Sunday, March 31, 2013

The Man Who Took on Nielsen

adweek reporting;
...John Mandel, who spent his career as a media buyer before joining forces with Nielsen for a time, is now the CEO of PrecisionDemand, an analytics company that breaks down several different data sets into recommendations on which network to buy ad space, how much of it to buy and for which time slot—all with the goal of making, as Abraham put it, the cash registers ring.
The process, for those unfamiliar with the purchase of TV advertising, goes something like this: Advertisers buy airtime from networks in the form of gross ratings points (GRPs) measured by Nielsen, which break down viewership by age, sex and other broad segments. "Here's X-million dollars," you tell the network. "Run my ad on your new show every week at 7 p.m. until it’s been seen by at least 4 percent of women 18-49 watching TV at that hour, since that’s the consumer set market researchers tell me buys my product."
As with other companies (including TRA, Simulmedia and Invidi), PrecisionDemand gives advertisers a data set to use as an overlay, telling them which of those GRPs is more valuable to the client's specific needs—because there are enormous differences.
Women watching Bravo, for example, have far more money than women watching soap operas, though they fit into the same Nielsen demographic. If a retailer doesn't have stores on the West Coast but half of the network’s viewers are in Los Angeles, then clearly half the advertiser’s money is wasted. Without analysis to tell them which networks, programs and time slots are most likely to reach and appeal to a client, then marketers are simply buying points for "women 18-49," measured with a yardstick Mandel maintains is only "40 to 60 percent effective."
Industry grousing about Nielsen ratings has gotten louder in recent years as TV viewership has become fragmented and smaller demographic measurements have become more valuable...
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/man-who-took-nielsen-148110?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=03-25-2013&utm_campaign=daily_digest

Saturday, March 30, 2013

The Difference Between What You Share And What People Want To Read

BusinessIntellligence reporting:
The stories people share aren't necessarily the stories their friends want to read, according to data from 33Across, which tracks links for online publications.
It found that people are sharing science related content more often than any other content category. However, science content is clicked on significantly less than the content that is less popular for sharing, like politics, news, or celebrity gossip.
There's some rationale behind the split in what's read and what's shared. People will want to share science content because it makes them seem smart. People will click on celebrity content because no one will know.
The data in this chart shows how many stories are shared in a particular category for every 100 reads. So, for every 100 reads of a science story, 17 are shared. The clicked is how many links are clicked by the person sent the link

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-difference-between-what-you-share-and-what-people-want-to-read-2013-3#ixzz2P2cQEETu

BBC Study Confirms Tablets’ Growing Role In TV Consumption

TechCrunch reporting:
Companies like Google, Twitter and Nielsen — who respectively make money from digital advertising, want to make a lot more from digital ads, and get paid to provide data to justify ads online and offline — are putting some significant effort into showing the connection between how consumers watch TV and use their tablets and smartphones to shape that experience in the U.S.. Now the BBC — via its commercial operations of BBC World News TV and BBC.com — is also weighing in, with an international study out from BBC World News and BBC.com looking at how news is consumed today. It shows that the role that tablets are playing in TV usage — which we already knew was strong in the U.S. — is actually an international phenomenon.
The survey, BBC says, polled some 3,600 consumers across Australia, Singapore, India, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Poland, Germany, France and the U.S., the BBC, working with InSites Consulting, says this is the biggest study of its kind. The geographical reach complements the ongoing work from Pew Research Center on digital media usage, which focuses on the U.S. only.
Specifically, the BBC notes that it found the following:
– Some 43% of tablet owners say that they watch more TV now than they did five years ago. 83% say they use tablets alongside TV.
– 25-34 year-old professionals are the biggest “news enthusiasts.” But that enthusiasm is still TV-first, other screens second, with tablets remaining distinctly in a secondary, not primary, role. Across all age groups, 42% of news consumption is still happening on TV, with laptops (29%), smartphones (18%) and tablets (10%) scoring in significance.
– Advertising may be appearing in different formats, but users are not surprised by that.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/bbc-study-confirms-tablets-growing-role-in-tv-consumption-but-also-that-tv-remains-supreme/

“Post Classic”: The Washington Post integrates its print edition into a new iPad app

Nieman Journalism Lab:
What if you had an old-school newspaper newsroom where the digital producers were at the core of the operation, and the task of putting together the print newspaper was the side job?
The Washington Post’s Cory Haik, executive producer for digital news, says that’s “exactly what we are trying to do,” with the new iPad app the paper launched Monday as a step in that “one web” direction. (Disclosure: I freelance regularly for the Post.)
But the Post is also trying to find ways to bring along less digitally oriented readers. The new app includes a print replica edition — so you can still read the daily paper in its entirety from A1 to the back page — but with the display of each story still optimized for the tablet, rather than frozen in awkwardly static PDFs or in ungainly digital presentations. (The replica includes puzzles, comics, and Sunday magazine, plus a 14-day archive so you can dig back into recently published material.) Plenty of newspapers offer a replica edition for the iPad, but most are separate from their “traditional” iPad apps. (Can we say “traditional iPad app” yet?)
“The app features the new ‘Post Classic,’ which yes, is an entire replica of the broadsheet newspaper,” Haik told me in an email. “This was something users had been asking for since our first version of the iPad. They wanted the complete Washington Post. The mobile teams worked hard to create something that delivered across the board. It’s more than a PDF reader — we thought a lot about the UX and flow from the ‘Post Classic’ version into our iPad reading experience.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/post-classic-the-washington-post-integrates-its-print-edition-into-a-new-ipad-app/

New quality online ‘newspaper’ without ads planned for Dutch market

The Irish Times reporting:
A new quality online “newspaper” due to launch in Amsterdam in September has raised more than €1 million in just eight days from subscribers willing to pay in advance for what it describes as “slow journalism” – in-depth news analysis, entirely free of advertising.
As newspapers all over the world struggle to cut costs, increase advertising revenue and generate income using website paywalls, the backers of De Correspondent are using an entirely new model – appealing over the heads of advertisers directly to readers who value quality journalism above all.
By midday yesterday, the new news “platform” had exceeded its start-up target of €1 million through a campaign of so-called “crowd funding”, raising the cash directly from 15,754 individual subscribers so far, each of whom has paid an annual subscription of €60 in advance.
That extraordinary response means the publication has already raised more than 105 per cent of its launch costs, and with 21 days of the period allocated for fundraising still to go, now confidently expects to be significantly over-subscribed.

New Flipboard: News and Posts Handpicked and Shared

All Things D reporting:
One of the best ways of following topics that are interesting to you is Flipboard, a popular app for Apple and Android mobile devices that automatically turns social-network posts and news from online publications into beautiful, magazine-like pages you “flip” through by swiping.
Now, a new second generation of Flipboard, out Tuesday, is extending the app so it allows users to create and share their own handsome digital magazines with a few clicks and without any design talent required. If you make your magazine public, anyone with Flipboard, which is a free app, can read it and comment on it.
I’ve been testing this new version of Flipboard, which has some other improved features, over the past week or so, on several iPads and an iPhone. My verdict is the new features make a great mobile app even better. There are some limitations to the new capabilities, but they make your mobile device more personal and more of a creative tool, rather than just a means of consumption. For now, the new version is only available for Apple’s devices, but an Android edition is in the works.
http://allthingsd.com/20130326/new-flipboard-news-and-posts-handpicked-and-shared/

Two years in: Reflections on the New York Times paywall

journalism.co.uk reporting:
Paywalls, in particular the metered model, have been in the news as recently as this week. On Tuesday the Daily Telegraph announced a UK paywall, building on its existing digital subscription model which, since November, had only applied to international web traffic.

Back in November, the Telegraph described its international paywall as operating under a "New York Time's style 'meter'" model. Today marks two years since the New York Times launched its paywall globally. It was not the first to do so, of course. The Times, Sunday Times and Financial Times in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, to name just a few, had all been running online payment models for some time. And more continue to join the line-up, such as the Washington Post which launched its model last week.

Approaches vary from the 'meter' style, which gives a certain level of access before charges apply, to what is often referred to has a 'hard' wall, such as that in place for the Times in the UK, and which does not offer a free article allowance. There are also joint paywalls across news outlets in countries such as Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia, run by Piano Media.

But the arrival of the New York Times in the market of paying for website content was still a significant moment and was accompanied by much commentary - even before the launch. So, two years on, how is the paywall performing compared to the predictions 24 months ago, how does the news outlet feel the paid-content landscape has changed in the past two years and what have been the key lessons learned along the way?

To find out, we spoke to Paul Smurl, who until recently was the vice president for paid products at NYTimes.com, and is now general manager for core digital products.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/two-years-of-the-new-york-times-paywall/s2/a552534/

As Telegraph joins paywall bandwagon, here's five leading approaches to gated access and user revenues

The Daily Briefing reporting:
For much of the newspaper industry, the debate around paywalls has moved from an if to a how. But digital distribution offers a far broader range of levers and tactics for persuading users to pay than did print. These different approaches are coalescing around themes - a set of tactics publishers are employing and combining to persuade readers to cough up for online access.
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2013-03-26/paywall-approaches-gated-access

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Here’s What People Are Doing On Their Smartphones And Tablets

BusinessIntelligence reporting:
It's interesting to note how smartphone behavior differs from tablet behavior:

Untitled
BI Intelligence

So, what are some key behaviors - aside from gaming and content consumption?
Well, mobile commerce is exploding. It now makes up 20% of overall ecommerce activities, as seen below:

5 Really Creative Banner Ads

Digiday reporting:
The 18-year-old banner ad unit isn’t getting much slack by today’s social media-driven, content-obsessed marketers.
There are some who want to throw in the towel. The unit is now traded like porkbellies by machines and seems destined for use by direct marketers singularly focused on cost per acquisition and dismissive of brand goals. Creatives aren’t enamored with the units, for the most part. The Barbarian Group CEO Benjamin Palmer was asked at last week’s Digiday Agency Summit whether he’s betting on banners. His response: “Eh.”
And yet not all banners are awful punch-the-monkey executions. Some, in fact, are very creative.
“All this shit about advertising not working anymore is a load of crap,” said Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction. “It does work. Investing in great creative in the right places when your objectives are more brand building than direct response is worth it and makes more of an impact. People do see ads, and they are interacting with them, and they are impacted by them when they’re done right.”
Digiday reached out to five creatives at agencies to develop a list of recent banner ad campaigns that have really stood out and have raised the creative bar.
Coca-Cola banner for Project Re:Brief
http://www.digiday.com/brands/5-really-creative-banner-ads/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Brands%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=DD%20Brands%202.0 

Friday, March 22, 2013

Native Advertising Is Bad News

Digiday reporting:
Native advertising is a more insidious encroachment into consumer media content than any prior form of advertising. Billions of banner ad impressions may annoy readers, but they don’t misdirect users by disguising the source of the message — and this is exactly what native does. If publishers and marketers aren’t careful, they are going to poison the well of digital ad communications by breaking consumer trust.
First, understand why publishers are so tempted to make native their future. Digital outlets are getting creamed by RTB on online ad inventory that avoids the comparatively high prices publishers charge for ads. If you want to reach a business executive, you could pay The Wall Street Journal a $17 CPM on its website, or you could use DSP audience targeting to reach the same executives at a $2.50 CPM. eMarketer estimates RTB will account for 19 percent of all U.S. display advertising in 2013, and if you factor in the lower costs per impression, that translates to about 44 percent of all online display impressions. (Any publisher saying RTB is substandard ad inventory must now be prepared to explain why nearly half of her inventory is lousy.)
Like all marketing intrusions, native has a spectrum of annoyance; I classify it into three categories: “The Frame,” “The Insertion” and “The Misdirection.” At each level, native is growing more problematic.
“The Frame” is the most innocuous of sponsored content, where an article has an intro or ending noting it is sponsored by a marketer. The sponsor acts as a wooden frame, holding the content up for your view but not in the picture. No real issues here.
“The Insertion” is where the actual content is produced by a marketer and mirrors real stories or videos. Examples include Quartz.com or The Huffington Post’s entire section of sponsored content, where Chevron writes about the future of energy or IBM notes it is a platform for sharing comments about vampire movies. Such native insertions can cause trouble, because even when the source is disclosed, the attempt of the content to look native confuses readers.
The Atlantic caught fire for its Scientology sponsored post that, while using different font, a different color headline and a colorful “sponsored” tag at top, discombobulated the audience accustomed to The Atlantic’s high editorial standards.
“The Misdirection” is a deeper level of trouble, where content is specifically designed to misdirect the source. Facebook Beacon was a classic example, in which Facebook broadcast your commercial purchases on other websites to friends. Beacon scared the wits out of Facebook users, with the potential for guys buying lingerie for girlfriends being exposed to their wives; the deeper issue was Facebook was misrepresenting itself as a promoter of a product without your consent. IZEA has washed over similar rocky ground with its past paid posts, or acquisition of Be-A-Magpie, which helped marketers buy the minds of tweeters. All of this could be disclosed, but the intent is clearly to misdirect the recipient.
And that’s the rub. Native confuses the source of the message, despite disclosure, and in human communications, understanding the source of anything is critically important for us to judge value.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/native-advertising-is-bad-news/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=DD%20Daily%202.0

Can Newspapers Evolve Into ‘Local Membership’ Organizations?

Streetfight reporting:
In the days before MapQuest and Google Maps, the first stop you’d make when planning a long road trip was often your local AAA office. There — if you were a member — you could get directions, maps, listings of hotels and attractions, and information on discounts at some of the places you were headed. And, of course, if you got stuck somewhere along the way, AAA would give you the tow, jump or gas you needed to be on your way.
And today, even with the the popularity of digital maps (and the prevalence of insurance companies and car manufacturers providing roadside assistance), AAA’s membership base remains strong with about 53 million U.S. members, up about 50% from ten years ago. Each member pays about $60 annually, allowing the organization to more or less “own” the market when it comes to automotive travel membership.
Meanwhile, AARP “owns” the market on membership for senior citizens, and countless other organizations have a similar lock on their own niche areas — charging yearly dues and providing value through discounts and services.  But, so far, I don’t think anyone has really nailed a local membership model, and there are two organizations that have great potential to dominate in this area — local newspapers and the YMCA.
Before we get into their opportunity, though, let’s talk about what I mean by “local membership.”
What makes the AAA model so successful is that they offer a core service (roadside assistance) with other perks. Some people pay for the core service but stay around for the perks — a couple of hotel and restaurant discounts and the membership essentially pays for itself. And a timely towing when stranded might inspire someone to hold onto their membership for decades.
On a local level, families always have products or services they need, and information is one of them. “What to do this weekend? What daycare to use? Are there safety concerns in my neighborhood? What neighborhood should we move to? What summer camps are available for my child?” From a product standpoint they need those home services, day cares or events to attend.
Many families will pay $100-200 annually to join their local science center or zoo so that they know that on any given weekend that can have something to do. That’s a lot of money, but after a couple of visits the membership dues pay for themselves. Getting someone to say just that “it pays for itself” is the key to any successful membership program.
http://streetfightmag.com/2013/03/22/can-newspapers-evolve-into-local-membership-organizations/

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Secrets of Financial Times success

 Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Want to know the secret sauce of the FT’s industry-leading crossover percentage? In February, it offered these numbers: 286,000 print subscribers and 316,000 digital subscribers — the first newspaper to see digital surpass print. Of those 316,000 digital subs, though, 163,780 — or 51 percent of them — are subscriptions bought by companies for their employees. These are business-to-business sales, rather than business-to-consumer sales. Those are the fruit of another ahead-of-the-pack move by the FT. Under Caspar de Bono, FT Direct Licensing has built an first-of-its-kind direct business. Rather than leaving B2B customer sales relationships to aggregators like Lexis Nexis and News Corp.’s Factiva, the FT began converting corporate FT buyers to direct relationships in 2008. It sold those 163,000 digital subs through 2,787 separate annual licenses, up 40 percent from 2011. It also sells an additional 13,000 newspapers a day under these contracts for people who still like the feel of old-fashioned print. In addition, the FT has now extending its direct license business beyond companies to the education industry.
... The FT is working with Flipboard to allow FT subscribers to read its content in that app, following The New York Times’ similar integration. “You paid for it — you decide how you want to read it,” says Grimshaw, noting the “reader is the king in this now.” The job of the FT and publishers generally: “Do the plumbing.” As with the price/cost question of digital subscriptions, it’s becoming blindingly clear that readers don’t care about the mechanics of how they get their stuff, movies, music, TV or news — they just want it to be where they are, when they’re there...

Data assets drive the business

The data team has about 30 people, organized into three groups: Data Analytics & Campaigns, Data Product Development, and Data Technology. It’s a team that’s grown from about a dozen when the FT first started transforming its old-fashioned research group into a digital-forward team, and began hiring analysts from non-media consumer marketing backgrounds. This is the group that has moved to the center of how FT managers make decisions. It’s not seat-of-the-pants intuition; it’s about ideas tested and the data that results that leads to new ideas about how to snare customers. How many of these capabilities do you find inside your news company:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/the-newsonomics-of-a-news-company-of-the-future/

Habemus opinionem: The New York Times experiments with more structured online comments

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
New pope, new approach to online comments for The New York Times. On Wednesday afternoon, as Catholics celebrated the white smoke, the Times rolled out an experimental approach designed to enhance discussion by adding structured data.
Times readers who went to the paper’s story on the election of Pope Francis were asked them to define themselves three ways: Were they happy with the decision or not? Were they surprised by the choice or not? And are they Catholic or not? (They were not asked to declare alignment as lawful good or chaotic evil.)...
Those framing questions shape the kind of responses the Times could expect; instead of cutting readers loose at the tail end of an article, it’s asking for a specific reaction — and limiting them to 100 words rather than the normal 800 characters. The new system was also accompanied by a slight design change that added a little more breathing room to individual responses and increased the size of the text. And the new comment metadata meant readers can filter comments by perspective — not unlike how Amazon product reviews separate “helpful” reviews into positive and negative varieties.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/habemus-opinionem-the-new-york-times-experiments-with-more-structured-online-comments/

Journalists land at Cisco, other brands as ‘corporate reporters’

Poynter reporting:
Former Businesweek reporter Steve Wildstrom has worked as a “corporate reporter” for Nvidia and Cisco, Giselle Abramovich writes. Those are people who “who work inside the company and produce media like blog posts, videos, webinars and more,” she writes.
The twist is this path isn’t exactly like public relations. Brands are realizing, to a degree, that if they truly want to be publishers they can’t just have people churning out corporate boilerplate. They’re loosening the reins a bit in a bid to attract actual reporters.
Wildstrom says he was worried how his colleagues would react, but “Cisco’s editorial policy is to forbid its writers from covering the company or its competitors,” Abramovich notes. Wildstrom, who covers tech, tells her he steers clear of pieces he can’t report honestly: “That’s how I have chosen to handle it. If I can’t be honest, I won’t write it,” he says. “Whatever organization you work for, shy of BBC, NPR or PBS, it has commercial motives,” former Ad Age editor and current content strategist Jonah Bloom tells Abramovich. “Ultimately, the consumer is the arbiter of whether your info is credible, useful and has integrity.”
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/207359/journalists-land-at-cisco-other-brands-as-corporate-reporters/

What makes journalism ‘innovative’? Lessons from this year’s Scripps Howard Awards

Poynter reporting:
 ...
Unfortunately, too many news organizations and journalists still see innovation through the lens of their legacy medium and the way they have always done things. A newspaper doing a video or a TV station doing a magazine? This is not innovative to the reader/user.
True innovation in news means connecting that reader/user to important information in a new and meaningful way. Will non-journalists share your project on social media and email it to their friends? Then you might be onto something truly innovative. The day of doing journalism for journalists — or awards — is over. Focus on the customer. Serve the customer.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/207335/what-makes-journalism-innovative-lessons-from-this-years-scripps-howards-awards/

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Women's Service Mags Trade Housekeeping for Style Shift tone without losing their identity

adweek reporting:
Traditionally the purveyor of recipes and cleaning tips, women's service magazines have come a long way, but apparently not far enough. More than a decade ago, Real Simple and O, The Oprah Magazine packaged service as lifestyle, forcing the category to pivot en masse. The Web also has made free service content easily accessible, and young women are more inclined to search online than pick up a magazine.
So, in the past year, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal and Woman’s Day—all facing long-term advertising and newsstand sales declines—further downplayed their bread-and-butter housecleaning, parenting and relationship advice in favor of fashion, beauty, shopping and entertaining.
While service titles indulge readers with style and home decor and put stars like Lauren Conrad on their covers, looking too much like fashion and beauty titles risks alienating loyal readers.
Avoiding that trap means delivering the content in a way their readers expect. So instead of serving up fashion trends, Woman's Day gives women tips on dressing for their body type and saving money by shopping their closets. Unlike the typical fashion magazine, it also shows women of varying sizes and ethnicities.
Redbook, rather than confining plus-size style tips to their own page as fashion books often do, sprinkles them prominently throughout the style department.

Tablet storytelling is visual, tappable, deep

Poynter reporting:
Three years after Apple and others put digital tablets firmly into the hands of consumers, what do we really know about the way the devices are used for news?
Hundreds of people filed in to a large ballroom at South by Southwest last week for “Lean Forward, Lean Back: Tablet News Experience” to hear perspectives from Poynter research, focus groups and practical case studies from news organizations around the world.
The session brought together part of Poynter’s research team, led by Poynter’s Sara Quinn, who shared findings of the Institute’s EyeTrack: Tablet study, with Mario Garcia, CEO and founder of Garcia Media, and researcher/developer David Stanton from Smart Media Creative. Jeremy Gilbert of Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern was also on the research team.
“It’s essential for editors to rethink how the audience consumes content,” Garcia told the crowd.
The international news designer recommends a multisensory approach to designing for the brain, the eye and the hands. “You must keep the finger happy,” he said, meaning that a tablet user expects to find elements of surprise and engagement. “Like a children’s pop-up book,” he said.
When Garcia maps out the possibilities for interactive “pop-up moments” in a story, he thinks of it much as a screen director might develop a storyboard.
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/206747/tablet-storytelling-is-visual-tappable-deep/

Tech Explainer: Five challenges for publishers adopting HTML5

TheMediaMuch of the coverage of HTML5-based digital products built by publishers has centred on its lean, flexible development, cost benefits and usability.
Web-based apps, so we've heard, will save money on digital production costs, free publishers from the tyranny of native applications (and therefore the App Store) and enable publishers to create new complex and beautiful products better suited to multiple uses and myriad devices.
(If you're not familiar with the basics of HTML5 I recommend reading our explainer piece which you can find here).
So far, so promised land - but what are the disadvantages for publishers adopting HTML5?

Browser support

The continued use of older versions of browsers is a constant thorn in the side of developers, meaning they have to check how their software/website runs on a plethora of slightly different environments. However, with HTML5 that could become even more severe, as many elements of HTML5 simply won't work with some older PC/desktop browsers.
The main issue is with versions of Internet Explorer before number 9 which aren't compatible with HTML5 at all. Acccording to Stat Counter, more than 11 percent of internet activity worldwide comes through Internet Explorer 8 or earlier. ..
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2013-03-11/html5-challenges-for-publishers?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=dd5a8f08d5-nl_DB_03_12_2013&utm_medium=email

WSJ staffers told to ‘stay the course – and accelerate’

Romenesko reporting:
Memo to the Wall Street Journal staff
From: Narisetti, Raju
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 5:23 PM
Subject: Stay The Course
Colleagues
On an average weekday in the last 12 months, our total circulation was 2.3 million for all three print editions of The Wall Street Journal combined. We should all be very proud of the great print offerings we provide, once a day, every single day to this audience.
On an average weekday in the last 12 months, WSJDN actually had 3.9 million readers a day coming to our websites, every single week-day.
The green line in the chart below is when readers come to us looking for the terrific journalism WSJ promises them, as measured in the % of daily readers who come, each hour.
The blue line was when we were publishing our stories, by the hour, in 2011-12.
The red line shows how all of you moved the needle significantly in recent months to get more of your great journalism to your audiences when more of them were looking for it on our site.
May you all stay the course. And accelerate.
Thank you. Goodbye
Raju


http://jimromenesko.com/2013/03/10/wsj-staffers-told-to-stay-the-course-and-accelerate/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=dd5a8f08d5-nl_DB_03_12_2013&utm_medium=emailchart

Newspaper Paywalls: Here's Why They’re Really Doing It

From family-owned independents to the largest national chain, it’s become clear that most U.S. newspapers will soon charge readers to visit their websites.
And when they finally decide to take the leap, these papers typically trot out a column or interview by a top editor or publisher explaining why they’re pulling the switcheroo.
Sometimes they’re straightforward.
But more often, they tend to sound the same — by turns sheepish and defiant, full of vague buzzwords and unclear reasoning. Here’s what I wish they’d say.
Dear Readers,
Since this is a newspaper, and we’re supposed to put the biggest news right at the top, I’ll get right to it: We’re going to start charging you money to visit our website. That’s obviously a big change, but it doesn’t look like online advertising will start paying the bills anytime soon. So now it’s your turn.
If you’re thinking that sounds kind of desperate, you’re right.
Newspapering was a stable thing for a long time. Then the Web came along and unlocked an endless supply of ad space — which, unlike old print advertising, also came with the ability to track how well an ad performed.
So we’ve had to cut costs, and that mostly means people. Buyouts, layoffs, unpaid days off, renegotiated contracts — you name it, we’ve done it. And I know you can tell the difference. Between advertisers buying fewer pages and fewer journalists producing news, our product has definitely declined. If you’ve picked up the printed version of the paper on any given Monday, you know what I’m talking about. The thing is so thin that when the paperboys try to toss it, it just kind of flutters away. I hear a few of them have taken to folding it up into a paper airplane. But at least we haven’t started cutting the number of days we publish! Not yet, anyway.
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2013/03/11/paywall-curt-woodward

Start-ups yearn for print media coverage but won’t pay for it

Timo Ketonen in his blog:
Start-ups’ have a high need for all kinds of publicity and media coverage but they generally avoid paid advertising channels. Instead they focus on their own and earned channels. This is no surprise considering typical start-ups’ limited marketing budgets. Conversely, they still value traditional media coverage, especially newspaper coverage.
The infographic findings are based on a summary of six case studies of start-up companies’ media purchasing patterns. Idean prepared the study with Project Manager and Doctoral candidate Timo Ketonen from Ã…bo Akademi University.
In addition to the advertising spending, the infographic looked at the total marketing and communication mix. A typical mix included newsletters, company blogs, press releases, SEO, seminar presentations, social networks as well as coverage on newspapers, magazines, online news and video sharing services. We found that search engine marketing and display advertising stood out from paid channels, although the company’s focus was still on own and earned channels.
We also asked which channels had the strongest influence on each company’s success. The start-ups were most united on their own company websites and newspaper coverage’s impact on their success. If the companies would have the power, money and time then they would typically focus more on newspaper coverage, company blogs and seminar presentations.
All in all, this is again bad news for the traditional media sales executives. If and when these currently young and small companies are one day the wealthy engines of our economy then traditional advertising will not be among the first options in their channel mix. 
http://timoketonen.blogspot.fi/2013/03/infographic-start-up-media-purchasing.html

Sunday, March 10, 2013

The rise of data (big and small) in journalism

NiemanJOurnalismLab reporting:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their joint tome on big data this week, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, and Cukier, the data editor of The Economist, argue that having access to vast amounts of data will soon overwhelm our natural human tendency to look for correlation and causality where there is none. In the near future, we’ll be able to rely on much larger pools of “messy” data rather than small pools of “clean” data to get more accurate answers to our questions.
“We are taking things we never thought of as informational and rendering them in data,” Mayer-Schönberger said in a talk Wednesday at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “Once we think of it as data, we can organize it and extract new information.”
In their book, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier give a number of examples of industries that will be changed forever by the new messiness of data. Bradford Cross cofounded FlightCaster.com, which predicted U.S. flight delays using data about flight times and weather patterns. The company was sold in 2011, at which point “Cross turned his sights on another aging industry.” He started Prismatic, one of a number of news aggregators that filters content for users by analyzing data about sharing frequency on social networks and user preferences. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier write:
This is a humbling reminder to the high priests of mainstream media that the public is in aggregate more knowledgeable than they are, and that cuff linked journalists must compete against bloggers in their bathrobes. Yet the key point is that it is hard to imagine that Prismatic would have emerged from within the media industry itself, even though it collects lots of information. The regulars around the bar of the national Press Club never thought to reuse online data about media consumption. Nor might the analytics specialists in Armonk, New York or Bangalore, India have harnessed the information in this way. It took Cross, a louche outsider with disheveled hair and a slacker’s drawl, to presume that by using data he could tell the world what it ought pay attention to better than the editors of The New York Times...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/were-going-to-tell-people-how-to-interview-databases-the-rise-of-data-big-and-small-in-journalism/

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Why Digital Natives don’t like newspapers?

Newsosaur reporting:
...If publishers intend to make good on their long-stated pledge to pivot from print to digital products, it is important for them to understand the profound difference between the consumers they have vs. the consumers they wish they had. That’s what we’ll do in a moment. First, a few facts: 

∷ Print newspaper readership ranged from 16% of forty-somethings to only 6% of those in their twenties, according to a survey released last year by the Pew Research Center.  By contrast, Pew found that 30% of Americans aged 50-64 and 48% of those over the age of 65 had read a newspaper on the prior day.

∷ The repudiation of the print delivery system by young people is probably the single greatest factor in the sharp decline Pew detected in newspaper readership in the last decade.  Pew found that only 29% of the American population read a newspaper in 2012, as compared with 56% in 1991 – the first time researchers asked the question.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2013/02/why-digital-natives-dont-like-newspapers.html

AARP Launches YouTube Series

Marketing Daily reporting:
In its ongoing efforts to create engaging original content online for the 50-plus audience, AARP is launching a series on YouTube called “Movies for Grownups.”
The series is an expansion of the TV show, which is already currently on RLTV. Viewers can subscribe to the “Movies for Grownups” YouTube series for free.
The series features the program’s founder and AARP’s film expert, Bill Newcott. During each weekly episode, Newcott will discuss what’s new in theaters and on Video on Demand (VOD) home entertainment releases.
“Movies for Grownups has gained immense popularity over the years and has grown from a magazine feature into a multiplatform offering, reaching people through radio, TV, online and beyond,” said Larry Gannon, AARP vice president of TV and radio programming in a release. “The Movies for Grownups YouTube channel will serve as a beacon for the film world on providing insight into the latest releases that matter most to the grownup audience.”
The 12-year-old program has showcased films that appeal to an older audience, beginning with articles in “AARP The Magazine.”  It has grown each year with film reviews and blogs on www.aarp.org, an award-winning radio show and its annual Movies for Grownups Awards gala in Hollywood.

Mainstream media meltdown!

Salon reporting:
Newspapers will never be the same. But what happens to democracy if the Web business model can't fund journalism?

The decline of journalism over the past generation, which has accelerated in the last decade, would be a less pressing concern if the existing news media were making a successful digital transition, or if the Internet was spawning a credible replacement. The evidence suggests on balance that emerging digital news media are hav­ing a negligible effect upon the crisis in journalism. It certainly is not due to a lack of effort, as commercial news media have been obsessed with the Internet since the 1990s; they understood that it was going to be the future.
For traditional news media, it has been a very rocky digital road. A 2012 report based on proprietary data and in-depth interviews with executives at a dozen major news media companies found “the shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers con­tinue to contract at alarming speed.” For every seven dollars of print advertis­ing lost there is only one new dollar of Internet ad revenues; the executives said it “remains an uphill and existential struggle.” The newspaper indus­try’s percentage of overall Internet advertising fell to 10 percent in 2011, an all-time low; it had been 17 percent in 2003. “There’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now,” one executive said. By all accounts, the “clock continues to tick” for old media to find a way to survive online in the inexo­rable transition to the Internet....
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/03/mainstream_media_meltdown/


Cracked Tears Down Editorial, Advertising Wall

Digiday reporting:
Most publishers wring their hands over how to run sponsored content that works for their audience and how to keep church and state apart.
Not such a problem for humor site Demand Media-owned Cracked, which skips the go-between of a “creative services team” and has brands work directly with its eight-person editorial staff. That’s helped it create sponsored content for brands like Virgin Mobile, Old Spice, AMC and TubroTax that bend toward Cracked’s warped sensibilities, like this AMC-sponsored article (for its show “Freak Show”) “6 Terrifying Mutations With Awesome Historical Explanations.” No, it’s not exactly investigative journalism going on at Cracked.
“When a brand hears that from the people actually doing it, it’s powerful in getting the brand to commit. It’s not just putting an article up about deodorant; it’s taking that team into finding the tangential relationship between messaging and what our audience cares about,” said Michael Dosset, who heads up Demand’s market strategy team.
This is a different approach than those adopted by other, more hard-news publishers which help brands create content. Publishers like The Atlantic, Huffington Post wall off creative services from editorial. Even BuzzFeed and Gawker have clear separation between editorial and advertising. Of course, Cracked isn’t like news publishers. Its editorial content is young dude-targeted, list-heavy pieces such as the 5 most unintentionally hilarious 80′s music videos or 4 things nobody admits about modern human sexuality.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/cracked-tears-down-editorial-advertising-wall/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=DD%20Daily%202.0

Washington Post to Try Sponsored Posts

Digiday reporting:
There was a time when putting ads on the front page of newspapers was considered risque. Those days are over. The Washington Post became the latest publisher to quit worrying and learn to love sponsored content.
WaPo tomorrow plans to launch “BrandConnect” that will let marketers create content throughout the WaPo site and on its homepage. It’s kind of like Forbes’ BrandVoice, which lets brands post on the Forbes platform. CTIA, the wireless trade association, is the inaugural advertiser and will create content through blog posts, videos and infographics, according to a rep. The Post did not provide specifics on exact nature of the content or how long it would run.
As a sign of how important it views this, the Post is giving the sponsored content prime real estate along the left rail of its homepage.
Sponsored content, often operating under the guise of “native” advertising, has proven a controversial proposition at some publishers. The Atlantic unleashed a furor when it ran a sponsored post by Scientology. BuzzFeed has been criticized because some of its sponsored content seems indistinguishable from editorial. What’s more, that’s exactly the point at some level.
It isn’t exactly a leap. Newspapers frequently run special advertorial sections from advertisers. Those have long been accepted, yet the updated version of advertorial from the Web is at times held to higher standards.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-tries-sponsored-posts/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Digiday%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=DD%20Daily%202.0

Sunday, March 3, 2013

6 Ways the Content Marketing Backlash is Getting it Wrong

cm reporting:
If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, we’re due for a MASSIVE backlash against content marketing.
It’s already started. More and more bloggers are finally getting fed up with all the hype and are pushing back. A recent post by Neil Hopkins (Interacter) is a case in point. It’s called “Content marketing is nothing more than the Emperor’s new clothes,” which pretty much sums up what most of the new batch of whistleblowers are so mad about.

It’s not the thing itself that is getting everyone so upset, it’s the hype.

This is a weird moment for me because I tend to be the guy who likes to stick a pin in the over-inflated. I’m a card-carrying hater and I especially enjoy hating the very things that everybody else has agreed to love. Group-think triggers my aversion to anything resembling a Nuremberg Rally, Red Scare, Witch Hunt or Chelsea Football crowd. So it’s distinctly uncomfortable to find myself riding on a bandwagon when the people throwing rotten tomatoes at it look so much like me.
In his post, Neil trots out the Google Trends graph showing the dramatic increase in mentions of the term ‘content marketing.’ If you’ve ever seen a hockey stick, you’ll recognise it. He also brings in the CMI’s definition of content marketing and the Wikipedia history.  His conclusion: “Every time I hear the phrase ‘Content Marketing,’ I want to scream until I puke.” (Given the Google chart, it’s a mystery how poor Neil keeps any food down at all).
So even though I have to suppress an urge to join the hecklers, I am a content marketer and I feel I ought to defend the discipline. With that in mind, here’s a summary of the arguments I’ve heard against content marketing. In each case, I hope to show that the argument is not with content marketing at all: it’s with some other obnoxious phenomenon that has attached itself to our fair art.
So here are the main objections:

“Content marketing is not new.”...http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/03/content-marketing-backlash/?utm_source=CMI+Posts+to+Email&utm_campaign=bf54dc5bdb-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Apple apparently expects to sell more iPad minis than iPads this year

TabTimes reporting:
DisplaySearch says that Apple is expecting to sell more iPad minis than iPads this year, something the research firm puts down to increasing consumer demand for smaller tablets.
The market research firm’s latest Monthly TFT LCD Shipment Database indicates that tablet PC panel shipments “shifted dramatically” towards smaller screen sizes in January of this year, another sure sign of the iPad mini’s continued success.
In fact, DisplaySearch notes that smaller tablets have been in such demand that this trend is having an adverse effect on larger models. The firm says that while shipments of 9.7-inch tablet panels dropped from 7.4 million to a paltry 1.3 million units last month, 7-inch and 7.9-inch panels increased from 12 million to 14 million. 10.1-inch tablet panel shipments grew but only “slightly”.
This beginning of a shift to smaller tablets also looks to have been noted by Apple with DisplaySearch claiming that Tim Cook’s company now expects to sell more iPad minis than iPads in 2013.
“Apple had planned to sell 40 million iPad minis and 60 million iPads in 2013,” said DisplaySearch analyst David Hsieh on the company’s blog.
“However, the reality seems to be the reverse, as the iPad mini has been more popular than the iPad. We now understand that Apple may be planning to sell 55 million iPad minis and 33 million iPads in 2013.”
However, while the rise of these smaller tablets is seemingly having a knock-on effect larger models, DisplaySearch does still expect tablet panel shipments to rise significantly from 160 million in 2012 to 254 million this year.
Of that figure, the research firm anticipates that 5-inch to 8.9-inch panels will account for 136 million units, with 9-10-inch models hitting 118 million.
This isn’t the first time DisplaySearch or other researchers have noted inclining demand for smaller tablets, a sector which has been led not only by the iPad mini but also by Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7.
http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2013/02/28/apple-apparently-expects-sell-more-ipad-minis-ipads-year

The Demographics of Social Media Users in U.S 2012

PEW reporting:
A late 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that young adults are more likely than others to use major social media. At the same time, other groups are interested in different sites and services.
Internet users under 50 are particularly likely to use a social networking site of any kind, and those 18-29 are the most likely of any demographic cohort to do so (83%). Women are more likely than men to be on these sites. Those living in urban settings are also significantly more likely than rural internet users to use social networking.
Read on for a demographic portrait of various social media services.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Social-media-users.aspx?utm_source=Mailing+List&utm_campaign=a475e5add9-Newsletter_030113&utm_medium=email

German publishers release Tolino e-reader

gigaom reporting:
German bookstore chains Thalia, Weltbild and Hugendubel have partnered with Bertelsmann and Deutsche Telekom to release a touchscreen, front-lit e-reader, the Tolino Shine. It costs €99 (USD $128), is available for sale on March 7 and is intended to compete against Amazon’s Kindle and the Kobo in Germany. The Tolino will be sold at the partners’ 1,500 physical stores as well as online.
An ebookstore with about 300,000 German-language titles is accessible from the device. Users can also shop for ebooks from the individual booksellers’ websites. (By contrast, the German Kindle store contains about 150,000 German-language ebooks.) The Shine supports EPUB, PDF and TXT files. The Telekom cloud provides users with unlimited storage of ebooks they purchase from the partners, and 25 GB of storage for ebooks bought from other retailers.  The telecommunications provider also has over 11,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots in Germany.
The German tech industry body BITKOM estimated last fall that 800,000 e-readers were sold in Germany in 2012, and it expects that to rise to 1.4 million units in 2013. Today’s press release announcing the new device also says that about 11 percent of Germans read ebooks on mobile devices.
The companies involved in the deal suggest that, while Amazon is too large a competitor for any one of them to go up against, by banding together they have a better chance. In the press release, Thalia CEO Michael Busch describes such a partnership as “unseen before” and says: “Every company has to consider its strategic approach and interests and choose the partners that will serve these interests best in order to compete with the mighty U.S. online retailer giants.”
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/01/leading-german-booksellers-partner-with-deutsche-telekom-to-release-new-e-reader/
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf
Leading German booksellers and Telekom put together in the future on the future of digital reading
– Partners promote common brand “Tolino”
– Tolino start with one of the largest e-book deals on the German market
– eReader “Tolino shine” from 7 March 2013 in the trade
– New eBook partnership across traditional industry boundaries
The leading German bookseller Thalia, worldview, and Hugendubel Club Bertelsmann and the German Telekom combine their expertise in the future of technology and trade in relation to the digital reading. The competitive ratio of the bookseller remains unaffected. While Telecom provides innovative readers and a powerful technical platform, secure the booksellers nationwide sales and expert advice. In Berlin, the companies are today their strategic partnership. She is also open to other interested booksellers. Their common goal is to be among the top names in digital reading.
The partners are focusing on the new brand Tolino. The eReader Tolino shine is 7 from the March 2013 available to all partners. It weighs less than a paperback, collects a library and has a battery that lasts longer than the holidays. Thanks to E Ink ® HD display and integrated lighting relaxed reading is possible as well in bright sunlight as in the dark.
- See more at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/german-consortium-to-challenge-kindle-with-new-e-reader-shine/#sthash.79V7B8Tk.dpuf