Tag Archives: Websites
FT Alphaville to launch U.S. version of popular “Markets Live”
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FT Alphaville will launch Friday the first U.S. edition of its popular British real-time service, “Markets Live.”
“Markets Live” is a real-time service in which our commentators offer their views on moves and news in the markets in a live streaming-media format
The U.S. version will be different from the daily chat hosted by Neil Hume and Bryce Elder in London.
It will take place every Friday at 10 a.m. EST and will be hosted by FT Alphaville’s New York correspondents, Cardiff Garcia and John McDermott.
As with the British edition, Garcia and McDermott will look at share price moves and other financial asset news, dip into analyst commentary, and engage in the usual banter with the Rabble on the Right.
They’ll also include a recap of each week’s economic indicators and survey the week’s big economic events from around the world. The conversation will frequently feature FT colleagues in Europe, along with business journalists from FT Tilt for emerging markets analysis.
Read more here.
Tech journalists leave biz weekly to start new site
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The two business journalists who left the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2008 to start the TechFlash site for the Puget Sound Business Journal have now struck out on their own with the help of investors.
John Cook and Todd Bishop launched Geekwire.com on Monday. The site will cover technology news.
Bishop writes, “We have strong plans for the future of the business — including stuff that will surprise you — and the cool thing is that we’ll be able to try new things quickly, and adjust on the fly. We’ll also be better positioned to apply input from you, as members of the community, about the directions we take. One thing we’ve learned from the companies we cover is the importance of being nimble, and flexible. We’ll be putting those lessons to use.
“This very preliminary version of the GeekWire site is the first example. We built it over the weekend with the help of our partners.
“We hope that you will join the community by sharing opinions, insights, guest columns, news tips and more.
“And finally, a big thank you to the Puget Sound Business Journal, our home for the last two years, where we founded and built TechFlash for American City Business Journals. We’re grateful for that opportunity, and we’ll miss working with the many great people at the newspaper and the company.”
Meanwhile, Emory Thomas, the publisher of the Business Journal, an American City Business Journals paper, writes on TechFlash that it will continue as well.
Thomas writes, “I am already seeking and strategizing about filling their positions with top-notch talent that will help take TechFlash to the next level. In the interim, the whole PSBJ staff, led by reporter Greg Lamm, has agreed to step up to blog on, and edit, the site. We’re lucky to have Greg in the lead TechFlash role – he’s a savvy blogger who regularly manages the Business Journal site and is an award-winning reporter and experienced editor.
“Meantime, I’ll be devoting a great deal of energy to finding and putting in place a new TechFlash editorial leadership team. I welcome all suggestions and applications.”
Read the note from Thomas here.
Business Insider made money in 2010
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Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst who founded The Business Insider, reports that the business news site made $2,127 in net income last year on $4.8 million in revenue.
Blodget writes, “But, thanks to our generous sponsors and partners, we are, at last, able to reward our hard work.
“Our newsroom salaries for full-time employees, for example (which include bonuses and benefits) are now higher than at many companies in the traditional news industry. Because the digital news business is quite different from the traditional news business, we often promote from within, and we’ve had the huge pleasure of watching folks who joined us as interns grow up to take leadership positions. True, we can’t yet toss around the $300,000-$500,000 a year per brand-name columnist that Huffington Post and Daily Beast are now reportedly tossing around. But, in future years, if we keep doing what we think we can do, we should be able to pay our top people a lot more than we do today.
“(We also give our folks stock options, which helps make them feel and act like they own some of the place. Which they in fact do.)
“Now, before we move on, a quick note about our profitability: It’s not going to continue, at least not for the next few quarters.”
Read more here.
The best financial blogs riff on each other
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Time magazine compiled a list of the most influential — and useful — finance blogs out there and then asked some of the best-known bloggers to review one another’s work.
Among the blogs selected were Business Insider, Felix Salmon’s blog for Reuters, Dealbreaker, DealBook from the New York Times, and Planet Money from NPR.
Cal-Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong writes, “Felix Salmon suits me. Would he suit you? He really ought to. Too many people are either on Team Politics or Team Ideology or Team I Talk My Book. You cannot learn much from them. I can name 10 articles in the past month alone that I am grateful to have learned about because of Salmon. I would have gotten to about three of them without him.”
Dealbreaker editor Bess Levin writes, “No one wakes up earlier than the team at DealBook, and their efforts before most people have had any caffeine make it hard not to visit the site (if just to scan the headlines) every morning. In addition to the site, you can sign up for a 5 a.m. e-mailed newsletter that does one of the best jobs of providing a comprehensive look at the most important stories of the day, gathering everything you need to know from the major news outlets.”
DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, “If there’s one place online that has captured the zeitgeist of trading floors on Wall Street — the bathroom humor, the outsized egos and the language — it’s Dealbreaker. The site is run by Bess Levin, a humorist cum reporter who has successfully managed to turn Wall Street’s biggest names into cartoon characters — and into her most loyal readers. The site feels like a mashup of Page Six and Bloomberg News. The articles may be laced with humor, but beneath all that wit lies a remarkable truth that often cuts closer to reality than more sober news reports. Bess’s trick is that she’s not laughing at Wall Street; she’s laughing with them.”
The problems with the FT’s strategy
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Reuters blogger Felix Salmon argues that The Financial Times‘ strategy of charging for Web access while practically giving away its print paper isn’t working — the paper continues to lose print subscribers and its unique visitors online aren’t growing as fast as others.
Salmon writes, “The FT’s paywall is structured very aggressively — you have to register after reading just one article per month, and then unless you subscribe you’re cut off after 10 articles per month. That’s good at maximizing short-term cashflow, but it clearly hurts growth: the FT doesn’t release numbers for unique visitors, but both Quantcast and Compete show FT uniques falling significantly over the past year, and actually being overtaken by Business Insider. What I said back in 2007 was that the FT was removing itself from the conversation; that’s exactly what seems to have happened.
“I don’t doubt for a minute that the FT’s CPMs are very high. But they’re getting there the wrong way, by minimizing the Ms (the number of pageviews) rather than maximizing the Cs (total ad revenues). Eventually, the FT is going to be such a niche product, compared to other business and finance publications, that global B2B advertisers simply won’t see the point in buying it any more. What it should be doing is becoming so big and important outside the UK that major advertisers feel the need to buy it even if they have no desire at all to reach the UK audience. But it’s nowhere near that point yet, and it doesn’t seem to be getting there, either.
“And if the FT isn’t serving advertisers well, it’s not doing so well for readers, either. Paywalls should always be completely invisible to subscribers, but the FT’s fails miserably on that front: subscribers keep on running into that wall on a regular basis, especially when they try to visit ft.com from their mobile device, or when they try to follow a link sent to them by a non-subscriber.”
Read more here.
FT using data to drive revenue
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Eric Pfanner of the New York Times writes about how the Financial Times is using data about what its readers view on its website to increase its revenue.
Pfanner writes, “When a reader signs up for an online subscription, The FT can track every click. That makes it easier to tailor content and new services to their interests. When customers let their subscriptions lapse, The FT can pursue them via e-mail and other means in an effort to get them to reconsider.
“In businesses where getting to know one’s customers has long been essential, this might not seem revolutionary. But Mr. Ridding said improvements in collecting and mining customer data were a big reason digital sales accounted for 24 percent of The FT’s revenue last year, a big jump from 19 percent a year earlier and a considerably higher percentage than many other publishers can claim.
“The FT, one of the few papers to charge readers successfully on the Internet, said it had 207,000 subscribers to its Web site and other digital versions of its newspaper, up 50 percent from a year earlier. It has also sold more than 1,000 corporate subscriptions to its digital content, and revenue from this source rose 30 percent last year, Mr. Ridding said.
“While The FT is making a big push to generate more revenue from readers, better information on its customers has also helped with advertising, which rose at double-digit rates last year after a weak 2009, he said. Advertisers, no longer content with a scattershot approach, want to know more and more about their audiences: where they live, where they travel, what they read, what they buy and more.”
Read more here.
FT.com paid circulation up 50 percent
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Amy Wicks of Women’s Wear Daily reports that the subscriptions to the Financial Times website have risen 50 percent in the past year.
Wicks writes, “A combined subscription for print and online is $33.96 a month, and a premium subscription to online only is nearly $30 a month. Overall, FT.com’s paid circulation is up more than 50 percent, to 207,000, a third of total global paid circulation. Chief executive officer John Ridding said advertisers are paying the same rates now for print and online.
“For 2010, the FT’s ad revenues rose more than 10 percent, thanks, in part, to the return of the luxury category, and FT.com saw double-digit ad revenue growth, helped by the rise of new mobile platforms. ‘This [the U.S.] is our biggest market now,’ said Ridding, noting that circulation in the U.S. is 120,000. How to Spend It, the FT’s weekend glossy (which launched in 1994), posted a 40 percent increase in advertising, and the March 19 fashion issue will be the biggest ever published in the U.S.
“When it came to talking competition, Ridding wholeheartedly believes that when The New York Times implements its metered system, it will be successful. But don’t hold your breath for an iPad-only version of the FT. ‘We’re always in favor of innovation and experimenting, but I don’t see the need to invest in a new publication. Our current brand is doing just fine.’”
Read more here.
Biz journalists win Gracies
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Three business journalism projects received Gracie Awards, presented by the Alliance of Women in Media.
“Breaking Faith: Fraud in the Heartland” from CNNMoney.com won in the outstanding investigative program in the online category.
Jennifer Rogers of Reuters Insider won for outstanding anchor for a news or news magazine show online. She interviews newsmakers and covers breaking business news for the business news service.
“New Economics of Hollywood” from Bloomberg News won in the hard news feature category. It analyzed the business of the film industry and was anchored by Carol Massar.
The Gracie Awards honor exemplary programming created for women, by woman and about women in all facets of electronic media as well as individuals who have made contributions to the industry.
The winners will be recognized at an industry luncheon on Wednesday, May 25, at the historic Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills
Forbes putting Web content into magazine
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Forbes chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin writes about how the business magazine is using content that started on its Web site in its magazine.
Dvorkin writes, “We’ve been at that for months, and our efforts are evolving here, too. In fact, content on 24 pages in the last two issues of Forbes began in some fashion on Forbes.com.
We started it all with ‘The Conversation.’ Instead of Letters to the Editor, a convention that seems no longer appropriate, we began contextually integrating user comments about our stories — from Forbes.com, Twitter, Facebook and regular mail, too — throughout our magazine’s different sections. That, in turn, led us to a special digital project called Names You Need to Know, which enabled us to crowdsource portions of our Dec. 20, 2010 magazine cover. Fifteen pages of that issue of the magazine were dedicated to a conversation between our staffers, our contributors and audience members on the most important — and perhaps least known — people you should really know about in 2011.
“The notion of a dialogue in print has taken yet another direction. In the issue dated Feb. 28, an online conversation between Michael Noer, one of editors, and Jon Bruner one of our reporters, was turned into a fun and informational five page magazine feature on Jon’s use of all sorts of technology gadgets on a weekend trip to Romania. Online commenters also became part of the print ‘story.’
“In the current issue, a conversation turned serious. Forbes health reporters Bob Langreth, David Whelan and Matt Herper asked a question on their Forbes.com pages: Will health care costs bankrupt America? Other Forbes staffers and contributors, including Avik Roy, entered the debate, as did audience members. That informative and engaging digital exchange — full of information and perspective — was transformed into a magazine discussion (we continue to explore new presentation formats). It comes right after the Clayton Christensen cover package.”
Read more here.
A business news story not found in the NYT
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Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, writes Sunday about how other media have been covering the paper’s decision to begin charging for online access to content, but the story has gone uncovered in the Times.
“Yet the introduction of the pay model is major news for The Times, for the rest of the newspaper industry, and for Times customers and readers, some of whom have asked me why there hasn’t been coverage. Hence I think there’s a journalistic imperative for The Times to cover it energetically.
“John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst, said: ‘People call me and ask me what I think about The Times’s new plan. I say, ‘Do you know what it is?’ ‘
“The stakes for The Times, which like other newspaper companies has seen major declines in print advertising revenues, are enormous. I asked Mr. Morton to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the strategic importance of the pending pay model to the future of the organization”
Read more here.