Posts filed under 'newspapers'
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.
(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!
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.
March 23rd, 2008
The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.
By clicking on the scissors icon (
) next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway - but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.
These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights.
Firstly, although the phrase ’social bookmarking’ is not used, this is clearly an attempt at that, and it isn’t social. There is no way to discover other bookmarkers apart from, as Inside Guardian suggests, ‘guessing’ their name.
Equally, new articles are not suggested as a result of what you bookmark - although you can click on Guardian-defined categories to see the latest stories about ‘ITV’, for instance.
To add insult to injury if you want to import your old ’saved stories’… you can’t. You have to visit every one, and clip it all over again. Nice.
Here we have a centralised service which requires you to be logged in and is generally controlled and defined by the publisher.
Why would I use it when I can’t use my own categories? When it doesn’t help me discover new things, or organise old ones in new ways? When I can only bookmark Guardian stories?
Where is the benefit?
So here are my suggestions.
Firstly, allow tagging and user categorisation. Make them into links so you can see what else is being tagged with the same. Allow people to discover each other through shared interests.
Secondly, create a widget/bookmark so people can clip material from - shock, horror - other sites.
But most important - and easy - is this: The fact that I can see Guardian Unlimited Editor-in-chief Emily Bell’s clippings is a massive draw (sadly, no clippings yet for Jemima Kiss).
But do they make this visible on Emily Bell’s articles? No.
Not even her profile includes a link.
What a missed opportunity.
Every Emily Bell story should include a link to ‘Emily Bell’s clippings’, it’s as simple as that. If I respect her work as a journalist, there’s a chance I’ll want to be reading what she reads. And that’s where The Guardian - and news organisations generally - have an advantage: the editorial angle; the brand; the relationship.
And what a great way to keep readers on your site.
More broadly, I’ve posted previously about the concept of letting readers see ‘What the journalist read to write this’ as part of the model for a 21st century newsroom. And Radio 4’s iPM del.ico.us account is a great example of this in practice. So I won’t repeat myself on that.
Having said all that, I’m guessing this is actually a stepping stone to The Guardian’s planned social networking service, where user profiles will link to their clippings pages and, I hope, allow for more serendipity and linkage.
In the meantime, however, here’s an opportunity to iron out those glaring problems first.
March 18th, 2008
What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups - and get them talking?
That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?
Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web - the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.
The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.
Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense - I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 - $150 off of it.”
The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”
Instead Rick explained his own business model - a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.
This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ’scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).
The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.
The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.
And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.
The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion - and create discussions of their own - online.
In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.
Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.
The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.
The question is, which half will be which?
March 18th, 2008
In an attempt to reconnect with its readers, German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) introduced a thematic and participatory website a few weeks ago.
The translation of The Kindly Ones, a blockbuster book wherever it’s been released, landed in German bookstores last Saturday, February 23. Its controversial content (sex, Nazis and sadism) makes it a favorite conversation topic among the quality-newspaper-reading population. FAZ decided to organize this conversation.
Lately, what many consider the most boring newspaper of the known universe has seen its readership figures decline steeply. Such a move, reinforcing reader involvement, could be a good idea if this venerable institution wants to compete online. Currently, FAZ.net lies at the bottom the German web and its growth is flatter than Niedersachsen, says Comscore.
The first 120 pages of the book were published as a feuilleton in the paper version. Online, the Reading Room (sic) was introduced, a minisite aiming at transferring the paper’s offline literary reputation on the web.
There, local superstar and Oscar Nominee Christian Berkel reads several chapters, available in streaming video and downloadable mp3.
More daringly, FAZ built a debate around the book, despite its poor track-record when it comes to user participation. Every day, FAZ journalists choose a topic related to the book, which is then discussed by ‘experts’ and readers, in two distinct forums.
This oh-so-old-media-like two-tier structure notwithstanding, the conversation seems very qualitative. Elegant design and crystal-clear Ajax help readability and fosters interaction.
So far, so good. The Reading Room boasts 850,000 pageviews in February and the concept was implemented on Martin Walser’s Ein Liebender Mann on Monday.
This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns.
February 26th, 2008
A student writes: “I dont think the Reading Evening Post read your blog Paul. If they did, they didn’t pay much attention...”
Yes, the previous contender for Worst Newspaper Video have done it again. But this time, instead of Sports Editor David Wright, it’s young gun News Reporter Stuart White, who looks quite smart in the official picture that sits above a slightly less well-dressed moving picture version of the same.
The 1980s-era production style remains, with the same stock music, garish graphics - and this time, some appalling spinning, zooming, transition wipes.
Stuart’s challenge: to read out the day’s headlines “in just 60 seconds“. Yes, that’s some challenge. Perhaps someone should suggest that idea to BBC3.
One problem: when you take out the credits it’s not actually 60 seconds, which may be why Stuart is drowned out by the closing music at the end, just as David Wright was before him. Do they ever watch their own videos?
I’ll be more barbed: Stuart has the flat delivery of a 12-year-old reading ‘What I did on my summer holidays’, while his eyes flit below the camera like he’s checking his emails as well as reading the headlines. Presumably he’s reading a script. Doesn’t he know what the news is?
And what was that about a “sweet Haribo ring”? Some lessons in writing for broadcast needed.
Of course I’m being harsh, and as before this is not Stuart’s fault. Step up owners Surrey and Berkshire Newspapers Limited, part of the Guardian Media Group.
The one good thing is they’ve discovered YouTube, so unlike last time, I can embed it below for your convenience and their viewing figures. Let’s see if I can generate more views from this blog than from their own site - at least it will prove the value of making your video embeddable.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/0st6x-vrW5M&rel=1]
PS: As if by magic, Andy Dickinson has created his own video summarising the kind of thinking that leads to this stuff:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s014hNGowTs]
February 18th, 2008
In the final part of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom I look at how new media has compounded problems in news organisations’ core business models - and the new business models which it could begin to explore.
Let’s start by looking at the traditional newspaper business model. This has rested on selling, in a broad simplification, three things:
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Advertising. Put more explicitly: selling readers to advertisers.
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Selling content to readers, and, twinned with that:
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Selling the delivery platform to readers - i.e. the paper
Developments in the past few decades have eaten into each of those areas as follows:
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A rise in alternative channels (radio, TV, direct mail, web, mobile) has reduced newspapers’ market share of advertising. Their case isn’t helped by declining readerships and new media channels that offer access to more specific audiences, and more specific measurement.
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A rise in content sources - again, radio and TV, plus increased competition due to the rise of desktop publishing, before an incredible proliferation of content with the ease of publishing online. This has resulted in supply outstripping demand, and people becoming less willing to pay for basic content they can get elsewhere.
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Finally, changes in society - particularly the rise of office- and computer-based occupations, the
decline of city centre-based employment and use of public transport - have seen
a reduction in the value (and accessibility) of the paper as a delivery platform. Twinned with this, other delivery platforms - the web (both at work and at home), and mobile phones, but also free newspapers and on-board TV - have added platform competition.
Newspapers have done very well at protecting generous profits despite increasing competition on a number of platforms, and declining readership - but the changes in consumption patterns enabled by the web, and the migration of advertising online, represents a massive challenge to existing business models. How can you make money out of content that increasingly fewer people are prepared to pay for? How can you justify paying printing and distribution costs when online distribution is not only vastly cheaper, but more effective? How can you sell readers to advertisers when there are fewer of them, and you know less about them than your online competitors?
Going online
The obvious answer has been to colonise the new territory, and export the business model online. But there are problems.
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Content is free.
Paywalls don’t work - or rather, they work against your main source of revenue: advertising. Any money you make from selling subscriptions will be outweighed by what you lose on advertising through having fewer readers. And that’s because:
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You don’t own the platform. You own a small part of it - your own website. Readers can go to a competitor through a single click or search. They can even cut out news organisations entirely and, if this is all you’re rewriting reporting, go to the football club webpage, the band’s MySpace, the company’s press release.
How do we tackle these issues? Let me count the ways…
Attract more readers.
Well, duh. Newspapers have always tried to do that, yes? But what readers are they trying to attract? Newspapers and broadcasters have been limited by geography, and relevance to readers, so that the ‘why are we spending money on a website that isn’t read by local people?’ culture remains. We need to challenge our ideas of who our readers could be.
Because online, your market changes. You can attract readers in another city, or another country (UK sites seem to do this well). You can attract readers who wouldn’t pay for a newspaper because it was too generic. And because of this, you can attract advertisers who want to appeal to those readers.
If each online reader is worth 60% less than a print reader, it helps to have, say, 80% more of them (e.g. 18m online readers to your 10m or so print readers).
In other words, online, news becomes about being very very big (international) and very very small (hyperlocal; personalised). Industrial age economies of scale no longer apply.
You can launch hyperlocal sites, or specialist sites (Lucas Grindley’s ‘Zoning by interest’ posts offer a range of ideas here about reducing the size of newspapers, splitting the sections, and offering them as parts of a package, a la cable packages).
You can have hugely popular bloggers. Or produce a major interactive, feature section, or useful tool that attracts readers through word of mouth.
Create content people will pay for.
This is incredibly difficult. Financial information is a rare example of journalism that has a clear commercial value, and even that’s under threat. Content is so easily replicable online, that timeliness is only a marginal selling point (mobile is a different matter - more on that below). It may be possible to produce reports that have commercial value, but this is not going to be realistic for most general news publications.
Most publishers are not creating commercial value, but social value. This is easy to dismiss, but online, social capital is a very powerful currency. One option (if not too injurious to publishers’ pride) would be reader donations. Readers may be more inclined to support journalism they believe in, such as a particular investigation or issue, rather than the website as a whole.
If this raises complaints about influencing the editorial agenda, ask yourself why we have supplements on travel, motoring, technology? Would it be because advertisers support them?
And if readers are committed enough to donate to a story, how attractive will advertising alongside it be to advertisers?
Or, you might bite the bullet and go non-profit, as many news organisations are.
One further option: sell to third parties (syndication). Content used to be king before it was dethroned by the dotcom crash, but there may still be websites who need your content to attract users. Most however, are looking to:
Create new platforms.
This is where the money is at the moment, if you can make it work. Web 2.0 is all about building on top of the web (which is itself built on top of the internet). Facebook is a perfect example of a company building a platform that people are prepared to sign up to. Flickr and YouTube are others.
What these companies understand is that the web is a place, not a destination. If your business model rests on selling advertising, you need to think more creatively about attracting - and keeping - people to your site. They don’t hang around newsagents.
And once you’ve created a successful platform, you can sell it to others.
Put those three points another way…
News is a service, not a product
The most successful online news operations understand that news is a service, not a product: the BBC’s success is not just in the resources they have allocated, but the way they have done so because of the culture of a public service organisation. The Teesside Gazette’s hyperlocal service rests on servicing the users’ very clear needs. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow spends the first half of the day dealing with emails from readers (and has created filters to assist him). Facebook is the ultimate hyperlocal news service: what your friends are doing. Twitter does the same.
Success online rests on responding to, anticipating - and creating - the needs of readers. It is no longer about simply producing ’stories’. Stories were an effective way of serving the need for information when paper was the platform - but that information (who, what, where, when, who, how, why) can be packaged differently - and more effectively - online. Databases, tagging, geotagging, maps, multimedia, interactivity, personalisation - to name just a few - all offer new possibilities.
Not only that, but because we are now in the service industry, the relationship with the reader becomes more important. Responding to their comments, following up on leads, involving them in a variety of ways all become key. This becomes even more important when you realise…
Advertising alone will not save you
Let me repeat the statistic above: around 40% of ad spend online goes to search engines. News organisations are not even close to being dominant players. To expect to match the revenues previously generated by print advertising is naive. Meanwhile, every day more competition launches onto the web looking to fund its activities through advertising.
We are living in an age of convergence - not just technological, but commercial. Amazon are in the sales industry, but use content (reviews) to leverage sales; Lastminute.com do the same. And neither produces the goods that they sell - their business model relies on partnerships and effective supply chains - and service.
So why can’t an industry built on content do the same, and sell things? In some places it already is. Mixmag’s download chart and NME’s ticket shop are obvious examples. If building a formal partnership is too much work, there are plenty of ready-made affiliate schemes (This blog has one for books on online journalism - how hard can it be?).
Note: you need to match the service levels of new media startups too. From Tim O’Reilly:
“Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company’s own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with “most popular”, a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the “flow” around products. With an order of magnitude more user participation, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s sales also outpace competitors.”
Another option is merchandising. This requires some creative thought - slapping your logo on a t-shirt or mug isn’t going to do it. But think of all the wit and creativity that journalists bring to their work. A classic quote from a columnist, or even an interview are just two that spring to mind. What about the photographers, cartoonists and illustrators? Again, there are plenty of online services that will do the production and sales processing for you.
For that matter, there’s no need to restrict yourself to material created in-house. Broker models such as those of iStockphoto or Threadless would allow a news organisation to leverage its profile, reach and technology to sell on behalf of willing readers, taking a small cut. User generated content? You ain’t heard the half of it.
Selling services
News websites have the perfect opportunity to leverage their content and - crucially - communities to provide services over and above the news itself.
This shouldn’t be a completely new experience: newspapers already provide classifieds and dating, while crosswords are one of the few areas online newspapers still charge for. The Sun’s site is a masterclass in exploring new services such as gambling, dieting, and gaming. But for most news organisations competition such as Craigslist and eBay has stolen a march here by providing a better and cheaper service online.
To catch up news organisations should look at Tim O’Reilly’s core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:
- “Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models”
An obvious first place to start would be to rethink their services as a whole for the web 2.0 era, or build upon editorial ideas. Offer readers the service to place their own ads instantly (as Horse and Hound do). Geotagged classifieds? Or property ads? Editorially-driven dating?
But that’s just the first step. A second step is to think of entirely new services, and to do so in a way that’s about web business models, not physical ones. The most common model is providing a basic service for free and charging for added features or customisation - you might call it upselling; Disney call it the ‘velvet rope’ business model. Jared Lukin calls it the ‘Freemium’ business model*.
Examples abound: Flickr provide image hosting for free - but if you want to store more than a couple hundred images, you have to pay; LibraryThing do the same for lists of books; PBwiki provide free wiki hosting - you pay for added features; SurveyMonkey provide free surveys for up to 100 responses but for raw data or larger samples, it’ll cost. And Wordpress offer free blog hosting, but for advanced features you have to buy credits. Then there are those who simply charge for an advertising-free version (alternatively, you might simply provide a service for free to attract readers for advertisers, a la Facebook).
The news organisation may choose to build on top of an existing service, generate entirely new services, create niche offerings in the same vein, or act as a vendor for existing services. Again, the question becomes: what do the readers need? What are big issues, industries, interests, attractions in our area? Editorial knowledge and contacts now become hugely important resources.
Good places to start for more ideas are Yochai Benkler’s Ideal-Type Information Production Strategies on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks (Amazon US). And the final chapter (Collaborative Minds) of Wikinomics (Amazon US).
Mobile - we’re still waiting
The expectation that mobile will provide the answer is palpable. Whereas online people expect to get things for free, with mobile, the story goes, there is a culture of payment. If people will pay £1.50 for a tinny ringtone or pixelated wallpaper, surely content companies can’t lose?
Furthermore, mobile offers the promise of another platform to sell to advertisers.
But we’re at risk of making the same mistakes as were made with the internet. Mobile is a different medium - not just another channel on which to shove your content. People want specific things: current research suggests maps and local search are top of the list.
In this context, geotagging is central to preparing for a mobile future. Being able to access information relevant to where they are will be key (geotagged classifieds? Reviews of a restaurant within 500 feet? Crime rates when looking at houses?).
And the success of Twitter offers a lesson in the value of text alerts. On one level, these are useful for driving readers to your website; on another (that velvet rope again), charging for subscriptions to more specific alerts becomes a real possibility. Those fortunate enough to have content already appropriate for mobile phones (wallpaper images; short video clips) can sell that too; otherwise, it’s time to think creatively about what your readers will want when they’re on the move.
Aside from mobile, there are a range of other platforms to consider too, including Internet and DAB radio, digital and IPTV, and live events.
To finish, here’s a final diagram, and a list of suggested questions that news organisations might ask themselves to help change their business model. Here’s the graphic…
…and here are the questions. Could you add more?
Questions to ask in generating new media business models
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What data/information on the purest level do we have, or is within easy reach? (e.g. sports data, crime information, contacts, council meeting minutes, biographies, etc.)
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Who would have an interest in that?
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Where are they, online and offline?
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How could it be packaged to service these people?
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How could it be distributed to service these people?
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Why would they want this service?
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What might they want to do with the data? (e.g. compare it, export it, transfer it, build something with it, etc.)
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Who are our existing users?
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What can they add to our data or services?
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Why would they want to do so? What would motivate them to do so?
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What are the big issues/interests in our area? (e.g. local industries, popular activities, events, attractions, personalities, etc.)
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What services would fill a need there?
Of course the real trick is knowing which of the many options to invest time and money in - and that will depend on the strengths of the organisation, its content, and its staff.
*UPDATE: Ben Compaine has written a useful article on why the Freemium model didn’t work for the New York Times’ ‘premium content’ offering TimesSelect:
“the model is most likely to succeed when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money. Free e-mail accounts that offer greater storage for a fee. Termination cost on other carriers networks in the Skype model is explicit justification. In the case of TimesSelect, it would be obvious to most readers that arbitrary withholding access to some portions of content was not related to significant costs. It may have made some sense as “value” play, but it clearly did not work. “But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results,” concludes Wilson.”
Once again, this is a work in progress. Please add your comments, analysis, examples, corrections and caveats and I’ll try to address them.
January 28th, 2008
The Online Journalism Atlas continues, with Kristine Lowe looking at online journalism in Norway, where some newspapers make more money online than in print. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.
Norway is one of the most newspaper-reading in countries in the world, a fact also reflected in the country’s online media environment. In contrast to many other countries, Norwegians seem to prefer news-driven sites with journalistic content to all others.
Early starters
Early adoption has put Norwegian online media at a great at advantage, some of the online players even earn good money.
The first traditional Norwegian newspaper to hit the web was Brönnöysundsavis, a regional paper which launched its online edition 6 March 1995, closely followed by Dagbladet, the country’s second biggest tabloid.
Norway’s biggest newspaper, VG, a tabloid, and Aftenposten, the country’s biggest broadsheet, both owned by Norwegian media group Schibsted, also started publishing online in 1995. Schibsted, who own media assets in a number of other European countries, have since garnered international recognition for their successful transition online. Following a favourable mention in the Economist, this transition was even put on the curriculum at Harvard University.
VG is now not only Norway’s most read news site, it is the country’s most visited website overall.
Another early starter was Nettavisen, the country’s first online only newspaper, which saw daylight on 1 November 1996. The founders of this paper later helped start German sister site Netzeitung in 2000.
Ownership structure and profits
Schibsted
Schibsted is the dominant player in Norway’s media landscape. The company owns VG, the most read newspaper both on paper and online, and Aftenposten, the most influential national newspaper. The media group also owns the country’s biggest online market place, Finn.no, Norwegian search engine Sesam Sök and stakes in several of the major regional newspapers. The country’s most read business site, E24, is also a Schibsted product.
To give a clue about the audience the site aims to attract: its Swedish sister site famously advertised for “journalists with expensive habits” in 2007. Innovation is expensive, and many of Schibsted’s most recent ventures, like its European freesheets, are loss-making, but several of its online product are very profitable. Finn.no has had a profit margin around 40 per cent for three consecutive years (2003 – 2006), and VG.no is in a similar position: for 2007, it is expected to deliver a profit margin of 42 – 45 per cent. Schibsted’s newspapers have traditionally been politically conservative.
Dagbladet
Dagbladet is the country’s second biggest tabloid. Owned by the Berner group, the liberal newspaper is in the unique position that it has more readers online than in print. Online is also where Dagbladet makes money (the print version is in the red). Dagbladet online recorded a record profit of 26,6 per cent in 2005, but this was reduced to 13 per cent in 2006.
Edda Media
Edda Media is the Norwegian arm of Mecom. The newspaper group consists of a number of regional and local newspapers, with a total of 27 online newspapers, as well as local radio and TV stations (some of which are subsidiaries of the respective local newspapers) and a few specialist online portals. When the company was acquired by the British group in 2006 it had an average profit margin of 7.5 percent.
A-pressen and TV2
A-pressen is another major media group, owned by the Labour Union, Telenor, the country’s partly-privatised phone company, and free speech charity Fritt Ord. The group owns a number of local and regional newspaper, as well as 50 per cent of the country’s biggest commercial TV channel, TV2.
Until recently, A-pressen was not known for being very innovative online, but it is now pressing ahead with a new online venture together with TV2 that has seen the two share more content and launch ‘hyperlocal’ search engine derdubor.no (where you live).
TV2 bought Nettavisen in 2003, and until recently the news site provided almost all of the content for the TV channels website. This is about to change, and under the leadership of TV2’s new CEO, Alf Hildrum, the company will use more resources on developing a website aimed at marketing the TV channel’s programmes.
Public broadcasting
Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK, has also focused a lot more on its website recently, launching a number of new online portals - such as weather portal yr.no and children’s portal super.no. It is expected that NRK will see substantial traffic increase to its website as it starts opening up more and more of its archive in 2008, enabling users to download archive material for free.
The online team at NRK is also actively marketing NRK’s content in places like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, and has signed an agreement with Joost to broadcast a separate NRK channel there.
Other players
There are currently two other major TV channels in Norway: TVN, owned by German Pro Sieben; and TV3 Norway, owned by Swedish Modern Times Group (MTG), but the websites of both are focused on marketing TV content, not on online journalism.
ABC Startsiden, owned by Telenor, is currently Norway’s third most used website. It comprises Startsiden.no (a catalogue of websites), a search engine and a WAP-service. In March 2007 it launched its own news site, ABC Nyheter. The news site was the first commercial site in Norway to nurture citizen journalism as part of its site. ‘Citizen articles’ is currently a separate section on the site, but articles from this section are sometimes used in the main section of the site, always clearly labelled ‘citizen articles’. The internet company delivered a 65 per cent profit margin in 2006, a margin expected to be marginally down for 2007.
Aller Internett is made up of ten different news sites: some of the oldest, like IT-site digi.no, going all the way back to 1996. Together with TV2 Nettavisen and Norway’s four biggest regional newspapers, it also owns business site NA24 – the second most-read business site after E24.
Other notable Norwegian news outlets are Dagens Naeringsliv and Finansavisen (both financial dailies) Dagsavisen, Klassekampen and Morgenbladet, all newspapers and all with news sites, but none of these have made a huge impact in the online environment.
Blogs, Social Networks and Community
In an egalitarian country such as Norway, it’s perhaps not surprising that the newspapers have left most of the blogging their to readers, rather than encouraging their reporters to venture into the blogosphere.
Dagbladet is a notable exception, its reporters started blogging as early as 2002, but these blogging efforts were more mostly abandoned. Since 2005, Dagbladet and VG have both had blogging platforms where readers are encouraged to set up blogs. These thriving blogging communities are further encouraged by competitions to write ‘blog post of the week’ etc. (MyTelegraph was a latecomer compared to these two online newspaper communities).
Other than that, Aftenposten has set up a blogging site for its foreign correspondents, but there’s not much blogging going on there as of yet. Most of the national newspapers do have something called blogs on their sites, but the content is more akin to traditional op-eds published on a blog platform, and the feeling of reading an op-ed is exacerbated by the fact that many of the online newspapers don’t link out.
VG and Dagbladet also have their own social networks, Nettby and Blink, both launched in 2006. The former is the second largest social network in Norway, with 606,000 registered users.
Outside of mainstream media, Norway does have a thriving blogging scene, though in contrast to England, we haven’t seen blogs setting the political agenda in any major way. Norwegian blogs tend to be more diary-like, often almost literary in form.
Among more co-ordinated non-mainstream online media sites, INorden, the Scandinavian citizen journalism site written by bloggers, and Sonitus, a ‘human blog aggregator’ - a site made possible by dedicated individuals who continuously sift through Norwegian blogs to pull out the best blog posts - also deserve to be mentioned.
Education
Traditionally, the journalism schools at Volda and in Oslo have been the two main institutions training journalists: the former used to educate the broadcast journalists, the latter the print journalists. With the new focus on multimedia journalism, this is now changing and both schools strive to incorporate more training in online journalism.
There are also a number of other journalism schools in the country, including a course whose graduates are currently in so much in demand that many are recruited before they graduate: a BA in business journalism at business school, BI.
Kristine Lowe is a journalist and blogger who writes for a number of Norwegian, British and American clients. Of the organisations mentioned here, Kristine has worked for NRK, Dagens Naeringsliv, NA24 and ABC Nyheter in recent times. She is also a regular contributor to Ethical Space: the international journal for communication ethics.
January 25th, 2008
The Telegraph is starting to make a habit of combining Flash and databases to impressive effect. Their latest project brings in mapping too, to produce a political map of the UK which has real depth behind its Flashy appearance.
It’s done this with some nifty database connectivity. A click on a particular constituency brings up info about the last election results. So far so-so. But a tab to the right (see detail below: surely this should be the default?) offers a ‘Public services profile’ of how health, education and crime have changed, along with (currently empty) spaces for related articles and links. If and when this works it promises the sort of connectivity that has been lacking from so much online journalism. But will they be brave enough to link to reports on other sites?
Other features include the Swingometer (see how different swings affect the results), previous results, and lists of vulnerable seats - all of which are now expected, having been done before by the BBC among others (as I reported in the mists of 2005) - while the links to the latest polls add something extra.
Meanwhile, usability is smooth with postcode search, drop-down, and zoom feature, plus the ability to ‘mark’ an area.
Telegraph.co.uk’s Editor Marcus Warren says the tool was prepared for last autumn’s “General Election that wasn’t. It would have been ready for the closing weeks of the campaign but in the end the Prime Minister thought better of going to the country so we pursued the project at a slightly less breakneck speed and launched in the political “new year”.
“It’s also part of a more general drive, both by us and elsewhere, to drill down to the local level and exploit data relevant to our audience’s lives. We also wanted to the tool to be “fun”. (Originally, for example, the images of the party leaders were caricatures.)”
While acknowledging the influence of the likes of “Start Swinging” with Peter Snow, Warren says there has been no one model “that made us exclaim: “we want one of them too”. Like everyone else, we’ve been keeping an eye on the digital election campaigns in Australia and the US, both Google’s approach and that of others. World Archipelago have done a great job in building the thing, as have the people here who worked on it.”
The most frustrating thing at the moment about the map is simply the fact that there is no election on yet, which gives the Telegraph team plenty of time to respond to feedback, iron out problems, try new ideas, find out about others through the blogosphere (Warren admits to not being aware of Electoral Calculus until Simon Dickson’s post) and be all mysterious about their plans. As Warren says:
“There are lots of clues in there which hint at what else we plan to do with it. And we have other surprises up our sleeve as well.”
For my part I’d like to see some individual RSS feeds/mobile alerts for constituencies and some tapping into the power of tagging - perhaps automated grabs of delicious bookmarks with clusters of key words in them (or indeed which key words become popular), or getting Telegraph journalists to tag their sources with a particular phrase that is picked up by the engine. But I’m being fussy. What do you think?
January 25th, 2008
So the Independent has relaunched its website. At first glance there’s nothing spectacularly new or innovative, but a deeper look reveals some intelligent changes - particularly on the business side of things. Here are the headlines:
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A much more promin
ent place for RSS feeds, ‘Most popular’ (read/emailed/commented), videos, podcasts, blogs, (’Just posted’ and ‘Catch up with our experts’), photo galleries, poll, etc. Which is as you’d expect.
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Likewise, there’s the now customary ‘Digg it/Stumbleupon/Facebook/delicious’ box on every article (plus change font size/print/email).
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‘In the News’ navigation choice drops down to big stories of the moment. Not as striking as Sky and The Guardian, who are able to include those stories as a navigation choice in their own right.
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Editorial nous remains important as ‘Editor’s Choice’ becomes even more prominent (in comparison, ‘Most popular’ lies below the fold). The ‘Day in a page’ drop-down menu (presumably for people who missed the news that day and want to catch up) remains but drops to the bottom.
- Open House is described as an “online debating chamber where our diverse stable of columnists and commentators come together to discuss the issues of the day - and invite you to join in.” Looks like an attempt at cloning commentisfree.
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IndyBest micro-site brings together “The Independent’s ever-popular weekly 50 Best features and the daily 10 Best series”. Are they annoyed
ShortList came up with the idea first?
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The final verdict? Clearly the Inde has its business head screwed on, while managing to tick all the boxes a newspaper should have been ticking last year in terms of technology. Editorially, however, it’s still trailing its broadsheet competitors in terms of making the most of the possibilities of the medium, with The Telegraph doing exciting things with databases and Flash, and The Guardian excelling on blogging and podcasting. Still, at least The Independent prints links to other sites in its newspaper, which is something its competitors have never done well.
And for the record, here’s what it looked like on January 4, before the revamp:
January 24th, 2008
Last week I interviewed Mike Hill, Deputy Editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, for an article on changing tools and approaches in local newsrooms (due to appear on Journalism.co.uk). Mike has some interesting plans on using surveys beyond the simple reader poll (since reported here), and experiences of the weaknesses of geotagging, among other things. The interview can be heard here - it’s around 10 minutes.
January 24th, 2008
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