The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years.
Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks.
With developer Jeff Reifman leading the way, NewsCloud has developed three applications (Hot Dish, Minnesota Daily and Seattle In:Site) that engage users in news content through linking to stories by providing a headline, photo and blurb. The applications also allow them to blog, post links themselves and much more – all while getting points for completing “challenges” that can be redeemed for prizes, which works as an incentive to stay engaged. Prizes include everything from t-shirts to tickets to a baseball game to a MacBook. Some of these challenges are online ones (sharing a story, commenting on content, blogging, etc.) and others are offline challenges (attend a marketing event, write a letter to the editor). [Read more]
Launched in April/May 2009, idaventry is a community driven local news and features site with strong editorial comment. I invited publisher Dave Raven to write a guest post for OJB on their latest campaign regarding Daventry Council’s investments in Icelandic banks.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to be writing this guest post, since there will be few occasions when a local community website such as iDaventry.com can speak off-topic about an international event.
The reason is Daventry District Council’s investment fiasco, locking up £8 million of ratepayer’s cash in the four Icelandic banks that crashed so spectacularly last October.
This June a Parliamentary select committee the CLG, concluded Local Governments were badly advised by external treasury management advisers. So that’s alright then – it’s not the Council’s fault. [Read more]
Steve Outing highlights how Men’s Health are exploring the new features of the 3.0 iPhone/iPod Touch operating system:
“Now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.
“Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.”
Outing then explores what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app (much more detail on his post):
One-off premium purchases
Enable premium services for an added fee
Delay the news by an hour
99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
A paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house.
I’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s excellent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. So far, it seems far much better than his previous book The Long Tail, incorporating a much broader set of ideas rather than rely on the ’simple-concept-plus-copious-examples’ genre.
I may blog in more detail at another point - for now I’ve skipped past the usual examples and gone straight to the chapters on economics. If there’s one lesson you can take from those chapters, I would say it’s this: in a world of abundance look for the new markets created by that abundance.
Keen to practise what he preaches, Anderson has put the entire book online for anyone to read - and embed. It’s embedded below.
National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10. That’s according to a massive count of newspaper’s twitter accounts I’ve done (there’s a table of all 120 at that link).
The Guardian’s the clear winner, as its place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its @GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total …
@GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992 followers, @TimesFashion is 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.
Screenshot of the data
Other findings
Glorified RSS Out of 120 accounts, just 16 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc (you can see which are which on the full table).
No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
Rapid drop-off There are only 6 Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much - no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do - they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.
The full spreadsheet of data is here (and I’ll keep it up to date with any accounts the papers forgot to mention on their own sites)… It’s based on official Twitter accounts - not those of individual journalists. I’ve rounded up some other Twitter statistics if you’re interested.
There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended - but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore - so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion.
MySociety, the non-profit organisation led by Tom Steinberg, has redesigned their TheyWorkforYou.com website with data about UK Parliamentary politics.
The site provides easily accessible records of the UK Parliamentary process, and now contains data going back to 1935.
The immediate benefit for journalists is that the records going back this far are now far more accessible than previously. Previously, the archive data only went as far back as 2001. [Read more]
The internet blows my mind. Ryan Carson opened my eyes to the power of it a few months ago. We can sit down and create a blog or web application and have it instantly accessible to the world. That’s unique, and it’s exciting.
We’re asking the BBC to join us in this creativity. Today, we’re launching BBC Free - it’s a campaign to convince the BBC to offer full article RSS feeds.
Currently, their feeds are just a single line or two and this hurts your RSS experience, and it also hinders creativity in online news. RSS feeds are machine readable and a ton of great startups base their news products off that content. By making the feed “full article”, we can be far more creative with how we improve your online news experience.
We’re not asking the BBC to create an amazing news API like The Guardian. The BBC doesn’t run adverts, any users of RSS will appreciate this change, and people who don’t use RSS won’t know anything has changed.
We’re imploring you, internets, to help us with our campaign. Full details are at our site http://bbcfree.net - the twitter hash tag is #bbcfree and you can follow the campaign at @bbcfree.
Update, 2 days later: Paul is kind enough to let me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going well until this post … You can read my climbdown here…
The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.
(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)
The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.
And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.
The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK … [Read more]
Unless your site is entertainment or the wikipedia, your visitors are not dropping by to kill time. People visit websites to solve problems: they want to learn something new, check a fact, purchase a product, or accomplish some other goal. Visitors do not come to hear your point of view for its own sake (usually), enjoy the brilliance of your branding, or le […]
three suggestions that would improve the BBC experiment and increase the likelihood of coming up with something genuinely useful: 1. Share the wisdom. Don’t keep the ideas in-house, waiting for some designated day when you pick the best of the emails. Instead curate all the ideas and make them available online. Refining other people’s work - or tweaking […]
Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't fo […]
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.
Imagine my surprise this evening when I happened upon the local evening paper to find there was a whole feature about Shire Oak Reservoir, complete with lead-in on the front page. The article was clearly derived from my earlier blog post, but bore no kind of reference whatsoever to the Brownhills Blog.
With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here's their answer.
The end of news websites?
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).
