As traditional media outlets close down, the relative importance of non-market players becomes more important.

Governments around the world were quick to see the opportunities for their news agencies. From Xinhua (China) to ITAR-TASS (Russia), from AFP (half of its budget comes from state subscriptions) to Voice of America, governments are trying to shape the world’s public opinion.

The coverage of Gaza by Al Jazeera is a case in point. They produced quality journalism no other outlet could dream of. Now, viewers should keep in mind that money for such newsgathering comes straight from the pocket of the Emir of Qatar. Believe me, I’m sure Al Jazeera’s journalists keep that in mind too.

To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, I built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds.

[iframe http://windowonthemedia.com/ismellarat/ismellaratSmall.php5 442 352]

Details about how it’s done and which sources are scanned are available at windowonthemedia.com.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

France is currently paralyzed by yet another strike. Unlike the ones you’re used to when visiting my country, usually from railway or airport staff, this one was launched by lawyers and judges alike, united against their government minister, Rachida Dati (read more here).

Traditional journalists have been covering the event as it unfolded. Google News brings you more than 300 bland and unsurprising articles.

The only place where you can read what’s going on in France’s judicial system is a blog. Maître Eolas, a lawyer who opened his blog 4 years ago, just published 64 testimonies from justice professionals. He even renamed his blog ‘Daily news from angry justice professionals’.

Narvic, probably the best media commentator in France, immediately saw that Maître Eolas had become a media.

I see here the best proof that justice professionals in this country are the first ones to think that’s something is rotten in the media kingdom. To them, only Eolas’ blog is credible enough to collect their grievances.

Yes, blogs are dead. The amalgamation of all blogs in an imagined blogosphere has ended. OJB has nothing to do with *~ChElLe~*’s MySpace blog, for instance. It was about time late-adopters (you know who they are) realized this basic fact.

Blogging is about leading a conversation. Such discussions sometimes reach a level so high that it has implications in the public sphere. Maître Eolas’ blog served as a Cahier de Doléances for French lawyers. Just like Guido Fawkes’ role in Peter Hain’s resignation, Maître Eolas’ blog is now the Fourth Estate ; a real counterweight to government policies.

Do you know other examples of bloggers having an influence on public life?

Such a phenomenon might very well be limited to Western countries, where the market for journalists is such that it’s more profitable to write for one’s own pleasure outside the traditional media. In post socialist countries for example, the shortage of journalists is so acute that any blogger is hired by a media group after a few months’ blogging. In such conditions, barely any blog can exert any real influence.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

As communism fell in Lithuania 19 years ago, existing dailies started to publish what they wanted. And what they wanted was money. The 2 main titles promptly became filled with advertorial paid for by politicians and industrialists.

The Lithuanian public quickly became disheartened with the printed press and turned to the internet instead. That’s why the audience of Lithuanian #1 website for news is only 8 times smaller than its UK counterpart, even though the country is 20 times as small as the UK (and twice as poor in terms of GDP per capita).

Seeing this enthusiasm for online news, MG Baltic, a Vilnius-based holding that trades in everything from consumer goods to news, decided to launch a website. The avowed goal was to complement their mass media portfolio.

On August 7, 2006, alfa.lt was born. 2 years later, it’s the national #3 website for news and #6 website overall. It’s also on-track towards breaking even with profitability planned for 2010.

To know more about this success story, I went to alfa’s office and interviewed the project manager and editor-in-chief, Virgis Valentinavicius.

Business plans aren’t dead

Far from an idealistic website that would make the world better, alfa.lt is the brainchild of executives eager to milk online advertisers. This made Virgis’ discourse very different from the traditional ‘do first, monetize later’ motto heard in start-ups. For him, every single litas invested must be turned into clicks.

The brand’s philosophy is to reach to young, hard-working and high-achieving Lithuanians looking for serious information. Now, this young professional also needs entertainment, which alfa.lt provides. This mix of news and entertainment should make alfa.lt an all-encompassing provider of quality content. Dumbing-down isn’t in alfa.lt’s interest, Virgis said, as intelligent readers are more profitable in the long run.

(As I don’t read Lithuanian, I haven’t been able to make my opinion on alfa’s quality. A Lithuanian friend of mine was very critical of its content, calling it ‘similar to yellow press.’ Do you read alfa? What’s your opinion on its quality?)

Online marketing is the key

Success came from one main source: online marketing, Virgis explained. Alfa was the first in Lithuania to invest massively in targeted online ads. Designed to look like headlines, they were first put on Google Adwords, on news-related keywords, but this proved too expensive.

Instead, alfa.lt advertised on social networks. One.lt, the country’s #1 social network, provided alfa.lt with the demographic it needed at a very cheap price. Today, Virgis is thinking about stopping such online-advertising campaigns. In 2 years, prices have tripled as competitors started to use the same technique.

Online ads were at the foundation of alfa.lt’s success, Virgis said. In 2007, the site’s traffic increased fivefold from 100k unique users a month to 500k.

It’s all about the content

To satisfy this audience it acquired at great costs, alfa.lt has to offer the best possible articles. The bulk of the company’s resources are oriented toward content-creation.

About 20 journalists fill the crowded newsroom in the business district of Vilnius. Like every post-socialist country, Lithuania severely lacks journalists. Market pressures mean that salaries are sky-high and talent is rare.

Adding another twist to an already-critical market situation, 3 news websites opened in 2007, pushing salaries even further. Virgis didn’t want to spend all its money on bringing journalist stars in the newsroom. Instead, he hired people who could react with speed and adapt to change quickly. ‘Journalism needs no education but common sense’, he said.

With very little resources and a challenger position (see graph), alfa.lt doesn’t want to take risks with content. On video for instance, Virgis is very cautious not to waste too much money. ‘Alfa needs to be very specific when doing video’, he said, and online TV is a luxury that doesn’t always bring clicks.

Same answer when it comes to social features. Alfa.lt’s in the news business, not in social networks, he repeated. These are 2 different markets that require different sets of skills. What he suggested was for his parent company to buy a social network so as to benefit from synergies.

As a result of this content-oriented strategy, almost 70% of all content on the site is home-made, compared to 50% at Delfi.lt, alfa’s main rival and market leader. That will give the site a serious competitive edge when Google news comes in Lithuania and start making direct deals with wire services, as happened with AFP and AP stories.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

4 years after launching his blog, a famous French writer publishes a book of comments. The revenues of the book roughly equal 30 years of on-blog advertising.

Pierre Assouline is the typical 50-something, successful French intellectual. Whatever he authors turns into a bestseller, he is involved in the movie industry, writes op-ed pieces for the best newspapers, gives lectures and hosts a radio talk show. And, like many of his ilk, was definitely technophobic.

Until 2004, that is. 4 years ago, people at Le Monde convinced him to launch a blog, 6 months only after he started mastering e-mailing skills. La République des Livres (Books Republic) was born.

Hosted by the #1 news website in France, his blog quickly garnered success. It is currently ranked #16 on Wikio’s national blog chart and #1 in the ‘literature’ category. More than 170,000 comments have been left under a few thousand posts.

A few months ago, Assouline decided to compile an anthology of all comments (150k at the time). After reading through all his archive, he selected 600 of them that he organized in categories. They fill about 350 pages, published after a 50-page foreword in Brèves de Blog (Blog’s shorts).

Now, the literary value of such an aggregation is very debatable, although I found reading the book enjoyable despite my abysmal knowledge of literature. Assouline’s foreword nicely puts blogging into a wider timeframe, quite useful if you live around geeks for whom History started with Pong.

What’s most interesting, however, is to look at the numbers. 16,000 copies of the book have been made and the price tag is 21€ (30$/17£). Let’s do a little math. Sales amount to 315k€, which leaves an operating profit of 150k to share between the publisher and the writer. (See my post in French for the details).

Let’s compare this figure with revenues from blogging. With an estimated 5,000 daily visitors and a very optimistic 2€ eCPM, yearly revenues barely reach 6,700€ – approximately 4,800€ in operating profits. The book is therefore 31 times more profitable than the blog.

Now, 150k comments have been written by approximately 24,000 people. Even if 60% of them are 1- or 2-time commentators, the number of loyal readers, including those who do not comment, probably nears 30,000 persons.

That’s quite a large pool of prospects if you’re to market a blog’s spin-off, all the more as you know exactly how to reach out to them.

Bloggers could very well get inspiration from the movie industry, where profits come from squeezing a brand into by-products, rather than trying to monetize clicks and pageviews.

Do you have other examples of a blog being monetized in such ways?

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends. It would read through the Wikipedia pages of a given theme and summarize key concepts. A semantic algorithm would bring a selection of the most authoritative people on a subject.

The journalist is left with what she does best: checking and analyzing the data.

That means avoiding the pitfalls of redundant news content. That means escaping the trap of writing about topics without having a clue of what’s at stake. That means interviewing people who do things rather than those who talk about it.

This article is the first of a 4-part series. We’ll explore semantic hacks for newsgathering, writing and publishing in the coming weeks.

Part 1: Semantics today: What revolution?

Semantic journalism is closely related to the semantic web. The latter is a tidal wave redesigning the web since the early 2000′s, the motto of which is to make a webpage readable for machines. XML and RDF are the key words, Tim Berners-Lee the guru.

Now, having machines precisely understand the meaning of a story is another matter. Querying a database in natural language has been done since the 1970′s. Concretely, it means typing ‘What is the temperature in London?’ and seeing the machine display ‘20°C’.

But since the 1970′s, little has improved. Put simply, the computer reads the sentence, identifies a few words, their syntactical function and runs through a database to pick relevant information. Each word is given a meaning from the multiple senses it can carry.

In the example above, the computer can tell that ‘temperature’ is not referring to Sean Paul’s hit from the sentence’s structure. Then, it asks the database containing weather-related data for the current temperature in London.

Semantics rapid evolution has to do with Moore’s law and its army of escorting laws, all of which say that it’s getting cheaper to store and access data. Semantic applications can add more meanings to each word. Eventually, a semantic app will know that Temperature is also a 1937 movie. With a large enough database, it can store an almost infinite amount of temperature-related data.

However, when Sean Paul says that he ‘got the right temperature fi shelter you from the storm’, a computer will have a hard time understanding that there’s no actual shelter and no storm, no matter how many databases it commands. The key is to know that it’s a lush R&B song.

Some researchers argue that the traditional approach will not solve the semantic conundrum, no matter how much processing power is unleashed. Instead of a stratified method, where the program identifies the grammatical syntax, then the different possible meanings of each word, they favor a ‘what’s going on’ approach (they call it dynamic sense building, as opposed to compositional sense computing, in the words of semanticist Bernard Victorri).

In a paper, Daniel Kayser (full disclosure: that’s my dad) and Farid Nouioua explain that when a computer reads the sentence The truck in front of me braked suddenly, the key to extracting meaning isn’t in any of the words, but in knowing what is not said.

The semantic field for the word ‘car’, according to Sabine Ploux’s very cool semantic altlas

What the sentence actually means does not come by putting together the sense (as found in a dictionary) of each of its words. You need to know a lot about ordinary driving situations to grasp what any reader would find easily (e.g. the risk of accident was high). The knowledge required is not to be found in any dictionary or encyclopaedia, as thick as it might be. They argue that sense doesn’t come from what’s written, but from what’s assumed and left unwritten.

Semantics did not dramatically improve over the last decade. Automated summaries, for instance, a problem that has kept semanticists busy for the past 40 years, are still not expected for a distant future. Worse, it’s hard to see any technological lock that could, if broken, propel semantics into a higher gear.

In the coming weeks, the Online Journalism Blog team will test all kind of semantics apps that could help journalists. We’ll try to separate semantic snake-oil from genuinely innovative apps and discuss the value semantics can add. Stay tuned!

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

A thick veil of gloom is slowly blanketing journalism. From resembling Clark Kent and Tintin in their youth, journalists now look more like Jason Blairs, untrustworthy information distorters. Layoffs, shorter deadlines and declining ad revenues are adding to the pessimism of the trade. To feel better, some of them even fake readership data.

We stand against this trend. We are sure that journalism is getting better and stronger by the day. And that journalists will benefit from this.

More than just a big vent session for happy or angry journalists, we want to list the reasons why journalism is going in the right direction. Why it’s easier than ever for young journalists to access sources. Why journalists have more power than ever against their editors. Why journalists will have a more positive impact on society.

This is why the Online Journalism Blog team created JollyJournalist.com, a place where you can tell the world why you think that these are good times to be a journalist. We’ve added ten reasons to get you started below. Once you’re done reading them, please head over to JollyJournalist.com to comment on them or add your own!

Spread the joy !

<a href=http://windowonthemedia.com/JollyJournalist ><img src=http://windowonthemedia.com/JollyJournalist/jolly_journalist.jpg border=0 width=140px height=153px></a>

Copy and embed in your blog!

Oh, and the more people participate, the jollier it gets – so please help us spread the word by blogging about JollyJournalist.com or also by putting our nifty badge on your site!

1. The power of organisation without an organisation. Social networks allow you to find people with the same interests, with different abilities and a commitment to the same goals – regardless of location or status. The news team is no longer within the same four walls, they can change with each story.

2. Write what you want and build a personal brand. Your editor doesn’t like what you have to say? Start a blog and post it there – if it’s interesting and well written, the world will notice.

3. Be the paperboy. That’s actually better than it sounds: As a journalist, you can now also take care of the distribution of your content – and decide whether you want it to be an article, a blog post, a video, a podcast or whatever.

4. The death of churnalism. News is consumed in such a way that commoditized wire content can be delivered at zero marginal cost. There’s no need for rewriting. Journalists can focus on fact digging and analysis.

5. Information like it’s Christmas. Google allows for journalists to get information without having to go the library. Most importantly, scholarly data and free-to-use databases offer the critically-minded with thousands of references to build an argument and add value to an issue.

6. Whistleblowers at arm’s length. Wikileaks and the like have made it really easy for people with sensitive information to bypass censorship and reach a journalist. That means more insider information in the newsroom.

7. Real-time fact-checking. Interviewing a politician who’s bluffing you with tons of statistics? Ask her to quote the source and confront her to Google on your 3G cell-phone.

8. Ask people who actually know something. Browsing blogs or academic work gives you access to hundreds of contacts in just a few clicks. The address book isn’t nearly as valuable as it used to be, therefore opening up the profession. (OK, political journalists not included).

9. Interview the world for free. Skype means free interviews for freelancers. What’s more, asynchronous e-mail interviews mean you can get answers from New-Zealand while sitting comfortably at your desk in Europe.

10. Feedback that’s not from mom. Reading comments, blog-searching or twitter-watching let you see what others are saying about your article or your area of expertise. You know when you do well. And when you need to improve.

(We also have a French version and a Czech version!)

By Paul Bradshaw, Nico Luchsinger and Nicolas Kayser-Bril

A new research from Indiana University showed that 54% of URL requests had no referrals. That means that most of the time, people do not click on links. They merely pick a site in their favorites or type in an URL in the address bar. A mere 5% of URL requests came from search engines.

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months – the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know.

The share of users that asked Google for “bbc.co.uk” actually rose over the years, meaning that web-literacy did not increase. Some users still do not understand the difference between the address bar and a search engine. As internet penetration continues to grow, late-adopters are forced to go online. Their behavior is far from the gorgeous image constantly pictured by geeky web consultants.

Should we jump to conclusions and withdraw all the theories on network building and SEO? Rich Gordon, from the Readership Institute, argues for instance that the answer for news outlets lies in building destinations, not bridges nesting deeper into the user’s head so as to see her come back more regularly.

Even though the figure of 54% of URL requests without referrals is impressive (and growing), it does not imply that web users are stuck in some 1995-like behavior. Asked by e-mail about the discrepancy between what some webmasters report, with Google traffic being the main concern, and his research, Mark Meiss offers several answers.

Quite surprised himself, he admits first that his experimental design considered requests from AJAX pages or RSS readers as having no referral. He also stressed the difference between some heavily visited websites, such as Facebook, and those on the news market. Users looking for news can be dwarfed by the new usages that emerged recently and that focus on a few websites (read: social networking). The full interview can be read here.

Although users do not adopt the newest surfing technologies as fast as the geek elite would like them to, the strategic visions centered on the power of the link should not be dismissed. AOL locked-in system failed years ago, and so will Facebook’s.

Journalists should not consider this research as a confirmation that they the ultimate destination for news, as some of them would like to think. Success lies in information flow, not in puddles of still articles.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

The title attribute of a hyperlink allows for a short description of the destination page to be displayed under the cursor. It helps the user get a hint of the linked page’s content without the loading time associated with Snapshot-like plugins (used on this blog).

Most of us would look at the browser’s status bar, but it can be difficult for regular users to determine whether a link is safe for work or if leads to any interesting content. For all the value the attribute adds to user experience, it takes an awful lot of time for a journalist to fill in all the fields. 30 seconds per link, 10 links per article and that’s 5 additional minutes per story.

Asked by email, French usability guru Fred Cavazza hesitates but admits that for all its benefits, titling every link requires some courage.

There’s no evidence that the ‘title’ attribute improves SEO, and some even say that it messes up the programs used by users with disabilities.

Wikipedia (picture) makes an excellent use of the title attribute. In mainstream media, very few articles have links and even fewer display a title. When they do, it’s automated and only includes the linked text (on nytimes.com and chicagotribune.com, for instance), adding little value.

Do you title your links? Do you have a plugin that automates the process? Do you think it’s something news organizations should focus on?

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Skoeps.nl, a citizen-journalism venture, closed down last week after its owners declared it unprofitable. The business plan seemed simple enough to succeed:

1. Find loads of money,
2. Advertise massively, and
3. Share advertising and syndication revenue with writers.

The plan worked, except that there wasn’t enough revenue to share. Skoeps cash-flow was in the black, which means that, if investors refused to go forward, growth must have been minimal and could not have offset the initial investment in the near future.

They planned on giving €500,000 away to contributors in 2008. Despite what should have been a market-killing proposition, they failed to come up with compelling content and raise their game to the level of the national, widely-known media brands.

Among the reasons why people become journalists, ‘to save the world’ probably ranks first, closely followed by ‘to fulfill my attention deficit disorder’. Only at the very bottom will you find ‘to earn big bucks’. In all likelihood, non-professional content producers (yes, that’s the politically correct term for ‘citizen-journalists’) think the same.

It seems that web-users will devote time and efforts to giving away content to a platform only if they have the promise of a large enough audience to listen to them. Poland’s leading citJ website, Wiadomosci24, and its contender Moje Miasto (My Town), are lead by the two main media groups, Polskapresse and Mecom. They both make intensive use of the synergies between pro and amateur, mass and specialized channels. Polskapresse, for instance, advertise the site in the group’s papers and promising contributors a space in the print edition.

Even pure players seem to follow this trend. Despite $10m in Series A funding, NowPublic still sees no need to pay writers. A debate on the site as to how to share advertising revenue was superbly ignored by the community. Only 8 writers took part in the conversation. Their deal with AP is their best USP.

When monetization comes into play, open-pricing is the best option. The average donation stands at $4 on average. Instead of working on increasing page views, writers would focus on increasing the give-through-rate, so that they will try to provide content the audience deems worthy.

Non-professional contributions only add value if they have a unique edge against the mass. John, 34, from Westmoreland, TN, writing about the Middle-East conflict is useless. The same user writing about the tornado is priceless. The BBC does that brilliantly with the discreet box they put at the end of hot stories.

That’s why Steve Boriss announced the end of citizen-journalism. Journalism will increasingly be a job of connecting and editing contributions from the right experts. Whether this will be better done by humans or by Google is another matter.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns.

The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007. Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them[1].

(We also have a nice, embeddable Flash version with hi-res maps)

These maps allow you to grasp several media trends at a glance. First, traditional newspapers are highly selective in their coverage of world news. Looking at the three British dailies, editors favour countries that are bigger and more populous, but also closer to home and better developed. They also give more room to the countries of origin of British immigrants, especially if they are white (look at the size of Australia and New-Zealand). Hardly surprising, but still disheartening, especially when you consider that the only brand that does not advocate objectivity, The Economist, covers the world more equally.

Second, we see that web-only outlets do not offer such a different view of the world. That makes sense, considering the narrowing of the news agenda on the web that was described in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s latest report. Their lack of resources forces them to contract their scope. Smaller issues are better covered by the blogosphere, which seems unbeatable at providing niche news.

The world according to newspapers is a project that came up while writing a dissertation for school. I first published some maps on L’Observatoire des Médias, a French blog. Seeing the response, Gilles Bruno and I decided to go further and keep track of newspaper coverage. We want the maps above to be updated daily (or weekly) in order to pressure editors into covering more diverse issues.

We will build a scraper that will automatically retrieve the data for the 164 countries on several newspapers and a Java or Flash interface that will morph the maps. If you have any skill in cartograms, or data scraping, or if you have funds to buy these skills, you are more than welcome in the team!

[1] Colors indicate the same thing. However, a country can appear in red if it’s in the top 10% but still shrink, as the top 3 countries concentrate most of all media attention.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns.