Russian media tycoons Alexander and Yevgeny Lebedev have invested £100 million into the London Evening Standard and Independent titles, while launching the fledgling hyper-local TV station, London Live. And the investment is paying off, according to financial reports released late last month, with the shift to a ‘free and cheap’ business model, in combination with sharp cost-cutting, causing losses to be slashed.
“The new blood [in our newsroom] is coming from the J-schools in the US. We almost exclusively hire J-school graduates.” That was the encouraging message for journalism students from Editor in Chief of USA Today, David Callaway, during a World Editors Forum panel on newsroom innovation in Turin last month.
The announcement of the new members of the Color Quality Club was awaited with great anticipation. The list of winners includes many “old friends” who have already secured their place in the Star Club, alongside a series of new names who join the ranks of the winners for the first time.
Who is your audience? Is your content actually reaching your audiences? How are they engaging with your content? And what impact is your journalism really having? These are the questions individual journalists are now being encouraged to respond to as newsrooms realise that stories no longer end when the author hits “publish.”
Affordable rent and the cool vibe of Berlin make the capital of Germany a top destination for European startups. After the success of our startup tour at last year’s World Publishing Expo 2013, we hooked up again with local experts Kindai Projects to explore the German startup landscape and visit two truly innovative newsrooms. Editors-in-chief from Norway, Switzerland and The Netherlands joined us on the journey.
A Newsquest-owned Scottish regional daily claims to have more than 10,000 paying subscribers to its metered-paywall site. Separately, the editor of the U.K.’s largest-selling regional paper says a metered paywall is the best business model for newspaper websites.
Amid growing calls for US and UK regulators to launch formal investigations into Facebook’s disturbing mood manipulation research, leading US media scholar Jay Rosen has a reminder for journalists, editors and personal social media users alike: “Facebook has all the power. You have almost none.”
The rapid spread of online misinformation was voted one of the top 10 trends facing the world in 2014 by members of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils. In this third installment in the World Editors Forum blog series on the 2014 Trends in Newsrooms report, Julie Posetti and Craig Silverman report on social media verification trends.
It has been nearly a year since the SFN Report “Paid digital content: The journey begins” was published, so we met with Valérie Arnould, author of the report, for an update on the rapidly evolving paid-content situation.
Former News of the World Editor and Downing Street chief Communications Director Andy Coulson has been sentenced in London today, along with three other former NOTW news editors, charged in conncection with the hacking scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
WAN-IFRA is calling on its supporters around the globe to nominate great speakers for our events. We are constantly looking for the hot topics and best practice case studies of online and print publishers. We are especially interested to hear the stories from users, news media players and inspiring outsiders that could help facilitate the transformation of the news publishing industry. If you would like to speak at one of our events, or know of someone who can contribute, we’d like to hear from you.
In this second instalment of The World Editors Forum’s Trends in Newsrooms blog series exploring the top ten industry trends of 2014, Karen Kissane reports on Trend 2: the inexorable rise of mobile news consumption.