Gannett Tries Pay Walls at Three Papers
Eagle-eyed Doug Fisher at South Carolina spied “a low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper” announcing the coming of pay-per-view to Gannett’s Greenville News, one of three papers the chain is taking to pay-per-view on the Web. See his commentary.
Pay Walls Debut at Three Gannett Papers Testing ‘Journalism as a Service’ is the headline on Poynter Online’s NewsPay column by Bill Mitchell.
Included are The Tallahassee Democrat, The Greenville S.C. News and The St. George, Utah Spectrum.
Mitchell notes that Gannett called this "a small-scale test."
Gannett publishes 82 daily U.S. newspapers, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper, and more than 600 magazines and other non-dailies including USA WEEKEND. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in 19 U.S. markets.–Corp.HQ
At http://tallahassee.com, for an example of the pay system, the Web front page headlines and summaries are still visible, but clicking through to read a full local story results in a table of pay rates.
Original Tallahassee.com stories require one of several subscription plans or a $2 day pass. Options include a $9.95 monthly Web-only subscription or various Web/Print combinations.
Still free are stories from USA Today and other sources woven into the site, such as those under the heading “From our news network” on the “Topic: Oil Spill” pages.
It probably goes without saying that the local business directories and ads are still free, too.
What’s a ‘newspaper’ when random Twitter feeds build the contents?
(This item was originally misleadingly headlined, “What’s a ‘newspaper,’ division?”
The Newspaper Division name-change discussion is elsewhere. )
So does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?
That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”
So today I “founded” two newspapers. All I had to do was login using my Twitter I.D. (“bobstep”) and type the feed names into a box.
Well, maybe I just “found,” not “founded,” the first one. I went through the Paper.li form to create it, but it may have been there already.
In both cases, the page is built of headlines and summaries from the Twitter feeds subscribed to by the owner of a feed — “AEJMC” for the first one, and “BobStep” for the second.
This may be important: Note that the contents of our “newspapers” aren’t items that the group or person named on top wrote — or even read; they are just the latest Twitterings from sources we thought might have something interesting to say once in a while. Perhaps we haven’t been watching closely enough to see that they really don’t. Nothing like running their stuff under your name to make you sit up and take notice.
Selections from the owners’ own posts are in a sidebar off to the right of those screen images, where the feed owner is called “curator” of the page.
Anyhow, if those are “newspapers” then the name "Newspaper Division" is broader than some of us thought!
Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.
More on this over on my personal blog.
A 2013 timeline for newspapers to go mobile
Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri offers a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”… The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.
Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast mobile devices will replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.
Result: If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.
By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”
More on that, and my own dumb experience with smartphones, here:
Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid
Reflections on a newspaper’s online transition
AtlanticWire blogger Jared Keller summarizes recent online articles about the present and future of newspapers…
Seattle PI Heralds the Dawn of the Blogpaper | The Atlantic Wire.
- An E-Model For Journalism , Los Angeles Times
- How Blogs Are Becoming Like Newspapers , Gawker
- New, Old, Niche, Mass, It’s All Media , Adpulp
Also see the “More on Journalism’s Future” tab at the bottom of the page.
Chat Feb. 18 about newspapers’ future, depth advantage
From AEJMC Hot Topics blog and Newspaper Research Journal:
Newspapers offer more depth, insight than do major online sites : Hot Topics.
While newspapers and news Web sites cover generally the same topics, newspapers offer stories with more breadth and depth than their online counterparts, according to a study published recently in Newspaper Research Journal.
Related, via AEJMC on Facebook:
The study’s researcher Scott Maier, journalism professor at the University of Oregon, will lead a LIVE online chat 12 p.m. EST Thursday, February 18 on the future of online journalism.
Panelists include: Kathy Best, managing editor of Digital News and Innovation at The Seattle Times; Melissa Ludtke, editor of Harvard University’s Nieman Reports; and Jane Singer, a University of Iowa professor and internationally renown scholar on digital journalism.
To participate in the LIVE event:
visit http://aejmc.org/topics/newsroom/chat/,
type your name and chat.
NYTimes featured in Apple iPad launch
Apple's iPad displaying a New York Times front page
Here’s Apple’s iPad. The format looks familiar… See the video below.
Endgadget live blog of Apple iPad announcement.
NYTimes live blog of the event
Martin Nisenholtz of the Times told the Apple iPad launch-event audience that the newspaper’s developers wanted to offer “the best of print and best of digital, all rolled up into one.”
The iPad with the Times front page bears a striking resemblance to “TheTablet” pictured in Knight-Ridder veteran Roger Fidler’s book Mediamorphosis, published in 1997, on page 238.
On page 239, he wrote, “The idea that people will be leisurely reading documents on portable tablets by the year 2010 may seem unrealistic given the present state of computer and display technologies, but it is no more fantastic than was the 1980 vision of people routiinely using mobile cell phones…
A quick search just found this post by Juan Antonio Giner Roger Fidler and his vision of a newspaper tablet, complete with a link to this 1994 video showing that TheTablet mock-up. Here’s more from the Reynolds Journalism Instititute’s tablet-watch and the Society of News Design.
Times to Start Metering Frequent Readers in 2011
New York Times reporter RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA’s lead calls it “a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry.”
The Times announced on Wednesday that it is developing an e-commerce software system to meter use of NYTimes.com and charge non-subscribers who are frequent visitors.
Starting a year from now, you will need either a subscription to the newspaper or its online product for unlimited access to NYTimes.com.
Other readers will continue to have free access to the site — directly or by following links from Google News or RSS feeds, up to a to-be-determined number of articles.
Times President Janet L. Robinson and Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations, will be answering questions from readers today on the “Talk to The Times” page.
A 21-questions FAQ file says search engines will still deliver readers to Times stories, but after reading the found story, clicking through to additional Times stories will count toward a monthly limit.
The story’s sidebar is Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future by media business columnist David Carr.
“By setting the meter back a ways, The New York Times can maintain not only visibility on the Web, but also still participate in selling a mass audience to advertisers,” Carr says.
Related: Staci D. Kramer at PaidContent.org, including a memo to the Times staff first posted at Romenesko
Finally, here’s the press release from NYTimesCo
“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”
SeeClickFix as a fix for newspapers?
Tale of three newspapers:
The New York Times reports that The Journal Inquirer in Connecticut is using SeeClickFix.com, a Web service that allows citizens to post “something needs to be done about this…” alerts to other citizens, the media and officials:
Newspapers See the Appeal of a Local Web Gadget, SeeClickFix.
The story mentions that The Journal Inquirer began participating in SeeClickFix, but “did not receive responses until an article about the site ran in The Hartford Courant.”
There was no irony flag on the Times paragraph, but as a Courant alumnus, I recall the Rockville/Manchester J-I as Courant competition — a scrappy suburban daily covering cities north and east of Hartford.
Curious, I checked: That original Courant SeeClickFix story was about SeeClickFix as a New Haven-born startup, mentioning its use by publications outside the Courant’s main home-delivery areas. The May item is behind the 30-day paywall for archive searches at Courant.com, but a Google site search of courant.com found it in the paper’s mobile edition.
I also found Courant reader comments mentioning SeeClickFix, such as this one about a Manchester restaurant, and this letter to the editor about bicycle commuting. But the Courant itself doesn’t appear to be using the service.
However, my search also found a blog item today by a Courant reporter linking to the most recent Times story. Its heading was “The future of journalism,” so who knows…
Meanwhile, SeeClickFix’s own blog has items about the JournalInquirer’s involvement (at a $38 a month investment), as well as a working link to the Courant’s original coverage.
Related links:
Tablet versus Tabloid — you decide
Tablet versus Tabloid — you decide
This is the week that a bunch of major newspaper and magazine publishers announced their joint venture to create a “highly featured reading application” and “robust publishing platform” to enable all sorts of new portable digital devices, such as the much-rumored Apple tablet.
See the press release from Hearst, Condé Nast, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc.
Meanwhile, Time has an online video of one prototype, while News Corp. has a couple showing off another…
NAA has hopes for targeted ads
From Online Media Daily:
“The Newspaper Association of America is touting online behavioral targeting as a partial fix for the industry’s revenue woes.
“‘Targeted advertising shows significant promise for newspapers seeking new ways to support local journalism,’ the organization writes in comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission. The comments were filed in advance of this week’s FTC public workshops about media, ‘From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.’”
The NAA questions the idea of regulations that would require a consumer “opt in” system for targeted ad programs. Some privacy advocates think opt-in is a good idea.
More from OMD reporter Wendy Davis: Newspaper Group Argues Against Opt-In Consent For Behavioral Targeting. Via MediaPost Publications
