I’ve played with it a bit and I still prefer my RSS feeds, but you tell me what you think…
Google, long seen as an enemy by many in the news industry, is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.
On Monday, the company unveiled an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news stories from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as fast as they would the pages of a magazine.
Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, attempts to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: because they often are slow to load, they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, has long argued that if reading news online resembled more closely the experience of perusing physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.
“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”
via Google Releases News-Reading Service - NYTimes.com.
At least one publication is doing well in this economic downturn. I guess it helps when your publications knows economics really well:
In conjunction with the Audit Bureau of Circulations releasing its first half 2009 FAS-FAX report earlier this week, The Economist announced that the magazine more than met its 764,000 rate base in North America, with total circulation during the period reaching 810,821, an 8.5 percent spike year-over-year. Its global circ grew 6 percent to 1,418,013—double what it was a decade ago.
But The Economist’s circ gains are only part of the picture. The Economist Group, the magazine’s parent company which recently expanded its portfolio with the acquisition of Congressional Quarterly, saw its profits jump 26 percent to a record $92 million for the fiscal year ended March 31.
Here, FOLIO: spoke with Alan Press, on what role the magazine’s marketing strategy has played in its success. For three years, Press has served as senior vice president of marketing, overseeing marketing strategy for The Economist, Economist Conferences and the Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes industry and political analysis.
More here:
There are downsides to the slow death of newspapers. Today’s NY Times explains one of them. Here’s an excerpt:
You don’t see newspapers fighting to open court proceedings the way they used to, and people are starting to notice.
“The days of powerful newspapers with ample legal budgets appear to be numbered,” wrote a public defender in Georgia, Gerard Kleinrock, in a recent Supreme Court brief. “Will underfunded bloggers be able to carry the financial burdens of opening our courtrooms?”
The brief concerned the case of Eric Presley, a Georgia man convicted of cocaine trafficking. The judge closed the courtroom during jury selection in Mr. Presley’s case, on the theory that it was too small to accommodate both potential jurors and the public. Citing the public’s lack of access to the jury selection, Mr. Presley appealed, and the Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear his case.
Thanks to The Press-Enterprise, a newspaper in Riverside, Calif., the press and public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases. In the 1980’s, the paper fought ferociously to establish that principle, taking two access cases to the Supreme Court.
News organizations used to consider those kinds of litigations a matter of civic responsibility.
via Sidebar - Fewer Newspapers Fight to Open Court Proceedings - NYTimes.com.
Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.
EbooksMr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy publishers’ profits.
He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright books online for public use.
via FT.com / Media - E-books could spell the end for hardbacks, warns Hachette chief.
Here’s an exceprt. Click thru the link at the end to read the whole thing and hear audio of BCN’s final on-air montage.
So a few weeks ago, on the night that they were to sign off for good, I knew I had to listen for one last time. I sat at my computer and listened to them play one last set of great music, and share stories. Something else cool happened as well. I started looking on Facebook (a site that I’ve had more negative feelings towards than positive of late), and it seemed like everyone I knew that had any connection whatsoever to Boston was talking about ‘BCN going off of the air. It was a nice moment, and it reminded me that I’m happy to have a central place to share those thoughts. The internet may have diluted the community effect that radio has these days, but it also brought a diverse group of people together to share their thoughts on it.
I sat there with my headphones on, listening to them play Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” one last time. As the song ended, they played a montage of highlights from the long and wild life of the station. As it ended, the call letters of the new station were spoken, and then it cut to static. I listened to that static for a long time without even realizing it. WBCN going off the air was never a “my life will never be the same” moment. It wasn’t something I thought about on a regular basis. But sitting there, listening to that static, gave a me a chance to reflect on that thread that has been woven through all my years living in Boston. It’s strange to think that it’s gone.
via Selectism.com: Columns | Beau Colburn | The Rock Of Boston.
Amid unrelenting bad news, the Postal Service is striving to make the case that mail is here to stay.
“We’re very optimistic about the future of mail because mail has great value,” said Susan Plonkey, vice president for sales. “Mail works.”
Top postal officials say the recession is to blame for the agency’s $7 billion deficit and a steep drop in the volume of mail, and they express confidence that mail, particularly advertising, will rebound.
But even the Postal Service acknowledges that some mail is gone for good. Earlier this week, the Postal Service said that it would offer cash incentives in a bid to get up to 30,000 employees to voluntarily resign or take early retirement by the end of September and save $500 million next year.
With the Internet, the Postal Service has been experiencing what it calls “electronic diversion” with people moving online for correspondence and other activities.
Companies’ campaigns to push consumers online are likely to continue that trend. Verizon Communications has begun a “Get Your Green On” campaign, giving customers a chance to win a 2010 Toyota Prius Hybrid in a sweepstakes if they go paperless. While several phone companies charge for detailed paper bills, in September T-Mobile will begin charging $1.50 for a basic printed bill each month.
via As Internet Booms, the Postal Service Fights Back - NYTimes.com.
Newspapers’ financial woes worsened in the second quarter as advertising sales shrank by 29 percent, leaving publishers with $2.8 billion less revenue than they had at the same time last year.
It’s the deepest downturn yet during a three-year free fall in advertising revenue — newspapers’ main source of income. The magnitude of the industry’s advertising losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters.
The numbers released Thursday by the Newspaper Association of America weren’t a shock, given the dramatic erosion mirrored the advertising losses that the largest U.S. newspaper publishers already had reported for the April-June period.
Still, the statistics served as a stark reminder of the crisis facing newspapers as they try to cope with a brutal recession and advertising trends that have shifted more marketing dollars to the Internet.
via Newspaper slump deepens as 2Q ad sales fall 29 pct - Yahoo! Finance.
“We’re #1!” Brown University (my alma mater) takes home top honors in GQ’s “America’s 24 Douchiest Colleges” List:
Home of: The “Peace Sign on My Mom’s 7 Series” Douche
Affectations: A belief that grades, majors, and course requirements are just another form of cultural hegemony; using the word hegemony.
In ten years, will be: Living with your family in an old house that you quit your job to refurbish yourself (by overseeing a contractor) with painstaking historical accuracy in a formerly decaying section of the city that’s recently been reclaimed by a small population of white guys in hand-painted T-shirts who are helping you put together a health care fund-raiser for MoveOn.org.
Douchiest course offering: English 200: On Vampires and Violent Vixens: Making the Monster Through Discourses of Gender and Sexuality.
Honorable-mention limousine-liberal institutions: Duke, Reed, Oberlin, Wesleyan, Bard, RISD.
AMERICA’S 25 DOUCHIEST COLLEGES: GQ Features on men.style.com.
The Phoenix continues to note the demise of The ProJo. In fairness, it should be noted that The Phoenix also just went through their own round of layoffs in the last week. I’m told they only laid off one salesperson in Providence, but also a handful of others in their other markets.
Glance at the cover of any major newspaper, outside a handful with national audiences, and you’ll find roughly the same thing — a single wire service story out of Washington or Baghdad surrounded by missives on the latest murder, City Hall intrigue, and statewide unemployment figure.
Here in Rhode Island, the Providence Journal has taken the trend to its logical conclusion — moving all of its local coverage to the front section of the paper and banishing the national and international news, save for a front-page story or two, to a second section dubbed projoNation.
Absent any obvious path to financial security, the über-local approach may the best available for the modern daily. With national and international news just a click away, diminished papers are focusing their energies on what they, alone, can deliver.
But the new strategy is not merely a matter of moving parochial concerns from the back pages to the front. Layoffs, shrinking space, and a growing appetite for the instant on-line update are forcing editors to re-imagine the local news altogether, with profound implications for civic life.
Stories are shorter. Entire cities and towns are going uncovered. Local science, business and arts reporting are in decline. Newsrooms are shifting to a web-first mentality. And a retreat from intense and often narrow coverage of the city or town council has created an opportunity for a journalism with more perspective — and an impediment to the same.
An American newspaper that has narrowed its sights is, at the same time, embarking on its greatest experiment. And there is, perhaps, no better place to watch the beakers bubble than at the long, brick building on Fountain Street in downtown Providence.
via The Phoenix > News Features > Short-sighted?.
Glenn Beck used his popular Fox News show this afternoon to attack the background of Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor who co-founded an African American political advocacy group that organized an advertising boycott of his program.
During his 2 p.m. PDT show, Beck did not address the boycott spearheaded by Color of Change to protest the talk show host’s remark last month that he believes President Obama is “a racist.”
Instead, he spent a large share of his program suggesting that Jones, who co-founded Color of Change in 2005, is a radical. Jones now serves as a special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
During a six-minute biographical profile, set to ominous music, Beck said Jones was twice arrested for political protests and has described himself as a “rowdy black nationalist.” The talk show host cast the piece as part of a broader examination of Obama’s “czars,” special advisers to the president who “don’t answer to anybody.”
“Why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?” Beck asked.