7 News-Themed Facebook Apps To Try Out

Yesterday, Facebook revealed the names of 12 media companies launching social reader apps on Timeline. Seven of them are news-themed.

The Guardian and the Washington Post were two of the biggest names to first experiment with social readers. So far, almost 6 million people have signed up for and installed The Guardian‘s news app, says Martin Belam, the news organization’s lead user experience and information architect. More than 5o percent of users are under the age of 24.

“The app is putting our reporting and features in front of the grown-up audience of the future,” Belam recently blogged.

Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of media partnerships, concurs that the apps have, so far, shown “significant increases in traffic and engagement.”

“These apps create new ways for readers to discover content, while giving publishers the opportunity to reach new audiences,” Osofsky wrote in a blog post announcing the newest additions to Timeline. “They’re built around news and content people care about and identify with and provide easy ways to control the social experience.”

So, who are the new news apps on the block?

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Two Become One: How Magazines Will Ape Their Apps

In a reversal of today’s content publishing model, print magazines pretty soon could start looking a lot like their app equivalents.

“The next redesign of our titles will see them redesigned with our tablet versions in mind,” magazine publisher Future’s tablet editor-in-chief Mike Goldsmith told an industry forum this month.

As publishers extend their print titles to iPad, they can choose either to repurpose the paper originals, which can seem lazy and ill-suited to the touch screen, or to custom-produce interactive apps with a native interface in mind, which is expensive.

If he did that for Future’s 60+ titles, he would “bankrupt the company”, Future’s Goldsmith said. So, today, only three Future titles have the shiny iPad treatment.

But re-imagining today’s disparate print and tablet production workflows in lock-step from the start, making tablet requirements less of an extension, could cut costs. And that could make it feasible for publishers to out their entire portfolio as full iPad editions, as well as in their core printed form.

Already, one Future title, Tap!, is sized to match iPad dimensions. That was a no-brainer (after all, Tap! is all about apps). But many other magazines, too, are now published in a secondary, miniature form factor that increasingly references the tablet’s own.

And upcoming revisions at Future will borrow further stylistic conventions, as a recent iPad-inspired refresh to Future’s flagship gadget magazine T3 suggests. T3 has begun conceiving some editorial in fragments - swiped through on screen to satisfy readers’ fingers, as well as broken up in short, boxy segments in print. Nowadays, print must satisfy the shorter attention spans of a generation hooked on fragmented and intimate, tactile engagement.

This ironic repurposing of apps back in to print could, in time, significantly re-shape the discipline of magazine design. But that’s something many readers may now be ready for. So potent is the agency users feel when controlling their screen with their fingers, growing numbers of them are catching themselves pinch-zooming a printed leaf in the expectation of interaction.

Other publishers are approachi...

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Murdoch the magician picks two rabbits out of the hat

Rupert Murdoch looked as if he had no hand to play. But the old gambler came up trumps by producing a couple of surprise cards from his sleeve.

By cancelling the suspensions of the arrested Sun journalists he will have quelled the rebellion in the ranks.

And by pledging to launch the Sun on Sunday he will have given the staff a sense of a long-term commitment to the paper and his UK empire.

In that sense, it may have calmed matters too at his other News International titles, the Times and Sunday Times, where there has been growing concern among staff about their future.

He is nothing if not a magician by pulling two rabbits from the hat. And it would appear that, for the moment at least, he has conjured up a Wapping peace.

It was very noticeable from his email to staff that he was eager to stress his affection for the paper he built from near-death into Britain's largest-selling daily.

I'm not so sure about his claim that "The Sun occupies a unique and important position within News Corporation."

In truth, it occupies a unique and important position within Murdoch's heart rather than that of his US-based company.

In so many ways, it represents him, with its sharp-elbowed, devil-may-care, anti-establishment and sometimes vulgar approach. The Dirty Digger did not get that nickname for nothing.

But he is also able to be subtle too, as he showed today. A palpable sense of relief surged through The Sun newsroom at the news of their colleagues being allowed to return to work.

I couldn't believe that was possible when I spoke soon afterwards to Sky News because I understood, obviously wrongly, that the conditions of police bail precluded the arrested journalists from communicating with each other or with other journalists.

Evidently, some of those released on police bail after their arrests last Saturday also thought that to be the case.

But it appears those bail restrictions apply to some of the people arrested in the hacking investigation, Operation Weeting, rather than those detained under Operation Elveden, the separate inquiry into allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

As one admiring Sun staffer remarked on hea...

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The Best Free Tools for Twitter Analytics

What are the best free tools for analyzing a Twitter profile?

During a social media audit I like to run a company’s Twitter profiles through some basic analysis tools to set benchmarks and compare them to competitors.

I got good response to my post on Facebook analytics tools so I thought I’d do something similar for Twitter. But this time I’m going to highlight free tools that anyone can use.

I’m focusing specifically on profile analysis as opposed to Twitter tools for other purposes. For a list of trend tools see the Twitter section in Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends.

Twitter tools frequently come and go, especially the free ones, so a list like this is always evolving. But here is a small collection of tools that I like to use.

Twitter Web Analytics

Twitter has created its own free analytics tool, however it is still in beta and not yet available to everyone:

The data is fairly basic; the publishers we work with that already have access have not found it particularly useful yet. But it is always good to get data straight from the source and the toolset will continue to evolve.

Topsy Social Analytics

Topsy’s Social Analytics tool offers a good way to trend and compare mentions and replies for up to three profiles:

(click on the image to enlarge)

In addition you can track links to a domain or mentions of a particular keyword. Topsy also provides data on the top links in the past 24 hours for each profile.

Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter lets you compare the growth of followers, followings and tweet volume for up to three profiles:

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defining social business

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The 4 Factors That Make News Stories Popular on Twitter

A new study claims it can predict the popularity of a news story on Twitter with an 84 percent accuracy rate by looking solely at four factors that affect content.

The study, led by Bernardo Huberman of the Social Computing Lab Group at the Palo Alto-based HP Labs, examined the content of an article before it was published in determining how popular it would be on Twitter.

Specifically, the authors looked at:

• The news source that generates and posts the article;


• The category of news the article falls under;


• The subjectivity of the language in the article;


• The people and things mentioned in the article.

“Our results show that while these features may not be sufficient to predict the exact number of tweets that an article will garner, they can be effective in providing a range of popularity for the article on Twitter,” Huberman wrote in the study. “We achieved an overall accuracy of 84% using classifiers.”




The study, however, raises a lot of questions for journalists.  continued…




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“The Guardian’s Facebook app” - Martin Belam at news:rewired

In September last year the Guardian launched our Facebook app as one of the media partners working on new features announced at the company’s f8 conference. The app uses the Open Graph to implement “frictionless sharing”, where the act of reading an article automatically pushes it as an action into Facebook’s database.

The Guardian Facebook app

Several of us at the Guardian - including colleagues Meg Pickard and Dan Catt - had thought for some time about what a “social news experience” might be like, but when we came to build the app we concentrated on shifting one particular metric. We knew that 77% of visits to the Guardian from facebook.com only lasted for one page. A good hypothesis for this was that leaving the confines of Facebook to visit another site was an interruption to a Facebook session, rather than a decision to go off and browse another site. We began to wonder what it would be like if you could visit the Guardian whilst still within Facebook, signed in, chatting and sharing with your friends. Within that environment could we show users a selection of other content that would appeal to them, and tempt them to stay with our content a little bit longer, even if they weren’t on our domain.

When we launched the app, some people were quizzical about the approach.

Christine Burns said in two tweets: “The Guardian are going the right way to kill off normal social exchange of references to their articles. Almost as bad as Times paywall. The Guardian has been pretty sure footed with social media until now, but their Facebook integration is a fundamentally illiberal mistake”

Jason Cartwright tweeted: “The whole thing is weird - why would you cede control of the distribution to FB? Feels like old AOL walled garden model”

And @Playwert got straight to the point...

“WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A GUARDIAN APP ON FACEBOOK WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OWN FUCKING WEBSITE” - @Playwert

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Look at the bottom, not the top, of your traffic analytics to boost your website's readership

The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction - and could be hurting their businesses as a result.

The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be... to look at what's getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.

Don't do that.

Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that's drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive - and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.

So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?

Instead of looking at what's attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what's working, but what isn't.

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'Nevermind RBS, what about the media fat cats?'

Following the row over RBS chief executive Stephen Hester's bonus payments, the NUJ is turning its guns on the bumper rewards paid to executives in large media companies.

The NUJ today declared that public outrage directed at RBS should now be aimed at directors of the Trinity Mirror media group, who it says are pocketing more than £1.3 million a year - equivalent to 50 journalist jobs - at a time when editorial staff are facing another pay freeze and 700 job have gone in a year.

The NUJ says there can be no excuses for excessive bonus payments in the media industry and the money should be used to save jobs.

It claims the total directors’ pay and pensions bill for Trinity Mirror last year was £3.9million - £1.3million of which was cash bonuses - and chief executive Sly Bailey's package of pay and pensions was £1.7m, including a cash bonus of £660k.

Chris Morley, NUJ organiser said: “Stephen Hester has shown the way that most decent people in this country expect directors to act in companies that are failing to deliver growth. We need those at the top of companies such as Trinity Mirror, Newsquest and Johnston Press to show a real example and instead of thinking about their own wallets, to think instead about protecting their workforce and the overall business.

“Bonuses need to be earned and where that is in doubt the money should go to keeping up the resources of editorial departments across each business - not a race to the trough where rewards are showered on those who have done little to earn them.”

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With iBooks 2 And iBooks Author, E-Book Publishing For The Masses

E-Books that originate in newsrooms are an increasingly common phenomenon. The Washington Post and POLITICO, to name two publishers, have both gotten into that business lately, and have had success with porting their work to the longform platform.

Apple’s recent introduction of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author brings the ability for much smaller newsrooms with limited budgets to create and sell e-books for iOS devices. And these are not just any e-books: these are interactive e-books that gives you the ability to embed videos, photo galleries, quizzes and interactive images. continued…

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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.

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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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