We plan to skip the WAN/IFRA/FIPP conference this week in Rome and attend the micropayments conference on Monday in Manhattan (see previous item for outlines of both). The newspaper industry has never developed any theoretical framework about either what and how it…
Two notable conferences are being held during the next three working days: The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP), and IFRA (the joint International Newpaper Colour Association and F
Do you publish e-mail address on your Web site? For years, we’ve been suggesting that webmasters encode those addresses in JavaScript to prevent spammers’ robots from capturing and spamming those addresses. The only problem with this solution is that not all Web…
Because this Web page is written using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is formatted for three columns, and CSS doesn’t always display three columns in all Web browsers, we’ve been getting reports (particularly from AOL users) that some of this page’s columns overlap.…
As New Medium consultants to Playboy Enterprises during the mid-1990s, we would never have suggested the following computerized photographic exercise: Digital artist Jason Salavan has digitally averaged four decades of Playboy magazine centerfolds and produced composite portraits of each of those decades’…
A badly kept secret is that U.S. newspapers have been trying to disguise their shrinking circulation by increasing the numbers of ‘bulk’ circulation that they drop off unsolicited in hotels, or have advertisers purchase, or drop off at schools under the failed…
Two weeks ago, we noted PaidContent.org’s report that UK Internet Advertising Bureau Chairman Richard Eyre‘s speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers Association’s annual awards banquet was practically a cry for merger between the IAB and the AOP. Mike Butcher, deputy…
Backtracking this site’s own referrer logs, we discovered the above named site, which describes itself as ‘A public radio and television strategic investment initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’. The site contains consultants’ reports, newslinks, and other resources investigating what…
There’s a good story today on the front page of The New York Times about how otherwise reputable companies become ‘white collar’ spammers by purchasing and using lists of consumers’ e-mail addresses. If you’ve provided your persona demographic information and registered to…
Newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers are merely creating a few amateur guest columnists. That’s not ‘participatory journalism’. What is will be unveiled next Monday by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Called iCAN, the BBC Interactive‘s participatory journalism program lets any…
We thank the students in Strategic Communication Research I at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism (‘MoJo‘) for their time this morning. For those whose questions we didn’t answer in person, we’ll answer you this coming week by e-mail.
Here is the text of my speech today at Exploring Freedom of Expression in a Digital World, the 2nd Annual Fall Symposium of the University of Missouri’s Center for the Digital Globe. It equated 100 years ago to today, provided examples of the revolution underway in communications, defined the New Medium and how it functions, and outlined some consequences that this New Medium will have on credibility & responsibility in civic affairs.
As we earlier this month mentioned, a U.S. television network has asked us to review for accuracy some of the facts it plans to report in a forthcoming program on digital newspaper editions. One problem the producer is having is that one…
On Thursday afternoon, we’ll be speaking about Credibility & Responsibility in an Age of the Individual’s Media at the University of Missouri’s Center for the Digital Globe. CDiG is holding its 2nd Annual Fall Symposium, entitled Exploring Freedom of Expression in a…
CyberAtlas today provides us with the following update on mobile content access: Instat/MDR expects the number of worldwide wireless Internet subscribers will have risen from 74 million at the end of 2001 to more than 320 million by the end of 2006.…
Brian Peddle of SavedByZero.org discusses possible ways to track readers of Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. It certainly won’t beat an e-mail subscriber list and e-mail open/clickthrough tracking as ways to know who reads your content.
The US company known as Mazingo (Please note: not the UK company by the same name, so below), which offered magazine and broadcasters multimedia content to owners of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) has closed. The one year-old, San Francisco company’s Web site…
Professor Jay Rosen of New York University’s School of Journalism offers some interesting and contrarian thoughts about blogging & journalism.
The New York Times is now offering almost every of daily news stories and some daily photos to users of Verizon’s mobile phones. Mobile subscribers can also use their handsets to e-mail NYT articles to friends and save NYT photos for use…
We received an e-mailed press release from Newsstand.com this morning, suggesting that, “When searching for the perfect gift for friends, family and business associates this holiday season, NewsStand Inc. suggests purchasing digital edition subscriptions of newspapers and magazines.” That’s not a bad…
InsightExpress found that 85 percent of the 1,500 U.S. online consumers it interviewed disagree with the Direct Marketing Association’s various pro-marketing definitions of spam: 43 percent agreed that “Any unsolicited e-mail message, commercial or ogtherwise, is spam.” Another 18 percent agreed that…
Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org a few days ago pointed us to a good essay by John Blossom, entitled Pencil Sharpening: Why Paid Content Struggles to Define Meaningful Price Points. We agree with what Blossom writes, notably about how publishers are wrongly pricing…
We’re now in the tenth year of publishing periodicals via the Internet. Most major newspapers and magazines have been doing so for at least sixth years. But, despite all that time, they are still ‘searching for the business model’ for profitably publishing…
Coincidental to the subject of whether the Financial Times has been “proving that people will pay for valuable content” (see our previous item for the source of that quote), Mitch Ratcliffe speculates that the FT‘s newly expanded deals with Yahoo! Finance and…
Emily Bell of Guardian Online won The UK Association of Online Publishers‘s best Consumer Editor Award and David Molony of Emap Media’s TotalTele.com won the best Business Editor Award. The Web site of the Financial Times won 2003 AOP Chairman’s Award for…
A study by the Radicati Group consultants believes that wireless e-mail will increase US corporate employees’ productivity, giving them 55 minutes extra working time per day this year and up to 80 minutes per day by 2007. eMarketer provides a briefing about…
Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org report that UK Internet Advertising Bureau Chairman Richard Eyre‘s speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers Association last night was practically a cry for merger: ” If I may say this in a spirit of shared emphasis…
Maxim, Blender, and Stuff magazines have launched mobile phone portals to distribute their branded ringtones, sound effects, images, games, and applications. The mobile wireless portals (for example, Maxim‘s) feature content such as Beyonce’s Crazy in Love and Justin Timberlake‘s Senorita set as…
The first mobile phone call was made 20 years ago today. It was the first of trillions. And it was made to Alexander Graham Bell‘s grandson.
While many newspaper New Media operations insist upon formatting their sites for only certain types of browser software and for only certain size monitor screens, some newspaper newsprint production have realized that consumers like a choice of formats. The World Association of…
Alan Abbey, Internet Editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote us last week to say that his newspaper has backed off requiring that user (and use ‘cookies’) before they can see his site’s Lastest News, Editorials, Op-Ed, and Columnists Web pages. Although Abbey…
Newsstand.com has begun distributing a digital edition of New Scientist magazines. That’s a bit of a coup for two reasons. “This is a great leap forward for New Scientist. It will bring the magazine to a whole new audience, many of whom…
Cyberjournalists.net profiles Gordon Joseloff, a former CBS News and UPI foreign correspondent, who has used blogware to create an online news publication about his hometown of Westport, Connecticut. A very affluent community of 26,000 people, Westport has weekly and semi-weekly printed newspapers,…
Cyberjournalist.net reports on the ten blogs that the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, has launched.
In August on the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits site, we’d reported that Penthouse Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. had lamented, “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media” and how he admitted that there may no longer be a future for magazines…
The Public Broadcasting Corporation‘s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, is preparing a story about newspapers’ digital editions, mainly those retailed through Newsstand.com or Olive Software. This US news program, known for its thoughtful and in-depth reporting, has been working on this story…
An example of moblogging (blogging via mobile phone) is blogging from your local pub while watching a favorite sporting event (in this case the Boston Red Sox versus the New York Yankees in the US baseball championship semifinals) on the pub’s TV.…
PaidContent.org features a transcript of the speech that Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave on Monday to the Royal Television Society: “What we are witnessing at the moment in the UK is, I believe, a tipping point. As…
Last month, a posting on the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits site highlighted a marketing newsletter report (which the newsletter has since put behind a paid access archive) that unpublished parts of a Quris study of 1,691 American e-mail users found that 92.3%…
eMarketer today provides its usual good briefing skills to Perseus’s survey of blogs, which estimated that there are 4.12 million blogs worldwide. In that survey, the conclusion that got the most publicy was 66% of the surveyed blogs had not been updated…
Anyone who is following the controversy over whether or not the BBC should be allowed to compete online with commercial UK news organizations should find useful the UK government’s Department of Culture, Media, and Sport web page that offers downloadable (PDF format)…
In which American states will consumers most likely respond to online advertising? The southeastern, according to an analysis by Advertising.com of 6.9 billion banner ad impressions. eMarketer today provides a good briefing and informative tables about this survey. Measured regionally, consumers in…
We look at the prospects for paid subscription blogging, in our monthly Publishing: Free to Fee column published today at ClickZ.com. The second half of the column will appear there next month.
Earlier today, we reported a case of a sports league disintermediating news companies from the process of delivering sports news to online consumers. Here’s another example, this one involving wireless phone users. A year ago, we reported that Nokia had chosen not…
ChannelSeven has an interview with Privacy Consultant Richard M. Smith, who’s now semi-retired. Among other topics, he talks about how much data-mining is actually wasted by marketers: “Web sites and database companies collect an amazing amount of data that isn’t used. One…
eMarketer, in a story about RedSheriff’s report about the top Australian Web sites by traffic, presents this interesting bar chart displaying both the sheer numbers of consumers online in major countries plus the percentage those users represent of their national population. [One…
Who gets the rights to offer downloads of a major American sport? The that sports’ league itself. Major League Baseball is offering downloads of this year’s US baseball quarterfinal and semifinal games, plus video clip of highlights from regular season games. Each…
The satirical weekly, The Onion, reports how “an Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992.” As one corporate IT systems administrator said, “The local-access network…
The majority of print periodical publishers surveyed by GartnerG2 either foresee no change in the relationship between print and online or don’t know what the future holds. They aren’t optimistic about the future of online advertising as a means to increase revenue.…
At theFeature.com last week, Kevin Werbach, the former Internet analyst for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and former managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter, argues that both the radio spectrum and governments need to regulate it no longer exists. (Oh,…