Online Newsroom Investment - 2006 Annual Report

Perhaps the most significant investment that media companies have made over the last year or so is in the distribution and marketing of news (both as text and video) over wireless technology. Increasingly, news, especially breaking news, is becoming available on cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), such as a BlackBerry, which can access the Internet through a WiFi, cellular, or Bluetooth technology connection.28

One example of how wireless technology has allowed news to become more portable and on-demand can be seen in Verizon’s V Cast multimedia partnership with CBS News. Subscribers can view breaking news stories and segments from the CBS Evening News on their cell phones. “At the intersection of the mobile phone and the television lies programming promotion and brand extension potential. This deal with Verizon Wireless represents a major step for us into mobile entertainment and another point of contact with the consumer to promote out great content brands,” Cyriac Roeding, vice president of wireless for CBS Digital Media, told EcommerceTimes.com.29

Several online news sites have also continued to make investments in software in an attempt to make their news products more appealing to the on-demand news consumer and allow more opportunities for citizen journalism.30 In 2005, two news features that furthered the discussion of citizen journalism and on-demand were wikitorials and podcasting.

Wikitorials are “online communities that encourage users to collectively write and edit articles.” “ Wikitorial ” comes from the Hawaii an “wiki wiki , ” which means “quick” in English. The Los Angeles Times was one news organization that experimented with wikitorials last year , and the result can be seen either as one step in an experimental process or somewhat embarrassing. After allowing readers to respond to , and even rewrite , the newspaper’s editorials, the site was soon overrun with profanity and pornographic photos and then suspended.31

Podcasting is a way to distribute audio and video programming over the Web that differs from earlier online audio and video publishing because the material is automatically transferred to the user’s computer and can be consumed at any time, usually on an Apple iPod or another kind of portable digital music player commonly known as an MP3 player.32

News sites that began offering podcasts in 2005 included the Denver Post, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Forbes and the Washington Post. One survey estimated that 4.8 million people had downloaded a podcast from either a radio station or an other source in 2005 — up 485% from 2004. The study also found that 20% of “podcasters” download them on a weekly basis.33

Investments in wikitorials and podcasts are relatively inexpensive . For example, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Philadelphia Daily News spent “just a few hundred dollars” on microphones, an audio mixer, and recording software when launching its podcast. There is also very little evidence that news organizations have added any editorial staff. Rather, it seems that existing news staff have been used or the work has been outsourced, as when the Denver Post hired college students to record and edit its site’s podcasts. One pressing question for 2006, of course, is whether any revenue can be generated from these new online news features.34