Category Archives: Independent News & Media

Independent: Recently Read on The Independent

Posted on by
Reply
"Recently Read is a new social reading experience on The Independent that is part of a new class of apps that help people express who they are on Facebook. The experience is based on you and your friends’ activity on Independent.co.uk. After opting in, the articles you read on Independent.co.uk will be added to your profile on Facebook, and on both the Independent site and on Facebook you and your friends will be able to discover recently read Independent articles."

Guardian: Independent writer’s admission highlights news copyright issues

Posted on by
Reply
David Banks: "[When] interviewing someone, a journalist uses skill and labour in recording quotes accurately and selecting those most appropriate for publication. So the quotes in an interview are protected by copyright. If any are to be used by another publication then the fair dealing defence would have to be used and the copyright owner, possibly a competitor, would have to be credited."

Gizmodo: Apple’s New Subscription Model Is Evil

Posted on by
Reply
"The fact is, that Apple's new subscriptions—while justifiably wrapped in the smooth, glossy coat of user-friendliness—are a major power grab that inserts the company between basically every content provider and every iPad and iPhone user. You know what? That's fine. That's how ecosystems like this work. Think of all the products and services that exist and feed off of into Twitter and Facebook. Apple should take a cut. Just not an amount so significant it might kill the people who have helped make the iPad experience so great."

ReadWriteWeb: How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future

Posted on by
Reply
"[The Independent] announced last night that it now offers granular subscriptions by Facebook. Instead of just "Liking" the entire site and getting all its articles pushed to your Facebook newsfeed, you can now limit your Like to particular authors and some topics on the site. I just subscribed to trailblazing journalist Robert Fisk's Independent articles on Facebook. This might seem like a small change - but it's not. Media sites all over the web are sure to implement this kind of feature soon."

Independent Editor’s choice Blogs: New ‘like’ features on independent.co.uk

Posted on by
Reply
Jack Riley: "W"e’ve made a big effort to refocus Independent.co.uk over the last year to take into account the new ways people are finding, consuming and reacting to the news. It’s paid off; referrals from Facebook have grown 680 per cent comparing January and December of 2010, with referrals from Twitter also up 250 per cent. ... starting with a few key areas of the site, we’ve been developing the tools to let people get their news from The Independent through social networks in tighter categories, designed to better reflect the parts of our editorial output you particularly enjoy. To that end, you can now ‘like’ all of our commentators on Facebook, and if you do then when they publish a story it’ll appear in your news feed."

The Economist: Bold newspapers: The crucible of print

Posted on by
Reply
"The strategies being pursued by News Corporation, the Daily Mail and General Trust and Lebedev Holdings rest on distinct assumptions about what readers want, what they will pay for, and the future of advertising. It is highly unlikely that all three experiments will work. It may well be that none of them does. But none can be faulted for lack of boldness."

Indepenent: Why (and how) we’re changing commenting on independent.co.uk

Posted on by
Reply
Jack Riley: "what we're trying to achieve with the new comment system is bigger than just the (admittedly excellent) [Disqus] system we're putting in place. It's about first of all letting people authenticate their commenting using systems with which they're already familiar (in Facebook's case, that's 400 million people worldwide and counting), and secondly, it's about restoring your trust in our comments section, so that some of the really great submissions we get on there rise to the top, the bad sink to the bottom, and the ugly - the spam and abuse that are an inevitable adjunct of any commenting system - don't appear at all."

Independent: A fresh start for comments on independent.co.uk

Posted on by
Reply
Indy online editor Martin King: "Websites have been encouraging cowardice. They allow users to hide behind virtual anonymity to make hasty, ill-researched and often intemperate comments ... So we have changed our logins to encourage comments from individuals or even official bodies using their Facebook or Twitter accounts – with other options for Yahoo or Open ID log-ins. There is also a Disqus option, where your account must be validated through your e-mail."

Wired.co.uk: Why Lebedev’s Indy should go digital

Posted on by
1
Peter Kirwan: "at the Independent ... Print-based ad sales have plummeted. So going digital would incur less of a blow to revenues than previously. Meanwhile, of course, the cost of printing and distributing copies looms ever larger in relative terms. ... The cost base of a digital-only Independent could shrink by half, to £30m or £40m. As for revenues, a decent digital sales operation working on behalf of a broadsheet newspaper can hope to bring in £20m-£30m a year. The online display market is returning to growth. In the not-too-distant future, a digital-only Independent could hope to break even."