Another one gets personal

You could say another one bites the dust. But I'd rather say another one gets personal.

(Visit: http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2010/11/board_members_of_la_nacion_confirm_closu.php)

Full text from EditorsWeblog:

Board members of La Nacion confirm closure of print edition

Posted by Emma Heald on November 16, 2010 at 9:50 AM
Board members of Chilean newspaper La Nacion approved on Friday the closure of the daily's print edition due to circulation decline. The 93-year-old newspaper will be only available online, Milenio reported.

According to media reports, the last print version will circulate on November 28, Efe revealed. However, neither the publishing company nor the government, which owns 69 percent of the newspaper's shares, could confirm the date. "The newspaper will not close," said government spokeswoman Ena Von Baer to Efe. "The government's desire is to keep the newspaper. It has asked the directory that this diary is maintained in a sustainable manner that suits the new time."

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Heady

No other word for it: Heady. Now let's add three more apps to the growing list of ways to personalize your news and advertising consumption. Your personal newspaper, if you will.

But let's also remember that the key driver here is the new platform: the I-Pad. Yes the experiences of these services are great improvements over the previous generation of personalized newspapers (for the PC platform) such as MyYahoo and IGoogle and Kibooko.com and ICurrent.com -- all of them from the beginning of time, which, of course, was 1993 at the MIT Media Lab and Fishwrap.

But, anyway, let's add Pulse News, Flipboard and FLUD to the lexicon, and the history of the personal newspaper.

And the platforms will keep coming. Long live the king: Personalization.

(You want to see it yourself: http://mashable.com/2010/09/08/ipad-social-news-apps/)

Or read it here:

As news consumption shifts to the personalized social news stream, the platforms we use to consume the news are also changing.

With its media-friendly design, the iPad is the first mobile device to create an environment perfect for real-time news consumption that maintains the sophistication and style of traditional print magazines and newspapers.

Pulse News, Flipboard and FLUD are three apps paving the way for rich, personalized news experiences on the iPad. Each reinvents what it means to read the news by creating a more dynamic, social and visually stimulating way to consume information.

Flipboard and Pulse News are particularly interesting because they both leave it to the user to define the term “news” on their own. They also compel the reader to include their social network friends in the process. Below, we break down all three for a look at how the iPad changes the way we get our news.

1. Pulse News for iPad

Pulse News for iPad transforms the news gathering and reading approach and perfectly appropriates those practices for optimal consumption on the iPad.

The $3.99 application is more than a stylized RSS reader, and includes Twitter and Facebookintegration as well as built-in functionality — powered by Posterous — that lets users create their own My Pulse mini blog and automatically share their favorite stories with friends.

As a news reader, Pulse does not disappoint. Application users can select from featured sources, add their Facebook and Twitter accounts as content sources, connect their Google Reader accounts or add individual RSS feeds or websites. The application supports up to 20 different news sources, each displayed horizontally with photos and text to depict each story. Users who activate My Pulse get an additional five slots for sources.


Stories can be viewed in landscape or portrait mode, text or web format, shared on Twitter or Facebook, and “Pulsed” (added to a user’s My Pulse blog). Users can also flip from one story to the next.

Pulse comes in iPhone and Andriod-friendly versions as well, which makes for a news reading experience that extends beyond the iPad and is almost universally accessible.

Price: $3.99
Notable Features: My Pulse, and Bump technology for instantly discovering friends’ sources.
Lacking: Categories for newspaper-like navigation would be a welcome addition.

2. Flipboard

Flipboard is designed to be a personalized social magazine. It’s equal parts news reader, Twitter application and Facebook client, surfacing the latter two for stories in the form of videos, photos and URLs as shared by the user’s social network friends. As such, it is the most avant-garde when it comes to reinventing the way we consume news.

The very first thing users are greeted with when they launch the app is a stunning photo slideshow. The slideshow is created from photos that are pulled from Flipboard news sources, so once users configure their Twitter and Facebook accounts, the slideshow will also incorporate photos shared by friends on those social networks.

Users can flip the page to edit Flipboard’s contents. This is where the user will go to configure their Facebook and Twitter accounts (multiple accounts are not supported just yet) and add content sources as sections. Sections can be anything from a news outlet or a blog, to a Twitter account or list.


Content sections include the photos, videos and text as shared by friends and pulled from the original source. Each section has a magazine-meets-newspaper feel to it and users can easily breeze through each stylized section by flipping the page.

Flipboard does limit application users to nine sections and does not include support for Google Reader. These limitations are punctuated by the somewhat limitless and Google Reader-friendly options provided by other iPad news readers. Still, Flipboard is not a news reader in the traditional sense, so it should not be approached as such.

Flipboard is free, and as such it’s a must-try application for social media users in search of an alternative way to browse status updates.

Price: Free
Notable Features: Stunning slideshows and incredible Facebook integration (users can “Like” and comment on stories)
Lacking: Extensive source support

3. FLUD

FLUD closely resembles Pulse News in purpose and design. The $3.99 application is built to feature news stories from user-defined sources. The app highlights stories with photos in a magazine-like fashion.

FLUD presents app users with several news sources to get started. Users can click the wrench icon to edit those preferences, select from feature feeds, search for feeds or connect their Google Reader account to select from those feeds.

In landscape mode, stories appear to the right of feeds. In portrait view, stories appear above feeds. The app displays each article in “Text View” to highlight just the text and photos for each story, but users can also tap on “Web View” to view the story as it would appear on the site.


FLUD has one design element that distinguishes it from the competition: Categories. The application distinguishes sources by type, so users can navigate to view just the technology, creative, politics, business, science, lifestyle, entertainment or sports sections individually. By sectioning news based on their sources, FLUD is still able to reinvent the way we consume news while maintaining familiar elements for easy digestion.

Unfortunately, FLUD is lacking in the social media department. Individual articles can be shared and posted to Facebook or Twitter, but users are not able to use either social network as a news source.

Price: $3.99
Notable Feature: Intelligent, auto-defined categories
Lacking: Source support for Facebook and Twitter

BONUS: The Early Edition

The Early Edition iPad app is just a heavily stylized feed reader, and much less social in nature than Flipboard or Pulse News. But, the application’s stellar presentation of feeds is what makes it stand out from the rest.

The Early Edition looks and feels like a newspaper powered by feeds.

Users can keep the plethora of pre-populated feeds as sources, add their own sources or connect their Google Reader account to pull in those feeds. News sources are automatically separated into newspaper-friendly categories like Business, World News, Politics and Food and Wine, but app users can create their own news section should they so choose.


Since the app is structured like a newspaper, users can view article snippets on the front page of each section, flip between pages and select individual stores to view the full text. Individual articles can be viewed in their original web format, and also be sent to Instapaper. The Early Edition works like a typical news reader in the background, marking stories as read and removing them from each “edition” of the paper after each refresh or fetch.

The application does have it quirks. For instance, users can’t easily move feeds between sections or move sections to reorder them. Still, at $4.99, the application creates an enjoyable news reading experience that personalizes the paper and makes your feeds feel more like colorful news stories.

Price: $4.99
Notable Feature: Customizable newspaper-like sections
Lacking: Social media integration

It's already happening

Yes, Google has flip board. And there is CRAYON, and there is twitter.times. I-Google. And Daily Me. And ICurrent.com and Kibboko.com. And there is Tabbloid. Yes, there are numerous sites that take your choices, translate your interests into RSS feeds and present you with a page of stories, some looking newspaper-like and others looking web-like.

Tweet Tweet

Whatever the source of a newspaper style presentation, the personal newspaper arises.

Here is probably the most innovative to date: Paper.li.

This puts daily me to bed, as they used to say every evening as they cranked up the press to print the newspaper.

(Visit: http://gigaom.com/2010/08/29/let-a-thousand-personalized-newspapers-bloom/)

Let a Thousand Personalized Newspapers Bloom
By Mathew Ingram Aug. 29, 2010, 11:42am PDT 5 Comments

Mathew Ingram
I wrote recently about Paper.li, a service from a Swiss company called Small Rivers, which pulls in your Twitter stream and extracts any links shared by those you follow, then displays those links in a newspaper-style format. (The company was recently funded by Kima Ventures, whose co-founder bought the French newspaper Le Monde.) More and more Twitter users I follow seem to be making use of the service to construct their own personalized newspapers. Here are a few of the ones I have come across (if you’re interested, my Paper.li is here):

Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)
You can easily create Paper.li newspapers around Twitter lists, such as Robert Scoble’s list of influential technology types (full disclosure: I am on this list) and Spigit VP Hutch Carpenter’s Innovation list. You can create Twitter-stream newspapers from specific hashtags as well, such as #climate or #autism. There are also a few celebrities using Paper.li to create papers from their streams, including British actor and author Stephen Fry, comedian Eddie Izzard and former pop superstar Boy George.

The service — which is still in alpha, but says it plans to launch a beta soon — is much like the “Daily Me” concept (a term coined by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte) that many services have tried to deliver. Many of these services try to learn from articles you say you like, in the same way that music services such as Pandora try to learn from your behavior. (There’s another Twitter-based service called Twitter Times that takes a newspaper-style approach.) What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.

An old dog

The saying goes you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well with the internet, none of the old saws work.
The over 50 generation is embracing social media.

(Check out http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx)

That means that newspapers and especially weeklies that have been clobbered by the division of their readership between over 50 year-old habits of consumption and under-50 year-old habits, now have a nexus where the two meet: social media.

In other words the print-centric generation and the web-centric generations now have neutral, mutual ground in social media. That provides real new opportunities for newspapers and weeklies if they can tie the two together.

Here's the overview story. If you want the whole story you'll have to order the report:

While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

Between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%--from 25% to 47%.
During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%--from 13% to 26%.
By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%.
“Young adults continue to be the heaviest users of social media, but their growth pales in comparison with recent gains made by older users,” explains Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and author of the report. “Email is still the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, but many older users now rely on social network platforms to help manage their daily communications.”

One in five (20%) online adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day, up from 10% one year ago.
Among adults ages 65 and older, 13% log on to social networking sites on a typical day, compared with just 4% who did so in 2009.
At the same time, the use of status update services like Twitter has also grown—particularly among those ages 50-64. One in ten internet users ages 50 and older now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.

ABOUT THE SURVEY
This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are primarily based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults, age 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English. A combination of landline and cellular random digit dial (RDD) samples was used to represent all adults in the continental United States who have access to either a landline or cellular telephone. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=1,756), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting telephone surveys may introduce some error or bias into the findings of opinion polls. For more information, please see the Methodology Section.

In a nutshell

Newspapers have moved their emphasis to online,and seen year after year percentage growth. Until now. Check this out.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-how-income-from-news-readers-stagnates-despite-growth/

How Income From News Readers Stagnates Despite Growth

Here is the current dilemma, for many a consumer online news publisher, summed up in a graph pair…

The chart shows that monthly unique visitors per week at the top 10 Norwegian newspaper sites rose from 4 million (2003) to 10 million (2006) to 16 millionm (2009) but that the rate per visitor dropped during the same period (from $1.5 basically to $2.1 to $2.0 during the same period.)


(visit http://paidcontent.org/images/editorial/_original/media-norges-online-challenge-o.png)

In slides presented to investors today, Schibsted‘s Norwegian publisher Media Norge says: “Overall traffic levels may be reaching saturation and online ad prices are stagnating...”



Most publishers know this, but few actually disclose their average revenue per user. Media Norge is a stand-out in that regard. Giving us a rare insight, it acknowledges average income per monthly unique visitor of two Norwegian kroner (that’s $0.32 or £0.21) is now less than it was back in 2006.

So Media Norge, which publishes Norway’s largest paper Aftenposten and classifieds site Finn.no, told investors it will “focus on improving traffic quality and value - loyalty over heads and eyeballs”.

This sounds an awful lot like Mirror Group Digital director Matt Kelly’s oft-argued thesis that readers from search engines are too fleeting to monetize. In Kelly’s case, Mirror.co.uk has hived football and showbiz news off to separate niche sites in a bid to cultivate loyalty. In News Corp.‘s case, The Times has blocked search engines from crawling its site.

For the Scandinavian group, like other publishers, the search for “quality” will go hand-in-hand with a resumption in selling content. “The climate for selling content to readers online is improving,” its slides say. “Media Norge plans experimentation, launches and enhanced monetization.”

It’s also planning to shave 100 million kroner ($16.2 million or £10.4 million) from its online costs through synergies and sharing of group facilities.

Media Norge Q2 revenue is 8.5 percent up from last year, though Aftenposten specifically has come in three percent down, but both posted big pre-tax profit rises after cutting costs.