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

A timely start to the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin with Vivian Schiller, ex-president/CEO of NPR. While quoting some of the bad news in the annual State of the Media report for 2011, Schiller outlined seven reasons to be cheerful: Conditions finally right to give paywalls a fair shake. What has changed, she said is that while scale still matters, brand is back. The other thing is that you

National Public Radio is one of the media success stories of the past year, with audiences at an all-time high. Interest in the presidential election helped boost audiences to a record 21 million listeners per week, an increase of 9%. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller says the rise is part of a long-term steady trend up, and NPR being described as the most successful hybrid of old and new media. Schiller

News editors are slowly realising that video on the web is not TV. And interestingly, it is often newspapers that are leading the way. In this clip on Beet.tv, Vivian Schiller, general manager at the NYTimes.com, explains how she had to unlearn much of what she knew about video journalism after years in TV news at CNN and Discovery. For example, TV folks try to avoid having a talking head,