Business 2.0’s 2-minute time trick
July 31, 2003
Following up on CyberJournalist.net’s note yesterday that CNN.com continues to link to subscription-only articles from Business 2.0, Rafat Ali reports on PaidContent.org that the free links only work for two minutes, which is why all the Business 2.0 stories have been broken into multiple pages. “If say you are on the second page of a 3 page story, and your two minutes are up, as soon as you click on the link for the third page, you will encounter a subscription wall,” Ali reports. “The idea, according to [a] Time Inc source, is to catch the readers midway through the story when they are engaged enough in the story to pay up.”
Scoop your own newscasts on the Web
July 31, 2003
Some may call scooping your own newscast on the Web blasphemy, but Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman says TV stations should consider doing so because online revenue could soon help save TV news jobs. “A successful, profitable website will give news directors new ammunition to fight for valuable coverage resources.” He argues that you can’t get better online promotion than breaking that story of a child’s murder on the Web at 4:40 p.m. and then at 5 p.m. broadcasting, “It’s a story we first broke on WDHX.com.”
TV Web sites first, though, need to do a better job of capturing online ad revenue. One recent study found that TV station sites generated $72 million in ad dollars in 2002 — less than 5 percent of total Internet ad dollars. Newspaper sites, on the other hand, generated $655 million in ad dollars, 40 percent of the $1.65 billion spent on local Internet advertising.
Related headline: Is TV news giving away the future?
Tips for making PDFs more user-friendly
July 31, 2003
“Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online,” Jakob Nielsen says. “PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.”
Of course, for news sites trying to get public records online quickly on breaking news stories, PDF files often make a lot of sense. So Nielsen offers a few smart suggestions to improve usability when PDF’s must be used: Create a gateway page for each PDF document; warn users they’re getting a PDF; offer instructions on how to download the software if needed; and break big PDF files into sections and offer separate links into each one, with a brief summary of the content next to each link.
Do not call, turn to Web instead
July 31, 2003
Telemarketing remains the largest source of new subscriptions, generating 39.1% of new orders, according to the Newspaper Association of America. So with do-not-call lists growing longer, newspapers need to find alternatives to telemarketing — and the Web is their best option. This means not only enabling readers to subscribe online, but manage their accounts on the Web, too (such as putting subscriptions on vacation holds). And it’s even more incentive for newspapers to build out their Web site content to draw in new readers and thus new potential subscribers.
The Utah Digital Newspapers Project
July 30, 2003
From ResearchBuzz: The Utah Digital Newspapers Project, at http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews/ , contains digitized newspaper content from eighteen different Utah newspapers, from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
‘Paid content is the way to go’
July 30, 2003
Interesting Q&A with Louis Borders, the man behind KeepMedia, the new magazine article portal launched this week. Asked about whether he sensed a change in thinking about paid content, he said, “The biggest thing that happened in paid content this year so far was when AOL announced that their Time magazines were going to go behind the AOL pay wall, which is a huge statement that paid content is the way to go. We were pretty excited about that. The more content that moves behind the pay wall, the more willing people will be to pay.”
CNN links to subscription Business 2.0 stories
July 30, 2003
CNN.com continues to link to articles from fellow AOL Time Warner publication Business 2.0 — including some of the content now available online only to subscribers of AOL or the magazine. But when CNN.com links to the subscriber-only content, anyone — even non-subscribers — can read the full stories.
News sites: More flash than substance?
July 30, 2003
A University of Iowa student’s thesis concluded that many award-winning Web sites are impressing judges with flashy layout rather than with the quality of their reporting and editing, the Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser reports. The thesis, by Erin Robinson, seems more subjective than scientific, but it’s interesting to read to hear a student’s perspective on the industry (such as her frustration upon encountering expired discussions that still inviting the viewer to participate). The thesis also includes a few interesting quotes from online news editors, such as Chris Kelley, editor of dallasnews. com, who predicted that speech-recognition software is on the way and will change news consumers’ habits — when you can verbally ask a “wired” room for a news update and a voice will respond with the latest.
Merrill Brown leaves RealNetworks
July 30, 2003
Merrill Brown, the former MSNBC.com editor-in-chief who joined RealNetworks last year to head the RealOne online audio and video subscription service, is leaving, CBS MarketWatch reports.
UPDATE (7/31): Brown tells The Seattle Times, “It just seemed to me that the creative opportunities I was looking for here and the scale of what I wanted to do careerwise wasn’t exactly in sync with the direction the company wanted to go in. I wanted to find the right creative and editorial opportunity, and it didn’t look like it was going to be here.
“The entire experience that consumers will have as they engage in news content, in entertainment content, and everything they do from the home is about to change with broadband ubiquity,” he said. “That creates a lot of content opportunities for people like me.”
Credit Card Server Hacked at ‘Greenville News’
July 29, 2003
Editor & Publisher reports what it calls the newspaper industry’s first incident of computer hacking directed at subscriber credit-card numbers. A server used for a special online subscription renewal promotion at The Greenville (S.C.) News, which held the credit card numbers of 170 subscribers, was compromised, E&P reported. Security of such data is of high concern as newspapers try to convince readers to purchase subscriptions and other products online.