Last week The New York Times gave me an offer I couldn't refuse: 12 weeks of digital access for $5. No, that's not $5 per week. That's $5 for the entire 12-week period. See why I couldn't refuse? I'd been reading the Times' Top News on Flipboard for months, and I knew I liked it in that format. Now that I have access to the entire paper for a few months, I decided to try out the native Android and iOS apps and see which I liked better. Note that I purchased Tablet access, so I didn't test this out on my...

Canadian Businesses Lobby for Right to Infect Computers with Rootkits and Viruses (Boing Boing) Newspapers That Aren't Dying: 4 Success Stories and 4 Lessons (Paid Content) Hearst Digital Magazines to Undergo Rapid Transformation (Good e-Reader) Licensing Controversy: Balancing Author Rights with Societal Good (The Scholarly Kitchen) Kindle Daily Deals: A Patch of Ground by Michael Archer (and 3 others)...

This following article appears in the latest issue of Scandinavian Libraries. From the Article: In 2011, the National Library of Norway launched a new digital newspaper service (www.nb.no/aviser). The service is free of charge, and all Norwegian libraries can access the newspapers with which the National Library has an agreement. Since the autumn of 2006, the National Library has collaborated with a number of Norwegian newspapers on digitization and digital submission. New newspapers are submitted to the National Library in a high quality digital format, while the National Library and the newspapers share the costs involved in digitizing the older issues. Under the...

In this era of fading revenues, how can a newspaper or magazine draw traffic while differentiating itself from the hundreds of other similar sites out there? Lewis DVorkin, Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media, has written about how Forbes is doing just that. Most news sites, DVorkin writes, are still very similar to their appearance of ten years ago: plain, generic, boring text; sidebars with as many links as possible (search-engine fodder, don’t you know); very little individuality from article to article or even paper to paper. The larger point is this: the...

Moderator, Staci D. Kramer, Editor and Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOM Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp.: Investing quietly in early stage companies in China for about a year.  Took a 20% position in a public film company in China recently.  Seeing some light at the end of the tunnel in MySpace. New media companies, like MySpace, are not as stable as traditional companies and when you get a bit behind it is very hard to catch up because everyone else moving so fast. Yahoo needs big answers and not many of them at a given time....

Ernest Hemingway was a columnist for the Toronto Star from 1920-1924 where he wrote 191 stories. More than 70 of them are currently accessible via the digital archive (free). A newsprint version of the material is also available for sale. Direct to ‘The Hemingway Papers’ Digital Archive The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star’s team of Hemingway experts. See Also: Toronto Star publishes digital archive of Ernest Hemingway columns: Young ‘Papa’ wrote of bootleggers &...

That's the title of an article in Blackweb 2.0: Internet and new media have changed newspapers and publications over the years. But how has this change translated into the Black press? Some of the most talented African-American writers, editors, and publishers have contributed to the Black press for over one hundred years. Black papers became the way for black people to communicate and share news about the community.  But as technology continues to influence the media, the Black press has been slow in making the digital transition. “The integration of social media has been delayed in the Black press,” says the  National Newspaper...

From a NY Times Announcement: The New York Times Media Group announced today that as of Sunday, March 18, one year after launching paid digital subscriptions, it had approximately 454,000 paid subscribers to its various digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (IHT). The Times also announced that beginning in April it would be moving the pay gate at NYTimes.com to 10 free articles a month from 20. With this change, The Times’s digital subscription plan will continue to allow for access to a generous amount of free content on the Web...

The Project for Excellence in Journalism discuss this new study by the Pew Research Center.  At the current time $7 is lost for every $1 gain in digital revenue.  Much more in the article: A new study, which combines detailed proprietary data from individual newspapers with in-depth interviews at more than a dozen major media companies, finds that the search for a new revenue model to revive the newspaper industry is making only halting progress but that some individual newspapers are faring much better than the industry overall and may provide signs of a path forward. In...

From LIBER: A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service. The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. [Clip] Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana 1914-1918 project. Additional Details in the Complete...

Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar has a guest post on TechCrunch discussing four major errors that publishers make when importing content to tablets. These mistakes include developing their own platform rather than using one that other companies’ development teams have already made, not enabling social network sharing of their content which could expose it to a wider audience, not creating new brands for their digital content, and concentrating on traditional SEO rather than trying to appeal to new social methods of search (such as, for example, Taptu). It’s interesting just how much emphasis experts are placing on taking advantage of...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...