A 3G and WiFi compatible reader is being tested in France. It’s called Read&Go.
French telecom company Orange has announced a new e-book reader, entitled the Read&Go. While most such readers — like the Kindle — are meant to be universal devices, Orange’s machine concentrates almost exclusively on newspapers.
Ah, convergence. The buzzword that was so hot five years ago and so quickly faded once the newspaper business in South Florida went south. One couldn’t pick up a trade rag, or read a trade blog without reading about Tampa and their “universal news desk” and the fantastic new building that would magically make TV reporters and newspaper reporters mind meld into robo-reporter.
At the same time, dreams of creating a new-style ‘multimedia reporter,’ adept at both television and newspapers, have fallen flat. After three years, only one print reporter regularly produces stories for the TV station, the top-rated in the market.
But that hasn’t dissuaded the people in the Tribune company.Their PR machine is crowing.
Tribune Company today announced that it will join the broadcast and interactive operations of its Miami television station, WSFL-TV (CW39), with those of its Ft. Lauderdale-based newspaper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, under a single roof to create a media powerhouse serving readers, viewers and advertisers.
Thats right… a powerhouse consisting of the CW and the Ft. Lauderdale newspaper is going to take over Miami as the leading news source.
“This strategy is unprecedented in a major U.S. market,” said Howard Greenberg, Sun-Sentinel president and publisher. “This gives our print, broadcast and interactive operations the opportunity to work together to develop unique content and programming in a variety of areas. Plus, with this combination, there will be no better way for advertisers to reach more people with a consistent message.”
Blah, blah, interative, blah, blah, reach, blah, blah, excited, blah blah, efficiency…
Mr. Murdoch is having a birthday.
He’s built a media empire from two newspapers he inherited in Australia by doing the revolutionary. He gave the people what they wanted.
The only downside to his birthday is that his concept is still revolutionary.
Today the Murdoch owned New York Post didn’t disappoint it’s readers in the wake of Eliot Spitzer screwing around with whores.
Email announcement today from Jerry Lyles, Vice-president, Publisher Relations, Publishing Group of America.
I’m writing to share some great news for our company and yours.
Today, we completed the sale of Publishing Group of America to Bain Capital and Shamrock Capital, two firms with excellent track records in stewarding corporate growth. You probably know some of their current and past holdings, which include Doubleclick (internet advertising services), Warner Music Group (music publishing), Modern Luxury (16 city-regional high-end consumer magazines), Latin Communications (previous owner of Spanish newspaper La Opinion), and NextWave Media Group (online advertising agency).
As you know, our magazines have resonated with readers as national supplements to local news. We have expanded our support products from Hometown Content to online auto mall UpstreetAuto.
Bain and Shamrock share our commitment to providing content solutions for newspapers. They see substantial growth opportunities for us all. With their backing, we will be expanding our magazine lineup and introducing new digital products to enhance readership, connectivity and support.
First among these is Spry, a monthly health magazine that debuts next September at 9-million circulation, making it one of the largest launches in history. All of our testing to date shows that this magazine is a winner. And there will be more to come. In the meantime, we will be upgrading our digital capabilities to extend the community that your readers have created in the magazines.
We’re looking forward to making 2008 an exciting year. Toward that end, if there is anything I can answer on our new ownership, please don’t hesitate to call.
NEW YORK Here are some of the top daily gainers for the six-month period ending September 2007, based on today’s FAS-FAX. The daily average is based on Monday-Friday.
Newspaper/City –- % increase – daily circ
TRIBUNE-REVIEW, Greensburg, Pa — 48.36% — 149,068 (*ABC noted “change in publishing plan and/or frequency”)
DAILY SUN, The Villages, Fla. — 9.52% — 28,620
THE BEACON NEWS, Aurora, Ill. — 7.49% — 27,563
BULLETIN, Bend, Ore. — 7.21% — 32,369
THE DOTHAN (ALA.) EAGLE — 6.03% — 33,546
SHAWANO (WIS.) LEADER — 6.01% — 6,505
REDLANDS (CALIF.) DAILY FACTS — 5.14% — 6,852
LEADER-TELEGRAM, Eau Claire, Wis. — 4.45% — 26,024
THE JOURNAL-REGISTER, Medina, N.Y. — 4.07% — 2,787
THE MACOMB DAILY, Mount Clemens, Mich. — 3.65% — 42,045
LA OPINION, Los Angeles — 3.57% — 124,784
THE MONTANA STANDARD, Butte, Mont. — 3.42% — 14,732
THE DAILY ITEM, Sunbury, Pa. — 3.16% — 24,929
THE ST. AUGUSTINE (FLA.) RECORD — 2.63% — 17,582
THE GARDEN ISLAND, Lihue, Hawaii — 2.57% — 9,646
CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE, Crystal River, Fla. –- 2.57% — 26,303
NEWS HERALD, Panama City, Fla. — 2.44% — 28,526
TIMES, Weirton, West Va. — 2.43% — 5,310
BANNER-HERALD, Athens, Ga. — 2.39% — 26,569
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 2.31% — 338,260
UPDATE: DAILY NEWS, Bowling Green, KY — 1.1% 20,157
This is definitely cool. A newsstand that displays digital front pages.
Sure, I could get the news on my desktop computer or iPhone (yeah, I wish!), but as a newspaper editor, I’ve got a soft spot for tradition.
Front pages shown here feature some of Birmingham’s big stories during the past year: the rise of “American Idol” Taylor Hicks, the firing of Alabama Crimson Tide Coach Mike Shula and the hiring of Nick Saban. (The Birmingham News won the Pulitzer soon after.)
This editor is really thinking and certainly not afraid to tackle a difficult design and technology project. This link will take you to a step by step way to make your own digital newsstand. There should be one of these in every newspaper’s lobby.
Here’s a taste of the tech know-how to get this done.
With a little AppleScript work, I trained my Mac to get the papers.
The Mac Mini connects to the Internet and to my iTunes library through my home wireless network. Each morning the computer launches a script triggered by an iCalGraphicConverter and launches a slideshow with PhotoPresenter, a nifty little $8 shareware program with lots of snazzy transitions. The remote can pause or cycle through the pages.
I think there’s a market for you Scott, do the major vending machines know about your design? Very nicely done. Congratulations, and forget about that headline - just trying to draw people in you know!
An article in Southern Newspaper Publishers Association weekly eBulletin describes how a publisher in Chattanooga decided that attempting to appeal to young readers would alienate the newspapers appeal to its core audience.
It’s not tit-for-tat when publishers / editors make the decision to try to attract young readers. Boomer readers like a lot of the same things X’ers do. So to think that adding content that appeals to X’ers means you loose boomers is wrong.
I think we have to remember who our core readership is and how to reach them,” said Tom Griscom, publisher and executive editor. “You can still go after young people, but we are clearly focused on getting that group that grew up as readers.”
After hearing of the idea at other places, Griscom and the Times-Free Press did their own research and began to consider how, and if, the idea for news targeted specifically for baby boomers would work.
Here’s the fun part. The research was conducted among the newspaper’s staff. The publisher / editor asked the boomers in the NEWSROOM if they thought it would work.
The boomers initiative was launched after the first of the year, and every day since, Times-Free Press readers have been able to check the top of their front page near the masthead to see what baby boomer stories are in that day’s newspaper.
I’d love to see a story list that they have identified as boomer stories. I’m guessing they are general interest stories that would appeal to all of their readers. As a boomer, I hate the banner illustrated below: its condescending. Riding a roller coaster is the “ride of their lives.” C’mon.
Here’s another heads-up for you Chattanooga Times-Free Press. Boomers aren’t your core audience anymore. Sure, the top of the age 50+ still qualifies, but the lower end of 40-45 is vunerable.
I agree, a newspaper can’t take any age group for granted, but the future lies with X’ers. Spend more time trying to appeal to them and we boomers will keep reading. We don’t need labels to tell us what appeals to us.
USA Today has been running a series for their 25th year of publication. Today they have picked the 25 things that have all but vanished.
First, their number one pick is “indoor smoking.” This makes the top of the list of things that have “left us?” Here in flyover country, there is still a lot of indoor smoking. So it’s not even close to “vanishing.”
Second, they blew it when they said afternoon newspapers were vanishing:
Remember the kid on the bike who never quite reached the porch with your afternoon daily? He moved on, as did lifestyles and the media world. City afternoons became lonelier for newspaper readers.
It was #22 on their list, but only 56% of the nation’s newspapers are morning papers.
They pretty much nailed it with the rest of their list, but these two examples point out that they are slightly out of touch.
I wonder why the so-called developing nations are so far ahead of the U.S. in newspaper readership?
I find this fact astonishing: In one year, 2,100 newspapers were started in India. There are already 60,000 newspapers being read.
Here in the capital, a bustling megalopolis with 15 million residents, two new dailies have hit the streets in the last four months, angling for their share of a market already divided among more than a dozen competitors.
In 2004, there were 1,456 newspapers in the United States. You can count on one hand the number of new dailies that came on the scene, and those were usually tri-weeklies that made the jump to six or seven days.
People in the world’s biggest democracy still respect newspapers; they count on them for information and read them in numbers that would make publishers, editors and advertisers in the United States drool.
One can make the argument that internet penetration is much much lower compared to the U.S., and that would be correct. But total U.S. newspaper circulation has been declining for decades, even with the launch of USA Today.
Time will tell if the expanding middle class in these countries eventually will change how they get their news.
In the meantime, newspapers in the U.S. have to keep their noses to the grindstone to figure out ways to attract new readers.
You have no doubt heard that said before, perhaps even said it yourself. It’s usually in respond to what one might consider a controversial headline of photograph.
This is one of the bromides that may have a kernel of truth for a very limited number of newspapers.
Those newspapers are in major metro areas that depend heavily on commuter traffic where more than once newspaper is available at at newsstand or vending machine. A reader may decide to purchase the newspaper based on a headline.
But since about 90% of our newspapers are sold by subscription, it really doesn’t make any difference what’s in the headline or front page photo, those papers are already sold.
