Monday Note: Read, Share and Destroy

Frédéric Filloux: "In recent months, we’ve seen a flurry of innovative tools for reading and sharing contents. Or, even better, for basing one’s readings on other people’s shared contents. In Web 2.5 parlance, this is called Social Reading. ... All of theses apps start with the same raw material. They collect and rearrange RSS feeds, they crawl Twitter or Facebook streams. Unfortunately, from a news publisher vantage point, all these aggregating apps kill value by removing ads from the articles they assemble for our reading pleasure."

The Wall Blog: Facebook is not about brands getting fans it is about engaging with them

Pete Davis: "Can [brands] really create the engaging content that will have their followers believing that their brand in someway reflects their lifestyle choices – whether that be through association with fashion, culture, music or general interest. Unless they happen to be another Natalie Massanet or a brand like Sony that has its own editorial team, the chances are the answer is no. The content generated on Facebook and other branded content ventures cannot be sales or PR driven; it has to be more subtle than that. It needs to reflect the lifestyle choices of the brand’s target audience. ... To my mind there is an opportunity here for brands to associate themselves with key content creators, such as magazine publishers to create this material on their behalf."

Currybet: News innovation isn’t just about writing code, it is about how we use that code to tell stories

Martin Belam: "on the web you can find newspapers being accused of failing to invent all manner of digital services, including Google, Facebook, Quora, Craigslist and The Huffington Post. Personally, I’m unconvinced that this isn’t akin to asking why the Great Western Railway didn’t invent the automobile. ... What news organisations did do with tools like photography though, was incorporate it into their product at a time when it became economical to do so - the same with colour printing."

Forbes: Turning Forbes magazine content into Web content — and vice versa

Lewis DVorkin: "The way Forbes sees it, there are two sets of business news consumers — print and digital — and each wants something different. The imperative is to use the same underlying information to serve both. To accomplish that, we’re developing new labor and economic models. That also means educating content creators that their jobs are changing, then providing the right tools to perform tasks associated with those new jobs. ... Most [traditional publishers] still dump their print stories into continuous Web pages that look and feel ten years old (Yes, Forbes does a bit of that, too, but we’re changing. Those old-style pages are being retired as we continue to re-architect our site to put David Whelan’s type of authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience.)"

New Media Age: Publishers need to think more like brands

Gina Lovett: "In some verticals, like fashion and beauty, the content being produced by brands is proving a real competitive threat to online women’s magazines. ... Pursuit of the seamless integration of content with ecommerce is expediting the evolution of online magazines into etailers: think News of the World’s Fabulous magazine and IPC Media’s Look. Meanwhile, online stores like ASOS are ramping up their content, with editorial appointments from traditional magazine titles like Melissa Dick, former Elle UK editor."

Telegraph Blogs: Apple announces App Store subscription service

Shane Richmond: "To put [Apple's subscriptions policy] into perspective, here’s what a newspaper pays to a newsagent to sell its papers: about 28 per cent. You can argue all you like about whether or not it’s fair that Apple takes a similar cut – and American papers, who traditionally rely a lot more on subscriptions might be more concerned. What does it mean for a service like Spotify, however? They will now have to offer the ability to subscribe within the app at the same price as – or less than – the £9.99 that its subscribers currently pay. Will they raise prices or take the hit themselves?"

The Economist: Bold newspapers: The crucible of print

"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."

Mail Online: Google called ‘deeply unethical and tax avoiding’ by ex C4 boss

Luke Johnson: "Effectively, Google invests negligible amounts in Britain, pays negligible amounts of tax on its underlying surplus to contribute to civil society, and yet extracts vast sums in advertising revenues. The tragedy is that those advertising revenues siphoned off to California should be
used to help fund high-quality content – TV programmes, radio shows, newspaper and magazine articles."

Nieman Journalism Lab: The Newsonomics of Google Grouponomics

Ken Doctor on Groupon: "the remorse being expressed in newspaper buildings across America this week is the same: Why didn’t we come up with that idea? The remorse should go deeper; check out the Groupon Merchant Services page, and try to find a similar one, with similar marketing support, offered by a newspaper company online. In fact, Groupon’s whole pitch to merchants, cheerfully animated in its Grouponomics section, is a textbook lesson in selling local."