Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is an article worth? ‘Dead tree’ thinking could hinder digital content economy
Thursday, 11 February 2010, 22:28
Patrick Smith on unnbundling, the ever-present elephant in the room during digital content discussions: "But to reach a competitive pricepoint, [Rupert Murdoch] and other publishers will have to massively realign the value of each piece of news and comment from its current-day, paper value of one or two pence to fractions of pence."
YouTube: Newswipe S02E02 at 5:09
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 13:16
Heather Brooke on Newswipe on attribution and sourcing and accountablity in British journalism.
Your Right To Know: When Brooke met Brooker
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 12:51
Heather Brooke on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe: "I’m talking here about the way journalists grant public officials anonymity for no good reason. By the very definition of their role, official spokespeople have absolutely no reason to be anonymous yet one of the more dubious practices of the British press is the way reporters collude with officials by granting anonymity."
Nieman Journalism Lab: Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 17:49
Genius way to illustrate the conundrum facing every news executive thinking of raising a subscription barrier: "Paywall!, our revenue game … allows you to explore the situation at the [New York] Times or at any other news site. …"
Guardian: The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 08:49
Alan Rusbridger: "My commercial colleagues at the Guardian … can't presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. … They've done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded."
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Jeff Jarvis’s cockeyed economics
Saturday, 23 January 2010, 19:19
Paul Carr defends the New York Times metered access plan with reference to economist Hal Varian's "versioning" of digital goods: "Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important … [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning … The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay."
Reuters: The economics of the New York Times paywall
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:50
Felix Salmon: "it’ll be much easier to change the number of articles that people can read for free than it will be to change the price of a monthly or annual subscription. … the experience of the FT suggests that there’s a strong temptation to [gradually reduce the number of free articles per month]: it has been dialing down n to a very low level, as it becomes increasingly addicted to online subscription revenue."
Publish2 Blog: Nine Steps to Verified Link Journalism
Wednesday, 6 January 2010, 09:15
"If you see a blog post titled '10 Iconic Journalists Every J-Student Should Study' and want to share it with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or old-fashioned e-mail contacts, please consider what you’re endorsing when you link to it. … I’ve wondered since last night, when I first saw the link, if people realized what it was: linkbaiting as SEO, with the hopes of increasing traffic to an irrelevant site, boosting its rank in search results for the keywords in its URL."
Daggle: If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?
Thursday, 26 November 2009, 07:13
Essential reading from Danny Sullivan: "As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how “worthless” the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it."
paidContent:UK: New Media Age Putting More Of Itself Behind Paywall
Thursday, 5 November 2009, 10:15
"NMA, which already required a £99-a-year subscription for everything bar 'lead' stories and opinion pieces, is now putting those stories from its print edition behind a paywall, too." Plus, a great debate in the comments.
The Shatzkin Files: Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change
Saturday, 24 October 2009, 12:55
"Aggregation … simply means pulling together things which are not necessarily connected. Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand."
Daggle.com: Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content
Friday, 23 October 2009, 00:02
Robert Thomson doesn't like promiscuity of readers who get their news online, and blames Google: "the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators." Danny Sullivan responds…
Online Journalism Blog: Ten ways journalism has changed in the last ten years (Blogger’s Cut)
Sunday, 27 September 2009, 13:18
Great piece by Paul Bradshaw, from March 2008 – I particularly like this: "Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet."
Paul Graham: Post-Medium Publishing
Wednesday, 23 September 2009, 12:16
"There have always been people in the business of selling information, but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing. And the business of selling information to consumers has always been a marginal one. … People will pay for information they think they can make money from. That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But will people pay for information otherwise? History offers little encouragement."
