[there are four news stories in this post.]
OJR article :: Free Content Becoming Thing of the Past for UK's Online Newspaper Sites
by Daithi O. hAnluain
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
OJR article: UK News Sites:Free and Subscription Services, Times Online, Financial Times, Guardian Unlimited, Telegraph, Nielsen/Netratings, The Association of Online Publishers, Online Publishers Association, LexisNexis, ABC Electronic, mbites, Reuters, The Press Association, Bloomberg, CNN, Google News, EL PAIS, Hollinger Telegraph New Media, OJR article: The Guardian of the Web, Robert Fisk, Independent Digital, BBC, and BBC News Online.
...Just 18 months ago, the United Kingdom was the land of free online news: Readers surfed from site to site and read every word, searched every archive and subscribed to every news alert -- all for free.
Now everyone's charging for something: With ad sales producing nowhere near the revenues needed to support news sites, every major newspaper site in Britain has decided it's time to bolster sagging income by charging for content.
In March 2002, Times Online started charging for its crossword; the Financial Times started charging for parts of its news site in May. Guardian Unlimited and Telegraph joined the fray in June, leaving their main news product free, but charging for special services like an ad-free version of the site, and for special news alerts.
"Now, it's serious," said Tom Ewing, European market analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings. "There's a real market developing."
But while British press barons are united in their bid to squeeze cash out of their consumers, they all follow different strategies. Basic access is still free -- no one in the United Kingdom has cut off their readers cold turkey. ...
The Telegraph is the most fee-free British broadsheet on the Net, charging for a digital edition aimed at overseas readers and for fantasy football -- though registration is required to access the free content. The Guardian plans to introduce registration soon, though they are anxious to keep their critical mass of deep links from blogs and Google (see OJR's Q&A with Emily Bell)...
In These Times :: From the Screen to the Streets
By Howard Rheingold
...Blogs and moblogs, such as the international network of Independent Media Centers, South Korea's influential OhMyNews and MoveOn.org's misleader.org are signs of what San Jose Mercury-News columnist Dan Gillmor calls an emerging "we journalism." Each of these sites offers up-to-the-minute news alerts, provided by a combination of citizen-reporters and trained staff. While the owners and administrators of such sites range widely - from passionate individuals to collectives to upstart nonprofits - these blogs are markedly more democratic than their corporate-run, top-down brethren.
Internal and external forces, however, threaten to undermine "we journalism" before its impact is fully realized.
Misinformation, disinformation, incredulity and magical thinking all are problems on the supply side of these new reporting modes. Aggregators of blog postings - which rank blog listings by popularity, similar to Google's page rank technology - already serve as a filter for this flood of amateur journalism. And reputation systems, filters and syndication services also could develop into useful tools for assessing the veracity of information sites. But political activists and those who sponsor progressive projects also have a role: For "we journalism" to have long-term credibility and lasting impact, progressives must fund, staff and promote media literacy - teaching users to create and consume this new journalism...
The Register :: Mac fan's blog leads to layoff in Redmond
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
...A temp worker at Microsoft's in-house print shop appears to have lost his job as a result of his two biggest passions - Macs and blogging.
Earlier this week, Michael Hanscom posted a picture of several Power Mac G5s being off-loaded outside of the MSCopy print facility. Four days later, someone at Microsoft caught wind of the blog post and asked that Hanscom be removed from his position doing temp work for Xerox in the Microsoft shop.
"In the end, what it boils down to was a slight misjudgment on my part," Hanscom wrote in a fresh globule. "While I (and many other people) may find Microsoft's reaction to be extreme and unnecessary, chances are they had every legal right to make the decision that they did. I would certainly have preferred that they simply request that I take the offending post down (which I would have done in a heartbeat), but for whatever reasons, they chose not to take that route."...
Byte and Switch :: Info Overload! Billions of Bytes Born
...If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You're as prolific as the average person on the planet.
That's according to a team of University of California at Berkeley researchers who claim there were about 5 exabytes of new information stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media in 2002. And because nobody's volunteering to do a recount, we'll take their word for it.
How much is 5 exabytes? It's 5 million terabytes -- or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- which is enough data to fill the print collections of the entire Library of Congress 500,000 times. And that's twice as much new information as was created in 1999, when the Berkeley researchers first conducted the study. The team, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, estimated that the storage of new information has grown about 30 percent each year since 1999...
Some other interesting highlights of the report:
...The Internet is the fastest-growing new medium of all time. The volume of information on the Web grew from between 20 and 50 TBytes in 1999 to 167 TBytes in 2003. There are about 2.9 million active Weblogs, containing a total 81 GBytes of text...
K-Collector