Losses mount at Washington Post ahead of summer paywall plan
The Washington Post posted discouraging earnings Friday, with revenue and circulation down from a year ago. Read more at paidContent »
The Daily Mail: Paywall? We don’t need no stinking paywall
The Daily Mail, the world’s sixth largest news site, says it is not only growing digital revenue faster than most other papers, but has engagement levels that put it above Yahoo and even YouTube. Read more at paidContent »
The “barbell problem” in media: The ends are fine, but the middle is getting squeezed
photo: Flickr / George Kelly
Some of the larger traditional brands in journalism will probably wind up prospering in the new digital era, and some hyper-local ones will as well — but what happens to the players in the middle? Their future remains uncertain. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon launches “Send to Kindle” button for web publishers and WordPress blogs
Amazon launched a “Send to Kindle” button that publishers can add to their websites. The Washington Post and Time are among the first to sign up. “Send to Kindle” is Amazon’s answer to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper. Read more at paidContent »
Why the Washington Post is smart to try sponsored content, and why others should too
photo: Shutterstock / Eldorado3D
The Washington Post has launched a feature offering advertisers the ability to place sponsored content on its site, and while this form of advertising has come under fire, other media outlets should consider doing the same. Read more at paidContent »
Washington Post steps into sponsored posts with a new platform, BrandConnect
On Tuesday, the Washington Post stepped into the sponsored content fray with a new platform, BrandConnect, that lets marketers create content and publishes it on the newspaper’s homepage. Read more at paidContent »
Bradley Manning provides more evidence of why we need a media entity like WikiLeaks
During his court-martial trial, Bradley Manning said that he tried to contact journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post but got no interest and then decided to leak classified military documents to WikiLeaks. Read more at paidContent »
Can you automate political fact-checking in real time? Truth Teller is going to try
photo: Shutterstock/Donskarpo
Truth Teller is a prototype launched by the Washington Post — with funding from the Knight Foundation — that is designed to fact-check political speeches in real time. But can it do this? And will anyone care? Read more at paidContent »
Is the decline in longform newspaper journalism a good thing or a bad thing?
photo: Flickr / Jan Arief Purwanto
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the past decade has seen a dramatic decline in longer stories at some of the industry’s leading newspapers. But does that mean longform journalism is dying, or just evolving? Read more at paidContent »
News companies must pay for swiping Twitter pics (but our photo laws are still a mess)
photo: Lisa A
A new court ruling forces the Washington Post to pay for publishing disaster photos found on Twitter. The ruling may seem fair but it will do nothing to solve bigger issues of copyright law in the age of photo sharing. Read more at paidContent »
Snapchat rises: Why Poke’s decline shows Facebook’s inability to invent
photo: Zef Nikolla
Facebook’s Poke app, a copy of red-hot Snapchat rose almost to the top of the iTunes appstore on launch. A few days later it has tanked, making me wonder: can Facebook really invent any new Internet behavior or is it destined to be a copycat forever? Read more »
Paywalls roundup: Washington Post, Daily Beast, Gannett
The Washington Post is reportedly planning a paywall in 2013, and the Daily Beast is also contemplating metered access. Gannett announced this week that it is seeing a rise in revenues as a result of its paywalls. A news roundup. Read more at paidContent »
Why does the paywall debate always have to become a religious war?
photo: Shutterstock/Nickola Che
It seems that no discussion of the merits or weaknesses of newspaper paywalls is complete unless one side accuses the other of having virtually nothing intelligent to say on the topic. Is there no common ground at all between paywall advocates and paywall skeptics? Read more »
Four things the Washington Post’s new editor can do to avoid disaster
photo: Flickr user Zert Sonstige
The Washington Post’s new editor, former Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, faces a mountain of problems at the newspaper, which has seen circulation and revenues fall dramatically. Here are some areas he needs to focus on in order to turn the sinking ship around. Read more »
Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters
photo: Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa
Journalists like Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have questioned whether social media or the web have anything to contribute to journalism, but the case of Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong shows alternative sources like blogs and Twitter can play a powerful role in breaking news. Read more »
Clay Christensen, newspapers and the cliff of despair
photo: Flickr user Zarko Drincic
Like other industries that have been disrupted by new forms of competition, Clay Christensen says that newspapers were almost incapable of taking the steps they needed to take — even long after the danger of not taking those steps had become abundantly obvious. Read more »
No, giving away the news doesn’t mean lower-quality journalism
photo: Flickr user George Kelly
A Columbia Journalism Review columnist argues that a free or advertising-supported news model inevitably leads to lower-quality journalism. But there is no reason why ads can’t co-exist with high-quality reporting just as easily as they can subsidize pageview-driven clickbait, despite the CJR’s claims to the contrary. Read more »
Five reasons why media companies should pay attention to The Atlantic
photo: Flickr user Denise Chan
While it has gotten attention recently for the launch of its new online business offering, Atlantic Media has been making a lot of innovative and interesting moves in transforming its business from print to digital — moves that other media companies would do well to emulate. Read more »
Fact-checking politics: Why we need “open journalism” more than ever
photo: Flickr user Hans Gerwitz
There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary. Read more »
Why newspapers need to get to know their readers better
Although the ad-driven business model behind Facebook looks similar to that of a newspaper, the crucial difference is that the social network knows a lot more about its users. The more focus that newspapers put on doing the same, the better off they will be. Read more »
The one big thing that newspaper visionaries didn’t foresee
A memo written by the managing editor of the Washington Post in 1992 says a lot about how much of the future of media was obvious even then, but it also misses the most disruptive force the industry has seen — namely, the rise of social media. Read more »
Why the Washington Post will never have a paywall
The Washington Post is one of the few major newspapers left without some kind of digital paywall or subscription model, but despite the financial pressures on the company, publisher Donald Graham says he remains committed to not charging readers for the newspaper’s content online. Read more »
Paywall site Ongo, backed by NYT and WaPo, folds after 16 months
photo: Getty Images / Mario Tama
Paywall solutions are having a bad month. Google shuttered One Pass at the end of April. Now paywall and news aggregation site Ongo, which launched in January 2011 with $12 million in funding from the New York Times, Washington Post and Gannett, is closing. Read more at paidContent »
The decline of social-news apps and Facebook as a gatekeeper
The recent dramatic declines in users of some Facebook social-reading apps from newspapers like the Washington Post reinforces a lesson that media companies need to keep in mind at all times — namely, that Facebook is the information gatekeeper now, and you are just a provider. Read more »
Journalism: Dying by a thousand cuts, or being reinvented?
photo: Flickr user Denise Chan
When they think about competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look mostly at media players such as the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. But the reality is that much of what is competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely recognize as journalism. Read more »
ProQuest’s Udini is a cloud-based research tool for regular people
photo: ProQuest Udini
Online research database ProQuest’s usual customers are libraries and other large institutions that can afford to pay a lot for access. ProQuest’s new cloud-based tool, Udini, aims to make Internet research easy and affordable for everyday people — and builds in some Evernote and Instapaper-inspired features. Read more at paidContent »
The future of media = many small pieces, loosely joined
Some traditional media entities seem to be hoping for a single magic bullet that will cure their revenue problems, but it is more likely success will come from making a number of smaller bets. Unfortunately, large media players don’t tend to be good at that. Read more »
Why Bob Woodward is wrong about the internet and journalism
Veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward said this week the Internet would not be of much use in a case like Watergate, the story he helped break in 1972. But he misses the point about the value of using a multitude of sources instead of just one. Read more »
Newspapers: It’s not a revenue problem, it’s a culture problem
photo: Flickr user Tony Margiocchi
According to a Pew Research Center report that looked at 38 newspapers, both large and small, some are seeing massive declines in digital revenue while others are seeing dramatic increases. One of the main reasons for this discrepancy, the report suggested, are cultural differences within newspapers. Read more »
Why Warren Buffett is wrong about newspaper paywalls
Being a billionaire means Warren Buffett’s views on all kinds of things get a lot of attention — but his comments about the benefits of newspaper paywalls suggest the octagenarian investor misunderstands what the business of content looks like in our digital and hyper-connected age. Read more »
John Paton to news execs: Abandon the gatekeeper model
MediaNews Group chief executive John Paton reiterated his “digital first” message in a fire-and-brimstone speech to a journalism group in Toronto recently, saying media entities of all kinds must let go of their attachment to the “information gatekeeper” model or they will surely perish. Read more »
Facebook’s Latest Scoop: Thousands Of Journalists Use Subscribe Feature
For many news sites, Facebook has become one of the biggest sources of referral traffic to its stories, and today the social network reveale… Read more at paidContent »
Facebook data: Thousands of journalists now have a Subscribe button
According to Facebook, reporters have been especially receptive to the Subscribe button feature launched in Sept. 2011. The number of journalists who have enabled the subscribe button is now in the thousands, and the average journalist has seen a 320-percent boost in subscribers since November. Read more »
WSJ Poaches Narisetti From Washington Post
The reverb from Kevin Delaney’s departure from the Wall Street Journal for Atlantic Media Group just hit DC: WSJ alum Raju Narisetti is head… Read more at paidContent »
NewsRight Launches With 29 Publishers; 'Not A Litigation Shop'
Three years after the Associated Press started the News Registry to help publishers track their content online — and make money from reuse… Read more at paidContent »
Major Newspaper Publishers Band Together On Social Shopping Portal
photo: Corbis / Randy Faris
A group of eight newspaper publishers — Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Cox Media Group, Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Hearst, MediaNews Gr… Read more at paidContent »
Subscriber Content
Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Planning a paywall? Maybe you should sell some e-books instead
While the number of newspapers and other media entities that are erecting paywalls or launching subscription-based apps continues to grow, other content publishers such as The New Yorker are looking at different ways of monetizing their existing content, including e-books and one-off feature packages. Read more »
Hands on with the Washington Post’s new Android app
Washington, D.C.’s largest and oldest daily newspaper, the Washington Post, launched a free Android application on Monday. I tested the software and found it to be intuitive to use and full of valuable news content, photo galleries and real-time local data for the metro D.C. area. Read more »
The Morning Lowdown 09-30-11
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