Women rise to the top at NY Times, NBC News

Jill Abramson is taking the place of Bill Keller as executive editor of The New York Times, the newspaper announced today; this will be the first time a woman has run the publication. Also today, NBC News announced it has hired former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller as its chief digital officer.

The NBC announcement comes three months after Schiller resigned from NPR, and marks a return to network news, as she was at CNN earlier in her career, paidContent reported. In the newly created role, Schiller's responsibilities will include “strategic oversight of the network’s digital extensions on the web and in mobile, interaction with the joint venture that oversees the msnbc.com digital network, as well as providing direction to the network’s new emerging properties such as EducationNation.com and theGrio.com.” She will report to NBC News President Steve Capus.

Abramson, currently the title's managing editor, will take on the role of executive editor in September, and Keller will stay on, but as a writer. Her historic new role at The Times is big news.

“Symbolically, it's a big victory in the face of a big void,” Poynter's Jill Geisler wrote. “Those of us who came to journalism in the 1970s, as Abramson did, know how women struggled against discrimination. The Society of Professional Journalists didn’t even allow women into its self-titled “fraternity” until 1969.”

Looking ahead, both women will face the challenges of an ever-changing digital landscape, shifting business models and tough competition from other newsmedia outlets. They will also wield new power to innovate and break new ground in these areas.

Images: Schiller (left, via mediabistro) and Abramson (via the New Yorker)

WPP buys Brazil's largest digital agency

Global advertising company WPP Plc has bought Brazil's largest independent digital agency, F.biz, The Telegraph reported today.

WPP now owns 70 percent of F.biz, which will be independently positioned as part of WPP Digital, the Wall Street Journal explained.

Fbiz was founded in 1999 and had a 50 percent annual growth rate since then, according to ClickZ. WPP meanwhile, reported global revenues up 6 percent in the first quarter of the year. By market, its U.S. operations were up 8 percent, UK by 7 percent, continental Europe by 6 percent and BRIC countries by more than 17 percent.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

Freedom of information laws backslide in Netherlands, get a boost in Nigeria

Dutch home affairs minister Piet Hein Donner yesterday announced he will continue pushing for more restrictions on freedom of information laws, saying they are misused by journalists, DutchNews.nl reported.

Donner's plan would allow government officials to turn down so-called “improper” requests and narrow the scope of information searches.

“Dozens” of government workers' jobs are devoted to answering questions and giving documentation, which is caused by “journalists firing off random shots in the hope of hitting something,” he said, according to DutchNews.nl.

The laws were created to give citizens access to government documents, the report explains, yet Donner's definition of “citizen” apparently does not apply to journalists – only to people not looking to publish what they find.

Nigeria, meanwhile, has its first freedom of information law, giving citizens access to public records for the first time.

Government offices now have seven days to provide requested information, and also makes it against the law to destroy records, The Associated Press reported. The National Assembly passed the bill May 24.

Image: fountainvalley.org

U.S. newspaper ad revenues down 7% in Q1

Total U.S. newspaper advertising revenue, combined online and print, slipped 7 percent to US$5.56 billion in the first quarter of 2011, News and Tech reported.

Total print advertising revenue declined 9.5 percent year-over-year to $4.75 billion in the first quarter of 2011, according to the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America, Media Post reported.

The figures are down 55 percent from the first quarter of 2006, when total print revenues reached $10.5 billion. It is also the 20^th straight quarter of year-over-year print revenue declines.

Compared to the previous quarter, national advertising was down 11 percent to $924 million, while retail decreased 9.5 percent to $2.67 billion. Classifieds also fell 8.15 percent to $1.15 billion.

The bridge spot was online ad revenues, up 10.6 percent from $730.4 million to $807.9 million quarter-over-quarter, which makes up 14.5 percent of total newspaper advertising revenues.

Image: HotCards.com

Schmidt: I 'screwed up' on social media

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt admitted that he underestimated the impact of social networking services when he was CEO of Google, causing the company to miss out on “the friend thing,” MediaGuardian reported.

“In the online world you need to know who you are dealing with. I clearly knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it,” he said in a speech at AllThingsD’s D9 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

"The CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up," he said, according to Bloomberg.

The company plans to add more social media elements. It announced a new service, called “+1”, in March, which allows users to recommend web pages to friends and contacts, such as the "like" function on Facebook.

According to Schmidt, the consumer Internet is now dominated by four companies: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. "We have never had four companies growing at the scale that those four are in aggregate," he added.

Image: David Gadd/Allstar via MediaGuardian

Ex-Newsweek president to launch 7 new iPad magazines

Created to launch tablet-only magazines, Nomad Editions will release seven or eight more titles on the iPad in the coming months, CEO Mark Edmiston, former Newsweek president, told paidContent.

The company’s free iOS carousel app went live May 11, and currently houses five titles: Real Eats (food), Wide Screen (movies), BodySmart (fitness and weight loss), u+me (social media) and Uncorked (wine). Each title is new, and costs 99 cents per month, or US$9.99 per year.

Introductory issues of the first four titles were free, and subscriptions can be placed through In-App purchase. The subscription automatically renews at the beginning of each month, unless the user chooses to cancel.

Of people who download the app for free, 10 percent convert to paying subscribers, Edmiston said. Currently, the magazines are created for the iPad, but they may become available on other platforms in the future, paidContent noted.

Analytics firm: Better video experiences make for happier (and more) users

If an online user has a bad experience trying to watch a video, that user may leave the site, and will blame the website hosting the video for the problems. So how do publishers pinpoint these issues and fix them?

Video analytics firm Alcatel-Lucent today is showing off its latest product, aimed at top level service providers, and designed to discover where and when problems arise in a user’s video viewing experience, MediaPost reported.

AppGlide Video Analytics views the video experience from a user’s point of view, and uses “player plug-ins to measure Quality of Experience (QoE) across the network and determine when things like delayed starts and buffering cause people to bail in different regions. It also offers tools for measuring content delivery network devices as well as analyse content usage.”

The service is being pitched mainly to telecom companies and cable operators, Light Reading explained. It’s most basic goals are to help service providers reduce customer churn, and to also decide whether they can charge more for certain kinds of “over-the-top” video and related services, said Buck Peterson, general manager of AppGlide.

“The loyalty [of customers] is not with the service provider, but with that online piece of content,” he said, according to the report.

Image: Mullen

Schibsted rules out acquisitions outside Scandinavia

Schibsted ASA, the Oslo-based newspaper group which also has footprints in France and Spain, does not plan to acquire any papers outside Scandinavia.

It’s “not high on our agenda,” according to Chief Executive Officer Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Bloomberg reported.

Although Ryssdal is happy with the freesheets, 20 Minutes in France as well as 20 Minutos in Spain, and will keep on investing in them, he points out a tougher future for print titles.

Like all other players in Europe and U.S., Schibsted has been eagerly to find out new business models as the internet drew readers and stole advertising revenues.

Ryssdal told the Financial Times that the industry’s hope lies in experimentation with different charging models online as well as new devices, such as iPad.

“But you need patience. We are hopeful that these revenue streams will start to generate money, but it will take quite some time,” he added.