Kobo launches in South Africa

E-book company Kobo is launching in South Africa and aims to make up 50 percent of the country’s e-readers within a year, challenging current favourite Kindle.

The Kobo Touch was announced at a press conference yesterday in Johannesburg. It is launching with retail partner Pick ‘n Play, which also sells iPads, within South Africa, Books Live reported.

The device will cost 995 rand (US$114). Amazon, on the other hand, ships the Kindle to South Africa, and it is available in some retail stores, paidContent noted.

Earlier this month, Kobo released its new Glo and Mini readers in the United Kingdom and Canada, according to Wired. It also announced partnerships with bookstores in New Zealand: Booksellers NZ and The Paper Plus Group.

France threatens Google with tax

France has told Google it if it doesn’t pay news publishers in the country for taking excerpts from its newspapers in search results, it will charge the Internet giant and other search engines a tax, as Germany has previously done, paidContent reported today.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt met with French President François Hollande yesterday to discuss the matter.

“(Hollande) stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners seemed, to him, the best way – but, if necessary, a law could intervene on this issue, as with the current project in Germany. The development of the digital economy calls for an adaptation in taxation in order to better understand the value of sharing and funding the creation of content,” a statement released by the Elysee presidential palace said, according to paidContent.

The proposed law would basically tax the revenue Google earns from ads that show up alongside search results.

But Google isn’t backing down from the so-called pay-to-display law.

“Since Google currently claims to send four billion page impressions per month to French newspapers, which is, by any metric, a large volume of traffic -- so, in response to the threat of the French tax, Google has threatened to simply stop indexing French newspapers altogether,” Wired.co.uk explained.

Saying Google drove traffic away from newspaper sites and refused to pay for content, Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers stopped using Google News earlier this month, Reuters noted.

Image: Medacity.com

Hurricane Sandy takes out top media sites

The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Gawker’s sites, including Gizmodo, all fell to Hurricane Sandy Monday evening, when the websites went down due to power outages and flooding, GigaOm reported tonight.

The media sites continued to tweet, explaining that they were down due to “technical difficulties.” and “outages,” However, Gawker explained its situation most colorfully: “Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something. Back with you shortly.”

Although TechCrunch reported Buzzfeed as being back online later in the evening, thanks to Content Delivery Network Akamai, which hosts content at servers distributed around the world, as of midnight eastern time, Gawker appeared to still be down and Buzzfeed was down again. Servers for the Daily Kos were being powered by back-up generators; however, as of midnight, its website was down as well.

The Huffington Post was back up as of midnight.

Image: HuffPo’s front page as of late Monday night

Twitter changes presidential election conversations

Twitter has a significant role in shaping the political narrative and deciding the winners and losers of the U.S. presidential debates, according to Stephen Mills opined this week for the Guardian. 

Mills contends we are in “the era of Twitter,” with the last era of blogging going away. According to a reporter for the technology site Pandodaily, Hamish McKenzie, political blogs have gone from being the "first and fast reactors" to being "almost obsolete by Twitter."

Even media baron Rupert Murdoch seems to have plunged into Twitter to show what he thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Silicon Beat reported.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Sept. 6 saw record-high tweets per minute, with the climax after President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. 

The whole night’s event had about four million tweets. More than 9.5 million tweets were sent about the DNC during the entire DNC. The peak came at 52,756 tweets per minute following Obama’s speech, which set a new record for a political event, according to Silicon Republic. 

In August, Twitter's government and politics team announced the launch of the Twitter Political Index, a new barometer of what the public is thinking and tweeting about Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, Inc. reported. 

The Index is designed to evaluate and weigh the attitudes of tweets mentioning Obama or Romney, whether positive or negative. For example, a score of 65 for a candidate indicates that tweets are on average more positive than 65 percent of all tweets. The resulting index scores indicate how positive they are being mentioned relative to all tweets.

The Index for each candidate updates every day after 8 p.m. with a historical chart at election.twitter.com. 

The index aims to provide more nuance to political coverage, illustrating instances in which the social media conversation diverges from more traditional polls, Inc. noted.

Image: Twitter

Newsweek cuts print edition

After nearly 80 years as a weekly magazine, Newsweek will axe its print edition and go digital-only in the new year, the Washington Post reported today.

The digital-only publication will be called Newsweek Global, and paid for through paid subscriptions. Its content will also be tailored for e-readers, tablets and the Web, and some content will also appear on the Daily Beast, according to MediaGuardian.

Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, broke the news to staffers in an e-mail this morning.

“Four years ago we launched The Daily Beast. Two years later, we merged our business with the iconic Newsweek magazine - which The Washington Post Company had sold to Dr. Sidney Harman. Since the merger, both The Daily Beast and Newsweek have continued to post and publish distinctive journalism and have demonstrated explosive online growth in the process. The Daily Beast now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a month, a 70 percent increase in the past year alone - a healthy portion of this traffic generated each week by Newsweek’s strong original journalism,” Brown wrote.

“At the same time, our business has been increasingly affected by the challenging print advertising environment, while Newsweek’s online and e-reader content has built a rapidly growing audience through the Apple, Kindle, Zinio and Nook stores as well on The Daily Beast. Tablet-use has grown rapidly among our readers and with it the opportunity to sustain editorial excellence through swift, easy digital distribution - a superb global platform for our award-winning journalism.”

She added that the move to an all-digital Newsweek  “comes with an unfortunate reality” – that staff cuts are expected.

Newsweek has lost about half its print readers over the past 10 years. Advertising has also gone down drastically, mirroring the industry as a whole.

The Washington Post Company owned Newsweek for more than 50 years, and sold it to Dr. Sidney Harman in 2010 for $1 and liabilities.

NY Times to launch Portuguese news site in 2013

The New York Times announced Sunday it will launch a Portuguese-language online edition designed for Brazil in the second half of 2013, reported El País.

Headquartered in São Paulo, the site will publish an average of 35 articles per day, most of which will be articles translated from NYTimes.com. About one third will be original content by local journalists written exclusively for the Brazilian reader.

"Brazil is an international hub for business that boasts a robust economy, which has brought more and more people into the middle class," Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of The New York Times Company, in a statement.

Several major media brands have focused their interest in the Brazilian market. In the beginning of this month, the Financial Times began printing its  Brazilian edition, reported News&Tech.

The launch, which comes ahead the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympics, represents the Times's plans to expand its global reach into Brazil, reported blog Media Decoder, from NYT.com. The Times has already a bureau in Rio de Janeiro. As well, the site’s editor, who has not yet been selected, will report to Joseph Kahn, the foreign editor of The Times. 

Michael Greenspon, general manager of the company’s news services division, told the Financial Times that The Times had chosen Portuguese over Spanish because “the question with Spanish is, "which Spanish? Mexico Spanish is different from Spain Spanish", reported Portada-online. However, he added it was likely that in five to 10 years The Times would also have a Spanish digital edition. 

Earlier this year, The Times launched a beta Chinese-language Web site (cn.nytimes.com) which has seen rapid adoption by readers in China. It will officially launch next month.

Image: naharnet.com

Guardian hires first digital strategy director

In an effort to grow its digital business as it builds a “digital-first future,” Guardian News & Media has hired its first-ever digital strategy director, paidContent reported today.

Beginning in April 2013, Wolfgang Blau, currently editor-in-chief of Zeit Online, “will work across GNM's editorial and commercial teams, helping them to grow global audiences and revenues by developing new digital platforms that deepen reader engagement and provide new opportunities to commercial partners,” the Guardian stated in a press release.

The Guardian announced last year that it will aim to double digital revenues by 2016.

In 2011, Zeit Online won an award at the Online Journalism Awards, and Medium Magazin also named Blau Germany’s “chief editor of the year,” Journalism.co.uk noted.

“Wolfgang is an innovative digital thinker who understands the opportunities that the Guardian's trusted journalism and open approach to publishing on the web present. His guidance and insight will be invaluable to Guardian News & Media as we continue the journey towards a digital-first future,” Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, stated in the release. Blau will report to Rusbridger.

Image: turi2.de

Amazon expands Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Europe

As Amazon promotes its self-publishing programme in Europe, it is also now expanding its Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to the United Kingdom, France and Germany, paidContent reported today.

The library allows Prime members who own a Kindle to borrow one e-book for free each month. Kindle Direct Publishing enables authors to self-publish on the Kindle platform

On Oct. 25, Amazon will put its glow-in-the-dark Paperwhite Kndle e-reader in several European countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, the Wall Street Journal noted.

Self-published authors earn money each time their book is borrowed from any of the lending libraries. Amazon announced in a press release that the KDP Select Fund has been increased by $100,000 in October, to $700,000, with a larger increase expected for November. Last month, authors earned $2.29 per borrow, more than many KDP books earn per sale.

“It's also been great for independent authors, who get to reach a whole new audience and make money in a new way, and now they'll be able to reach even more readers around the world. We're excited to bring the lending library to the UK, Germany and France,” Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content, stated in the press release.

Fairfax uses BitTorrent for market research

Australia’s Fairfax Media finds videos people are interested in by searching illegal download site BitTorrent, and then offering the owner payment in order to legally share it, Fairfax TV head Ricky Sutton said at a government broadband conference, The Australian reported yesterday.

“One of our major ways to get content is going to BitTorrent, and other BitTorrent sites, and find what people are illegally downloading to then go to the content owner and say, ‘hey, I watched this last night it’s going awesome on BitTorrent’ and then say ‘how about giving it to us?’”

“We then bring it over here and we advertise on BitTorrent that it’s legally available on our platform, and then pay some revenue share based on it. That’s worked quite effectively.”

Helping producers earn something on content that is being unmonetised elsewhere is probably much cheaper for Fairfax than commissioning video content from scratch, like the television industry operates, paidContent pointed out. 

Fairfax hasn’t invented this tactic, however. The music industry does it too; with labels believed to closely watch what is downloaded without paying as well, the article noted.

Fairfax mostly buys independent content, not major television shows, TorrentFreak observed.

Image: BitTorrent

Facebook hits one billion active monthly user mark

Facebook has hit one billion active monthly users, or one in every seven people in the world, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has confirmed. Facebook also used the milestone to launch a digital video ad titled "The Things that Connect Us,"  to promote its own advertising tools.

"Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life," wrote Zuckerberg in a Facebook timeline update on his personal account. "I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too."

Facebook has recorded 1.13 trillion Likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and 219 billion shared photos since its launch in February 2004. More than 300 million photos are uploaded every day and 62.6 million songs played, according to the Guardian. 

At the same time, rumours are circulating that Facebook makes public users’ private messages in Timeline, sparkling concerns of privacy issues, The Washington Post reported.

Facebook explained that the Timeline messages were actually old wall posts.

“Every report we’ve seen, we’ve gone back and checked. We haven’t seen one report that’s been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post],” TechCrunch cited Facebook as saying.

The world's biggest social network recently launched paid posts for individual users, allowing users to pay about $7 to promote their news in their friends' timelines.

Facebook’s tumbling IPO means it has to work harder, with smarter, more targeted and more lucrative advertisements, according to The Washington Post.


Image: Facebook

Survey: Americans prefer established media for breaking & mobile news

Although Web-native sources like The Huffington Post and Yahoo News are popular in digital news market, well-established news outlets such as The New York Times, CNN and Fox News turn out to be better choices for breaking news and mobile news, a new study shows.

The study, commissioned by The New York Times, aimed to examine the cross-platform behaviours of news consumers. A sample of 3,022 U.S. residents, ages 18 to 65, participated in the online survey by Knowledge Networks. Eighty-five percent of the respondents were qualified as “news consumers” who get news every week.

According to the new research, 53 percent of digital news consumers get information from Web-native sources due to convenience and accessibility. Only 43 percent of consumers use traditional news sources on a regular basis for digital news in terms of in-depth reporting and trustworthiness.

Sixty percent of people said they would turn to an established outlet as their “second source” to learn more. Meanwhile, 83 percent of Americans are likely to turn to a second source for more information when breaking news happens.

The findings are consistent to some extent with another survey published by the Reynolds Journalism Institute in August. The survey found that more than 60 percent of U.S. adults “prefer news stories produced by professional journalists,” and more than 70 percent agree that “professional journalists play an important role in our society," Poynter reported.

The recent study also says that mobile news consumers are able to increase their news consumption volumes faster than non-mobile users. At the same time, young people are driving the big trends in social media and mobile news consumption.

And according to Jeff Sonderman of Poynter, traditional news outlets should adapt to the new trends based on their advantages in brand loyalty and credibility.

Image: Poynter