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Posted 1:11 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Publishing In the Biggest Newspaper As Homework
Eva Domínguez on an educational initiative
Many students are becoming reporters and will end up publishing in the most-read newspaper in Spain. This, of course, will happen in the following years but it is also going on right now thanks to the El País de los Estudiantes program. Schools from all around the country are participating in this competition, which started two weeks ago and will close by the end of May. During this time each school team, lead by a teacher, has to create, edit, and put together a newspaper online. The quality of stories and the writing and creativity will be evaluated. All the newspapers submitted will be available online and the winner will be the one with the most votes. The awards for this first national edition are computers and trips.
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Posted 9:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
2002's Main Goal: The End of Free News?
Juan C. Camus on content business models
The end of free news is the main goal of online news websites, stated Declan McCullagh, director of Wirednews.com, during a recent seminar in Spain. In an interview at Clarin.com from Argentina, McCullagh said the "at no cost" style of Internet content and services has been the main cause of the pain suffered by dot-com companies. He thinks that what's needed is a new model of doing business. McCullagh said that during 2002, online news will be hard pressed to discover new ways to raise revenues, and the main goal is to end free content. He thinks that micro-payments would be the best way to get that. (Note Jeppe Kruse's item on Danish micropayments from yesterday.)
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Posted 7:02 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Marriage In Boardroom Heaven
Katja Riefler on living media convergence
The decision about media convergence usually is made by top management. "Expanding the reach of the brand" and other "synergies" are the most cited reasons. Journalists that have to deal with the consequences often find themselves confronted with new tasks and demands. It really is astonishing how many statements concerning convergence you can get from executives and how rarely a colleague involved raises his or her voice. So I really appreciate that fellow journalist Robert Nelson was bold enough to take a very personal look at the issues that happen in his neighborhood and I highly recommend that you read his article about Strange Bedfellows in the Phoenix New Times.
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Posted 7:00 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
W. European, Far Eastern, and American Internet Populations Near Parity
Vin Crosbie on international online publishing
According to Journalism.co.uk, IDC's Internet Commerce Market Model states that the percentage of the Western European population using the Internet now surpasses the percentage of Americans online, with 40% and 39% respectively. Meanwhile, NUA Internet Surveys estimates the actual numbers of Internet users in those regions as 180.68 million in the U.S. and Canada, 154.63 million in Europe, and 143.99 million in Asia and Australia, with the European and Far Eastern numbers growing faster than the North American. Americans have long assumed that they are the predominant population online, but that numerically hasn't been true for years
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Posted 6:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Will This Kill Internet Radio?
Steve Outing on music royalties dispute
An arbitration panel of the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed a compromise for royalty rates to be paid by Web radio broadcasters to the music industry. (Here's Reuters' report.) Webcasters offering radio-like broadcast would have to pay music companies and musicians 0.14 cent for each song heard by each listener; Internet broadcast of existing AM or FM radio programs would pay half that rate.The music industry thinks the compromise rate is still too low. In reality, it would appear that music executives want Internet radio to disappear. This royalty rate will be unaffordable for most of the fledgling Internet radio industry, which has yet to develop a sustainable revenue model. Music industry greed and short-sightedness (my opinion) look like they will kill Internet radio before it's able to establish itself. That's a shame. Shame on the music industry. (The rate is not final yet, so there may still be hope.)
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Posted 6:01 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Times Publisher Knows the Competition
Steve Klein on convergence
Back in the early days (1995) of USAToday.com, then VP/GM Lorraine Cichowski preached to the staff that the competition was NOT the Washington Post or New York Times but rather AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN. As well as USAToday.com stacked up against its obvious competition, Cichowski had her eye on what she predicted would be bigger fish. Now, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, has delivered the same message a good six years later. In a speech at Seybold Seminars, Sulzberger said that the paper's long-term competition isn't the Post, USA Today, or even the Wall Street Journal, but rather Microsoft and AOL Time Warner.Reporting on Sulzberger's speech, the New York Daily News said the Times publisher hinted at the future in convergence technologies for media companies and stressed the need for the Times to become a multimedia provider of news and information rather than restrict itself to print. "Our competition are people who are going to have control not only of certain degrees of information, but real control over the systems and applications that drive that," Sulzberger said. NYTimes.com, with the exception of certain content areas, will continue to be free. However, Sulzberger said, "We are insistent on making our Web operation profitable. Advertising will still be the key driver toward profitability." Finally, as to the skill-set of the future, Sulzberger said: "Not only do we want our staff to acquire new skills, we want them to become, in a sense, media pioneers. We want them to discover breakthrough ways of using these new mediums."
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Posted 2:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Festival of Content
Juan C. Camus on online competition
All the news websites in Chile are trying to attract users to their own pages, where they are covering the song festival of Viña del Mar, a beach city near Santiago, the country's capital. That festival is "the" major summer event for the local entertainment jet set, so you can see all the events on television channels, and watch celebrities take part in different activities. The same goes for the website, where there are video chats and live web-cams such as Canal 13 (the TV channel is host of the festival); forums and news in Emol; a complete calendar with the events of each of the six days of music in La Tercera; and photo galleries at Terra.cl.
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Posted 12:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Will They or Won't They Find Information Abroad?
Jeppe Kruse on Danish micropayments
Much like everywhere else, 2001 was a poor year for Danish online media. But unlike many other countries, the Danish online businesses have taken active measures to prevent further downfall. After discussing several original business models (one of which was to put pressure on ISPs to make them share their revenues), they've agreed on a centralized micropayments model. Thirty of the biggest online media, including the largest Danish portal, are launching the micropayments network in March. If you're Danish, their most recent press release has all the information.Seeing that most of the professional Danish online media is represented, the strategy is obviously to lure as many users as possible into the system by launching this all at once. Only a very small percentage of Danish Internet users don't occasionally visit one or more of the media. The majority will have to make an active choice whether to try micropaying or not. This is probably the only way a micropayments system could ever get off the ground. Still, one issue remains: Danes are rather fluent in English, and inevitably some of them will go "abroad" to satisfy the need for free information. If micropayments don't take off, the media won't be the only ones suffering. Danish language and culture could take a hit, too.
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Posted 12:27 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pay-for-Content Comes to Italy
Carla Passino on Repubblica.it's move to pay-per-view
Leading Italian newspaper La Repubblica has introduced pay-per-view on its website. It will only charge for the print content that it republishes online (including archive material), while Web-original content will remain free for the foreseeable future. Repubblica Extra — this is the name of the pay-per-view venture — will be available in three formats: fully navigable, PDF, and text only, and will cost 57 Euro for a 6-month subscription or 29.99 Euro for a 60-issue subscription. "The subscription formula is crucial for an electronic newspaper that is identical to the print edition," wrote Repubblica.it editor Vittorio Zucconi in an open letter to his readers.I wonder whether this strategy will succeed. Readers who accessed Repubblica.it for its online content will hardly fork out for rehashed print content. On the other hand, there is a concrete risk that Repubblica Extra will hinder print subscriptions and copy sales. Since the pricing structure offers significant savings over the paper edition, many readers will be tempted to switch to the electronic one once and for all.
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Posted 12:58 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
AOL Still Top U.S. Consumer ISP
Vin Crosbie on Internet access trends
America Online (AOL) is still the largest consumer ISP in the U.S., with 19.4% of the market, according to a report by ISP-Planet. During December 2001, AOL had 27.7 million subscribers, MSN 8 million, United ONline 5.6 million, Earthlink 4.8 million, and Prodigy 3.6 million. Completing the list of top 10 U.S. consumer ISPs were CompuServe, Road Runner, AT&T Broadband, AT&T Worldnet, and SBC.
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Posted 12:53 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Skating Controversy Generates Boffo Online Traffic
Steve Klein on online sports
The International Olympic Committee probably could have done without last week's judging fiasco in pairs figure skating at the Winter Olympics, but NBCOlympics.com loved it. The site drew 1,114,283 visitors on Monday, Feb. 11, a 190% jump from Feb. 10's 384,423 and 10% better than the previous one-day high of 1.016 million set Feb. 8 (for the Opening Ceremonies). The spike tops the corresponding Day 4 of the 2000 Sydney Summer Games competition (353,872) by 215%, all according to MSNBC. It also beats Sydney's best day: 466,176 on Sept. 28, 2000 (the day Marion Jones ran the 200), by 139%.The site added to the online excitement with its polls on the judging controversy. Taking in 340,000 votes on NBCOlympics.com (which is powered by MSNBC.com), nearly 91% said that Canadians David Pelletier and Jamie Sale should have won. The number of voters shattered MSNBC.com's previous poll record of about 250,000 votes as to whether Bill Clinton should resign as president. After the Canadians were awarded gold medals last Friday, NBCOlympics.com asked readers about the decision. In about three hours, there were 146,004 responses. About 88% said the IOC made the right decision.
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Posted 12:50 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Further Fall of Online City Guides
Peter M. Zollman on dot-com cutbacks
At one time, city guides and online yellow pages were going to be the ticket to riches online. (At some point in the future, they probably will be — because print yellow pages are extremely profitable, even more so than newspapers. And if you eliminate the printing costs and distribution costs ...) But as the saying goes, that was then and this is now.Citysearch, the once-upon-a-time, multi-bazillion-dollar-funded online entertainment and city guide business, is scaling back once again, the alternative Houston Press reports (last item). Now it'll have some local freelancers, and the Houston city guide will be edited and produced out of Los Angeles. Doesn't sound like much chance for local flavor there. But you can bet it'll still have a link to Ticketmaster, Citysearch's parent company.
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Posted 4:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Mobile Content Profits in Chile
Juan C. Camus on SMS and WAP publishing
In a new way to get profits, Emol, a major news portal from Chile, has allied with Entel, a telecommunications company (part of Telecom Italy), to deliver news and more than 100 types of content (including local stocks) through mobile phones. The content comes from El Mercurio (a newspaper that originated emol.com) and Valor Futuro (a related finance website), and the cost per call is about US 10 cents. The system behind the alliance allows customers to get the news through SMS or WAP.
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Posted 12:04 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
European Publishers Form Online-Classifieds Network
Katja Riefler on old and new alliances
Names on the Internet can sound funny and people in the online publishing business in Europe now have to remember a new one: "Adexalliance." That's the name Europe's leading newspaper publishers have chosen for Europe's largest online classified advertising network, representing 900 newspapers, from seven countries, covering 70 million newspaper readers. According to their first press release, the alliance initially will offer the opportunity of cross-country/cross-market searches for jobs, properties, and cars. And it will offer international advertisers one-stop solutions throughout several national markets.Not all of the participating online classified sites are market leaders in their countries yet. But some of them are and so there is hope that this time the intended sharing of knowledge, information, and technology will help everybody move forward to successful and financially sound online ventures.
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Posted 11:50 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
It's About Convergence, Not Who Wins
Steve Outing on old-vs.-new media
Lost Remote's Cory Bergman continues to impress me with his writing. On Monday, he wrote an essay called "The Convergence Culture Clash." An excerpt: "I thought we were finally getting beyond all that silliness. You know, the 'my newsroom is bigger and better than yours' syndrome. Who am I kidding? Just last week, journalists of all shapes and sizes on Poynter's Online-News discussion group squared off in spirited debate, trading barbs and highfalutin philosophy over which medium will 'win out': TV, newspapers, or the Internet. The answer is simple. All three will win out by working together, along with a good dose of radio and wireless. It's called convergence: a mind-bending, culture-busting mandate that puts people first, not tradition." If you click any link in this weblog today, let it be to read this essay.
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Posted 11:39 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Curtain Closes for Pirate Movie Site
Steve Outing with an update
Earlier this month here we noted the pirate movie website Movie88.com, which was selling streaming first-run movies over the Web for $1 — without permission of the copyright holders. Now comes word that the pirate Taiwanese site has been shut down by authorities in Taiwan, working in concert with the Motion Picture Association.
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Posted 11:22 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
U.S. Protests EU Proposal to Register Digital-delivery Publishers
Vin Crosbie on point-to-point publishing
The United States is protesting a European Union proposal that would require sellers of digitally delivered goods and services — including U.S. publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books digitally delivered to EC consumers — to register in Europe and to pay higher taxes than for physically delivered printed editions. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Kenneth Dam told the Associated Press that the Bush administration has "serious concerns" about the proposal, which he said "may be contrary" to EU treaties pledging not to discriminate against people and businesses in other countries. The proposal is currently being deliberated by EU finance ministers.
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Posted 11:05 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
ESPN.com Dominates Super Bowl Traffic
Steve Klein on online sports content
If you like Media Metrix numbers — and ESPN loves Media Metrix numbers — then the sports media giant is easily turning out to be the team to beat. ESPN.com generated record traffic in January with 11.743 million unique users, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram's Art Garcia in his weekly Internet column. That number doubled the site's traffic from January 2000 (5.86 million) and marks the fifth consecutive month of record traffic. As for the competition, AOL Sports generated 10.346 million unique users, the NFL Internet Group had 8.706 million, and the SportsLine.com sites had 5.189 million.As for Super Bowl weekend, Feb. 1-3, ESPN.com led all sports sites, attracting 2.387 million unique users. The game-day number was 1.733 million, compared to 1.439 million for the NFL Internet Group, 1.371 million for FoxSports.com, and 1.176 million for SuperBowl.com.
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Posted 7:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'What, Me Worry?' About Online Newspapers
Vin Crosbie on business model problems
I sometimes think that Alfred E. Neuman, the vacuously grinning cartoon mascot of MAD magazine, is the patron saint of online newspapers. His motto is "What, Me Worry?" Worries abound for the online newspaper industry. Indeed, in the keynote address to Editor & Publisher magazine's Interactive Newspapers conference earlier this month, Institute of the Future director Paul Saffo bluntly declared, "You all completely screwed up" when it came to figuring out what to do with the Internet. "There's a whole generation of newspaper executives who should be fired."The Poynter Institute for Media Studies (publisher of this weblog), at the request of many online newspaper executives, last month created a private e-mail discussion forum to address business issues. Although the forum's participants adopted a policy of non-disclosure about their discussions, I betray nothing by noting that the forum has been overwhelmingly silent this month — with but a single non-essential question posted, no answers given to it, and no discussion of the greater issues besetting online newspapers. What exactly is the current status of the online newspaper industry? As residents of London's East End are prone to remark, denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt.
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Posted 5:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
NY, Cannes to Host Wireless Media Conferences
Madan Rao on mobile communications
Two interesting events this week reflect growing cross-Atlantic interest in the wireless media world: the GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, and Wireless Internet World in New York City. Topics covered will include billing, CRM, enterprise applications, wi-fi, m-advertising, wireless content, telematics, interface design, and investment opportunities.
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Posted 4:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Size Matters, but Rivalry, Even More So
Eva Domínguez on Spain's online ratings war
Media ratings wars are nothing new. Nevertheless, it is getting wilder than ever in the online world in Spain and, even more, between the two biggest competitors in the online newspaper industry, elpais.es and elmundo.es. The latest official results, for December ratings, have angered the editor of elmundo.es, who accuses elpais.es of adding pages of other sites of its media holdings in order to inflate its statistics — and has complained about it to the ratings company, Oficina de Justificación de la Difusión. The rivalry between these two newspapers has been especially notorious since El País Digital hired almost all the online staff of El Mundo in June 2000.
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Posted 2:18 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
IBS Loses a Partner, Keeps a Name
Barb Palser on the importance of controlling domain names
The partnership between Internet Broadcasting Systems and WCCO-TV Channel 4 in Minneapolis apparently is coming to a mysterious end. That's a big story in itself, as Channel4000.com was one of the premier members of the IBS network. It also demonstrates the importance of controlling one's domain name. Since its launch in 1996, the site was promoted as both "Channel4000.com" and "WCCO.com" -- both URLs went to the same place. For several hours on Tuesday visitors to WCCO.com or WCCO-TV.com saw the new, non-IBS site. But Channel4000.com -- which is owned by IBS -- continued to point to the IBS version. The event raises the interesting prospect that WCCO could find itself in competition with the brand it helped build.Another IBS relationship ended recently, when IBS split with KCBS in Los Angeles to develop the website of KNBC. Now the URL of the former KCBS site, Channel2000.com, produces a map of IBS' California partners.
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Posted 2:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Another Free Site Goes Paid
Steve Outing on paid online content
Yet more news on the paid-online-content front: VentureReporter.net today goes to a paid, restricted-content model. The deal: $100 a year gets you six issues a year of the Venture Reporter print magazine, plus access to the VentureReporter.net website (which is updated daily) and e-mail alerts. For $1,000 a year, you get a "Gold Pass," which gives you access to archives dating back further than 60 days and access to a database of digital business cards, which contains all the e-mail addresses of the executives featured in the company's database.Will this work? You tell me. (Discuss link is below.) But my gut instinct is that tying access to the website to required paid reading of the magazine isn't the right approach. It relegates the website to undeserved "supplementary" status vis-a-vis the print product. I'd prefer the approach of effective incentives to encourage paid online subscriptions — not "take this magazine or you won't get the Web."
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Posted 12:57 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
AvantGo to Charge Publishers for 'Custom Channels'
Vin Crosbie on handheld device publishing
AvantGo, whose channel technology provides publishers with content delivery to consumers' personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, tomorrow will begin charging publishers for custom channels with more than eight subscribers, according to a report in the UK information technology newsletter, The Register. An AvantGo representative told The Register that many companies had registered custom channels specifically "as a way of avoiding having to pay for registering full channels with AvantGo." It's an open secret that many U.S. newspapers and magazines have done so for that purpose, and might be caught by surprise. Some are already switching their PDA subscriber lists and delivery to Mazingo, an AvantGo competitor that already handles PDA channels for many major newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters.
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Posted 8:21 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Forums Reflecting a Community
Peter M. Zollman on online community
If you offer forums and chat on a website, they ought to reflect the local community. A quick scan of Nola.com, operated in conjunction with but independent of the Advance-owned New Orleans Times-Picayune, shows that the flavor of America's most unusual city is captured effectively in the forum topics. "Vampire sightings," "Bourbon Street," "Jazzfest 2002," "Faith and Beliefs," "Ghost Hunters," "Meter Maids," and "Mardi Gras" are among the topics listed.At the top of the list under the "most popular" label? Take it from a one-time restaurant reviewer in New Orleans — this really is the most common topic of conversation in the Big Easy: Dining.
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Posted 10:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Report From the Trenches
Norbert Specker on online Olympics coverage
As NBC is popping those champagne bottles for the record profits (cost, $545 million; advertising revenue before games started, $750 million) it will derive from the Olympics, here is my report as an Internet-only Olympics follower. It is dismal. The ban on Internet broadcasting issued by the IOC and NBC results in my Canadian CBC not being available until next week on the Net. The reason: the national broadcast might here and there include tidbits from the Olympics.BBC Online is providing Internet listeners with hourly roundups which — when decisions are in the making — is plainly unsatisfactory. I have not found a live radio station either in English or German that would provide the service of telling Net-bound fans what one could see on any TV around the world. I am only sorry I did not have the idea a little earlier for want to offer this myself from the Caymans. Great climate. I just could not imagine that coverage would be non-existent. How a network like NBC can buy the rights to radio broadcast and again not come up with a decent offering of radio live coverage is beyond me. This "I won't do it but you can't have it" attitude is certainly not helping to move things along on the Net.
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Posted 10:48 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
They'll Pay More for Broadband Services
Steve Outing on paid online content
Will they pay or won't they? It's the question we in online media are all asking (and we ask it a lot in this weblog). Here's a bit more evidence to add to the stew: research by Sage, released last week, suggests that consumers are more willing to pay for broadband services and content. Services with the broadest appeal are those most likely to have a high degree of multimedia content. An interesting tidbit from the research: the amount consumers are willing to pay for broadband content/services is less than for non-Internet alternatives.
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Posted 10:31 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Surprise on Most Networked Country
Steve Klein on Internet readiness
And the world's most networked country is (the envelope, please) ... the United States, according to the inaugural "Global Information Technology Report: Readiness for the Networked World," a project of Harvard University's Center for International Development. The study defines most networked as high saturation and usage of information and communication technologies. The report, available free online in PDF format, ranks 75 countries according to a "Networked Readiness Index." Rounding out the top 10 countries are Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, Austria, and Great Britain.Among the report's conclusions: "We have yet to begin tapping into the power of the newest and next technologies," and, "The next generation of the Internet, one that is executable and extended, will fundamentally change business practices and the sources of competitive advantage."
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Posted 12:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Don't Bother Taking Down Controversial Columns
Steve Outing on nothing leaves the Web
If you live in Salt Lake City or Denver (or read Poynter colleague Jim Romenesko's MediaNews weblog), you know about Denver Post columnist Woody Paige's column last week that oh-so-rudely slammed Salt Lake and Utah's Mormon majority. Paige says the column, which ignited a firestorm, was meant to be satire and was misinterpreted. The Post reacted to the pressure: Paige apologized, and the original column was taken down from DenverPost.com.Now, taking the offending column off-line doesn't really do much good. Because once you publish on the Web, it typically doesn't go away. Because the article got so much notoriety, others copied the column and posted it on other websites — out of the Post's control. And search engines recorded the column for posterity. On Google, you can use its cache feature to find the original Paige column. Given that, the Post would have been wiser to simply keep the original column, but append Paige's apologies, a message from management (perhaps), and attach a discussion forum to let readers have their say. Removing the column was gutless, many observers are saying, and also had little real effect.
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Posted 12:37 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Sites That Want Your Money
Steve Outing on paid online content
VentureReporter.net (formerly Silicon Alley Reporter) writers Rafat Ali and Ben Fritz have compiled a list of media sites that currently charge for content, included in their article, "A Time of Proving & Disproving: The Online Paid Content Report." The piece doesn't come to any new conclusions, except the usual — that publishers want to charge money for their content online, but are (understandably) skittish and cautious about actually doing it. The key trend is for media sites to create unique, high-value niche content that consumers will pay for because they can't get it elsewhere. Generalist content is not something consumers will pay for, and neither will the advertisers. The reporters write: "One thing is clear: the newspaper sites will be the last one to jump the paid-content bait." (Note: You'll need to register to see the article above.)
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