First in print, then online

Interesting quote today in this article on gva.be. The journalist note that these specific stories about a trip to Russia appear first in the print paper and will be afterwards published online.

Few remarks:

1) Why not publishing the news on the same day as the print edition? Will there be less buyers of the print paper when these specific stories also appear online (cannibalism)?
2) If so, why not focussing on both the print and online version. It seems like the business model based on advertising is becoming more profitable; the New York Times for example realised that it can earn more money by making the content free, or as a director of a media research firm stated after the news was made public:

The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.

3) More or less, these articles have the same content, same pictures, same (sub)titles, same structure, same layout as the offline counterparts. Why not adjusting these features to the online environment? In some way, we can speak of shovelware, a term which defines the information that is dumped onto the website without changed content or enhanced content.

Farcasting the news

Since februari 2007, gva.be and hbvl.be are experimenting with Farcast, a mobile service/platform that reporters can use to send text, pictures and videos from location to the digital news site. They can also send their gps coordinates so that the news site can show a map with the exact location of action. This example whows how great farscast can be in regional reporting.

The site of Farcast stresses that "with the introduction of the Farcast application, hbvl.be and gva.be are now, more than ever, the absolute frontrunner in fast, accurate, multimedia news. With Farcast, ‘Gazet van Antwerpen’ and ‘Het belang van Limburg’ have taken an important step in the further development of their websites."

I think it is indeed a great step towards a fully multimedia coverage of news items.
Knowing that gva.be has this hard- and software at his disposal, one could wonder why the site is still using unclear and simplistic maps like this one when they have farcast.

Online readers = readers?

When conducting an online poll, one have to be very careful when interpreting the results, especially when generalising the results of the sample to a whole population. In this article on the news site of the Gazet van Antwerpen, de journalist is paying attention to the lack of representivity of an online poll: instead of writing that the 'Flemish citizens' (a population often used in Flemish newspapers) do not agree with the political coalition in Lier, he states that the 'readers' do not agree. But the good work is only half done ...

Besides the possible confusion thanks to the word 'reader' (all Flemish readers? Worldwide readers? Print or online readers? Oh ... only the online readers of the Gazet van Antwerpen) , this generalisation does not take into account the fact that the sample is not drawn out of all the readers of the newspaper, but instead is based on a self-selection of online readers. Thus, the title of the article should have been "online readers of the GVA do not agree with ..." or even better "online readers of the GVA who participated in the online poll do not agree with ...". But of course, this doesn't sound right.

In the article itself, the interpretation is rather good: the journalist explains that the sample is composed by self-selecting, online readers of de GVA, but nevertheless, the title on top of this article leads to some extent of confusion for readers who do not read the whole article.

More about this kind of statistical difficulties and challenges on this site.