The difficulty with what's "obvious", what anyone can plainly see, is that, in media matters, it's very rarely true. Take just a few examples.

It's obvious that if you buy a bulky Saturday paper, you won't need one on Sunday.

Continue reading on Peter Preston on Press and Broadcasting

Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science blog and column in the Guardian keeps journalists writing about health in check; Hilary Alexander, fashion director of the Telegraph; Jemima Kiss, technology writer at the Guardian; Robert Peston, business editor for the BBC and Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK have all been ranked by PeerIndex as the five UK journalists with the greatest online influence.

Continue reading on journalism.co.uk

The role of community manager has gone from being a social experiment to an integral part of the newsroom. But are they there to teach old hacks new digital tricks or is there now a genuine business imperative and ROI factor in having staff to represent your brand through social media?

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The New York Times's paywall launch seems to be off to a fine start, with management proudly announcing 100,000 new web-only subscribers shortly after the launch.

If each of those subscribers stick around and pay $15 a month, that's $18 million of high-margin annual revenue the company just added.

Continue reading on Business Insider

by ukaop.org.uk

Ahead of the ePublishing Innovation Forum, we caught up with Audra Martin, VP, Customer Engagement and Operations at the Economist, where she is speaking on 'a pricing strategy that suits you and your customers', with the Economist's iPad/iPhone app downloads reaching over 1 million.

What are the main learnings from your iPad launch, and managing the ongoing product development process around it?

Continue reading on Association of Online Publishers

For more than a year, coverage of the New York Times as a business has been relentlessly about its "metered model" pay wall and other digital matters. But without any media news notice, the newspaper has engineered a coup on the legacy side of its operations.

Essentially, it has replaced telemarketing as a source of selling new subscriptions with "events marketing" -- pitching a booth at a well-trafficked venue like the U.S. Open tennis tournament or the South by Southwest conference in Austin and trying to sign up passers-by.

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The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has launched a new journalism industry encyclopaedia today, aiming to catalogue the "most important players and innovators in the evolution of journalism" and "provide a centralised source for background, context, and the latest news about them".

"Future of news encyclopaedia" Encyclo currently has 184 entries covering a variety of organisations, including online news sites, newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks, and technology companies.

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Washington Post journalists are creating paid, self-paced online courses for the public, the newspaper announced in an email to subscribers on Wednesday.

The MasterClass website aims to take the Post's "knowledgeable resources into this field for our readers who are interested in exploring areas we are uniquely qualified in helping them understand," according to an FAQ that accompanies the MasterClass website.

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Twenty-five thousand people read The Times on iPad each day. Its stablemate The Sunday Times counts 22,000 readers, including two million iPad page views.

Those numbers may sound small (in print, the papers circulate an average 446,109 per day and 1,031,727 on Sunday). But they're a start and they point to the popularity of iPad within the new multi-platform paid ecosystem.

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The Manchester Evening News has been awarded the Digital Innovation of the Year prize at this year's Regional Press Awards for its Police 24 project.

The project saw the MEN analyse tweets from Greater Manchester Police, which was tweeting every reported incident over a 24-hour period on the 14 October last year, breaking down and visualising the incidents as close to real time as possible.

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Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships -- and their audiences' relationships -- with advertisers.

That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

Continue reading in The New York Times