Online Newspapers News & Articles

When we last spoke with Jim Gaines, we talked about the future of digital publishing. Recently we had the opportunity to catch up with Gaines again. This time, he had a story to tell.

Would you pay for your newspaper online? Probably not your average teen, who doesn't seem to even know what a newspaper is. If they don't read them now is there really a need to preserve their content for the future?

FLYP is more than a magazine. Its dynamic, interactive insights about American and world culture engage users through a variety of text, video, audio and animation and have proven to be a journalistic endeavor that turns news and information into a multimedia experience.

FLYP has been described as Life Magazine for the Web 2.0 era so it’s only fitting that Jim Gaines, former managing editor of People, Time and Life magazines is editor-in-chief. A veteran news journalist, Gaines is committed to multimedia initiatives and advocates for experimentation and change within the digital publishing landscape.

We had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Gaines about the future of digital publishing. He shared many insights about how the web publishing industry can best position themselves in the New Year and what he considers to be important in the years ahead.

This week newspapers and their journalists get kicked in the shins. Many unfavorable reports depict the state of journalism as lowly and despicable, slow to change and as a result withering in the spotlight of social media.

Back in October, the New York Times created and released a Campaign Finance API (Application Programming Interface). Designed to let users analyze and re-use some of the data the NYT had been looking at while reporting on the presidential campaign, the API offered overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. They also launched a movie API, which allows users to search New York Times movie reviews by keyword and get lists of NYT Critics' Picks.

Now the Times has released a new API offering every article the paper has written since 1981 -- 2.8 million articles.

Good news! More people are reading newspapers. Twelve percent more, to be exact.

According to a new report by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America, the average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper websites grew by nearly 7.3 million in 2008 to 67.3 million visitors, an increase of 12.1 percent over 2007.

Approximately two years ago, online newspapers tore down their walled gardens, exposing many years' worth of content, once available only to those who paid. Year 2007 was a simpler, gentler time.

Then the world exploded into economic crisis.

This week in the Web publishing industry has been a little bit of everything: from blogs to online content, from social media to online visitors.

We have also learned that 95 of the top 100 newspapers have blogs. As far as the numbers go, it was a great week to be an online publisher.

The issue of user-generated content has been subject to scrutiny and debate among online news media, many of whom have questioned its place in online journalism.

We reported that A Moderated Approach to User Generated Content seemed to produce more accurate and censored content than opponents would lead you to believe. Then, we reported on the status of online comments as used by online newspapers and as to whether or not comments enhance the quality of online journalism.

Now, we bring the next phase in the saga of online comments: the difficulty in maintenance and moderation.

User comments seem to be a hot topic as of late. Much of it related to why newspapers should either eliminate or enhance them.

In a recent article on Gawker.com, it was strongly suggested that comments should be rid of altogether, citing that “newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments” and that blogs are “not equipped to regularly break the news.”

They don’t think that the comments a published story garners adds anything to the content, nor do they help to engage a discussion among readers. Though they do find value in the blogs hosted by reporters, they argue that the comments posted by users do nothing more than expose the ignorance of readers and had they been submitted as letters to the editor, they would never been published in the first place.

An interesting point of view for a media site dedicated to commenting on the behaviors of others. And a perspective with which Editor & Publisher differs.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

Speaking of the economy. Have you heard the one about Bear Stearns? Of course you have.

But have your heard this story?

Publishing 2.0 provided an interesting commentary “Following A Breaking News Story On The Web”. As it turns out, when big news breaks on a Sunday, it becomes quite apparent how different the Web is from traditional print media.