Summaries by Steve Shipside

Innovative uses of digital media
Rob Curley, Vice President New Product Development, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, U.S.A.

Self-styled “Internet punk” Rob Curley listed the top “strategies that we better not be afraid of”:
- You must dominate local breaking news. If it happens in your town you’d better feature it, or people will go to another site.
- Focus on hyperlocal content and database-driven coverage.
- Multimedia overkill.
- Evergreen content — the material you never need to update because it’s always fresh.
- Embrace platform-independent delivery (PSPs, iPods, everything).
- Lastly, remember that it’s a dialogue, not a monologue.

Curley showed examples of his previous work, notably for Marconews, Florida (http://www.marconews.com):
- Daily listings feature every event, every social club meeting, every history club, every bar band, and every golf tournament, with reminders available via e-mail or SMS.
- Restaurant reviews not only listed by food type and location but the answers to 30 questions, including ‘if I have no money and clean your windows can I have a hamburger?’ [five said yes].
Restaurant guide transferable to iPod with one click, or accessible by mobile phone.
- Church guide, including location, sermons, and 360-degree scrolling views. Even a podcast of the sermon.
- A three-minute ‘travelogue’ about every beach in the area.
- Fishing blogs with details of yesterday’s catch, a fishing forecast, user-uploaded photos of their fish, and an interactive map of the sandbars.
- Every statistic of every local football game, scores updated as they happen, and post-match studio interviews with the journalist who had covered the event.
- When the local major families competed for the rights to hold charity dinners, Curley’s team published the menus, interviewed the chefs — and filmed the evening.
- On politics they had the politicians blog, included neighbourhood maps of street-by-street voting, and a questionnaire to match users’ views with politicians’.

In Curley’s “evolving newsroom,” writers are now referred to as reporters, whose duties include adding multimedia features to make stories better for the Internet. They must be available to participate on vodcasts and podcasts, read readers’ comments, and embrace changing roles and responsibilities.

Web TV & video
Jim Chisholm, iMedia, France

Jim Chisholm said surveys show that Internet users are most interested in television, photos, and video telephony. He highlighted the Nokia N93 video phone, which is clearly aimed at transforming citizens into broadcasters. He also demonstrated a Bluetooth link between PC and phone, over which a podcast was downloaded, an advert displayed, and then TV transmission was demonstrated live on the phone.

Chisholm said, with cheap/free Skype and other VoIP phones in the offing, this phenomenon is set to mushroom. Increasingly, video broadcasting and conferencing will take place not on large screens but on games consoles — which puts it squarely in front of the kids.

Chisholm pointed to the media niche this creates for rapid delivery to small audiences, using as an example a video of a rocket attack in Beirut. A blogger shot the video from a balcony, using a video phone provided by a newspaper. The paper put the footage on its site before TV news could get onto the case. Users want to interact with video, too — twice as many people in the Netherlands voted on Big Brother as voted in the general election.

His suggestions include teaming up with local TV news, including digital services from agencies (notably Reuters), and partnering with local telcos. Offering free network access, for example, would provide a media platform and a ready audience. The key is to exploit the deregulated environment in content and distribution while drawing up an honest assessment of the paper’s media value, market, competition and growth. To survive, newspapers must evolve from a “print plus” model to truly integrated multimedia.

Panel discussion: Digital formats

A group of 16- and 17-year-olds from the International School in Vienna tested new formats from various newspapers around the world and gave their feedback during a panel discussion. The teens talked about their favourite sites, including MySpace, LiveJournal, and other social networking sites. They spend an average of 4.7 hours per day online during the week but only 2.6 hours on Sunday.

The panel expressed differences about what they seek, but sports news and local/own language content for those far from home featured heavily. Most expressed reservations about MySpace but nonetheless found themselves using it “because everyone else does,” and ending up “addicted.” Peer pressure emerged as a powerful force, with little evident loyalty to specific channels.

MSN Live Messenger, for example, emerged as the principal chat tool, but most agreed they would switch to another if needed to talk to a particular friend.

Some specific comments on online newspapers:
- The layout and navigation of newspaper websites can be quite overwhelming.
- Brightly coloured and intrusive adverts were seen as distracting.
- They preferred dedicated news sections to features.
- Sports sections were generally highest rated.
- Web TV is a great idea.
- On blogging they preferred the authority of staff blogs, but were far more likely to reply to reader blogs, which were seen as less intimidating and more diverse.

One of the teenagers concluded, “To win over our target group you [newspapers] have to improve layout, fonts and interactivity. I also don’t think you should market sections aimed at us as being ‘fun’ or ‘educational’ — don’t condescend.”

Continue reading ‘Day 2 – Beyond the Printed Word 2006, Vienna’

Summaries by Steve Shipside

The new Web 2.0 players: MySpace, YouTube, Flickr — What can we learn?
Robert S. Cauthorn, CEO, City Tools, U.S.A.

Robert Cauthorn, creator of the first profitable newspaper web site, said this is the third-greatest news period ever (the others being WWII and the 1960s), and there are things to do but nothing to fear. Stories are for sharing now, with 43.7 million blogs, 44,000 new videos posted on Google Video each day, and 50 million MySpace members sharing stories.

The communication model has been that we [the papers] talk and you [the audience] listen. That has changed to the paper talking, the reader listening, then the reader talking, the paper listening, then everyone talking and listening. The best move is to participate, not dominate.

Cauthorn cited Digg as a means by which users decide the news agenda and noted that it has passed the NYT in user numbers. He also pointed out that the sharing process requires a ‘folksonomy’ -— a means of organising material like a taxonomy but in the sense of folk wisdom -— the way people themselves decide on what is of interest and priority.

Cauthorn implored papers to turn their content and their archives into Wikis and let the users loose on it, so as not to have to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of sifting and prioritising. He pointed to City Tools’ own page, with the ability to link and click so that lists of top-10 topics can be discussed, challenged, pooled, and aggregated — then dropped onto an iPod with one click.

In conclusion he exhorts newspapers to go back to their content and consider:
- How much of it is telling stories?
- Have you distributed authority?
- Share everything.
- Make documents come alive.
- Grant prestige to others (a la Digg).
- Participate in community.
- Let many people create context and content.
- Encourage discovery.

Launching a community site: www.stomp.com.sg
Jennifer Lewis, Editor, Stomp, The Straits Times, Singapore Press Holdings, Singapore

How can hard-to-attract younger demographics be drawn into interacting with a newspaper? Stomp’s most popular talking points include the facility for readers to upload pictures from their mobile phones of everything that annoyed them that day, including bad parking, drivers ignoring traffic lights, seat hogs on public transport, or long queues at service windows. ‘English as it is broken’ has proved a popular element, encouraging people to submit examples of poor English from street signs and other media. This also plays on the authority of the parent site, The Straits Times, since it is the ST that provides the English expert who explains the grammatical glitches. Similarly, an ‘Ask the ST Anything’ feature allows readers to submit online questions to the editorial staff and researchers of the paper.

The principal attraction, however, proves to be citizen news gathering. Stories about loan sharks and tributes to a deceased war hero were generated by readers online faster than any news team could have managed. These are then picked up by the Straits Times itself and printed along with the Stomp logo.

That builds the credibility of the story initiator, creates interest in their peer group, helps other users identify with the ST, and generates further publicity for Stomp. The whole system is self-policing with Stompers themselves reporting any inappropriate posts, and the buzz has attracted both advertising and a regular sponsor in the form of Nokia.

Buying a community site: www.familjeliv.se
Gunnar Springfeldt, Development Director, Stampen Group, Sweden

Springfeldt identified these growth areas:
- interactivity
- participation
- women on the web, and
- changing patterns of news delivery and advertising

To encompass these it was decided to acquire a social networking site as a faster route to the market. The decision was taken that family is the key. It was felt that the key was the mother figures since, even in a time of great social changes, Springfeldt identifies the women as those who run the family, make the purchasing decisions, and above all interact with other people and other families.

The business model is simple: the Familjeliv forum is free, but a premium content option costs 2 Euros a month to gain access to personal classified ads. Advertisers are keen to participate, notably insurance companies who, it seems, are particularly keen not just to reach but to engage in conversation with users in order to best explain their complex product offerings. For the users it’s about the sense of connection, community, and assistance. It has proved essential to include the option of assuming anonymity when posting delicate questions about divorce, family breakup, and personal problems.

Interaction figures are astonishingly high, particularly since there is no content other than user questions and answers. That accounts for 35,000 forum entries every day on every possible topic related to family life. The site is run by just two administrators, with a further two monitoring statistics. The users themselves provide the moderators to police the site, with it being considered an honour to do so. This is also part of a deliberate policy in which the newspaper, while associated with the site, has chosen to remain discreetly in the background since the site belongs first and foremost to those who use it.

Traditional media and the blogosphere download powerpoint
Colin Daniels, Acting Director, New Media Lab, Rhodes University, South Africa

The blogging search engine Technorati currently tracks more than 60 million blogs, with one blog created every two seconds, leading to a blogging landscape 100 times bigger now than in 2003.

Comparing the online viewing figures of mainstream media and personal blogs, Colin Daniels made it clear that giants like the New York Times clearly dominate the top spots. However, borrowing the ‘long tail’ argument, he showed that moving further down the graph, blogs become more numerous, and if you take into account the full length of this tail, they actually draw a cumulative readership greater than the mainstream media.

Daniels then considered newspaper-run blog sites and their reasons for success:
- Blogs attract a higher quality of feedback and interaction than forums.
- Bloggers can cover niches ignored by the paper’s regular news beats.
- Blogs increase the community coverage of newspapers.

Daniels’ conclusions:
- Blogs are a bottom-up social movement forming the bulk of the media long tail.
- They’re updated constantly and generate site traffic.
- Bloggers are great media watchdogs and symbiotic relationships form between them and the journalists.
- Journalists use them increasingly for leads.
- Staff blogs alone, while safe, are not enough.
- They’re a bottom-up social movement that forms the bulk of the long tail.
- Conversations and commentary cluster around posts.
- They have advertising potential.
- They serve niches better than reporters can.
- They’re not going away.

Continue reading ‘Day 1 – Beyond the Printed Word 2006, Vienna’