Mail online goes top of the world

The Daily Mail has become the leading online newspaper in the world, according to figures by the tracking service comScore.

The British middle-market tabloid has eclipsed the previous, and long-time, holder of the top spot, the New York Times.

The figures show that Mail online reached 45.3m people last December compared to the NY Times's 44.8m. Trailing behind them are USA Today, the US-based Tribune newspapers and The Guardian.

Mail's online's editor, Martin Clarke, puts it down to ever-improving US traffic, and says: "We just do news that people want to read."

In an interview with the BuzzFeed website, he talks about the paper's middle-class roots and its "Fleet Street heritage" being the source of its "entertaining, engaging way with clear, concise, straightforward copy and lots of good pictures."

BuzzFeed's unidentified author describes the Mail's website as being unlike any other online properties:

"It's dense and almost endlessly scrolling, and feels like several newspapers stacked on top of one another.

It blends original reporting with sharp rewrite, celebrity gossip and hard news, citing but relatively rarely linking out to other publications."

The NY Times isn't too happy about being overtaken. A spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, disputed the way the comScore figures are compiled.

She says the Mail only passed the Times by including in its total a personal finance site published by the paper.

"It's a roll-up of their properties," she says, arguing that the Times could beat the Mail if it included its Boston Globe properties in its total.

We remain the number one individual newspaper site in the world, she says.

She also distances the two papers by saying the Mail "is not in our competitive set."

As the author rightly points out, online traffic is notorious for the varying slices that can be taken, and there's no clear standard.

So "the ...

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Is Apple's iBooks Author the right eBook creation tool for journalists?

Nope, not even close.

Oh…kay, so is Apple's new iBooks Author at least another option for writers looking to pick up some extra money writing eBooks?

Sure.

Apple released its new eBook production tool last week, coupled with an upgrade to its iBooks app. Apple's trying to get into the textbook market, positioning its iPad as an electronic textbook reader. But to do that, Apple needs an ongoing supply of eBook textbooks. The company's signed deals with some textbook publishers, but it's also offering the iBooks Author tool to encourage more people to create texts, as well.

The iBooks Author app's gotten plenty of attention since its release for its user license restriction that any book created with it can only be sold through the iBookstore. No Amazon. No Barnes and Noble. While iBooks Author can export files as a PDF, it won't generate the ePub file needed for best results in publishing eBooks through those and other online vendors.

That alone disqualifies the iBooks Author app as a serious option for any journalist looking for a single eBook creation solution. Better to continue creating an HTML file using your favorite editor, then running that file through Calibre to generate your ePub, which you can submit to Amazon, BN.com... and the iBookstore. The iBooks Author app also requires that you be running Mac OS Lion - it won't download to Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier versions of the Mac OS. And if you're using Windows? Fuggedaboutit.

But if you do have Lion, creating a book through iBooks Author and selling it exclusively through Apple is better than not making or selling eBooks at all.

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Peecho lands 570,000 euros for its ‘cloud print button’

Peecho, a Dutch startup that enables anyone to sell professionally printed products from their website, mobile or desktop apps, has raised $750,000 in financing from Peak Capital and DHG Holding to boost development and marketing of its embeddable 'cloud print button' service.

Basically, their solution lets anyone sell digital content as physical products (think magazines, photo books, canvas prints and whatnot), by helping its customers hook into a network of professional print production facilities.

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Research: Professionals With iPads Are Deserting Printed Media

Stark new research statistics suggest digital replacement of analogue content is now very high amongst tablet owners.

• Newspapers: Seventy two percent of worldwide professionals polled by IDG Connect say they are buying fewer since owning an iPad.

Asia and the Middle East lead the way with, respectively, 90 percent and 80 percent of respondents saying they now purchase fewer printed papers.

“These markets for physical media are already in decline,” the iPad For Business Survey 2012 concludes. “On this evidence, tablet computing will hasten their demise.

“For advertising- funded media (newspapers and magazines), the challenges are particularly substantial. Readers who can afford iPads tend to be more demographically desirable than those who cannot.”

In North America, 15 percent of respondents said they would consider buying an alternative tablet to iPad next time.

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Is A Facebook Newsroom On The Way?

There has been talk for years about the possibility of Facebook entering the news gathering and distribution game in a big way, given its size and the number of links posted to it every day.

So today’s news that Facebook has purchased a number of Facebook Newsroom-themed URLs shouldn’t come as a surprise.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The Times Plans Social Sharing Upgrade, Real-Time iPad News

News International’s The Times may shed its social media invisibility cloak by letting subscribers gift paywalled articles to friends.

It is also considering introducing micropayments and may add rolling news to mobile editions.

“Sharing, within the Wapping headquarters, has been a hotly-debated topic,” News International digital product director Nick Bell told me during a one-on-one Q&A session at the Digital Content Monetisation Europe conference in London on Wednesday.

“Over the next six months, you will see us rewarding our paying subscribers with the ability to share amongst their network. That’s going to be an interesting piece for us. If they want to share content with their direct friends, then we’re going to enable that.”

But exact details, like whether recipients of subscribers shared articles will get to read for free, are at an early, exploratory stage.

“We’ve watched with interest the launch of other newspapers’ apps on to Facebook,” Bell said. “We have yet to see where the true value lies there. If you speak to the likes of The Guardian and The Independent, they probably agree on that.

“It’s a huge platform and a great way to get a lot of eyeballs on your content, to increase your brand presence in that space - but, actually, trying to derive direct monetary value from those users is still a challenge. We’re monitoring that space with interest and we’re keen to give more value to our paying customers.”

The Times pioneered paid content’s big second wave when it implemented platform-wide digital fees in summer 2010 and reported 115,000 customers in September. Its online audience and exposure in social media has naturally declined, but the company remains bullish, with a liberal ethos to charging formats going forward.

A social metre?

Bell said the payment method is not set “hard and fast” but told me the publisher won’t let some articles go free under the metre model operated by titles like The Financial Times and New York Times.

“We’ve taken that question back to our customers on a very regular basis - they keep telling us that they don’t want that system,” he said. “They want to have a level playing field - if they are paying for content, then other people are also paying for content.

“Where...

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Penguin's DK: Goodbye Books, Hello 'Flat' Content. Make Once, Use Anywhere

Dorling Kindersley, the division of Penguin that publishes children, travel and reference titles, made a strong case for how it is moving to a “flat” content model, where a printed book is only one of many output options. The digital publisher of DK also said that companies like his need to do this to be ready for the next big thing in books—whatever it is—but as is so often the case for old media industries, the change is “massive” and not easy for everyone in publishing.

Speaking at the Digital Content Monetization conference in London yesterday, Peter Buckley, digital publisher for DK, said that the company’s e-book catalog probably now numbers in the thousands—he does not keep exact count—and that the company is “almost there” in terms of having titles on offer simultaneously as e-books as well as printed books.

For a company focusing on reference books, the rise of apps has been a big deal for DK. E-reading devices like the basic Kindle, with its high emphasis on providing a good text experience, were limited as a platform for books that have more graphics than text, and with their emphasis on information and discovery, beg interactivity.

However, apps have a drawback, too: they are too expensive to produce. Buckley said that now the tide is shifting for companies like his to move away from apps to e-books.

E-books, he said, are taking on more and more functionality, and they, rather than apps, have become the go-to place for paying customers looking for publishers’ works.

“It’s not as sophisticated as an app to publish something in, for example, the iBookstore, but the technology will either catch up with e-books or something else will come along,” he said. “E-books are a lot cheaper and easier to produce. And they sell so well. [Platforms like the] Amazon/Kindle and Apple’s iBookstore are so solid for us, and people are used to paying for that content up front.”

But he also added that DK will not leave the app space altogether. It will continue to create apps for certain categories of their catalog such as travel—DK oversees the Rough Guide brand—where these benefit more from their ability to be updated and interface with web-based content.

Flat content. That assumption that “something else will come along” is also driving what Buckley calls the...

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What does SOPA mean for us foreigners?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is an American piece of legislation, and as a general rule, American legislation has only limited influence outside US borders. My fellow Europeans might, for example, marvel at the almost proud dysfunction that led to the creation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but ultimately it was irrelevant to us; a sideshow to be watched with bemusement.

SOPA is a little different from most legislation, however, in that it has an explicit focus on websites that are, in some sense, "foreign." SOPA regulates the dealings between American service providers—most notably search engines, advertising networks, and payment processors (such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard)—and foreign sites. Search engines will have to remove listings of offending foreign sites; advertising networks will have to stop selling ads to offending sites; payment processors will have to stop processing payments for offending sites.

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Introducing events

Today we’re launching an events section in each EveryBlock city.

Until now, there hasn’t been a great way to find events happening in your neighborhood. There are a bunch of events sites out there, but they suffer from three problems.

First, they focus on general-interest events — the Cubs game, the big stadium concert, the citywide festival — instead of neighborhood-scoped events. There hasn’t been a place to find the “long tail” of events.

Second, they don’t allow for geographic granularity. When you search, the smallest radius they support is 5 miles, which, from EveryBlock’s perspective, might as well be at the other end of the city.

Third, they’re siloed. Sure, you could go to your park district’s site for park district events, and to your city’s site for city-sanctioned events, and to your neighborhood association’s site for your neighborhood association’s events, but nobody collects that in one place.

Our new events section is our first step in solving these problems.

You’ll now see an events calendar on your custom EveryBlock homepage. Click that, and you’ll see upcoming events near your followed places. You can browse by date and category (clean-up, garage sale, school meeting, etc.). All of this uses the same level of geographic granularity you’ve come to know and love on EveryBlock, so that you can see events happening near a given block, neighborhood or custom location.

As with the rest of our site, the events come from a variety of sources — sites that we aggregate data from (starting with our launch partners Eventful and Time Out Chicago), plus users like you. If you’re an event organizer or otherwise know about what’s happening in your neighborhood, you can post events yourself. (Look for the "Post to EveryBlock" link at the top of each page while you're logged in.) Events also show up in your timeline and in our daily email digests, so they fit into the existing ways people use EveryBlock.

We hope this turns you on to fun neighborhood events you didn’t know about, lets you spread the word about events you’re organizing yourself and gives you more excuses to meet your neighbors and strengthen the bonds in your community.

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