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Posted 8:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Music Industry That Cried Wolf
Norbert Specker on rethinking business models
The key issue of digitalization for the content industry is: embrace or fight? This eternal battle — fought in the newspaper realm with the question, "But if we go online, won't we cannibalize our paper subscriptions?" — echos in the music industry. Upward of 80% of people who share music files online buy the same number or more music CDs off-line as before. So now the industry that is shouting about clearly ridiculous loss numbers because of CD burners and Internet file sharing (equating each burned CD and downloaded file with a lost sale is over confident, to say the least) has to rethink its approach to file sharing, according to Wired News. Because in the end, the consumer is always right.
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Posted 8:08 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Knight Ridder Gives Some Web Control Back to Publishers
Steve Outing on a shift in strategy
I'm hearing reports of a shift in strategy for Knight Ridder — to give back some control to local publishers at KR's bigger papers for their websites. KR had gotten a healthy dose of criticism both externally and internally (from those who run KR papers' sites) for its decision earlier this year to make all the sites look alike as part of implementation of a new content management system, and to have the sites be under the wing of Knight Ridder Digital in San Jose. I don't have details yet (KR officials haven't returned my calls), but it looks like the look and feel of the big KR sites will be decided locally, within the parameters of the technology being used for all the sites to publish. According to a KR Web editor who's privy to the details, content will be driven largely by the newspapers. The emphasis on city sites (e.g., BayArea.com, Charlotte.com, Miami.com) might continue, but it will be up to the local publishers to decide what to emphasize as the primary newspaper Web brand.
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Posted 7:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Twist of Convergence
Norbert Specker on short messaging service
In a strange twist of convergence, mobile phone users have the option to send an SMS to the Viva (German TV station) site, which gets displayed on a live ticker. Various teletext (videotext) companies have found the same amazing phenomenon: people will pay (40 or 80 cents to their mobile operator of which 40%, 50%, or sometimes 70% go to the content provider, in this case Viva) to get their private messages displayed in a public environment. It adds up, you know.
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Posted 10:55 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Merrill Brown Talks (... and Talks)
Steve Outing on interview with MSNBC.com's departing editor
Staci Kramer has an extensive Q&A interview with MSNBC.com's outgoing editor-in-chief, Merrill Brown, in Online Journalism Review today. Brown is one of the stars of online news, and no doubt will be missed at MSNBC. What's up next for him is uncertain, but when I interviewed him yesterday he expressed an open mind about what's next for him personally. I got the impression that he probably won't leave the interactive media field, though it's unlikely that he would go to work for an organization that's competitive to MSNBC.com.
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Posted 10:10 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New Look at Emol.com
Juan C. Camus on website design
A new design for Emol.com was presented this week. It improves presentation of the 13 channels, where News is the default. Emol.com is the portal related to El Mercurio, the major print media company in Chile. But this is not the only major change. The portal began to use Certifica.com technology to quantify the site's audience. The first numbers will come out at the end of June. Internal sources at the portal are forecasting that Emol.com will beat all Chilean market competitors.
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Posted 10:05 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New Media Will Reflect General Strike in Spain
Eva Domínguez on employment rights
Next Thursday, June 20, most online newspapers in Spain will not carry the usual amount of news. Many media sites have agreed to support the call for a general strike made by the main unions against the Government's policies on employment. Therefore, print media that will go on strike will not work on the 19th and there will be no print edition on the 20th. Online media that support the protest will not work on Thursday. The Federation of Journalists Unions points out that journalism is one of the less regulated and most unprotected sectors.
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Posted 6:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Pop-Under: Patented?
Peter M. Zollman on online advertising
If your website's been using "pop-unders" —ads that are similar to pop-ups, but show up underneath the primary site (so they're only visible after the first window is closed) — you may be in for a nasty surprise. EContent Magazine reports that a patent application for pop-unders has been filed by Exit Exchange. The company claims rights to the use of pop-unders since May 2000 — referring to "a post-session advertising system that may be used in media such as computers, personal digital assistants, telephones, televisions, radios, and similar devices," according to the filing. If you used pop-unders before May 2000, you may be a hero to the entire online advertising industry — because your pop-under usage could help block the patent. Otherwise, lots of companies that have been using the pop-unders may be liable for royalties.
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Posted 1:06 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Have Broken-Linkers Forgotten the Search Engines?
Steve Outing on news archives
Chris Sherman, who edits Search Day and is one of the leading Internet search experts, chimes in on the recent debate here about Knight Ridder Digital "breaking" many thousands of links to its sites' content: "In all of the broken link controversy, I don't recall anyone raising the issue of search engine ranking algorithms. Following Google's lead, they all put major emphasis on link analysis. Even with content that disappears behind archives, the engines still calculate overall prominence from number of inbound links — it doesn't matter if the content requires a password or fee to access, it still counts toward 'page rank.' Media companies that break links are behaving with just as much malignant stupidity as those trying to prevent deep linking."
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Posted 12:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Morris Is Top Online Dog This Year
Steve Outing on online news competition
Yesterday I noted the success of CJOnline.com in getting eight finalist spots in the NAA Digital Edge competition for North American news websites. That's a Morris property, and if you count all the Morris newspaper websites, then the company got 20 finalist spots — double the next in line, Tribune Co. Morris' Steve Yelvington has posted a chart showing how many finalist spots each major news company won. Morris' 20 is particularly notable in contrast to Knight Ridder's one finalist spot. KR, of course, has been criticized harshly ever since it introduced a new network-wide site redesign affecting all its newspaper sites. (Digital Edge winners will be announced at the NAA's Connections conference in Denver, July 13-16.)
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Posted 11:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Football As It Happens
Carla Passino on Repubblica.it's World Cup coverage
Repubblica.it got the World Cup coverage just right with its live reporting from Japan and Korea. Thousands of Italians must have logged on to the newspaper's website this afternoon to follow the blow-by-blow account of Mexico vs. Italy as it happened, and suffer together as La Nazionale barely managed to qualify to the next round.The page automatically refreshed every 90 seconds to display the latest update on the match, but impatient users had the option to refresh manually by clicking a button. Graphics were pared down to a minimum to ensure fast download times, although a selection of photographs was made available as soon as the game ended for readers with time to spare. And (take note, Steve Outing) Repubblica.it also introduced an interactive poll to vote on the performance of star player Alessandro Del Piero.
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Posted 11:14 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Newspaper.com: Community Weblog Central
Steve Outing on a good idea
Dave Winer caused a lot of controversy last week with his column about Knight Ridder Digital. Today he comes up with another controversial idea — but I think this is a good one. Newspapers, he says, should start hosting weblogs for community members, organizations, and even businesses. Give the community publishing space and let a thousand voices bloom. With businesses, newspaper-site-hosted weblogs can be a revenue source; imagine the bicycle shop with a local-biking weblog hosted on the newspaper site, for which it pays, for example. Now, Winer has a vested interest in this idea because he runs a company that produces software that can be used for publishing and hosting weblogs. Nevertheless, this is a great idea. Why should Blogger get all the weblog hoopla and glory? News organizations should grab some of it.Will this public-weblog-hosting concept catch on? If it does, it will come slowly. I think there's still much fear among mainstream publishers of letting the public publish its thoughts, ideas, and news. To which I say, Get over it! (Obviously, there are some legal implications to ponder about allowing publishing of content that's not vetted — but that's a topic beyond the scope of this short item.)
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Posted 10:42 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'No' Lives Again in Brazil
Juan C. Camus on a website for journalists
It's very good news that No, a Brazilian e-zine for journalists, is returning after being off-line for about a month. The original project — the name is short for "News and Opinion" — began in April 2000. It was financed by three companies, which decided to end it in April 2002. The change upset Brazilian journalists, who had come to appreciate the great job done by the No staff. The announcement from No explained that the website "became the journalistic address of bigger prestige in the Brazilian Internet and reached more than 1,500,000 monthly page-views, although it (has) never done any advertising campaign." But the site is coming back. With the name of "No Mínimo," it is online again with a part of the previous staff and the support of local community groups.
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Posted 6:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
CJOnline.com Is NAA Finalist, 8 Times Over
Steve Outing on small paper's Internet success
CJOnline.com, the website of the Topeka Capital-Journal (Kansas), has been nominated as a finalist in eight categories for the Digital Edge Awards of the Newspaper Association of America. This is remarkable because it means that the site is a finalist in every category in which it entered — and this apparently is a record for most finalist nominations in this competition. CJOnline.com, part of the Morris organization, is a remarkable site, especially when you consider that it's part of a 50,000-circulation newspaper. The site has 16 staffers — half devoted to revenue/business, half to editorial — and last year booked over $1 million in revenue (and it's profitable). It's led by the indefatigable Rob Curley, who emphasizes locally produced content and editorial support from the print side. Looking for a small-paper online role model? Here's one. (All the Digital Edge finalists should be announced on the NAA site on Thursday.)
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Posted 3:17 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Flash Ain't That Difficult
Steve Outing on multimedia content presentation
Back in February I took a class about how to use Flash for news content production (taught by Don Wittekind and Scott Horner of the Sun-Sentinel in south Florida, and sponsored by the Society of News Design and the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media). It was a great hands-on class. You can take it, too, this fall in either Chapel Hill, North Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia.After getting a day of training in Flash, we got an assignment for the next day: come up with a Flash animated graphic in about five hours — with coaching as needed by the instructors. The Estlow Center website now has all of our projects online. Take a look. (From the main Estlow home page, look for the link below the group picture.) It's not that any of them are great, though several are quite good. They do demonstrate that creating animated multimedia graphics with tools like Flash is not that hard. We produced these with one day of training under our belts. (Artwork was supplied; we had to craft it into an interactive presentation.) Think what a trained graphics staff could do.
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Posted 12:16 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Paid Wireless Content Will Work Well In Europe, Asia
Madan Rao reporting from Internet World UK
Pay-per-view and other subscription models for online content will work better on the wireless Internet than the wired Internet, according to Christopher Graves, business development director for Europe and Asia at Dow Jones Consumer Electronic Publishing, who spoke at the Internet World UK conference in London this week. The Wall Street Journal has already signed contracts for wireless content delivery in Europe and Asia, and expects its non-English products to grow much faster than the English offerings in the coming years, especially in languages like Chinese. "I am delighted that the Financial Times has also started charging for its content, though I wish they would charge for all of it and not just some of it," Graves said.
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Posted 11:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
How Not to Mix Two Portals
Juan C. Camus on website design
ESPN.com has a really good Spanish-language website, ESPNDeportes, which covers the main sports from the USA, Mexico, and Argentina. And the World Cup, of course. During the last week, ESPNDeportes announced an agreement with YupiMSN, the regional portal from MSN. This is the follow-up of a previous agreement between MSN and ESPN and it converts ESPN's website into YupiMSN's "sports area."Maybe this combination is finished in the lawyers' offices, but it isn't in the designers'. The original "red and orange" 800-pixel layout of ESPNDeportes.com has just been surrounded by the "blue" YupiMSN look. The final layout is shocking.
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Posted 12:27 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Elimination of French 'Coûte Cher'
Norbert Specker on online sports content
Le Monde reports that the elimination of the world champion French team from the World Cup sent the shares of TV station TF1 down another 3.34%. TF1 holds the TV rights to the World Cup, and since the first loss of "Les Bleus" 10 days ago the shares have dropped over 10%. With reason: France is a proud nation and now that the French footballers are out of the tournament, the World Cup really ceases to exist in that country. Nowhere else will the World Cup be dismissed so fast.
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Posted 12:04 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Pioneer Exits
Steve Outing on MSNBC.com's loss of its editorial leader
Editor-in-chief Merrill Brown has announced that he is leaving MSNBC.com as of June 21, according to an AP report. Brown has led the popular news site for six years, and he cites the lack of growth at MSNBC.com and the online media sector as a whole as his reasons for departing. He's leaving to explore other opportunities, which may not be in the Internet field, according to the report.
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Posted 6:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Police Track Accused Serial Killer Through Internet
Vin Crosbie on cyber crime-solving
A postal letter from an anonymous serial killer to a newspaper. Inside, an Expedia.com map annotated with an X to indicate where a body is buried. Instead of a return address, the postal envelope bore simply the URL of a bondage and sexual torture website in a distant state. From those few clues, Illinois State Police tracked through the Internet and arrested a local man they claim killed as many as eight women. The only online technology lacking in this tale of cybersleuthing might have been a webcam, because the accused, before he could be brought to court, committed suicide while alone in a police cell that lacked any video monitoring.
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Posted 4:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Gillmor-Winer Spat: Last Words?
Steve Outing on the Knight Ridder Digital controvery
As reported here last week, Dave Winer wrote a scathing essay in his weblog that suggested that Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News was derelict in his duties by not writing more critically of his company's trouble instituting a new content management system (in which many thousands of article links throughout the Web suddenly went dead). Gillmor responded to Winer publicly on Saturday. (Apologies for being a little slow to note this here. Also, note that the Discuss This link below includes discussion about the original item, which generated an active debate here in our discussion forum area.)
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Posted 12:04 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Jack or Jill of All Trades
Jade Walker on interactive employment
Journalists looking to work in digital media might want to consider taking a few classes at the local university before applying at the major news sites. The ability to edit and write is still necessary, but now you also should be a savvy Internet user, a graphics whiz, and a reporter/editor who's knowledgeable about everything from national security to the space program.WashingtonPost.com is currently looking for a new National Producer, and the qualifications are sure to weed out most candidates. (But the free bagels every Monday are a nice touch for the hired journalist and XML genius who is flexible enough to work late nights, early mornings, and weekends.)
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Posted 10:33 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Cute Little Soccer Game
Katja Riefler on wasting time
We saw some nice online games posted here in Germany for the Winter Olympics. Forgive me if I post here my personal favorite for the World Cup season. You'll find it at the website of the German regional newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, which does a good job with a small staff in competition with larger websites during this major sporting event. (Flash 5 plug-in required to play this game.)
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Posted 10:25 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Terrifying News Cycle
Jade Walker on lighter online news
In the midst of Mideast suicide bombings, the raging battles in India/Pakistan, and the latest "dirty bomb" arrest, it's difficult for anyone to remember a time when peace prevailed. Perhaps because such a time never existed. In response to the continuous stream of "bad" news, 0Format created a mock CNN home page to provide a humorous parody of all the recent "terror warnings." The "other terrifying news" is particularly good for a smile.
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Posted 1:11 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Deep Linking in Denmark
Norbert Specker on the law and the Internet
Danish publishers have gone to court to stop a subscription service called Newsbooster. For $190 per year, this service provides a daily dose of news links from various sources. The hearing is scheduled for later this month. Here the disturbing factor for the Danish publishers is that Newsbooster actually makes money from their content. Read a complete report by Anick Jesdanun (in which Belo Interactive also gets another run in the spotlight for its recent deep-linking controversy).To put this case into perspective, last year Swiss publishers stopped a clipping service based on their Web offerings, only to launch their own similar service a few months later. The practical but cynical view: rather than coming up with industry-wide services that are marketable themselves, publishers wait for some enterprising soul to provide the test, then clamp down on the service to come up with a publisher-driven offer based on that role model. A bit like Microsoft, isn't it?
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Posted 2:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Better Support for Text E-mail Subscribers
Steve Outing on this weblog
Text e-mail subscribers to E-Media Tidbits should notice some improvements in the format of their daily deliveries. Thanks to the efforts of our e-mail vendor, Publishmail, those subscribers who receive text-only versions of this weblog now see hyperlinks, and the formatting has been improved to accommodate more e-mail client software. Previously, text subscribers did not see links, and the formatting didn't work for everyone. Those who receive HTML or graphical versions of the weblog in e-mail are not affected by this change. (If you don't currently get Tidbits by e-mail, sign up here.)
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Posted 2:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
War of the Bloggers
Steve Klein on blogging
Remember the "War of the Worlds"? Well, there seems to be a war of the blogs going on between veteran bloggers, who go back five years of so, and war bloggers, who have dominated the blogging scene since September 11, according to an article in the New York Times by David F. Gallagher. Much like the Internet, blogging was started by a few programmers who pioneered the hyperlinked journal format to discuss tech matters. But veteran blogger Cameron Barrett, who has published his Camworld blog since 1997, is unhappy about the general perception of blogs since September 11. "War blog editors need to make it clear to their audience that they are not the only kind of weblog out there," he says. Say war bloggers: Get over it. "The essence of the Internet is constant change," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who publishes InstaPundit.com. "To get your nose out of joint about that is just silly."
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Posted 12:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
My Web Writing Under the Microscope
Steve Outing on link usage
In my recent Poynter.org article, "Immersed in the News," I included many links to examples of "immersive" Web content. For one example within the main body of the article, I mentioned an MSNBC.com immersive package but didn't give the link until the reader plowed through my two-paragraph explanation and analysis. I was intrigued to discover that a discussion of this technique popped up on WebWord.com. Participants of that discussion put more thought into analyzing my technique than I did, frankly; it just seemed the natural thing to do in this instance (where I wanted the reader of my article to read my thoughts before clicking off to see the example itself). It was interesting for me to get some unsolicited group feedback on my Web writing technique, too (where I learned from one person that I overuse parentheses!).
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Posted 12:44 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Instant Messaging Everywhere
Katja Rielfer on mobile communication
Instant messaging probably will gain importance for online publishing, as Steve Outing explained recently. This will be even more the case when this application gets mobile. In Germany, the cell phone entertainment portal Jamba recently announced the availability of the first mobile messenger application that will work with different mobile telephone providers and also between cell phones and the PC. You can download the application on your mobile phone (just three different models at the moment) and use it without restriction for one Euro per month. The technology company behind this is Communology. It has some English-language information on its website.
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Posted 12:37 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Chronicle Story Package Combines Best of Print and Online
Paul Grabowicz on online newspapers
The San Francisco Chronicle is using its online site as a perfect supplement to a special report it printed on FBI covert activities at the UC Berkeley campus in the 1960s and early 1970s. The SF Gate website features copies of FBI memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, timelines and picture galleries on the Berkeley student protest movement and other topics, a chat session with the reporter who wrote the stories, Seth Rosenfeld, and links to other resources on the Web.
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