The Washington Post is to follow The New York Times and erect a metered paywall this summer.

The move to a paywall future will likely give newspapers struggling for survival around the world pause for thought, particularly in the UK. In November, the Telegraph introduced a metered paywall strategy for overseas users.

The latest move makes The Washington Post one of the last big American newspapers to erect a paywall. Read More »

Twitter has given an update on how its expanded Tweet programme is going, which it introduced with a few media partners back in July. 

The expanded tweets was a play by Twitter to both make Tweets more valuable, with content previews, photos and videos right within a Tweet, and the platform more sticky.

It follows the news earlier this week that Twitter is testing a new “like” button with a small group of users and testing a new “star” feature with others.

Read More »

The Daily Mail and Telegraph websites are the early winners in the race to get people sharing their content on Pinterest while the Guardian has attracted the most followers to its official Pinterest page.

Links to web pages from the Dailymail.co.uk were found to have been shared or ‘pinned’ by Pinterest users most (1,963,999), with the Telegraph.co.uk attracting 429,137 shares to come second.

The Guardian.co.uk, however, takes third place with a total of 329,720 pins, according to a study of 13 UK national newspaper sites by search and social analytics company, Searchmetrics. Read More »

Great piece on Nieman Labs looking at how our changing online habits are effectively killing off the newspaper homepage as we know it.

It isn’t saying it will disappear for good, far from  it, but the importance of the newspaper homepage in the grand scheme of things has been greatly diminished because of how increasing numbers  of people enter websites. They’re coming in sideways.

It’s a nice phrase to some up the search engines, mobiles, emails and social media links that bring us to newspaper content. As a result of the changing nature of our digital journey’s newsrooms are starting to rethink what a homepage is. Read More »

Bad news again from Guardian News & Media as it announced that as many as 100 jobs are to be cut, from its staff of 650, and losses of £44m — up by £6m on last year.

Amid all of this financial pain it has pushing been ahead with its digital first ‘open journalism’ strategy that has become the core of the paper’s business. Underpinning this is an old style digital land grab. A drive for the largest audience the paper can find online fuelled by expansion into the US. All this, we are told, is apparently at odds with the implementation of any kind of paywall.

We hear this even though there is mounting evidence to suggest that having a metered paywall, as that is the only variety of relevance, is the right answer for similar newspapers. Read More »

Twitter is making a play to keep users on Twitter for longer with the introduction of new expanded tweets that give more interactive experiences on Twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com.

Beginning with a select group of news partners, that includes The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal, expanded tweets will deliver rich content inside tweets. This will include a preview with the headline, the introduction and sometimes the Twitter accounts of the publisher and writer.

It builds on Twitter’s existing expanded tweets where users have been able to play videos from YouTube or see photos from Instagram.

It also strikes me of recognition that in some cases tweets need to contain more than 140 characters, as I wrote recently. Read More »

Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail is to follow The New York Times and others and begin charging its readers for content. The paper is to implement a metered paywall system although it has yet to announce how much it will charge or how many articles it will give readers for free.

It said the it was moving its plans forward for the paywall in response “to an unpredictable advertising market”, which that has seen both print and digital sales drop this spring at publishers in both North America and Europe. Read More »

The Econ0mist has proven itself incredibly successful on Facebook and very adept at engaging people on the social network. Testament to that is its passing the one million fans mark.

The one million strong milestone highlights not only how well it has done, but also how much bigger it is on Facebook when compared to its rivals. It has more than twice as  many fans as Time and the Wall Street Journal for instance. Read More »

Google last night opened up its social network service Google+ to brands and businesses with the launch of Google+ Pages.

In so doing it finally offers a much needed alternative to Facebook where many brands, which many brands are increasingly making the focus of their social media campaigns.

Already as Marketing reported major UK brands including Burberry, MailOnline, O2, Cadbury and Mumsnet are among the first to launch pages on Google+. Read More »

While it was reported earlier this week that News International had ditched the idea of a paywall for The Sun other parts of the News Corporation empire are pressing ahead with plans.

The Australian will put its paywall live on Monday, according to News Limited boss John Hartigan, beginning with a three month free trial. Read More »