ITZ Publishing

Sarah is Searching for Citisins who Want to Print their own Tourist Guide : The Next Women

Sarah is Searching for Citisins who Want to Print their own Tourist Guide : The Next Women.

Sarah is Searching for Citisins who Want to Print their own Tourist Guide Recently, we were introduced to Sarah, the model tourist in the new Startup Citisins, that wants to revolutionize the enormous tourist guide industry with a technology that allows for a Do-it-Yourself Custom made guide, by selecting your own hotspots on an interface and get a printed version via a Printing-on Demand tool. The founders of Citisins are young and ambitious and have seen the success of the Offbeat Guides. Citisins was a finalist of the Rising Sun Startup Rally at The Next Web conference. Right now they are looking for beta-testers: travellers all around Europe to test the first version. They are especially looking for citisins in the following cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Rotterdam.

Brill's Journalism Online and ITZ Publishing Forge Alliance

Brill's Journalism Online and ITZ Publishing Forge Alliance.

By Jennifer Saba

Published: June 29, 2009 11:15 AM ET
NEW YORK Journalism Online, the company founded to help publishers charge for content, and ITZ Publishing have announced a partnership to work with small and medium-sized newspaper companies.

The Portland, Ore.-based consulting firm ITZ Publishing is advising Journalism Online affiliates about their usage and traffic patterns in order to help determine what content to charge for.

"Greg Swanson and the ITZ Publishing team have been market leaders in developing breakthrough solutions for news publishers," Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, said in a statement. "We're going to take that expertise and the company's analytic strengths and world class tools and put them to work for Journalism Online's affiliates across the country."

Journalism Online's strategy is to give publishers a variety of tools and options to charge for content including the ability to implement micropayments. The company, also founded by former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz and cable executive Leo Hindery Jr., does not advocate pushing all content behind a pay wall.

"There is an enormous opportunity for news publishers to generate subscription and other revenues from readers online, while still attracting a large audience of people accessing news for free and providing advertisers with significant opportunities," Crovitz said in a statement. "The marketing and data analysis expertise of ITZ Publishing will be especially valuable to publishers in retaining a large number of unique visitors and page views online while converting many free users to paying subscribers."

ITZ Publishing was founded by Greg Swanson, the former director of interactive media sales for Lee Enterprises. The company includes The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer among its customers.

"There's no higher priority today for publishers than the creation of strategies to maximize subscription and other paid content revenue opportunities," Swanson said.

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Jennifer Saba (jsaba@editorandpublisher.com) is an E&P senior editor.

Moreover May Sue UK Newspapers Over Redistribution Fee | paidContent

Moreover May Sue UK Newspapers Over Redistribution Fee | paidContent.

Patrick Smith Jun 26, 2009 12:43 PM ET

Online news aggregator Moreover, which until last month was part of Verisign, is considering taking legal action against the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency in response to plans to impose a fee on re-distribution of online newspaper articles. The NLA, which polices unauthorised use of content for thousands of local and national newspapers, wants to impose charges on “web-scraping” services that copy sites’ entire content and redistribute it via tailor-made datafeeds to paying customers, something it says Moreover does.

This comes as the company was recently bought out by a UK investor group, led by former AOL business development SVP Paul Farrell, and relocated its HQs to London. Also, this not the first time Moreover publishing model has come under fire: AP sued the company in 2007 for publishing excerpts of news reports, though the case was settled in August last year. More details on PCUK here.

OK, word of mouth is the most compelling form of marketing, but...http://ping.fm/EAQFr

News after Newspapers: Circulate enters the fray: holistic, user-centric content discovery tool

News after Newspapers: Circulate enters the fray: holistic, user-centric content discovery tool.

Circulate enters the fray: holistic, user-centric content discovery tool

News after Newspapers

An examination of the tools and techniques for journalism and news publishing that are rising as newspapers fall, by MARTIN C. LANGEVELD

Again with full disclosure up front: this is a venture in which Martin is personally involved:

A few weeks ago in Washington DC, my partners and I announced the formation of CircLabs and the intent to develop a product "code-named" Circulate, incubated at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. But the announcement stopped short of an explicit description. We've now unveiled the CircLabs Inc. website with more details about our plans for Circulate on the About Us/FAQ page.

Circulate is a holistic, user-centric solution aimed broadly at sustaining journalism in a digital world, with specific relevance to the ongoing exploration of paid-content models for newspaper Web sites. Circulate enables experimentation with subscription and per-item user charges, but as a user-centric content discovery tool, Circulate goes well beyond the announced features of other systems that have been proposed in that space.

Circulate will be rolled out in phases. Initially, it will be a browser add-on that you can have always handy as you move around the Web. Circulate will function on multiple platforms to allow full portability: a mobile application is planned, possibly first as an iPhone application, along with user start page and e-mail notification options.

We describe Circulate on our site in these terms:

Circulate will be present whenever and wherever Web users go online. Circulate learns the user's preferences and becomes an intelligent, indispensable Web assistant that replaces the hassle of search with on-target recommendations and social interactivity....

Circulate travels with you, at your option, wherever you go online. Using your expressly shared interests and preferences, along with your current browsing path, it suggests where you may want to go next, or later on. Over time, you can refine your content interests so that Circulate gets to know you and becomes an even better personal guide to the Web....

Before Circulate, you had to know where you're going online or use unpredictable search engines. And you needed to do all the work by typing search terms or by scanning links. This hasn't changed much during all the time the Web has been around.

Circulate solves this problem by bringing the Web to you simply and quickly. With Circulate, you can take a big step into the post-search, Web 3.0 world. Circulate is a personal information agent that works just for you....

When you begin using Circulate, you'll probably want to tell it a little bit about yourself. As you continue to interact with it, you can allow it to learn more about you and your preferences, and it uses that information to deliver Web recommendations to you.

Eventually, you'll find that Circulate brings you what you want to see, learn about, and interact with online, before you even think about it. In a real sense, it will become an intelligent personal information agent.

As a Circulate user, you'll be able to have an account with a home-base publisher, like the local paper, and optionally profile yourself. Then the Circulate system will go to work and discover and present to you information that’s really relevant to your interests. You'll be able to set alerts if you want, but you don't have to. Circulate won’t start out carrying advertising, but eventually when it does, you'll see advertising that matters to you, not blindly-aimed mass-market ads. And it sets up the possibility that you could optionally subscribe, through your home-base publisher, to valuable information at hundreds and eventually thousands of news and other websites, all at a low monthly blanket rate.

Circulate will feature social functionality, so that you can share and discuss content (but its content recommendations are not sourced through "collaborative filtering"). Over time, you will be able to select additional features on Circulate as they are developed.

Importantly, a core, fundamental value at CircLabs is user privacy. While Circulate will work best when the user shares information, that will happen with the user's explicit permission, not by virtue of obscure language buried in user agreements no one reads.

For publishers, we see Circulate as a game-changing solution that can enhance revenue in a number of ways:

• Local branding
• Increased high-value site traffic
• Local advertising on Circulate
• Subscription revenue
• Per-item revenue
• Other forms of commercial revenue

We invite publishers to contact us and to explore the features of Circulate in more detail. We've begun software development, but Circulate will improve even faster if we can work with publishers in various ways, including technical collaboration, refinement of the end-user experience, marketing to end users, local and national advertising sales, and paid content options.

Besides myself, the CircLabs leadership team consists of Jeff Vander Clute, President; Joe Bergeron, VP, Product Development; and Bill Densmore, Co-founder. You can read more about us here.

We expect to begin beta testing Circulate this fall.

MediaPost Publications Zen And The Art of Online Selling 06/18/2009

MediaPost Publications Zen And The Art of Online Selling 06/18/2009.

"Who are those guys, Butch?" -- The Sundance Kid

And that is the question every marketer who ever spent an online ad dollar has asked.  Who are these guys, and why do they matter to me?  The answer is often presented in terms of demographic categories. And if your site is perceived to be the leader in a target category, you stand to do well.

But that is where the advertiser really needs the seller for the kinds of insight and intelligence that strengthen or change completely their conviction.

It is an aphorism that selling begins with customer knowledge. The customer, after all, is king -- or queen, as the case may be.

May I disagree?

It is the customer of the customer who rules, after all, isn't it?

In other words, the starting point for successful selling online is deep audience insight. And here clickstream metrics cannot give you the answers. There is no substitution for audience knowledge and insight.  You know, the kind of understanding that comes from actually speaking to them, listening to them, engaging in dialogue with them.

Do you think you do know this already? Perhaps you do. But I wouldn't be so quick to believe that, as most sales teams I know and most online publishers do not regularly use any of these audience-intelligence-gathering methods:

1.    Identify passionate site users and regularly speak with them.
2.    Create user advisory boards comprised of passionate, engaged users.
3.    Survey users on why they are there, what they are seeking to accomplish, and whether or not they were successful.

Why speak regularly with your audience? Doesn't that question itself seem silly? But I know it's rare that a sales, marketing, or even editorial person consistently engages audience members on a regular basis. About their sites, that is. And yet your customers are counting on you for that knowledge. In another context in MediaPost, I have quoted the golden words of  Brandon Starkoff, SVP/Global Director at Starcom: "We seek to place most of our business with online publishers who are leaders in their category. And one of the ways that we can see their leadership is by the extent that they know their audience."

Starkoff emphasized in that telling conversation that Starcom relied on these online leaders -- these audience experts -- for guidance in understanding how their clients could be successful. And that would include insights into the type of programs and ad units that would work.

Does your team -- or do you as a salesperson -- offer the advertiser guidance that they can take to the bank? If they can look to you as such an audience expert that they can confidently place their dollars in successful programs, well then you are in, by definition, a leadership position.

The Zen koan I would like you to consider then would be: What does it mean to focus on your customer by not focusing on your customer?

And the answer to the riddle would be: You focus on your customers by first focusing on their customer. And you can do that easily.

Some practical steps to get started on the path:

1.Send a simple survey (you can do it for free via Survey Monkey) and pose questions similar to the ones that Avinash Kaushik of Google has suggested that all sites should randomly ask their users:

a.    Why are you here today?
b.    What were you hoping to accomplish?
c.    Were you successful? Why or why not?

2.    Find users who are passionate about your site. How? If you have registration data and can ask your tech team to help, great. Otherwise you can use the above survey and find users that spend a lot of time on the site.

3.    Ask these users if they can spend 15-20 minutes with you to find out more about who they are, why they come to your site, how they feel about the content and advertising, what ads they see or would click on, etc.

4.    Create advisory boards with your best users to offer insights into your site, your content, programs, how advertisers can catch their attention, etc.

Once you connect with your users in these kinds of ways, don't be surprised if you become addicted to user feedback, advisory groups, and relationships. The insights you capture can only make your selling, marketing and content development exponentially better. And if you are not already a leader, you will become one to your advertisers.