In the session on paywalls at the ISOJ, Jorge Meléndez, vice president for new media, Grupo Reforma (Mexico), explained how the newspapers have had paywalls since 2002. The newspaper sites were free for the first two years. But they realised there was a very small online advertising market so the group just did it. Part of this involved an active strategy to convert newspaper subscribers online. The impact of the paywall was

Figuring out how and whether you want to get into journalism can be a challenge for students as they embark on their college education. We had several questions around this topic in the first-year undergraduate course at UBC in new media and journalism that I teach with my colleague Candis Callison. In particular, students wanted to know about promising, emerging journalists in Canada who they could look to as role

Earlier I took part in a live blog discussion with Global News on the role of social media in the protests in Egypt.  Here are my initial thoughts on what is happening in Egypt and the significance of social media. I used to be based in Cairo in the early 1990s for the BBC. In countries like Egypt, part of the government’s power comes from controlling the media. What social

Google has hired two of the leading researchers in visualization. In an understated post entitled That was fast!, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg announced that they had joined Google. Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking collaborative visualization platform Many Eyes. They left and set up Flowing Media a few months ago. But in the post dated August 5, the pair said they were “bidding the company adieu.”

This presentation by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, highlights how media habits in the US have changed in the past 10 years. It highlights how internet use has changed from being based around a stationary and slow computer to mobile connections built around storage and services in the cloud. The presentation was delivered at the Newhouse Monetising Online Business conference How Media Consumption Has

The CBC has released an interim report (PDF) into its news content across television, radio and online. CBC News editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire said the News Balance Report “adds to a considerable body of research we use to ensure our journalism continues its leading role in establishing and performing to best industry practices.” Among the areas covered by the report is a comparison of the issues covered by TV, radio and

We shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that most of news still comes from traditional sources. This is the conclusion of a study in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that most original reporting still comes from primarily newspapers, followed by television and radio, despite the proliferation of digital media. Newspapers accounted for two-thirds of new information, followed by TV at 28% and radio at

Director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, on the future of journalism at Minnesota Public Radio. He talks about the potential to produce better journalism now then ever before. His concerns: the unbundling of content and the challenge of monetising civic news. (Via Project for Excellence in Journalism)

Vancouver-based Orato.com used to describe itself as the “only news site in the world dedicated to First Person, citizen-authored journalism”. The citizen journalism site is perhaps best known for assigning two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women whose remains were found on his farm. The concept behind Orato was

Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt encapsulated the challenge facing newspapers in an interview with the FT (only available to subscribers). He highlighted that there was always an uncomfortable relationship between news gathering and the profitability model.  News, itself, did not produce revenue.  Profits came from the bundling of news with advertising and other services: So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of