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Introducing “News near you” on Google News for mobile

2011-05-13T17:15:00Z

Posted by Navneet Singh, Product Manager - Google News

Google News for mobile lets you keep up with the latest news, wherever you are. Today we’re excited to announce a new feature in the U.S. English edition called “News near you” that surfaces news relevant to the city you’re in and surrounding areas.

Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

Now you can find local news on your smartphone. Here’s an example of a “News near you” mobile section automatically created for someone in Topeka, Kansas:

To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.

You can turn off the feature at any time either by hiding the section in your personalization settings or by adjusting your mobile browser settings. Please visit the Help Center for further details.

So, go to news.google.com from your smartphone and get the latest news from wherever you are.

Storify launches public beta: Curation is a core news skill

2011-04-28T14:34:50Z

Word has been spreading about the intriguing online curation tool Storify. So far only a select group of private beta users have been able to use it. This week Storify entered its public beta phase, so now anyone can try it.

Here’s why every newsroom should learn to use a curation tool like this…

By Amy Gahran

News has always been social. People talk about current events, share links, offer opinions and context, and provide their own content. This happens through social media, blogs, media-sharing sites, and other digital channels. Storify allows you to choose key elements from this ongoing stream of content to construct a curated story-like narrative, Legos-style.

Curation is quickly becoming a core skill for news professionals. It involves recognizing that news and journalism are, and always have been, a collaborative process between reporters, sources, and communities.

By finding sources, choosing quotes, and framing context, journalists have always been engaging in a curatorial process. However, the result of that curation was packaged into a narrative story format—mainly because of the constraints of print and broadcast media.

Digital curation starts with learning the value of retweeting selectively, participating in Flickr photo pools, creating YouTube playlists, using Facebook for engagement and more. Tools like Storify allow you to to pull together a narrative that spans multiple services and platforms. It’s an especially valuable tool for telling a story in progress. The product is a work that is itself linkable and embeddable—which means, your story is easy to share.

Recently the Register Citizen (Torrington, CT) announced that one of its 18 newsroom positions will be dedicated to digital curation. It’ll be interesting to see if other news organizations follow this lead.

Storify is not the only digital curation tool out there. ScribbleLive is a similar tool designed to integrate more thoroughly with news sites. And undoubtedly there will be other entrants to this field.

The key is to start experimenting NOW with digital curation, using whichever tools are available to you. Newsrooms should foster this skill with a eye not just toward storytelling, but engagement.

Experience with digital curation increases career and business options for journalists and news organizations. But in newsrooms that are not keen on adopting digital curation tools, journalists can—and should—experiment with independent projects.

Digital curation tools will evolve. Users—perhaps especially journalists—will strongly influence this evolution.

Best practices. Recently, Staci Baird, a journalism instructor at San Francisco State University posted her guidelines for using Storify for news. She touched on this topic in her talk at the recent KDMC Mobile Symposium.

The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Guardian Readers 'Fix' the Fukushima Power Plant

2011-04-06T13:28:08Z

Should the Fukushima power plant be bathed in 'friendly radiation', or floated out over the Pacific ocean by air balloons? You decide

As a hip, 29-year-old man-about-town, I often fall asleep at night in front of BBC News 24. This means that my dreams often contain more current affairs content than other people's. After one episode of Newsnight last week I woke up in the middle of a picnic in Fortnum and Mason's, when my Mum unexpectedly turned into a zombie version of New Statesman's Laurie Penny and started beating me over the head with a tin of caviar.

Dreams can be useful though. Some of the world's most reputable websites, like increasebrainpower.com, claim that if you sleep on a problem, you're reasonably likely to wake up with a solution. So what if I could harness this power to solve issues in the news?

One opportunity to do this came with the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami, a natural disaster which killed tens of thousands of people in Japan, resulted in a critical emergency at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and most catastrophically of all for Daily Mail readers led to the detection of trace quantities of radioactive material near Oxfordshire.

The crisis at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant raged for weeks, with the main challenge being to find "the best ways to make the plant safe again." The answer came to me during a mid-Question Time nap last week – with the Space Shuttles recently decommissioned, surely we could use them to lift the damaged reactors into space, where they could explode in peace without causing harm to any people or wildlife, or unsettling the residents of Oxfordshire? As long as we tugged them in the opposite direction from the space station, I couldn't really see a problem with this plan.

If only there were some way for ordinary, unqualified members of the public with interesting ideas, but no actual experience or knowledge of how nuclear reactors work, to have their opinions published in a serious forum for the benefit of the energy industry and mankind.

And then something brilliant happened. The Guardian finally decided to step in and ask its readers for help: "Fukushima nuclear crisis: Send us your ideas for stopping radiation leaks." Their plea continued:

"The Fukushima plant remains in a critical condition and solutions to immediate problems are not forthcoming. That's why we're looking for your views on the best ways to make the plant safe again. In particular, we're looking for opinions from experts with knowledge of the nuclear industry, but whether you're an engineer in the field, an academic, or a nuclear plant worker, we'd like to hear from you."

Adding on the form, "please be as brief as possible," because the last thing you need in a crisis like this is a complicated solution.

Oddly my idea wasn't accepted, but many others were, representing some of the finest minds ever to have graced the Comment is Free forums.

Todd: "Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. [...] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste."
Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: "repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens"
Andrew, Inventor: "water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific."
Hugh, Geology Student: "I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench."
Max: "I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant"
OmegaSector: "IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil."
Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: "Small scale nuclear strike."
Kevin: "Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that's over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?"
Not Einstein: "friendly radiation... to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire."
ChemtrailsUK, I LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS: "They should have got that expert that's was on Alex Jones show. And did what He said ages ago to surround it in cadmium rods to atract the plutonium then cover in sand or quarts then as is melts into glass cover that in cement. Its way to late now. 1000 times Safety 1km out to sea of fukushima. No more sea food for me."
Harry: Moor a large tanker along side the plant. Flood the hull with water. With a large crane lift the problem reactor cores into the flooded hull, where the water will keep them cool for as long as it takes to sail the hull to a deep ocean trench and sink it.
Jon: Clearly, radioactive material such as Cesium, with a lifetime of 600 years, and Plutonium, which lasts many times longer than human history, should not be produced. It is a crime against humanity and life itself to do so.

And, er, so on.

Now to be fair to the Guardian, it's great that they tried to apply crowd-sourcing to journalism in an unusual and innovative way, and some of the suggestions offered were more sensible, and in at least one case vaguely approximated the fix that was actually applied yesterday.

But the thing is, as much as I love you all, I'm not going to ask for your help dealing with a nuclear disaster, because most of you, like me, don't have a clue. And yet there's this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general 'X-Factorization' of television, that somehow everyone's opinions are valuable and worth listening to.

Bollocks. As the late, great comedian George Carlin once said, "think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." 95% of the ideas that run through our heads are moronic, as the internet basically proves. If you want to know how to fix a power plant, or do brain surgery, or predict the effects of climate change, then ask an actual expert. Because no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea.

Contact: layscience@googlemail.com | @mjrobbins

Martin Robbins

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The iPad Destroys Journalism

2011-03-25T15:00:14Z

This also points to the need for new platforms that allow these media companies to syndicate their content. Proliferation of individual apps or channels is not the new model. Google/Yahoo news isn’t the new model – they’ve been surpassed by Facebook already. Community sites like Digg and Reddit are not even in the running.

via Bradford Cross, Measuring Measures – Measuring Measures – Why the iPad is Destroying the Future of Journalism.

Why Newspapers Need Community Managers

2011-03-21T10:32:47Z

Photo credit: Alana Fisher

The term “community manager” has been around for a while. However with the growth of social media in business, it’s turned into more of a buzz term. Do a search online for “Community Manager Job” and you’ll get hundreds, if not thousands, of results.

In an insightful post on the Econsultancy blog, they make an effort to clear up some of the smoke about what exactly a community manager is, and what they job really entails.

The author summed up the job title and purpose nicely:

Community managers are trained specialists, who guide and engage with the members of a community. They may get involved with setting the overall strategy for the community, working closely with the brands.

For our purposes, the “brand” is the newspaper. If the newspaper is smart and up with the times, then at the very least they are active in three areas: Story commenting on the website, a Facebook Fan Page, and a Twitter Page.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sky News Puts Monthly Fee On New iPad App

2011-03-17T10:19:54Z

Sky News became the latest News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) property to go gung-ho about tablets on Wednesday when it launched its first iPad app for free, but the app will be wrapped in to BSkyB’s subscription packages “at some stage in the year”.

“Sky subscribers will get it as part of their package, everyone else will pay a monthly fee,” Sky News’ head John Ryley said at a launch event Thursday morning. “We think it’s worth it.” Prices weren’t disclosed, though presenter Adam Boulton says ” a few pounds a month” and BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) tells paidContent:UK: “To be confirmed in due course.”

That model breaks with the notion from broadcasting, in which the Sky News TV channel goes out free on Freeview despite being operated by BSkyB’s pay-TV platform. The Sky Sports News app is currently free despite being paid on TV, though the Sky Mobile TV app requires subscription.

“Sky is a pay-TV operator,” Ryley said. “We believe there should be a value attached to our journalism. Sky News HD is already a premium service, so we’re already in the pay-TV market in news.

“Look how successful pay-TV has been. We launched nearly a year ago Sky News HD. Whilst I won’t go in to the numbers, it has had a very significant take-up on channel 501. People are paying for it.” Of course, BSkyB subscribers pay for HD, not specifically for Sky News HD.

The app is getting heavy coverage on Sky News today.

“We’ve put a lot of money and brain power in to it, but that’s because we believe that tablets are the future of news consumption,” Ryley said at a launch event compered by Sky News anchor Dermot Murnaghan. “Our journalism really fits the tablet.”

What’s the app like? It leads heavily on live news, is supposedly updated by the minute by a team of 15 editorial staff and includes multiple live video streams, interactive charts, maps and galleries. The live videos can be rewound.

But the user interface, which doesn’t employ typical iPad navigation controls, is confusing, with white-on-black text and incoherent presentation of items relating to each story somewhat obscuring the depth the app appears to have. Text equivalents of stories are downplayed.

For me, the inclusion of the 24/7 TV channel at least means I no longer have to watch Sky News’ rolling news via the TVCatchup website.

Build costs seem to have been significant. “This is a gamble, they’re big investments, but we think we’ve got it right,” Ryley said. SkyNews.com producer John Jelley added: “It’s taken significant investment. We had to come up with some completely new technology. We’re certainly looking at patenting some of the technology involved in it. We’ve got a lot of manpower on this.

Jelley scratched apps from BBC News, CNN and The Times for updating less frequently: “Most news apps repurpose web feeds and jazz them up a bit. That doesn’t take advantage of what the iPad can do. They’re large editions you have to download, they’re not live products.”

Sky News brought in bloggers to spread its word…

Mobile Users Like Local News Apps, But Most Won't Pay for Them

2011-03-14T14:20:00Z

A new study of mobile device users indicates that almost half use their handhelds to get some kind of local news or information. But will they pay for it? Here's the latest data: just 10 percent of adults who use mobile applications to get local news/info pay for these services, which is 1 percent of all adults. And most of them say they're not particularly interested in paying much more.

Matt Waite: To build a digital future for news, developers must be able to hack at the core of old systems

2011-03-08T19:46:24Z

"Instead of a single monolithic system, where a baseball game story is the same as a triple murder story, general interest news websites should be a confederation of custom content management systems that handle stories of a specific type. Each system has its own features, pulling data, links, tweets and anything else that can shed light on the topic. Humans + computers. Automated aggregates where they make sense, human judgment where it’s needed. The home page is merely a master aggregation of this confederation.

Each area of the site can evolve on its own, given changes in available data, technology, or staff. It’s the complete destruction and rebuilding of every piece of the workflow. Everyone’s job would change when it came to producing the news."

The new watchword? Deconvergence — it’s time to separate digital from print « ReJurno

2011-03-08T19:25:24Z

"The cold reality is this: you can’t have these two different cultures in the same organization anymore. They set up camps. They expend energy fighting each other for the same resources instead of toward creative efforts to improve their organizations. That’s what led to the demise of TBD.com."

Newspapers Need to Be Of the Web, Not Just On the Web

2011-03-04T17:04:09Z

The secret to online success for newspapers doesn’t depend on the choice of technology, or decisions about content, or even specific kinds of knowledge about the web, says Emily Bell — the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and the former head of digital for The Guardian. All it requires, she says, is a firm commitment to be “of the web, not just on the web.” Speaking at a journalism event in Toronto last night, Bell said the biggest single factor in the success that The Guardian had online was the determination to be part of the web, and to embrace even the controversial aspects of the online content game — including user-generated content and the use of tools to track readers and traffic. “Its useful to have the digital skills,” she said, “but more important to have a digital mindset.”

One of the most controversial things The Guardian did early on, according to Bell, was to launch the Huffington Post-style Comment Is Free platform in 2006, which allowed anyone to submit opinion or commentary pieces and have their blog posts run alongside the traditional columnists employed by the paper.

It was this last part of the project that really caused a furor within The Guardian, said Bell, because the traditional columnists didn’t want their pearls of wisdom to be appearing alongside the rantings of non-journalists, and they expressed their displeasure in no uncertain terms to Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. To his credit, Bell says the editor stood firm.

Bell also noted that one of the big factors in the rise of The Huffington Post was the New York Times‘ decision to put all of its columnists behind a pay wall, which it did in 2005. The wall was dismantled in 2007, but while it was in effect it locked the NYT’s opinion leaders away from the web, and effectively removed them from the discussion stream — which created a perfect opportunity for Arianna Huffington, and helped her build a business that AOL just acquired for $315 million. It remains to be seen what kind of impact the NYT’s new “metered” pay wall will have once it launches, which is expected to happen soon.

Bell said one of the mistakes most newspapers made was to not pay close enough attention to the technology side of the online content business, and to ignore the obvious impact of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Bell said she met with Google executives in 2004, and they warned that the traditional media industry was out of touch with what readers and advertisers wanted. But newspaper executives thought “that was just about search, and that wasn’t our business — but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was our business.” The same thing happened with the rise of social media, she says: “People thought, oh that’s not our business — but it was.”

The former Guardian executive said that using tools to track what readers click on doesn’t mean that “we will all just write about Britney Spears without her clothes on,” but simply means that journalists can keep an eye on what people are interested in reading about. The idea that paying attention to such metrics is somehow undercutting journalism is “just plain wrong,” she said. Bell also noted that newspapers have seen the digital side of their business as the risky part, when the reality is that the legacy print operations are actually more risky. “Even if you don’t know what is going to happen in your legacy business, you know what is happening now — you are losing money,” she said.

When asked during the Q&A session about how newspapers should blend their traditional newsrooms with their new digital operations, Bell said that “the jury is still out” on whether merging newsrooms is a good idea. But she said one thing was clear: that having traditional print editors telling digital staff what to do was “a recipe for disaster.” A number of newspapers that have merged their newsrooms — including the Washington Post, which used to have its print and online operations in two completely separate buildings, with separate management — have suffered after the merger because, as journalism professor Jay Rosen and others have pointed out, the “print guys won.”

Bell’s views on who should be driving the innovation at newspapers echo those of publisher John Paton, CEO of the Journal-Register Co., which owns a chain of regional daily and weekly papers in New Jersey and Connecticut. In a digital manifesto he wrote for the company last year, Paton said that newspapers need to “be digital first,” and that the best way to do that is to “put the digital guys in charge of everything.”

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Kevin Lim and George Kelly

“The price you pay for asking people to pay the price”: Gerry Marzorati on class and the NYT paywall

2011-03-03T13:00:05Z

Two years ago, when The New York Times’ Gerry Marzorati spoke at the Berkeley School of Journalism, “the newspaper was in free fall. I remember people volunteering to give you money,” Michael Pollan recalled.

Last night, when Marzorati, now the Times’ Assistant Managing Editor for New Products and Strategies, gave a talk at Berkeley about “Making the Online Times Pay,” the mood was much more optimistic. Marzorati told Pollan and Mark Danner, who jointly moderated the talk, that he was confident the Times’ new metered paywall system would be a success, and might even bring in enough revenue to enable the Times to expand.

But he was much less sanguine about the future of publications that cannot rely, as the Times and a few other publications do, on an elite readership.

“The audience for The New York Times — which is an affluent, well-educated audience — that audience will pay for premium information,” Marzorati said. (“Of course, advertisers want to reach that audience, too,” he noted later.)

“That has implications for other sections of society, other cohorts, that I think are going to increasingly get less clear, less concise, less thorough journalism.” It’s a national problem, he suggested. “We are living in a country where we are having inequality of all sorts, and one of the inequalities that is growing is the inequality between the really well informed and the not-well informed,” Marzorati said.

The print-and-ink news devices of the past served readers, rich or poor, with the same content in the same format. Not so with the iPad.

Asked at an event on Monday whether “the iPad is the solution” for the future of newspapers, Marzorati replied, “I think these devices are good for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and The Economist and the New Yorker. Whether it’s actually going to mean we’re going to have a better-informed society because of these devices, I’m not at all sure.”

“The most affluent parts of the culture are better informed than they’ve ever been,” he noted. “They understand how to navigate the terrain, and they can get tremendous amounts of information. The public which used to get their nightly news from the nightly network broadcast and Time and Newsweek, are they better informed now? No. I think they’re misinformed to an extent that would have been unimaginable in the 60s.”

“Someone who used to watch the network news because that was available is now watching Glenn Beck, and that person is not informed.”

But the extent to which individual news outlets can affect that situation, he noted Tuesday, is questionable. “I think it is a problem for our civic culture,” he said. “It’s not one the Times itself can really change.”

Marzorati didn’t add many details on Tuesday about the Times’ planned implementation of its metered paywall — which is “is in the final testing phase” and expected to “launch shortly,” per Times Company CEO Janet Robinson — although he did say that the paper might charge an additional fee, even to print subscribers, for full access to the Times across multiple platforms.

“If you are someone who only uses the Times occasionally and comes through search, you’ll continue to do that. You’ll continue to go to the homepage as many times as you want,” he noted. But “for someone who is having an online equivalent of the deep, immersive experience of reading the print version, if you’re reading many stories beginning to end, day in and day out, you will eventually get a notice that if you want to continue the experience, you are going to have to pay.”

The idea is to leverage the loyalty — and goodwill — of dedicated Times readers. “This isn’t going to be a panacea or a silver bullet,” Marzorati noted. “There’s a feeling that the people — what we know about those people — these people will be willing to pay to subscribe.”

Danner asked Marzorati about the Times’ paywall plan in light of polling statistics suggesting that only 18 percent of people who currently read a newspaper would be willing to pay to read it online.

“Obviously, we have seen the numbers,” Marzorati replied. “We just think the Times is different. We don’t think the Times is the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune. We think we have a connection with our readership which is different.”

The difference, he clarified, is that Freep and Trib readers may not be as willing or able as Times readers to pay a premium price for premium news. And that “is a gigantic problem, and the implications are going to play out in ways we don’t even know yet. I think, in particular, in state capitals, the falloff of covering state houses is going to be terrible.”

Marzorati also noted that one of the reasons the Times has been able to weather the news industry crisis as well as it has is that, instead of being dependent on local advertising dollars, it was able to get national advertising — including luxury advertising.

And the paywall, he said, shouldn’t hurt the paper’s advertising revenues. “We understand that the aggregate large number [of viewers] will come down. That’s just the price you pay for asking people to pay the price. Whether advertisers will care — I think not. I think a) there will be enough people who continue to use the website immersively, and b) there is also a propensity among advertisers to value someone paying for the product more than getting the product for free. They get information about users that they would not get otherwise, and they feel that that person has a deeper attachment to the product.”

Besides, he noted: “Remember the main place to advertise is the homepage, and the homepage will be available for free.”

The criterion for judging the success of the paywall, he said, is whether it will allow the Times to grow and expand its coverage. “We know we will survive, and that we will survive very much like we are now. But the challenge for us is how to grow as a business — which is to say, increasingly make profits the size of which we can then plow back and invest in the organization.”

“Obviously, if we were able to get a sizable percentage of the people who use the site in one way or another to pay for the site, that allows for all kinds of growth.”

And that growth will include global expansion. “We’re going to be building a kind of mini website for India,” Marzorati noted. India “is an enormous newspaper-reading culture that is only now beginning to transition online, and we want to be there and we want to have a product that not only appeals to Indians, but also Indians in the diaspora who might want information about India from a product that they are now using here.” So “we’re plowing money into that.”

For the Times, he said, “growth is about figuring out interesting ways to invest and do more different kinds of journalism.” And for now, the ability to grow is a goal along with growth itself. “We would just like to have that kind of mindset. “

UK's Biggest Regional Paper Flipping The 'Paid' Web Switch

2011-03-01T21:47:27Z

The UK’s best-selling regional daily newspaper will start requiring a bundled print-and-web subscription for the majority of its website articles.

In the UK, the recent re-awakening of the paid web news phenomenon has been mostly led by nationwide newspapers like News Corp.‘s The Times. So this move by the Wolverhampton-based Express & Star of the English Midlands is significant.

In its version, the paper “will continue to publish highlights of the day’s news on the front page of its website, which will remain free-to-view, but other content will be behind the paywall”, says Journalism.co.uk.

Deputy editor Keith Harrison (suggests) the move is intended to boost Express & Star‘s paying print readership, if not its web audience: “We’re not trying to sell this as a standalone, in competition to the hard copy paper. It’s a package to add value and help the overall circulation.” No details of the bundle are yet available, however.

The timing is interesting, because Expressandstar.com’s traffic has grown healthily…

Is it any coincidence that print circulation has been falling in that time… ?

Few local and regional titles, which, in the UK, cover only news from their local patch, operate paid fees. Some Tindle titles charge for digital print replicas. Johnston Press last year trialled a paid web model around six titles but never went ahead with it, following apparently low take-up.

In the U.S., several more metropolitan papers have been going behind the “paywall”.

Apple’s Digital Newsstand Just Disrupted The Publishing Industry

2011-02-16T00:04:56Z

How much pricing power exactly does Apple have over publishers desperate to figure out a digital strategy that results in paying subscribers? A hell of a lot—at least that is what Apple is betting with its new subscription billing service. Apple is taking a 30 percent cut of all digital subscription revenues. Just take a moment to think about that for a second.

Up until now, Apple took a 30 percent cut of one-time purchases in iTunes. So the 30 percent number doesn’t seem strange, at least not to consumers. What do we care how the money is split up as long as we all of these digital goodies are affordable? But publishers and other media companies with subscription businesses (cough, Netflix, cough) care very much. Apple is saying if we deliver a paying customer, we will take 30 percent of their subscription dollars in perpetuity as long as they consume your media on our devices.

You could argue that iTunes is the new digital newsstand, and so it deserves a cut. True, it does deserve something, but let’s compare what Apple wants to take with what a real newsstand collects. Typically, magazine companies take as much as 75 percent of the cover price of a magazine sold at a newsstand, which shows who has the pricing power in that relationship. But that is on a per-issue basis. The newsstands are merely lead generators which get people to sample magazines and newspapers before a portion of those people convert to paying subscribers. The newsstands don’t get anything extra for helping to bring in a new subscriber, forget about an ongoing cut of the subscription fee. Of course there are services that deliver subscribers to publishers, but even they don’t get an ongoing cut of the subscription. It’s more of a lead-gen type deal.

Apple is now telling media companies to forget about the way they’ve been doing business for decades. There are new rules in its digital newsstand. And, while some big publishers like might try to hold the line or go over to Android, in the end if consumers decide they want to read digital magazines on their iPads, they may have no choice but to do what Steve tells them to do.

And that could kill their business. Not only would they be handing over a substantial portion of their revenues to Apple, but they get virtually no data in return—data about customers. It’s that credit card data they use to do their consumer marketing and sell those readers to advertisers. So yeah, there’s going to be lots of resistance to Apple’s subscription scheme. No wonder the antitrust knives are already out. In the end, the old guard will fight it as long s they can, while new entrants with nothing to lose will build readerships on the iPad. It’s probably never been a better time to start a digital magazine.

Correction: An earlier version of this post reported that magazine publishers collect 95 percent of newsstand sales, which came from a source at a magazine publisher. After this figure was questioned in comments, I went back to my source who admitted he was wrong and suggested that for a large publisher with clout 70 to 75 percent was a better figure. Some commenters say it is closer to 50 percent, which may be true for smaller publishers. Nevertheless, these only apply to single issue sales—the equivalent of a paid download in the App Store—not ongoing subscription fees.

Photo credit: Susan NYC

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Traditional Publishers that Agree to Apple’s iOS Subscription Demands are Insane, or Desperate

2011-02-16T02:15:48Z

"The arrogance of this is stunning. Consider, first, that publishers are not allowed to sell their content at a higher price inside the App Store even though Apple takes 30 percent of the money. And then consider that publishers are not allowed even to show their audiences, from inside the apps, how they can bypass Apple and get the subscription directly from the publishers themselves.

The second demand is in line with Apple’s current insistence that it can decide what content is allowed within news organizations’ apps. The cowardice they’ve shown in this arena has surely emboldened Apple to extend it in this anti-customer way.

None of this should surprise anyone who’s been watching Apple take firmer and firmer control of the iOS ecosystem, or who’s watched media companies compete for the right to be Apple’s pets. But it’s discouraging nonetheless." (Via Mathew Ingram)

HuffPo economics shows that Digital Newspapers are still unsustainable

2011-02-14T15:19:44Z

Huffington Post Blogonomics (from New York Times)

Interesting article on the economics of the Huffington Post in the NYT - apart from (as you'd expect) having a strong power law relationship between post and popularity - see diagram above - a few nuggets emerge:

Early on Friday morning, I counted the number of comments in two types of Huffington Post articles — those, respectively, in its news (paid) and blog (unpaid) feeds. The count covered articles that were published over a three-day period from Tuesday, Feb. 8 through Thursday, Feb. 10, and which the site had labeled as politics pieces. Over the course of these three days, The Huffington Post (I have abridged the text to pull out The Numbers):

- published 143 unpaid blog posts. Collectively, they received 6,084 comments, or an average of 43 per article.

- published 161 articles in its politics news feed. The articles in its politics news feed received 133,404 comments: more than 800 per article, and roughly 20 times as many as its blog posts

Not all of these reflected original reporting, like that of Sam Stein or Howard Fineman, but they were all articles that The Huffington Post was paying for in one way or another: whether to reporters, or to editors who curate and repackage content (sometimes brushing up against fair use guidelines) generated at other Web sites, or to news wires like The Associated Press.

That means that there were about 50 page views per comment on average.

At this 50:1 ratio, the average blog post, which received 43 comments, got about 2,150 page views.

The top-performing blog post — one by the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich — had received 547 comments (tantamount to about 27,000 page views) as of Friday morning.

By contrast, more than 40 percent of the blog entries received 5 comments or fewer.

So far so good, now for the economics:

The Huffington Post had revenues of about $30 million last year, they’ve reported, almost all of which was from display advertising. This revenue was generated on roughly 4.8 billion page views over the course of 2010, according to Quantcast data. That means the average page view was worth a little more than six-tenths of a cent, or that 1,000 page views were worth about $6.25.

Do the multiplication, and you find that the average blog post — which we estimate generated a couple thousand page views — was worth about $13 in advertising revenue (Demand Media pays about $15 an article for comparison, but I can't tell the diference in input costs to produce). The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4. Even Mr. Reich’s strongly-performing post was worth only about $170, by our estimates.

So assuming the average blogger churns out say 8 stories a day, 6 days a week (round that up to 50 posts) they can earn (assuming 2 weeks a year vacation) a maximum of about $10,000 per annum gross at $4 per annum. You clearly therefore want to be one of the Median bloggers, who get a few big hit stories - that's a whopping $33,000 per annum.

Of course, the HuffPo is going to take quite a lot of that (all of it in the case of the Free Bloggers).

And yet, and yet, I hear you say - how could AOL value the Huffpo at $315m, ie (at 4.8bn pageviews) 6.6 cents per pageview, or at c $140 per Median Post, so your heroic Median Blogger actually created c $350,000 of value to the sellers (ie the owners) for the total potential payment of $33,000 - a 10:1 ratio (and that's assuming they got all the value paid to them, which was extremely unlikely).

There are 3 main lessons from this:

1. What Nick Carr called the "Digital Sharecropping" nature of user generated content is alive and well in online newspapers. At those sort of numbers you are daft to do anything except write your own blog unless you are one of the top performers or a total newbie.

2. If the Huffington Post (and by extension, the Digital Newspaper industry) had to pay anything like the economic value of the workers' content produced, (or even enough for a decent living) the industry wouldn't exist (and these sort of pay to value ratios make anything Marx was protesting about look positively insipid). This business relies on people working for subeconomic wages.

3. It's worse - the only reason there is that amount of Ad revenue is because of vigorous curation and SEO maximisation to get Google hits. What happens if Google et al start to respond to increasing user clamour for cleaner search results?

The rest of the article is about economic models for how journalists may get paid, but I think that's a pipe dream as long as others are prepared to work for free. The real lesson from social media businesses remains, from MySpace on - be an owner, get other sucke....sorry, valued contributors - to contribute content for whuffie and change, and sell the f*cker to some dumb mon...strategic investor before you run out yourself.

On that note, Broadstuff get about 3/4 million views a month on average, so at Average HuffPo value it's worth about $56,000 per annum in revenue term, and thus by extension (Revenue to Purchase Price) that makes us worth c $600,000 to buy.

Anyone want to buy this f*cker, going cheep

Washington Post Announces Personalized News Aggregation Site

2011-02-11T19:22:33Z

The Washington Post announced Friday it will launch Trove, a site that aggregates news and enables users to personalize their news stream based on their interests. The site, which is currently in private beta, is expected to launch in March.

The announcement highlights a trend among news publishers looking to personalize news consumption based on social connections and topical interests. Trove combines aggregated stories picked by editors, along with the ability for users to select from “channels” they are interested in, through a simple on-boarding process that asks the reader, “What do you care about?”

The homepage presents these two content types side by side, fulfilling the readers’ need for serendipitous discovery of content as well as feeding their want for content they are interested in. It’s aiming to achieve the balance between news that editors think you should know about versus the news you want to know about.

Of course, the service also integrates social conversation. In the sign-up process, users connect their Facebook accounts, which enables them to then view the conversations taking places around stories in the channels they’ve selected. It also uses your Facebook profile to determine content you might be interested in based on what you’ve selected in the interests of your Facebook profile.

Personalized Content

Using a quiz-like selection process between stories, the site asks users to select the topics they want to follow. The selection shows the user both the topic and a story example and asks which story the user would prefer. He or she can select one or the other, both or skip them all together. Based on the user’s selections, Trove builds a stream of channels with stories that link out content from across the web. It also uses an algorithm to suggest related channels that the user might be interested in keeping up with.

That’s the interesting part. The content comes from all around the web (more than 10,000 news source, according to the Wall Street Journal), and not just The Washington Post‘s site, which is also likely why the company built it as a separate product. However, integrating this feature into the site may have given it more exposure, rather than attempting to create another destination portal.

Users can filter their channels and customize them by selecting what is included and what isn’t as part of the channel, changing the stories that go into the layout. Users can even select the source for a specific channel. For example, if I really enjoy The Guardian‘s coverage of Egypt, I could select that as a “must have” or an “avoid” to further filter my channel.

The Post invested between $5 million to $10 million in the product, taking quite a gamble to build a destination for a place where the reader is able to personalize the content. The gamble isn’t necessarily on personalized content itself because that’s nothing new. In fact, most of the recent sites that let readers personalize their consumption have been largely built as apps for iPads, with the likes of the Flipboard, the coming of News.me and Pulse.

Social Dialogue

Though Trove is taking a stab at creating a personalized news environment, its social integration has a ways to go. Of course this is still very early for a product that’s in beta, but if it is to capture a wider audience and provide utility for readers, it will have to include features that are more innovative than simply being able to see the conversations around stories and being able to add comments on channels. The dialogue should be more social and integrated into the consumption experience. Right now, its social aspects feel a lot like a forum.

Trove doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its name: a newfound treasure. It’s far too similar to other aggregation news sites out there, most notably Google News. The utility of Trove isn’t different enough from other aggregators, aside from its user interface and the ability to easily filter content.

If the site is truly about helping users find the signal in the noise, it will use the selected interests to build more focus in the channels created, rather than continuing to add a stream of content based on the user’s interests on the main page.

Perhaps the treasure trove in the site is yet to be found. The idea is to build a product that helps surface and amplify quality and interesting content. Right now, however, Trove does not effectively execute its goal to find a signal through the noise.

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Kindle Books Now Outselling Paperbacks at Amazon

2011-01-27T21:11:55Z

It’s official: electronic Kindle books are now outselling paperbacks on Amazon, marking a major milestone in the publishing industry.

The news was revealed in Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings report, and comes just six months after the company announced that e-books were outselling hardcovers.

In a statement, CEO Jeff Bezos said, “Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected – and it’s on top of continued growth in paperback sales.”

The company adds that for 2010, it sold 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperback books, and “three times as many Kindle books as hardcovers.” Those numbers don’t include free Kindle books, making the numbers all the more significant. The growth in e-books, as well as strong sales of the Kindle 3, helped Amazon achieve $10 billion in a single quarter for the first time in its history.

More About: amazon, e-books, Kindle, trending

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Has Google Admitted Defeat in the Social Web Race?

2011-01-05T16:49:58Z

Google has been trying over the past year to inject some social networking DNA into the company by building social aspects into some of its services — and launching new services such as Google Buzz — in an attempt to keep up with the growth of Facebook, but so far its efforts have not had much effect. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster now says that the web giant has “given up on social,” because it realizes it doesn’t stand a chance of actually competing with Facebook. The problem with doing this, as the analyst notes, is that as advertisers continue to chase the social graph, Google will have very little to offer them.

Munster made his comments in a video interview with Bloomberg News on Wednesday, and much of his analysis echoed the points we have been making at GigaOM for some time: namely, the idea that Google needs to be afraid of Facebook and its social graph (subscription required), because “social search” is becoming an increasingly competitive force on the web, as consumers look to their friends and social connections for recommendations rather than a simple algorithmic search. While Google is not going to disappear any time soon, it has yet to find a way to really take advantage of the increasingly social nature of the web. Says Munster:

Facebook has shown that finding information is more social-based and less machine-based, and as people trust friends more than machines, you’re going to see ad dollars shifting from Google over to Facebook.

Google has been integrating social elements into many of its services — including the addition of Twitter results to its search pages, and an update to its search indexing system to make it more real-time, as well as enhancements to Google News that allow users to customize their news (and the potential integration of Twitter). Buzz, however, appears to remain stalled in terms of mainstream adoption, and there has been little sign of any overarching social strategy, apart from comments from Eric Schmidt that the company plans to add a “social layer” to its services rather than the single Facebook competitor some expected Google to launch under the code name Google Me.

Part of the problem, as Om and others have argued, is that Google doesn’t seem to really understand social networking on a fundamental level, or have social elements as a core part of the company’s DNA the way Facebook does. Although both companies are staffed with engineers, Facebook is driven by being social in a way that Google is not. Adam Rifkin noted in a blog post last year that Google is dedicated to serving people who want to find things quickly and then leave (a group he referred to as “pandas”) while Facebook has focused on getting people to stay longer on the site, and has only recently begun expanding outwards through the use of social plugins such as the “like” button.

In his comments to Bloomberg, Munster also said that Facebook has become the cool place to work, and is stealing employees away from Google in the same way that the search company used to take people from Microsoft and other aging tech giants. Facebook “is like Google was five years ago,” according to the Piper Jaffray analyst, while the web giant is “turning into Microsoft” because it is no longer innovating. And while Facebook may be small compared to Google — with a market value estimated at $50 billion to Google’s $200 billion — Munster said that the social network’s growth rate is much higher, and that it is where “ad dollars are going to go in the future.”

Accusing Google of turning into Microsoft may be a little harsh, but there’s no question the company has so far failed to make much headway in terms of the social web, and Munster is right that advertisers and others appear to be increasingly looking to the social graph and social connections in addition to (and potentially as an alternative to) algorithmic search ads. That is a challenge Google has to find a way of dealing with somehow — and quickly.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Kurt Nordstrom

On the increasing uselessness of Google.....

2011-01-02T12:36:26Z

The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul Kedrosky found the same:

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

And I can't believe Google doesn't know this - nor does Paul:

Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But it's hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem. Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility. For my part it has had a number of side-effects. One, I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of which I use mechanisms other than broad search. Second, it has made me more willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers -- the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Reading the comment's on Paul's blog post was interesting - you can parse the responses into 3 broad groups:

- Yes, we agree with you, and here are some tips on how to deal with it
- Yes, but its not poor Google's fault, its those evil spammers (ie Google has no way of changing their systems and is at the mercy of SEO)
- No, there is no problem, this is the best of all possible solutions (complete bollocks IMHO, it was definitely better a few years ago)

(Ignoring the ones trying to pimp their own products or agendas of course, and the end posts comparing the economics of online vs library copies of Consumer Reports.....)

Ignoring these comments, I have found my behaviour is exactly the same as Paul's , i.e. increasingly reaching for paid-for, edited research (Which? in the UK) as Google and some of the "comparison" sights (clearly flooded with Spam, Sock Puppets and Sleazeoids) become less and less credible. (Another aside - I had a gift voucher from Amazon, and searching for a book I wanted I found Page 1 was totally full of results for the book on Kindle, which was very irritating - they need to allow one to select e-book and/or book).

The interesting question to me is what happens if this gets worse, as Google risks attacks on 2 fronts:

(i) Other search engines decide to eschew Ads for accuracy and cut down the spamming, to gain market share. There is an article on Techcrunch today about Blekko, which appears to promise this.

(ii) The market for paid-for search and research grows - how much would you pay per month for a neutral search engine? Which? costs about £7 a month, would you pay that for a neutral engine?

Frankly, I don't believe that it is not possible to reduce this sort of spam, I think Google's problem is more that it is trying to navigate a line between income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has veered too far to the spamside.

Update - this piece was ReTwt'd by Tim O'Reilly, and had the equivalent of a slashdotting so down went our server - fortunately those nice people over at Hacker News pointed to the proxies pronto. I liked two of the themes in the comments there:

(i) a lot of these sites must be known, ditto their pattern, so just a few weeks judicious "mechanical turk" work should have a large 80/20 impact

(ii) Google is like a monoculture, and thus parasites have a major impact once they have adapted to it - especially if Google has "lost the war". If search was more heterogenous, spamsites would find it more costly to scam every site. That is a very interesting argument against the level of Google market dominance

Update 2 - Anil Dash and Coding Horror have picked up on the same issue today.

Update 3 - Bruse Sterling has picked up on the story - his comment:

"we may be approaching a period where the machines will feed you an infinite amount of cunningly-engineered gibberish"

Yes, Finds Pew Study, People Will (and Do) Pay For Digital Content

2010-12-30T16:48:42Z

For a long time - right or wrong - content on the Internet has been synonymous with "free." Free music. Free videos. Free access to your local newspaper. Free blogs. And so some have worried that people might be reluctant to actually spend money to buy digital content if they can already find it (or something similar) online without having to pay. But a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project should assuage some of those fears. In fact, almost two-thirds of Internet users have paid for digital content.

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In a survey of 755 Internet users this fall, Pew found that 65% have paid to download or access some kind of online content from the Internet. The purchased material ranged widely -from music to games to news articles, with music, software and apps being the most popular. The survey looked at "intangible" objects - digital content that needn't have a physical form - not at "tangible" goods and services that people can buy online.

33% of those surveyed had purchased music online, and the same percentage had purchased software. 21% had purchased apps for their mobile devices. And 19% had purchased games. 18% said they'd paid for digital magazines or newspapers. And 16% said they'd paid for videos or movies. Only 10% say they've purchased e-books. The Pew survey asked about 15 different content types all told, and found that people's digital consumption habits were varied, with 6% of respondents saying they bought content not included in the Pew's list of 15.

According to the survey, most people who buy digital content online spend about $10 per month, but the average is higher: $47 per month, including both subscriptions (an average of $12 per month) and individual file access ($22 per month). In order to access this content, 23% turn to subscription services while 16% download the file and 8% stream it.

This is the first year that Pew has conducted this particular survey, so there isn't any historical data to see how online purchasing may be trending. But the news seems to be good for those who want to charge for digital content, provided, so it seems, that it costs less than 10 bucks.

Discuss