Six months ago Polish publishing company Polskapresse took an innovative step in response to declining sales. The company, at the time publishing six regional dailies in different parts of Poland, decided to combine them under one brand: “Polska”. Marek Miller makes an early evaluation of this project.
The reason
The Polish regional press market is divided in two. Half belongs to Media Regionalne (part of David Montgomery’s Mecom) which publishes nine regional dailies; the other half belongs to Polskapresse (part of German Verlagsgruppe Passau). The press market was divided in the way that no regional newspaper published by both publishers would compete directly on the same regional market. (more…)
A third year BA Honours Journalism student studying at Middlesex University and based at the Journalism Centre Harlow College has emailed me the following questions. As always, I make the responses public.
1. What effect do you think the increase in Internet news sites will have on newspapers?
It’s already had an effect – increased competition, increased immediacy and reduced costs. But it’s not just news sites – the internet enables people and organisations to communicate with each other without needing news media to do it for them. That’s a real challenge. (more…)
What should the BBC be doing with its news online? Here’s my call for your contributions. Please help spread the word by embedding this video yourself - and let me know where your video is in the comments.
This weekend’s plaything is Scribd, a document sharing website. If you have a PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, powerpoint, image or open office doc - for example, annual reports, raw material, etc. - this is a good place to put it to make it both interactive and conversational.
A quick look at the tag cloud reveals some useful sources too, including the environmental protection agency, NASA, food and drug agency and so on (it is currently, as you’d expect, very US dominated). (more…)
It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.
In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. (more…)
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been turning the Online Journalism Blog into a group blog. For our first project we have taken Jo Geary’s news interactivity index, and applied it Europe-wide, creating an ‘interactivity index’ of newspapers across European countries - at the moment: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland…
The team so far is as follows: UK and France: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Switzerland: Nico Luchsinger; Portugal and Spain: Alex Gamela; Poland: Marek Miller; Macedonia: Darko Buldioski; Hungary: Molnar Emil; Netherlands: Wilbert Baan.
If you want to help add information on one or more of your country’s newspapers you can do so here - you’ll need to ask Nicolas for a password: nicolas (at) observatoiredesmedias.com.
More newspapers will continue to be added, and there are other graphical tricks to come.
You can also embed this widget on your own blog with the following code:
In my capacity as amateur psychotherapist to the blogerati, I have discovered a new raft of complaints as social media addicts adapt to the demands of new technologies and fluctuating social structures. The syndromes identified include:
Comment Guilt
Patients complain of an overwhelming regret that they are not commenting more on other people’s blogs, and ‘engaging with the online community’. Feelings of worthlessness and frustration. (more…)
