine Journal.
Reporter Monica Wright believes that editors and journalists can easily get to grips with search engine optimization (SEO) and has produced some handy hints for beginners.
According to Wright, headlines need to work not just for your story but also need to work out of context so they make sense to readers coming to the story via search engines.
2 - Tags
“The title tag is one of the most important factors when optimising your pages, so be as literal and specific as you can be, without making it too long.”
She adds: “Use your meta description tag to summarise your story. Provide the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ as concisely as you can.”
3 - Make Most Of Anchor Text
As hyperlinked text plays a part in SEO, Wright recommends using specific terms when linking to other pages/sites rather than generic links such as “See Related Story”.
4 – Deploy Effective Keywords
Services which suggest keywords and alternative words may be useful here.
5 – “Evergreen Content”
Wright notes that non-time specific features such as guides etc can draw in search traffic and attract long-tail interest.
Visitors can search the results by school, by city or by state to see how the air quality at any given institution compares to others across the country.
In addition, the feature has video reports including interviews with industrial pollution experts.
USA Today says it has analysed data covering a total of 128,000 public schools across the United States.
Facebook was the most searched for term this year on Google in the UK.
The internet giant has unveiled its annual Zeitgeist charts showing the most popular and fastest rising search terms for 2008.
Heading up the UK for most popular searches is the social networking site Facebook, followed by the BBC, YouTube and eBay.
Also making the UK Top Ten are News, Hotmail, social networking service Bebo and Yahoo.
In addition, video-sharing site YouTube and Facebook feature in the UK’s chart of fastest rising searches.
The list is topped by iPlayer from the BBC and also includes iPhone, Large Hadron Collider and Wiki.
Google produces charts for countries as well as a global list, and this year’s fastest rising global search results have some familiar and not so familiar names.
At the top is Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the late actor Heath Ledger is at five, incoming president Barack Obama is sixth and Disney boyband Jonas Brothers make tenth place.
The global chart also has three social networking sites unfamiliar to most Brits – Tuenti, Nasza Klasa and Wer Kennt Wien – so Jemima Kiss produced these guides on The Digital Content blog.
Further details on the Google Zeitgeist results can be found on the BBC.
Regional publisher Archant recently rolled out its new geotagged directory service across its online titles.
Each Local Business Directory can be reached via the homepage and enables visitors to search for businesses by keywords and locations.
Results then appear in text on the left and on the right they are plotted across a map (using Google Maps API) which users can then click for further information.
A defence of using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in journalism has been published by Telegraph.co.uk’s communities editor.
Writing in the British Journalism Review, Shane Richmond asserts that tailoring headlines and intros to suit search engine algorithms is a viable way for reporters to attract more readers to their content.
And he rejects suggestions (recently highlighted in an article from Guardian writer Charlie Brooker) that using SEO strategies inevitably leads to irrelevant headlines, tons of stories on the most popular search terms, and “conning readers”.
“There’s always been a certain formula to journalism: focusing on the five Ws – who? what? why? when? and where? – that underpin any good story,” writes Richmond.
“SEO rules are as important as any of these and in fact they bolster the first two.
“SEO is value-neutral. It doesn’t require you to dumb down, to fill your stories with the names of celebrities or to write 500 articles about Viagra every month.”
Richmond also points out that SEO techniques are an important tool to draw the audience which comes to articles via news filters, social bookmarking sites and recommendation sites such as Digg.
And he illustrates the changes that implementing an SEO strategy would bring to headline writing by using The Sun’s infamous “Gotcha!” splash during the Falklands conflict.
“Across Europe, every traditional media organisation is realising that their audience and advertisers are rapidly moving online, so many players with strong offline traditional brands are looking for web-savvy partners to help them ensure they retain their users and customers after the transition,” said Ed Freyfogle, co-founder of Nestoria.
Online newspapers can now deploy a free widget from Topix to provide related story links to their own content.
The news aggregator claimed its ReLinx headline widget can be easily integrated with various content management systems and produces real-time link results.
In a press release, Topix also stated that the widget can be used by news sites as an inline linking option.
Chief executive Chris Tolles said: “News sites invest precious time and money in generating original content, but it’s often difficult to package that information to take full advantage of the Web’s interactivity.”
The widget is being used by US site – TwinCities.com – and its senior online editor said ReLinx proved easy to install.
Chris Clonts added: “The links it generates are amazingly relevant, giving us a tool to drive users deeper into our site and freeing up the producers for other tasks.”
Topix is a news aggregation site which links to both mainstream media sites and discussions threads on forums.
Among its core investors are US regional press publishers Gannett, the McClatchy Company and the Tribune Company.
Visitors to Newsquest websites can now use a third-party application to compare prices of financial products.
The regional publisher is partnering with BeatThatQuote.com to offer a comparison service for credit cards, loans and other packages, reports Brand Republic.
The comparison service can be accessed via the Money channel on each of Newsquest’s 132 local news websites.
Newsquest Digital managing director Roger Green said that the initiative represents “the latest in a series of moves to make our trusted media brands relevant to the way people live their lives today - in print, online and on the move”.
A turnkey appliance enabling online users to submit and share recipes has hit the web market.
The Recipe Guide can be installed by news, community and special interest websites and provides gourmets with a platform for sharing food tips and discussing all things culinary.
Produced by American firm Caspio, the ready-made application allows users to upload recipes with accompanying photos.
These can then be rated and commented on by other members, who can use the search facility on the site or via widgets on affiliated sites to find what they want.
In a press statement, Caspio said that Recipe Guide is the first of its kind to provide a ready-made tool for publishing user-generated content recipes.
Caspio added that it expects the appliance to attract the attention of local visitors as well as advertisers and to improve site stickiness.
“The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything.”
These are the words of the man credited with the invention of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and in them he encapsulates the central idea behind the Web - connectivity.
And it is through the act of linking that the millions of disparate institutions, groups and peoples that populate the Web can connect to one another.
Therefore, linking is a founding principle of the Web and a principle of its founder – and yet one blogger recently termed it the “Achilles’ heel” of mainstream media.
While a group of editors at a conference earlier in the year was reportedly “appalled” by suggestions that their online news articles need to link out more.
Are they missing a trick and failing to engage with the ethics of the Web? Or are they making a judgment call based on sound commercial ideas?
This SPOTLIGHT post will look at some of these issues while also highlighting some of the ways news sites are starting to get to grips with linking.
It will also take in the basics - what is linking, what are the different forms it can take and how can it be used by digital journalists.
Finally, we’ll round off with the usual suggestions for further reading.
DEFINITIONS
Hyperlink
“An element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document.”
This definition from Webopedia shows the two main types of hyperlink (hereafter shortened to link) – an internal link to a different section on your own site or an external link to a new website.
Hyperlinks are usually a different colour from the main text to make them stand out and are often underlined, as in the above sentence where clicking on Webopedia would take you to its page entry on Hyperlink.
Rather than users being diverted to a new website (as with the above link), inline links open up within the document and usually open as a box with a select amount of content from a different site.
These are currently being used by both the Washington Post and by the BBC – more of that later.
Deep Linking
This takes users to a direct page on a different website as opposed to just the main page or homepage.
For example, a definition of deep linking can be found on Wikipedia – this deep link takes you straight to the entry on it rather than just the Wikipedia homepage.
More definitions of different types of links can be found on Netlitigation.com.
NEWS SITES & LINKING
Now that we’ve examined the most common sort of links relevant to digital news media, let’s look at how some commentators believe linking can enhance online journalism.
In this section we’ll also be looking at the ways that some mainstream news websites are experimenting with external links.
1 – The Web & The Ethic of the Link
To kick us off, here is academic and blogger Jay Rosen talking about “the ethic of the link”.
For Rosen, the “ethic of the web” is all about connecting people to each other and to knowledge - and this means online newspapers which do not link out are essentially “anti-web”.
Therefore, one argument for mainstream media to incorporate external links in their content is that they can never be fully integrated into the World Wide Web until they do so.
Former BBC journalist and new media blogger Alfred Hermida asserts that traditional media could also risk alienating users by not engaging with the connection capabilities of the Web.
“Editors should be thinking of their products as a service that is part of a larger network of news,” he notes.
Hermida adds: “Legacy media risks becoming irrelevant by insisting they are destinations and refusing to open up to the network.”
2 – An Information Gateway
In 2007, Jeff Jarvis wrote on his Buzz Machine blog: “Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.”
Under Jarvis’s rule, this means local online newspapers link to content that other media provide rather than producing their own version of it.
Jarvis says this approach would enable regional news editors to “reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage”.
Local news websites then become an information gateway for the community, pointing users in the right direction.
3 – A Community Hub
An example of how this might work in practice was supplied earlier this year by blogger and local link journalism advocate Scott Karp.
When snow fell in Tennessee last March, KnoxNews.com produced its own news story on the biggest snowstorm for five years.
The site then also linked to the myriad of pictures and posts popping up across personal blogs showing how local residents had been enjoying the rare snowfall.
Writing on his Publishing 2.0 blog, Karp asserts: “Newspapers should aspire to be a hub for shared community experiences - and that’s what the link journalism piece on Knoxnews.com did, by presenting as a shared experience what would otherwise be disconnected blog posts.”
This approach could also be used for a non-geographical community, as shown by a new project from the Washington Post.
Launched this week, the Post’s Political Browser supplies links to all that day’s top political stories, including those on rival newspaper sites.
A press release from the Post states: “The Political Browser creates a hub for readers to instantly find the top news driving the day's political discussion selected by the Post's political team.”
And executive editor Jim Brady adds: “This section is a source for readers to find the best of the Web’s political stories all in one place.”
4 – Hypermedia News
Unlike the linear narrative of a print news story, a Web article can be read in different ways by different people thanks to the presence of links.
Therefore, readers can be given the option on whether they want to know more background information or follow links for further reading – just as in this blog post.
Or to paraphrase New York University’s Brooke Kroeger, according to PJNet, “a little story that any 6th grader can read can also be linked to an extremely sophisticated information base for a more sophisticated reader”.
Plus, linking can see a simple text article be supplemented with all kinds of multimedia to add an extra dimension for readers who want more than words.
It is this aspect of linking that the BBC has recently been experimenting with through its use of inline linking to its own pages and to sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr.
Last month, the corporation began using links within selected standard news articles to see if this enhanced the experience for some users without distracting others.
Readers can elect whether to have links enabled or not and clicking on one brings up a small box containing background information or a video or photographic content.
The user can then close the box and continue reading the BBC article or open a new browser window on this page.
Also making use of inline linking is the Washington Post, which introduced pop-ups to two of its blogs in April this year.
The Editors Weblog reports that the strategy (using Apture technology like the BBC project) was to give users extra information without sending them off-site.
5 – Transparency Of Sources
Jarvis terms this “supporting journalism at its source” - linking to original source material - and it’s a practice he says is prevalent in the blogosphere but not in the world of mainstream media.
Linking to sources shows the reader where the journalist has got his/her information from and credits the original author.
And according to blogger Tammi Marcoullier, encouraging reporters to link to source material should reduce incentives for journalists to plagarise others and will reward original content.
6 – Synthesis Of Stories
Simple linking will point out external sites which may be of interest to the reader if they want to know about x, y, z – the information gateway.
However, Scott Karp suggests that “link journalism” takes this whole concept much further by digesting and evaluating that information before presenting it to the audience.
For example, Karp writes about a post on the New York Times’s The Lede: Notes on the News blog concerning how newspapers were reporting oil price forecasts.
Karp notes “The value for the reader here is enormous - not only do they get Times blogger Mike Nizza’s framing and perspective, they get links to all of this original reporting and analysis on this issue.”
He adds: “The Lede has helped readers make sense of what they read elsewhere, helping to make the Lede more essential than those other sources.”
7 – Reciprocal Linking
This summer the SEO Company carried out an experiment to see whether mainstream news websites that included outbound links were likely to receive more inbound links.
Its conclusion? “In general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.”
This might just be in the interest of news websites when you remember how much value is placed upon incoming links by search engine software.
And it brings us back to the fundamental nature of the Web itself – a network of connections - and to its founder's vision of anything being connected with anything.
Linking & The Law
The fundamental right for websites to link to other websites has not yet been challenged in court (netlitigation.com), but there have been a number of cases challenging certain aspects or uses of linking.
Some of these saw victory for those linking (German courts legalised deep linking in 2003) and some saw defeat (French website fined for linking to site which committed breach of privacy).
At present, there are no formal rules and regulations governing links but here are a couple of websites which hold information on past court cases.
Netlitigation.com outlines some of the early legal challenges and this document from the World Wide Web Consortium offers an interesting defence of deep linking.
While Links & Law is a useful resource with details on various lawsuits concerning issues such as inline linking and deep linking.
Resources
The Web houses some good practical guides on linking for journalists, including this article from the Online Journalism Review about when and why to link in an article.
Another good authority is Jakob Nielsen, who has written extensively about usability on the Web.
This article may be four years old but it still has valuable advice on formatting links, while this page offers an interesting argument for deep linking over generic linking.
Of particular interest to journalists is a post put together by new media blogger Sarah Hartley with practical tips on linking.
And anyone who wants to know more about the ethical side of linking should take a look at this article on Poynter Online which has a set of online journalism ethical guidelines created by digital reporters.
Finally, more in-depth offerings and analysis of linking can be found in The Hyperlinked Society.
The chapters are available online and Lokman Tsui’s section on Newspapers and Blogs is well worth a look for its discussion on the dual function of links for citation and reciprocity.
And that wraps up this latest SPOTLIGHT post. Next time we’ll be taking a look at the related world of social bookmarking.
In the meantime, do get in touch if you have any interesting examples of online newspapers using links or if there are any topics or themes you’d like to see covered in this series.
Search engines have shifted importance from news websites to individual articles, according to a Google advisor.
And this means newspapers need to readdress how they structure their digital content as the unit of consumption moves from the whole site to a single story, said Richard Gingras at a recent conference.
Blogger Pam Maples notes that Gingras compared the current news situation with online music where the unit of consumption has changed from albums to individual songs following the success of iTunes and similar download services.
He then urged delegates to take a leaf out of Wikipedia’s book and create “living stories” which can be regularly updated.
Gingras was echoing ideas earlier espoused by Google’s vice president for search and user experience, Marissa Mayer.
Here’s a short video of Mayer explaining the atomic unit shift and the concept of “living stories”.
Search giant Google has launched a new feature which enables users to read newspapers from the past online.
Google News Archive Search is designed to bring readers digitised copies of printed newspapers in their original layouts.
The Google Blog reveals that the new initiative will allow users to search by event, headline, photograph or advertisement in order to find the archive article they’re looking for.
Readers can access the search through Google News and results will also bring up archived editions housed on the websites of participating newspapers, such as the New York Times.
However, many of these are on a pay-per-view service and visitors looking for free historical content should use the advanced search option and select No Prices.
I tested out the search by using the term D-Day Landings and opting for free archive content only.
Within the first ten results were links to scanned versions of original news stories about the landings from newspapers such as the St Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent.
The pages open in the Google News Archive window, where you can zoom in or out and browse other pages from the issue.
And this represents only the tip of the iceberg of Google’s ambitions with archive newspapers and magazines.
The blog post explains: “This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.”
The archived news article that caused a run on shares in United Airlines (UAL) was picked up by Google News, claims a new press report.
According to Associated Press, the story dating back to 2002 came under the radar of Google News software after it appeared in the Most Viewed section of the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s business section.
From Google News the article regarding the airline’s appeal for bankruptcy protection was mistakenly taken as current and a summary posted to Bloomberg, where it was viewed by thousands in the financial sector.
Within minutes the share price fell by almost 75% before the Nasdaq stock exchange put a stop to trading in UAL shares, reports the BBC.
Gabriel Stricker, spokesman for Google, said its automated crawlers check web pages for clues to the original publishing date and only saw a current one on the story.
