For news publishers, there's no doubt that the digital age has well and truly arrived. eMarketer published a report in January predicting that online advertising spending in the United States will overtake print this year.

Spending on online ads in the US grew by 23% last year, totaling $32.03 billion, estimates eMarketer. The company, which provides analysis of internet market trends based on its own assessment of ad selling companies' reported revenues as well as on data from other industry sources, predicts that online ad spending will grow another 23.3% this year, to reach $39.5 billion.

Meanwhile, US print advertising, which totaled an estimated $36 billion in 2011, is expected to drop to $33.8 billion.

eMarketer forecasts a significant rise in online ad spending over the next five years; it predicts that by the year 2016, online ad spending will total $62 billion in the United States, and that print spending will drop to $32.3 billion.

Compared to other industry analysts, eMarketer's predictions are high, yet all forecast a meaningful rise in online ad spending in the coming years.

eMarketer hones in on the consequences for newspapers and magazines. It predicts that for US newspapers, online ad revenues will rise by 11.4% to $3.7 billion, while print ad revenues will drop 6% in 2012 to $19.4 billion. eMarketer forecasts a continuing decline in ad revenue at US newspapers over the next five years, from an estimated $24 billion in 2011 to a predicted $21.5 billion in 2016.

The news is brighter for magazines, where print revenues are actually expected to rise by 0.5% to $15.4 in 2012, then remain more or less steady over the coming five years. Online ad spending in US magazines is expected to grow by a whopping 19.3% this year to total $3.3 billion, after having grown 18.8% last year. eMarketer predicts overall growth in magazine advertising revenues over the next five years.

David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer, explains that US consumers' increased use of digital platforms and the fact that ad companies can measure their activities more closely online, have helped fuel the growth in online advertising. Hallerman states that, "advertisers' comfort level with integrated marketing is greater than ever".

Digital ads offers another possible advantage to advertisers. An article in TabTimes last month reported that according to the marketing and media research firm Affinity, readers tended to respond much more to ads in iPad editions of magazines than in the printed version. Managing director of Affinity Tom Robinson said that iPad mag readers were much more likely to follow through on an ad by downloading an app, following a link or making a purchase, than equivalent print readers. Robinson credited "interactivity of the tablet environment" for this difference.

"Digital obviously offers more opportunities to respond with the interactivity, the links built in, the videos, and that is directly reflected in the fact that we're getting higher reader ad effectiveness scores on the digital side," he stated.

Sources: eMarketer, Mashable, TabTimes,

The Daily celebrates its first birthday today. When News Corp launched its tablet-only daily news publication on February 2, 2011, many in the industry had high hopes.

"News Corp. is redefining the news experience with The Daily. We think it is terrific and iPad users are really going to embrace it," said Steve Jobs, Apple's late CEO, at the time.

One year on, Josh Sternberg at Digiday has published an article about how The Daily has faired so far. At first, the answer seems to be that The Daily's first year has been bumpier than expected.

"There's been no shortage of critics of The Daily," writes Sternberg, "It's too expensive. It lacks a voice. The technology, at least initially, was wonky. It had several staff shakeups. And most of all, it hasn't proven itself a viable as a standalone business."

Rupert Murdoch said last February that The Daily needed 500,000 subscribers to make it 'viable'. It currently has a fraction of that: 100,000 paid subscribers and 250,000 monthly readers, according to Sternberg's article.

Last September, doubts about the Daily abounded after it was revealed that the app had 120,000 weekly readers - well short of Murdoch's goal. Media analyst Ken Doctor was quoted in an article in Bloomberg when the news came out: "The Daily's proving to be a great R&D experiment but probably not a viable business," said Doctor, "It's not breaking through the national noise."

Doctor stated at the time that he believed established newspaper brands would do better with iPad apps than tablet-only publications like The Daily: "If you are Dow Jones, if you're the New York Times, these are good times because you can get that brand and content out in so many different ways, and sell advertisers across devices. But for an entity like the Daily, there's going to be some difficulty."

However, Sternberg is clear that The Daily still has potential. First of all, it's growing; according to Paid Content subscribers increased from 80,000 in October 2011 to 100,000 in January 2012; an jump of 25% in 3 months. It's the third most popular paid app in Apple's store, and is the most popular paid news app. After being launched for iPads only, The Daily expanded this month to become available on certain Android devices too. Sternberg also writes that The Daily has a relationship with important advertisers "who aren't yet ready to throw in the towel on the ambitious experiment".

Most importantly, Sternberg points out that wealthy News Corp can afford to lose money in the short term on The Daily if that's what it takes to work out how to publish successfully in the digital era. "It's not just a bet the company can choose to take; it's a bet the company arguably must take," he writes.

Josh Martin, group director of media strategy at ID Media, is quoted by Sternberg praising The Daily's paid content model: "I think their model of a free trial, followed by a paid model is a good bet," he states. New readers of The Daily are given a two-week free trial, after which they are asked to pay 99 cents a week or $39.99 for a yearly subscription. According to Paid Content, new Android users will be asked to pay $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year after a one-week free trial.

It's still be too early to tell whether The Daily will be a success. But according to Sternberg, publisher Greg Clayman is confident about the tablet's future: "We've absolutely met our expectations. It takes a new publication an average of five to seven years to break even, and we're operating well ahead of that curve," he said.

Sources: The Daily, Digiday, Bloomberg, Paid Content

TED, the non-profit group that hosts lectures and posts them online for free, has announced a new approach to its 2013 program: crowd-sourcing.

In a blogpost published yesterday, the organisation declared that it was starting a "global talent search" for its 2013 program. TED will be holding auditions for new speakers in 14 cities across six continents between April and June this year.

Possible future TED speakers from Nairobi to Vancouver to Tokyo will be able to apply online two months before the auditions open in their city. Anyone can submit an application, excluding people who have previously spoken for TED or posted talks on TED.com/talks.

In each city, 30 of the best applicants will be invited to give a 3-6 minute talk in English. When all the auditions are over, videos of the speakers will be posted on part of TED's site and members of the public will vote for their favourites. The top 50 will be invited to talk at TED 2013.

This is no small number. TED promises that as a result of the new initiative "at least half of our TED2013 program will literally be crowd-sourced".

The new project extends TED's commitment to "Ideas Worth Spreading". Up until now, the organisation has shared knowledge via its conferences and via TEDTalks, lectures that are posted online for free under a Creative Commons license so that they can be shared. Now, through crowd-sourcing, not only the information that comes out of TED is being distributed, the knowledge that's going into it is being democratized too.

It sounds like a great idea, but what relevance does it have to journalism? For starters, there's already been some interaction between TED and bigger news institutions. Last October, TED hosted a daylong joint event with the Poynter Institute titled "Finding the Future of Journalism". It has also served as a platform for famous journalists, including The Guardian's Paul Lewis, who speaks here about crowd-sourcing the news.

But on a more important level, TED's new crowd-sourcing initiative provides an interesting model for traditional news organisations (as Paul Lewis' lecture itself suggests!). The possibilities are striking in the context of this blogpost by Eric Newton, Senior Advisor to the President at Knight Foundation. Newton argues that journalists are finally asking themselves, "how can they go beyond just informing communities to actually engage them?" He calls the result "open journalism" and describes it as a "two-way networked system of communication", i.e. something very similar to the new TED project.

Newton praises a paper written by Melanie Sill, former editor and senior VP of The Sacremento Bee, titled "The Case for Open Journalism Now" in which she advocates this new model of reporting.

Sill picks out The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger as an example of an important figure in the news already practicing open journalism. Last year The Guardian announced a digital initiative that promised to place "open journalism on the web at the heart of [The Guardian's] strategy". These certainly weren't empty words. The Guardian's digital open newsroom, Newsdesk live, which we wrote about yesterday, is just one example.

Although The Guardian's current finances are a poor example of this, Sill also promises that open journalism can offer news organisations economic benefits through "increased capacity and quality, cultural relevance and customer connection".

Newton is enthusiastic about the idea of open journalism, describing it as a process that "turn[s] lectures into conversations". There couldn't be a better description of what TED is doing right now.

Sources: TED (1) (2) (3) (4) Knight blog Annenberg Innovation Lab, sfnblog

"No comment".

Business executives had become more and more adept at hiding behind this phrase, argues David Carr of The New York Times in an article published on Sunday. Not only that, but major figures in business are often obscured by "communications" teams that are anything but communicative. But now, suggests Carr, "Twitter has the potential to cut past all that clutter".

Carr writes that thanks to Twitter "there's a chance to get a glimpse into the thinking of otherwise unapproachable executives, and sometimes even have a real dialogue with them".

He uses Rupert Murdoch as an example. The News Corp executive joined the microblogging platform at the very end of last year, and has since made the headlines several times with Tweets that Carr calls "devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and prone to crankiness, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know".

Murdoch has used the platform to take sides on divisive issues. He voiced his strong support of SOPA and attacked President Obama for not supporting it, tweeting: "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery."

Commenting on the US Republican presidential primaries he urged Iowans to "think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country".

Carr calls Murdoch's account "a fine opportunity for the rest of us to hear what's on the mind of a man who controls vast swaths of the global conversation". He is generally impressed by Murdoch's Tweets: "after a month of reading Mr. Murdoch's posts, I have to say there's something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it."

But as public figures start self-publishing, journalists also face major challenges. Mathew Ingram wrote an article for GigaOm yesterday, reporting that Brian Stelter of The New York Times, had highlighted the more disruptive side of "sources going direct" at a social media conference at Columbia University. According to Ingram, Stelter called the problem the "generational issue of our time for journalists", adding that it "keeps me up at night".

Ingram doesn't give much context to Stelter's statements, but he tells us why he thinks about why sources "going direct" could cause major disruption: "it removes the need for the journalist as middleman or information gatekeeper," he writes, "In the past, a journalist could have made a pretty good name for themselves by simply getting access to Rupert Murdoch and quoting his thoughts on Barack Obama or Google -- but now, he is providing those himself."

Yet in the end, Ingram is confident the shift "should be good for serious journalism". In the long term, it will mean good journalists move away from trying to get scoops, and towards filtering information and providing context and analysis, he argues.

The growth of Twitter is not just providing a publishing platform for executives, but for brands too. PBS Mediashift released an article last week noting that brands have moved on from making adverts where the message is just "Buy our stuff". Now they are actively creating and self-publishing their own content. Author Amy Vernon picks out the example of HBO, which created a custom video app for Facebook called Immortalize to promote the show True Blood. The app allowed users to integrate themselves into a scene from the popular program and it "took off" on Facebook. Vernon wrote that the campaign "wasn't advertising at all. It was creating interactive content for fans".

Brands creating content for social media may put traditional publishers in a similar position that business journalists find themselves in when they look at Rupert Murdoch's Twitter stream; in some ways, their role as the middleman has been cut out. Does this mean that traditional content producers will be left behind? Not necessarily, argues Vernon: "It just means that we all need to make sure we're providing some sort of value to our readers."

"For the so-called content creators -- writers, photographers and videographers -- it actually means more opportunity, not less," she concludes.

Sources: The New York Times, Huffington Post, GigaOm, PBS Mediashift