Cambodian Club of Journalists, Phnom Penh

19 June 2010

This course will look at

Using blogs for research and finding story ideas
RSS feeds for better journalism
Skype and CallRecorder
Mobile journalism (mojo)
Micro-blogging and using Twitter (TweetDeck) for journalism
Visual reporting: Panoramas, Wordle and Soundslides
Web 2.0 tools for reporting
Assessing information quality

Bio of the teacher
Stephen Quinn was a full-time journalist for two decades until 1995, and continues to practise as a journalist. He has worked for regional newspapers in Australia; the Bangkok Post; the UK Press Association, BBC-TV, Independent Television News and The Guardian in London; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney; and Television New Zealand. He was a producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Centre in 2002-03 while running a research centre in Dubai, to re-acquaint himself with new television production technologies.

Dr Quinn became a full-time university academic in 1996. Since then he has written 14 books, scores of book chapters and thousands of journalism articles. The most recent books are and Mojo: Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region and Funding Journalism in the Digital Age. Other books include Asia’s Media Innovators and Australia-UAE: Expanding trade and cultural links, which appeared in 2008. In 2007 he co-wrote with Dr Stephen Lamble Online Newsgathering: Research and Reporting for Journalism. He published three books about convergent journalism in 2005 and 2006. In the past decade Dr Quinn has presented more than 150 academic papers in 27 countries. More than a third have been by invitation.

Dr Quinn contributes to newspapers and magazines, consults for media companies, presents at industry conferences, and conducts research and training courses for media companies. In the past decade he had run almost 100 training courses in eight countries. He is a consultant for the Ifra Newsplex (based in Germany) and Innovation International (based in Spain), a member f the Counsel of the Newsplex, and a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Introduction
The history of journalists’ adoption of newsgathering technologies contains a continuing theme: reporters will embrace new tools if they are relevant – that is, they make the job of storytelling easier – and if the tools are easy to use (intuitive).

Some powerful digital technologies have become available to reporters over the past few years. This course focuses on some of the latest. But please note they require a little practice before they become second nature.

Blogs
Blogs and other related technologies offer new opportunities for journalists. Blog is a word combined from web and log. The word “blogosphere” describes all the content built by blogs, moblogs, podcasts and video blogs (these are discussed later).

Research with blogs
Journalists can use blogs as research tools, but the quality of information varies considerably. Think of them as a convenient electronic tool for listening to scuttlebutt. It’s a bit like listening to conversations on public transport or at social events. Sometimes they will stimulate ideas for stories.

Use blogs to discover what people in the blogosphere are saying about local businesses or sportspeople or politicians. But remember that blogs are more influential than they deserve because Technorati, like Google, ranks sites based on how many people link to that site. This produces high rankings for bloggers who link to other bloggers. If you find lots of links to a blog, this might mean the blogger is respected and the blogosphere thinks they know a lot about the subject. They might prove a useful person to interview.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is the leading tool for searching blogs. According to Technorati, more than 175,000 new blogs start every day. More than 1.6 million blog posts appear a day, or about 18 a second. As of early 2008 Technorati was tracking 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of social media. Four years earlier Technorati tracked a mere 2.4 million blogs. Now the site simply says it tracks “millions” of blogs. It claims to report within eight minutes of a blog being published.

Google also has a good search tool for finding blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ though it is still in beta, which is geek speak for still being tested.

Also remember that the same search terms typed into a blog search tool such as Technorati will produce different results compared with using those same terms in a search engine such as Fast or Google. So when casting the net wide for information make sure you search both on blogs and search tools.

Exercise
Choose a subject you plan to research. It might be a local person or sporting identity or organisation. Or for the exercise you could use your own name. Search for the name in a web-based tool such as Google or Fast or Yahoo! (putting the full name in quote marks tells the technology you only want mentions of the name that are in a phrase). Then do the same search in Technorati, the blog search tool.

Compare the different results. You will note that these tools search different parts of the Internet. It helps to research something topical because people tend to blog about current events. For example, you would search Technorati for a local sporting identity close to a major game, or a local politician close to an election.

RSS feeds
Blogs can help reporters do better research and consequently better journalism. But blogs are spreading so quickly it is difficult to keep up. A technology known as RSS is available to help keep journalists abreast of the news, and also follow the latest blogs. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. It means journalists can have information constantly fed to them instead of searching for it. Technlogy “pulls” content to your computer, as opposed to being “pushed” with email.

A program known as a news reader (sometimes called a feed reader or aggregator) checks a list of sites the journalist chooses and displays all updated articles. The software provides summaries of web content plus links to the full version of each story. As with email, unread entries are shown in bold.

News readers come in two forms: web-based aggregators that gather feeds for reading in a browser, or desktop news aggregators that can be installed on a computer. The latter can be cross platform, or specific to the Macintosh, Windows or Linux. I use Google Reader because it is part of the Google group of tools, such as Gmail.

Exercise
Set up a Google Reader account. You can use your existing Gmail account to log in. You will need to set up a Gmail account if you do not have one.

Google tools for reporting
Google’s mail tool (Gmail) is useful for journalists. The chat option keeps a transcript of the conversation, so you have content to use when you write a story. You can use the same log-in for Gmail as for Google Reader. Google tools inter-connect with each other, so you have access to Picasa, the free picture editing software, from the desktop.

Skype and CallRecorder
Skype (www.skype.com) is free software that lets you make free phone calls to anyone who has skype installed on their computer. It works best with broadband. If you put money into a skype account, you can call mobiles and landlines that do not have skype. The cost is low for international calls, compared with toll calls, especially from hotel rooms. I make almost all my international calls by skype.

Read this column by Amy Gahran headlined “Skype: Why every journalist should use it”. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=155339

CallRecorder (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/) costs $US16. It used to work only on a Mac running OSX. It links with Skype to record the conversation, using the Mac’s built-in camera. Calls are saved as a QuickTime movie. The local and remote audio tracks of the conversation are recorded on different tracks. So you can select one track to use as the audio for a sound slide. More on sound slides later.

A PC version is now available at http://www.callcorder.com/.

Exercise
Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder.

Online video and multi-media
Over the next few years newspaper journalism will transform itself from its current print emphasis to a focus on a combination of print and multi-media, delivered online.

As that happens, newspapers will compete with broadcast companies to be first with the news. Before the spread of the web, broadcast companies owned breaking news. Radio could interrupt programs to announce the latest news. Television could go live if executives considered the situation appropriate, but only if they had a camera crew at the location. Meanwhile, newspapers had to wait until they were published. Now newspapers can break news online, often ahead of radio and television.

Much research has shown that breaking news drives traffic to newspaper web sites. The most popular form of breaking news, the kind that builds and holds audiences for web sites, is multi-media: news that is some combination of text, video, still images, maps, timelines, chronologies, slideshows and audio.

The simplest and quickest way to get multi-media news on a web site is via the mobile phone. Reporters can also send news back to the office via text messages from mobile phones and via tools such as Twitter (more on Twitter later).

Enter the mojo, a mobile journalist armed with only a mobile phone and a wireless Internet connection. With these simple tools a reporter can get multi-media breaking news onto a newspaper’s web site within minutes of an event being reported, ideally after an editor has looked at it first.

Enter the mojo
At least six companies offer tools for streaming live video from a mobile phone to the web. They are Qik, Shozu and Kyte in the United States, Mogulus in Canada, Bambuser in Sweden and Flixwagon in Israel.

The technical process is simple: Register the mobile phone number with one of these companies. Within seconds you receive a text message with a web link. Select the link and the software loads onto the phone. Thereafter, it takes one button to open the video software or audio recorder on the phone and one more to begin and end filming or recording.

Most of the software is currently only available on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones and a handful of handsets running Windows Mobile. Newspapers need to consider how to pay for data charges because video and audio generate large files, and phone companies charge for data transmitted, not time connected. The best option is to choose an “all-you-can-eat” monthly data package if they are available.

Safdar Mustafa of Al-Jazeera talks about mojos at his channel. The video runs for 2:47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W9q3q_SVZI

In most examples of mojo work, the video is streamed from the reporter’s camera to the software company’s site. Then the newspaper copies selected pieces of video to the newspaper’s web site. A faster option, which would involve negotiations between the software companies mentioned earlier, would be to stream video directly from the camera to the newspaper’s web site. Newspapers considering this option would need to contact the individual software companies.

Recommendations
Of the software tools mentioned earlier, Qik and Bambuser worked best for reporting breaking news as of late 2008. My main criteria for selecting software were simplicity of use and quality of image. Qik is by far the easiest to load onto a mobile phone and use. If the software corrupts, one simply logs in to one’s private section of Qik and requests a repeat of the software. It appears seconds later and takes less than a minute to download onto a phone.

The quality of the video each software package produces varies, depending on how far the phone is from the server, the number of servers the company owns, and the calibre of local wireless broadband networks. Qik’s servers are in California while Bambuser’s are in Sweden. Both offer fast connections, which suggests they have plenty of server power.

Examples of the author’s mojo videos can be found at http://qik.com/mojo1 and http://qik.com/mojo2 and http://bambuser.com/channel/mojo1.

Twitter (aka micro blogging)
One of the big developments since early 2008 has been the concept of micro blogging via the web or mobile phone. Twitter was the original tool (http://twitter.com/). Reporting with tools like Twitter is limited to 140 characters (similar to SMS). A post to Twitter is called a “tweet”.

I originally used a free tool called Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/). But I now find TweetDeck easier to use and it has a cleaner interface. See http://www.tweetdeck.com/. I think TweetGrid is a great tool for monitoring Twitter: http://www.tweetgrid.com/ A video about it is listed in the readings at the end.

Tweetscan (www.tweetscan.com) is like a search tool for tweets. Insert words that interest you, such as earthquake or riot or protest and see who is twittering about these things. Or use TweetGrid. In May 2008 American blogger and journalist Robert Scoble reported the major earthquake in China on Twitter an hour before CNN or major media started talking about it. How did he do that? “I was watching Twitter. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on. Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account. It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.”

Here is a map of the world in which tweets appear from the continent of origin (it seems to have a lag of about 40 minutes). http://twittervision.com/

Also useful way to see what the blogosphere is saying is via Twitscoop. It uses an automated algorithm to monitor hundreds of tweets every minute and extract words mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a tag cloud at http://www.twitscoop.com/. Pierre Stanislas, one of the developers in Paris, said Twitscoop crawls in excess of 20,000 tweets an hour.

For a laugh, watch this mock documentary about a new form of communication called nano-blogging at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s

Think of Twellow as the Yellow Pages for Twitter: http://www.twellow.com/. A journalism graduate student in Buffalo New York, Craig Kanalley, launched a fascinating Twitter project in 2009 called Breaking Tweets. It organises thousands of tweets into a news service. Think of it as “hyperlocal gone global”. Find it at http://www.breakingtweets.com/

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools
Web 1.0 was one-way delivery of information to the audience. Web 2.0 involves interaction and connection between audiences, and is also known as and social networking. “Web 2.0 journalism” is the term that describes the relationship between the Internet, social networking possibilities and reporters. Examples of Web 2.0 tools for journalists include Facebook, Delicious and FriendFeed.

Facebook is an excellent way to find people to interview and story ideas. It has thousands of groups, many of which are useful for journalists. Join a group that relates to your area of interest. Some journalists have found Facebook a quick way to locate a photograph of someone in the news.

Delicious
This weirdly named site (http://del.icio.us/) allows journalists (after they register) to store all their bookmarks in one location on the web. So if reporters are on the road, they always have access to contacts and information.

More importantly, plenty of people make their bookmarks publicly available on the web, which means that it is often possible to locate ready-made sources of research on specific topics: del.icio.us is an excellent research tool for journalists. Visit my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/sraquinn/ to see my links about mobile phones and business models for journalism. More relevant for journalists is this huge collection of links on the subject of internet freedom: http://delicious.com/internetfreedom/ Search the site using keywords.

Visual reporting: Panoramas and Wordle
One new way of combining images and audio online is what has come to be known as a panorama. A panorama is a series of photographs taken over a short period of time and linked via software to produce a continuous single image. Audiences can explore the image by scrolling their mouse around the image.

Here are some good examples from The Washington Post and The New York Times. The first was taken at the Pacific Arch, the national World War II memorial on the National Mall in Washington. The $US 172 million memorial was dedicated in May 2008. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/360/042904-20p.htm

The second panorama was shot on the floor of the New York stock exchange. Vikas Bajaj, who covers finance for The New York Times, describes how the New York Stock Exchange has changed in the age of electronic trading. See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/23/business/20081023_NYSE_PANO.html?src=tp

Click and drag your mouse over either image in any direction to see some amazing detail.

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) describes itself as a “toy” for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak the clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes. A wordle is an excellent and simple way to illustrate news stories such as speeches.

Soundslides
This software, created by American photo-journalist Joe Weiss, has become the default tool for creating multi-media slideshows. Many newspaper photographers take many images at a news event but only one appears in the paper. Slideshows are wonderful ways to publish the spare images on the web, combined with audio. The software is available at http://www.soundslides.com. The demonstration version is free. It costs $US 40 to buy the basic edition and $US 65 for the deluxe edition.

Here is a suggested process for creating a slideshow. Assemble all your images in a clearly marked folder. Number those images in the order you want them to appear. Make sure those photos, already cropped and photoshopped, are in the JPG file format.

Prepare a sound track. It could be a reporter’s voice-over, or music, or an interview, or a file recorded on Skype via CallRecorder, or some combination of these. Make sure you save the sound track as an MP3 file. The sound track is the backbone or skeleton of the slideshow. The duration of the sound track is the duration of the slideshow.

Open the software and select new project. Make sure you know where you saved your project (desktop is simplest), and the name of the folder. You can use the video cited in the references to teach yourself how to use Soundslides. Allow about 5-6 seconds per photo, on average. A slideshow should be about 60 to 90 seconds. So 90 seconds of audio will require 12 to 15 good photos.

Nothing is more boring than image redundancy or repetition. So choose pictures wisely.
Soundslides offers a great way to tell multi-media stories. Sometimes a video of a person speaking can be boring. But that same voice combined with a slide show will produce strong storytelling.

Everything on one site
One good way to remember it all is via FriendFeed, which helps put all your links on one page. Demonstrate: http://friendfeed.com/sraquinn

Online resources
Mark Briggs has written a free book on multi-media for journalists. It’s basic but it includes a good section on Web 2.0: http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/.

You can learn lots about multi-media journalism at this site from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. Multi-media journalist Jane Stevens wrote many of the tutorials: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/

Mindy McAdams, professor of journalism technologies at the University of Florida, has a comprehensive blog about online journalism: http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/

The author’s blog about mobile journalism has a range of information about reporting with only a mobile phone. See http://globalmojo.org

Mark S. Luckie writes an excellent blog about multimedia which should be on your list of regular reads. http://www.10000words.net/

Readings
Jonathan Dube of Cyberjournalist provides an excellent introduction to RSS feeds for journalists. Read it at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001913.php. JD Lasica has written a RSS guide for journalists at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php.

If you use the Pro version of Soundslides, here is a video tutorial on how to use it: http://www.multimediashooter.com/wp/uncategorized/video-tutorial-soundslides-part-1/

Reporters Without Borders has a guide for understanding how people in repressed cultures can publish their blogs: http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

Wine is often associated with love. We open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate a wedding or the birth of a child. We give wine to friends to mark the Chinese new year.

Love and wine brought winemakers Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen together. They met in Australia while working for rival vineyards in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales. Sarah-Kate, a New Zealander, convinced Dan, an Australian, to move to the Central Otago region of New Zealand’s south island.

Central Otago is one of the most visually magnificent places in the world. It is also rapidly becoming known as one of the world’s best regions for cool-climate wine, especially pinot noir. America’s Robert Parker, probably the world’s most influential critic, featured the region in the Wine Spectator magazine.

Jancis Robinson MW, wine writer for the Financial Times, was in Shanghai and Beijing last month to launch the Chinese edition of the World Wine Atlas. She described Central Otago as possibly “the next great pinot region”. And influential Australia critic James Halliday called Central Otago “God’s country” in relation to pinot noir.

Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen have launched their own label in Wanaka in Central Otago (www.maudewines.com), and I had the pleasure of tasting the current vintage and some barrel samples while in Wanaka.

Sarah-Kate makes wine for her own label, Maude, and for a vineyard her parents own, Mount Maude. All are seriously good wines. The 2008 Maude pinot gris spoke of long romantic walks in an orchard, surrounded by the perfume of pears. The 2008 Maude pinot noir is refined yet complex – a lot like a good relationship. The 2008 Mount Maude chardonnay is creamily elegant, with excellent length on the palate.

Barrel samples of the 2009 pinot noir and chardonnay promise even better things. The chardonnay was like walking into a bread shop, to be embraced by aromas of brioche and bread dough. The pinot noir offered a range of red fruits, all contained in an elegant structure of new oak.

Wine speaks so much of love and wonder, and should be enjoyed in excess.

In Australia, where I live, people consume an average of about 80 glasses a year.

Australia makes good pinot noir. But pinot noir from New Zealand’s Central Otago region has been receiving much attention from the world’s influential wine critics.

Rudi Bauer, winemaker for Quartz Reef in Central Otago, is the region’s best-known winemaker. He was one of six people short-listed as international winemaker of the year, the equivalent of a wine-world Oscar. The award will be announced March 20.

Gibbston Valley was an early standard setter in Central Otago, its 2000 vintage gaining the trophy for best pinot noir at the London International Wine Challenge. That wine is so much in demand that it sells for $NZ450 (US$322) a bottle.

In 2008 the Wild Earth 2006 pinot noir received an award for best pinot, and then the trophy for champion red wine, at the International Wine Challenge in London. Last year Cuisine magazine named the wine New Zealand’s best pinot noir.

Wild Earth’s owner Quintin Quider, an American, told me yields were deliberately kept low to improve fruit quality. The vineyard sits at the end of Felton Road, opposite the famous Felton Road Vineyard.

Next door to Wild Earth, another American, Jen Parr, is weaving magic in the vineyard at Olssens, and picking up lots of awards, especially for her whites. Parr’s 2009 Annieburn Riesling is sold out, such is the demand for this sweet delight. The 2009 dry version of the Riesling has elegance and great length, with minerally hints of honeysuckle and lime.

Perhaps the best-known red at Olssens is the Nipple Hill pinot noir, named after a mountain above the property that looks like the breast of a powerful Amazon goddess. It is a friendly, entry-level red with plenty of ripe fruit.

* Published in Asia News, 19 March 2010

Online wine auctions can become an addiction, warns Stephen Quinn

People who know what they are doing can find bargains at online wine auctions. But it’s a lot like gambling: The house usually wins. But when the humble gambler does, it’s time to open a bottle to celebrate.

Like many things in life, the key to online purchases is doing good research so you know what you are getting.

Sometimes, like a player at the casino, we can win big. For example, this past month I bought two and a half cases of classic 2005 and 2006 New Zealand red wine that retails for $45 to $48 a bottle in that country. Michael Cooper’s Buyer’s Guide to New Zealand Wines rated the wines near the top of a nine-point scale – his equivalent of a high silver medal.

He described the wines as “refined, with excellent concentration of fruit”. Unlike some wine guides, Cooper’s book criticises poor wines as well as praises fine ones. Interviewed in Melbourne for the Taste of New Zealand event on February 22, Cooper told me he strives for accuracy and clarity.

“I tell people what I think about the wines honestly,” he said. And refreshingly he added: “You should always treat the views in my book for what they are – one person’s opinions.” It’s the same with this article.
I paid $341.75 for 30 bottles, including postage, freight and buyer’s premium. That works out at $11.40 a bottle.

Sometimes at the casino you can lose badly. So it is with the game of online wine auctions. Late last year I bought a case of 20-year-old Hunter Valley semillon and 18-year-old chardonnay. Hunter semillon with pedigree can last for generations, but only if it has been stored well. This wine had not. Because it was an old wine, the auction house would not refund my money.

That wine went down the sink.

With young wines – vintages from the past five to eight years – most auction houses will give your money back if the wine is corked. Not so with older wines. The lesson here: choose younger vintages unless you know how the wine has been stored. Names of auction houses will not be mentioned to protect the guilty.
This brings us to the auction process. You need to register online and provide a current credit card and an email address. You receive a user name and password via your email address.

Once you log on, bidding for wine involves clicking on the bid button and then confirming that, yes, you would like to buy that wine.

Most online auctions run for between 18 and 36 hours. If someone overbids you, the auction house sends an email advising how much you now need to bid, and provides a link back to the wine, where you can try again.

Online auctions also allow you to set a maximum bid. Bids jump in $5 increments, and bidding usually starts at around $9 or $10 per item.

I recommend setting oneself a limit per item – let’s say $90 a case. Sometimes you need to be strong. It is easy, and tempting, in the heat of the last few minutes to keep bidding. Some primal competitive urge takes over.

Most auctions will continue past the deadline if two or more people are still bidding in the last 10 minutes for an item.

My eagerness to win has cost me in the past. This leads us to the golden rule of online wine auctions: Know what you want and the maximum you will pay. Do your research before you start bidding, and be strong.
Here are a few tips, assuming you have identified the wine you want. Many auctions offer several cases of the same wine in the same lot. Bid low for all of them. Perhaps four cases at $29 each. It’s likely someone else will overbid you for some of the wine. But not always: You can often be left with one of those cases, which you got for a bargain.

Most auction houses charge a buyer’s fee of 15 per cent of the bid, and another $20 a case postage and handline.

Be prepared to lose. Remember the zen of wine auctions: it is better to have bid and lost than not to have bid at all.

* Offered to The Age. Published in Asia News (part of Asian News Network) March 2010

THE world’s largest newspaper printing plant, owned by News Corporation, started production in March 2008. Based in Broxbourne, north of London, it is larger than 20 football fields and can produce 3.2 million newspapers every night.

Most of the national titles in the United Kingdom have purchased new presses in the past five years. Rupert Murdoch’s three plants in the UK cost about $A 917 million.

Assuming the cost of a printing press is amortised over 30 years, the money News Corp spent works out at about $A 30.5 million a year, not counting interest charges. On top of that we need to add the cost of newsprint, ink, and distribution.

By comparison, the cost of hosting a major web site that transfers a few hundred gigabytes of data a day is negligible. Distribution costs for online editions of newspapers are low by comparison. But online advertising has not yet reached a stage where it is possible to turn off the printing presses.

Distribution and printing account for at least 60 per cent of the cost of a daily newspaper in Australia. In the United States, it is 70 cents in the dollar. At a large American daily, only about 18 per cent of the total budget is spent on content.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the newspaper industry was under “significant distress”. “One of the big costs that they have is distribution and printing.” He was arguing that a device like his company’s Kindle could help remove those costs, and would change the economics of the newspaper business. Kindle is expected to be available in Australia this year.

The Kindle is an e-reader, a mobile device designed primarily for storing and displaying digital documents. The best-known e-readers in 2009 were the Amazon Kindle, the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader. They are used mostly for reading books, but in America they also offer the content from daily newspapers without the advertisements. Other products are expected early in 2010. Rupert Murdoch was in South Korea in October talking to Samsung and LG about their manufacturing re-readers for him.

Newspapers could provide each of their readers who had subscribed for more than two years an e-reader as recognition of loyalty. The e-reader could become a status symbol. Readers could keep the device while they continue to subscribe. This would reduce distribution and printing costs, though managers would need to do the sums to calculate when this approach became financially viable.

A newspaper could negotiate a good price by buying e-readers in bulk. Analysts estimate it costs about $US 650 million a year to print and deliver The New York Times. In 2009 the company expected to pay $US 65 million just for newsprint. As of late 2009 about 830,000 people had subscribed to the paper for more than two years. To give an e-reader to each of those subscribers, at $400 per device, would cost the Times about $US 332 million.

These numbers are simplistic and it would still cost money to close down some printing presses and reduce the number of trucks used for distribution. Plus they still need to serve the other 170,000 people who make up the paper’s 1 million plus circulation.

Some people still want a printed newspaper, and advertisers like the permanency of print. Maybe those consumers will pay a premium for print. And for a media organization starting fresh, or looking for new business models, e-readers offer an option.

But the e-reader has issues that need to be resolved: Content is only available in black and white, which advertisers do not appreciate. The exceptions are Fujitsu’s FLEPia colour reader, which costs a hefty $US 1,000, and Samsung’s Papyrus. The latter is only available in Japan.

Depending on the device they buy, people will find themselves tied to one format that does not read other formats. It’s like buying a car that can only use one brand of petrol.

And e-reader suppliers take a huge cut from subscription fees. In America, Amazon is said to take 70 per cent of the revenues for delivering a newspaper’s content to the Kindle. For example, subscribers pay $US 14 a month to receive The New York Times on the Kindle, but the media house only gets $US 4.20 per subscription.

All e-readers have one major selling point: They are perceived as being greener than newsprint. Don Carli, senior research fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communication, said that despite the fact that print was based on “comparatively benign and renewable materials” it had come to be seen as wasteful and environmentally destructive.

“The carbon cost of print will soon have to appear on the balance sheets of advertisers, publishers and retailers. It will also appear in the price tags of goods and services. As we exit the global recession we will simultaneously be transitioning to a low carbon global economy that will change the meaning and value of waste and inefficiency,” Carli said.

Almost all e-readers use e-ink, which simulates the look of ink on paper. The technology uses a layer of micro-capsules filled with sub-micrometre black and white particles that create a low-power, reflective screen. These particles form images on the screen like printed text.

For editorial managers, the key decision is when and whether to invest in the transition. Publishers would need to subsidise the cost of the digital devices or include those costs in the subscription the same way that phone companies build the cost of the mobile phone into the contract. Publishers would also face the task of convincing advertisers their products would still be seen.

The debate has only started, but will grow louder as the Kindle and other e-readers become available in Australia.

* Published in the Bulletin of PANPA, the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association, December 2009

The financial argument for e-readers instead of paper as the main publishing medium for newspapers is strong. But e-readers have their limitations. Stephen Quinn reports.

In June 2009 a Moody’s senior analyst in New York, John Puchalla, criticised the American newspaper industry for its “distorted” cost structures. Similar cost structures operate at newspapers in Asia. In essence, too much of each dollar is spent on printing and distribution, and too little on what sells newspapers: the content.

Puchalla noted that 70 cents in each dollar were spent on paper, printing, distribution and corporate functions. Only 14 per cent of American newspapers’ operating expenses were spent generating editorial content. The other 16 per cent of costs were related to advertising and marketing.

The New York Times is one of the best newspapers in the world. It has won 101 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. Its annual editorial budget of more than $US 200 million is the largest of any newspaper. Yet that figure is a third of the yearly cost of printing and distribution: $US 650 million. In 2009 the company expected to pay $US 65 million for newsprint. Many Asian newspapers have the same distorted cost ratios.

Enter the e-reader. It is a mobile reading device capable of storing thousands of digital documents. In the US readers can buy and download content wirelessly. Elsewhere in the world people connect via USB. The best-known e-readers in 2009 were the Amazon Kindle, the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader. Others were scheduled to appear in 2010.

Newspapers could provide loyal readers – let’s say people who have subscribed for more than two years – an e-reader in recognition of that loyalty. The e-reader could become a status symbol. Readers could keep the device while they continued to subscribe. This would reduce distribution and printing costs.

For example, about 830,000 people have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years. To give an e-reader to each of those subscribers, at $US 400 per device, would cost about $332 million. These calculations are simplistic, and reduced print runs and fewer delivery trucks would still cost money. But e-readers offer a possible option for reducing costs, once consumers accept them. The paper spends $US 650 million to print and distribute about 1.04 million copies weekdays and 1.45 million on Sundays.

But all is not perfect in the world of e-readers: Content is only available in black and white, which advertisers do not appreciate. The exceptions are Fujitsu’s FLEPia colour reader, which costs $US 1,000, and Samsung’s Papyrus. The latter is only available in Japan.

Depending on the device you buy, you’ll find yourself tied to one format that does not read other formats. It’s like buying a car that can only use one brand of petrol. And e-reader suppliers take a huge cut from subscription fees. Amazon is said to take 70 per cent of the revenues for delivering a newspaper’s content to the Kindle. Subscribers pay $US 14 a month to receive The New York Times on the Kindle, but the media house only gets $US 4.20 per subscription.

Early in 2009 the Hearst Corporation announced it would release an e-reader for newspapers some time in 2010. It would be American letter in size and weigh less than half a pound. In March 2009 the Silicon Valley-based Plastic Logic said it planned to release an un-named e-reader in January 2010. The Plastic Logic product will have a screen measuring about 27cm diagonally, compared with the 15cm display of the Kindle. The Plastic Logic device will weigh about the same as the Kindle (about 300 grams) because it will be made from plastic rather than glass and silicon.

Plastic Logic’s vice president of business development, Daren Benzi, said the first version would have 16 levels of grey scale but his company intended to produce a color device “in the near future”. Eventually the device would show video. Benzi said the time was right for e-readers. They were smaller, lighter and easier to use, but mindsets had also changed, meaning that “people are a lot more comfortable reading digital content, and are more conscious of the benefits of getting their information this way”.

On 7 May 2009 Amazon announced a large-screen version of the Kindle, the DX. It has a 25-cm display, about the size of an A4 magazine, and 3.3 Gb of storage.

All e-readers have one major selling point: They are perceived as being greener than newsprint. Don Carli, senior research fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communication, said that despite the fact that print was based on “comparatively benign and renewable materials” print had come to be seen as wasteful and environmentally destructive.

“The carbon cost of print will soon have to appear on the balance sheets of advertisers, publishers and retailers. It will also appear in the price tags of goods and services. As we exit the global recession we will simultaneously be transitioning to a low carbon global economy that will change the meaning and value of waste and inefficiency,” Carli said.

Almost all e-readers use e-ink, which simulates the look of ink on paper. The technology uses a layer of microcapsules filled with sub-micrometre black and white particles that create a low-power, reflective screen. These particles form images on the screen like printed text.

The E.Ink company that invented the concept was a start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that came out of research at M.I.T. The company supplies the electronic-ink technology used in the vast majority of e-readers on the market today.

In June 2009 a Taiwanese company, Prime View International (PVI), purchased E.Ink for $US 215 million. PVI is the world’s largest maker of e-paper display modules. It acquired the e-paper business of Philips Electronics in 2005.

For editorial managers, the key decision is when and whether to invest in the transition. Publishers would need to subsidise the cost of the digital devices or include those costs in the subscription the same way that phone companies build the cost of the mobile phone into the contract. Publishers also face the task of convincing advertisers their products would still be seen.

* Published in Asian Newspaper Focus, October 2009

Spent a delightful week in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from Dec 14-21. Highlight was dinner with Remco Koster and his wife Okki. Here are photos from the dinner from Remco’s blog.

The US newspaper industry has reached the full-blown crisis stage, attendees at an American Press Institute summit heard. Read a full report here.

A worthy addition to the select group of  blogs about journalism is the Nieman Journalism Lab. It has just posted a list of  the top 10 blogs about the future of journalism. With the exception of one from London, the list consists of 7 from the US and 2 from Canada. Yes, as ever the border of reality ends in the North American continent, excluding Mexico. In the interests of broadening horizons, here are some excellent blogs from outside that continent.

• Onlinejournalismblog by Paul Bradshaw in Birmingham in the UK
• Innovations in newspapers by Juan Antonio Giner and a group of international colleagues. Disclosure: I am an Innovations consultant.
• Julie Starr in New Zealand.
• Mediafile by Robert MacMillan in London.
• Videoreporter by Ruud Elmendorp, a Dutch journalist based in Kenya.
• Mojoevolution by Frank Barth-Nilsen in Norway.
• I do not read French all that well, but friends have told me about Atelier. It has some good coverage of Africa.
• And speaking of Africa, this wonderful site collects hosts of mobile-phone based reports.

Some good news from the newspaper front in Australia. West Australian Newspapers has reported net profit of $A29.65 million for the three months to September 30. This is a 43.8 per cent jump on the previous corresponding quarter. It happened despite a weaker advertising market. Read the full story here.

The Christian Science Monitor will publish in online form only from next year. This move by a formerly print-and-online paper is the first of many. To date newspapers have cut costs by cutting into salaries of people. But the other two big costs are printing (presses and paper) and distribution (trucks and/or satellites). These other two are not likely to become cheaper. If anything they will get more expensive. So to produce the paper only online removes those other costs. That’s why I think the Monitor will be the first of many. Let’s hope the paper’s executives choose to put those cost savings back into editorial, because quality content will be what sells the paper, regardless of the delivery medium.