Plus prosaïquement, je vois 3 obstacles majeurs à l’introduction du payant.

1. La culture du manque d’imagination
2. L’économie du web favorise le gratuit
3. Les acteurs non-commerciaux se foutent bien du payant

Lire la suite sur Owni.fr

No related posts.

DépensesPubliques.com (PublicExpenditures.com) aims at making a city’s finances more transparent and accessibel to every citizen. I’ll develop it in collaboration with Jeff Mignon. Here’s the project description to be read on the NewsChallenge website:

DepensesPubliques.com makes public finances transparent. Transparency means accessibility, of course. It also means understanding. Starting with municipalities, we’re going to mine data and add layers of automated and user-generated context that will add value to this financial data.

A clearer view of his/her city’s finances will give the taxpayer more elements to argue and make a more educated choice on Election Day.

The front-end will give the user not only the cost of an item on the public expenditures list. It will also provide examples of projects of equivalent value and the price other cities have paid for such items. The goal is to illustrate concepts such as opportunity costs and efficiency.

Far from indulging in populism, we’ll carry out serious journalism. We will provide context and explanations to each item, by crossing data, by asking users for details or by sending a journalist in the field.

The first step will be to unlock access to about 40 Go of accounting documents and put them in the open, on Google Docs or Document Cloud, for instance.

Not only will our efforts pressure public officials to become more transparent, it will also encourage our fellow journalists to demand more public information.

Second, we will build a semantic engine that will turn accounting charts into computer-readable data.

Third, we will provide a front-end to display the data. We will build a CMS where users will be able to enhance, and contribute to, the data sets. More importantly, we will build an API to allow local news media to use our data.

Imagine an article about a mayoral promise of doing this and this. If the outlet printing the story is able to automatically display a box with the financial details of the project, it makes it easier for the journalist and the reader to keep public officials in check.

Read the rest and share your thoughts on the Knight website!

Here’s a (ok, terribly designed) mock-up of the front-end in French:

Related posts:

1. Outsmarting The Google Neo: The Google. Morpheus: Do you want to know what...

First, an article by media economics guru Robert Picard, who argues that classifieds will recover with the economy. After all, he said, each recession hits newspapers harder but they always get better in the end.

At the same time, Alan Mutter published a post about real-estate classifieds, which account for roughly 30%-50% of the category. According to the Newsosaur, realtors are increasingly leaving print for the web. When they do buy newspaper ads, it’s only to appease their clients!

What’s happening here is that a preeminent media economics scholar fails to understand a massive shift in media economics. Picard has been arguing for a while now that online classifieds couldn’t make up for all the print market because they’re worth much less. No kidding. Craigslist is for free, isn’t it?

Based on that argument, he says that the market has just been hit by the recession. Otherwise, the addition of print and web expenditures should match previous levels, shouldn’t they?

What Picard – and others – fails to see is that value cannot be measured with dollars anymore. The rules of the game have changed. You can create as much value for realtors and home-buyers while spending 10 times less.

Some scholars understand it very well, like Yochai Benkler. But guess who media execs will listen to? The liberal political scientist or the tough guy from the econ department?

With the expected recovery, media execs will prepare budgets based on the false assumption of a significant rebound in classifieds. It will not happen. When they realize that, chances are they’ll cut more journalist jobs. Too bad.

Related posts:

1. Where not to study media: MA in Media Economics at the University of East Anglia This is an old rant about my time at the...
2. Turkish investments in Eastern European media: Staying away from news I’ve been writing here that what lacks most in Eastern...
3. I smell a government rat in my news The media landscape is evolving. Nothing new here. The web...

People are usually quick to point out that old-fashioned curmudgeons will go bankrupt or that ordinary people are now able to produce their own news.

Cheaper newsgathering combined to depressed advertisers means that news is moving out of traditional market economics (Wikipedia is the most successful news website, in case you did’t know).

However, it also means that players with deep pockets, who usually stayed outside the realm of the market, have less trouble getting to the playing field now than ever before.

In other words, government- or industry-sponsored news outlets will have a much easier time pushing their stories forward now that foreign bureaus are closing down the world over.

To quantify the process, I built a nice app based on the Google News API to find out the share of articles that were paid by a government or another.

Embed code: <iframe src=”http://windowonthemedia.com/ismellarat/ismellarat.php5″ scrolling=no width=552px height=352px></iframe>

It’s here for you to play around. Post any interesting finding in the comments!

Here are the government-sponsored outlets that I listed. Don’t hesitate to suggest another one.

Related posts:

1. Turkish investments in Eastern European media: Staying away from news I’ve been writing here that what lacks most in Eastern...
2. C’est qui qui paye pour mes infos? J’ai lancé il y a quelques jours l’application I smell...
3. Watch out, Vkontakte, Facebook is coming right behind you It’s common wisdom in the online world to say that...

Last winter, I decided to drive across the Caucasus passes at the worst possible time – during a snow storm – so I could be in Yerevan on time to make a few interviews.

It’s only normal that I now enter the job market during a recession. I like challenges.

Why should you make new hires even though your 2009 revenues streams look like the Mojave Desert? Because you know that a recession is the best moment to invest in the future. And young talent is the future.

Why should you hire me? Because I’ve spent the last 3 years looking for ways to make online journalism sustainable, whether on blogs, at university, in the several media organizations I’ve trained in or on the road, looking for fresh ideas in remote countries.

What can I bring you? Apart from an MA-level education, I have experience working with journalists, programmers and managers. At a time when everybody’s at last realizing that journalism will have to look into programming, I have the skills required to bring coders and journalist together in innovative and profitable projects.

What can we achieve together? Anything. I’ve experience working in intercultural environments, I’ve lived and worked in about 6 countries and I’m willing to move to about any city on this planet. If you have a plan, count me in.

Why will I work with you? Because you have radically innovative projects and you’re committed to bettering information online. And because I’ll learn a lot while working with you.

Dear employer, I know you’re out there, so drop me a line (nicolas . at . windowonthemedia.com) or take a look at my résumé. See you around.

Related posts:

1. Zurnal24: How Styria won the Slovenian market In 2003, Austrian publisher Styria came into Slovenia with a...
2. Romania’s Hotnews.ro: from rogue pure player to market leader In early 1999, a group of financial journalists left their...

• Display isn’t adequate online, since it requires a scarcity of publishers to function. We all know that the unlimited inventory of the web pushes prices towards 0.
• Contextual ads don’t work for news. It’s been 10 years since the beginning of contextual and targeted ads. This system works only when users are in the mood for shopping. Google will still advertise offshore finance services in articles about tax evasion and flights to Tbilissi next to items about wars in the Caucasus.
• Classifieds don’t require news anymore. Several media groups (Le Figaro, Hürriyet, Schibsted) have noticed this fact and started to invest massively in online classifieds. Not in journalism.

Add to that that paywalls and voluntary payments don’t cover all the costs of content production (see Jeff Mignon for the paywalls and myself for the tip jar strategy).

Online advertising for news still runs on the old assumption that advertisers need space and attention and that news websites can provide them with it. But let’s face it: this value proposition is dead.

Any website can sell attention, and many do so in much better ways than media companies can. Yesterday’s advertiser now sells ad space itself, as LastMinute’s “50% of revenues must come from advertising” strategy shows.

What revenue streams are left for journalism? Online advertising has to be rethought.

Media brands still command some trust. Rather than selling attention to advertisers, they could start trading in trust. A major problem online is the lack of certainty as to whom is hidden behind an IP address. Consumer reviews can be distorted, as do social websites set up by brands.

Where do media organizations come into this? Their skills in conversation management could put them in the position of a fair broker between companies and consumers. The goal being for companies to pay to have the opportunity to discuss with a website’s audience.

That’s what VillageSoup is doing in Maine (via the Newsosaur). This hyperlocal outlet gives local advertisers an editorialized page to present themselves (here’s one) and lets them display business-related newsitems on a portion of the website. Technically it’s done on a blogging platform.

VillageSoup isn’t going far enough in the editorialization process. Blog posts from advertisers still carry stylistic flaws and typos, for instance. The editorial competences of a news organization could be put to use in helping out advertisers promote their businesses.

What difference with a communication agency? Trust. Journalists would be expected to tell the truth about such and such business they’re promoting and to tell the advertisers the truth about what consumers are saying. This, of course, is concomitant to improving journalistic standards and trust levels.

Related posts:

1. Adblock Plus: Rethinking internet advertising Adblock Plus is an add-on to Firefox that blanks...
2. Online news in Armenia You probably know that Armenia was the first country in...
3. Advertising spend: Crunching the numbers Advertising spend in France and Germany went up in...

17,000 miles, 19 countries and 75 interviews later, I produced this report entitled ‘Online news in post-socialist Europe‘ that provides an overview of the current developments happening on the Eastern front.

If you’re familiar with this blog, you probably know a lot of the examples and good practices that can be learnt from our colleagues in post-socialist markets.

The report explores in-depth the workings of the market for online news in Central and Eastern Europe, from the point-of-view of users, journalists and investors.

It explains why the region still shares common traits, from the as-rich-as-England Slovenia to poorer-than-Namibia Georgia, and why it is home to some of the best online entrepreneurs in Europe while its media executives still do not know how to send an e-mail.

Finally, it gives business developers, media analysts and bloggers a reason to look East more often when trying to find solutions to rescue journalism.

The report is available online as a wiki, so feel free to edit it and add your opinion.

A print edition can be shipped to you via snail-mail for only 39€ (it helps to pay back my travel expenses )

Related posts:

1. Unimedia.md: Moldova’s answer to the post-Soviet media gloom I wrote last week that to start a news website...
2. Turkish investments in Eastern European media: Staying away from news I’ve been writing here that what lacks most in Eastern...
3. Sustaining online news: Rethinking advertising You don’t need to be a genius to understand that...

Everyone, it seems, compares Twitter with Second Life, the next-big-thing that failed to gain traction in 2007, predicting doom and gloom for the current media darling. Look at PaidContent, Clickz and Greg Verdino for the stories.

Although it’s true that journalists always overdo it (no, dear NYT, Twitter is not a household name), Twitter’s growth pattern looks much stronger than Second Life’s.

Take a look at the Google interest over the past years.

I haven’t got the time to compute the numbers now, but it seems clear that interest for Twitter grows much more  rapidly and much higher that it ever did for SL.

It’s interesting to notice, though, that a breaking point occurred in December, 2008, when growth seems to have shifted from a linear pattern to an exponential one. And late 2008 coincides with the beginning of the media and celeb hype around Twitter.

UPDATE 04/30: Apparently there are signs that Twitter is just a bubble ready to burst. More than 50% of users fail to return to the site after 1 month, so that growth won’t be able to make up for the lost users.

Related posts:

1. Twitter in France: Little success Business week just published a detailed article about Twitter. There...
2. Twitter en France : Peu d’intérêt du public Business week vient de sortir un article détaillé sur Twitter....
3. Watch out, Vkontakte, Facebook is coming right behind you It’s common wisdom in the online world to say that...

Database journalism was born in the 1950’s as a synonym for computer-assisted reporting. Since then, computers have become ubiquitous, to the point that database journalism in its original meaning has come to merge with the very definition of journalism.

The developments of the internet have given database journalism a new definition, according to which it defines a process where the database becomes the center of the journalistic work (as opposed to the story in traditional journalism).

Go see. And do add your 2 cents about it.

Related posts:

1. Information vs. journalism During a workshop on the economics of journalism at the...
2. Emotion, victims and Modern Journalism Emotion has permeated media and politics. Appealing to sentiments is...

4 years later, in 2007, Styria decided to shake things up. It launched a free daily, Zurnal24, combined with a real website, zurnal24.si, to conquer the young, urban markets – a strategy Schibsted successfully implemented in France with 20minutes and 20minutes.fr.

Zurnal media hired 110 journalists and other staff and moved its tenfold-bigger newsroom to a brand-new building in a modern Ljubljana suburb. This strong investment bore fruits, as the print edition met its Styria-imposed revenue targets on time despite the current environment, in January 2009.

More impressive is the online success of zurnal24.si. The website achieved its targets by mid-2008, 6 months early. 6 months after the launch, it had reached the readership level of delo.si, the country’s biggest newspaper. It is now the #3 newswebsite in Slovenia, behind the 2 biggest TV stations.

Financially speaking, the website rakes in €50,000 in monthly sales, 10% of Zurnal media’s total income.

How did Styria achieve this? As it did in Croatia with 24sata, it hired the most talented local managers. Online, this meant poaching Milena Kalacun Lapajne, whom I met in Ljubljana, and her team from the national broadcaster and online champion, rtvslo.si.

Concretely, zurnal24 experimented a lot. Although it failed often, most notably with a blog network that didn’t take off, some of the innovations succeeded.

First, a few months after the launch, they decided to mix print and web journalists, integrating the newsroom. Styria cleverly gave a green light and didn’t interfere in the locally-born plans. The offices being in a new, open-space building, the reshuffle cost only €3,000, mostly spent in desk-reorganization. The integration concerned only the editorial department, advertising remaining separate (meaning that online sales aren’t part of discounted bundles as is often the case elsewhere).

Second, zurnal24 ventured into games, so as to get a foot on the juicy in-game advertising market. They outsourced the development of 2 softwares, Ski Challenge and Football manager (the latter soon to be discontinued). 1 game costs about €45,000 to develop and brings back €90,000 in ad revenues, as it appeals to big-name TV players such as McDonald’s or Hyundai. Zurnal24 also embeds Miniclip games on the website, probably to increase pageviews (see Forum4editor’s piece on the subject).

This is all good, but it isn’t really connected to journalism. When asked if zurnal24 would develop news-oriented games (see Paul Bradshaw’s post on games and journalism), Milena plainly said no.

A new portal will be developed this summer, which will drop the failed blog network and replace it with more user-generated content. UGC is currently running slowly with an SMS/MMS service that receives around 5 items a day.

The current crisis shouldn’t be fatal to Zurnal24. Its position as a market leader with growing readership (at a time when the competition is nose-diving) should ensure that it will be the last outlet advertisers stop buying ad space in.

On top of that, the cross-platform approach benefited also to the original weekly. Zurnal gained 100,000 readers, about 30% of its readership (according to figures from Styria).

The moral is: if you want to achieve success, you have to invest massively and cleverly, while letting a local team run the show.

Related posts:

1. Romania’s Hotnews.ro: from rogue pure player to market leader In early 1999, a group of financial journalists left their...
2. Dear employer: I’m on the job market! Dear employer, Last winter, I decided to drive across the...
3. Online news in post-socialist Europe 6 months ago, I left the sinking newspapers of Western...