Spanish Papers Understaffed
 (SPAIN) -- News staffs can be cut too deeply, according to Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute. The proof of this is in Spain, where understaffing seriously affects the quality of journalism -- a lesson that should be heeded by media in other countries, according to Clark. "Stories are reported over the telephone or by watching television coverage," he wrote after conducting five days of seminars for 150 Spanish journalists. "The writing tends to be hidebound, without a sense of a reporter's presence. A single editorial worker may be responsible for three or four stories per day, as well as page production. The practice of journalism -- reporting, writing, and editing -- gives way to feeding the production beast through 'auto-pagination.'" Moreover, younger reporters have developed great skill at what one veteran Spanish journalist called "piracy," cutting and pasting bits of content from many uncredited Web sources to form a story under their own byline. Journalists at the seminar also blamed tightfisted media owners for not dispatching reporters to cover important stories, such as the war in Afghanistan or the recent oil spill threatening Spain's own coastline. But the shortage of reporting resources is not unique to Spain. In his own country's media, Clark sees an early warning of troubling parallels. "Significant attrition would be necessary for journalism in the United States to retreat to the levels of Spanish staffing, but we already hear complaints across the land about reporters who are too busy to leave the newsroom."
Not All Content Is Salable
Newspaper And J-School Join Forces
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MARKETPLACE
XFN Going Global
(CHINA) -- The Xinhua Financial Network (XFN), a two-year-old news service partly owned by the Chinese government, is purchasing AFX-Asia, the Asian operations of Agence France-Presse's global AFX News. XFN has, until now, primarily covered publicly listed Chinese companies; but the new deal gives it bureaus in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and eight other Asian countries. In return, Agence France-Presse will acquire a minority stake in XFN, and the two companies are reportedly in talks with a real-time news provider in the U.S. to further expand their alliance. Together, XFN and AFX envision offering a compelling challenge to global news giants such as Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones. AFX News Chairman Eric Scherer likens the alliance to code-sharing arrangements between airlines. "You have companies that are very strong in their markets, but they share customers, they share resources," Scherer said. While XFN's single largest shareholder is the Xinhua News Agency, XFN insists that its coverage is not affected by domestic media-control policies of the Chinese government. The state-owned agency only holds a minority share. Other XFN investors include PR Newswire, Nippon Venture Capital, Funai Venture Capital and futures broker Refco Group Ltd. The company's last expansion was in March 2002, when it bought financial news provider DigiStock Korea Ltd., the South Korean agent for Standard Poor's Market Services and AFX News.
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News Interests Shift Through Day
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Newspaper Decline Accelerates
(USA) -- American families spent an average of US$56.81 on newspapers in 2001, or just over half of the US$90.33 they spent on Internet services, according to a new study. This represents a five-percent decline in newspaper spending from 2000, extending across all demographic groups. Compared with a three-percent decline for the 10 years ending in 1995, the figure also shows a startling acceleration. "If I was a newspaper publisher today, I would be very scared because of these ominous trends," said Peter Francese, the study's author and the former editor of American Demographics magazine. "Are you listening to the customer? The message they are delivering is not one I would want to be hearing if I was in your business." Yet some publishers questioned how circulation could be rising even as spending falls. One executive labeled Francese a "scaremonger". Another said that the Internet's predicted strangulation of print media has been widely exaggerated and that some online editions are actually profitable. "We're turning the tide and it's all about content," said William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post and 49 other papers. "The community and its newspaper are indivisible," Singleton said. "Newspapers are the last truly mass medium." In response, Francese noted that the same was said, once, of bygone general-interest magazines Life and Look. Meanwhile, a forecast by the Newspaper Association of America shows one definite bright spot for newspapers in the short-run: gaining ad momentum in 2003. "Conditions are improving a little more rapidly than they did in the last downturn in 1990-1991," said the article in NAA's Presstime magazine. Newspaper ad revenues should rise by 3.2 percent or more this year, with as much as 6.1 percent being possible.
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Financials Forge Ahead
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Questions Left Unanswered
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TECHNOLOGY
Interviews Appear Online
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Google News Gets Kudos
(UK) -- Independent research firm Newsknife, which has tracked Google News since its inception, recently gave the service a positive review. Apparently, the Google algorithms that monitor the world's news sites minute by minute, analyzing and ranking the most important stories, are doing a pretty good job compared to the human editors at other leading sites. "Up to early December 2002, we ran Google News Watch 17 times, checking the top two headlines at each site during a sub-12 minute window," said a Newsknife spokesman. "That's 34 possible Top 2 stories, and Newsknife reckons that Google News picked 20 of them, compared with Yahoo! News and CNN both at 25." These findings don't reflect everything about the quality of Google's selections, of course -- such as occasional lapses in computer judgment that produce erroneously categorized stories. But Newsknife remains impressed and notes that the software is, after all, still learning.
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Voice-Enabling Web News
(GERMANY) -- The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has become the first German daily newspaper to launch a voice portal, a Web site that accepts verbal input and produces text-to-speech output. Its Fonservice recognizes spoken words like "news" or "traffic" and leads surfers to the appropriate content, which is then translated into synthetic speech using ScanSoft's RealSpeak. Fonservice visitors can also issue voice commands like "repeat," "forward" and "back." FAZ, one of Germany's top four national papers, serves a large segment of wealthy and mobile business users, upon whom it is counting for early adoption that will bankroll Fonservice's continued development. Still a future dream, however, is a portal that can offer the whole Web via voice, rather than just a "walled garden" of information at a particular site. "Compared to the PC market, telephony is still in the era of the DOS prompt," said Dan Ridsdale, an analyst with UK market consultants Ovum. He thinks that technology in speech recognition has improved to the point that media companies had better begin claiming a stake in the game: "Personal assistant service providers will effectively own the customer interface, becoming the users' personal portal into the network."
Apple Worries Publishers
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GURUS
Changing The Logo
Mario R. Garcia, President/CEO, Garcia Media Group
Redesigns never get off the ground before at least a short discussion of what to do, or not to do, with the newspaper's logo, the way its name appears as a "brand" at the top of page one. Inevitably, someone in the organization's redesign team feels that "we should look at changing the logo, because it is so boring and old looking."
Truly, some newspaper logos are boring, and some show their wrinkles beyond the acceptable limit. And in some cases the logo has not been cleaned up or updated for decades or more. Although a redesign is the right opportunity to address the question of logo suitability, most of the time it is best to spend one's time reviewing other more pertinent issues, such as content organization, target audience, better utilization of typography and color.
The nameplate of the newspaper does represents its brand. However, readers do not read nameplates, they merely look at them, and identify with the style of letters, color and flair. Changes in nameplates are often not necessary, but are carried out to satisfy a new publisher or editor's whim. Nameplates can be updated, cleaned and redrawn, while retaining their character.
While some designers feel that a modern layout does not belong under an Old English, or Gothic, nameplate, their argument is not valid. There is always room in even the most contemporarily decorated home for a classic grand piano. And the same idea holds true on a newspaper's front page. Think twice before totally redesigning the newspaper's nameplate, but don't hesitate to update it and make the old style look fresh again. Good redesigns should salute the past as well as the future.
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NEWSPLEX REPORT
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- The mad scientists of media have a new laboratory in which to conduct their experiments. Newsplex, Ifra's newsroom of the future, opened for business last month at the University of South Carolina (USC), and is already booking time for training, research, and education. The goal: to give the newspaper industry the push it needs to truly converge...
Newsplex is designed to be a lab and demo space for cutting-edge technologies, a training ground for media professionals, and a teaching tool. "It's where the future of journalism and news technology intersect," declares Kerry Northrup, quoting the slogan of Newsplex, where he is executive director. It is nonprofit, although training sessions have been priced to help Ifra recoup some of the $500,000 it has invested and to pay operating expenses and the incorporation of new technologies. (Directorate members pay discounted rates.)...
"Newsplex is a place to test out ideas, and to put journalists in a different environment," said Paul Horrocks, editor of the Manchester (UK) Evening News, a Newsplex Directorate member. "If you're going to think out of the box, you've got to get out of the box."
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ANNOUNCEMENT
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Comments & Contributions:To comment on something in this Ifra Trend Report or to point us toward material pertaining to the future of news, newsrooms or news publishing, contact Kerry J. Northrup, Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations, fax-to-email +1.209.254.5862 or +49.69.25577648.
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