The extent of Facebook’s reach in Australia - it accounts for 29 per cent of all time spent online by Australians - has led to research group Nielsen defining the trend as “Facebook Time” and “Non Facebook Time”. “It’s just phenomenal,” said Nielsen Online’s director of analytics, Mark Higginson. “Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone.
It’s no longer the wisdom of the crowd; it’s the wisdom of my crowd that’s most important
On March 12, 2007, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about a black teenage girl from Texas, sentenced to seven years in jail for shoving a hall monitor. The story received 16,000 page views that day and about 1,000 page views the next day. Yet one month later it was the site’s most popular story, attracting 126,000 page views a day. Certainly, blogs were driving a good portion of the traffic. But more than one-quarter—about 35,000 page views—came from the social bookmarking site Digg.
(The Trafigura case) was the latest example of what I think of as the mutualization of a newspaper. Our readers have become part of what we do. They write commentaries for our Comment is Free site—they have helped with investigations into tax avoidance and police brutality. They form communities around individual reporters and issues, lending a hand with research and ideas, bringing us up short when we get things wrong. They have collaborated on big projects needing resources beyond our scope. We have done things that would have been impossible without them.
Recently, I was confronted with a legal obstacle that—possibly for the first time since we were founded in 1821—prevented The Guardian from reporting something that had happened in Parliament. We wrote a bafflingly cryptic front-page piece and I left the office feeling pretty fed up. But before sitting down to eat, I borrowed the restaurant’s computer to Tweet the fact of our gagging order. By the time I got home that evening Twitter had gone into meltdown. Several diligent tweeters had discovered the banned information and had published it. By morning, the news of the injunction and the corporation behind it—a hitherto obscure London-based trading company called Trafigura—was familiar to millions of Twitterers throughout Europe
Monitor Editor John Yemma stated that “93 percent of the 43,000 subscribers of the printed daily agreed to switch to a new weekly print magazine,” and in the publication’s short history, its circulation has increased to “67,000 fully paid subscribers (at $89 a year). And another 18,000 trial subscribers are paying a reduced rate.
New Portuguese newspaper “I” is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address… Opinion is the first section of the paper… Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours… Zoom looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages… More is where anything about people’s private cultural social lives goes, including sport… The 56- to 64-page paper is tabloid size and stapled, so looks as much like a magazine as a newspaper…. I’s circulation in August was over 16k copies, up from just under 11k in its first month, May (vs 36k for the leading title)
I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more. Traditionally, journalists have to fill a politics section even if there is nothing relevant going on in politics. We wanted to come up with something different.” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address, with five key words. * 1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion. * 2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page. * 3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. “We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams,” Figueiredo said. * 4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people’s private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited. More encompasses the fifth need that the paper wanted to address: sports, about 80% of which is focused on football - “this is very important in Portugal,
Editor of the London Evening Standard, Geordie Grieg, revealed the paper has managed to reduce its distribution costs from 30 pence per copy to 4p since going free, according to the Guardian. London’s major afternoon daily dropped its 50 p cover price in mid-October and went free, a move that has seen the paper’s circulation more than double from 250,000 to some 600,000.
Aftenposten, Norway’s most trusted newspaper, needs to cut 15 editorial positions… In order to do so through voluntarily measures, the Schibsted-owned paper has offered all of its journalists redundancy packages, part-time positions, or reallocation to other jobs within the company- including work as a receptionist or newspaper delivery person. The most amazing part, however, is what a paper deliverer in Norway can earn annually. The level of education is so high in Norway that there is often difficulty filling blue-collar job openings. Thus, the top paid delivery staff at Aftenpostern earned £80 000 in 2007 due to high wages and long hours. Normal hours at delivery work would still earn you about £40 000 a year. Two years ago when the shortage of delivery people was so bad, the editor-in-chief of the regional paper Tönsbergs Blad would deliver papers before coming into work each morning.
This link economy brings three imperatives for publishers. First, it requires them to make their content public if they want to be found. That is their choice, but if they retreat behind pay walls, hidden from search and links, they will not be discovered and they only create opportunities for new, free competitors. Second, the link economy demands specialization: Do what you do best and link to the rest. This specialization also brings a new efficiency that can make publishers more profitable. Third, in the link economy, it is the recipient of links who must exploit their value. That is still the publisher’s job
A study of 2,000 UK consumers by Lightspeed Research commissioned for digital research outfit The Global Web Index, challenges Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge users to access the websites of The Sun, The Times and Sky News. It found that 91% of UK consumers would be unwilling to pay for news online and 90% would be unwilling to pay for news analysis. Of those aged 16 to 24, 86% would never pay for news online, while in the 45 to 54 age sectors, 96% said they would not pay. In addition, only 5% of UK consumers would be happy to pay for each piece of news content online, while just 4% would be happy to take out a subscription for online news content.
journalists’ reign as “gatekeepers of information” is over. What friends are reading is at least as important as the news displayed on the homepage of a news site
