Trends In Newsroom 2010

The multitude of online competition that newspapers and the media as a whole face is exaggerated by what is arguably the Internet’s most disruptive trait; the freedom readers have to browse any source from around the world at will. Increasingly savvy readers use this new power to customize their news consumption, viewing only the information they want from only their preferred publications. This ‘personalized news’ has substantial and unavoidable implications for newspapers.

Over the past few years, little orange buttons have been popping up on websites of all kinds, representing XML, a computer language that has provided newspapers with a type of news distribution previously unimaginable: Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Websites integrating XML into their programming make it easier for readers to browse news; news outlets’ ‘RSS feeds’ can be subscribed to with one simple mouse click, instantly sending the latest headlines from those sites to an RSS reader, a freely downloadable software.

RSS has facilitated the trend towards personalized news. Newspaper websites divide their RSS feeds into sections, subjects and even columnists to which readers subscribe at will. But newspapers also quickly realized that RSS could be exploited to provide readers with personalized services, services that ultimately increase page views and reinforce brand loyalty while simultaneously helping them to browse other sources.

All this talk of customization sounds wonderful: who would complain about getting only the news they want, not wasting time browsing through material that has no personal significance? But reading only for individual preference could have its downsides, for newspapers as well as for society.

The established newspaper subscription business model is dead on the Internet. In its place, new economics are emerging, economics in which users will remain free to browse the Web while paying minute quantities to access certain content through a seamless system. The system on which this new economy is based is called micropayments.

Personalization doesn’t only pertain to text. The array of new media and new forms of distribution mean that newshounds are going to want their customized content through their medium of preference. Podcasting, one of the hottest trends on the Internet, has thus invaded the lives of print journalists.

To get an idea of how newspaper podcasting is evolving, particularly the daily audio news round-up, The Editors Weblog spoke with Rob Curley, Vice President of Product Development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, (New Media Director at the Naples Daily News at the time of the interview), Guy Ruddle, Podcast editor at the UK’s Daily Telegraph, and Howard Saltz, Associate Editor/New Media & Strategic Development at the Denver Post. All three papers have introduced daily podcasts, and although their three employees agreed that some of the kinks need working out, they also urged newspapers to experiment.

In the course of 2006 the Flemish financial newspaper “De Tijd” (content), Philips and iRex technologies (device), Belgacom (network), Agency.com and i-Merge (both interactive advertising agencies) joined forces with the Flemish Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT) to explore the technicalities, user attitudes and business models regarding the e-paper.

The eReader, a reading device based on the e-ink technology, was tested in a living lab setting by 200 test users for a period of 2,5 months (April-June). Each day “De Tijd”, as well as personal documents in PDF format, could be downloaded and read.
The test users constituted a representative sample of “De Tijd” readers. This implied that the panel had a non-typical profile as it mostly consisted of more highly educated men, with high computer skills and a busy job…

The opinions on what constitutes the best and/or most plausible scenario for e-Paper in the short and long term were very diverging among the actors interviewed. Nevertheless, some clear patterns could be discerned…