Posts Tagged ‘the new york times’

A participant in a survey on The New York Times aimed at gauging willingness by consumers to pay for newspaper content online has leaked details from the survey to the Gawker Web site last week. If true, this tip presents more details than we’ve heard to date about The Times’ plans to charge.

Although Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty responded to the Gawker article, writing “It’s very early in the process…we are still in the data collection phase,” here’s what was leaked:

There will be two premium packages: NYT Gold for $150/year and NYT Silver for $50.

NYT Silver: Get the “story behind the story” – videos from Times journalists; access to some stories before they appear elsewhere online or in print; TimesMachine – digital images of the paper back to 1851 (including ads); and a real time push of headlines via TimesWire. There’s also a free subscription to the crossword puzzle, 25 percent discount on items in the Times online store, and even a free tote bag.

NYT Gold: all of the above plus TimesEvents – in person get togethers with Times staff and TimesInsider – direct chats with Times staff and even tours of the newsroom.

Gawker has screen shots from the survey.

The New York Times has promoted veteran reporter and editor Jennifer Preston to the position of “social media editor.” The announcement was made – wait for it – via Twitter (a formal release was issued afterward).

Preston is charged with ensuring “some consistency about what we consider good uses of [social media] and bad uses of it,” according to Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman. Preston is not a regular social media user…yet, he added. “But I don’t think that’s a terrible handicap here in real ways. Nobody’s an expert.”

The need for a social media honcho at The Times may have been spurred by a mid-May faux pas when details from an internal meeting about Web strategy were broadcast on several reporters’ Twitter feeds.

By the end of Preston’s first day on Twitter, she’d already amassed more than 2,400 followers. Her first tweet: “how should @nytimes be using Twitter?”

Preston previously oversaw The Times’ regional weeklies.

Cars.com’s NewCars.com subsidiary discovered that 20 percent of its overall ad spending on Yahoo in 2007 came from click fraud, according to an article in this morning’s The New York Times.

It’s not alone. As advertisers move increasingly to more measurable forms of getting the word out, such as pay-per-click, click fraud has soared. Reggie Davis,
vice president of network quality for Yahoo, puts click fraud at his site between 12-15 percent. Research group Outsell pegs click fraud at 13 percent of all online advertising clicks.

(Google contends that it has the problem under control and that fraudulent clips account for just 0.02 percent of all online activity.)

Click fraud occurs when clicks are made surreptiously in order to drive up payments to a site. But it also means the advertiser pays for clicks that aren’t really customers.

NewCars.com reported that, over the last year, a substantial number of clicks on the site have come from Bulgaria, Indonesia and the Czech Republic, countries where the company does no business.

“Click fraud is a serious problem, and we’re aggressively trying to fight it,” Isabel Sopoglian, vice president of online marketing for Cars.com, told The Times. “In this tough time, it’s important for advertisers to not waste dollars.”

The problem is so bad there are even click fraud Web sites where companies pay consumers to click on ads. These companies often pretend that they are offering a market research service.

Products such as Click Forensics promise to reduce click fraud by more than 60 percent in a month. The company has 120 customers. NewCars.com is a client and claims that their number dropped by nearly two-thirds, to just 7 percent, after Click Forensics entered the picture.

Other click fraud detection and eradication companies include AdWatcher and Anchor Intelligence.

Oh my…

Twitter actually surpassed both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in unique monthly visitors for April. Twitter topped out at just under 20 million, while The Times was at 15 million and The Journal in third place at 12 million.

Graph from Compete here.

We’re big fans of hyper-local. But how local do you need to be? A new initiative in the Czech Republic, sponsored by investment firm PPF Group, is placing its hyper-local newsrooms right next door to Internet cafes.

“There is no option to close the door” between the cafes and the adjacent newsrooms, Roman Gallo, director of media strategies at PPF, told The New York Times. “It’s a feeling for the reader that you can touch your editor and tell them what you want.

PPF is based in Amsterdam and has holdings in banking, insurance and media..

PPF is only investing $13.4 million in the project for now, Mr. Gallo said. It plans to begin publishing seven weekly newspapers and about 30 Web sites serving four distinct regions of the country next month, clustered around the four cities in which the “news cafes” will be situated: Olomouc, Usti, Teplice and Kromeriz. The cafes, Web sites and newspapers will operate under the name Nase Adresa, which means “our address.”

If the Web sites and newspapers are successful, PPF will look at expanding to other Central and Eastern European countries.

Google apparently likes the plan. The search giant is making its local staff available to help teach PPF journalists how to use tools like Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube. The Web sites will use Google’s AdSense.

The project is also supported by the World Association of Newspapers.

Amazon will be holding a press conference tomorrow at Pace University in New York City. While it’s still not clear what exactly Amazon will be announcing, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company is unveiling a textbook specific model of the Kindle with a larger screen.

But the newspaper Kindle may also be set to launch. TechCrunch says that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., New York Times Co. Chairman, will be sharing stage with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The textbook Kindle rumors are backed up by the CIO of Case Western University, Lev Gonick, who says that Amazon will be providing the university with larger screen Kindles next school year to distribute to chemistry and computer science students with content pre-installed. It will be more of a user test, with students being asked to compare the Kindle with standard textbooks.

Gonick also says that the new Kindle will have a “fully functional Web browser” which could make things interesting as it opens up newspapers to free access instead of Amazon paid control.
 
Five other universities have also been indicated for the upcoming university specific Kindle: Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia and Arizona State.

By the way – the location of the Amazon press conference is the original site of The New York Times back in the 19th century. Coincidence?

The housing crunch is affecting both the real estate and job market together. New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau yesterday found that the number of people who changed residences declined to 35.2 million from March 2007 to March 2008, the lowest number since 1962, when the nation had 120 million fewer people.

Sam Roberts, writing in The New York Times, speculates that the lack of mobility suggests Americans were unable or unwilling to follow job opportunities that require a move in location.

Not moving is bad on a number of fronts. Movers and Realtors will have less business. And stores that sell new appliances may find their business depressed as well.

Joseph S. Tracy, research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told The Times that “if mobility stays low, you can worry about the allocation of workers.” But that’s compounded by the overall down economy: it’s not as if you can just pull up stakes and move to a part of the country that’s growing.

It’s also taking longer to sell a home. Jed Smith, a research director for the National Association of Realtors, said that on average it took a homeowner 10.5 months to sell a house in 2008 compared with 8.9 months in 2007.

In its report Wednesday, the Census Bureau said that Americans’ mobility rate, which has been declining for decades, fell to 11.9 percent in 2008, down from 13.2 percent the year before and setting a post-World War II record low. Moves between states dropped the most, to half the rate recorded at the beginning of this decade.

Immigration from overseas was also down – to the lowest in the decade. No one’s moving when there are no jobs.

The data doesn’t jive with everyone. The Times quoted Robin Camacho, a Las Vegas real estate agent, who commented on the high foreclosure rates in the city. “I see people moving constantly because they have no choice.”

For the last year, The New York Times has been following three small businesses to report on their challenges, especially in today’s tough economy. One of those businesses is Renting Your Home, a two-year-old Web site that provides tools for home owners to rent their properties, collect rent via credit card, and connect with maintenance providers around the U.S. Renting Your Home then posts the landlords’ advertisements on some 23 rental Web sites.

The site is certainly not the only one of its kind but it’s probably the best looking. We were very impressed by Rent Your Home’s clean Web 2.0 design; the company clearly wants to create an inviting place to rent homes.

Renting Your Home pricing goes from $20 to $50/month (credit card payments are only available in the top package). Company founder Jeff Takle says the site’s conversion rate of visitors to customers is 8 percent.

Renting Your Home is still getting started – that’s why it’s profiled in the Times’ small business series – with only 1,000 customers and revenue just north of $100,000. But in terms of design, classified providers in all fields, from automotive to real estate, would do well to take a peek.

The New York Times is now earning a small chunk of change from the Amazon Kindle. The device, which has caught on more than its initial pundits believed, supports not only books but online newspapers. And according to an internal memo from The Times, more than 10,000 paid subscribers are reading the paper on the Kindle.

Doing the math, if the electronic Times costs $13.99 a month, that would mean the Times’ Kindle edition is generating in the neighborhood of $1.4 million a year. Amazon doesn’t tell what kind of cut it gets (but based on its book model, it’s well north of 50 percent).

Other Times-Kindle data from the memo: More than 2,000 subscribers have signed up to receive various New York Times blogs. And an election week promotion where free issues of the Kindle Times were made available resulted in 8,500 copies (beyond the 10,000 paying subscribers) being downloaded to the Amazon device.

If we take the low estimate that there have been about 240,000 Kindle sales so far this year, The Times would have a penetration rate of about 4 percent.

The New York Times, of course, is not alone on the Kindle platform. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and International Herald Tribune are all represented.

With newspapers already giving up on print, pushing portable electronic readers like the Kindle, Sony Reader and the upcoming device from Plastic Logic (to be formally announced in January at the CES show) may become increasingly popular….and profitable.

Now here’s an announcement dripping in irony. A New York Times’ columnist who wrote about careers for the paper has lost hers. Marci Alboher, who wrote the “Shifting Careers” blog about other people’s jobs, is no longer working regularly with the paper.

The news came as a surprise. Many of her articles had hit The Times most-e-mailed list and Alboher was regularly getting booked on TV and radio. Moreover, “As an online journalist focusing on work and careers, and as someone who fervently believes that embracing new technology is crucial to surviving as a journalist, I too felt like one of the safe ones,” Alboher wrote on her blog.

Alboher is now following her own career advice and writing thank you notes to people who have helped her in the past.

Here’s Alboher’s full post on her new free time.