If you have followed The New York Times Twitter feed you will know that until now it has been an automated one much like many other publications, but that’s now changed — at least temporarily.
As Poynter reports The New York Times has replaced its main automatic feed this week with two real people, in social media editors Liz Heron and Lexi Mainland, as an experiment. Read More
Interesting report on Journalism UK about News International possibly rethinking its closed, anti-social media or iron curtain, approach to its paywall. The Sun had been due to follow same paywall model employed by The Times and the News of the World.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know I think this is the equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot. I mean, seriously, why do it? Why have a paywall that cuts you off from the social media conversation? Read More
I’ve said a bunch of times that metered paywalls can work and that this will be the case with the delayed one at the New York Times, which is set to finally launch shortly.
Others have said it will be a success too and research has shown that where metered type paywalls have gone up they have had little effect on newspaper web traffic, but it is always nice to have more evidence such as the Augusta Chronicle. It put up a metered paywall and not only did it work, but it boosted traffic. Read More
The New York Times Company has issued a short update on its delayed paywall, which was meant to launch last month, but will now instead “launch shortly”. Read More
Listen carefully, I think I heard a penny drop. Entertainment title Variety has had a brain wave and is launching a breaking news blog outside of its paywall.
Rather like The Times Variety has a paywall that hides all of its content, which of course discourages websites from linking or sharing its content.
News Corporation might recently have delayed The Sun’s move to paid content, in light of the disappointment with the The Times, but that is not stopping the Telegraph Media Group pushing ahead with plans to introduced a metered paywall for Telegraph.co.uk.
Marketing reports today that the Daily Telegraph website is to a unveil paid-for website in September and that it will be a metered model, which unlike The Times and its anti-social media paywall will allow articles to be freely shared online. Smart move. Read More
Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the News Corporation’s policy on new media: one minute, it’s great, they buy MySpace. Then they put up paywalls, hide their blogs and eschew social media. Then they launch a pioneering iPad newspaper. Confusing.
This month, anyway, it seems that new media is in. Not only with the launch of The Daily, but also with this pretty clever campaign, Word Nerd, to encourage people to follow their official Twitter feeds, their journalists’ Twitter feeds and, of course, take out a subscription.
Word Nerd: subtly letting you know I got a high score
Bloomberg is reporting that the New York Times paywall is to cost less than $20 (£12.50) a month and maybe as little as $10.
The news service quoted “a person familiar with the matter. The paper had talked about launching its paywall this month, but it looks like it will go up early in February. Read More
Rupert Murdoch’s planned iPad newspaper, The Daily, is to use Tumblr as part of its social media strategy to drive subscriptions.
Good news to hear that it has a social media strategy as last week the indications were that the now delayed Daily would have a website that would only be accessible to subscribers like the the anti-social media approach of The Times. Read More
The Independent has been beavering away to make its website more social with Facebook and has had some excellent results.
Referrals from Facebook grew 680% comparing January and December of 2010, with referrals from Twitter also up 250%. Read More
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