online

This piece is for a student publication website.

Teaching dance in a school in India.

Below are some of the stats from yesterday's online news exercise. The CfJ Newswire site was built, filled and managed entirely by second year undergraduates - who should be very proud of themselves. The team of 14 reported live between 8am and 5pm. Aside from producing some impressive rich content - which had to include international, national and local stories - they also used their social media skills to find and engage an audience from scratch.

It may seem viable to pay for online content uploaded by the ex-giants of Fleet Street (now that they are losing money faster than Lord Ashcroft can spend it). However, a free publication appears to be making a profit! Has the 'pay-for-content' debacle found a decent counterpart among free journalism?

The Caledonian Mercury, Scotland's new online national newspaper, launched last night. It is written by a team consisting almost entirely of former Scotsman journalists. They are a superb bunch. I am going to pay particular attention to the foreign coverage. It is being edited by Andrew Macleod, who, as foreign editor of the Scotsman, was among the most creative and compassionate journalists it has been my privilege to work with.

Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of Scotsman.com, has announced plans to launch a quality online national newspaper for Scotland. You can read the details here.  Will it work? Stewart was a member of the team I managed at the Scotsman. He is among the most dedicated, diligent  and sophisticated journalists I know. He understands the web from an editorial perspective and a commercial one.   If anyone can make an online title pay its way I suspect he can. Good luck, Stewart.

This week (Monday 30/11) a newspaper innovation is launched that can help the free world’s news industry to recover the prosperity it first achieved in the in the nineteenth century.  Johnston Press, Britain’s most prolific newspaper owner with 286 titles, will place the online content of six of its local titles behind pay walls.

Online readers of the Worksop Guardian, Ripley and Heanor News, Whitby Gazette, Northumberland Gazette, Carrick Gazette and Southern Reporter will have to pay £5 for a three-month subscription.

It's not our Rochester, but the one in New York state. Still, here's a fantastic example of a newspaper looking for new ways to engage its community, particularly those under the age of 40. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle has joined forces with a local college to develop a series of online and real world games that aim to entertain, engage and help inform its readers.

The Online News Association in the US has announced the finalists for its Online News Awards 2009. For students of journalism, it's well worth having a trawl through the (very long) list of categories to see what US professionals reckon to be some of the best online journalism projects around.

"The future is online," he said.

Before we all get warm and fuzzly inside: a notable trend is still, that 'western' papers are slowly decreasing (but not as much as expected) in volumes (and especially in advertising), but the overall is overturned by monumental increases in Asian, African and Latin American papers.

Altogether, a 1,3% increase worldwide.

Yahoo (cough) reports