Mobile news consumption is picking up very fast

The changes are a revolution: Almost one in three visits to Norwegian media products are now from mobile platforms.

For two years I have been recording how users choose the different digital platforms of Norway’s biggest newspaper: Aftenposten.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

The dramatic changes over the last 24 months are indeed a revolution.

People are moving from PCs to mobile platforms at increasing speed. It is only a matter of time before smartphones and tablets will outperform the PC as the major platform for media consumption in Norway.

With 1,3 million unique visitors to its web site every week in a country of 4,5 million there is no reason to believe that the numbers from Aftenposten are not representative for the media market in Norway as a whole.

So let us compare which platforms people used to consume the news from Aftenposten in January 2012 with the same month two years ago.

PC versus mobile platforms

Some conclusions

• Visits from mobile platforms have increased from 3,7 % of the total in January 2010 to 30,5 % in January 2012 (23,9 % mobile phones, 6,6 % iPad).
• Two years ago there were 26 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones.  Last month there were only 2,3 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones and tablets.
• So far there are no signs that the new traffic from mobile phones and tablets have cannibalized the traffic from PCs.  Instead the mobile visits are coming on top of the visits already from PCs.
• iPad is picking up quickly – and made a jump during the Christmas holiday. Almost seven per cent of the total visits to Aftenposten’s products now come from the iPad.

Android picking up market shares quickly

There are also interesting developments in what type of mobile phones people use to access the news site:

• Apple’s IOS has stayed the biggest mobile operating system ever since this statistics started two years ago. But in January 2010 IOS was barely bigger than Nokia’s Symbian operating system.
• Since then Symbian have almost disappeared completely and instead Android phones are starting to pick up market shares at increasing speed.
• Last month IOS was 53,6 % of the mobile visits, while 34,5 % used Android phones. The gap between the two is decreasing every month.
• Especially the Android-based  Samsung Galaxy gt-i9100 seems to gain popularity quickly in the Norwegian market. From December 2011 to January 2012 the number of visits from iPhones actually decreased by 3,7 per cent, while the number of visits from Samsung Galaxy phones increased with 15,1 %.  No wonder which phone was under the Christmas trees!

Looking for ways to make users pay for digital content, many editors consistently make a wrong assumption: That stories from the printed newspaper have higher value than the web stories.

I have read it numerous times: Interviews with chief editors who present the fact that a story was printed in the newspaper as the very definition of users’ willingness to pay for the same story in a digital version.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

I think the assumption in most cases is wrong.  That a story has been printed in the newspaper has little bearing in itself on whether there is a willingness to pay for that particular content in digital form.

One big challenge of introducing user payment for digital content is to decide which content is premium and which content should be free.

Making this decision is very hard – as it goes to the very core of defining what type of journalism constitute real value to the readers.

The easy way out is to say as many chief editors do: The content from the printed paper is premium, the online content is free.

And why shouldn’t we think like that? People have after all through decades shown that they are willing to pay for the content in the printed paper. Therefore the argument is convenient: Let us make the same content available to them online for a charge, and they will be willing to pay.

Wrong!

But as a result of this way of thinking, most attempts at asking users to pay for digital content, for instance on iPad, so far are more or less replicas of the printed paper.

It is time to end this way of thinking.

In the long run the distinction between premium and free content cannot be defined by what has been found worthy of being printed in the newspaper. One reason is that much of the value of a printed newspaper is in how content has been packaged and put together for that specific format. As the content is being split up on digital platforms, the value proposition changes and different rules apply.

Therefore we need to find a new way of distinguishing between premium and free content – and that distinction can no longer be defined by platforms, but by the distinctive qualities in the content itself.

Why is this? Because when studying their own content in depth and trying to make readers pay online, many editors will find the following to be true:

• Parts of the content in the printed newspaper looses its value when disaggregated from the print package and presented in a digital version
• Parts of the content that has been produced “free” for the web site actually provides great value for readers – and in fact have the potential to be treated as premium content instead of free.

This being said, it is easy to understand that many news organizations have chosen a replica of their printed product as the first attempt at making users pay.  The strategy in fact makes sense – at this stage. After all readers have a clear picture of what product a newspaper is – and may be willing to pay for the convenience of receiving it in a different format. Also most newspapers are organized primarily with the printed paper as the main output.

But now is the time to move on. Premium content should be defined across platforms – and with qualities that makes it truly unique no matter where it is published. At the same time we need to take into consideration also the other factors influencing people’s willingness to pay.

Among media companies not just choosing the replica model we basically see three ways of distinguishing between premium and free content:

• The meter model – allows free access to a specific number of articles per month and starts charging after the level has been reached. This is the model used by The New York Times, which reportedly now has more than 300.000 subscribers. The meter model does not try to distinguish as much between which content is premium and which content is free. Rather the underlying assumption is that all content is premium, but that readers can get some of it for free anyway.
• The freemium model – defines some types of content as free and other as premium, depending on topics or qualities. This is for instance the model used by Wall Street Journal, Hamburger Abendblatt and the highly successful Swedish news site Aftonbladet.
• The paywall – charging for all content, no matter where it is published. This is basically the strategy of The Times in London. A

This discussion is primarily based on the freemium model. What are some of the qualities that could define premium content in this model?

It of course depends on the brand in question and how it is positioned in its market.

But I think many editors will find that they need to develop new content formats to succeed with user payment. This is necessary to make sure the content is sufficiently unique, deep, engaging, useful or entertaining to make readers think they cannot be without it.

Some of the questions that need to be answered:

• Is the content truly unique? Can you find more or less the same other places – or is this really the only place to get this type of content and quality? Is the content in a format that makes it unique?
• Is the content useful? Are readers being helped in achieving their personal goals, like getting in better shape or improving their finances? Will readers feel they will be better off in their life with the content?
• Is it engaging people?  In today’s world of social media only content that engage people have real value.
• Is it convenient to get to the content if you are willing to pay?  Is in fact being a paying customer much easier that to be a freeloader? Is the media company making it so convenient for readers that it is just “too damned easy to pay”?
• Is the payoff clear?  Do you immediately understand what extra value paying for the content gives you?  Is is deep enough? Entertaining enough? Or just another copy of what you will find on any other web site?

Newspaper readership will continue to drop in most markets in the years to come. As this happens, defining premium content in terms of whether it has been printed on paper or not will become increasingly less relevant.

We need a new definition.

So how, then, should we define premium content in the future? What are your thoughts?

Media companies hope to build solid revenue streams by betting on user payment on mobile platforms. But a look at Apple’s top grossing lists for iPhone and iPad sends a warning signal.

I was involved in launching a paid recipe app for iPhone in the Norwegian market at couple of weeks ago -and that made me follow closely the top grossing lists for iPhone and iPad.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

Apple provides three different top charts for apps: Top free apps, Top paid apps and Top grossing. While the first two rank how many apps are downloaded, the third ranks how much money the apps bring in at any time. The top apps on this list may not necessarily be the ones downloaded the most, but they still succeed in bringing in money for the developers.

What types of apps dominate the top grossing list?

To find out I went through the top 25 grossing lists for both iPhone and iPad in the Norwegian market as they were ranked in the evening on Sunday, June 12th. All apps were assigned to one of four categories:

• Usefulness. Apps that primarily help people perform a specific task
• Entertainment. Primarily games.
• Media/content. Apps that primarily are designed for consumption of news or other types of media content.
• Social. Apps that primarily are built on people connecting to each other

Top grossing iPhone apps

Not a single app on the top 25 grossing list for iPhone apps was a media app. In fact you would not find a media app among the next 25 apps on the list either.

Two of the 25 apps were categorized as “social”.

However, the two dominating categories were “Entertainment” (13 apps) and “Usefulness” (10 apps).

I noted another interesting aspect: Only one of the ten most grossing iPhone apps were priced “normally”.  That was the Hipstamatic app priced at NOK 11 (USD 2). All the rest at the top 10 carried either an extremely high price tag (4 navigation apps priced at USD 75 and above) or were free (games apps that made money on in-app purchases).

Almost all the rest of the top 25 list followed the same pattern: Either they were userpaid apps helping people achieve a specific task, like finding the owner of a car or creating music, or they were free or almost-free games apps.

Conclusion so far: To succeed in bringing in money on iPhone apps you should either try to be extremely useful or succeed in creating compelling entertainment for your users.

Here is the top grossing list for iPhone apps:

[table id=2 /]

[easyembed field="Linebreak"]

Top grossing iPad apps

The top grossing list for iPad apps in the Norwegian shows a slightly different pattern, yet more or less the same conclusions can be drawn.

12 of the top 25 grossing apps are within the “Usefulness” category, while 11 belong to “Entertainment”. Also for iPad we see some highly priced navigation apps quite high on the list. In the “Entertainment” category the main difference from the iPhone market was that only very few of the top grossing apps were free.

Two apps in the “Media/content” category made it to the top 25 grossing list.

The first was already in the third place on the list:  ”Lillesøster”, a children’s book specially designed for the iPad format and with a price tag of 5 USD.

On ninth place was Aftenposten, the news app from Norway’s largest newspaper. (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten).

Aftenposten’s news app is free to download and could also be used for free for the first weeks after it was launched on March 31st. This has led about 40.000 people to download the app. However, since June 7th Aftenposten has required users to pay. Access is available only as a subscription and can be bought both from within App Store and from Aftenposten’s web site. There are also bundled products which include the iPad subscription. These can only be bought from Aftenposten’s web site.

It is obviously too early to say how Aftenposten’s iPad app will rank on the top grossing list in the long term. The ranking is also complicated by the fact that parts of Aftenposten’s income on the app is not reflected in App Store’s grossing list.

Conclusion for iPad: To succeed in bringing in money on iPad apps your chances seem to be much higher if you bet on meeting people’s need for usefulness or entertainment. But looking further down the top grossing list media/content apps seem to do much better on iPad than on iPhone.

Here is the top grossing list for iPad apps:

[table id=3 /]

[easyembed field="Linebreak"]

What does this mean for media companies?

Is it hopeless to charge for media content on iPhone and iPad?  Of course not. But the top grossing lists give some clear hints to what in particular drive people to pay on these new platforms. Publishers are smart to study this to see if some of the elements can be introduced in news apps as well. For instance: How do you use your media product to help people achieve their goals? What can you do to make it really useful in people’s life? Is there any way to gamify the news experience – or to use in-app purchases creatively?

The Apple’s top grossing lists for Norway will, however, not give the full picture of how media apps will do when it comes to user payment:

• Few media companies have so far tried user payment extensively. Aftenposten is the first major news company in Norway to put its iPad app behind a paywall.
• Many media companies have so far kept most or all of their user paid revenues out of App Store. Typically the users will pay for the product at the media company’s web site – and then get access for free on iPad by entering login information. As we all know, Apple is now tightening the rules for how this can be done, but so far most revenues on media apps have been kept outside the App Store statistics.

It is used in lots of board rooms these days – as an expression of the danger newspaper companies are in. But in fact the executives would be wiser to ban the word. What word? Read on.

Publishers' worry about print revenues may harm their potential in developing good business models for digital media

I have heard it used so many times in different media contexts. We are afraid of it and try to avoid the effect of it. It is a word that makes media executives sleep less at night.

It is called “cannibalization”.

Yes, we would love to build new digital revenue streams. We dream about how users will pay tons of money for our excellent and unique content. But it better not have any harmful effect on print revenues!

So the thinking goes.

To put it in another way: Digital revenues are fine as long as they do not “cannibalize” print revenues!

This line of thought influences product development, pricing strategy, marketing and editorial workflows in many media companies.

It is a dangerous way of thinking.

In fact the word “cannibalization” should be banned in media companies. Using it will only cause harm to media’s chances of surviving the massive digital transformation we are witnessing.

Did you hear me?

Ban the word “cannibalization”!

Yes, I really mean it.  Don’t allow the executives or other employees to even use it!

Why should the word be banned?

Let us start with the basic statement that I keep repeating here at BetaTales:

What can become digital, will be come digital.

Now, then: What does this mean?

It means at least two things:

• Print newspapers will at some stage be extint. We can argue about when it will happen, but the trend is very clear
• This being said, the major strategic challenge for media companies is not how to save print revenues, but how to build a successful business model for digital content

Why should using the word “cannibalization” be a problem?

Because even using the word implies a mental context that will in fact be counter-productive in producing the efficient future business models of digital media.

Let me ask you a question, all CEOs of media companies:

What do you think is the most strategic important issue to focus on for the next five year?

• Saving as much as you can of your print revenue?
• Or: Building digital revenues as fast as you can?

I have already given you my answer: You need to have full mental focus on buiding future digital business models.

I know many of you will answer that you will be able to balance both.

I don’t believe you.

In fact I think many media executives still underestimate the major challenges facing our industry. They think they can transform a business model of the past to the digital future. If that is the way you think, managing “cannibalization” makes a lot of sense.

But they will be proven wrong.

Instead I believe the winners will be those who have been liberated from their past business models. They focus primarily on how they can build a digital future, and less on how to save the print business a few more years.

I am not saying that media companies should ignore the print business, which is still the biggest revenue stream. Continue to develop the product, increase quality, lower costs and make distribution more efficient! The printed paper will be an important platform for media content for many years still.

But do not let considerations for the print product limit product development in the digital area!

Stop worrying about cannibalization!

Instead you should set your digital products free to compete in their own markets – without considerations for effects on the printed products.

There is an interesting success story to study within the media group I work for myself: Schibsted Media Group.  More than ten years ago visionaries within the corporation realized that classified ads inevitably would move from print to online.

Instead of saying that all efforts should be put into protecting the lucrative print ad revenues, they suggested to start a new company that would try to be the leading digital market place for classified ads.

A company – finn.no – was indeed started in March 2000. It set out to be the market leader in online classified ads in Norway. Prices were only a portion of prices in the newspaper. The newspapers were instructed to market the new online classified ads brand.

It is no secret that there was a lot of discussion within Schibsted about this strategy. Yet it proved to be one of the big success stories.  Finn has for years operated with an extremely high profit margin, driven by its position as market leader in online classifieds. And how did Finn become market leader? By aggresively seeing the opportunity early, before the market had developed and matured.

Today Schibsted is No. 3 globally in online classified ads, according to Businessweek. That’s not bad for a company from a small Scandinavian country.

Market dynamics in the news business are different from the classified ads – and the same rules may not necessarily apply. Yet the main lesson is the same: Make sure to focus on what will be the future!

Many media companies try to offer print and digital products in bundled subscriptions. That may very well be a smart strategy, provided that it is done in a way that will lead to a future business model for the digital media. But if the main purpose is to slow down the fall in newspaper readership without any clear plan for the digital future, such a strategy probably will fail.

I believe the mental focus in the organization is extremely important for media companies that are in the middle of a radical digital transformation.

The losers will be those who put all their energy into slowing down the digital transformation and saving the past. The winners will adapt a digital-first strategy to rush forward to build a new, smart and sustainable digital business model.

I don’t think you can win by doing both.

Therefore: Start by banning the word “cannibalization” in your company.

What is most important? Publishers copyright or the best user experience for readers? A fight over the iPad app Zite poses an interesting dilemma.

I have for the  last few weeks fallen in love with Zite, a personalized news magazine for iPad. Zite promises to learn from my reading habits – and serves stories that should fit my special area of interest.

To be honest I have been amazed about the accuracy of Zite. I now use it every day to follow developments in digital media, my particular area of interest. And Zite really is able to serve up the most interesting stories to me, whatever source they may come from.

Add to this that the user experience is very elegant. Ads are stripped away and I am left with the core content: Text and photos. It even allows me to share the stories on Twitter or in other social media without leaving the application.

Within a few weeks Zite has become my most common way to catch up with developments within my area of interest.

But then arrive the publishers! Time, Washington Post, National Geographic and Associated Press are among media companies protesting against how Zite uses their content. Alltogether 10 major media companies require Zite to stop using their content immediately. With good reason, it seems.

Working in the media industry myself (I am editor in Media Norway Digital) as the same time as I love the user experience of the Zite app, I find the conflict intriguing. Apparently it is an example of the media industry’s formal rights clashing with what is the best solution for their readers.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

The front page of Zite personalized magazine

Let us look at the interests of the two parties:

The user experience

Zite lets users pick topical sections that are of interest to them and then serves relevant stories from all over the web. The stories are presented in a neatly designed magazine layout. Over time Zite will learn what the users find particularly interesting and serve more of these stories. Users are also encouraged to tell Zite whether they liked a particularly story or not – and whether they like more stories from a particular source, thus assisting how the app becomes even more personalized.

To kickstart the selection of stories a user can link her Twitter or Google Reader account with Zite, giving a great personalized experience from day one.

Zite is based on web crawling – and not just aggregating RSS feeds. As default stories are presented in “reading mode” and not as the web page where it originated. This means that ads and a lot of other visual noise is eliminated, making it better for in-depth reading.

For me as a reader it is a very nice user experience. I am presented with a good selection of fresh articles from different sources and in a way that makes them very comfortable to read. I don’t have to move back and forth between many web sites, but get all the content presented in the same, elegant user interface.

I simply love it!

A note: In response to the letters from the publishers, Zite now displays the content from these media companies in “web mode” instead of “reading mode”, thus displaying all the ads as they appear on the web sites. While the media companies may be happy, this makes the user experience significantly worse.

The default article view on the Zite personalized news magazine

The publishers’ perspective

Publishers make money by either selling content to readers or by selling ads that are presented together with the content.

An app like Zite omits both those two possibilities to make money. The full content is presented to readers with ads stripped away – and the infringement on the publishers’ right is quite clear.

This is how the publishers describe their position in the letter to Zite:

By systematically reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses. Your application takes the intelletual property of our companies, as well as the hard and sometimes dangerous work of tens of thousands of people. It depreives our websites of traffic and advertising revenue. We do not know your intentions, but your actions harm our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content.

For publishers it is extremely important to be in control of their own content and how it is being distributed. Most publishers depend on a model where they prefer users to come to their web site to read their content, either after having paid for it or to be the targets of commercial offers by way of ads.

Aggregation services like Googe News, Pulse, Flipboard and now Zite thus have been of great concern for many publishers, who think they should get a cut of the cake when other commercial players are making money on their content.

The dilemma: Publishers’ rights or the best user experience?

The conflict poses a real dilemma, as I see it:

• First: Services like Zite and Flipboard offer real benefits and a great user experience to readers.
• Second: Media companies are not able to offer the same user experience to the readers themselves
• Third: There is no good business model in place for media companies to make money on third parties offering services like Zite and Flipboard.

A service like Zite does not only redistribute content from media companies, but adds new value for the readers in term of selecting content in a particularly useful way. This is a different process of selection that the traditional editorial packaging:

• An editorial package will typically provide content only from one or very few sources. It will provide more or less the same package to all its readers.
• A personalized and automatic service like Zite will pick content from numerous sources and the package will be fully personalized for each individual user.

We now see how the best automated services offer a quality in selection that in many situations fit users’ need better than what can be achieved with human editorial editing.

The dilemma is quite clear: Some of the best user experiences offer no way for the content providers to make money.

What should media companies do?

There seem to be two approaches the media industry can take. They are not outruling each other:

• Protect your rights. Use legal means to stop unauthorized use of your content. Set up regulations, such as ACAP restricting distribution of content.
• Build new and universal content models allowing revenue share for innovative companies like Zite, Flipboard and others that build great content services.

One thing I am quite sure about: A strategy that only is based on fighting readers’ option to have the best user experience possible will fail!

That means that media companies either must be able to provide the best user experience themselves or partner in some way with those that can do it.

There is an obvious user need for smart and reader-friendly aggregation of content from numerous sources. Stopping people’s access to these kind of services will therefore not work. It will just make people find the content in illegal ways.  Just look at how the music industry for a long time failed to provide efficient ways for users to download music easily in a legal way, paving the way for massive illegal downloading.

In my opinion it will be an illusion to think that the media industry itself will be able to provide the best user experience in all areas.

So we need to find ways to work together with innovative companies like Zite, providing models where publishers get paid and the innovators can develop new products quickly without having to negotiate thousands of copyright agreements ahead of launching.

How can this be done?

It is a hard question – and I don’t really have any good anwers myself.

However, I do recommend that you read this blog post from Damon Kiesow at Poynter.  He identifies three possible winning strategies for media companies:

• Develop their own innovative apps
• Collaborate with developers like Flipboard and Zite to display and monetize content
• Implement robust application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow for controlled distribution of content for use on external sites and apps

The road to getting there is bumpy and whether it is possible at all is still not clear. But at least we need to find ways that will allow other parties to innovate with our content.

To conclude: Whatever the media industry does, the best option is to contribute in making sure users have the best content experience possible! Because in the long run the best user experience will always win.

What do you think?

Related articles from other blogs

• The Consumer In Me Likes Zite; The Producer? (paidcontent.org)
• Major Media Companies Unite to Serve Cease-and-Desist Against iPad News Aggregator Zite (mashable.com)
• When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage (kara.allthingsd.com)
• The iPad App That Went Too Far: Media Says Cease & Desist to Personalized Magazine Zite (readwriteweb.com)
• Personalized iPad Magazine Zite Responds to Cease-and-Desist Letter From Time Inc., Washington Post (fastcompany.com)
• Publishing Heavyweights Target iPad Media App ‘Zite’ (wired.com)
• AP, WaPo, Other Big Media Companies Send Cease & Desist Over Zite App (paidcontent.org)
• Zite faces wrath of media companies (cbc.ca)

Do you dream of being the digital journalists with lot of interactive story telling techniques? It is easier than ever to impress your colleagues and readers. Here are ten very simple tools.

Many journalists think they need to be able to program to use advanced interactive story telling techniques in their online stories.

That is no longer so.

Instead you need to learn to embed something into your online stories. Once you have learned that, you have access to unlimited creative possibilities.

Embedding simply means that you incorporate an element from a different web site into your own. This is usually done by pasting a few lines of code into your article.

The most common element to embed is YouTube videos. But if you start looking, you will find thousands of other services that can be used to enrich your online journalism.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

Here are ten tools that can be useful for journalists. All tools presented here are free to use at the basic level. However, several of them also offer a premium level, typically with more options and opportunities for customized branding.

Consider it just a starting point. I would love if you contribute other tools in the comments below!

1.Embed videos: YouTube.com

Whatever you write about, chances are high that someone has uploaded a great and relevant video to YouTube, vimeo.com or other video sites.  Choose “embed” under the video you like, select the size of the video and copy the code you are given to paste into your site.

As an example: Here is a video from YouTube made for a previous blog post about an interesting example of innovative journalism:

2. Create timelines:  Dipity.com

Timelines is a great way of illustrating how a story has developed over time. One easy-to-use tool for creating elegant timelines is Dipity.com. Timelines can be created manually – or by incorporating RSS feeds or by importing content from services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google, etc.

Just for illustration: Here is a quick timeline I put together displaying a few of the BetaTales articles in 2010.

[easyembed field="Dipity_BetaTales"]

3. Use interactive maps:  Umapper.com

Maps can be used to illustrate articles in many ways. The most common is to use Google Maps directly.  But there are also a number of excellent third party services that give you even more creative possibilities. Personally I like the service from Umapper.com.

One cool functionality is to make a geo game map, such as the one below:

More to read about using maps: Five ways to take your map mashups to a new level (10.000 words)

4. Include any document in your story: Scribd.com

Journalists often need to quote reports and documents in their stories. Sometimes the whole article can be about the content of a specific document. Many journalists then choose to include a link to the document. But wouldn’t it be even better if you could include the document in your own article?

You can! Scribd.com is a great service for embedding any kind of documents. The process is very simple: Create an account, upload the document you want to embed and then grab the embed code.

As an example: Here is the digital media handbook of Society of Professional Journalists:

There is a similar great service for sharing Powerpoint presentations: Slideshare.net. These presentations can also easily be embedded into any article.

5. Live blogging: Coveritlive.com

Coveritlive is a fantastic tool for live events and it is being used regurlarly by thousands of media sites as well as numerous bloggers.  It can be used for simple live blogging or as a platform for sharing video, sound and interacting with readers.

Many news sites used Coveritlive as part of their coverage of the recent earth quake in Japan. See one example from Belgium here.

6.Put social media content together: Storify.com

Another tool that can work out very well when news happen fast is Storify. This service is particularly good when you quickly need to incorporate selected content from social media into an article.

See an example here:

[easyembed field="Storify"]

7. Slideshow: Flickr.com

For creating a simple slideshow with several photos you can use Flickr.com.  It is very easy: Upload your photos, put them together as a set, view them as slideshow and then choose “Share” and “Grab the embed HTML”.

Here is an example of a set of photos I took on Stung Meanchey, a huge garbage dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia:

There are many more tools to make slideshows, some of them quite advanced. Several let you make soundslides as well, adding audio to your presentation. Here are some of the options:

• Soundslides: A premium product to make soundslides
• Animoto: Another premium service to let you make videos mixing images and audio

Do you want to live broadcast from a news scene? It is actually not that difficult if you use your smartphone. A very useful service for this is Qik.com.

To use qik you need to download an application to your smartphone. They support a large number of different models.

On the news scene you can use Qik to record a video. Immediately the video is streamed to your qik account, from where you can embed it into any story.

This is a very convenient way to bring short news clips to your readers. There is no need to upload a video anywhere. By using qik the video is immedieately stored on your account – live as you record.

Here is an example of a video recorded by qik:

Another, and more sophisticated service for live video is Livestream. You may want to check out the Procaster service, which for instance enables you to make a broadcast of going through different web pages live.

9. Add a word cloud: Wordle.net

Say you have to write about the speech of your prime minister. Or you cover a new government report. And then you run into the typical challenge: How to illustrate the article in a good way?

Have you considered using a word cloud? Wordle.net is a fascinating service that lets you take any word input, for instance the entire speech of the prime minister, and make a colorful word cloud. In this cloud words that are most frequently used will be bigger than others.

Here is a word cloud I created on the basis of the RSS feed of this blog:

10. Include a poll: PollDaddy.com

Engage your readers! One way is by including a poll where you ask them to vote on a question.

PollDaddy is one of many services offering you to create a poll easily and without any technical skills.

And now: As you are at the end of this article, you might as well let me know how useful you found this posting to be. Please vote below!
[easyembed field="Poll"]

Added bonus 1: Tool list

Here is a great list of tools for journalists, picked by David Brewer: Social Media Kitbag for Journalists.

Brewer is running the great website Media Helping Media, a site dedicated to helping journalists where media is still developing.

One of the tools suggested in his list is Thinglink.  It allowes you to share links inside any photos on your site, making them interactive elements of stories. I have tagged the first photo of this post using this tool.  Move your mouse over it to see how it works.  To me it seems like a tool with great editorial potensial.

Added bonus 2:  Use 360 degrees panorama photos

Microsoft just launched its Photosynth app for iPhone – and with this you have a simple tool to easily take and include 360 degrees panorama photos into any story.

Here is an example I took at the Akershus fortress in Oslo, Norway:
[easyembed field="Photosynth_Akershus"]

So you got stuck, working for the printed newspaper all these years? And now you realize your future is with digital media? Here is your digital makeover plan!

Many of my journalist colleagues these days find themselves in the same trap: They realize that the future holds limited demand for print journalist experience alone and that the brightest career potential in the business is within digital media.

The only problem is: They have no experience with digital media whatsoever!

What should you do? Is there a digital makeover plan you can follow?

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

One thing is for sure: It will require hard work on your part. But if you want to stay in the media business, you better get on with it! And please don’t wait for your employer to fix it for you. Your competence is your own responsibility.

Also I think you can be sure of the following: Career opportunities in the media business will be fewer and fewer every year for people with only print experience. Especially that applies to any kind of management position.

Why is that?

Because most media companies will realize they have a digital competence deficit in their staff. As digital media takes a stronger position in the media houses, top managers realize it will be foolish to hire editors and managers with only print experience. Rather they should look for people who know how digital platforms work.

To put it even more clearly: Your print experience will be in less and less demand over the next years! If you look at it in a perspective of 5 – 10 years, changes will be dramatic. As a print journalist you are indeed naive if you don’t believe that this will affect you professionally in a big way.

• Read also: How print journalists can fall into the typographers’ trap

So you got to do something, don’t you?

Yes, you do! And you better get on with it!

Here is my suggestion for a one-year first-step digital makeover plan for journalists:

Step 1: Get yourself on social networks

If you are not on Facebook yet, you better register now. Understanding social media is essential for digital journalists and there is really no other way to do this than to participate yourself. Therefore your first step will be to get active on some of the most common social networks. As a minimum I suggest  you start using actively Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Also familiarize yourself with YouTube and at least one location based social network, like Foursquare or Gowalla. And if you are really dedicated to the task, you might consider starting your own blog. Really, there is no better way of learning digital media than maintaining an active blog.

Let us not forget an important aspect of this step: Start interacting with your readers! Respond to their comments, ask for tips to stories, use readers’ expertise in your articles, follow all discussions about your own content.

Step 2: Get experience in online journalism

If you work in a media company, start talking to the web people in your organization. The best alternative is to ask if you can work for the web site for a while, gaining useful experience. If that is not possible, show active interest in writing exclusive stories for the web site, including special versions of the print stories that you write. Your main purpose at this point is to gain as much experience as possible and to learn from your online colleagues. Study their writing style and what makes stories work on the web as opposed in the newspaper. Experiment with different headlines and see which ones make readers click. And especially: Take good note of which print stories that do not work on the web site! There will be more of them than you probably thought ahead.

Too many technical terms the online people expect you to know? Check out this digital survival guide for journalists!

Step 3: Learn basic photo editing

In big print organizations specialists often take care of the photo editing. So far, at least.  Hardly any web site editorial organization can afford that luxury. Instead it is expected that all journalists know how to crop and photo shop an image. And I tell you: There are hardly any journalists under the age of 30 that do not know photo shopping today at some level.

The most used software is Photo Shop. You may decide to start with Photo Shop Elements, which is a simpler version.

How to learn it? There are numerous online courses!  A great place to learn is Lynda.com, which has easy-to-follow videos for self-study of any type of software.

Step 4: Start making short video clips

Video is an essential and growing part of the web. As digital journalist you might as well start to learn using video at once. The best starting point is making small video clips, for instance with your iPhone. This can be short clips from the interview you are writing about, like what I have done in this story about the social media strategy of 20minutos.es in Spain.

Using video can be incredibly sophisticated or amazingly simple. At this stage you should start with the simple solutions. You will realize they can still create great value for the reader.

Digital journalists should of course learn more sophisticated video recording and editing as well, but I suggest you start with the shorter and unedited clips and then move on as your confidence grows.

Step 5: Start experimenting with interactive elements, like maps and time lines

Digital journalism opens up for many new story telling techniques, such as sound slides and time lines. Until recently many of these techniques required a lot of technical knowledge to use. Not any more. Today there are lots of sites offering to help you make your story telling more interactive.

Here are three tools you can start playing with:

Time lines:  http://www.dipity.com/ Create exciting time lines to illustrate how the topic of your story has developed over time

Maps: http://www.umapper.com Make maps that users can click on for more information.

Live log: http://www.coveritlive.com A great tool for live events, allowing you to live log and communicate with readers as the events pass.

After finishing your work, all services provide you with a code that you embed into the story. You will probably need some help from an experienced web journalist for this part. But I tell you: Learning how to embed external elements like maps, time lines and Youtube videos gives you unlimited creative possibilities in digital journalism.

A great blog for getting tips on interactive multimedia journalism is 10.0oo Words.

Step 6: Start analyzing traffic data for your site

Almost all news sites will have some analytics system installed. Many use more than one system, depending on the purpose of the analysis. Live logging of traffic is for instance often a separate system.

Ask for access to the analytics of your news site and try to learn the basics of the service, whether it be Google Analytics, Xiti or another system. Try to understand the traffic pattern. Where do users come from? What stories are most popular?

The easiest and most fun software to learn using will typically be the live log, where you can see which stories people click on right now. By following the live log regurlarly you will learn a lot about what actually works and what does not in driving traffic to a web site.

Step 7: Get yourself a smart phone – and use it to its full potential

A significant shift in platforms is taking place – and it will have major influence over the media industry over the next years. It is driven by the growth in smart phones, but also tablets like iPad is pushing the development.

If you don’t have it already, hurry up to get a smart phone. Whether it is an iPhone or an Android-run phone is not that important. What matters is that you get a smart phone with lots of apps, GPS and all other features that are part of a modern phone.

Try to use it to its full potential. It will revolutionize your media consumption, and give you a new perspective of where journalism might be headed.

—————————————

My suggestion is that you make this list of 7 steps your plan for this first year of a digital makeover – although not necessarily in the same order.

If you spend time on all these steps – and try to learn as much as possible – you will be much better positioned in a year from now than you are today.

However, let me tell you: It is not enough! There are many more things you need to learn. But it is a starting step, putting you in the right direction.

But do not be fooled: It requires hard work! And you have to do it yourself. Don’t sit around and wait for your employer to come around with a course or two. Only you can be the manager of your own professional future.

And please, please, dear print colleagues: Do not fall into the typographers’ trap!

————————————–

Bonus:

After this article was written I was made aware of an excellent guide to become a good multimedia journalist:

Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency

It is written by journalism professor Mindy McAdams at University of Florida.  I really recommend that you read it! It is highly useful and very instructional.  (thanks to Blue Lady Blog for giving me the link)

Can the story of traffic accidents be told in a new way?  Journalists and programmers in the Norwegian media house Bergens Tidende joined forces to push local journalism to a new level.

Watch multimedia journalists Lasse Lambrechts explain how they worked with “Killing Roads”

Bergens Tidende is the major newspaper in Bergen, Norway’s second largest and most beautiful city. It’s web site has seen remarkable growth during the last year – and now has around 500.000 unique visitors every week. The number is amazing in a city of 260.000 inhabitants.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

The western part of Norway is full of narrow and winding roads, and traffic accidents are common news items. However, the journalists at Bergens Tidende wanted to dig deeper into this issue, and asked themselves not only who got killed, but why. Would there be any data that could help them understand this issue?

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration was approached, and after persistent use of the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act, the journalists got access to a database of all road accidents in the country.

• Killing Roads: Find bt.no’s main page for the editorial project here

The database turned out to be a journalistic goldmine: It contained details about 11.400 traffic accidents all over the country, all neatly arranged in an Excel file. Not only did the database give the exact position of each accident, but it also included numerous details, such as how many were killed and injured, the seriousness of injuries, driving conditions, type of vehicle, type of street, speed limit, time of the day, etc.

Still, most journalists would at this point probably have been happy to take a look at the database, extract some of the relevant accidents and made a couple of news stories based on them. In Bergens Tidende, though, the journalists instead were teamed up with programmers. Within a few weeks all the traffic accidents in the country had been put on a big Google map with endless ways to search the database.

Here is the smaller version of the map:

The data from The Norwegian Public Roads Administration did not give the names of any victims. But good journalism is always about people, and the journalists spent a lot of time over several weeks to identify victims. Relatives were asked for permission to use photos of the victims in the newspaper and on the web site. Many of them were interviewed at length about their experiences.

“Killing Roads” has been one of the biggest editorial projects at Bergens Tidende over the last few years, and resulted in a large number of newspaper articles, numerous stories on the web site as well as many video reports.

This video report (in Norwegian) tells the story of a couple who was killed in one of the traffic accidents.

The online part of this project is innovative and some of the best we have seen. It demonstrates how successful you can be with mixing the experience of programmers and journalists.

Here are some of the stories:

• Interactive graphic of the young traffic victims in the local province
• Interactive and searchable map of all traffic accidents in Norway
• The road strech with most accidents
• Test drive the most dangerous road – and see exactly where the accidents happened
• Readers marked more than 500 dangerous road stretches in Norway
• … and many other stories here

What is the most important things they have learned?

Lasse Lambrechts, a programmer who now works as multimedia journalist, says:

- It is always more work than you imagine. And it is extremely important to have a good structure, which I have learned in my years as programmer.

Lambrechts thinks they are the first team doing something like this in Norwegian journalism, and he believes the project is rather unique also globally.

Lasse Lambrechts is one one of many in a large team that has worked on “Killing Roads” at Bergens Tidende. Other team members include developer Håkon Ferstad, journalist Øivind L. Eidsvik,  video journalist Sonja Ystaas and journalist Erlend Langeland Haugen.

Bergens Tidende has decided to make the map of traffic accidents available to any other news media or blog in Norway that might be interested. All it takes is a couple of code lines – and a localized version of the accident map may be embeddedon any web site, as displayed above.

Personally I was very impressed with their work. I think it is an superb example of how different professions in the media, such as journalists, video journalists and programmers, by working together can a world-class editorial experience.

We need more of this type of journalism if the media companies shall survive in the future!

Bring it on, my fellow colleagues!

Bring it on!

———————————————————

Disclaimer: I work as editor at Media Norway, which is the company owning Bergens Tidende. However, I have not been involved in this editorial project in any way.

What are the digital trends that will shape the media industry? I asked five digital media experts. Here are their answers.

Everybody in the media industry these days seems to be trying to predict what happens in the digital media space right now. But the more experts you ask, the more different answers you get.

For the record: This is an updated version of the previous blog post “Digital trends that will shape the media industry”. Two more experts have been added to this post.

I put the following question to five recognized digital media experts:

• What are the three most important digital media trends right now that will shape the media industry over the next 3-5 years?

Here are their answers:

Knut-Arne Futsæter is one of Norway’s leading analysts of media trends. As research director at the market research agency TNS Gallup he regurlarly presents the latest research about media habits of the technological sophisticated Norwegian population. TNS Gallup is responsible for the official Internet surveys in Norway.

Futsæter is a very good person to follow on Twitter if you want to catch up on interesting links about what happens in digital media.

Thomas Baekdal is the man behind the well respected and very popular digital media blog Baekdal.com.

Having worked with new media in Denmark for 13 years, Baekdal now spends most of his time on his blog. I do recommend you to follow it, as Baekdal.com in my opinion is one of the most interesting digital media blogs out there.

His background is unusual, with a mix of expertise in design, fashion, media and publishing.

Thomas Crampton used to work for years as a globetrotting newspaper journalist, primarily for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

He then changed the course of his career – and since 2004 has been passionately involved with digital media. He is now the Asia Pacific director for 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy – and a frequently used keynote speaker on social media.

I recommend you to follow his excellent blog, in which he often provides very interesting information about social media in Asia.  He also tweets at @thomascrampton.

Grzegorz Piechota is the president of International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) in Europe.

One of the points he makes is how the older generation also will become digital.

“New devices like iPads seem to be much easier for the old generation to understand and to use. (Look at my parents-in-law.)”, he writes.

“Printed media used to think they had problems with the young readers, now watch out as their core readers are going finally to discover digital news, entertainment, communication, geolocation and e-commerce.”

“And you know — at least in developed countries the market of the old is much bigger than the market of the young, and it is going to be bigger and bigger.”

Grzegorz tweets at @forum4editors.

Nic Newman presents himself as a “digital consultant working on the future of journalism”.  For many years he used to work for BBC, first in different editorial positions and then in charge of teams developing major web sites for the broadcasting corporation.

One of his points is how the use of videos create new ways of telling and distributing stories.

“Navigating the world of the web through video led gateways will shake up the old broadcasting elites and open a new wave of innovation on TV, PC, Tablet and mobile”, he writes.

He tweets at @nicnewman.

• Read also: 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010

It was time to cut the crap: The Spanish news site 20minutos.es decided to make a sincere effort to increase the quality of readers’ contributions. Here is how.

The Schibsted-owned free newspaper 20 Minutos in Spain also has the third largest news site in the country, 20minutos.es.  Now it has launched a major program to increase readers’ contribution on the site. The program is called Eco and is an innovative self-developed framework for integrating readers’ commments and social media into the news stories.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RS

I recently visited Madrid and met with deputy editor-in-chief for 20minutos.es, Virginia Perez Alonso. She explained to me the philosophy behind Eco, that was launched on November 26th.

- 20minutos.es has a long tradition collaborating with our readers, especially when you compare us to the biggest news sites in Spain, like El Pais and El Mundo, she said.

Watch a short interview with Virginia Perez Alonso in the video above!

- In fact this is an area where we really wish to make a huge difference. We want to show that we understand our readers.

But as many news sites have experienced, building quality in readers’ participation takes a lot of work. Too much of comments are just crap that create noise rather than making real contributions.

20minutos.es set out to change this. They wanted to increase both the amount and quality of readers’ contributions, thinking this would differentiate the site in a positive way for its bigger competitors.

The answer was called Eco.

What is Eco, then?

It is a platform aggregating all readers’ contributions to a story, whether it is on 20minutos.es itself or in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

The total activity around a story is calculated into a Eco measurement. Stories with the most reader activity will then be given visible symbols on the front page of the news site.

Here is how it works:

On the front page

The number of comments each story has received is clearly marked in connection with the subtitle.

Then, if a story reaches a sufficient “ecco”, a measurement for readers’ activity, a special symbol is placed on the story image, indicating that this is a “hot story”.

It looks like what you see on the left. The eco symbol will take on a stronger color the more reader activity is associated with the story. Over time, the editors hope, readers will get used to the meaning of this symbol and look for the stories creating the most readers’ activity.

What happens, then, when readers click on the story?

In the actual article page a set of symbols appear after the lead paragraph.

It looks like this:

The bar both gives the proprietory “eco value” as well as number of comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.

Below the story are the comments and other contributions from readers:

Notice the tab for corrections. Readers are encouraged to report any factual error they might find in the story – and there even is a tab for the responses from the editorial staff.

An essential part of the eco system is that the most liked comments are displayed on the top. That is one of several measures to encourage readers to provide quality contributions.

- For sure this will not be used by every reader. These functions are for the most important of our readers, explains Virginia Perez Alonso.

They currently receive about 300.000 comments each month and expect this number to increase as readers get used to the new eco system.

A major challenge is to get all the journalists to participate. Each journalists gets his/her own user page in the eco system, but to succeed it is also necessary that they in fact participate actively. Convincing all journalists that this is worthwhile will still takes some time, admits Virginia Perez Alonso.

It is still too early to say how the eco system will work out. Yet I was impressed by the massive effort in making readers’ engagement the differentiator from competing sites. 20minutos.es has spent most of its limited development resources for several months on this project and is betting on this making a significant impact on its success.

I hope they will succeed.

• Read more articles about social media on BetaTales