[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. According to Steve Outing of Poynter, newspaper podcasting is moving into a new phase, from one news-based podcast to specialist ‘channels’. “Case in point: the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com, has begun offering podcast channels from its Datebook, Food, and Opinion sections. (Business podcasts have been offered for a few months.)”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Poynter reports on a new survey by the International Federation of the Periodical Press (PDF) which claims to identify success factors for magazine websites. Rich Gordon writes:

“The survey isn’t scientific, and relies on self-reporting by publishers who consider their sites to be “successful” by whatever standards they wish. But the findings are interesting:

• The publishers’ top goals are developing new online audiences and attracting new readers for the print editions.
• When it comes to money, building revenues and profits for the long term is deemed twice as important as building the business in the short term.
• More than 8 in 10 publishers expect to expand their Web efforts within the next year.
• More than half the publishers say their site has expanded the magazine’s audience by more than 20 percent.
• Most of these self-described “successful” sites — whose print counterparts typically publish monthly — update their online content once or more a day.
• Six in 10 sites offer chat or online discussion.
• Two-thirds have attracted new, online-only advertisers.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. NewsIsFree has updated its website with a new XML-based search engine – SIETS – which “allows its end users to read and search news headlines also from sites which do not provide RSS feeds.” Looks pretty impressive at the moment.

The site is also beta-testing new functionality for page browsing at http://www.newsisfree.com/pages/power

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. I’m currently downloading BlogTorrent specifically so I can then download EPIC, a film about the future of news distribution, as reported on Journalism.co.uk. I’ll post comments once I’ve watched it…

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Sick of having to forever register with sites just to scan through an article that turns out to be of no interest anyway? Always losing registration details and having to re-register? I’m ticking both those boxes and so particularly welcome the BugMeNot add-in for the Firefox browser which reportedly “automatically fills in the fields (with bogus information)”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. More from Poynter (yes, I’m catching up with my emails again) – this time worth quoting in full:

“Two recent reports, from Nielsen//NetRatings (PDF) and from Scarborough Research (PDF), present conflicting numbers, but both cite substantial unique, unduplicated website usage.

“But is that a good thing? One point of view says that a low overlap means the website is extending the total reach of the newspaper, capturing readers — especially younger readers — who prefer the Internet as a medium. Without a robust website, the newspaper might simply lose those readers forever, the argument goes. Scarborough clearly favors the “Integrated Audience” metric as supporting combination print/Web ad sales.

“But there’s a countervailing point of view. I know of one major newspaper that has set a multiyear strategic goal of raising that overlap to 50 percent. Pepper and Rogers might support that concept, because it indicates a deeper, more powerful relationship with your best customers. But executing that plan could be difficult. It requires significant attention to creating different products and different experiences online and offline. That raises challenges in the areas of content, services, branding, and promotion.”

I’m off to read these reports for a possible update…

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Poynter’s Steve Outing is encouraging “newspaper folks” to read a piece by Rich Gordon on similarities between the current reaction to new technology, and the introduction of the transistor radio in the 1950s. To quote Outing quoting Gordon: “Newspapers’ problem in the Internet age is not, mostly, their content. It is, instead, the package (or device) the content comes in that compares unfavorably to the Internet in the eyes of young people.”

You could probably pick any number of other parallels with the introduction of new technologies. The introduction of television news, for instance, reduced the importance of the ‘immediacy’ of newspaper reporting (as it was always a day late), so the importance (and number) of features and analysis increased. I could go on, but as this is one of the areas of my MPhil, I’ll leave it for another time…

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Another great example of wikis being used by a news organisation – CNET.com’s ongoing report on India’s technology industry (Courtesy of Poynter). It seems the form suits rolling and analysis-heavy stories like this best.

This comes after the LA Times’ experiment with a ‘wikitorial’ went awry. To quote from The Guardian:

“At first the comment piece evolved sensibly. But once the newspaper’s online monitor had gone to bed all hell broke loose. Discussion of US exit strategy from Iraq gave way to ‘Fuck USA’ and hardcore pornography. The feature was pulled after 48 hours.

“The newspaper, cheered perhaps by the high ratio of encouragement to derision in bloggers’ post mortems, has promised to revive the idea with better policing.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. This one’s from the Online News Association (ONA) and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Read the press release here. Contest rules, entry forms and information are available at http://www.onlinenewsassociation.org .

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. The BBC’s continuing online dominance in the UK is making some wonder if the trickle-down theory that the Beeb espouses (we’re bringing people online, and they’ll soon drift on to commercial media sites as well, so stop complaining we’re undermining the business of online news) is still tenable – see the Economist (subscription site, sorry) and Hypergene.

Seems to me, though, the big, big story is the BBC’s success at getting people to contribute high quality content online and giving people open access to its creative archive. A public service ethos being truly translated for a new medium. As wired says, “America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters – the BBC – is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.”