The title of this blog post is a complete lie as the slideshow above will mean little with out me yacking over the top of it, but I thought I'd throw it up here anyway. I like visual presentations delivered by engaging speakers. I think I can create the former, the latter... well, forget about the latter. On a related note, if you are ever asked to deliver a presentation at a Strategic communications in countries emerging from violent conflict conference at short notice (let's say, you've got 20 minutes and no coffee) a slideshare account may just save you. I didn't use the effort above, but I did use the latter portion of this. More on how I publish various online newswires way back here and using Publish2 here. Might have more on this soon.

Last week's Guardian Media Talk podcast found host Matt Wells raking over the pay vs. free coals with Jeff Jarvis. There's something of a backlash going on against the 'free' model for newspapers online at the moment, but how many newspapers or news outlets are currently making decent cash from the online subscription model? Not ads, but subscriptions.

Does the paid subscription model only work for niche online publications like some of those below? Or can more general news outlets make it work?

I'll add to this list as and when I find any new additions. For the record, for online news I've only ever paid for Salon.com (back in the day) and AtlasF1.com (also back in the day). I'm now working with the Frontline Broadsheet launched today... (issue 1 pictured above) which is resolutely print only - here's the subscription pdf) The only print subs I hold are; Frontline Broadsheet, Private Eye and Guardian Weekly.

One point to note, a May, 2009 survey found that readers "could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas"

1. Wall Street Journal

January 2, 2008 from paidcontent.org: “a new report from Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang. WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year”

November 5, 2008 from paidcontent.org: “WSJ.com is making more than $200 million from advertising and subscriptions, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch told analysts during the company’s earnings call. He said the site is making “probably $100 million in subscriptions and certainly over $100 million in advertising.” link

2. Financial Times

FT.com’s paid content strategy appears to still be paying off as owner Pearson (NYSE: PSO) announces “good growth” in content, subscription and digital revenues at FT Group, despite worsening advertising sales. In a Q109 trading update ahead of its AGM today, London-listed Pearson says that advertising at FT Group accounted for just 16 percent of its revenues and three percent of Pearson’s overall revenue, suggesting that paywall fees, B2B data subscriptions and events are proving enough to drive growth on their own. link

3. Malaysiakini

The site charges $40 a year for the English news, contributing $600,000. Ads brought in $200,000 last year, and an additional $200,000 came from grants. As a result, the site has been breaking even since 2004.

Subscription is at the heart of the business model, said Chandran. It started charging in 2002, even though most people said they didn’t want to pay and only 1% of readers subscribed. Today only 5% pay a subscription.

“People are more willing to pay for independent medium as it will help bring about political change,” said Chandran. link

4. Salon.com - not really making any cash at all...

Salon Premium revenue is recognized ratably over the period that services are provided. This source of revenue has been decreasing since Salon's quarter ended December 31, 2004 when paid subscriptions peaked at approximately 89,100 and decreased to approximately 28,500 as of September 30, 2008. Salon expects this downward trend to continue, as it is placing greater emphasis on its advertising sales to generate revenue. link

5.The Economist

Economist.com took a pass on the free-content phenomenon first time around - now, just as flares and yo-yos came back in to fashion, the publisher sees pay walls regaining popularity in an advertising downturn.

The news mag’s site already charges for stories over a year old and, publisher Paul Rossi told our Future Of Business Media conference, that could be just the right model for a looming recession: “The growth in online advertising is slowing. Is this the return to paid content online, because advertising becomes less a driver for the business? It will be be interesting to see if paid content comes back online because the model is changing." link

Frontline: A Broadsheet - issue 1 cover, originally uploaded by noodlepie.

Up and out of the house, my first destination was a cafe to get my morning iced coffee and tea. At a small coffee stall, I leaned back in a little plastic chair and watched the traffic roll by, still many more motorbikes than cars. From coffee to breakfast, I walked into the first noodleshop I encountered, a small food stall selling Bun Bo Hue. The first sip of broth consisted of some of the most intense flavors I’ve tasted since I was last in Southeast Asia. Pungent and thick, with chunks of beef and pork, it was a delicious re-introduction to the food of Saigon. link

I have just spent a week with the AlJazeera.net news team in the Qatari capital Doha talking about a variety of online tools, how they work and why they might be useful for online journalists. We looked at a number of examples of some of them being used in the wild by journalists around the world. Below is a list of tools I either taught, demonstrated or just mentioned in passing during this week in Doha,

Blogs

• blogger
• wordpress
• typepad
• tumblr

Blog search

• technorati
• google blogsearch
• icerocket
• twingly
• blogpulse

Bookmarks

• delicious
• publish2

Twitter

• tweetdeck
• seesmic desktop
• thwirl
• tweetgrid
• twellow
• wefollow
  
• twitterfall
• bit.ly
• mobile twitter applications
• twitpic
• watwet
  
• artwitter
• splitweet
  
• twitterfeed
• twitter translate

RSS

• google reader
• yahoo pipes
• mloovi
  

Photographs

• flickr

Video

• google video
• blinkx
• qik
• bambuser
• flixwagon
• kyte.tv
• ustream

Audio

• audioboo
• phoneboo
• utterli

Social networks

• facebook
• ning

Organising the digital desktop

• netvibes
• igoogle

I have been a blogger since 2006 and I have twice in the last three years had to relocate my Yahoo! blog page. At first I thought I was the victim of unknown hackers, but later discovered that Yahoo had taken steps to freeze my account. I personally don't see how the political views expressed on my blog violate Yahoo!'s terms of service.

After repeated attempts to phone and e-mail Yahoo customer service, I have yet to receive a clear answer about why my blog was suspended. I believe it is worth noting that Vu Minh Tri, the head of Yahoo Southeast Asia Pte Ltd which operates the 360° blog service in Vietnam, is on record saying: "Yahoo is willing to cooperate with government agencies to ensure a clean and healthy social network."

Publish2 is social bookmarking service for journalists. The idea is to encourage a kind of link journalism by creating a space for journalists to store links and publish them as a newswire. These maybe links related to a story you're working on, research or clips. I've been using it of late for three very specific tasks;

• publish breaking news on Twitter @frontlineblog
• publish a newswire to the news pages on frontlineclub.com
  
• publish from my mobile phone

Once you've signed up, installed the wee bookmarklet into your browser toolbar and married your delicious social bookmarking and Twitter accounts to Publish2, the first two tasks on this list are easily doable. I bookmark a story to my account on Publish2, this automatically feeds into the frontlineclub delicious account which in turn automatically appears as the newswire on frontlineclub.com

If I decide a news story requires a tweet, I'll add one at the same time I bookmark the page by scrolling down on the Publish2 bookmarlet and adding the Twitter comment (see above) and using hashtags if appropriate, to help make the tweet more searchable. Publish2 auto-shortens the link using bit.ly which allows you to track the spread of your links.

All of the above works very well, beyond the wee bit of downtime where Publish2 hasn't been working. I could opt to bypass the delicious step and just install the Publish2 widget onto frontlineclub.com but I've been using delicious for so long, I like what it does and it was always the way I wanted to set up the website before playing with Publish2.

The problem arrives when I try to publish from my mobile phone. Publish2 can grab items I choose to share in my Google Reader. What I want to be able to do, and can't, is automatically feed these items from Publish2 into delicious, and then automatically onto frontlineclub.com, and/or send them to Twitter. I also want to be able to edit the description, tags, and tweets too. If Publish2 can solve these last few hiccups, and I see they're working on an iPhone application, I'll be using it exclusively for publishing to the Frontline Club.

He is, but I'm not - unfortunately - but it felt like I was for thirty minutes or so last night. Mike, now in New York City, emailed me a week or two ago to say he'd seen the Vietnam episode in the new Anthony Bourdain TV series No Reservations. The TV chef wrote to me about his trip to Vietnam. A quick search on YouTube and there is the episode spliced into four segments - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4. The guy is completely enamoured with the place, as he explains in the clip above. And I'll admit, noodlegirl and myself were pretty much silent for ten or fifteen minutes after watching the clips. Especially as the first place he eats in - Banh Xeo on Dinh Cong Trang - in the very first clip is a place we ate at roughly once a week for six years. And Bourdain's completely right - you need the noise, the fumes, the heat, the street chatter and the shouting for Vietnamese food.

It's interesting, but not too surprising, to hear how he has fallen so deeply for the place after relatively little time in the country. I've always had something of a love/hate relationship with Vietnam. Step away for a while and it's easy to forget the day long/night long powercuts, the traffic, the heat and humidity, the bloke down the street who used to get drunk and chase his wife with a meat cleaver, the pimps at the corner cafe, the rip off artists, the hassle and the tape. Far, far easier to focus on the good things that you miss i.e. the food. I can replicate power cuts and crap traffic in France without any difficulty. I cannot buy, nor make, a Banh xeo like the one you'll see in Part 1. But, be warned if you're viewing from outside Vietnam, you might find yourself shelling out for a ticket to Saigon immediately after watching it.

Graham H. on Dipity.

I wrote about this on the Frontline blog, but it's worth a crosspost here. Two freelance journalists, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan, were kidnapped in Somalia six months ago today. There's no mention of their plight in the mainstream media today - at least not yet. It's a given that it's tough being a journalist and getting kidnapped. Being a freelance, with no big media outlet out there batting for you, must be a lot tougher. Head over to Frontline to read the whole story or browse the timeline above.

P.S. that's a new look Frontline Club website I've been working on. Would love to hear any thoughts/suggestions. I'll post more on that as and when I get make the time.

This is a loose diagram of how I work when I'm doing online journalism, tracking news, prioritising, editing, aggregating, contextualising, researching and publishing. It's the basic model of a presentation I'll be giving soon - rest assured, the presentation looks a lot more interesting...

However, the actual process of doing all this stuff is a bit convoluted involving Firefox, browser buttons, NetNewsWire, Tweetdeck, Yahoo Pipes etc. What I'd really like is one destination where I can gather the online input, filter it, editorialise it and send it out to the relevant sites. Not all stories suit Twitter, some suit both Twitter and Social Bookmarks, some just the blog etc. My question is:

Is there a tool out there that makes this process of link powered journalism easier?

I guess I'm looking for a one-stop shop I haven't found yet.

P.S. Please note, there are no blog subscriptions involved in this newsgathering model - only key words and "key phrases"

P.P.S Apologies if the diagram doesn't make any sense to you...

Beyond all of this, my main bugbear I've encountered too many times in this field is folk who don't know how to give a presentation, have no formal teacher training (and boy does it show) and think that knowing stuff is enough. It ain't. Alors, for what it's worth, to add to Dave and Suw's thoughts, my two  practcial rules for training/talking,

• Rule No.1: Never ever ever rely on wifi/technology. It will fail. Search through any of the Le Webs and wotnot and you'll see a litany of awful presentations, mumbled words and presentations that don't work simply because the idiot giving it designed it to work only if the conference/seminar/webinar/twitup wifi works properly. And it never does.
  

• Rule No.2 Simple. Be bloody interesting. Most of this stuff is pretty dull to describe at the best of times. Don't grind your trainees into a coma with flowcharts, graphs, pie charts and slides packed with words. If social media is so much bloody fun, make it so.
  

If you ever happen to be at one of my talks, training sessions it's all pictures all the time. The longest piece of text you'll get on a slide of mine is about seven words. Over and out.