Industry - correspondent.com

"Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling." - The conclusion to Robert Kuttner's long and fascinating column in the Columbia Journalism Review on the future of the printed press.

Kuttner approaches declining circulations and rising internet readerships (and revenues) from the point of view of a young blogger, who reads not only the four newspapers Kuttner reads in the morning, but also 200-odd RSS feeds and numerous other blogs.

Paris between the wars wasn't just a golden era for American fiction: Journalism thrived in the French capital too, with reporters flocking to the city to work as foreign correspondents, cultural critics or as hacks on one of the two big US newspapers based there.

The Independent has a fascinating look at the dynamics of the BBC News 24 newsroom.

Britain's Guardian newspaper continues to pioneer. Yesterday's announcement, however, looks to some observers like a step backwards. Very shortly, the newspaper will be launching what it calls a "downloadable news digest." In practice, it's going to be a 12 page pdf version of the newspaper's top stories, which can be printed off by readers and carried on a metro or a coffee break. You can see a preview copy here.

Why print? Surely news is moving inexorably online. Is the Guardian's pdf version a rearguard action from a newspaper which declared only last week that it plans a 24 hour online edition, putting stories on its website before they reach print? Not exactly: The Guardian's pdf will be updated every 15 minutes, so it's also going to be as up-to-the-minute as the website.

Additionally, it's a good business move. A 12 page Guardian could compete with any of Britain's numerous freesheets. It keeps the newspaper's brand in the freebie market, where rivals have lost ground. Better still, the newspaper doesn't need to pay any print or distribution costs for its freesheet: Getting hundreds of thousands of copies to every Tube station is a costly logistical nightmare, but having your readers print it themselves makes for substantial savings. Moreover, the Guardian has announced that British Telecom will be sponsoring the pdf edition, so the costs, which let's face it, are likely to be small, are covered at least. In all, a good move for the Guardian.

Readers of The Times' website are in for a media-enriched experience. Its publisher, News International chairman Les Hinton revealed this week that The Times is developing a video service codenamed Times TV.

Three respected British news providers are hoping to increase their share of the US market. Tax-funded broadcaster the BBC, influential weekly The Economist and daily newspaper The Times are launching or expanding services to Americans.

How about a newspaper that doesn't rely on newsprint to reach its readers? That's the idea behind Colorado Springs' High Plains Messenger, which launched last month as a purely internet edition. This community newspaper has no print edition, and doesn't plan one, according to its founders.

Worrying news from Moscow, where dozens of investigative journalists have been murdered since the early 1990s. Is the government linked to the killings?

The investigative piece continues a series of excellent reports on the media in the Times. Last month, the newspaper looked at the life of its former correspondent George Steer, whose reports from the bombing of Guernica inspired Picasso to paint his most famous work. Guernica honoured Steer with a bronze bust in April, marking the 69th anniversary of the Luftwaffe attacks.

The Times also has a profile of "super geek" Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. The scourge of newspaper classified ads is reported to be working on a citizens journalism project - watch this space for details.

Trust in the media is rising, according to a poll (pdf format) conducted for the BBC and Reuters. National television and newspapers come top of consumers' trust lists - blogs, however, come at the bottom. Some commentators, including Ben Compaine argue that blogs don't do too badly, considering they are opinion sites rather than news sources. Possibly, though Britain's notoriously partisan newspapers rank highly in that country's trust ratings.

Britons, like Germans and Americans, claim to trust their government rather more than they trust the media. Will the current blog frenzy on British newspapers enhance or damage their credibility?

Arabic news channel al-Jazeera plans an English language network broadcast later this year. It has already signed up names like Sir David Frost and BBC "Scud Stud" Rageh Omaar - not to mention opening a Washington bureau just down the road from the White House - and, according to a profile in The Observer, it's hoping to cause as much of a stir in the English-speaking world as it has in its Arabic base.

Cubebreak is a fictional content marketplace for amateur video - its business plan will look very familiar to anyone who's been peering into the world of Web 2.0 for too long. Check it out via Samizdata.net.

Britain's telecommunications industry has come out fighting against European Union plans to extend television regulations into online broadcasting.

Five winners of this year's Pulitzer prizes for journalism had strong online content elements, a spokesman for the prizes has announced.

More on the trend towards hyperlocal news. Citizen journalism guru Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere project has been bought up by Backfence, which is developing a US-wide network of community news sites staffed by citizen journalists.

World Editors Forum director Bertrand Pecquerie has some harsh words for the US press - and for advocates of citizens journalism. Writing on CBS News' Public Eye forum, he claims that US journalism has been in a "profound crisis" since 9/11, as "media nationalism" "transformed (journalism) into a war machine alongside the Bush administration."

A group of developing countries led by Malaysia, Singapore and India has launched a new internet based news service to counter what it describes as "biased reporting" and "lopsided coverage" from the international (Western) media.

Reuters has become the latest mainstream media company to introduce content from bloggers to its offering. The news giant announced this week that it had struck a deal with blogging network Global Voices Online, which should see comments from bloggers posted alongside reports on major news events.

The BBC publishes an interesting column by Dan Gillmor on how mainstream media can integrate the energy of citizen journalists into its newsgathering effort.

More blogs entering the mainstream media. Tomorrow sees the launch of BlogBurst, a syndication service that delivers work by 600 bloggers to newspaper websites and print editions.

Matt Welch posts a 'farewell to warblogging' as one of his final essays for Reason. In the weeks after 9/11, hundreds of individuals discovered weblogs as a means of discussing their reactions to the terror attacks, resulting in what Welch describes as "an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation."

Most of the changes the digital revolution has brought to the media business have been positive. However, as part of an effort to draw more readers to sites via search engines, newspapers might have to wave goodbye to that wonderful industry tradition: The outstanding headline.

An undercover reporter for a Sunday tabloid set out recently to do an exposé on a British Neo-Nazi group. He managed to befriend some of them well enough to be invited out to the pub. Unfortunately, they rumbled that he was a journalist rather quickly when he offered to buy the drinks...

The apparent decline in newspaper circulation - and the upwards spiral of those newspapers' online readership - has been a major area of debate for new media commentators. In some ways, the move online hasn't stretched the imagination of editors too far. Newspapers have taken on elements of the wire service, breaking news stories as they happen, added video and audio footage and, lately, opened their doors to reader input.

Print edition circulations may be falling, but US newspaper websites are recording record surges in traffic.

Objectivity is the great secular faith of US journalism. When covering a story, reporters are supposed to cast aside their political affiliations and don the priestly robes of objectivity. But does the internet spell the end of American journalism's fetish for objectivity? And can the US learn from openly affiliated bloggers - or British newspapers, who are often proudly partisan?

Podcasts, blogs and viral messages: Now politicians are edging into the new media game. The NY Times reports on how US presidential wannabees are using the Web's latest interactive innovations to reach voters. It seems more likely than ever that the next US presidential election will be fought and won online.

This weekend sees the launch of Mochila, an online content marketplace where newspapers, broadcasters and websites can sell their content to other media businesses.

What are the characteristics of citizen journalism? And what can the professionals do that their blogging counterparts can't?

"Without editorial control, (blogs) are unconstrained by sense, proportion or grammar... they are the preserve of those with time on their hands. Blogs have a few successes in harrying miscreant politicians or newspapers, but they are a vehicle for perpetuating myths as much as correcting them."

A short, succinct attack in today's Thunderer column in the Times, not so much on bloggers but on the wild claims made on their behalf.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark contends that the main reason newspapers have lost the connection from their communities is a failure to pursue good old-fashioned investigative journalism.

Comment Is Free, the Guardian's new "collective group blog" is up and running. Alongside Guardian and Observer regulars, there are some celebrity contributors including politican George Galloway, US blogger Glenn Reynolds, novelist Ariel Dorfman and human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. It also includes a photoblog from Guardian photojournalist Dan Chung.

We're assured more will be added. The site looks good and is fairly easy to navigate for a news & blogs aggregating side, though it should take a few weeks for the comments section and interactivity to reach full steam.

Big media companies are prowling for new media acquisitions. What are they looking for in potential partners?

Rupert Murdoch claims that the era of editors, chief executives and proprietors may be ending, to be replaced by a new generation of "internet pioneers."

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just published its third annual State of the News Media report. Weighing in at a hefty 630 pages (should you decide to print it), it's a comprehensive look at the American news business across all media.

The survey includes an interesting new section, "A Day in the Life of the News", which takes a randomly-chosen day (May 11 2005 this time) and surveys how broadcasting, publishing, online and bloggers covered the major and minor events of the day. It's a fascinating cross-section of American media in action.

As the report is so bloody huge, we're not going to digest it in one go. Instead, correspondent.com will dip in and out of the survey over the next week, and report with our analysis and those of other commentators. In the meantime, the six major trends the survey identifies are listed here, while an Executive Summary is available in PDF format here.

Good for Jeff Jarvis: He's running a one-man campaign against the pernicious influence of the PR industry in US newspapers - even though the Washington Post has joined the New York Times in criticising weblogs for cosying up the PRs!

Two tales of new and old media. iVillage, a multimedia web offering describing itself as "the internet for women", sells out to NBC Universal for $600 million. Commentators are surprised by the sum: Even though iVillage makes an annual profit of nearly $10 million, it has been touting itself for sale for over a year.

A fortuitous consequence of FT.com's free content week is that Reuter's chief executive Tom Glocer's speech to the Online Publisher's Association conference is now available online.

One of the major themes of last week's Online Publishers Association conference was - predictably - the clash between the worlds of old and new media.

Advocates of blogging and citizen journalism called for fewer subscription barriers and a more "open source" approach to news; traditional media companies argued that free content is all well and good, but the money to pay for coverage has to come from somewhere.

Sales of paid-for regional newspapers fell by as much as 12 percent in some UK regions, according to figures released by the Audited Bureau of Circulations.

"Journalism is an independent act of gathering and assembling information by an organization," writes Poynter's Everyday Ethics columnist Kelly McBride. "The work is completed in service of the audience. The journalists' loyalities are with the reader and viewer. You might question the independence and loyality of various news organizations, or even all news organizations. But at least, in theory, you expect those values to guide the process of gathering news," she adds, attempting to draw a line between professional reporters and the ranks of "citizen journalists."

Britain's Ministry of Defence has made a formal declaration that journalists and civilian media facilities will never be targeted in combat zones. However, the MoD has admitted that accidents have happened in the past, and may be unavoidable in the future. It added that journalists often find themselves in trouble because of a lack of understanding and preparation for combat zone reporting, and says that journalists entering war zones should receive full training beforehand.

Jeff Jarvis reports on the Digg phenomenon in the Guardian. He argues that the site is making the news "a community activity again."

Editor's weblog rounds up the experiences of three newspaper podcasting chiefs, including the UK Daily Telegraph's Guy Ruddle.

Also from Craig Newmark (this time his blog) comes the news that Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews has just won $11 million extra investment funding. The cash, from new strategic partner Softbank, will be spent spreading "citizen participatory journalism on the global stage."

A prominent media figure says that people are getting too excited about citizen journalism: "there's no substitute for professional-level writing and fact-checking and editing." Does this count as stating the obvious? Perhaps, and it might have been interpreted as just another salvo in this month's backlash against blogs, were it not for who said it - Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Local crime was one of the reporter's traditional beats. Apart from the goriest high-profile cases, crime reporting has suffered a relative decline in recent years. Could technology be launching the comeback of the old-fashioned crime reporter?

In September we reported that Yahoo had hired US journalist Kevin Sites to spend a year exploring the world's most dangerous war zones. Now the project is up and running, how is he getting on?

Yesterday's New York magazine report on blog winners and losers has rung alarm bells among some media commentators.

New York Magazine dedicates its front page to the blogging phenomenon, with profiles of "brand name bloggers", a look at the top fifty most linked to blogs and a long feature on the "haves and have-nots" of the weblog world.

Following on from today's news industry trends post, here's another list of trends identified in 2005 and which the Editor's Weblog expects will become big stories in 2006.

last year the World Editor's Forum published its Trends in Newsrooms 2005 report, claiming it to be the "essential resource for innovative editors and cutting edge newsrooms."

Fifteen years from now, the UK's Guardian might still be producing a print edition. Rather than the now-familiar "Berliner" newsheet, however, it's more likely to be a thinner, expensive publication "for people who really want that."

Any publisher will tell you that changing a newspaper is like turning around a supertanker. Successful newspapers are colossal brands, often family-owned and with a strong team ethic among the staff. These used to be strengths, but conventional new media wisdom has it that the sheer blundering power of big newspapers has made it impossible to react at the nimble pace required to keep up with the digital revolution.

But recent evidence suggests otherwise: They're taking their time, but they're getting there. Despite the foot-in-mouth proclamations of certain publishers and newsmen, newspapers are responding to the digital revolution.

So you want to build a new media empire to rival AOL-Time Warner or Fox. Where do you start? The International Herald Tribune collared four leading media execs at last month's World Economic Forum at Davos to hear their views...

Google's Visions Of China
01 February, 2006

The top image is the page you get if you type "Tiananmen" into Google Images.com.

If you make the same search request on Google's new Chinese service, Google.cn, the bottom screen comes up.

Censorship in action - thanks to Google for helping to perpetuate China's totalitarian fantasies.

Different worlds.

Waking The Grassroots
01 February, 2006

Reports of big media's demise have been premature. According to a report in Marketwatch, industry insiders have been underwhelmed by "citizen journalists" response to requests for help in building networks.

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Voting For News
01 February, 2006

Another interesting online-print dynamic: The Wisconsin State Journal now allows readers to vote a story from its website onto the front page of its print edition.

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Separation Of Powers?
31 January, 2006

Britain's powerful National Union of Journalists has just issued a series of guidelines aimed at regulation the use of citizen journalists - or what it calls "witness contributors" in the mainstream media.

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Bring On The Blogs
30 January, 2006

Traditional media have agonised about how best to incorporate weblogs into their offering. Some have offered readers the opportunity to create blogs within a newspaper's "umbrella", while others have allowed their reporting and comment staff to contribute to blogs on their newspaper's website.

The latest innovation comes from Swiss weekly L'Hebdo, which dispatched reporters from a wide range of beats to cover one of the epicentres the rioting that swept France in November last year.

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See No Evil
26 January, 2006

Google has been widely condemned for agreeing to censor its site in accordance with Chinese government demands. The search engine, whose unoffical slogan is "don't be evil", has agreed to block access to websites making reference to material which the Chinese government regards as "sensitive."

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A Call To The Bar
25 January, 2006

New media may have changed the way journalists work, but how much do they miss traditional newsroom practices?

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Serious Journalism
23 January, 2006

Reuters has announced the opening of a UK-based Institute dedicated to debating and scrutinising the news industry.

According to its chair, "Britain lacks an arena where the operations of journalism and its public policy implications can be seriously thought through and where anecdote and allegation can be tested by evidential research."

The Reuters Institute opens at Oxford University this autumn, where it will be a part of the university's Politics and International Affairs department. More in the Media Guardian.

Wrong Side Of The Tracks?
19 January, 2006

Debbie Galant went from freelancing for the very grand New York Times to running a busy and irreverent neighbourhood newsblog aimed at readers in three New Jersey communities. Her weblog, Barista of Bloomfield Avenue, produces up-to-the-minute news that her former colleagues might sneer at as smalltown stuff, but which has won a large following - and even the ability to get things changed in the community.

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"Melting Papers"
15 December, 2005

Digital Paper might be a few years away, but there's evidence that traditional newspapers could be gone before then - at least from their current format.

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Hold The Press
05 December, 2005

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine is just back from a planning meeting with the Guardian's management, and he's impressed by how British and European publishers are taking steps to address the digital revolution while their US counterparts flounder. As someone in his comments box has noted, the result is a "visionary post" and it's definitely worth checking out.

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Talking Heads
05 December, 2005

JD Lasica has an interesting video interview with Rocketboom writer/presenter Amanda Congdon today.

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Desktop Guardian
30 November, 2005

British newspaper The Guardian has launched a downloadable desktop newsfeed reader, packaging RSS feeds from the newspaper and other media sites in a stylishly-branded format.

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Big Media Is Next On Craig's List
23 November, 2005

Not content with having shaken up the classified advertising industry with his wildly successful Craigslist, Craig Newmark's next project aims to revolutionise the newsroom.

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Heard It On The Newsvine
18 November, 2005

Here's an interesting new media company: Newsvine. It's just launched in private Beta format, but a free public site opens shortly.

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$2m Crystal Ball
18 November, 2005

The American Press Institute has announced a $2 million study into new business models for the newspaper industry.

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Making The Front Page
18 November, 2005

Not long ago, the best that bystanders at a newsworthy event could expect would be a broadcast interview as an "on-the-scene eyewitness." Now that even the most basic mobile phone comes complete with a digital camera, witnesses can contribute photos likely to be flashed around the world.

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Says Who?
17 November, 2005

'The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said, "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."'

Who said this? A late-nineties net evangelist? A hack cheerleading another 2000 "Geek with the Golden Touch?'

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What's Frightening Them?
07 November, 2005

A British-American finance group has just acquired a German newspaper publisher. German journalists, intellectuals and some politicians are up in arms. What are they scared of?

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Bedtime For Big Media?
19 October, 2005

A group of bloggers and "traditional" journalists have joined forces to create a weblog news agency designed to raise the profile and credibility of the new medium.

Going under the working title Pajamas Media - a dig at the mainstream media's depiction of bloggers as "a bunch of guys in their pajamas" - the organisation aims to "out-report the mainstream media on turf they had long controlled."

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One More Thing...
19 October, 2005

Another contribution to Apple's media domination of the past few months: Time Magazine features a Steve Jobs interview as its cover story.

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Online Ad Spending Soars
04 October, 2005

More evidence of an online renaissance: Spending on online advertising shot up by 60 percent in the UK during the first six months of this year - and for the first time has overtaken billboard advertising.

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What's The Limit?
29 September, 2005

"Google as phone company? As cable provider? As university? As eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, and Yahoo all rolled into one? It is conceivable; and that, in the end, is what makes the company - and search, the application that spawned it - so fascinating. Nothing beguiles like the promise of unlimited potential."

Following on Proximity Vision's reports on Google and Yahoo's latest ventures, The Guardian provides some analysis of the options facing "the fastest-growing company of all time."

Google's Lucky Number
27 September, 2005

If like hundreds of millions of other web users you have Google set as your home page, you'll have noticed that the search engine giant is celebrating its seventh birthday today. That's seven years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the first Google data center in a student room at Stanford University - and now the company is one of the world's biggest names.

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Apple Expo Paris
26 September, 2005

Coming a mere fortnight after the high-profile launch of the iPod nano, the Apple Expo 2005 in Paris was not expected to be a platform for major Mac products. Apple's boss Steve Jobs wasn't going to deliver a keynote address, either - a sure sign that nothing major was due. However, it did offer the tech giant the opportunity to showcase its latest software - and gave many Europeans their first chance to get their mitts on the nano.

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Adventures In Capitalism
23 September, 2005

A sure sign that the second wave tech boom has arrived in earnest: US venture capitalists are spending again. In the first half of 2005, VCs raised more money than all of 2003, while this year is set to be the biggest year for mergers and takeovers since 2000.

This time VCs are spending smart as well as spending big. According to the International Herald Tribune,

"There is also the widespread growth of broadband Internet access, the popularity of Web-based cellphones and the emergence of a second generation of start-ups that are building on the successes and failures of the first. These and other factors are ushering in a renaissance of new start-ups, and venture capitalists are eager to take part in this second wave of Internet innovation."

Building A Broadcaster
22 September, 2005

Hot on the heels of its hiring a backpack journalist to contribute reports from warzones to its news ops, search engine giant Yahoo has stepped up its plans to enhance its content offering.

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Reporting The Trends
27 July, 2005

An industry weblog pulls together the six main strands of new media publishing, circa 2005ad.

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Napster News
22 June, 2005

As Associated Press rolls out its new flagship product designed to revolutionise newswire operations, disgruntled users are proposing alternative models for the newsroom of the future. Could a Napster-style file sharing network help AP return to its roots as a news agency co-operative?

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Blog Solutions
20 June, 2005

Mainstream Media publications have been trying to figure out how best to exploit the weblogging phenomenon for months. A French newspaper has come up with a novel way of adding readers' comments to its online edition.

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