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Every £1 spent on print advertisements yields £5 in revenue, compared with £2.15 for television and £3.44 for online advertising, a study of 26 leading UK retailers found.
links for 2009-12-29
Reply
links for 2009-12-28
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The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.
links for 2009-12-27
links for 2009-12-25
Happy Christmas!
I hope you’re enjoying the festive season as much as I am.
links for 2009-12-23
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"2009 might well be remembered as a year of cutbacks and closures, but also a year when newspapers started to fight back, make changes and began to reassess unsatisfactory aspects of their business models."
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"This year marks the first year that Facebook has captured the #1 spot, and the fourth straight year that social network search terms have topped the “most-searched” list, Experian said. In 2008, MySpace held the #1 slot."
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"Original content isn't enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren't enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience."
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"Women CEOs were nearly twice as likely as men to have been appointed to the job from outside the company — even though our analysis clearly shows that inside-CEO candidates perform better over time, presumably because long-term growth depends on deep industry- and firm-specific knowledge."
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"What do you have to lose but the illusion that you are in control of your customers?"
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"Given the downsides of product and service proliferation, less choice can be a competitive advantage. One of the best examples is Aldi — a German-based chain of discount grocery stores that is rapidly expanding around the world and developing a devoted following of customers. Part of the Aldi philosophy is that less is more. Each store is limited to no more than 1,400 different items."
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The prime time period for evening mobile viewing runs from about 7.30pm to 11pm across the week, a similar pattern to the viewing habits of people watching on a television.
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"According to their application, they hope to build a national network of regional reporters/editors/researchers/graphic artists who will create original work on spec, to be placed by The Journalism Shop editors."
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"The iPhone and various Blackberry handhelds dominated the mobile device market, while Google, Yahoo! and YouTube led the way as far as most accessed sites and brands on the mobile web.
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"The demo included a flythrough as well as a playable level from Unreal Tournament."
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Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, Google News: You know that feeling in your stomach on New Year's Day? Part trepidation, part excitement, part hangover? Right now, the news industry seems struck with a mix of fear over what changes might yet come and excitement over the many paths available to it.
The Times 2085? (from 1985)
Thanks to my wonderful ex-colleague at The Birmingham Post, John Cranage, I have some fantastic Christmas reading to do in the form of The Times’ 200th Anniversary publication:
I’ve already had a flick through the 166-page annual from 1985 and the whole thing looks marvellous. However, there was one advertisement that stopped me in my tracks. It was from Ben Johnson Ltd. Back in 1985 it appears they were the colour printers for The Times. They used their advert to imagine just what the newspaper might look like by 2085:
This is the (non-advertising part of the) text:
What will your great great grandchildren be looking at in a hundred years from now to mark three centuries of The Times?
Will there even be a Times then? The need will still be there for the same objective reporting of contemporary events coupled with interpretation and comment. But will it appear daily in the form of black text and pictures printed on paper? Probably not. It may, for instance, appear on a hand-held screen with direct access to a news databank transmitting constantly up-dated text and pictures of selected subjects of interest to the individual reader.
The equivalentof this commemorative book may be a disk, a series of holograms harking back to the quaint old days of paper and ink or even, as an exercise in nostalgia, a genuine book.
iPhone Apps? Kindle? News aggregators? The semantic web? We’re only a quarter of the way to 2085 and – apart from perhaps the holograms – these are all perfectly practical suggestions for today. Giving away a book as a disc is actually a pretty outdated idea.
How fast we move.
And what are Ben Johnson doing today? Nearly 25-years on they are still in business as Ben Johnson Office Solutions providing “fully-supported office IT, print and document management solutions”.
links for 2009-12-22
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"This collaboration between The Wonderfactory and Time, Inc. is an excellent example of how tablets will enable the creation of innovative, addictive experiences by publishers, media companies, and advertisers. "
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"Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010? This video prototype shows the take of the Mag+ project."
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"Condé has a demo video it has been showing to advertisers, employees and plenty of other people, including me. The demo gives you a pretty good overview of what the publisher and Adobe (ADBE), which is building the software to produce and view the magazines, have in mind."
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"If these companies took just one or two papers each among their 66 to experiment with new models, to radically rethink and resize them and to learn instead of demolishing their old institutions brick by brick, they and their still-dying industry would be much better off; they might find a new way. "
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This Week in Space is different than a company putting up a video on its Website or posting a Podcast. These are top-flight independent journalists doing a show on a topic about which they are passionate.
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"In it’s heyday, PVRBlog held an amazing 9/10 Google PageRank. And despite hardly any new content (8 posts in 2009), the site still sees several hundred visitors a day. Perhaps most impressively, PVRBlog may have over 180,000 RSS subscribers thanks to some early Google promotion. Yet Matt says his revenue maxed out at $3,000 a month (and currently brings in about $100/mo)."
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"Simply enter your RSS feed URL, Twitter name and a description of your blog, then upload two images and voilà – you’ve created your very own iPhone app! MotherApp takes care of submitting the app to Apple for approval and notifies you when it’s available for download."
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"Only one year after launch, it has sold 1 million coupons and received $30 million in second-round financing from Accel Partners."
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"Despite the hype over online “accountability” and unprecedented tools for “one-to-one marketing,” Web publishing woefully underutilizes the technological tools that have been at its disposal for years. The habits of publishers and marketers have not kept pace with the technologies."
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"I know a lot of news organisations are implementing online strategies to both increase the number of pageviews and the amount of time people spend on the site – giving journalists and multimedia editors time to respond to comments and correct copy in this way has to be one of the most sensible planks of any such strategy."
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"Accounts to be filed at Companies House this week will show that Global has taken a £193.5m hit after spending £545m to acquire GCap Media and Chrysalis Radio before advertising markets dived."
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I’ve also noticed that they seem to be becoming more common, permeating not only technical subjects, where they seem to have originated from, but other areas, such as mainstream media, design and of course, the internet.
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"Henrik Thomsen, a Danish radiologist, has said the health of patients in England is being put at serious risk because he and other scientists are prevented from sharing their knowledge, due to what they see as an increasingly draconian atmosphere in London's libel courts."
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"At the end of every year since 2000, we invite readers to look back on the last twelve months of their lives and reflect on what has been important, defining or constant during that particular year, and then sum their year up in just 24 words."
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"London listings magazine Time Out has launched a free iPhone application that includes a map showing events near the user's location."
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"Baltimore Brew is a daily online journal featuring independent reporting and informed commentary about greater Baltimore. Think of us as your post-apocalyptic* source of information and insight on the city."
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"It’s a reminder that journalists will do anything to avoid getting real jobs, including conjuring a new kind of workplace that doesn’t include any of the legacy costs of trucks and printing presses."
links for 2009-12-21
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"I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). "
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"It's simple. You create it. You're heard. You earn. "
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"To make the articles more palatable to marketers, AOL’s system will also screen pieces for grammar, spelling, even plagiarism, before going through a human editor. "
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"Journalists, or would-be journalists, would bid for the right to write stories using a reverse-auction system, in which the lowest bidder “wins” — and I use that term more loosely than it has ever been used in the history of mankind."
links for 2009-12-04
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