Digital news round-up

Here’s a round-up of the top digital media news this week:

Journalism.co.uk profiles the Boston Globe’s Instagram wall, which displays every Instagram photo posted in the local area. Journalists uses the wall, called Snap, as a source for stories. The wall came about through a partnership with the Globe and MIT Media Lab. The images are geocoded and pop up on a map of Boston. It was launched this spring. 

The BBC Trust is being asked to reconsider how it goes about recruiting the new director general of the BBC, MediaGuardian reports. A proposal up on change.org is asking for a more transparent process, stating that it “will be critical in securing public trust after a series of mismanaged scandals at the broadcaster.”

Is the Huffington Post for sale? No, well, not exactly. “It’s not on the cards. AOL is the owner. But I cannot stand here and say, some day, ‘AOL will not sell it if the price is high enough or there is a better owner’. But, right now, AOL is a good owner for Huffington Post and we’ll keep it,” AOL Huffington Post Media Group international SVP Jimmy Maymann told paidContent’s Robert Andrews.

The future of online advertising is “programmatic buying,” which allows advertisers to follow individual customers online, The New York Times reports. These ads are “fast-paced, algorithmic bidding systems that target individual consumers rather than the aggregate audience publishers serve up.”

Image: Snap, the Instagram wall at the Boston Globe, via Journalism.co.uk

News Corp to buy 40% of YES Network

Media giant News Corp is reported to be buying a 40 percent stake in the YES Network, a regional group of stations partly owned by the New York Yankees baseball team.

The deal means an increase in the cost of cable, and “prove[s] once again how the price of live sports will keep going up in the age of cord-cutting,” paidContent reported today. The network is the Yankee’s game provider for about 15 million homes in the northeastern part of the United States.

YES stands for Yankees Entertainment and Sports. It was founded in 2002 by former cable executives Leo Hindery and Amos Hostetter and is estimated to be worth about US$3 billion.

“COO Chase Carey talks a lot about sports as tremendously valuable in a fragmented media world where live viewing is on the wane. While he dismisses rumors that News Corp. wants to go up against giant ESPN, Fox Sports is big and he'd like it to keep it growing,” the Chicago Tribune explained.

Google report: Censorship on the rise

As it once again publishes the number of government requests it receives, “one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google announced today.

This is the sixth time the online giant has published its Transparency Report. It started in early 2010, and does so twice a year. The data released today has been updated with the requests it received form January to June 2012.

Requests from government entities to remove content was mostly stagnant from 2009 to 2011, but “it’s spiked in this reporting period.” In this first half of this year, there were 1,791 requests from government officials globally to remove 17,746 pieces of content.

In addition, “government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts,” Google explained in a blog post.

“Governments’ growing interest in Google users can be explained in part by the fact that more people are online, but the numbers suggest the pace of surveillance is growing faster than the rate of connectivity. Also take note that while many of these requests relate to legitimate court orders or police investigations, others are illegitimate and Google does not comply with all the requests. In the last report, for instance, the company refused to give the government of Canada the identity of a YouTube subscriber who peed on his passport and flushed it down the toilet,” Gigaom noted.

Images: Google's Official Blog

Study: Viewers abandon video buffering more than 2 seconds

Everyone knows online users’ attention spans are short, but a new study shows most won’t wait much more than two seconds for an online video to start.

After two seconds of watching the buffer sign, viewers get frustrated and begin to leave. Each additional second of waiting results in a 5.8 percent increase in the rate of leaving, according to the study, authored by Ramesh K. Sitaraman of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and S. Shunmuga Krishnan, of Akamai Technologies.

But that’s not all – a user who experiences wait time on a video is also more likely to play less of the video and also less likely to come back to the site.

“Further, we show that a moderate amount of interruptions can decrease the average play time of a viewer by a significant amount. A viewer who experiences a rebuffer delay equal to 1% of the video duration plays 5% less of the video in comparison to a similar viewer who experienced no rebuffering. Finally, we show that a viewer who experienced failure is 2.32% less likely to revisit the same site within a week than a similar viewer who did not experience a failure,” the study explains.

The study collected and analysed a data set of more than 23 million video playbacks from 6.7 million unique viewers who watched a total of 216 million minutes of 102,000 videos over 10 days.

Twitter adding photo filters, Google sued over photo

Twitter will add photo filters to compete with the Facebook-owned Instagram, The New York Times reported.

In upcoming months, the microblogging site will update its mobile applications to allow users to add filters to photos being shared on Twitter, all without using Instagram.

“As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock,” Nick Bilton explained on the NY Times Bits blog.

TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff pointed out that “Twitter needs to embed more media on its site and rely on third parties less.”

Google, meanwhile, is having less fun with online images. It is being sued by a French man for invasion of privacy after he was photographed by Google’s Street View urinating in his own yard, PC World reported.

TRVL releases free cloud-based publishing tool

Indi travel publisher TRVL built its own software to publish its iPad-only magazine, and is now giving away the software to help others create their own publications, paidContent reported.

The software, called PRSS, launched last week.  It allows users to drag and drop Web objects to design pages, and stores magazines on Amazon’s cloud hosts, thus saving on distribution.

Creators of the tool are Amsterdam-based entrepreneur Michel Elings and photographer and writer Jochem Wijnands.

“Distribution costs for Woodwing, InDesign and all the others are so expensive. People were downloading terabytes of data from our magazines, this wasn’t cheap to us. We also had to pay Apple a 30 percent cut and Adobe takes a 30 percent – you have only 40 percent left!” Elings told paidContent.

The tool is currently for producing a publication optimised for the iPad only, but the iPhone and other iOS devices will follow soon, PRSS explained in an online announcement.

Journalist launches interactive photo service

A freelance journalist is hoping news outlets will be interested in his new service to create visual interactives, Journalism.co.uk reported Friday.

Benji Lanyado, the creator of the Reddit Edit, created a template he can “build on top of” to make custom visual interactive articles.

“The next level is to make images interactive,” he said, giving the Boston Globe’s “big picture” as an example.

The interactive articles can be built from scratch in one to four days and dropped natively into a news outlet’s site or embedded like a YouTube video. Video, audio and everything else can be customised, and they work on both mobile devices and tablets too, benjilabs.com explained.

U.S. newspaper circulation holds steady as readers shift to digital

Newspaper circulation in the United States is staying the same, as readers shift from print to digital and even begin paying for online content, the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers show.

Circulation was about the same in the six months ending Sept. 30 as is was in the same period in 2011. However, paid digital increased to 15.3 percent of the total, compared to 9.8 percent in the period last year.

More than 300 papers now charge for their digital content, including 70 of Gannett’s 80 community titles and McClatchy’s 30 launching paywalls as well, Poynter noted. Many publishers, including The New York Times, are also increasing print subscription rates, taking losses in print numbers in order to get equal or greater revenue.

Branded editions, which are products owned by newspapers, “such as commuter, community, alternative-language or Sunday-Select type newspapers, make up 5.6 percent of newspapers’ total average circulation, up from 4.2 percent in September 2011,” according to ABC.

Digital circulation includes tablet or smartphone apps, PDF replicas, metered or restricted-access websites or e-reader editions, ABC explained. 

Image: Justanimcgirl

HuffPo wants to dominate your iPad and TV too

The Huffington Post on Thursday launched an iPad app that can be viewed on your television screen – a trick that may lead to tablets competing with TVs as the focal point of living rooms, GigaOm reported.

The HuffPost Live app is a mix of entertainment and social media, and is the app for the online TV network of the same name. The network streams video and is aimed at readers who can join conversations via webcam. When live broadcasting is not on, highlights are aired, The Next Web explained.

“On its own, the HuffPo Live app is not extraordinary. Where it could be a real game changer, however, is the fact that the app can be slung onto a TV set using Apple TV. This means that Huffington Post has a chance to control not just a living room’s second screens but also the primary one as well,” according to GigaOm. “In practice, this could occur if groups of friends watch the presidential elections on HuffPo Live and share comments in real time via their iPad — comments that would appear on their TV. If this comes to pass, HuffPo Live will have created what amounts to a walled garden extraordinaire in living rooms across the land.”

The app is available on Apple’s App store for free download.

Telegraph unveils paywall outside UK

The Telegraph has launched a metered paywall for users accessing its website outside the United Kingdom, Journalism.co.uk reported today.

Users can access 20 articles for free each month before they must buy a subscription for £1.99 per month.

More than two years of planning have gone into the metered paywall system at Telegraph Media Group, which says two-thirds of its online audience comes from outside the United Kingdom, according to MediaGuardian. The site had 2.7 million average daily users in October, up 34 percent year-on-year.

Within the UK, Telegraph.co.uk is the third-most popular national newspaper website, following guardian.coluk and Mail Online, Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show. There are “currently no plans to introduce a meter model for UK readers,” the Telegraph stated, according to Journalism.co.uk.

Users outside the UK will also be able to buy a £9.99 monthly subscription, which also provides access to both the daily and Sunday iPad editions, The Drum explained.

Image: Telegraph subscriptions page

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