The Telegraph has introduced a metered paywall joining the FT and The Times as major British newspapers asking readers to pay for content.

The move follows the launch of a paywall on its international site in November 2012. Like the original New York Times paywall, and the recently announced Washington Post, The Telegraph will offer readers 20 stories for free each month before they hit the paywall.

With the Telegraph joining the rush to a paywall The Guardian remains the only major upmarket British newspaper, other than the Independent, not to have a paywall.

Readers are being offered a number of subscription packages including ‘The Telegraph Web Pack’, which offers unlimited access to the Telegraph’s website, plus access to its apps, for £1.99 per month or £20 per year. Read More »

The San Francisco Chronicle has launched a paywall around its premium content as it becomes the latest major US newspaper to make the leap to paid content.

The Chronicle follows the Washington Post, which last week announced its plans for a metered paywall, and its fellow Californian paper the Los Angeles Times. The LA Times put up its paywall in February.

News of the Chronicle’s move comes as it is being reported that the Irish Independent and Irish Times are to begin charging for access to news content this year, according to a report in the FT. Read More »

No surprise if you ask me that the Guardian’s mobile website has attracted record levels of traffic with 17.2 million monthly unique browsers last month.

The latest ABC digital audit shows that February 2013 was a record month for the Guardian’s mobile site, attracting its highest ever level of traffic. The figures for February are up 7.9% month-on-month and 44.7% year-on-year. That beats the previous record of 17 million set back in April 2012.

At the same time though the paid for iPad app for the Guardian & Observer sits at somewhere over 23,000 subscriptions, which is a far cry from the 280,000 active iPad users the Guardian had last June before it began charging. If you recall when first launched Channel 4 sponsored the Guardian iPad app for six months making it free to access. Read More »

The Times has seen its readership fall way below that of its rivals, according to the latest National Readership Survey’s PADD report covering January to December 2012.

The survey found that The Times is now read by fewer people than any other general quality newspaper brand. It has a combined print and digital readership of 5,506,000. That puts it along way behind the The Guardian, Telegraph and even the Independent and the London Evening Standard.

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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 »

Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Online, has described the Daily Mail’s all-conquering website as the “crack cocaine” of journalism.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Clarke said people are addicted to it as he talked about the success of the paper that has beaten The New York Times and The Guardian to become the world’s biggest newspaper online. Read More »

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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The Washington Post reports on the curious case of The New York Times reporter, Jodi Rudoren, who has been given her own social media minder who will be looking at every Tweet and Facebook status update that she writes to check and edit them before sending.

We all know that social media can be tricky and that its instantaneous nature can cause huge issues for us all, which is a problem considering how essential Twitter has become to most working journalists today. There have been cases of journalists Tweeting in haste and suffering Twitter storms at length. It has in the worst cases proved the undoing of some journalists. Read More »

A hedge fund analyst in New York City, Shashank Tripathi, apologised last night for posting fake Hurricane Sandy news updates on Twitter. Tripathi who uses the Twitter handle @ComfortablySmug sent out a series of fake tweets claiming more dire news about the storm hitting New York City.

One tweet about a floor of the New York Stock Exchange being flooded was widely retweeted. He also falsely claimed that an energy company, Con Ed, was cutting services to all of Manhattan.

The fake Tweets were not an isolated incident. Fake pictures were also rife. The image here? That’s not from Hurricane Sandy. This scary looking shot of waves battering the Statue of Liberty turned out to be production art from the disaster movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. Read More »

We all know the  increasingly outdated and cliched image of hackers – a young, socially awkward man, in a basement causing chaos (this despite the best efforts of Angelina Jolie). There is now a more socially aware type of hacker coming to the fore, using social media and opensource tools to build digital projects to help their community.

Hurricane Sandy, which has already swept across the Caribbean and is now hitting the East Coast of America, has illustrated this perfectly.

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