One of Canada’s two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail, is going after Toronto readers with help from local blog site Torontoist.
In an announcement on the Globe’s website late Friday night, Toronto editor Kelly Grant [pictured with the announcement] said the newspaper had created an online Toronto hub that would include material from Torontoist, in addition to features such as a Toronto traffic page incorporating Twitter feeds.
The Globe would also increase its city hall staff from two to four.
Torontoist editor David Topping described the agreement as a content-sharing partnership, but didn’t say whether Torontoist would publish Globe and Mail content in return.
The arrangement doesn’t appear to be content-sharing in the usual sense, but rather link-sharing. So far at least, if you click on a Torontoist story from the Globe and Mail site, the story opens on Torontoist, giving the blog site a nice traffic boost.
This is a nicely done video, even if it adds little to our understanding of the problems facing newspapers (repeating the old saw that newspapers shouldn’t have offered their content online free of charge and accusing them of doing too little with video to compete against television).
The one-hour video Us Now is an excellent primer on web-enabled social innovation, with examples that include Couch Surfing, Slice the Pie and Zopa.
And for a taste of participatory democracy, there’s the remarkable Ebbsfleet United, “the world’s first and only web community-owned football club” (not to mention FA Trophy winners).
No sooner does the New York Times announce the appointment of a social media editor than bloggers wonder aloud why she has had such a low profile in the social media universe thus far.
The credibility of Jennifer Preston [pictured] has been called into question by Ben Parr at Mashable and Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, who say they found little evidence of her in the usual social media venues.
And Gawker figures it’s all part of a NY Times plot to clamp down on the use of social media by staffers, rather than foster more of it.
Among Ms Preston’s alleged anti-social behaviour: she kept her Twitter updates private until after her appointment to the new position. Her Twitter followership appears to be surging now, however.
The Times’ move comes several months after a Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, appointed a “communities editor”. The paper chose its technology writer, Mathew Ingram, who was already a prominent blogger and avid user of social media.
I’ve been playing with the new Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine” and I think one of the best terms to describe it is straight out of the 1960s: “mind blowing”.
Wolfram Alpha is not about searching for web pages (Google is still pretty good at that) but, rather, about getting answers to numerical questions, computed on demand from vast amounts of curated data plus algorithms.
For example, Wolfram Alpha can:
perform mathematical, financial or scientific calculations
analyze geographical or statistical data
provide a summary of events on a particular date, including the weather (automatically defaulted to your current location based on IP address)
tell you all the words that will fit in that crossword puzzle that’s had you stumped all day
tell you how the height of Mt Everest compares with the length of the Golden Gate Bridge [see screenshot]
It also has an astonishingly ability to deliver related chunks of interesting information including nicely formatted tables and graphs.
I recommend watching Stephen Wolfram’s complete introductory video (it’s about 13 minutes and takes a while to load).
There’s also more info about Wolfram Alpha here and here.
The New Zealand Herald’s website nzherald.co.nz holds a narrow lead in domestic unique users over news portal stuff.co.nz, according to the latest data from Nielsen Online.
The two sites, owned respectively by rival newspaper groups APN and Fairfax, are perennial contenders for the top spot among Kiwi news readers, and also draw large international audiences, not included in the above numbers.
Yesterday’s executive changes at the Globe and Mail are being described as “part of a broader set of changes to expand the newspaper’s digital strategy.”
Few hints of what that might mean are being made public at this stage, but statements by publisher Phillip Crawley make it clear that he wants changes to happen quickly. And the man appointed to lead the paper’s newsroom says the paper could charge for its online news coverage.
As a result of the shakeup announced yesterday:
John Stackhouse [seen in the above video] becomes Editor-in-Chief, replacing Edward Greenspon, 52, who led the paper for seven years. Mr Stackhouse, 46, joined the paper 20 years ago, and has been editor of Report on Business since 2004.
Roger Dunbar, who has been Vice President of Digital and Business Development since joining the paper in 2004, becomes VP-Business Development and Marketing.
Angus Frame, 37, becomes VP-Digital. He was the editor of globeandmail.com for seven years before being named Group Director - Digital Media last year.
There’s no question that the Global Positioning System is a great tool, although I confess I’ve never used it (unless you count sitting in the back of a taxi while the driver finds his way down unfamiliar roads via a little electronic map on the dashboard).
Coming on the scene in 1995, it wasn’t available during my days as an ocean navigator, when the trusty sextant, an almanac and a lot of arithmetic, were the most reliable system for position-finding, at least when the sky was clear.
But today’s news that the GPS satellites need investment to keep them operating beyond next year shows how far we’ve come in making navigation part of the average person’s life. GPS devices have become so good, and cheap, that they are used by many people to complement road signs, maps, and asking a “local” for directions.
GPS, or similar alternative systems provided by Russia or being developed in other countries, will be the foundation of so many new services provided via mobile devices. One way or the other, we all need to know where we are.
Further to my previous post about the NY Times considering selling memberships to help fund its journalism, Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher today posted some useful ideas on how to entice members with more than coffee mugs, t-shirts and tote bags.
Here are some of his most innovative and promising ideas, in my opinion:
* Every newspaper member gets exclusive discounts from a large group of participating newspaper advertisers. Rather than the anachronistic printed coupon books that have been around for decades and are sold for fund-raisers (in Colorado these are called Gold C Books and sell for $10), allow members to use their mobile phones to show retailers, restaurants, etc. their discount coupons after entering their password. This eliminates the problem of leaving the coupon or coupon book at home, since most of us carry our cell phones everywhere. A special app for smartphones could identify nearby discount deals based on your current location, or be browsed or searched.
* Advertisers should be persuaded to take part in the member discount program as part of their overall ad deal with the newspaper and its digital services, so there’s a wide variety of discounts and deals to be had.
* Consider deals with groups of restaurants, or ski areas. A paying newspaper member can get one free meal (when another is purchased) once per month at a selection of participating restaurants, or one free ski lift ticket per month. If our hypothetical newspaper membership is only $10 a month, it’s a no-brainer that you buy a membership if you like to eat out or ski.
As Outing points out, the key to making memberships work is in offering value. If people won’t pay for online journalism directly, perhaps they can be persuaded with discounts on other things they buy.
When it comes to funding online news, most ideas revolve around either wringing more dollars from advertisers, or somehow convincing consumers to pay for access to content.
The New York Times continues to explore the latter approach, despite the disappointing returns from the Times Select pay wall which was dismantled in 2007 after two years of operation. [For more on Times Select, watch this video interview with former Times VP-Digital Vivian Schiller.]
Writing in the New York Observer today, John Koblin quotes Times executive editor Bill Keller as telling staff this week that the company is consider two options:
Allow users to view content freely, then charge if they go over a certain limit
Invite users to contribute voluntarily through a NY Times membership - the benefits of which could include access to special online content
Jeff Jarvis lampoons the first idea, pointing out that it (like other content payment ideas) discourages readers from doing exactly what websites want: spending more time on site, and viewing more content.
Readers’ inner dialogue is not hard to imagine: ‘Uh-oh, should I read that next story - and see that ad and maybe find something worth linking to and bring in other readers? It might start costing me. I’d better conserve my Times characters; they’re adding up; already read 20,000 of them. I think it’s time to go elsewhere now.’
The second approach is hard to imagine taking hold - although at least in the United States there is a tradition of voluntary financial support for public broadcasting from individuals and institutions. And really, isn’t membership-based access to content just another way of saying “paying for content”? The challenge for the Times will be to make that fly in a way that Times Select couldn’t.
Koblin says Times execs will make a decision by next month.
One of Canada’s two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail, is going after Toronto readers with help from local blog site Torontoist.
