En morsom diskusjon om nyhetsvaner på nettet rusler og går på espen.com. Og ikke minst nyttig — denne bloggeier tester allerede Morning Coffee-konseptet med stor entusiasme. Del dine nyhetsvaner, du også.
Archive for March, 2008
Del dine nyhetsvaner
Friday, March 21st, 2008Irak-produksjon i Aftenposten
Friday, March 21st, 2008Aftenposten har laget en multimediaproduksjon om Irak-krigen som absolutt er verdt å få med seg. Oversiktlig og ryddig, og det er nettopp dette det ofte skorter på i slike flash-baserte produksjoner. Man kunne imidlertid ha våget seg på mer av alt — både mer foto, gjerne video og ikke minst mer faktainformasjon og lenker. Nå blir det nesten for knapt. Se oversikt over andre mediers dekning av femårsmarkeringen.
Can news websites achieve Google-size ad revenue?
Thursday, March 20th, 2008UK newspapers could get much more ad revenue out of their websites, Ernst &Young claims in a new report. The consultants say that if newspapers got as much revenue out of their users as Google, they would have earned 120 to 250 million pounds each in 2007, instead of around one-fifth of that. Google had revenues of 1,26 billion pounds in the UK in 2007.
E&Y say that the newspapers should start offering advertisers cost per click (CPC) based ad models alongside the usual cost per thousand page impressions (CPM). But can ads in newspapers ever become as relevant to the user as Google’s search-based ads? Maybe on the newspapers’ own search pages? Some news websites have fought advertisers who wanted CPC before, because they feared too few would click (they know their own click-through rates, of course).
Other recommendations: acquire online classified ad services (a well-known strategy in Norway) and improve behavioural targeting of users. It would be interesting to know how much of this is done already, and what regulations exist — probably privacy rules are tougher in for example Germany and Norway than in the UK and US. (tip: journalism.co.uk).
UPDATE: A prediction for the US online ad market says growth will continue and the shares of the different types of advertising will be very stable in the five years ahead.
Iraq: 5 years
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
For five years, brave Reuters photographers, cameramen, correspondents and support staff have documented the Iraq war. Now they have put together a stunning multimedia production. Especially impressive is the timeline. Watch. (via Media Storm blog).
Other Iraq 5 year coverage:
Rita Leistner – one woman’s war
State of the News Media 2008
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008It’s a yearly event, the presentation of the US State of the News Media report. I haven’t had time to dig into it yet, but see for example Robert Niles at OJR for reactions.
The introduction summary is quite downbeat and pessimistic, also on behalf of online journalism:
The pressure points vary by news sector. In print, the problem is vanishing advertising, particularly classified. Were it not for that one sector, newspapers’l problems would be comparatively modest. In television, where problems with audience are more acute, the industry is being sustained by the fact that still nothing compares to the persuasiveness of television advertising. Online, the problem is that the revenue model is in search, not conventional advertising – and journalism sites are now already lagging behind other Internet sectors financially.
See also:
Cliché killer
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Hm, this could hurt. Kill The Cliché is a new type of media watchdog service which mines newspaper sources (now six) for over-used words and displays the sins and sinners in tables, charts and tags. Something to fear for finance and sports journalists especially?
Not sure about “kill”, though – something of a cliché metaphor as well? (via FP Passport).
Hvorfor DN.no ikke er nr. 1
Monday, March 17th, 2008Dagens Næringsliv er en stabil leverandør av noe av den beste journalistikken i Norge (trolig den aller beste). Sist lørdag demonstrerte redaksjonen dette nok en gang, med en analytisk reportasje om kvoter i grønn gråsone. Et særdeles viktig tema for samfunnet, et område hvor den norske stat skal pøse ut milliarder, et felt hvor vi fort kan oppleve både tvilsom bruk av fellesskapets midler eller korrupsjon. Kort sagt, det er vanskelig å finne et felt hvor det er viktigere at journalister følger godt med, graver og analyserer. Som DNs folk gjorde i denne gode artikkelen.
Men at det går an å lenke til artikkelen er ikke DN.nos fortjeneste. Prøv selv om du kan finne saken der. Det nærmeste du kommer er trolig en knapp omtale. Nederst står en oppfordring om å lese hele saken i papiravisen. Ingen lenke. Via DN.nos egen søkemotor finner du heller ikke fram. På DN.nos egen klimaseksjon? Ikke der heller.
Hvis du derimot går via Sesam, Google eller andre søketjenester, dukker saken faktisk opp likevel. DN vil altså at lesere skal finne saken, men bare slike som orienterer seg på annen måte enn via DNs egen nettavis? Tips: er du på jakt etter DN-saker, velg stikkord du tror er i saken og søk i Google med site-kommandoen (feks: gråsone site:avis.dn.no).
Ikke så rart, altså, at DN.no i beste fall er nr. 3 blant næringslivsnettstedene i Norge, selv om de burde vært nr. 1. Motivasjonen for tilbakeholdenheten er klart å “beskytte” papirutgaven (det kan neppe være fordi arkivet er så lønnsomt — jfr. Times Select og alle de andre som åpner arkivene for å tjene mer på dem). Det tvinger fram to spørsmål: 1. Har det noen gang vært en fornuftig strategi å ha en dårligere nettutgave enn man ellers kunne hatt for å beskytte en papiravis? 2. Hvis ja, hvor lenge vil dette fortsette å være lurt?
All guns blazing
Monday, March 17th, 2008The BBC is on to something very important with the season of programmes and debates called “White – is white working class Britain becoming invisible?”. Not only because of the topic, clearly important and controversial, and hence exactly the kind of material that public broadcasters should be concerned with. But also in the way it is done, as a series of originally produced documentaries on TV complemented with debate programmes also on TV and on the web, a website rich in material and also programmes from the archive on radio and TV. Using all the guns at its disposal simultaneously, a broadcaster can have an impact on society — dominate the public sphere, as it were — in a way that’s otherwise almost impossible in today’s fragmented society. Of course, that kind of power places a heavy responsibility on the producers. Here’s how they present “White”.
Accompanying the series is a fancy flash presentation of the debate. You have to click on the banner at the starting page to see it. Not sure if this really works in the context, but it looks good (tip: mymarkup.)
Svensk satsing på nettdebatt
Monday, March 17th, 2008To tidligere Expressen-journalister skal starte en “nyhetsdrevet sosial mediekanal”, leser jeg hos Martin Jönsson. Det dreier seg tydeligvis om en ambisiøs satsing, siden Bonnier og Proventus finansierer gildet. I lys av vår hjemlige metadebatt om nettdebatter er det unektelig interessant når Jönsson skriver:
I dag sker den viktigaste debatten på nätet inte på någon enskild sajt och de traditionella mediernas tal om interaktivitet och läsarmedverkan är till stora delar bara en läpparnas bekännelse. Maktplattformen DN Debatt är fortfarande – 2008! – inte öppet för kommentarer direkt och i övrigt är det framför allt via bloggar som debatten sker. Vill man följa aktualitetsdebatten är det till bloggportaler som Knuff och Bloggportalen man får gå, för att sedan leta sig vidare. Den största makten över debatten ligger därmed hos blogglänkningverktyget Twingly.
I en Mandag Morgen-sak (pdf) jeg skrev før i år siterte jeg tidligere Dagbladet.no-sjef Rune Røsten på dette: “Det er mulig å bygge opp et stort antall brukere på relativt kort tid. Det kan komme en “debatt.no” som vil være førende for politisk debatt. Men det vil kreve en del ressurser og tålmodighet.”
Eksemplet fra Sverige viser i hvert fall at det går an å tenke i de baner. (Svenskene viser i det hele tatt en større gründerånd på nettet, jfr. Blondinbella og de andre bloggerne som gjør bloggingen til levebrød). Jönsson igjen:
En redaktörsdriven, smart konstruerad sajt för aktualitetsdebatt låter därför som en bra idé, förutsatt att den bygger på total användarfrihet, så att debattinlägg kan delas och visas på egna bloggar, Facebooksidor och andra communities. Med en tung aktör i ryggen kan det också bli lättare att attrahera makthavare och opinionsbildare,. för att höja statusen på debatten.
What search engine does Umberto Eco use?
Friday, March 14th, 2008Umberto Eco has been a constant provider of reading pleasures over the years, intellectually stimulating, above all in his deceptively light and humorous essays. He is one of those writers who has access to a source of abundance. The serious professor turned successful novelist, of course. He wrote the book on semiotics, then Sean Connery played the monk-detective in the movie adaptation of The Name of the Rose. Beat that. Eco has never been a technology pessimist, that’s why one hesitates to take seriously some of his very un-original statements in a recent interview. That he can only find 10.000 pages when he searches for Goethe when Google finds 15,7 million — that doesn’t change his point about the new confusion of our unfiltered times, though one wonders what search engine he prefers. But some of the other arguments are just too 1997 to be believed (computers have led to increased paper use due to printing, not less — please). Take consolation instead in his confession of liking technical schnickschnack and the image of the aging professor carrying around a 250GB external harddisk with the complete Italian national library on it — that’s the genuine Eco spirit.
