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Posted 5:32 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Fantasy That Is a Revenue Reality
Steve Klein on online sports content
Revenue is every website's fantasy, but at CBS SportsLine.com, revenue is a reality thanks to fantasy-league subscriptions, Purva Patel reports in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. SportsLine expects about 35% of its revenue to come from fantasy-league subscriptions by year-end — five times where it stood in June. The sports media company didn't charge for services a year ago, but SportsLine has generated more than $10 million in revenues since converting to fee-based billings in January. "We're on the right track," said Mike Levy, the company's founder and CEO. "Making it free really gave people a chance to try it, and then they got addicted to it."Just how extensive is SportsLine's fantasy reality? Fantasy-football participants have created about 65,000 leagues and 15,000 individual teams to date this year. Fees range from $30 to $250. The fantasy players have also helped boost advertising revenue, according to Levy, because the primary customer, the 18-to-54-year-old male, is a desirable demographic.
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Posted 3:54 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Bibl, SMS Styl
Vin Crosbie on wireless publishing
Sports, sex, money, and religion (though not necessarily in that order) have always been the most popular subjects of content. And as more and more content is being published online via Short Messaging Services (SMS) — the wildly popular (worldwide) text telephony format that has yet to break through in North America — it shouldn't be any surprise that religious publishing has found a way to fit within SMS' less than 164-character message limit. Gospel Search, a Christian portal based in Norway, is parsing the Bible for use in SMS next year. To convert such a large book into such a small format, Gospel Search is translating Bible passages and Christian hymns, prayers, and commandments into the abbreviated language used for text messaging.Europemedia reports that the firm has abbreviated the Catholic "Our Father" prayer into just 160 characters. Gospel Search will launch its SMS Bible service in Norway, but says it also plans launches in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the USA. By the way, if you'd like a quick primer about text telephony abbreviations, try MobileScreenSavers.com's SMS abbreviation dictionary.
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Posted 3:34 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Make or Break — Breaking News
Peter M. Zollman on deadline online journalism
The phrase may be overused — especially this week — but it's been proven that coverage of breaking news can make or break a news website. Do a good job and the traffic you get will stick with you, perhaps forever. Blow it and, well, you blew it. So here are some disappointing notes about the death today of Minneapolis senator Paul Wellstone in an airplane crash. On StarTribune.com at 1:15 p.m. Central time, about an hour after the story broke: A three-paragraph AP story that made no mention of Wellstone or who was actually on the plane. (The home-page link mentioned it; the story did not.) On TwinCities.com (from Knight Ridder Digital and the Pioneer Press): A four-paragraph AP story, with a map vaguely locating the town where the plane crashed, and a broken link to information about the airport near the crash site. BUT, click on the "breaking news" link in the lower-right rail (below the home screen) and you find an automated posting of a 10-paragraph story from the AP that went up almost 45 minutes earlier. Maybe there's consolation in the fact that it was somewhere on the site — even if it was well hidden.
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Posted 10:47 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Arts & Letters Daily Returns
Steve Outing on weblogs
One of the oldest and most popular weblogs, Arts & Letters Daily, has sprung back to life after shutting down a few weeks ago (as reported at Jim Romenesko's MediaNews weblog). The Chronicle of Higher Education bought it, and founder and editor Denis Dutton, a philosophy professor in New Zealand, will continue to edit it.
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Posted 10:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
We've Got the Scoop, You Can't Have It Yet
Steve Outing on when to release exclusive news
Investigative reporter Bill Dedman sent me the screen shot below of the SeattleTimes.com home page as of 6:34 p.m. Pacific time yesterday. Times reporters had dug up some hot information about the the D.C. sniper suspects, who have a Tacoma, Washington, connection, but the website announced that it wouldn't be publishing it until later. The page reads: "Page updated at 06:34 p.m.: Sniper case coverage: The Seattle Times' latest coverage of the D.C. sniper case, including the most in-depth profiles of suspects Muhammad and Malvo, will be posted at midnight Pacific time."
Commented Dedman, "I get that they don't want those of us on the East Coast, much less over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to peek over their newsroom shoulders by looking at the site. But readers think we don't know anything if we don't have the latest info on the Web. So this is an interesting approach: Tell the readers that you've got a lot of good stuff, and you'll let them have it as soon as the competition goes to bed. This may be what everyone has to do, but the Times is just being honest about it."
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Posted 2:57 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Where's Rafat Ali?
Steve Outing on global Internet access
In an item posted earlier today, I mentioned that weblogger Rafat Ali was posting from a small town in India temporarily. In case you've overlooked it, Ali has posted some observations in the Discuss This area for that item. Interesting.
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Posted 2:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
WeatherBug Bests Weather.com
Steve Outing on website traffic
WeatherBug's PR person had something to crow about today: a report that for the first time, the upstart Internet U.S. weather service had beaten out Weather.com (the website of the Weather Channel) for top-dog status in the weather content category. According to third-quarter data published by comScore Media Metrix, for the first time since WeatherBug debuted in 2000, it surpassed Weather.com in both daily and monthly usage over three consecutive months — July, August, and September. In the most recent month, WeatherBug saw 16 million unique visitors, vs. Weather.com's 15.3 million. WeatherBug has an average of 5.5 million daily users.WeatherBug has reached these lofty numbers in large part because it's a free desktop application that appears when users boot up their computers. To use a term I haven't uttered in quite a while, it's "sticky."
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Posted 1:36 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Spain's Journalists Cannot Live Without It
Eva Domínguez on the Internet as a professional tool
Journalists in Spain cannot work without the Internet. The Web has become an essential tool for reporters, according to the results of a recent survey by Deloitte & Touche and Accesogroup. The study contacted by phone, e-mail, and online forms more than 600 professionals from all over Spain. More than 90% of them admitted that the Internet is one of their daily sources for information and documentation. Journalists consider online pressrooms as a basic resource and e-mail as the best channel to receive information.
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Posted 12:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Google Eliminates Sites on 'Case by Case' Basis
Peter M. Zollman on search engines
Google apparently has been eliminating some sites from its French and German versions, but won't identify which sites. In an excellent report by Declan McCullagh on News.com, the issue of whether this is censorship or simple business decision is explored pretty comprehensively.
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Posted 11:31 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Let's Put Users First
Carla Passino on websites' readability
It is odd how we can spend hours discussing the finer points of online journalism and, in the process, lose sight of the basics. I have discovered this the hard way over the last few weeks. I'm recovering from a small eye operation and can only access the Internet sparingly. When I do access it, I have to enlarge fonts to ensure that I don't strain my eyes. Easy, I thought. Just a question of adjusting text sizes on my Web browser. Alas, I was very wrong. I quickly found out just how many sites force their font size to an exact (and usually very small) number of points, preventing users from modifying text size to suit their needs. (Only a few platform and browser combinations enable you to override style sheet specifications.) Worse, I discovered that the very site I edit is guilty of this usability misdeed.Now, my condition is only temporary and, hopefully, in a couple of weeks, I shall be able to read tiny text to my heart's content. But this may not be the case with other users: people with bad eyesight, for example, or low-quality monitors. Jakob Nielsen has long been preaching that websites should let users control text sizes and I think we should heed him. As online journalists and publishers, we need to be very aware that, if we reduce readability, we turn users away — no matter how sophisticated and interesting our content may be.
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Posted 10:00 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
From Somewhere in India, the News on Worldwide Paid Content
Steve Outing on weblogs
So what if he's holed up in a small town in India. Rafat Ali still is managing to keep up on the latest new-media news about paid content and post to his weblog, Paid: the economics of content — despite a creaky and slow Internet connection available to him in the small Indian town where he's spending time with his family. Ali posted 13 items yesterday, and several a day during the week before. It's an encouraging sign that the world is increasingly wired to the Internet nearly everywhere you go — even if access isn't ideal yet in many parts of the world.
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Posted 6:37 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
3 Days Free, 2 Days Paid
Steve Outing on paid vs. free content
Frankly, it's kind of fun to watch Salon.com's experiments designed to get to profitability. The latest is interesting, to be sure. It involves the sex-advice column of Cary Tennis, a popular feature that Salon recently placed under the Salon Premium (paid subscription) umbrella. Lots of loyal readers didn't like that, so Salon has backed off a bit with a compromise. For the five-day-a-week column, three of his columns are free for everyone to read, and the other two are available only to paying Salon Premium subscribers.It's an innovative approach, but my guess is that the numbers aren't quite right. To actually entice Tennis fans to pay up for a Premium account, I think a better approach would be to give free readers five columns a week, but only give them one question and answer. Salon Premium members could get four a day, and free-access users would be teased about what they're missing daily. (Careful readers may recognize this as Randy Cassingham's model for his This Is True e-newsletter.) But who really knows what will work? These kinds of decisions are more business art than science.
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Posted 3:32 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
1,000 Paid Subscribers in 20 Days
Eva Domínguez on charging acceptance
elmundo.es has convinced nearly 1,000 people to pay for some of its online content in just 20 days. As I reported here in early October, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in a surprise move decided to charge for all the content coming from the print version. Since then, 1,000 readers have subscribed to any of the paid services offered, Gumersindo Lafuente, editor of the digital division, announced yesterday.
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Posted 1:13 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
At Last, Online-Print Price Parity
Steve Outing on paid content
I've long expected that in time, the prices that periodical readers paid for online or digital versions would be equal to print-edition pricing. While we're not there yet — in most cases, publications charge more for print subscriptions and less for paid Web or digital-replica editions — there are signs that we're heading toward parity. As reported by Econtent Magazine, the entertainment-industry trade publication Daily Variety has made its Variety.com website subscription price equal to the print-edition price: $259 a year. (This does not mean that I think that free websites for periodical publishers will go away. But for those publishers who do decide to charge, the value in the minds of consumers eventually will be equal for print and digital.)I have a recommendation for publishers, however: Offer at least some discount for digital delivery, to reflect the cost savings by not printing and distributing physical copies to customers.
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Posted 12:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Report From the ONA Conference
Steve Outing on last week's gathering
While I didn't make it to last week's Online News Association annual conference, Staci Kramer did. (And so did a couple other contributors to this weblog, who've written on it earlier.) Kramer wrote up a nice summary about attending the event for Online Journalism Review. It's worth a read.
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Posted 12:07 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Nordic Ombudsmen Launch Attack on Web Ads
Ernst Poulsen on ethical ad guidelines
The four Nordic Consumer Ombudsmen on Monday launched an attack on several forms of Web advertisements. Ads that cover editorial text for a while (drop-down curtains) and animations that play across the screen are considered especially inappropriate, as they blur the line between editorial content and advertisement. The guidelines are similar to the ones previously agreed to by a large number of Norwegian media companies, and are probably a healthy sign of an industry moving away from Wild West manners (although there's room for disagreement).Also ruled out are advertisements that make using one's browser unusually difficult. Full-screen ads should not only disappear within a few seconds, but should also have options, which make it possible for the reader to close the window instantly. Pop-up windows are still legal, but should not make the browser unusually hard to use (such as endless-exit pop-ups do). Naturally, ads that pretend not to be advertisements — for example, faux system messages — would be considered inappropriate.
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Posted 11:14 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Tablets Are Coming; Fidler's Ready
Katja Riefler on newspapers on new devices
For how many years have we heard Roger Fidler talking about future newspapers to be read on a tablet PC? 20? Anyway, here they are. Early in November, at least six manufacturers are going to release tablet PCs at the size and price of sub-notebooks. And it it is Fidler who claims to have the solution for displaying interactive newspapers on them. With the help of Adobe and the Los Angeles Times, he has developed the PDF-based "KENT format" — designed to guarantee the best readability on 10.4-inch screens that can contain videos and animated ads. Content from the paper can be reformatted to fit the new page size, and will be enriched with videos, additional facts, whatever you like. The file size of a fully interactive edition shall not exceed 20 MB. I'm not sure whether this idea is really the future of newspapers or whether people who'd like to read a newspaper online wouldn't prefer to read the original digitized print version. Unfortunately, there is only limited information about the project at the moment at the Institute for Cyberinformation site at Kent State University.
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Posted 4:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Nokia Chooses Agency, Not News Media, to Provide MMS Sports
Vin Crosbie on handheld publishing platforms
Nokia of Finland, the world's largest manufacturer of cellular telephones, has chosen not the news media but IMG of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the world's largest sports management and marketing agencies, to provide sports news, updates, audio commentaries, and sports images to users of Nokia's new Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) mobile phones. Nokia today announced that IMG will provide the sports content to Nokia's Essential Sports service in Europe, the USA, and the Asian Pacific regions. Most new cellular handsets being built by the world's major mobile phone manufacturers are equipped to receive MMS."MMS is already taking the industry by storm with strong growth in markets like Italy where in the first two weeks of service more than 180,000 Multimedia Messages were sent. We want to see this happen in all markets and with all our customers, and this agreement with IMG is just one example of the initiatives we are taking," said Esa Harju, director of strategic marketing for Nokia Networks. "Sports are universally popular and IMG's analysis of mobile user behavior patterns certainly indicates that MMS offers a major opportunity for new rich media," added Mark Selby, head of IMG's mobile division. "With MMS, we see a major opportunity to create compelling rich-media services that deliver the emotion of sport." Nokia issued no statement or comment about why it had picked a sports marketing agency, rather than a sports news media organization, to supply this content worldwide.
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Posted 1:09 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Lessons for News Sites From Google
Steve Outing on Web usability
Here's a GREAT quote from Google product manager Marissa Mayer in an interview conducted by GoodExperience.com: "When you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are — you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed." (Thanks to Holovaty.com for pointing to this interview.)In an item here yesterday I complained about MSNBC.com's new look, which adds complexity instead of taking it away. Many news sites, including some otherwise wonderful ones like WashingtonPost.com, have home pages that are the antithesis of Google — with dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of links and content elements. I do not think this is a good thing. Print comparisons don't always work, but if the Washington Post paper edition, say, offered as many front-page options as does its website, it would scare readers away. Does your news site need to go on a home-page diet?
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Posted 11:58 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Compelling Storytelling
David Carlson on fascinating websites
I can't think of a website that I've found more interesting lately than the Sonic Memorial Project. It is an open archive on the history of the World Trade Center, and it is a compelling site — indeed, a great example of how the Web offers us new ways to tell stories. This story is told mostly with sound — hundreds of sound streams offered side by side in what the site terms "an interactive soundscape." There are ambient sounds, voice-mails, radio broadcasts, and archival recordings related to the events of September 11, 2001, the history of the twin towers and the neighborhood in which they stood. Led by National Public Radio's Lost & Found Sound, the project is "a cross-media collaboration of ... radio and new media producers, artists, historians, and people from around the world." Anyone can contribute. There still is a toll-free number that anyone can call to leave sounds for the site."We never could have imagined all that is out there — tapes of weddings atop the World Trade Center, recordings of the buildings' elevators and revolving doors, home videos made by a lawyer in his 42nd-floor office, sounds of the Hudson riverfront, recordings of late-night Spanish radio drifting through the halls as Latino workers clean the offices, an interview with the piano player at Windows on the World, video e-mail greetings that tourists sent from the kiosks on the 110th floor, voice-mail messages from people who worked in the World Trade Center," the site producers report. "Hundreds of people from around the world have called offering their recordings — making this a dramatic, unprecedented audio archive of immediate, first-person accounts chronicling a historic event from almost every vantage point."
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Posted 10:16 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
'Feria del Libro' in Santiago
Juan C. Camus on the book business
El Mercurio and La Tercera in Chile are supporting from their websites the new edition of the main Chilean book fair ("Feria del Libro") of Santiago, which begins today. Both have made similar mini-sites with information, schedules, and highlights about visiting authors.Coincidently, both companies have a similar approach to the book business. While El Mercurio has an agreement with the publisher Aguilar, La Tercera has its own with Random House-Mondadori to publish books with its own name. As an example, the last book from El Mercurio is Pinochet, The Biography.
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Posted 9:42 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Small Paper's Experiments With Weblogs
Steve Outing on online content
Journalist weblogs continue to come to my attention. The Journal-Times, a Lee Enterprises paper in Racine, Wisconsin, is experimenting with weblogs written by staff journalists. So far, sports reporter Gery Woelfel is writing two, a general sports blog and Tundra Talk, a weblog about Green Bay Packers football. The paper's site promises another weblog soon, Inside the JT, "a look behind the scenes at the decisions that shape the newspaper."
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Posted 9:38 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Michel Colonna D'Istria Passed Away
Norbert Specker on a European new-media leader
Belatedly the sad news reached us that in August, Michel Colonna D'Istria, a French online news pioneer who was on the board of advisers of the Interactive Publishing conference that I run, drowned during a vacation in Banuyls, at just 44. He leaves his wife and three children. During his two speaker appearances at the conference, Michel exhibited his charm with engaging, lively and enthusiastic talks. A true pioneer of the online news industry in France, he led the interactive efforts of both La Libération as well as Le Monde. Michel offered his help and advice with no restraints and he had been a very supporting force for us since 1994. I am grateful to have criss-crossed paths with this lovely man and très, très triste to never have the chance to do so again. (Obituary in Le Monde.)
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Posted 6:30 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Why the Wrong Guys Win on Deep Linking
Steve Outing on Internet law
You might have missed this week-old opinion piece on WSJ.com by Norwegian journalist Olav Ovrebo about the deep-linking controversy. But it's worth a read. Ovrebo points out that the reason the anti-deep linkers keep winning court cases in Europe (like Newsbooster v. Danish Newspaper Publishers Association) is the European Union's database directive, which provides legal protection of databases and was approved in 1996 (and now implemented in all EU countries). Ovrebo says that legislation resulting from the directive sets a low bar about what constitutes a database worthy of protection. A news site with a database of news articles could come under the directive's definition. Ergo, even sites like Google News that link directly to news articles on free-access websites could be found to be in violation by a European court relying on the directive and subsequent legislation as guidance in a decision. "I think this aspect of the EU's database directive has been too little reported on — it's the real reason why anti-deep linkers keep winning," he says.
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Posted 4:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
MSNBC.com's New Look: Yuck!
Steve Outing on website design
Allow me to be the among the first to publicly proclaim my dislike for what MSNBC.com has done to its site design. New today is the addition of an MSN navigation wrapper, to steer more MSNBC.com users to various features of MSN. What was a wonderful design (here's a Google cache of the site) has been destroyed. (Your opinion may vary.)A major reason that I liked the old MSNBC.com is because it included a relatively compact home page — in contrast to many news sites that contain several screenfuls of content choices. It was relatively uncluttered, yet still easy to find what you wanted. The MSN stuff just creates a cluttered page. The new design looks like the MSN navigation was simply slapped on to the page with no thought. It's a step backward.
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Posted 1:12 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
ONA Panel Warns Not to Charge for General News
Vin Crosbie on digital publishing
Newspapers that charge for online access will fail to generate sufficient revenues or subscribership, a panel at this weekend's Online News Association annual meeting in New York City concluded. Panelist Peter Krasilovsky of Borrell & Associates, which surveyed 15 U.S. newspapers that charge readers for online access, reported that "none are getting a premium return on their investment" and are instead generating a mere 1.4% to 1.8% return. Krasilovsky and fellow panelist Ira Silberstein, the director of business development at New York Times Digital, agreed that charging for general news content online was "a thing of the past." Silberstein said NYTimes.com has studied the subject many times and never found a compelling business case for it. Silverstein said his organization had been successful only at charging for its archives, crossword puzzle, and for special multimedia Times Talk packages, though he noted that the multimedia packages "involved more work than their financial returns were worth." Panelist and moderator Joseph Russin, the Los Angeles Times assistant managing editor for multimedia, agreed that there didn't seem to be a compelling business case for charging for general news online, but warned that the subject is far from a thing of the past in the minds of publishers desperate to earn an online profit.
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Posted 12:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Content Management the Buzz at ONA
David Carlson on publishing tools
To me, the most revealing thing at the Online News Association convention in New York last week was the amount of discussion of content management systems — finding ways to manage content with less human labor. What it amounts to, if you will allow a bit of over-simplification, is making "shovelware" automatic through software. I'm all for it. Let's put the humans to work doing something that machines can't do — creating original content for the Web. My fear, though, is that corporate management will take those jobs back instead of investing them in what is really needed to let this new medium prove itself. The promise of the Web is that the best things about the existing mass media (the depth and breadth of newspapers, the immediacy of television, etc.) can be separated from the weaknesses and combined to create a new, far more compelling medium. The problem is that very, very few of us are doing that because we are too busy shoveling. Let's hope content management can ease that crunch.
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Posted 9:54 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Merrill Brown for President of Online News
Steve Outing on Web pioneer's ONA speech
In need of a pep talk to re-energize you about the online news business? Industry pioneer Merrill Brown obliged with an inspiring keynote talk at the Online News Association's annual conference in New York on Friday. (Sample: "We work in the most successful new medium ever created and in the most important news medium of our time. Our accomplishments dwarf those of broadcast or cable television in their first years.") If, like me, you didn't make it to that Manhattan event, the full text transcript of his speech is available, as well as a video of it.
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Posted 9:39 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Blogging Gets Doonesbury Treatment
Steve Outing on weblogs
Today's Doonesbury comic strip pokes fun at the weblogging trend, which should give a big boost to the weblog concept. Thanks, Garry Trudeau! In recent months, I've been asked quite a few times by reporters working on weblog stories for my opinion about the future of weblogs. I remain bullish on the weblog concept, but I think that much of the general public doesn't have a clue yet about what a weblog/blog is. After today, that'll change.
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