Leading in Turbulent Times
Sulzberger Navigates Between Past, Present at the Once Old Gray Lady
Published: July 21, 2008 NEW YORK (AdAge.com) --
How fast, and how treacherous, are the currents sweeping over The New York Times? This September, its home page -- some of the most valuable real estate on the web -- will start automatically displaying links to competitors' takes on big news. That's not your traditional paper of record.
But don't scrap every old way yet. Craigslist's Craig Newmark, of all people, recently subscribed to the print edition for the first time. He wanted to get better informed about the presidential election, he said. "Hence, subscribing to the Times." The publisher trying to simultaneously navigate the future and the present is Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who nonetheless showed his characteristic bounce when we visited. He smiled when we mentioned Mr. Newmark, who has casually helped destroy newspapers' classified-ad business. "He's such a mensch, isn't he?" Mr. Sulzberger said. "Did he tell you he was now a subscriber to the Times?" Mr. Sulzberger, 56, has been publisher since 1992 and chairman of the family business since 1997 but still gets called "Young Arthur" sometimes. It's partly that enthusiasm and tone that strike some people as insufficiently Timesian. Changed landscapeBut something interesting is happening. The light on him started changing after the Chandlers cashed out of Tribune's troubles and the Bancrofts sold Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch. Mr. Sulzberger, by comparison, blocked a push from Morgan Stanley Investment Management to end his family's control.
The family yanked major money from Morgan Stanley in apparent retaliation. He doesn't seem different; the environment definitely does.
"The fecklessness of the Bancrofts reflected that Arthur had sharp values," a Times reporter said. "He may not be a business visionary, but he is stalwart in a way that they were not." You could even argue that visionaries aren't what they once were. Conditions are cloudy in the summer of 2008. The Fed chairman premised his testimony to Congress on July 15 on "considerable uncertainty." But Mr. Sulzberger remains on the hook for some things you can just feel -- especially if you just survived the newsroom's first-ever layoffs, a response to declining ad revenue, or you own company stock, which hit its lowest price since 1995 last week. The biggest is a brewing battle royal among international news brands. It isn't just Mr. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, after all, racing to claim turf the Times will want to own. It's Thomson Reuters, CNN, the BBC, the Associated Press, even NBC, the Guardian and others. "There's a half-dozen to a dozen news entities that are growing into global shoes," said Ken Doctor, the newspaper vet turned media analyst for Outsell, a research and advisory firm. The Times has moved in the right directions in the past several years, he said, but needs to put a brick on the gas pedal. It just moved most of its weekly financial tables out of print July 13, not long after newsprint prices reached a 12-year high. "They came to the right decision, but they came to it slowly," Mr. Doctor said. "That is money that could have saved some of those jobs." Its dozens of blogs could be hundreds by now, Mr. Doctor added. The Houston Chronicle has 70 staff blogs and about the same number from community members. More business coverage
As it happens, the Times is about to dramatically expand its business coverage online, gradually introducing a slew of pages on subjects including the economy, energy, small business, personal finance and enterprise technology, according to Vivian Schiller, senior VP-general manager of NYTimes.com.
Built on the model of DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin's popular blog for the business section, each one will include original reporting and commentary from a dedicated staffer, news aggregated from elsewhere, relevant tools, e-mail newsletters, mobile applications and more. Despite this expansion into the Journal's core competency, Mr. Sulzberger avoids talk of direct confrontation. As a London correspondent for the AP from 1976 to 1978, when he joined the Times, he saw British papers react when Mr. Murdoch took over the Times of London.
"It didn't help them, because they stopped remembering who they were," he said. "We're not going to." His confidence in the brand can occasionally sound wishful.
"The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Newsday or any other competitor can't steal our readers," he said. "We can lose them. And we're not going to lose them." He doesn't mean this literally. Mr. Sulzberger is as aware as anyone that the Times reported paid weekday circulation of 1.1 million in the six months ending March 31, down 3.85% year on year. Paid Sunday circulation fell 9.26% to 1.5 million.
But the number of people who have subscribed at home for two years or more, a group that tends to keep subscribing, has risen to 820,000 from 550,000 three years ago, Mr. Sulzberger said.
"Think about that as a solid print base to lever yourself into your digital future."
Brand promise
The Times brand also still towers above most, a point not lost on advertisers, said Denise Warren, senior VP-chief advertising officer at The New York Times Media Group.
"That's what sets us apart in this kind of marketplace," she said. "They really get the brand promise of The New York Times and what it delivers."
As a guiding principle, however, "We're not going to lose them" may suffer a little from overconfidence. The company governs from the top down, but the fluidity out there requires a flatter structure, one editor said.
"Nobody's on top of the heap right now; everyone's still trying to figure it out," the editor said. "[And] in that process of figuring it out, you have to embrace that entrepreneurial spirit in everybody in the building."
If he hasn't made an entrepreneur of most, Mr. Sulzberger certainly has hired some innovators. The research-and-development group formed in January 2006 under Michael Zimbalist, former head of the Online Publishers Association, has stocked its lab with weird media gizmos to explore.
"You need to be adjusting course as you go," Mr. Zimbalist said. Mr. Sulzberger correctly predicted as much in a 1998 speech arguing that new media would require newspapers to manage severe change, drop their institutional remove and become more accessible to readers. Now that's becoming a concrete practice at the Times.
Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations, described an ethos known internally as Times Open -- which includes the automated links to other sources, called Times Extra, going live in two months.
The idea is to weave the Times into the internet by making Times content friendlier to application developers, using distribution tools such as RSS readers and building community tools such as Times People, which lets friends recommend Times articles.
"We're competing by collaborating," Mr. Frons said.
Setting the agenda
The trick for the Times will be finding the right mix of competition and collaboration. Whether you love or hate the Times, it plays a big part in setting the national agenda. Its brand depends on maintaining that dynamic. Mr. Sulzberger is right to brag that its site is the most blogged-about news source in the country. Others, of course, have their own ideas about running the Times -- and its declining ad revenue and paid circulation have given them an unprecedented opening. After the challenge to family control from Morgan Stanley, two hedge funds accumulated a big stake and threatened to run their own candidates for the board. Mr. Sulzberger struck a compromise, giving them two seats. The directors, the first outsiders to reach the board since the company went public in 1967, promptly quieted down. One declined to comment to Ad Age, deferring to Mr. Sulzberger, and the other did not respond to messages.
"I really do believe that our two dissidents, if you will -- although we've now embraced them -- have come to understand that the issues we face are complex," he said.
Call that good news about bad news.
Those complex issues are the same ones throwing a new light Mr. Sulzberger's way. It's not just that he and his family have held the Times while other owners have quit newspapers, although keeping the next generation of the family together will be no small feat. There are 13 family members in his generation, the fourth, and 27 in the youngest; he convenes semiannual gatherings and other contacts as seems warranted.
But the challenges also force him to focus on strategic questions about the paper, its transformation to a digital-information company and the broader media business. That's preferable to episodes such as the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication scandal. In an infamous incident, Mr. Sulzberger showed up at a company crisis meeting holding a toy stuffed moose. It was a gimmick meant to symbolize things that people were afraid to say, but nobody was in the mood for goofy shtick. He wouldn't repeat it.
"Obviously not," he said. "The anger that came out of that meeting, it was so palpable that the moose wasn't a necessary tool, it became clear," he said. "It just wasn't. Now, it had proven necessary in other situations, but it wasn't in that one, so no. "But look, if that's the biggest mistake I make as leader of The New York Times Co., this is a good thing."
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=129774
All the news has print in fits
Times research-and-development chief Michael Zimbalist says the newspaper has to continue changing because the world keeps changing even faster -- and events last week seemed to support his point.
Two New York papers, Rupert Murdoch's Post and Mort Zuckerman's Daily News, set aside their vicious duel long enough to consider cooperating.
However, newspaper readership in the top 100 markets turned out to have grown for the second big Mediamark Research survey in a row, according to an analysis from the Newspaper National Network.
But are people turning to newspaper sites? A Northwestern University Readership Institute study said 62% of respondents had never visited their local daily's site.
Tribune Co., meanwhile, fired the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, David Hiller,on the same day his latest round of layoffs started.
And The Wall Street Journal, which Mr. Murdoch says is going after The New York Times, raised its newsstand price again -- and cut its edit staff.
We're all just trying to keep up.
For more updates, go to AdAge.com/newspaperfutures
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Punch is not a 'business visionary'
Far be it from me to say it, but over at AdAge, that's the word....
Print Journalism Officially in a Crisis, Or, Put Your Hand in the Hand of Your Strongest Competitor?
Maybe just to make it all official, a recent study was conducted on the effects that recent layoffs and budgets cuts are having on the country's newsrooms (spoiler alert: it's bad). The study concluded that newsrooms are smaller despite a greater online need for content, there is less foreign news now than there was three years ago (Lara Logan fans will already be aware of this), and there is even less national news (though as New Yorkers one wonders how long it would take for us to notice this). The good news? Well, there isn't much except that smaller papers seem to be doing better than larger ones.
Meanwhile, over at AdAge Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Jr. is talking to Nat Ives about how the New York Times is navigating these treacherous waters. In a word, co-operation. Starting this fall the Times plans on "automatically displaying links to competitors' takes on big news" on its home page, no less (how very HuffPo) as well as expanding its online business coverage a la Andrew Sorkin's DealBook model: "each one will include original reporting and commentary from a dedicated staffer, news aggregated from elsewhere, relevant tools, e-mail newsletters, mobile applications and more." And while Sulzberger has been the recipient of much criticism of late, particularly after NYT stocks fell to a record ten-year low last week, he has garnered some praise for keeping the Times in the family, "The fecklessness of the Bancrofts reflected that Arthur had sharp values...He may not be a business visionary, but he is stalwart in a way that they were not."
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/newspapers/print_journalism_officially_in_a_crisis_or_put_your_hand_in_the_hand_of_your_strongest_competitor__89740.asp
Just a note on this: the solution doesn't lie in aggregating other people's content, it lies in aggregating your own. Not that anyone really gets this. It's called STORY.
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Print Journalism Officially in a Crisis, Or, Put Your Hand in the Hand of Your Strongest Competitor?
Maybe just to make it all official, a recent study was conducted on the effects that recent layoffs and budgets cuts are having on the country's newsrooms (spoiler alert: it's bad). The study concluded that newsrooms are smaller despite a greater online need for content, there is less foreign news now than there was three years ago (Lara Logan fans will already be aware of this), and there is even less national news (though as New Yorkers one wonders how long it would take for us to notice this). The good news? Well, there isn't much except that smaller papers seem to be doing better than larger ones.
Meanwhile, over at AdAge Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Jr. is talking to Nat Ives about how the New York Times is navigating these treacherous waters. In a word, co-operation. Starting this fall the Times plans on "automatically displaying links to competitors' takes on big news" on its home page, no less (how very HuffPo) as well as expanding its online business coverage a la Andrew Sorkin's DealBook model: "each one will include original reporting and commentary from a dedicated staffer, news aggregated from elsewhere, relevant tools, e-mail newsletters, mobile applications and more." And while Sulzberger has been the recipient of much criticism of late, particularly after NYT stocks fell to a record ten-year low last week, he has garnered some praise for keeping the Times in the family, "The fecklessness of the Bancrofts reflected that Arthur had sharp values...He may not be a business visionary, but he is stalwart in a way that they were not."
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/newspapers/print_journalism_officially_in_a_crisis_or_put_your_hand_in_the_hand_of_your_strongest_competitor__89740.asp
Just a note on this: the solution doesn't lie in aggregating other people's content, it lies in aggregating your own. Not that anyone really gets this. It's called STORY.
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Spelling at the Global Edition of the New York Times
As an Englishman, I did like this from Mediabistro:
The English Have Such a Delicious Sense of Humor
Oh the British and their sense of humor. MenuPages relayed to us this fun little diddy: Seems as though last week over at the NYT Freakonomics blog Stephen Dubner (the book's author) may have had his mind a bit in the gutter. According to the story, in a July 8 post Dubner called out the Economist for a perceived spelling mistake.
Consider this lead from a recent article about a huge Mexican mining company called Fresnillo, which was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange: In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale....They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.
As it turns out, the Economist meant what it said; they were, in fact, referring to the meat-filled British turnovers known as a Cornish Pasty. And just to make sure Dubner never confused the two again, generous folk that they are, they sent Dubner the real thing in the mail. After this we intend to keep a sharp eye out for any perceived "whiskey" misspellings.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/magazines/the_english_have_such_a_delicious_sense_of_humor_89630.asp
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
The English Have Such a Delicious Sense of Humor
Oh the British and their sense of humor. MenuPages relayed to us this fun little diddy: Seems as though last week over at the NYT Freakonomics blog Stephen Dubner (the book's author) may have had his mind a bit in the gutter. According to the story, in a July 8 post Dubner called out the Economist for a perceived spelling mistake.
Consider this lead from a recent article about a huge Mexican mining company called Fresnillo, which was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange: In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale....They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.
As it turns out, the Economist meant what it said; they were, in fact, referring to the meat-filled British turnovers known as a Cornish Pasty. And just to make sure Dubner never confused the two again, generous folk that they are, they sent Dubner the real thing in the mail. After this we intend to keep a sharp eye out for any perceived "whiskey" misspellings.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/magazines/the_english_have_such_a_delicious_sense_of_humor_89630.asp
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Monday, 21 July 2008
How to dismiss a distraction
Tell him to retire.
I've done this before but the weekly headlines given to Safire's column in the International Herald Tribune on language just give themselves to my urge to post on getting rid of Safire and finding someone younger, more globally engaged and more interesting.
How to dismiss a distraction
By William Safire
Published: July 20, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/opinion/edsafire.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
I've done this before but the weekly headlines given to Safire's column in the International Herald Tribune on language just give themselves to my urge to post on getting rid of Safire and finding someone younger, more globally engaged and more interesting.
How to dismiss a distraction
By William Safire
Published: July 20, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/opinion/edsafire.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
We don't do celeb buy-ins, the Chinese do.
I was struck by the somewhat sniffy tone of the following article about the Chinese media's interest in a celeb wedding, on the very day on www.iht.com the International Herald Tribune is promoting and running a story about the baby photos of Mr and Mrs Pitt/Jolie.
The IHT is slowly being drawn into the celeb culture obsession and it's a sad thing. A more interesting story to me would be about the decision of the IHT to run the baby picture story.
Actors' wedding leads to Hong Kong media frenzy
By Alexandra A. Seno
Published: July 20, 2008
HONG KONG: The bride said she hoped for a quiet wedding, but the Chinese entertainment news media had other ideas for an A-list Hong Kong actress, Carina Lau Kar-ling.
Her wedding, to be held on Monday in Bhutan to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Chinese cinema's biggest dramatic star and winner of the 2000 Cannes award for best actor, has generated a frenzy among a news industry that spares little expense and goes to great lengths to chase big celebrity stories.
Since the Chinese entertainment news media discovered the wedding locale, the industry has deployed, in typical fashion, considerable human and financial resources to cover the marriage.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/hkmedia.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
The IHT is slowly being drawn into the celeb culture obsession and it's a sad thing. A more interesting story to me would be about the decision of the IHT to run the baby picture story.
Actors' wedding leads to Hong Kong media frenzy
By Alexandra A. Seno
Published: July 20, 2008
HONG KONG: The bride said she hoped for a quiet wedding, but the Chinese entertainment news media had other ideas for an A-list Hong Kong actress, Carina Lau Kar-ling.
Her wedding, to be held on Monday in Bhutan to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Chinese cinema's biggest dramatic star and winner of the 2000 Cannes award for best actor, has generated a frenzy among a news industry that spares little expense and goes to great lengths to chase big celebrity stories.
Since the Chinese entertainment news media discovered the wedding locale, the industry has deployed, in typical fashion, considerable human and financial resources to cover the marriage.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/hkmedia.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
French papers join to sell digital reader
PARIS: Paul-François Fournier, an executive at France Télécom in Paris, thinks he may have found a way to help revive the ailing newspaper industry. It comes in a black plastic rectangular box with a screen half the size of a sheet of copy paper.
The device displays links to several French newspapers, with black-on-gray type and images that look a lot like ink on newsprint. Fournier clicks on one of the links with a stylus, and up come the day's headlines in Le Monde. Another click and a full article, as it appears in the printed newspaper, fills the screen.
Seven French publications have joined France Télécom to test a so-called electronic paper, a technology that offers what its supporters say is the most convincing electronic facsimile of ordinary paper in existence. In the experiment, called Read & Go, 120 people in France have been given electronic paper devices, allowing them to download the contents of the newspapers over France Télécom's wireless network.
France Télécom is not the first company to experiment with putting newspapers onto electronic paper. The Kindle, sold by the online bookseller Amazon in the United States, already allows customers to subscribe to e-paper versions of 19 newspapers from around the world. Amazon plans to sell the Kindle in non-U.S. markets, too, though no timetable has been set, according to Andrew Herdener, a spokesman.
But Read & Go includes something that separates it from the Kindle and many of the other electronic newspaper projects: advertisements. For now they are just sample ads from Orange, the brand name under which France Télécom operates most of its services. But if the test is successful and the service is introduced commercially — something that could happen as soon as next year, Fournier said — France Télécom and the newspapers intend to sell ads, with the revenue shared among them.
France Télécom has not yet worked out many details of the program, like how revenue would be divided, or how the subscriptions to the electronic papers would be offered. But Fournier, senior vice president for online advertising at Orange, said the company wanted to help newspapers succeed in the digital world, something they have generally struggled to do on their own.
"We are there to support this transformation," he said. "We are not there to do their business. We are not very good writers."
French newspapers could use the help. Advertising revenue in national, paid-for dailies fell 9 percent last year alone. Only 42 percent of adults regularly read newspapers in France, compared with 73 percent in Germany and 48 percent in the United States, according to the World Association of Newspapers. As in many other markets, rising online readership and ad sales have yet to make up for the declines in print editions.
With 24 million mobile subscribers in France, the company has a vast audience to whom it could market the service. In turn, Read & Go would bolster use of France Télécom's high-speed mobile network.
"There's incentive on all sides here," said Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. "It's a welcome change from the age-old newspaper business model."
The seven French publications participating in Read & Go include most of the country's major dailies: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien and Libération, which is being added to the test this month; a sports daily, L'Équipe; a business newspaper, Les Échos, and a weekly entertainment and culture magazine called Télérama. Some books and other content are also available.
Marieke van der Donk, senior manager of the entertainment and media practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Netherlands, questioned why the newspapers would allow an outsider to develop an electronic paper business for them, rather than doing it themselves.
"If the media industry is not quick enough, other players will enter their business and take over, like Google did with search advertising," she said.
But Pascal Laroche, director of digital editions at Libération, said his paper saw the project as a supplement for its existing outlets — alongside the print, online and mobile versions of the paper — not as something that would eliminate the need for any of those.
"This will not replace the newspaper," he said. "We hope that, if it is successful, it is the start of a new kind of support" for the industry.
Fournier said the Read & Go editions of the papers would be different from online, print and mobile editions, while borrowing elements from all three. The articles resemble the print versions, for instance, but instead of appearing once a day on the newsstand, they are downloaded and updated automatically, over the cellular network. The advertisements, meanwhile, resemble print display ads but have some of the interactive qualities of online ads, allowing readers to click on them for more information about a product being advertised.
Van der Donk said selling ads may be a challenge because media buyers have been skeptical about electronic paper publications, in part because of a lack of standardized ways to measure audiences for the ads.
Consumers will have to be persuaded, too. A recent global survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that readers, on average, were willing to pay only 47 percent of the cover price of a magazine for the equivalent publication in e-paper form.
And then there is the cost of the devices. In the Read & Go test, Orange is using a reader made by iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The participants in the trial have been given the devices at no cost. But a Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, has been selling iRex readers to subscribers of the paper at a cost of about €500.
Fournier said that at the end of the test, which is set for September, it would poll the users to see how much they would be willing to pay for the service. One possibility, he said, is that France Télécom could subsidize the cost of the devices, in the same way that it offers mobile phones at less than list price to customers who sign long-term contracts. He said Orange was also speaking with other manufacturers, and hoped to be able to offer two or three different models if the service is introduced commercially.
Sabine Gueraud, a Parisian participating in the France Télécom test, said she liked the fact that electronic paper allowed her to read the news both in complete darkness or bright sunlight, unlike a newspaper or a computer screen.
But Gueraud, a researcher at the University of Paris, said there were also some shortcomings. The test does not include one of her favorite reads, a satirical newspaper called Le Canard Enchainé. It is also not possible to clip and save individual articles.
"It's not as easy to use as a newspaper," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/paper21.php
No sign of the IHT in this project. Given it's French HQ, I'd have thought an ideal testing ground for the NYT.
But of course the IHT isn't headquartered in Paris, is it? It is after all the global edition of the NYT, and the executive editor doesn't even hold that title anymore: he's now called Editor, Global Edition (of the NYT).
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
The device displays links to several French newspapers, with black-on-gray type and images that look a lot like ink on newsprint. Fournier clicks on one of the links with a stylus, and up come the day's headlines in Le Monde. Another click and a full article, as it appears in the printed newspaper, fills the screen.
Seven French publications have joined France Télécom to test a so-called electronic paper, a technology that offers what its supporters say is the most convincing electronic facsimile of ordinary paper in existence. In the experiment, called Read & Go, 120 people in France have been given electronic paper devices, allowing them to download the contents of the newspapers over France Télécom's wireless network.
France Télécom is not the first company to experiment with putting newspapers onto electronic paper. The Kindle, sold by the online bookseller Amazon in the United States, already allows customers to subscribe to e-paper versions of 19 newspapers from around the world. Amazon plans to sell the Kindle in non-U.S. markets, too, though no timetable has been set, according to Andrew Herdener, a spokesman.
But Read & Go includes something that separates it from the Kindle and many of the other electronic newspaper projects: advertisements. For now they are just sample ads from Orange, the brand name under which France Télécom operates most of its services. But if the test is successful and the service is introduced commercially — something that could happen as soon as next year, Fournier said — France Télécom and the newspapers intend to sell ads, with the revenue shared among them.
France Télécom has not yet worked out many details of the program, like how revenue would be divided, or how the subscriptions to the electronic papers would be offered. But Fournier, senior vice president for online advertising at Orange, said the company wanted to help newspapers succeed in the digital world, something they have generally struggled to do on their own.
"We are there to support this transformation," he said. "We are not there to do their business. We are not very good writers."
French newspapers could use the help. Advertising revenue in national, paid-for dailies fell 9 percent last year alone. Only 42 percent of adults regularly read newspapers in France, compared with 73 percent in Germany and 48 percent in the United States, according to the World Association of Newspapers. As in many other markets, rising online readership and ad sales have yet to make up for the declines in print editions.
With 24 million mobile subscribers in France, the company has a vast audience to whom it could market the service. In turn, Read & Go would bolster use of France Télécom's high-speed mobile network.
"There's incentive on all sides here," said Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. "It's a welcome change from the age-old newspaper business model."
The seven French publications participating in Read & Go include most of the country's major dailies: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien and Libération, which is being added to the test this month; a sports daily, L'Équipe; a business newspaper, Les Échos, and a weekly entertainment and culture magazine called Télérama. Some books and other content are also available.
Marieke van der Donk, senior manager of the entertainment and media practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Netherlands, questioned why the newspapers would allow an outsider to develop an electronic paper business for them, rather than doing it themselves.
"If the media industry is not quick enough, other players will enter their business and take over, like Google did with search advertising," she said.
But Pascal Laroche, director of digital editions at Libération, said his paper saw the project as a supplement for its existing outlets — alongside the print, online and mobile versions of the paper — not as something that would eliminate the need for any of those.
"This will not replace the newspaper," he said. "We hope that, if it is successful, it is the start of a new kind of support" for the industry.
Fournier said the Read & Go editions of the papers would be different from online, print and mobile editions, while borrowing elements from all three. The articles resemble the print versions, for instance, but instead of appearing once a day on the newsstand, they are downloaded and updated automatically, over the cellular network. The advertisements, meanwhile, resemble print display ads but have some of the interactive qualities of online ads, allowing readers to click on them for more information about a product being advertised.
Van der Donk said selling ads may be a challenge because media buyers have been skeptical about electronic paper publications, in part because of a lack of standardized ways to measure audiences for the ads.
Consumers will have to be persuaded, too. A recent global survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that readers, on average, were willing to pay only 47 percent of the cover price of a magazine for the equivalent publication in e-paper form.
And then there is the cost of the devices. In the Read & Go test, Orange is using a reader made by iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The participants in the trial have been given the devices at no cost. But a Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, has been selling iRex readers to subscribers of the paper at a cost of about €500.
Fournier said that at the end of the test, which is set for September, it would poll the users to see how much they would be willing to pay for the service. One possibility, he said, is that France Télécom could subsidize the cost of the devices, in the same way that it offers mobile phones at less than list price to customers who sign long-term contracts. He said Orange was also speaking with other manufacturers, and hoped to be able to offer two or three different models if the service is introduced commercially.
Sabine Gueraud, a Parisian participating in the France Télécom test, said she liked the fact that electronic paper allowed her to read the news both in complete darkness or bright sunlight, unlike a newspaper or a computer screen.
But Gueraud, a researcher at the University of Paris, said there were also some shortcomings. The test does not include one of her favorite reads, a satirical newspaper called Le Canard Enchainé. It is also not possible to clip and save individual articles.
"It's not as easy to use as a newspaper," she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/paper21.php
No sign of the IHT in this project. Given it's French HQ, I'd have thought an ideal testing ground for the NYT.
But of course the IHT isn't headquartered in Paris, is it? It is after all the global edition of the NYT, and the executive editor doesn't even hold that title anymore: he's now called Editor, Global Edition (of the NYT).
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Can Newhouse keep Condé Nast's gloss going?
NEW YORK: When the wizards at Condé Nast Publications recently marched a prepress issue of Brides magazine through an in-house review, Si Newhouse, the company's chairman, wondered aloud whether a few of the letters on the cover were a tad too close together.
As it turned out, they were.
Newhouse rarely misses a chance to vet his magazines before they go public and, like a shopkeeper unwilling to trust anyone else's tally, still personally hand-counts ad pages in his magazines and their competitors - even as Condé Nast has grown from just a handful of publications to 26 in the United States alone, and dozens of others elsewhere.
Yet this boss with the exacting eye, who presides over a multibillion-dollar empire built on gloss, style, consumption, fluff and substance, is almost universally described as shy, strikingly ill at ease in conversation, and so unassuming that he rarely draws attention to himself or gives a direct order.
Newhouse (Samuel I. Newhouse Jr.) defies the image of the media baron driven by love of limelight, political influence or money. But largely because of him, Condé Nast - an arm of his family's privately held company, Advance Publications - is unlike any other major American publisher.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/SI21.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
As it turned out, they were.
Newhouse rarely misses a chance to vet his magazines before they go public and, like a shopkeeper unwilling to trust anyone else's tally, still personally hand-counts ad pages in his magazines and their competitors - even as Condé Nast has grown from just a handful of publications to 26 in the United States alone, and dozens of others elsewhere.
Yet this boss with the exacting eye, who presides over a multibillion-dollar empire built on gloss, style, consumption, fluff and substance, is almost universally described as shy, strikingly ill at ease in conversation, and so unassuming that he rarely draws attention to himself or gives a direct order.
Newhouse (Samuel I. Newhouse Jr.) defies the image of the media baron driven by love of limelight, political influence or money. But largely because of him, Condé Nast - an arm of his family's privately held company, Advance Publications - is unlike any other major American publisher.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/20/technology/SI21.php
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
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