I promised Asia NZ a narrative report on my trip, and more particularly on the conference, and have somewhat belatedly come to write it. So I thought I’d blog it here too. Here goes (in no particular order).

New media business models

I was invited to speak on a plenary panel at the conference about new media initiatives since I’d launched my online news marketplace allaboutthestory.com a few months before. I was happy if somewhat nervous to find myself sitting alongside veterans Steven Gan, founding editor of the large and successful Malaysiakini.com; Tarun Tejpal, editor in chief and publisher of the investigative magazine Tehelka in India; and Chen Juhong, editor in chief of qq.com, part of Tencent, a Chinese messaging service, blog platform and news portal which is one of the largest internet companies in the world.

It was interesting to hear about the business models of each. Malaysiakini.com started out as a free site supported by advertising but came close to crashing during the dotcom bust and ultimately decided to charge a US$6 monthly subscription. It was not an ideological move, Steven Gan said, but simply a question of survival: “We had no choice. Either you try it or you close up shop”. Traffic dropped, as expected, but has since rebuilt fairly well and the site now gets around 60% of its revenue from subscribers and 40% from advertising and has been “more or less profitable for the past five years”.

Tarun Tejpal was a passionate speaker who described something of a hand to mouth existence, as advertising waxed and waned, grants arrived and ran out, and issues of Tehelka were started with no money in the bank but somehow funds arrived in time to pay the printers. He has had some success encouraging patronage by tapping into “the conscience of the middle class of India” using catchphrases such as “be a good citizen and get a subscription” and “If Tehelka dies, investigative journalism dies”. Print is the strongest medium for spreading a message in India, he said, adding that Tehelka was one of few publications in a crowded media market willing to brave political fallout to break original national stories.

Qq.com, meanwhile, has volume on its side. The site, which is a bit like Twitter and runs alongside Tencent’s blogging platform and news portal, has hundreds of millions of users. There’s no charge for a basic account but the company earns millions from selling add-ons such as pimped out avatars and blog themes. Chen said 60% of users don’t get news on paper, only online, and it has 600 editorial staff in its newsroom.

Allaboutthestory.com is a much younger site which comes under the heading of infrastructure rather than publisher. It aims to connect writers and illustrators with editors of newspapers, magazines and websites and make it easy for them to do business with each other using a simple online marketplace . It’s free to join and upload content and registered buyers have a number of ways to browse and search for stories and cartoons, which they can buy and download for immediate use. Allaboutthestory.com does not charge for membership or commissioning efforts, but takes 20% from each sale. It’s early days for the site, which is based in New Zealand, but it is growing steadily and attracting interest from writers who need a foot in the door or help reaching more than one editor at a time, and from editors looking for new talent and material to fill gaps in their pages.

The plenary sessions were videoed and can be seen on the conference website, put together by organisers the East-West Center’s Asia Pacific Center for Journalists and The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. There’s also a write-up of some of the sessions.

Pacific issues

I also spoke on a smaller panel in a breakout session about issues in the Pacific alongside Elliott Raphael of NBC in Papua New Guinea, Shailendra Bahadur Singh of the University of the South Pacific School of Language Arts and Media, and Philippa McDonald  from Australia’s ABC TV. It was sobering to hear about the media restrictions in Fiji, which have since tightened and seen the Fiji Times put up for sale under a new requirement that foreign ownership of any media outlet must not exceed 10 % . A useful site to keep up with Fiji coverage is Pacific Scoop, which has stories about much of the Pacific along with a list of news sites and blogs. It was also interesting to hear Raphael’s reflection on how little of the foreign investment and mineral exploitation of Papua New Guinea has flowed into the local economy, which remains underdeveloped.

Chinese economy

It was unusual to have a media conference with a dual focus – on the economies and media of Asian and Pacific nations – but I thought it was the richer for it.

The chief economic messages were about growth in India and China, with more of a focus on the latter. Two key points were that China was well on its way to becoming the second largest economy in the world (which it’s now done) but that the powerful growth of the past years would not continue indefinitely or without setbacks.

With the growth came an influx of rural workers into cities where authorities were struggling to keep up with associated infrastructure requirements – housing, heath, sanitation and transport, for example. This will be an expensive issue for years to come. In addition, workers over time are demanding higher wages and better working conditions, which will affect margins for both Chinese and foreign companies, some of whom will ultimately jump ship to whichever country can provide a cheaper workforce and sufficiently palatable trading conditions.

Another point made several times was that China’s population growth would slow over time, which would affect its economic growth. The number of child-bearing women in China was in decline and the fertility rate was 1.2, according to Jing Ulrich, a dynamic speaker who advises foreign companies in China for JP Morgan. She said China was producing fewer babies than India, adding that “wealth and education are great contraceptives”. China would, like Western nations, find itself with a burgeoning elderly population supported by a decreasing workforce.

She spoke of  three notable changes in China: a shift in government policy from expansionary in 2009 to more neutral now; the government shifting away from accommodating the real estate sector and trying to control the asset bubble; and a shift from state driven investments to more private investment. She said China faced many sizable issues but they would be resolved with political will and large amounts of money.

A note of caution was raised by Kristi Heim, a journalist based in Washington State, about US attitudes towards doing business in China. While most businesses were bullish on China in 2006, she said, fewer were now.  A sticking point was a Chinese government decision to restrict bidding on government procurement projects to companies with Chinese-owned IP, effectively locking out foreign IT firms from a substantial market. That, along with China’s depressed currency and the fact that China was now building aircraft which meant it was a competitor for Boeing, a big player in Washington State, was tempering appetites for investing in China.

Changing media in China

The chief media messages that came out of the conference were about the effect of the internet, the difficulties of funding and publishing investigative journalism, and the rapid changes taking place in the media in China. I wrote about some of those issues in a blog post earlier this year, including the three main drivers of change identified by panellists:

• The internet – harder to control, faster, further reaching, changes people’s expectations. (See Asia NZ’s Charles Mabbett profile of Chinese blogging here.)
• Private ownership – many new media companies are privately owned and the likes of Tencent are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. These companies are driven to do business in new ways and respond to what their customers want. (Charles Mabbett looks more closely at Tencent and other new media companies here.)
• Pragmatic central government – understands times are changing, wants to retain credibility with populace, wants to open up albeit in a measured way.

Takeaways

The main takeaways from the conference for me were a greater understanding of the economics of the region, some terrific contacts, appreciation for the relative privilege we enjoy in New Zealand regarding freedom of speech and low corruption rates, and a stronger sense of wanting to do business in Asia. I have subsequently watched Asian-Pacific news more closely and remain interested in developments.

A couple of books I’ve since grabbed to better understand the dynamics of the region are: Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade, by Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist; and The Elephant and the Dragon, by Robyn Meredith, a Forbes foreign correspondent who chaired one of the sessions and whose approach I liked. She talked about the importance of looking behind the impressive facts and figures of the region’s growth and focusing on the human stories therein, and on the building blocks: health, housing, transport, infrastructure etc. I would welcome suggestions of other books and blogs to read.

Lots of pictures on flickr.com.

Semantic BBC

Been meaning to point to this for a while. Interesting post about how BBC used dynamic semantic publishing on its World Cup 2010 website.

The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content – metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players.

The foundation of these dynamic aggregations is a rich ontological domain model. The ontology describes entity existence, groups and relationships between the things/concepts that describe the World Cup. For example, “Frank Lampard” is part of the “England Squad” and the “England Squad” competes in “Group C” of the “FIFA World Cup 2010″.

The ontology also describes journalist-authored assets (stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics) and enables them to be associated to concepts within the domain model. Thus a story with an “England Squad” concept relationship provides the basis for a dynamic query aggregation for the England Squad page “All stories tagged with England Squad”.

The journalists use a web tool, called ‘Graffiti’, for the selective association – or tagging – of concepts to content. For example, a journalist may associate the concept “Frank Lampard” with the story “Goal re-ignites technology row”.

In addition to the manual selective tagging process, journalist-authored content is automatically analysed against the World Cup ontology. A natural language and ontological determiner process automatically extracts World Cup concepts embedded within a textual representation of a story. The concepts are moderated and, again, selectively applied before publication. Moderated, automated concept analysis improves the depth, breadth and quality of metadata publishing.

Rest of post is here.

Linking Out

Martin Belam looks at linking out from news sites and raises a couple of interesting issues. Here’s an abbreviated excerpt:

I see too little debate about what the audience want or expect in terms of links. Just because deep inline linking is the cultural norm for bloggers, it doesn’t follow that ‘links are good’ should be adopted as a religious mantra.

There are several clear use cases where additional links on news stories should be added as a matter of course, though – stories that reference medical or scientific reports, stories that reference published consultation papers, stories where quotes and pictures are sourced directly from the web, and stories specifically about websites.

There are some other key user experience considerations though.

Should external links be signalled in a different way from internal links? You can do this easily if you have a ‘Related links to this story’ component, but what about inline links? Using different colours on different types of links within an article won’t make it obvious to the user what is going on, and littering body copy with icons and (External link) parentheses doesn’t make for a great reading experience.

Another issue to consider is the consistent requests from a number of users for external links to open in a new browser window.  Chris Wheal says:

“I prefer external links to open new windows. This means no matter how many further links people follow, your website remains open in their browser.”He links to the RNIB’s advice on the matter. Not only for accessibility reasons, but the good practice of leaving the user in control of how their browser is behaving, opening links in new windows is to be avoided with almost everything except an audio player. But should you build a little widget that allows users the option of turning on ‘external links open in a new browser’ during their session on your site?

Rest of the post is here.

TBD
Mathew Ingram does a nice round-up on two US local-news-and-blog-network initiatives, TBD and GrowthSpur.

TBD.com, which has been in development for the past year or so and is expected to launch this summer, is being financed by Allbritton Communications, which also owns the online political site Politico. TBD editor general manager Jim Brady has said that the new venture is designed to be hyper-local and community-oriented, and the blog network is at the core of that idea (the Washington Post also partners with a network of local blogs). The company says it has built up a core of almost 100 local bloggers who cover the Washington area from a number of different perspectives, and content from these blogs will appear alongside news and opinion writing from TBD staff.

Ken Doctor looks at the newsonomics of TBD on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

TBD has added 50 new positions, all additional to the approximately 50 jobs ported over from the former NewsChannel 8. Jim Brady, TBD’s general manager, outlined the 50 for me: “About 30 doing news, including 15 reporters, six editors, two senior editors, six community engagement people. Another 20 doing tech, sales, product, and design.”

That tells us that the nut for TBD is about $3.5-4 million, salaries and operating costs combined. It needs to find new revenue — exclusive of what the former NewsChannel 8’s sales staff of seven brought in — to get to profitability. Profitability is a key goal for this for-profit company, and one key to proving out the model for use in other metro areas. The cost side is one of the areas that distinguishes the TBD experiment; it’s two to four times bigger than most of the local online news startups we’ve seen.

Steve Myers at Poynter Online also talked to TBD about transparency and other features.

TBD has built several features into its site that emphasize transparency as well as traditional journalism values such as fairness and accuracy.

Every article on the site will be accompanied by a “complete this story” feature, where reporters will acknowledge weaknesses in the reporting and ask for the community’s help in filling those gaps. “That’s not a strength of most media organizations, to say what they don’t know,” Brady said.

Users’ responses will go to a group of five or six editors and managers, who will review them and send them to a reporter if they look promising. The editors may credit the contributor if they have permission.

Likewise, Volpe said the site will be “very aggressive” about correcting errors, placing corrections at the top of stories, collecting them on a central page and perhaps hosting a corrections blog. (Brady noted that the Post has done a good job of that too.)

“For sources that go directly to reporters, Erik has made it very clear that reporters will not suppress corrections,” Volpe said.

Maps
The Ushahidi people have launched crowdmap, a tool for aggregating news and information – including from mobiles – and visualising it on a map/timeline.

Slate shows us a political map of the news in the US.

One of the most common criticisms of the news in the Internet age is that people read only stories whose slant they agree with. Two University of Chicago researchers challenged that assumption in a paper that argued that people are far more open-minded to opposing ideas than we think.

Saying no to Knight
From Nieman Journalism Lab an interesting post about a data visualisation start-up which turned down a Knight News Challenge grant.

Normally when you win a Knight News Challenge grant, there’s not much of a question about what to do. You take the money! But for Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media, winning in the 2010 competition prompted a tough decision. Ultimately, the data visualization team, responsible for such Internet classics as NameVoyager and Many Eyes, decided to turn down the grant. “We had to think very hard about this,” Viegas told me. “It wasn’t going to work for us.”

The reason: Viegas and Wattenberg didn’t like the open-source component of the News Challenge grant agreement, which requires that winners share all work done under the grant under a copyleft license that maximizes openness. “The licensing requirements weren’t right for us, or the project, really,” Viegas explained. (Their pitch was for a data visualization tool for news organizations; they declined to go into more detail than that.)

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

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.