Tablets are not killing newspapers, they’re offering a lifeline to the revitalisation and rebirth of ‘news brands’ beyond the dreaded paywall, say the experts. Assembled at Newsworks’ Tablet Summit, representatives from the likes of Guardian Media Group, Mail Newspapers, The Independent, Expedia and News International gave their take on the future of the newspaper industry as tablet take-up rockets. Guy Zitter group managing director at the Mail put it starkly. He said it was a case of ”Adapt or die”.

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The Guardian is scrapping some of the functionality within its much derided frictionless sharing Facebook app, in a seeming attempt to generate more direct traffic for its website. The app was launched in September last year, soon after Facebook’s F8 developer conference, which opened up Facebook as a platform. The Guardian were one one the first users of Facebook’s Open Graph system announced at that conference.

The app meant that users could read Guardian stories directly in Facebook, and the stories they were reading appeared in the newsfeed and ticker, and so where highlighted to reader’s friends.

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Fascinating story here that could have far reaching implications for us all in this industry. Or possibly none at all depending on your point of view about how much change is yet to come and whether that might involve a host of new platforms and services. Entrepreneur Corey Ford has not only posed the question, asking what is the future of journalism, publishing and media, but he is investing $50k in five companies to see if they can find the answer.

He is applying the spirit of tech start-ups to journalism as part of a four-month rolling accelerator project in San Francisco. The project, called Matter, will provide not only investment to start-ups, but space to work and a “collaborative community and culture” to help “teams validate their ideas”, and gain traction with their audience. Read More »

A good addition here to the tips for journalists using social media file from the Wall Street Journal.

Social media and journalism have developed a symbiotic relationship evidenced as we reported recently by a study showing many UK journalists say they “can’t work without social media. It is only some on the fringes who continue to argue that social media destroying good journalism. That is simply not true.

You only have to look to how journalists have used it to cover the Arab spring and Syria — that conflict in-particular has been noted as a ‘War Reported by social media and citizen-journalists’.

The tips here while aimed at those working in the media are more widely applicable to many others working in social media. It’s about good practice and that is universal.

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Good piece in the FT this morning looking at how public relations is changing and how the humble press release is no longer quite as humble as it used to be.

The rise of PR has gone hand in hand with the ever shrinking news rooms, number of journalists who inhabit them, and the rise in churnalism, which demands a constant stream of digital news to fill magazine and newspaper websites.  That has resulted in as much as 41% of news now being driven by PR.

The story quotes a figure from the US that says the ratio of PRs to journalists has shifted from 1.2 to one to four to one between 1980 and 2010.  Read More »

Basic intuition and a bit of self awareness will inform you that news consumption is changing rapidly.

However, a fascinating new report  by the Pew Center details just what an effect mobile is having on the news landscape, as well as showing that the networks we all assumed would be influential actually aren’t.

For instance while news gathering is very common among Twitter users, because as we know so many journalists use Twitter and many say they can’t work without it, the overall reach is limited because the audience remains relatively small.

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On the 16th January, 2006, I read a ‘quality’ piece of journalism by David Watkins on the MediaGuardian website.

It was the day of my 40th birthday. It was a piece of ‘quality’ writing – of the kind, I guess, that David Leigh would charge me and my broadband provider £2 a month for – that would turn my world upside down.

Just as Craig Newmark – one of the slayers-in-chief of the US newspaper classifieds market – was turning the once-comfortable world of the The San Francisco Chronicle, inside out with his little list. It is a worth a re-visit. If only for the fact that the doom of the printed newspaper has long been foretold.

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Earlier this week we were reading about how a growing number of journalists “can’t work without social media” and read Twitter as the most important of those journalistic tools.

Today Twitter has put out its basic four tips for journalists using Twitter, which is a useful addition and reminder to the many social media guides and tips that have been published including some here, which have proved some of the most popular posts on The Wall.

Those have included “The best social media policy ever written” and The New York Times with its ‘Five guiding principles of social media’.  So what has Twitter got for us? Read More »

Since its arrival social media has certainly changed the way journalists work, how stories are developed, and how news breaks.

It has had positive effects, without a doubt, but there are also concerns about its effect on productivity and the disruption it can have on working patterns as journalists balance the desire to stay connected with the need to switch off and get down to work.

New research highlights what many of us already know, which is that social media has created a dependency among those working in the media with more than a quarter of UK journalists saying they are unable to work without it. I’m surprised it’s only a quarter. Read More »

Mail Online is now a profitable business

Daily Mail & General Trust has today confirmed Mail Online is now a profitable business on a “run rate basis”, and posted a 3% lift in group revenue to £509 million in the second quarter.

The news comes just as the concept of paywalls, or more specifically metered access, was starting to gain traction as the most likely model for newspaper websites in the future.

The success of Mail Online’s lean digital operation, based primarily in the UK and US, could yet prove to be an industry inflection point. Read More »