David Black

“The Independent is to relaunch its website next month but it is unclear whether the newspaper publisher will still release its first ABC Electronic user figures before 2008.”

“Trinity Mirror plc is pleased to announce the acquisition of Globespan Media Ltd, publisher of Homesoverseas.co.uk and Showhouse.co.uk and their magazine counterparts, together with What House online and the What House Awards.”

“a secret weapon in the battle for innovation, new technology and product development; a four-person technical team called Reuters Labs, which regularly turns over a host of intriguing web and mobile projects.

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“Magazines can use the internet more effectively if they observe a couple of golden rules: there’s no use trying to control it and don’t expect giant leaps”

“Give your news article (or blog post) a headline that actually describes what’s in the story.”

“As newspapers integrate their web and press productions, is the art of the subeditor threatened by the need for internet-friendly keywords?”

“Finnish news publisher Sanoma Digital has launched a user-generated news website that also uses an open-source journalism platform to gather material for a series of weekly freesheet newspapers.”

“As newspapers struggle to survive with heavy emphasis on the Web, bulked-up local coverage and leaner staffs, they are dramatically revamping the way newsrooms operate.”

“Print is a serendipity medium where puns, clever language and cultural references can work really well. Online is an information-seeker’s medium (and that was true long before Google) where a clear and straightforward phrase wins the game.”

“I’m not getting Kindle in both senses of the verb — not buying and not understanding, both as a device and as a model.”

“Project Red Stripe: A story of innovation is a whirlwind tour looking back over the six months of the project from January to August 2007… it sets out to highlight seven tips that we think will make small scale innovation projects run well.”

Lessons from Economist Group innovation project.

“A funny thing happened while Halsey Minor was trying to kill print journalism. He ended up publishing magazines — big, heavy magazines, with beautiful pictures on quality paper — the kind he and others had declared obsolete.”

“Over at BBC Radio 4’s iPM website there’s an interesting experiment going on - and some good examples of my 21st century newsroom ideas in practice.”

“Nearly nine out of 10 households in the UK choose broadband to connect to the Internet, according to Ofcom’s second annual Consumer Experience study.”

US: “Advertising expenditures for newspaper websites increased 21.1%, to $773 million, in the third quarter compared with the year-earlier period, according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).”

“To my surprise and delight I have been picked to be part of the development team”

“But start squinting hard at the line that separates commercial from noncommercial and it starts to get fuzzy in a hurry. Consider the following questions. Are any of these uses truly noncommercial?”

“Even the most committed newspaper industry pessimist might begin to see a little sunshine after talking to Randy Bennett.”

“I’ve long been a fan of Pandora, Last.fm and the other major media recommendation tools… The problem I start to find with these tools is that they’re so good they shatter my meticulously-constructed illusions about my own tastes and preferences.”

“So here’s what you do next time a BIG story hits: As you send your reporters out to cover the story, get them to post short bits of news (limited to 140 characters) to a Twitter feed that either you’ve set up for this story, or that you keep ready for si

“Twitter can be a good resource to reach your audience via SMS… But you can easily pull that into a blog via an RSS feed, and really, in the age of networked journalism, it’s about your site being a hub in the network to disseminate news.”

“Who can I connect with? What did the journalist read to write this? Where did this happen? When are events coming up that I need to be aware of? Why should I care? How can I make a difference?”

“OF the total of 44 million GBP coming from digital, about 11 million GBP came from online and mobile revenues, the rest coming from digital broadcast and information sectors.”

“The Financial Times today announced the appointment of Richard Edgar as the first head of video for FT.com. Edgar joins FT.com from Reuters Video where he was editor in charge for Europe, Middle East and Africa.”

“Targeting will come in to rescue all forms of digital advertising.”

“If I were running a newspaper website, I would not pre-screen comments. But I would take the following steps to help ensure the conversation maintains a minimum level of quality.”

US: “Online ad revenues surpassed $5.2 billion in Q3, a 3 percent gain over Q2 and a rise of 25.3 percent from Q306, according to the latest numbers from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.”

“The BBC Blogs Network has been up and running for 18 months. This milestone provides a good opportunity to give you some insight into what we’ve been doing, how we think our efforts measure up, and where we might be headed in the future…”

“This week we launched the tenth in our set of correspondent’s blogs… It seems a good time to take stock. Over the past couple of years they have quietly changed the way in which the best of the BBC’s journalism gets out to our audiences.”

“According to figures from the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), 62 per cent of those surveyed are now turning to the internet as a main source of news rather than traditional media.”

EIAA study: “A watershed moment, indicating the internet is now swallowing up other media - 82 percent of Europeans aged 16 to 24 now use the internet between five and seven days a week whilst only 77 watch TV that regularly (down five percent on 2006)”

“Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy’s costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.”

“The number of people visiting U.S. newspaper Web sites rose 3.7 percent year over year during the third quarter, even as their print editions reported lower advertising sales.”

“Newspapers are in a lot less trouble than the money men seem to think.”

“Of Britain’s web population of 26 million it found that 15% kept a blog. Of those running a personal website, almost one in five were blogging at least once a day”

“I was looking to draw up a list of ten essential books on online journalism - but it seems to me that there are really only six. Have I missed something? Let me know.”

“A series of programmes examines the influence of the internet and changing technologies on the British newspaper industry. How are newspapers adapting and what influence will the national and local publications retain?”

“The planned geotagging-based relaunch at Archant’s stable of regional newspapers will not go ahead for several months, the according the Norwich-based group’s development director.”

“The newspaper division at Gannett saw online revenue growth of 11 percent in Q3; no actual numbers given. At its UK operations, online revenue grew by 46 percent on a constant currency basis.”

“Revenues dropped 9 .2 percent to $540.3 million, from $595.1 million in Q306. Advertising revenues were down 9.8 percent to $457 million, from $506.7 million in the same quarter last year.”

“The 2004 vintage of the BBC website is never going to go down as a design classic, but honestly, what did it do to deserve this?”

“the word “classifieds” doesn’t really mean much to anyone… to their users, Craigslist isn’t a classifieds site and Google isn’t a search engine. They are “places” to “find stuff” and “find things,” respectively.”

“in focus groups the abstract category “classifieds” didn’t really have any meaning for people.”

“In hyperlocal news, one reader’s banality is another’s vital intelligence.”

“When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world… News about a pothole repair just five blocks from your street is the least interesting thing you could possibly imagine.”

“I thus proudly determined my own top ten of the UK’s finest journalism bloggers:”

“I doubt very much that you would add any other feature to your carefully designed site the careless way that you seem to have chucked the ads in.”

“Your content will be remixed whether you like it or not. Do you want to be involved or not?”

“I decided to put together a list of ways that the Mercury News currently lets people participate, their stated plans for adding more participation (according to the Rethink blog), and some ideas for how they might take that further.”

“With a Web operation, news gets out quickly but in smaller chunks, and then it is tested against the facts… It is never really finished. Instead of a mammoth project aimed at a single product, it is a series of small steps that eventually take you some

“More than eight in 10 Internet users also do some offline activity while online, according to Burst Media.” 58% watch TV, while 30% read a magazine or newspaper.

“Dagbladet has begun using user-generated videos to illustrate secondary stories. Werring mentioned that it’s often impossible to illustrate these with video except by using videos shot by users on the scene.”

“This is cool: After joining in a blogfest at the BBC this week, the editor of the showcase news program [Newsnight] took a suggestion to heart and handed over a bit of control to the people formerly known as his audience.”

“An analysis of 88 major papers showed that in the last two years, about half had seen no significant change in combined print and online readership, or showed an increase, said Bob Cohen, president and chief executive officer of Scarborough.”

“Here is a chart for the Top 25 newspapers by circulation, both daily and Sunday, based on the new FAS-FAX numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations this morning, for six-month period ending Sept. 30.”

“The new audience metric calls attention to the “full reach” of newspapers at a time when much of the media attention is on the decline of newspaper sales.”

“A group led by Outlook Editor John Pomfret and involving editors and reporters from the newsroom and wpni has drafted guidelines for blogging on washingtonpost.com”

“As newsrooms worldwide, big and small alike, march towards integrating their print and online operations, newsroom design has become an increasingly significant consideration for editors.”

“Capturing an audience isn’t enough. Capturing a demographic isn’t enough. You need to capture intent. What are people doing on your site? Are they receptive to ads? Will they use them? “

“Just because a news organization can show which stories are most popular, does the practice serve a purpose for society when we publish the Internet’s equivalent of television network ratings?”

“For the year, online revenue was up 57.5 percent to $56.3 million. Lee claims that its combined newspaper websites reach more than 11.5 million unique visitors monthly. Last year at this time, Lee said its sites reached 2 million users.

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“Advertisers are well on the way to spend $21.4 billion on the Internet in 2007, says eMarketer’s new online ad spending report. By 2011, spending on advertisements online is expected to reach $42 billion.”

Updated list of newspaper and media sites produced with Drupal.

“Welcome to the BBC Internet blog, a sister blog to the existing Editors’ blogs for News and Sport. A place where we, senior staff from BBC Future Media teams will talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk…”

“Instead of printing stories on paper and having further material to view online, my New Metro would actually be the online product slowed down and freeze-framed for print”

“Former multimedia war correspondent and Yahoo! newsman Kevin Sites talks about how online media pick up where traditional media leaves off.”

“I have yet to work in a newsroom where its technical needs were caught up to its philosophy… it is much easier to convince editors that presenting information in databases online is a good idea than it is to actually code up an application…”

“The much-anticipated Web 2.0 regional news portal in Germany, Der Westen, has gone live.”

New German news site

Express and Star site is powered by WordPress.

“list of the 100 most popular British newspaper RSS feeds - according to their Google Reader subscription numbers at least.”

“Washingtonpost.com would probably have made more money by charging a few dollars a month back in 2001 or 2002. But he also found that by 2004, as the online-advertising market improved, charging for access was a doubtful money-spinner.”

“I tried to find blogs that, in Vin Crosbie’s words, ‘encouraged readers to join the process, not just to consume the results’.”

“Google is now generating more ad revenue in the UK than ITV1, according to The Times. The paper says ITV earned £317m from advertising on its main channel in Q3, while Google generated £327m from UK online advertisers.”

Tumblelog tool Tumblr upgrades to 3.0, including more photo and video features.

Christina Wodtke: “An extended dance Remix of my designing sociability, with twice the content!”

“the number of Internet users saying they spend less time with offline printed materials rose from 19.3% in 2001 to 23.2% in 2006. “

“Local + Social = Locial?… Yes, you can have 237 ‘friends’ on MySpace, but you can also be connected — mini-casting neighborhood concerns, throwing block parties, sharing tips on contractors and day care providers — with those close to you”

“More than 59.6 million people visited newspaper websites in July 2007, a 9% increase over the same period a year ago, the Newspaper Association of America reported.”

“Like Techmeme, Blogrunner is a service that keeps track of the latest news and blog posts on a range of topics (Politics, Technology, Media, Business, Economy, Law, Health, Movies, Books, Religion, Iraq, Entertainment)”

“The Times has created a new ‘comment desk,’ with the hiring of four part-time staffers, ‘to screen all reader submissions before posting them, an investment unheard of in today’s depressed newspaper business environment,’ Public Editor Clark Hoyt revea

“Our big thought: We have a unique position in the community and we should use it to help facilitate conversation.”

“Over the past three months, teams of Mercury News employees from all divisions, working in groups of three, have talked to more than 120 media users across Silicon Valley in a process aimed at getting us some quick feedback.”