The newspaper is not pushing up the daisies yet

Who killed the newspaper?, the Economist asked last year. This was just one of many death sentences the last few years for the newspaper as we know it. But WAN, World Association of Newspapers, is not ready to throw in the towel. New data from WAN show that newspaper circulation is growing and new newspapers are being launched “at a remarkable rate”.

– Global newspaper circulation up 9.95 percent over five years and 2.36 percent over twelve months
– Daily newspaper titles surpass 10,000 for first time in history
– More than 450 million copies sold daily
– In excess of 1.4 billion paid-newspaper readers
– Total free daily circulation more than doubles in five years

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Google fined in Belgian court case

This news just broke: Google lost the Google News copyright suit in Belgium. AP writes:

“A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.”

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Sydsvenskan buys island in Second Life

Riding on the hype from a potential launch of a Swedish Embassy in Second Life, the first Swedish paper has bought a piece of property in the virtual world. Last Friday, the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan launched its own island in Second Life in co-operation with communications agency Good Old.

Writes Good Old:“The island is called Sydsverige which translates to “Southern Sweden”, which is the area of Sweden that Sydsvenskan covers. The plan is to create a place where Swedish people can meet, and create their own projects if they want to. The planning will take place together with the visitors that are interested.”

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Swedish dailies track [some] blog links

Sweden’s leading daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have started to include links to blogs who comment on articles on the papers’ websites, Washington Post-style. Blog posts are tracked via a tool called Twingly and a list of the most blogged articles at DN can be found here. Example at SvD here. Twingly was just recently launched and has currently indexed about 2.8 million blog posts, which of course is a small number compared to the 1.6 million blog posts that the blogosphere spits out daily. The accuracy will of course improve over time as more and more blogs are tracked by Twingly.

Currently, the Swedish blog portal Knuff is far better att tracking blog links than both Twingly and Technorati. Here is a comparison between the three services and how they track the five top blogged articles at Dagens Nyheter.

Blogs posts tracked
Article Twingly Technorati Knuff
#1 24 19 26
#2 1 10 23
#3 2 2 18
#4 0 6 13
#5 2 4 10

UPDATE: The comparison above is a bit unfair, as Martin from Primelabs explains in the comments to this post. Apparently DN does not show all the incoming links that Twingly has in its database. In the Help section on the site, DN writes that you can find “a list of all blogs that link to an article on DN.se”. For some reason DN chooses to list only a selection of links. If this process turns out to filter out negative articles, then I expect an uproar in the blogosphere when bloggers find out they are being “censored”. Should DN continue to leave out a large part of the conversation they will most certainly open up for criticism.

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Simultaneous media consumption a challenge for advertisers

According to BIGresearch’s Simultaneous Media Usage Study, media consumers spend a lot of time multitasking when they use media. Almost 7 out of 10 use some other media while watching tv.

Joe Pilotta, VP, Research of BIGresearch, concludes that “The intermittent usage of media which occurs during simultaneous consumption creates a serious problem for marketers who rely on exposure to media models since the anticipated exposure is being shared with many other media options and may never occur.”

Percent who use other media while:

Watching tv: 67.9%
Listening to radio: 56.4%
Reading newspapers: 68.9%
Going Online: 70.7%

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Web 2.0 companies prefer YouTube to Super Bowl

Super Bowl ads [tv commercials, that is] this year may cost as much as $2.6 million per 30-second spot, which is too expensive for the more well known web 2.0 companies like Technorati and Plaxo. Instead, six of these companies have joined forces to create a series of “viral” spots that run on their own YouYube channel: YouTube “SuperDotComAdsXLI”.

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