Strange Attractor: FOR HIRE: I’m leaving the Guardian
Thursday, 25 February 2010, 19:32
Kevin Anderson: "I’m joining many of my colleagues in accepting another offer from the Guardian, voluntary redundancy. My last day is 31 March. … Like my colleague Bobbie Johnson, I’ve picked up a bit “entrepreneurial zeal” not only from the technology pioneers that I’ve covered, but also from the journalism pioneers that I’ve worked with both at the BBC and the Guardian."
The next web: AOL plans to dominate hyperlocal news – can indie journos compete?
Thursday, 18 February 2010, 23:08
"As major media companies colonize [the hyperlocal] space, do small independent publishers have a chance of competing?"
Guardian Local
Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 14:11
Covering Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh: "Guardian Local is a collaborative community journalism initiative to provide local online news and information in three cities across the UK."
Leeds | guardian.co.uk
Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 14:10
Interesting: Guardian local blog site for Leeds, with integrated MySociety and Openly Local functionality, plus Google Maps, local Delicious links and a Leeds-filtered panel for the Guardian's dating site.
guardian.co.uk: What’s hot? Introducing Zeitgeist
Sunday, 7 February 2010, 23:53
"Zeitgeist is a visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment. While other bits of the site are curated by editors (like the front page, or individual sections) or metadata (like blogs, which display in reverse-chronological order), Zeitgeist is dynamic, powered by the attention of users …"
Wired.co.uk: Mobile news apps vs tweet-led link economy
Tuesday, 2 February 2010, 08:43
Peter Kirwan: "Promiscuity is limited by the opportunity for discovery. Searching for alternatives to stories that pop up inside your app will cost you time. And for most mobile users, that's a commodity in short supply. On this basis, it's a racing certainty that some news publishers perceive apps as a way of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again, on the mobile web at least. … Suddenly, our work-flavoured, ADD-like, promiscuity-fuelled browsing for atomised content on laptops seems like just one scenario among others."
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."
Reuters: Running the numbers on the New York Times paywall
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:59
Felix Salmon: "[John] Gapper seems to think that online subscription revenues can make newspapers profitable again; they can’t. In fact, insofar as the paywall makes any sense at all, it does so only as a tool to boost print subscriptions. … [The] NYT is a mass-market general news publication: it’s not the kind of place where high-end business-to-business advertisers will pay $90 CPMs to reach C-suite executives."
FT.com: Charge for news or bleed red ink
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:55
John Gapper: "The point that link economy enthusiasts miss, I think, is that the trade-off between subscription and advertising is not a zero-sum game. Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly). But sites such as the FT and WSJ – or some health or energy websites – can charge $90 or more. The fact that customers are registering and paying not only shows commitment but provides publishers with personal data with which to target advertisements better."
Journalism.co.uk: Alan Rusbridger rules out pay walls at the Guardian
Wednesday, 20 January 2010, 15:22
Rusbridger: "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things".
paidContent:UK: Guardian.co.uk’s iPhone App Could Be A £2 Million-A-Year Business
Wednesday, 13 January 2010, 23:10
"Guardian.co.uk says it’s sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app since launching in December. … Over 300,000 downloaded Telegraph.co.uk’s free, ad-supported iPhone app between its February 2009 launch and December 2009 – the company says it’s recouped 10 times it development costs."
Guardian: Interactive 2010 sport calendar
Tuesday, 5 January 2010, 09:49
Great idea from the Guardian – make your annual sports calendar available online as a shared public Google Calender.
Independent: British press split in two by Wapping’s great gamble
Monday, 23 November 2009, 06:58
Great summary of the state of the paywall debate among UK national newspapers by Ian Burrell. Emily Bell of the Guardian: "This is not about newspaper publishing, this is about news, content and analysis on the internet and as long as you keep making the category error that says newspaper publishers are different you won’t make any progress."
Guardian: What’s your Woolworths now?
Sunday, 8 November 2009, 13:06
Disgraceful comment moderation at the Guardian. After a Guardian blogger calls for help finding the fate of former Woolworths shops, my comment linking to our three-month effort to collect information on the fate of more than 500 former Woolworths sites was removed.
