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.
Only handful of readers willing to pay for Newsday content
We reported last fall on Newsday’s website revamp and decision to start charging for its content. The Daily News is reporting that during a recent staff meeting last week, publisher Terry Jimenez admitted that a mere 35 people were willing to shell out the $5 a week for full access the new website.
Saving journalism through $400K salaries?
As the clarion call for non-profit journalism sounds a little farther and wider every month, we’re all beginning to learn more about how this all may work. A fascinating interview in PaidContent.org with two key players from the new Bay Area News Project start-up includes a not-so-comfortable admission that the new CEO of BANP — who comes from the influential management consultancy McKinsey & Co. — is being offered a $400,000 salary (!) — this for running a non-profit news enterprise closely affiliated with University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism?
Does something feel amiss here? Given the painful, widespread lay-offs in the news industry (not to mention the pain educators are facing in the University of California system), the ironies seem inescapable.
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.”
Live chat: ‘Women in the Newsroom: Burned Out and Fed Up’
Scott Reinardy
The AEJMC will host a an online lunchtime chat about the phenomenon of women journalists leaving newsrooms Thursday, Jan. 21, noon to 12:45 p.m. (EST).
Several women in prominent roles at newspapers — Kelly Davenport of the News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.); Sara Bondioli of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Rachel George of the Star-News (Wilmington, N.C.); and Laura Lane of the Herald Times (Bloomington, Ind.) — will be joined by moderator and educator Scott Reinardy.
Reinardy, an assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, recently authored “Female Journalists More Likely To Leave Newspapers” in the AEJMC’s Newspaper Research Journal.
Reinardy reports in the article that women journalists are far less likely to feel professionally accomplished in their jobs, and far more likely to feel exhaustion and burnout leading to departures, than their male counterparts.
‘Tell Us Something We Don’t Know’ department
New Adweek Media/ Harris Poll…. Click through for the results after teasing yourself with the questions. I hate to spoil the suspense…
TABLE 1
NEWSPAPER READERSHIP
“Approximately how often do you read a daily newspaper, either online or in print?”
Base: All U.S. adults
TABLE 2
PAYING FOR NEWSPAPERS ONLINE
“How much, if anything, would you be willing to pay per month in order to read a daily newspaper’s content online?”
Base: All online adults
Afterthoughts: Of course this is only the Harris Press Release, not the whole survey… But am I the only one who wonders how many readers (given the option) might answer one or both questions differently for local, state or national newspapers? Or might respond differently to questions about certain information rather than generalities like “a daily newspaper’s content”? Or who grimaced at the Adweek Media heading on a question about paying for media through means other than advertising?
Not fishwrap yet: E&P sold, back to work
Back in Business: ‘E&P’ Sold, Resumes Operations.
Editor & Publisher, the only independent news organization reporting on all aspects of the transforming newspaper business, has resumed publication in print and online following its sale Thursday to Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., the Irvine, Calif.-based magazine and newspaper publisher.
More about it from Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org:
Love that headline… “Boating World” may be one of the company’s best-known titles, but it also publishes “FishRap News,” which is NOT a newspaper industry trade paper.
(Disclaimer… I used to work for Soundings, and just had to check to see whether it was part of McIntosh’s empire. Apparently not, but we did use Macintoshes…)
PEJ’s “How News Happens” study, “The Wire” and “Deadline USA”
Pressing the police, policing the press started out as a simple blog post about David Simon’s critique of the declining state of hard-news reporting at his old Baltimore Sun.
Then the coincidences started rolling in, with almost all roads leading to Baltimore:
- Stories from reporters in London and Baltimore who decided to compare their police beats.
- A new Project for Excellence in Journalism content-analysis study, “How News Happens,” that concludes that, dimming or not, the Sun is still the center of the city’s news solar system.
Despite my headline, the “police” theme slipped away, but by the end I’d added a bunch of background links about The Wire and Simon’s work at the Sun, plus a bonus audio-only version of a half-century old story about a newspaper living up to its founder’s ideals on the eve of its closing.
If anyone has time at the start of a new semester to take a look, I think you’ll find some interesting material.
At least all the Baltimore references didn’t lead me off searching for Mencken links until just now, for a couple of 96-year-old closing quotes (incidentally, both are from the same article).
On the one hand…
“I know of no subject, save perhaps baseball, on which the average American newspaper, even in the larger cities, discourses with unfailing sense and understanding.”
On the other hand…
“The newspapers discharged broadsides of 12-inch guns to bring down a flock of buzzards — but they brought down the buzzards. They have libeled and lynched the police—but the police are the better for it…”
Society for News Design launches new design
The Society for News Design has an updated website for the new year, pledging to be “a dynamic representation of our evolving organization… inclusive… multi-platform… aggressively forward-looking,” according to SND President Kris Viesselman’s announcement.
In the inclusiveness department, SND’s former “Best of Newspaper Design™” competition changed its name last year to the “Best of News Design™” Creative Competition and opened the competition to all magazines, not just newspaper Sunday supplements.
(Presumably all entries for this year’s competition are on their way to Syracuse, since they are due Wednesday. Entries from outside the U.S. are accepted for another week.)
SND has a separate Multimedia Design competition, with quarterly and annual awards. Newspapers’ Web sites (The New York Times in particular) led last year’s honorees.
For this month, the new SND site features a “Designing the next decade” video interview with Roger Black (transcript included), an interview with programmer-journalist Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock.com, and a survey of newspaper and magazine presentations reviewing the past decade, “Finding some heroes of the ‘Zeros’ coverage.”
The main SND site now incorporates SND’s Update blog; also see the SNDEast blog by Lee Steele, design editor of the Connecticut Post and Region 1 SND director.
