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Around the Web: improving college rankings, Federer’s footwork, inventors killed by their own inventions, and more

Some links that have caught my eye of late:

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Around the web: August 25th to August 30th

Some links that have caught my eye of late:

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Jakarta Globe takes on the Jakarta Post

The newspaper industry in the US is suffering, as we know. But an Indonesian billionaire thinks there’s room for another English-language paper in Jakarta. In November, James Riady launched the Jakarta Globe to compete head-to-head with the well-established Jakarta Post.

Today’s IHT has the story: “Indonesian billionaire takes on the Jakarta Post

That it is probably the worst time in history to start a daily newspaper is not, at least for the moment, on the minds of the people behind The Jakarta Globe.

The Globe, an English-language paper that hit the newsstands in November, is an unusual sight in this era of the shrinking – or disappearing – newspaper: It is a 48-page broadsheet, big enough to cover your desk when unfolded and painted head to toe in color.

The paper is backed by the billionaire James Riady, deputy chairman of the powerful Lippo Group and one of the wealthiest people in Indonesia, with interests including real estate, banking and retail.

Riady is also a budding media mogul. He owns the Indonesian business magazine Globe and is developing a Web portal and a cable television news channel.

“I think they are serious about creating a media empire, becoming the Rupert Murdoch of South East Asia,” said Lin Neumann, The Globe’s chief editor.

This snippet caught my eye, as well:

Neither The Post nor The Globe would discuss advertising revenue or circulation figures. Bayuni said The Globe had not yet cut into The Post’s circulation.

The papers’ editors, however, both pointed to Bangkok as an example of a market that has been able to sustain two English-language broadsheets, although Bangkok is a much bigger market than Jakarta. Both said they would aim at the growing Indonesian middle class – a group that is increasingly learning, working and reading in English. More than half of The Post’s readers are Indonesian, as opposed to expatriate, and The Globe, recognizing this trend, is betting on the local population to increase its market share.

And there’s this, about competition for journalists in Jakarta:

The two papers are fighting over journalists as well as readers. Finding experienced, English-speaking local journalists is not always easy here and the competition for them is high. The papers, however, are taking different approaches.

The Globe has put together a team of about 60 Indonesian reporters, recruiting from wire services like Agence France-Presse and Reuters. One of its deputy editors is Bhimanto Suwastoyo, who worked for AFP for more than 20 years and is widely considered one of the best local journalists.

The Post, on the other hand, has long been a training ground for local reporters looking to get their start in the industry. The paper offers a training program in exchange for service of as long as two years.

Often, Bayuni said, those reporters move on to more prestigious or lucrative positions. Bloomberg News employs six former Post reporters.

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“Web news wars” and CNN.com

Brian Stelter has a good story in today’s New York Times about CNN.com and “Web news wars” among top news sites.

Some snippets that caught my eye:

On media ubiquity

  • CNN now is as close as any news entity is to achieving ubiquity, with an array of television channels, Web sites, a radio network, airport TV sets and magazines. It is even signing up newspapers for a wire service — fed by CNN.com — that will compete with The Associated Press.

    The challenge, for Mr. Estenson and others, is to make CNN.com more distinctive. At the end of a long day recently, he showed a visitor screen grabs of four Web pages on his Macbook Air.

    “When you look at the top news sites, they often look almost identical,” he says, gesturing to the home pages of CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo News. Down to photo choices and color schemes, the four sites look practically interchangeable and utilitarian, he says — hence his emphasis on the power of “unique signatures.”

On high-traffic times

  • Tracking audience sweet spots is also a juggling act. CNN’s television arm exerts much of its pull during the prime-time hours of 8 to 11 p.m., when advertising rates and audience levels are highest. But for the Web news desk in Atlanta, prime time is the lunch hour, when users log on during work breaks.

    More broadly, Ms. Golden defines “Web prime” as 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. During those hours, the home page will feature six or seven lead stories, on average, so no one headline lingers too long.

On profitability

  • CNN.com formally achieved profitability eight years ago, the company said; Time Warner doesn’t break out separate revenue figures for the unit. In an era when “monetization” is a buzz word among news organizations migrating to the Web, CNN.com has been able to capitalize on its traffic surge by keeping visitors on the site longer, thus exposing them to more ads.

    It’s also trying to make money from more experimental forays. During the inauguration coverage on Tuesday, for the first time, CNN.com Live, the Web site’s video arm, will include TV-style commercial breaks. Until now the only ads on the streaming service have been snippets that play before the main clip, and small sponsorship banners.

    Amid a recession, advertising sales are sluggish on television and online, putting a damper on CNN’s growth plans. But CNN.com is expected to remain flush; while Web revenue doesn’t match TV’s, the costs aren’t nearly as high.

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The Future of Newspapers — and online journalism

It’s no secret that the American newspaper industry is in trouble.

This New Yorker article by James Surowiecki from late December summarizes some of the problems:

  1. Advertising revenue is down. Way down. Department stores and real estate advertisers have been hit hard by the economic downturn. And online ads aren’t as lucrative as print ads.
  2. Fewer people subscribe to newspapers now. Surowiecki notes that “as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago — but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout.”
  3. Newspaper companies, critics say, have failed to innovate. Surowiecki says they’ve focused on the product — the newspaper — rather than the consumer.
  4. Ironically, papers like the New York Times are actually more widely-read now than, say, 10 years ago. But revenues are down since most readers are accessing the site online, for free.
  5. For solutions to the profit problem, Surowiecki points to a foundation/nonprofit model, bailouts from rich patrons, or increased online revenues.

Where do newspapers go from here?

Here are some resources for further reading:

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What I’ve been reading

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

  1. Boston.com: “How the city hurts your brain…And what you can do about it

    The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

    And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

    Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening.

  2. AFP: “Thailand blocks 2,300 websites for insulting monarchy

    Thai authorities have blocked 2,300 websites for allegedly insulting the country’s revered monarchy and are waiting for court approval to restrict another 400, the government said Tuesday.

    The blocking of the websites under harsh lese majeste laws which protect King Bhumibol Adulyadej has been criticised by rights groups and media organisations in recent months.

  3. Suzanne Yada: “Resolutions for journalism students, part I: Become invaluable” and “Resolutions for journalism students, part II: Network like mad

    If I only had two career resolutions for 2009, it would be these:

    1) Become invaluable, and
    2) Network like mad.

  4. Winterspeak: “It ain’t over

    …The US has had a high volatility, but flat 13 years, with the near and medium term outlook decidedly gloomy. Will we have 20 years of flat, but high vol, equity prices?

  5. CJR: “Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I

    “There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change.”

  6. Tools for News — a compendium of tools for online and multimedia journalists
  7. Read Write Web: “2009 Web Predictions

    It’s time for our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media.

    Looking back at our 2008 Web predictions, we got some of them right! “The big Internet companies will [embrace] open standards” (Google, Yahoo and others did this); “Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008” (check!); “Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground” (Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine were released and AWS grew). We also got some wrong, including most of our acquisition picks! Digg, Twitter, Zoho, Tumblr – all remain independent. Not to be deterred, we’ve made new acquisition predictions for ’09… although the names will be familiar 😉

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Misc.

The new World Hum — and the top 40 travel songs of all time

One of my favorite Web sites ((Back in 2001, the site ran an essay of mine called Soup to Nuts, about a funny experience I had here in Bangkok, long before I moved to Thailand.)), World Hum — tag line: travel dispatches from a shrinking planet — has just launched a re-designed site. World Hum’s Jim Benning, Mike Yessis, and Valerie Conners discuss the re-vamping in this video.

New features include videos, bigger photos, and a column by Tom Swick ((A few years back, Swick wrote a good story about Cuenca, Ecuador — where I lived for a year — for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.)) There’s also a piece by Anthony Bourdain called “Subcontinental Homesick Blues,” about “why music can make a travel moment.”

The site also contains a new feature: “World Hum’s Top 40 Travel Songs of All Time.” The songs were voted on by World Hum contributors, and each song has a corresponding YouTube video. (You can see the entire list on one page here.)

I contributed a list of my top ten songs ((For the record, my top ten songs were:
1. “Born to Run,” by Bruce Springsteen
2. “This Must Be the Place,” by Talking Heads
3. “Range Life,” by Pavement
4. “Long May You Run,” by Neil Young
5. “Just Like Honey,” by Jesus and Mary Chain
6. “American Girl,” by Tom Petty
7. “Love Shack,” by the B-52s
8. “Passenger Side,” by Wilco
9. “Float On,” by Modest Mouse
10. “Good to Be on the Road Back Home,” by Cornershop.)) and then, once the voting was complete, I wrote a few sentences about Neil Young’s 1976 tune, “Long May You Run.” That song is at number 16 on the list. You can find what I wrote here (scroll down a bit).

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Studs Terkel, Dead 96

Studs Terkel is dead at 96.

IHT: “Studs Terkel, ground-breaking U.S. oral historian, dies at 96”

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at WFMT radio.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.

(Emphasis mine.)

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CSM to cease daily print publication

Christian Science Paper to End Daily Print Edition. [NYTimes.com]

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Best Magazine Covers of 2008

Here are some of the best magazine covers of 2008.

(Via Kottke.)