newspaper

This year, online will overtake newspapers' share of the global ad market. And in the U.S., digital ad dollars could surpass television by 2017.

Medialife Magazine reports on a new report from market research firm Mintel, writing, "Online's sharp growth curve, combined with slight declines for television, will continue to be sparked by new innovations, such as mobile advertising and increased use of online video streamed directly to television sets. The growth of online radio services, including Pandora and Spotify, will also bolster online ad sales, coming at the expense of terrestrial radio. And the continued shift in consumption of information on digital devices rather than in print will prompt many advertisers to move their money out of newspapers and magazines and put it online."

Meanwhile, media agency Carat says online will overtake newspapers in the global ad market this year (they had earlier predicted it would happen next year). Digital will account for 15.3% of all spending in 2012, second only to television. Newspapers will account for 14.4%, says Carat.

Read more on these developments from Medialife Magazine here and here.

The new web radio service from Boston.com -- dubbed RadioBDC (as in, Radio-Boston-dot-com) launched today at noon, following a montage of station production and string quartet versions (!) of classic modern rock songs. Dicky Barrett, frontman for local faves The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, called in to congratulate staffers and "front-announce" RadioBDC's first song, The Bosstones' "I Want My City Back."

Boston.com is a regional news portal owned by the Boston Globe. It attracts more than 6 million unique visitors per month. The site announced it would launch an online-only alternative rock web radio station back in June (RAIN coverage here), then hired on-air staff from the local alt rock station WFNX (which flipped formats after its sale to Clear Channel).

Triton Digital announced today that it will provide the station with its content delivery network (CDN), a Flash-based audio player and three mobile apps (available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices), as well as measurement and ad insertion. Additionally, Triton will provide audience engagement solutions including song and artist facts, lyrics, sampling and purchase options, content sharing and more.

The station will stream online at Boston.com (here). It will feature live programming (including news and lifestyle features) from 7am to 10pm every weekday and Sunday morning. At other times RadioBDC will stream alternative music. The stream will also include ads, though the "primary revenue generator" will be sponsored events, the Boston Globe reports (here).

Boston.com's general manager Lisa DeSisto says RadioBDC is "a way to deepen the engagement" of the site's visitors, Radio-Info reports (here).

"It’s all about attracting audiences and getting people to do things with us,” said Christopher Mayer, publisher of the Boston Globe. “We’ve seen people move from print to the Web, and from the Web to mobile. Why wouldn’t they also want our content in audio?”

Daily newspaper The Financial Times says its digital subscribers now outnumber those for print. Plus, the publication says half of all FT Group sales revenue is now digital. TechCrunch calls the news "a milestone reached as the world of old media continues its push in a digital direction." 

The Financial Times' digital subscriptions number 300,000 (up 31% year-over-year) while print subscriptions are at 299,000. The publication's overall sales are growing too, pushed by digital which is outpacing overall growth "by quite some way."

Mobile has also become "a significant part" of Financial Times' operation, with 25% of traffic to FT.com coming from mobile devices.

TechCrunch has more coverage here.

NPR announced today its involvement with a new University of New Orleans venture to create a "multimedia newsroom" for in-depth local news for the Crescent City.

NewOrleansReporter.org will be a news website and mobile platform, with a presence on WWNO radio, the public station owned and operated by the university. It will reportedly be run by a staff of 10 to 20 producing news for the web, tablet, smart phone, social media, and radio. The site will also feature and link to other local, national and world news.

NPR, which is consulting WWNO on tech infrastructure and online revenue generation, says it hopes to have the new site live by year's end.

As an "open source," operation, all of NewOrleansReporter's content will be available for free to other local and national news outlets. In fact, the operation's success will be measured in part by how much of its content gets "picked up" elsewhere.

New Orleans, no stranger to hardship, will soon be the largest city in the U.S. without a daily print newspaper. The Times-Picayune announced earlier this year that it will print just three days a week beginning in fall.

"What we are seeing play out in New Orleans, with the Times-Picayune, is a scene we have seen repeated over and over in a lot of communities as newspapers have fallen on hard times," NPR EVP/chief content officer Kinsey Wilson told The Wall Street Journal. "[Newspapers'] weakening and sometimes collapse is leaving communities with a real information deficit. In broad terms, we have seen this as being an opportunity for public radio to be one of the emerging players, as the news business is rebuilt." (RAIN readers may remember Wilson as the keynote speaker at RAIN Summit West in 2010.)

NPR's press release explains, "The objective of the University and its partners is to create a strong, sustainable model for nonprofit, multimedia journalism that will serve the greater New Orleans area as an open source of trustworthy news and information for decades to come."

Read Wall Street Journal coverage here.

Step back with us (and the Smithsonian Magazine blog) to the 1938 issue of Short Wave and Television. A story in that issue, "Radio to Print News Right in Your Home," was a report that developers were testing a system to deliver data over radio waves to print a newspaper right in your home! (The image shows the cover of the same publication, but from an issue 4 years earlier. We particularly enjoy the idea that the cover story was apparently on page 590... pity the postman delivering that magazine.)

Certainly such an invention would decimate the traditional newspaper industry. (In fact, it's our opinion that if you didn't buy it from a one-legged paperboy on the corner, it's really not "news.")

Smithsonian writes, "This invention of a wireless fax, as it were, was credited to W.G. H. Finch and used radio spectrum that was otherwise unused during the late-night hours when most Americans were sleeping. The FCC granted a special license for these transmissions to occur between midnight and 6am, though it would seem that a noisy printing device in your house cranking away in the middle of the night might have been the fatal flaw in their system. It wasn’t exactly a fast delivery either, as the article notes that it takes 'a few hours' for the machine to produce your wireless fax newspaper."

Also, "battles between formats would continue right on into the 21st century as the fight over newspaper paywalls, cord-cutters, and ebooks continues to dramatically shift our media landscape."

There's more, and some great images, in Smithsonian here.

"These days, even the stalwarts of traditional media make themselves available on call, on screens of all sizes, and in evolving ecosystems of free and paid versions," writes Peter Osnos in The Atlantic. "What were once simply great newspapers, magazines, television, and radio are now websites with all the trappings, and that's where the audiences seem to be headed in droves."

The nation's most-established and traditional sources of news have all made very significant investments in digital distribution: online video, blogs, photo galleries, podcasting, mobile applications, widgets, and more.

"Major public radio stations, such as WNYC in New York, WBUR in Boston, and WBEZ in Chicago, have also turned their websites into bastions of multimedia to build their audience share."

What of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)? While "not yet the moneymaker forecasted for it," it is useful to spread "the word for those digital products that are generating cash."

Read "Even Old Media Institutions Are Acting Like New Media" in The Atlantic online here.