Polskapresse’s flawed strategy for dealing with falling circulation

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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. Continue reading →

Speaking: Investigative Journalism goes Global

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On June 13th I will be in London at the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference, hosted by Westminster University. The day will include the official launch of the second edition of the book Investigative Journalism, for which I’ve written a chapter on ‘Investigative Journalism and Blogs‘. I’ll be on a panel discussing “GLOBAL OPERATIONS Sourcing Globally, Reporting Globally”

Here’s the incredibly intimidating company in which I will be sitting.

  • Chair: Deborah Vogel, Course Leader, Postgraduate Journalism
  • Stephen Grey, Investigative journalist and author of Ghost Plane (tbc)
  • Gavin McFadyen, Director, Centre of Investigative Journalism
  • Paul Lashmar, Freelance investigative journalist
  • me
  • Deborah Davies, Channel 4 Dispatches

If you’ll be there let me know, would be great to say hello.

Five questions from another journalism student

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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. Continue reading →

Something for the weekend #7: sharing documents on Scribd

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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). Continue reading →

Council elections mashup – help improve it

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I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is

  • take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘,
  • gets rid of duplicate results,
  • and spits out a feed.
  • UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google News and Technorati searches for local election and the two london candidates
  • It also filters out anything with ‘Zimbabwe’ in it, as reports on those elections were coming through.

I’d like to invite you to clone the mashup and make improvements. Or you can just suggest them here.

Some things I’d like to do are: add images; geo information and mapping; other feeds; filtering based on user input (e.g. location).

Meanwhile, here’s how the two mayoral candidates are faring on Twitter mentions according to a search on Twist:

Boris vs Ken

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut)

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The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

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. Continue reading →

The European News Interactivity Index

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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…

European News Interactivity Index

Not just that, but we’ve made the index itself interactive. Specifically, Nicolas Kayser-Bril has created this PHP object which allows you to compare two selected newspapers or countries.

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:

<iframe src=”http://tinyurl.com/5c9vmy&#8221; frameborder=”0″ height=”605″ scrolling=”no” width=”415″></iframe>