There is no doubt that news these days does literally travel at almost the speed of light. What was once breaking news can be fish and chip wrap within minutes of hitting the web. Some news sites are better than others at getting out ahead of that ever shortening curve and this is what a startup by the name of News Whip wanted to find out – who is the best news site at being viral.

The Irish startup says it tracks about 60,000 freshly published news stories each and every day from approximately 5,000 different sources; which it used in the form of its November data to find out which sources were producing the most viral content.

To figure out what qualifies as being viral News Whip uses the per hour number of  tweets on Twitter or  Facebook shares with that magical number being 150 for each service.

Using this number as the qualifier News Whip came up with this list of the top producers of viral news content. Here is the top 10 of those sites:

1. Huffington Post

2. BBC

3. Guardian

4. Dailymail

5. Mashable

6. ABCNews

7. Techcrunch

8. Foxnews

9. ESPN

10. Engadget

Now News Whip did have two qualifiers when it came to  creating the list. One, they don’t go behind paywalls to monitor paid sites which explains the lack of any appearances from sites like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

The second is that News Whip looks at the aggregated data – “this is who’s most successful in quantity, not quality“.

I guess that explains exactly why “some” news sites made the list over others.

via The Next Web (who placed 24th on the list – congrats)

The who’s who of the most viral news sites is a post from: The Inquisitr

Do you want to know about current events? You can’t go wrong with the New York Times, NPR, or even “The Daily Show.” One thing you might want to avoid, however, is Fox News. A new poll shows that people who watch Fox News are less informed about current events than people who don’t watch any news.

Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University asked 612 people from New Jersey about recent current events. Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson professor who served as an analyst for the poll, said that the poll contained questions about the Arab Spring, the current GOP candidates, the Occupy protests, and several other major news topics.

Cassino said that Fox News viewers were 18% less likely to know that Egyptians toppled their government compared to people who don’t watch any news. Fox viewers were 6 points less likely to be aware that Syrians hadn’t overthrown their government.

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News… Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions that those who don’t watch any news at all.”

The report also notes that people who get their news from a print source like the NY Times or USA Today, were 12 points more likely to know about the situation in Egypt. NPR listeners also had good scores on the poll.

According to the poll, those who watched an Sunday morning news show were the most knowledgeable about international issues.

Cassino said:

“Sunday morning news shows tend to spend a lot more time on a single issue than other news broadcasts, and they are less likely to degenerate into people shouting at each other. Viewers pick up more information from this sort of calm discussion
than from other formats. Unfortunately, these shows have a much smaller audience than the shouters.”

Cassino also praised Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” for being an informative program. People who watched “The Daily Show” were 12 points more likely to identify the Occupy protesters as Democrats. Cassino said:

“Jon Stewart has not spent a lot of time on some of these issues. But the results show that when he does talk about something, his viewers pick up a lot more information than they would from other news sources.”

What do you think about the poll? Is no news really better than Fox News?

No News is Better Than Fox News, Says Study is a post from: The Inquisitr

Headlines: Not always super easy to come up with, you know.

News Fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

If I told you right now they had crack in it, you’d go, “I knew knew something was up.”

[sofapizza]

This is why the news organizations shouldn’t use Google image search is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remarkable for the number of screw-ups that they managed to work into a single one minute transmission.

[Video] Most embarrassing news broadcast ever disseminated on YouTube is a post from: The Inquisitr

Public-supported news, or as the news industry would have us believe – state run propaganda machines, is a hotly contested sore point in the US. Of course not all countries look at this way as evidenced by the BBC in England or the CBC in Canada. Even within the US there is the often looked down upon NPR which as an organization has to continually defend itself from attacks not just from their peers in the industry but also the government.

The argument used against these types of publicly-supported news agencies is that no matter how hard they try they will always have to kowtow to the government of the day. You will also hear the argument that publicly-supported news agencies don’t have to compete on the same ground that other non-public (big business) run news businesses and that gives them an unfair advantage.

If this is the case then one has to wonder why the BBC of England has been able to continually grow in this new media environment while big business run news agencies are floundering. Not only is the BBC growing but it is seeing its ad revenues triple in the last year an are expecting to double in the next year. In fact business is so good because of foreign visitors to their news site that they will be launching a US site at BBC.com to meet the need.

Even the US’s own NPR is continually striving forward always finding ways to use new media and new technologies to provide a better service while at the same time you have the big names in the news industry talking paywalls and subscriptions.

Given all this it was interesting to read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University and First Amendment scholar, where he questions this idea that publicly-supported news agencies are inherently biased and dangerous to journalism.

Interestingly, Bollinger contends that our largest threat to journalism isn’t from government abuse but the corporate sector. “To take a very current example, we trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company’s environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment,” he argues. “This reinforces the point that all media systems, whether advertiser-based or governmental, come with potential editorial risks.”

He concludes, “In today’s rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China’s CCTV and Xinhua news, as well as Qatar’s Al Jazeera. [Our] system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.”

Source: Fast Company

It is an interesting argument and one that I believe have a lot of merit. After all one just has to look at the polarization that is happening in the United States and how news organizations align themselves, whether they admit it or not, with those different sides. News has become more and more about the rating, about the mega-dollar advertising deals that sponsor many of these “news” shows that feed into this polarization.

I also find it very interesting to watch the rise, and profitability, of publicly-supported news agencies like the NPR, BBC and other similar “state” news organizations while at the same time the name brand news businesses we grew up with are struggling.

I have never believed that traditional media at its heart was in any danger of vanishing into the sunset. Rather I totally expect it to morph, to grow, to learn from new media, even to blend with it and in the end we will have a stronger and more ethical provider of the news.

The BBC could very well be that model.

Is public-supported news the real evil that the news industry portrays it as? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Former head of research unit responds to criticism by arguing for necessity of assessing excerpts by independent reviews

This article was written by Adam Vaughan, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 15th July 2010 00.59 UTC

The former head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which was at the centre of a media and scientific storm over leaked emails, said their response to the incident was delayed by “shock” at the leak and at the content of the communications, a Guardian debate heard last night.

Professor Trevor Davies, the UEA’s pro-vice chancellor of research, spoke out after climate scientists and sceptics clashed last week over the findings of a six-month inquiry into the emails dating back 13 years.

“We were shocked too by the excerpts from the original emails and that was one reason why we were accused of slowing our response. We had to verify they were real. We decided to assess them, not by a small number of emails, but by independent reviews,” Davies said.

The university was criticised by climate sceptics and commentators last year including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who accused it of reacting slowly to the publication of the emails in November and the ensuing media storm.

The pro vice-chancellor struck a conciliatory note at the heated debate, as panellists argued over whether the inquiry drew a line under the affair or was a “whitewash”, as one critic said.

Davies said: “There are lessons to be learned. We need to be much more aware of interactions between the mainstream media and the blogosphere and contribute to public debates.”

He said the university had a series of initiatives planned for later this year to such effect.

Responding to criticisms in the findings of last week’s Muir Russell report, which called the university and its Climatic Research Unit’s (CRU) responses to freedom of information requests “unhelpful and defensive”, he said: “We have to be more helpful to freedom of information and environmental regulation requests.” He defended two reviews commissioned by UEA as “wholly independent”, and reiterated the conclusions of the total of three reviews into the affair, all of which cleared scientists of wrongdoing and manipulating data, and said the science was sound.

But prominent climate sceptic bloggers Stephen McIntyre and Douglas Keenan criticised the CRU and UEA. “Both the Muir Russell review and Oxburgh review [an earlier review of the emails] are clearly whitewash. That is not the problem. The real problem is the lack of systematic accountability, whereby allegations of improper behaviour are dealt with,” said Keenan.

He also claimed that university researchers were switching from using their university to using Gmail addresses, to avoid being covered by freedom of information requests. Bob Watson, chief scientist at Defra, said he had not personally heard of any scientists switching to such email addresses.

Under questioning from McIntyre, Davies confirmed Sir Muir Russell, the chair of the six-month inquiry published last week, had not met Phil Jones, the current head of the CRU, in person after his inquiry’s panel was appointed in February. Evidence from Jones was instead taken by other officials.

Watson, a former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the system for advising governments on how to act on climate change should accomodate sceptical opinions. “I think the IPCC is probably the best system you could invent… but sceptical views must be in the document.”

He also said the IPCC had failed to admit mistakes quickly over an error in its last major report about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. But he added the UN panel was “very strong” and would be strengthened by a review into its work due to be published in September by the InterAcademy Council. Watson was damning about media coverage of the emails affair. “The printed press said UEA was guilty without examination. One had the feeling people were guilty without an in-depth analysis.” Davies said Jones, who admitted earlier this year he had considered suicide because of the pressure on him, had been “hounded by the press”. The panel included science journalist Fred Pearce, Davies, Defra chief scientific adviser Bob Watson and climate sceptic bloggers Doug Keenan and Stephen McIntyre. It was chaired by Monbiot.

Last week the third and final UK report into the emails affair, the Muir Russell review, cleared the CRU of manipulating data. Announcing the findings, Muir Russell said: “Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said. The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt.”

Jones, the former head of CRU and scientist at the centre of many of the emails, was appointed last week to the newly-created post of director of research at CRU.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

UEA’s delayed response to climate emails caused by shock, says professor is a post from: The Inquisitr

Andres Iniesta’s extra-time goal denies Holland in a showdown marred by 14 yellow cards and a sending-off

This article was written by Paul Hayward at Soccer City, Johannesburg, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 11th July 2010 21.43 UTC

This World Cup ended the way the modern South Africa began 16 years ago: with Nelson Mandela its star. Possibly the final reward of Mandela’s great political life was to pay a brief visit to the Johannesburg cauldron where Spain lifted the trophy for the first time with a goal in the 116th minute of a sometimes brutal encounter with Holland.

A tournament that was all about harmony produced an acrimonious finish as the Dutch attempted to stop, by brute force, Spain becoming the game’s eighth world champions. Howard Webb, the English referee, risked repetitive strain injury showing 14 yellow cards, a record for a World Cup final. He also sent off Holland’s John Heitinga as the Dutch suspended their artistic heritage.

With their poise and kaleidoscopic passing Spain represented football in its ideal state. Self-expression conquered pragmatism as fireworks over Johannesburg marked the end of Africa’s first World Cup. “It was a very difficult game but we have some fantastic players who knew how to respond to the problems,” said Vicente del Bosque, the Spanish coach. “We owe this to a great group of players.”

An all-European showdown tore at the nerves of two great footballing cultures as the contest threatened to run to a penalty shoot-out before Barcelona’s Andrés Iniesta closed the deal with a right-foot shot four minutes from the end of extra time.

In Spain, where many Basques and Catalans disown the national team, an estimated 300,000 fans rejoiced in Madrid’s city centre as a side packed with Barcelona players added the world crown to the European championship they won in Vienna two years ago.

This will go down as the blood and thunder final at the end of a competition that emphasised South Africa’s talent for integration and reconciliation. At times it was closer to white South Africa’s favourite sport, rugby.

Within walking distance of his old family home at 8115 Orlando West, Soweto, Mandela took a short golf-cart ride across the pitch at the Soccer City stadium as if trying to draw one last epiphany from South Africa’s transformation.

He was shrewd not to stay for the football. Two teams renowned for their verve turned the first half into a test of machismo, in which Holland were the worst offenders. English football managed to sneak a man onto the field but this was not a good night for Rotherham’s Webb. At the high point of his five-year sabbatical from South Yorkshire police, he faced the match official’s dilemma of whether to send a player off in a showpiece game as a succession of Dutchmen – Mark van Bommel especially – stretched his authority with persistent and bone-juddering fouls.

Spain responded with a few choice lunges of their own. With eight players booked in little over an hour Soccer City was hardly a festival of the finer arts. The vuvuzela was reassigned from a tool of support to an instrument of derision as the 84,490 crowd grew frustrated with the constant interruptions. Moments before the teams filed up the tunnel a pitch invader came within inches of swiping the World Cup trophy off its plinth but was tackled by security guards just in time. It was an isolated show of anti-World Cup sentiment at a tournament that left many European visitors ashamed of their preconceptions about crime and social disorder.

“South Africans are very proud of what the country has achieved and everyone in South Africa is walking tall,” said Danny Jordaan, head of the World Cup organising committee. “For years, many South Africans have been told that they are inferior, that they are not good enough. The nation has crossed a huge psychological barrier.”

Private security companies said violent crime in parts of Johannesburg fell 60%. Some believe criminal gangs took a kind of forced sabbatical to avoid the 40,000 extra police hired for the tournament.

The justice department reported that 194 crimes had been brought before the World Cup courts. After Spain’s win Fifa might be wise to set up a footballing equivalent to hear the explanations of those players who were less concerned with beauty than belligerence.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

World Cup 2010: Spain survive brutal final to become champions is a post from: The Inquisitr

Muir Russell report says scientists did not fudge data, but they should have been more open about their work

This article was written by David Adam, environment correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 8th July 2010 01.13 UTC

The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over leaked emails were yesterday cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics, but a review found they had failed to be open enough about their work.

Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were not in doubt. His investigation concluded they did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism and that key data was freely available and could be used by any “competent” researcher.

But the panel said the scientists’ responses to “reasonable requests for information” had been “unhelpful and defensive”. The inquiry found “emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them” and that there had been “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”. Scientists also failed to appreciate the risk their lack of transparency posed to the university and “indeed to the credibility of UK climate science”.

The controversy began when 13 years of emails from CRU scientists were released online last year. Climate change sceptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of manmade climate change. Critics also alleged the scientists abused their positions to cover up flaws and distort the peer review process that determines which studies are published in journals, and so enter the scientific record. Some alleged the emails cast doubt on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Announcing the findings, Russell said: “Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said. The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt … We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.”

The review is the third and final inquiry into the email affair, and effectively clears Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, and his colleagues of the most serious charges. Questions remain over the way they responded to requests for information from people outside the conventional scientific arena, some of whom were critics of Jones. “We do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA,” said the report, commissioned by UEA at a cost of £200,000.

It also criticised the CRU scientists for failing to include proper labels on a 1999 graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation, which was the subject of an infamous email about Jones using a “trick” to “hide the decline”. The panel said the result was misleading, though they accepted this was not deliberate as the necessary caveats had been included in the report text.

Acknowledging that the digital age brought a greater demand for openness and access to data, it concluded “like it or not, this indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.” Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, said the university accepted the report’s conclusion that it should have been more open. “The need to develop a culture of greater openness and transparency in CRU is something we faced up to internally some months ago and we are already working to put right.”

He hoped the review would “finally lay to rest conspiracy theories, untruths and misunderstandings” that had been circulating, and that the “wilder assertions” about the climate science community would now stop.

Jones issued a statement which said: “I am, of course, extremely relieved that this review has now been completed. We have maintained all along that our science is honest and sound and this has been vindicated now by three different independent external bodies. There are lessons to be learned and I need time to reflect on them.” Jones is to be director of research at CRU. Acton said this was “not a demotion but a shift in emphasis of role”.

Ed Miliband, the former climate change secretary, said: “Muir Russell has given the world a clear message: we should not believe those who tell us that one string of emails undermines years of climate science. We should also learn lessons because maximum openness and transparency is the best weapon against those who want us to stick our heads in the sand as if climate change isn’t happening. Now the world needs to step up the momentum again and get the deal that eluded us at Copenhagen.”

Writing on Comment is Free, Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, who testified to the inquiry, said: “The Russell review has rejected all claims of serious scientific misconduct. But he does identify failures, evasions, misleading actions, unjustifiable delays, and pervasive unhelpfulness – all of which amounts to severely sub-optimal academic practice. Climate science will never be the same again.”

Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said: “It is clear that greater transparency is required in climate research because of the intense public interest in it, and its profound implications for society. However, it is also now very apparent that many so-called sceptics owe a huge apology to the public for having presented the email messages as evidence that climate change is a hoax carried out by a conspiracy of dishonest scientists.”

Acton said: “CRU will be more closely integrated in the bigger school of environmental sciences and a key difference is to place some of the administrative burden that Phil had before this incident on the head of the school.”

Bob Watson, chief scientific advisor to the department of environment, food and rural affairs, said that while it was clear scientists needed to be more transparent, he hoped the report would “draw a line under this episode so that the scientific

community can begin to regain the trust of the public and continue to

do its vital work on climate change, which remains one of the biggest

challenges we face as a planet.”

Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford, said: “What everyone has lost sight of is the spectacular failure of mainstream journalism to keep the whole affair in perspective. Again and again, stories are sexed up with arch hints that these “revelations” might somehow impact on the evidence for human impact on climate. Yet the only error in actual data used for climate change detection to have emerged from this whole affair amounted to a few hundredths of a degree in the estimated global temperature of a couple of years in the 1870s.”

Additional reporting by Christine Ottery

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Climategate scientists cleared of manipulating data on global warming is a post from: The Inquisitr

This article was written by Alok Jha, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th July 2010 15.40 UTC

An EEG test could one day be used to identify people at risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia before they show any symptoms.

Scientists have found that a type of EEG (electroencephalography) brain wave is slightly different in people who have siblings with schizophrenia, compared with that seen in the general population. The researchers believe the information could be used to identify those at highest risk and pre-emptively treat them before they develop a full-blown mental disorder.

“Unlike in general medicine where we have lots of reliable [biological] markers, such as blood sugar for diabetes, in psychiatry we still rely very much on the behaviours and symptoms a person reports when they go to see a clinician,” said Maddie Groom of the University of Nottingham, who led the work.

She said markers of mental illness would not only help predict who was likely to be at risk but also how severe someone’s condition is and how well they are responding to medication. “[Markers] would give us a really big handle not only on what’s causing the disorder but also how best to treat and diagnose it,” she said.

In her study, she took EEG recordings from 30 teenagers whose siblings had developed schizophrenia and compared these with EEGs from 36 controls. Schizophrenia is thought to be at least partly inherited, so the siblings of people who have the condition have a slightly increased risk of also developing the disorder.

“Their risk is still very small but, nonetheless, when you compare them with people with siblings who don’t have schizophrenia, their risk is still greater than in the general population,” said Groom.

The volunteers were asked to perform a task where they had to press a button every time they saw a particular image on a computer screen. They then had to inhibit that response and not press the button when a different stimulus appeared on the screen in its place.

“This is a really difficult test to do and people without any mental health problems find it difficult,” said Groom. “But when we measured the brain activity of the siblings of the people with schizophrenia, their brain activity was reduced at the time when they needed to pay attention towards the stimulus and also when they needed to inhibit their response to that stimulus.”

While they performed the task, a particular electrical signal known as the P300 wave was significantly reduced in the siblings of schizophrenia patients and in the patients themselves whenever the stimulus they had to ignore appeared on the screen.

The p300 marker is thought to reflect attentional and inhibitory control aspects of brain processing. When someone needs to focus on something that is particularly important, and when that something requires an inhibition of a motor response, the P300 marker tends to be larger in people with good mental health.

However, Groom stressed that the brain activity of the siblings was not radically different from healthy people and that the marker may be related to the risk of the disorder rather than the disorder itself.

“The difference on a case-by-case basis from our healthy group was very small and you wouldn’t be able to pick them out from a crowd, measure their P300 and say that this person is related to someone with schizophrenia,” said Groom.

The researchers are also investigating P300 in people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Groom presented her work today at the Forum of European Neuroscience (Fens) conference in Amsterdam.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, said: “If we could identify [people at risk of mental disorders] early with biomarkers and treat them early, we could probably get in there before any damage is done and they become relapsing and chronic.”

In a separate study, also presented today at Fens, Seth Grant of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge created a catalogue that linked brain disorders to malfunctions in genes involved in making synapses, the junctions between nerve cells.

“What we found, in terms of disease, was quite striking – defects in the genes that encode these human synapse proteins are really a major cause of disease,” he said. “There are over 135 nervous system diseases, psychiatric and neurological, that arise because of defects in these synaptic proteins. These are common and rare diseases – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism.”

He added: “We recognise that these synapse proteins are the molecular basis for many brain diseases. We know no other molecular structure that is responsible for more brain diseases … Clinically, there is a wide spectrum of brain diseases and it is unclear how some of those are related to one another and if they are related at all. We can now see that many of them are related to one another because the molecular underpinnings of those diseases are in the synapse proteins which are physically binding to one another. There is a unifying mechanism that underpins a large number of brain diseases.”

The findings will help target drugs for mental conditions more accurately in future, said the scientists. When the synapses and their role in disease are fully understood, said Grant, scientists will have scores of new targets to develop drugs against. In addition, a drug would no longer be used to treat, say, only schizophrenia or autism, but would instead treat individual characteristics related to the malfunction of particular genes, which might be common to several diseases.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

EEG test may help predict who will develop schizophrenia, claims scientist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hey, they’re both similar shapes.

Err … kinda.

[Thanks CS!]

Geography fail: Controversy at FIFA World Cup is a post from: The Inquisitr

An amusing temple for every segment on every news show, ever:

How to report the news is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

So, Newsday, how’s that paywall working out for you? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Expected at some point during the next couple of weeks is the announcement by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman of New York Times, that the illustrious Gray Lady well be retreating to her petticoats of a paywall. As a side note there have been a few who have noted that this is around the same time that Apple is suppose to be unleashing its tablet computer.

While the announcement might come as soon as a couple of weeks chances are that it will take a couple of months for the change over to actually take place. During that time you can be sure that the freetards and other interested parties will be be raising their unified voices in opposition to the idea. Of course there will be dire warnings of failure and thousands of words will be written prognosticating how long it will be before NYT comes to its senses and tears down the wall.

It’s not like NYT hasn’t been down this road before as noted by Gabriel Sherman at NY Magazine’s Daily Intel blog

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

With this move the New York Times will be joining other online newspaper operations like The Financial Times as well as the rumored widening move by News Corp to switch its news properties on the web to a paywall access.

In many cases though this move is and will prove disastrous for an increasing number of organizations that retreat to behind a paywall because they are under the illusion that news is finite product. The problem is that the web has proven this to be a totally wrong assumption.

News isn’t finite. It is a constantly evolving and flowing stream of information that anyone can tap into and report and express opinions on. Wherever you turn on the web someone, somewhere is either reporting late breaking news or trying to provide thoughtful commentary.

What there is though is a finite resource of recognizable and brandable names, either individuals or organizations, that bring global eyeballs to the table. It is these people that are really the strength of any news organization as it is their journalistic reputations and editorial opinions that are sought by the person on the street.

It is the ability to create a niche market within a global market of news that is flooded with everyone wanting to have their say that is the real testing ground of whether the paywall method will work. It has worked for The Financial Times precisely because they have voices that people are willing to pay to listen to. However The Financial Times is a rarity of success as a paywall example as they have a recognizable brand that people have always been willing to pay a premium for so extending that to the web really wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Will the same thing work in favor of The New York Times?

Personally I think it does have a shot at working. The New York Times is an iconic brand that is known around the world. While its reputation has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years it still is considered to be one of those few “world class newspapers”. It might not have the same type of niche appeal as the Financial Times but even within the broader landscape of global news brands it is one that people are willing to pay for.

It’s going to be a risky move no doubt but if done right it could work for them. That said though it isn’t something that is going to work for other news organizations. The reason being that regardless of how important they might think they are in the eyes of the Web they are just another news outlet among hundreds of other outlets.

The Web is global in nature and increasingly the news is being separated into two types – global and hyper-local, anything in between is just news that anyone is capable of reporting or opining on. The thinking that by moving these run-of-the-mill news outlets behind a paywall is going to save them is flawed at its core.

The only thing it will result in is – in the words of  Tom Friedman: “I used to read you before you went behind the wall.”

The New York Times to retreat behind a paywall is a post from: The Inquisitr

We hear the scare tactics everyday. The news industry is tanking and the only way to save it is by returning to putting everything behind the paywall or instituting some sort of micro-payment schemes. News can’t survive by being given away for free is the mantra of the old school media companies.

News organizations after news organizations are crying the blues and cutting back on staff in order to keep the industry profitable enough for the owners and well placed editors. You would think that the coming news Armageddon will see the end of news as we know it.

The problem is that this is a specious argument that is put forth in order to protect the status quo of the news delivery systems. News will never die. Seriously. News is something that happens around us every day, every minute and nothing we do will ever stop news from happening.

What will change is the way in which we get our news and this is what is scaring the shit out of the old guard of the news industry – because at its root news isn’t an industry, we have just been led to believe it is.

While the boardrooms of the old world media companies are struggling to maintain any control they can over their profits that feed their million dollar lifestyles there are journalists and reporters who are finding a whole new freedom that comes from being exactly that – reporters of the news as it is happening. They are finding new freedom in being able to create content that will outlast even the outmoded methods of our current news delivery systems.

Even as these dinosaurs of newsprint carry on about returning to behind the paywall long time journalists are say no to the idea. Case in point is Saul Friedman who has been writing a column for Newsday since 1996.

Then he found out that Newsday, owned by Cablevision, would be returning its content back behind a paywall. It was a paywall that saw anyone other than a Cablevision and Newsday print subscriber having to pay $5 a week to access the site. This for Friedman was the breaking point and decided the time to quit had come. The idea of losing readership because of this paywall wasn’t acceptable to him.

Just as some journalists and reporters are deciding that the time is coming where they have to consider doing their job outside of the normal confines of a newspaper there are also a growing number of them that are looking to expand the way that they can keep on reporting on the news.

It is people like long time crime and court reporter Ron Sylvester who have seen the future of the business and realized that it is no longer just about the written word as published under some newspaper’s masthead. For Sylvester the role for journalists is going to become one of being a multi-media journalist where things like the written word are included with podcasts and videocasting.

As well it will mean being a part of the social media movement both as a way to promote one’s work as well as a way to find out about new stories that might be of interest. Journalist and reporters are becoming their own editors and ad departments. They are becoming their own sound man and videographers.

In Sylvester’s case he is also lucky enough to be able to draw on the skills of like minded contemporaries for projects that exceed his abilities to properly cover a story. This is almost the beginnings of the independent mobile teams of experts who can react quickly and without having to deal with the bureaucracy of an established newsroom.

While there is plenty of room for the independent journalist maintaining their own blog or being a part of a larger one I think the real power of a new world of news delivery will come from people like Ron Sylvester and other like him who will utilize all the aspects of technology in order to bring the real news to their readers. It will be the news without the preconceived filters that established old media organizations dole out what they think we need to read.

Regardless of what the dinosaurs of news might have us believe with their scare tactics news will never stop being delivered – only the methods of delivery will change.

The coming world of the multimedia journalist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Apparently the Mars-like sandstorms aren’t the only sci-fi plagues walloping Australia- a news broadcast appears to show a giant seagull looming over a background of Melbourne.

Giant seagull invades Aussie news broadcast is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well it looks like Rupert Murdoch didn’t get Chris Anderson’s memo about everything on the Internet being free.

Word is that the News Corp chairman told analysts in a earnings conference call that while the newspaper industry has to change to keep up with the time it doesn’t mean that everything will be free – especially his newspapers.

"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution," Mr Murdoch said.

"But it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites," he said.

He said News Corp would use the Wall Street Journal‘s online vehicle as a model.

"The extended downturn has only increased the drumbeat for change," he said, arguing that classified advertising for online news would never reach the levels once offered by print.

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content, is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

Source: Business Spectator :: News Corp to charge for all news websites

Time to get the comfy chair and popcorn ready because the blogosphere is sure to get going full force pontificating over this news.

All News Corp news sites to start charging is a post from: The Inquisitr

Even within archaic systems and services there are some that are even more out of touch with reality and do everything they can to perpetuate old and outdated ways of doing things. The Associated Press (AP) is one of those services and they have proven yet once again just how out of touch both they and management heavy news organizations are.

Rather than finding ways to make their content more useful, and as a result more valuable, they like much of the old media are struggling to find ways to keep everything within the existing status quo of where they control the dissemination of other people’s interpretation of the events happening around us – otherwise known as …. the news. Along those lines Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Director and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc (wow that’s a mouthful isn’t it), announced today that the AP would be creating a news registry that would allow them to tag and track all their content to make sure that those useless lying sacks of industry destroying bloggers everyone is in compliance of the AP “terms of use”.

The idea of course is that this way given their exclusive microformat the AP can control who can use their content and how much of that content they can use.

"The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content," the announcement explained. "The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage."

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

Source: Editor & Publisher :: AP To Create Registry to ‘Track’ and Protect Online Content

As PaidContent noted on their post this is going to piss off a whole lot of people

This is sure to raise a howl from people who a) don’t like efforts to manage content use, b) don’t like the idea of tracking and c) don’t like anything AP does when it comes to trying to protect content.  (We’ll also probably hear a lot about genies and bottles.) AP is trying to position it as not being about Google or bloggers, but about giving news orgs tools to enhance and protect revenue—and as an alternative to going completely behind a pay wall.

Would someone please give the AP the facepalm is a post from: The Inquisitr

Newspapers as they move away from the print world and try to embrace the online distribution of news are being faced with how they are going to make money. Advertising might work for blogs and other small news oriented endeavors but when it comes to the size of operations like The New York Times advertising supported distribution isn’t going to cut it.

Even at the peak of advertising on the web some would argue that there wouldn’t be enough income from ads to keep the newspaper running the same way it has been. Now that we are in an advertising slump it is even harder to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. So the folks at NYT has been floating a survey asking if people would be willing to pay $5.00 a month to access the NYT’s website.

As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker pointed out – if all 650,000 print subscribers paid this $5 a month NYT would see an instant influx of $39 million per year. Now as nice as that kind of money would be the chances of even getting close to that is next to nil. The fact is that as iconic as the New York Times might be in this day and age of news coming at us a mile a minute from more places than you can shake a stick at there is nothing special about NYT that would justify paying a per month fee.

The reality is that very few news organizations will ever be able to get away with charging any kind of subscription fee. Where the news in the past was made available by those with the money to invest in things like printing presses and vast distribution chains that is no longer the case. Today news distribution is a zero sum game where anyone can distribute both broad ranging news and niche news.

Does this mean that organizations like the New York Times can’t survive in a zero cost distribution world? Definitely not. The problem is that they are still trying to mold old world practices into a new world of news instead of using their brand and immense database of news to create a new organization that can live – and profit in the new world of news.

The inevitable? New York Times floats $5 per month access is a post from: The Inquisitr

If journalists don’t write about it does that mean that news doesn’t happen and if they do does that mean they have some sort of copyright over the reporting of that news?

For as long as there has been a news industry what is considered important enough to take up so-called valuable space on a printed collection of paper or take up valuable airtime has been limited to a select few. It is the people in editorial boardroom or producer’s offices who decide what they think we need to see or read each day. The majority of the time it is the news that is most likely aimed to promote our most visceral responses – hence the popularity of “bad news” being the good news.

It’s good news for the news gatekeepers because it is almost guaranteed to bring in the most readers or viewers. The worst the disaster, the juicier the scandal, or the more heart-wrenching the story, the better. Sure we every once in a while go through our angst ridden worrying that the news is too negative and that there isn’t enough good news. The problem is good news isn’t profitable news and what is important to the news industry is the stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and the management bonuses flowing.

As Jeff Jarvis points out today

The realization of that myth – the myth of necessity – hit me head-on when I read an unselfconsciously narcissistic feature in The New York Times this week about the room where the 4 p.m. news meeting is held. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has likened that meeting to a “religious ceremony.” The Times feature certainly acted as if it were taking us inside the Pope’s chapel: “The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.”

Behold the hubris of that: They decide what is important. Because we can’t. That’s what it says. That’s what they believe.

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment. I worked hard to gain and exercise that judgment. The myth further holds that no judgment of importance is more important than The Times’; that’s why, every night, it sends out to the rest of newspaperdom its choices. News isn’t news until it’s reported and it’s not important until The Times says so.

Our supply of news is dictated to us minute by minute, day by day. That doesn’t mean though that it is the only news out there. An incredible amount of new worthy things are going on everyday – from the bad to the good. Just because the large majority of it doesn’t make it through the editorial “money” filter doesn’t change the fact that those events or information isn’t news.

The news isn’t about the reporting of it. It isn’t about the people writing about it. News is about the event, the happening, the information. It is about the people who were involved with the event. It is about the people who made the happening happen. It is about the people who created the information.

What the new media, blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook (to a lesser degree) did was to allow the people responsible for creating the news to be the ones that distributed the news. Or as Dave Winer put it – “The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman”. No longer is our flow of news being dictated to us by the select few and what they think is important. We are getting to make those decisions now.

However being entrenched as our sole providers of what is important in the world isn’t something that the news industry will give up without a fight. Rather than try and find their way in a new world of news and information distribution that doesn’t flow through their gates, the industry is trying to bend and manipulate this new media into their way of doing business.

The news industry of the past is locked into the believing that if they aren’t the ones reporting the ‘news’ then it doesn’t exist. It is because of this belief that they then turn around and try and claim ownership of the ‘news’. Because they are the ones that paid someone to write about something that happened the industry figures that they have an ownership – a copyright – over it all even right down to barring online linking to that news or information.

In their effort to bend this new media way of getting our news the only thing the news industry is doing is hastening the breaking of their stranglehold on the distribution of the news. They still have all the same abilities to reports the news and the people who are a part of that news. All they are losing is the exclusive rights to distribute it – as they should.

News isn’t distribution and who controls it, news is what is happening in and around our lives except now we are the ones who can distribute it – as it should be.

Myth: Reporting the news is what makes it news is a post from: The Inquisitr