See you in Seattle for Annual Meeting

The PNNA Annual Meeting is next week, Nov 7-9, at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. Thursday will feature sessions dealing with the changing newspaper landscape and some interesting suggestions for product development and structural change to the historic departmental tableau. The Associated Press staff will give an update on their array of services. On Friday, Bob Hale, publisher of the Juneau Empire in Alaska, will lead the Great Ideas Roundtable. For more information, contact Jack Bates.

NEWS:

AP board approves overhaul of pricing and packaging

The Associated Press reports that its board has approved a new pricing and packaging plan for newspaper members. Instead of offering news feeds defined largely by the volume of news delivered – large, medium or small – the new plan is centered on a core service of all national, state and international breaking news, with options for adding other services or purchasing stories individually. The plan will offer U.S. newspapers more flexibility in accessing and using news of local interest that may originate in other regions. The changes, which take effect Jan. 1, 2009, were first proposed at the company’s annual meeting in May. The basic assessments charged to newspapers will continue to be based on circulation. AP said most of its member newspapers would wind up paying either lower fees or see no changes. Brettingen estimated the changes would result in $6 million to $7 million less annual revenue for the news agency, a shortfall he said should easily be made up from growth in other areas, including video and online sales. The pricing changes mark the first time the AP has revamped its fee structure since 1985, when the cooperative began assessing newspapers based on their circulation instead of the population in their area. Read the full article here.

Nokia, Reuters developing tool for journalists 
to publish from the field

Editor & Publisher reports that Nokia Research Center and Reuters are working together on a mobile journalism project that could transform the way journalists file news reports in the field, Reuters recently said in a statement. Through an ongoing trial that started this summer, Reuters journalists used the mobile journalism application in their everyday work to edit, combine and file text, images, sound and live and recorded video streams, producing and publishing multimedia stories of broadcast quality without needing to return to the studio or office. The mobile journalism application uses the multimedia capabilities already available in existing smart phones and combines these to produce a toolkit. The trial involved a select number of Reuters journalists who filed stories from events ranging from New York’s Fashion Week to the Edinburgh TV Festival to the U.S. presidential primary campaigns. A group of university students will use the application in coming months, to give an idea of how the toolkit could possibly work in a future citizen journalism context.

Slimp, Viers team up for online tech training

Two specialists in desktop production are inviting PNNA members to preview a series of 10 one-hour webinars this month. Kevin Slimp (pictured, above right), whose technology-review column appears in many state press association newsletters, has teamed with Russell Viers (pictured, above left), who produced the innovative DigiVersity.tv sessions online, to produce and market the latest series, braincast.biz. Lessons cover InDesign, pdfs, Photoshop and Illustrator. Interested newspapers can register for classes online, then access the training over their Web browsers and via toll-free telephone calls. Webinars began Nov. 1. The cost for a connection is $69, which covers everything needed. Learn more at www.braincast.biz.

WAN: The newspaper in 2020

The World Association of Newspapers asked 22 futurists, academics, industry insiders, Internet pioneers and other media experts to envision the newspaper of the future. Some say newspapers will resemble glossy magazines. Some say they will be individually tailored to readers. Some envision networks of news generators and digital news hubs. All of these future scenarios, however, are based on current trends in the industry as newspapers evolve and grow as multimedia businesses. “Envisioning the Newspaper 2020” will soon be published by the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project for members of WAN. The report was featured in a seminar on the future of newspapers at the World Digital Publishing conference in Amsterdam. More on the conference, including summaries of presentations, can be found here.

Analyst: Social networking faces uncertain future

CNet News reports that a report by U.K.-based Datamonitor compares popularity of social-networking sites to the dot-com boom, and it warns that long-term growth is by no means assured. The New York Times also warns in an article that “investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.” In other social networking news, these sites are being urged to do more to protect young people, reports BBC News. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection center wants the sites to install its “report abuse” button that connects people to police. CEOP research shows some sex offenders are starting to use social network sites, such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, to seek out victims. 

Media companies and tracking companies 
disagree on how to count Web visitors

The New York Times reports that media companies are frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: The growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight. Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented as recently as 2004. A main source of the discrepancies is over how to measure Internet use in the workplace. Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore both track the Web use of representative panels of people and use those traffic patterns to extrapolate the total number of visitors to a website. But online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems. Read the full article here.

Commentary: Examples of connecting with online readers 

Robert Niles wrote on the Online Journalism Review website about his experience speaking at an API seminar about “Multi-Platform News: The How-To Guide for Frontline Editors.” The API invited the two dozen participants to e-mail Niles examples of their newspapers’ best recent online work for a 90-minute roundtable discussion. He chose to focus on three projects, which illustrate important lessons for online editors. Learn more about the examples here.

PEOPLE:

Herald's Executive Editor Strick to retire in November

The Herald in Everett, Wash., reports that executive editor Stan Strick, who has spent 27 years at the newspaper, is retiring. He oversaw or participated in shifting the newspaper from an evening to a morning publication, beginning a Sunday edition, changing the paper’s design several times and starting the HeraldNet.com website. Strick served as assistant city editor, city editor and managing editor before being promoted to executive editor in January 1992. Strick formerly worked for large daily newspapers and United Press International. In his retirement, he intends to read, pursue photography and travel with his wife, Janet.

Neal Pattison to succeed Strick at Herald

Neal Pattison, 54, has spent decades as a reporter and editor. In recent years, he has worked as a journalism instructor and newspaper design consultant, including work with The Herald. Pattison was assistant managing editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 1996 to 2002. He also was managing editor at the Albuquerque Tribune from 1992 to 1996, including in 1994 when the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on government plutonium experiments conducted on uninformed civilians. He also spent a decade as assistant managing editor and city editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane.

IN MEMORIAM:
Lou Bate, 82

The Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City, Utah reports that Louis B. Bate Jr. died Oct. 24. He was 82. Bates was an employee of the Deseret News for nearly 40 years before his retirement in 1987. Bate served as city editor from 1973-86. He first worked for the Deseret News in 1948 while attending Utah State University. After graduating with a degree in political science/journalism he became the paper’s bureau chief in Price for a year before joining the city desk staff in Salt Lake City in 1951. He also worked as reporter, makeup editor, assistant city editor (1956-68) and associate city editor (1968-73). Born in Wichita, Kan., on April 2, 1925, he graduated from Woodstock High School in Illinois in 1943. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army’s armored infantry. Bate married Kathleen Daines in 1947, and the couple had two children, both of whom survive him: Rebecca Bate Sperry, Bountiful, Utah; and Michael H. Bate, Phoenix, Ariz. He also has six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

John S. Murray, 82

The Associated Press reports that John S. Murray, former president of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association and a state lawmaker for 12 years, died Wednesday, Oct. 21 from complications from a stroke and pneumonia. He was 82. Born in Albany, Mo., Murray moved to Seattle with his family at age 12. He built bridges in Europe for the Army during World War II and later earned a degree from the University of Washington. In 1953, Murray bought the Queen Anne News and built it into a publishing company that owned several Seattle-area community newspapers and printed dozens of others, including publications in Norwegian and Vietnamese. Starting in the late 1960s, Murray was elected to four years in the state House of Representatives and eight years in the state Senate. Murray retired in 1988 after selling Murray Publishing Co.

CALL TO READERS : Send stories to the editor Kristen Lowrey.

Copyright © 2007 PNNA, All Rights Reserved