The Guardian said the Times website had lost almost 90% of its readers since the paywall kicked in.

They referred to figures cited by Dan Sabbagh at BeehiveCity:

Number of people registering for The Times and Sunday Times websites during the free trial period: 150,000

++ Update 19/07 noon:  I’m now hearing from official sources that this number is in fact somewhat higher. But I’m hearing no challege to the more important numbers below ++

Number of people actually agreeing to pay money: 15,000

Number of people paying for The Times’s separate iPad application: 12,500

He goes on to put the new, paying, online customers into some context by comparing them with the number of lost print subscribers in the past year and comes up with this doom-laden sentence:

…it means that the 27,500 new digital subscribers are equivalent to 10,576 new print readers. Now compare that to the annual sales decline of 45,778…

The FT said the Times had lost two-thirds of its readers since the paywall was enforced and added:

The strategy is based on the theory that a mixture of subscription revenues and targeted, high-yielding advertisements can offset the lost value of advertising to tens of millions of low-commitment browsers. Charging for online content is unusual in the generalist news space, but specialist publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have paywalls. One media buyer said The Times had doubled its online advertising rates since the paywall went up, as News International seeks to demonstrate the value to advertisers of fewer but higher-quality readers.

The FT quoted figures from Experian Hitwise collated by research director Robin Goad:

The most significant fall in visits was in the weeks just before the paywall went up, when visitors were asked to register before viewing Times articles. Traffic fell 58 per cent in the five weeks between May 22 and June 26, with The Times’ share of UK news and media web traffic falling from 4.37 per cent to 1.83 per cent.

In the week after charging began on July 2, the rate of decline moderated, although World Cup news might have boosted web visits. Between July 3 and July 10, visits fell to 33 per cent of The Times’ pre-registration level, or 1.43 per cent of the market.

Goad, who published some initial stats a month ago, posted updated figures on his Hitwise blog this week:

The latest data for the week ending 17 July 2010 shows that The Times‘ market share has dropped off further still to 1.37% of the News and Media – Print category. The rate of decline is slowing however and the data suggests visits to The Times’ website are stabilising.

Experts and commentators may crow that this is exactly what they said would happen when Rupert Murdoch first took the decision to put The Times behind a paywall. Just take a moment though to see what the site has achieved.

The Times has retained a third of their online visits, and visitors are still spending an average of around three minutes per visit on the website, indicating that they are happy to pay for the content and not disappearing to alternative sites for news.

Time will tell if The Times loses further market share and when the introductory offer of “£1 for the first 30 days” expires perhaps consumers will search for their news content from other providers. So far though, The Times seems to be doing just fine. For now Mr Murdoch’s gamble has paid off.

Mathew Ingram suggests the object of the paywall is not so much to keep people out as to keep people in:

For many newspapers, the main driving force for instituting a paywall is to keep print readers from migrating away from buying the physical product (which still generates the majority of advertising revenue at most newspapers) to reading for free online, where their eyeballs are worth less than they would be in print. Think of it as eyeball arbitrage.

And Michael Wolff said there’s an ‘empty world’ behind the paywall and it’s all designed to slash costs:

Beyond the fact that we journalists, behind a paywall, will have fewer readers (our real currency), Murdoch, I rush to remind, has always run a ruthless newsroom, in which nobody comes out ahead but Rupert. In that light, it may be better to see the paywall as not about making more but about costing less. The paywall, and the integration of the Times and the Sunday Times behind it, becomes the deus ex machina by which (and this has long been a Murdoch dream) Murdoch and his son, James, the paper’s boss (with his eager corporate lieutenants, Rebekah Wade Brooks and Will Lewis), happily tear up several centuries of history and join the Times and the Sunday Times—and save a fortune.

Organ Grinder chimes in with a post about the Daily Mail doing perfectly well without a paywall:

Take the Mail in print. Around 1.9 million punters buying a copy every day, which means 4,881,000 readers scanning their favourite sheet each morning. And online, the growth from nothing much four years ago to 40,500,000 unique browsers a month is verging on the phenomenal: up 72% year on year. Through 2009, the Telegraph and the Guardian were two close competitors – sometimes ahead, often very near to, the Mail. Not now. Both still have good growth of their own, but Associated’s electronic baby – 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world – begins to hint at a different league.

Ah! Perhaps that’s because it is in a different league, say the snipers. Look at those yards of celebrity gossip and pictures on the site; this isn’t the Mail we know (and don’t much love). This is a different beast that somehow doesn’t count because it fights unfair.

Park that charge for a moment, however, and ask why the Mail’s online chief, Martin Clarke, is clearly (though pragmatically) opposed to paywalls. Because he doesn’t need them. Because the surge of traffic is bringing in advertising fast. Because he can see a moment, very soon, when his digital daily will make real profits of its own.

Oh, and Journalism Online, which aims to help newspapers charge for content, has got its first user up and running with its Press+ app:

Pennsylvania’s LancasterOnline went live this morning with the first newspaper use of Journalism Online’s Press+—metered out-of-town access to obits. The meter kicks in after an out-of-market user reads seven obits in one month; viewing more will cost $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. [Slideshow.] The plans were outlined earlier this year with hopes for a spring launch but “it took a little longer to test and be satisfied with it than we thought,” Ernie Schreiber, the site’s editor of content development, told paidContent.

Just about every news website created in the past 15 years has pushed users down a similar path: show them a whole bunch of headlines, arrayed into a variety of design styles, then expect the user to choose one of them and begin what the site hopes will be a lengthy run of clicking on stories. It’s a decision tree: Here are your options, now make a choice.

The very attractive BBC app takes a key step away from that pattern. When you launch the app, you’re not confronted just with a bunch of headlines — you’re also thrown immediately into the text of the app’s top story, without so much as a click. And once you’re reading one story, the act of flicking to another one seems closer to a default act than when you’ve just selected from a menu of options.

It’s a model that makes perfect sense from a broadcasting background; a BBC radio or TV show doesn’t wait to ask which story the listener wants first. It just dives right in. Considering how many news website users never get past that list of initial headlines, dumping the reader directly into a story might be a way to push browsers into readers. The BBC may not rely on in-app advertising to pay the bills, but for sites that do, it’s a model worth watching.

Then there’s Flipboard, an app that lets you browse your social media accounts in a magazine format. Here’s Robert Scoble talking to Flipboard founder Mike McCue.

Patrick Meier on media use of Ushahidi from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The following is from the GigaOm blog of Mathew Ingram (someone I enjoy following on Twitter: @mathewi).

A recent presentation by Toby Wright, chief technology officer at the Telegraph Media Group — one of the world’s oldest newspapers — suggests that they can take a tip from startups when it comes to being more efficient: namely, use cloud-computing services.

In his talk at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, Wright described how the organization is using cloud services for a range of different functions (hat tip to Roy Greenslade for spotting this). The list includes:

• Google Apps — for email and collaboration tools (document sharing, etc.)
• Salesforce — to manage the newspaper’s reader subscriptions system
• SuccessFactor — for human resources management
• Disqus — for managing of online comments and forums
• Amazon EC2 — for hosting real-time analytics
• Ooyala — for hosting and distributing video content

The Telegraph CTO didn’t say exactly what kind of impact the move to cloud services has had in financial terms, but he did say that from now on, the newspaper plans to make all of its new business ventures cloud-based. The CTO said that the company has no interest even in managing servers that are hosted somewhere else, or what he called “virtual tin.” And according to a report at CIO.com, Wright said that he believed using cloud services would be more secure than managing them internally, because most cloud providers actually have more stringent security than the newspaper group does.

Ingram concludes that other newspapers should take a leaf out of Wright’s book. I agree.

Cloud-based services are obviously something we’re all about at allaboutthestory.com, which we see ultimately as a platform not only for buying and selling content but also for sharing, distribution and other aspects of content management.

Like Wright, we know there are all sorts of services that can be cheaper and more efficient to buy in from outside. Same goes for exploratory projects that aim to foster efficiencies, culture change and cost control. How about an internal marketplace where departments (web and print, features and commercial supplements, graphics and scribblers) find and trade content at real-world prices to help you minimise waste and keep your staff realistic about costs? Sure, you could build something yourself. Or you could get allaboutthestory.com to build or host it for you. Bet we could do it cheaper and more innovatively and without distracting your teams from other core projects.

Ingram notes that TMG, like most newspapers, doesn’t use the cloud for publishing its content “presumably because it sees this as too important to hand over to someone else, or because it can’t make the transition from the kind of legacy software that most modern newspapers use to publish their content.”

The trouble with the legacy software Ingram’s referring to is that lifecycles are so long it makes it impossible to innovate quickly. Generally a year or more will be spent defining the requirements for a new CMS and shopping for suppliers, then another couple of years for development (during which the supplier will take longer to deliver less than you agreed), and then a year of rollout and training and bug-fixing. So four years on you’ve got slightly less than you wanted five years ago. Hopeless.

That’s going to have to change. If there’s one thing I took away from the many hours I spent considering future newsroom workflows at TMG, it’s that news orgs need way more flexibility from their publishing systems than they have now. They need leaner systems that are easier to update, reconfigure and replace, that talk to each other, that are platform neutral, that are easy to use, that speak the language of the web.

A good part of the answer to that problem lies in the cloud.

“Concerning the ‘Interview.’”

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Now his interruptions, his fashion of diverting you from topic to topic, have in a certain way a very serious effect: they leave you but partly uttered on each topic. Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you; you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your position.

The PBS folk have images of the pages Twain wrote on, more context about this piece, and Robert Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project, reading the piece on video.

But I’ve decided to subscribe to Lapham’s Quarterly. Partly because it’s a quarterly and I reckon I can handle four issues a year. Partly because the magazine’s sturdy enough to hold its own on a bookshelf without needing the ugly support of a magazine holder.

But mostly because I love the concept of this magazine. It mixes current and historical writing on themes that are current in the news today. Each edition embraces a different issue.

The one I’ve read, from last year, was about Crimes and Punishments through the ages. Alongside current pieces from writers such as Christopher Hitchens and an interesting piece about piracy off the coast of Somalia and elsewhere by Matthew Power, there are excerpts from Herodotus, Thomas de Quincey, Raymond Chandler, Maximilien de Robespierre, Plato, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Albert Camus, Jack the Ripper and many more. They are brought to life further by a great range of quite graphic historic paintings and photographs.

The magazine’s like an ice core sample – a little slice from each epoch – that helps explain what’s happening today and reminds us that our issues aren’t all new. It’s context on a grand scale. History on a plate. I love it.

Ooh, shiny shiny
Russell Poldrack, a professor of psychology and neurobiology and director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a piece for Nieman about how we respond to novelty (think iPhones and ‘you’ve got mail’ messages) and how we learn. Here’s an excerpt:

There is a growing body of research showing that things that are hardest are what make us learn best. This concept is known as “desirable difficulties.” If something is too easy then we probably aren’t learning very much. We have more to find out as we determine just how widely this idea applies. But there is enough evidence already assembled to give us reason to rethink how learning takes place in our daily lives.

The finding of desirable difficulties poses a serious challenge to journalists because things that make people remember best are also things that people are likely to avoid because they are difficult.

As researchers learn more about how learning and memory work, there may be additional clues about how to maximize learning. But there are already some tricks that can be used. For example, information is often remembered better when presented multiple times, but only when those different times are spaced apart from one another. Thus, presenting several versions of an idea in different parts of a story could help improve retention.

If journalism is about learning—about taking in news and information and understanding its relevance to our lives—then what neuroscientists and brain researchers are finding out about the brain and its capacity to absorb information surely matters.

Keep it simple, step by step, and repeat

Clifford Nass, the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Communication, wrote about what happens to our ability to engage when we multitask online and gives practical advice on how to manage content to help readers.

The heavy media multitasker’s (HMM’s) inability to filter irrelevant information, even when it is labeled as irrelevant, is shocking. In one experiment people were asked to only pay attention to red rectangles and to ignore blue rectangles. While light media multitaskers (LMMs) were unaffected by the blue rectangles, no matter how many there were, the HMMs were consistently distracted by the blues: The more blue, the less attention they paid to the red rectangles.

With this inability to filter in mind, news stories and editorials must be highly focused. Filtering provides a sense of proportion that HMMs lack so secondary messages will tend to dilute the primary message. Also, readers will not distinguish between experts and nonexperts, even when the distinction is made clear in the story. For this reason, it is important to avoid using sources that are obviously unqualified to create balance. Finally, even engrossing stories are going to be competing with advertisements, e-mails, phone calls, Twitter and a host of other media streams since HMMs will be chronically seduced by the other: With HMMs, nothing grabs and sustains truly focused attention.

If one thinks of the brain as a set of filing cabinets, HMMs—the readers of today and especially tomorrow—have messier cabinets and have a harder time finding what they need. This inability of HMMs to manage short-term memory means that stories will be more effective if they take people step by step through an argument or time sequence because readers will get confused by interlocking content. On the other hand, the classic inverted pyramid will be very difficult for HMMs to follow because the interrelated content requires memory management and integration.

As HMMs switch from reading an article to consuming other media and then switch back—a very frequent occurrence—they are often influenced by intervening content. News articles are therefore going to require more recapitulations and reminders to help readers pick up where they left off. It will also help to ensure that the layout, font and other visual features of the article are radically different from the rest of the page, thereby reminding readers of the distinction between the story and all of the other streams that they continually encounter. Perhaps most ironic is that the juxtaposition of unrelated content, driven by a desire to satisfy HMMs, is going to make it harder for HMMs to understand the stories that they do read.

Processing print isn’t something the brain was built for

And here’s a bit from a conversation with Marcel Just,  the director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, on the move from print to visual media.

Ludtke: As journalism moved onto television, news began to be conveyed in visual ways and this often led to what is referred to as a “if it bleeds, it leads” style of reporting.

Just: Processing print isn’t something the human brain was built for. The printed word is a human artifact. It’s very convenient and it’s worked very well for us for 5,000 years, but it’s an invention of human beings. By contrast Mother Nature has built into our brain our ability to see the visual world and interpret it. Even the spoken language is much more a given biologically than reading written language.

Ludtke: Does this mean that as we move out of the era of print and paper and into the digital era with more visual media, it’s going to be a more natural environment for humans to take in information than when it was the printed word?

Just: Yes, and it can be informative in a visual way. Now you can circumvent written language to a large extent. A lot of printed words are there to describe things that occur spatially. In many cases a picture is worth a thousand words. Now we can generate these pictures and graphics and we can convey them to other people very easily. I think it’s inevitable that visual media are going to become more important in conveying ideas and not just about raging fires.

Ludtke: Ideas?

Just: Ideas of physics and biology and politics and so on. [But] I think there’s a role for the printed word. I don’t think it’s going to go away.

The rest of the Nieman report is here.

There’s a lunchtime series of talks coming up about the future of ‘serious journalism’ in New Zealand that looks interesting.

Organised by the University of Auckland, the talks will run each Tuesday lunchtime (1pm) from July 20 to August 24 at the Maidment Theatre in Auckland.

The topics include whether successful ‘fake’ news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are good or bad for democracy, the history of journalism and what that might tell us about its future, citizens as news gatekeepers, Maori presence in news stories and politics as comedy.

They all look interesting and I’m going to try to make a few of them despite not being a resident of Auckland.

Of particular interest to me is the session with Gavin Ellis, former editor in chief of the New Zealand Herald, who will draw on his doctoral research to talk about the structures that deliver public interest journalism and how they have been and might be funded. I’ve spoken to him briefly about his research a couple of times and have been looking forward to hearing more about it.

Here’s a pdf of the flyer outlining the talks in more detail.

And here’s the press release:

JOURNALISM’S FUTURE AT STAKE

Is serious journalism dying? Was it in any good it the first place?
What must be done to ensure its survival?

These are some of the questions to be tackled at The University of Auckland’s forthcoming Winter Lecture series on “The end(s) of journalism”.

The six-lecture series will examine the decline in serious journalism brought about by digital convergence, media proliferation, fragmented audiences and the global recession.

It will look at the long-term implications of these developments, given how vital the media are to democratic deliberation. Alternative technological possibilities, programming forms and funding alternatives will be canvassed.

Academics from the University’s Departments of Political Studies, Film, Television and Media Studies, and Māori Studies will present the lectures along with Colin Peacock, presenter of Mediawatch on Radio New Zealand National and Gavin Ellis, former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald.

The lunchtime series begins on 20 July with a lecture illuminating journalism’s present predicament and prospects by returning to its roots. Subsequent lectures will consider the current state of New Zealand journalism, the Māori presence in media stories, citizen journalism on the internet, news satire, and the near-term future of serious journalism.

“The media in forms old and new affect everyone, and play a key role in supporting democratic purposes,” says series organiser, Dr Joe Atkinson. “This is a timely series in a period of extreme upheaval for traditional media and the lectures will be of wide general interest.”

Event: 2010 Winter Lectures at The University of Auckland on “The end(s) of journalism”
Dates:Six successive Tuesdays from 20 July to 24 August
Time: 1pm
Venue: Maidment Theatre, 8 Alfred Street.
Further information: www.auckland.ac.nz/winter, phone 373 7599 ext 87698

Live storytelling

Also in my inbox this morning was an invite to True Stories Told Live, a Book Council event on this Sunday, July 4,4pm, at TAPAC Motions Road (opposite the Zoo) in Auckland ($10).

It’s billed this way: Seven people, seven stories, straight up, unscripted, live and unrehearsed.  An ex-nun, a celebrant, an acclaimed short story writer, a biographer,  theatre director, scholar and physiotherapist will get up in a room in front of an audience and tell a story. It could be anything, but something with a beginning, a middle and an end and it sort of needs to be true…  It’s about attempting to bring back the oral tradition.

Which reminded me of this:

Performance Journalism

This is an excerpt from a Boing Boing post (via @gnat) about Pop-Up Magazine:

The San Francisco event they’ve invented…is a stage show aimed to bring the best of magazines into “the medium of live,” as Editor-in-Chief Doug McGray told me. Pop-Up’s got a masthead and table of contents, shorts, features, even integrated ads, and many of the contributors make their livings through words and images on the page (there are also film-makers and radio producers). There they all were, behind not laptops but a podium, spot-lit and performing.

Here are a couple of things the writer, Elizabeth Soep, said stood out:

• Urgency: The show sold out in minutes. And then there was an after-party that required special tickets of its own. I felt myself getting physically riled up booking my own tickets, as each little “available seat” icon blinked off before my eyes. Hate to say it, but that kind of flurry changes the way you think about an evening of journalism.

• Ephemerality: It’s live, as in, no digital record. There’s novelty now in content that’s over and gone once it’s done its thing.

• Spontaneity: There was this moment early in the show when the writer Jennifer Kahn was wrapping up her story about her 80-something-year-old dad’s unlikely ascent in competitive weightlifting. When a home-video clip of his win ended, the man himself strolled onto the stage, trophy raised. It was pretty awesome, that unexpected shift from media to live.

• Draftiness: Pop-Up is unrehearsed. Many of its segments are built around bits and pieces of things that either aren’t finished or didn’t make a final cut. Like Josh Harkinson’s photo presentation of his canoe trip through a hideously polluted Texas waterway. He closed by saying he’d pitched the story to Outside Magazine and they said no, they don’t do stories like that. Moments like that one give live-audience “readers” a feeling that they’re in on a process that otherwise only happens behind closed doors.