Belgian newspapers continue to attack news aggregators

Written on 2nd July 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

About a month ago I reported that Belgian newspaper publisher Copiepresse demanded that Google should pay €49 million to compensate for the damage listings in Google News had caused them. A weird case, and not just because Copiepresse can easily prevent these listings. What struck me the most was the old-fashioned attitude of the Belgian media company. Call me naive, but I expected the executives of traditional media companies to be visionary enough to realize Google News brings them nothing but traffic. Was I shocked back then, now I’m really amazed by the next step of Copiepresse: they’re suing the EU’s news aggregator NewsExplorer.

This aggregation service from the European Commission wants to help visitors to grasp cultural differences among the EU by showing articles from all countries concerning the same matter. This unique piece of technology is a bit too modern for the Copiepresse conservatives, who prefer officials that use scissors and scrap books to collect the latest European news – behind closed doors. Just imagine helping out citizens by publicly organizing news.

Forgive me my cynicism and lack of respect for traditional business models. It’s just plain frustrating to see a large media company trying to destroy an emerging world of news and information. Copiepresse fails to see threats to their business models as challenges and tries to keep us in a bygone age of information.

There are only two positive notes here: the court has tossed out the case, based on jurisdictional grounds (so there’s hope for Google too), and what goes around, comes around. A company that only sees threats in the digital revolution, will find itself dismantled in a few deccenia. The only thing that bothers me about that, is the waste of journalistic talent.

Belgium, business models, copiepresse, Europe, European Commission, google news, News, newsexplorer, Newspapers, traditional media

4 Comments »

CoveritLive builds bridges between traditional and new media

Written on 6th June 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Although I’m not a big fan of live blogging – I would rather write an article right after the presentation — I do admire the team behind CoveritLive. They’re making blogging more mainstream by building bridges between traditional media and new media. Its easy UI, good functionality, and no-nonsense approach make it easy to convince people to get some live blogging 2.0 going on. The Liverpool Daily Post for example, showed its readers how a typical day in the editor’s room looks by live blogging for 17 hours. These English journalists are pioneers, but they’re certainly not the only ones exploring the new frontiers.

Belgium newspaper La Libre used CoveritLive to keep worried tennis fans up to date during the Justine Henin retirement announcement. American regional television stations have warned their viewers for tornadoes and wildfires and collected eye witness accounts from across the disaster area. These news media only had to place a widget on their site. After that it was just a matter of doing what they’re payed for: report. Users can browse to the site and look up the widget. That’s more accessible than, for example, a Twitter feed as it doesn’t look too abstract for less-experienced Internet users.

Lowering the barriers of live blogging

With its growing popularity, CoveritLive has found the resources to add some new features that improve its accessibility.

• Users can now add their own logo to the widget and adjust color, fonts and whatnot so that the CoveritLive screen blends in with the rest of the site.
• CoveritLive has added dedicated media servers, attached a one GB outgoing pipe and improved the compression technology of the pictures so that users can live post pictures without too much hassle.
• There’s a new support center which will help less-experienced web users to set up and run a live blog
• Every self respecting hip Web 2.0 service adds an iPhone client, so does CoveritLive.

There’s an advantage for journalists

Apart from its accessibility, another reason for the success of CoveritLive is that it simply fulfills a need of journalists: live reporting without any hassle. They don’t need blogging software for writing editorial pieces, as they can just use the existing content management systems. But those programs weren’t build for quick reporting. So that’s why they now embrace a technology that most of them have maligned for quite some time.

coveritlive, live blogging, Newspapers, traditional media

5 Comments »