How can digital revenues for newspapers be increased?

Terry Maguire is more optimistic than Christof Reiss about the revenue that newspapers could get from the net. Especially if they can get their act together. In his presentation at the WAN-IFRA conference in Jaipur, he gave several examples of how disfunctional the Indian newspaper websites are when it comes to helping out a business visitor to Jaipur who might have an extra day to look around the city. He even had a hard time getting the weather forecast and gave another example of a news story about an American citizen who was accused of killing his mother in Rajasthan. He couldn't find a news follow up as to what happened in that case in court, and lamented the lack off attention to the continuing life of a story that newspapers and their web sites can provide. "Keep that story going," he said and suggested that more newspapers could follow the Wikepedia model of constant updatation.

Using the tagline,"First with the best, and the last with the most," Maguire essentially said that although newspapers could be quick and or comprehensive, they are, too often, missing the boat on the internet where they could be bringing together a host of information or be the entry point to stuff that people need to live their lives. Newspaper sites could easily include the connections that people need on a daily basis such as their food needs or even education in a far more dynamic way than they are presently doing.

New beginnings and sorting out

This a fresh initiation of our blogging efforts. The idea is to create a discussion of the content and publishing issues peculiar to Asia and maybe even more provincially to India and South Asia. There are two sides to playing with geography and nationalities especially with cultural issues. On the one hand everyone wants to know about the other (including other regions and cultures) and on the nothing is really very interesting unless it is grounded in detail or particularity.

Ideally we would like to create a texture or backroom for ideas, content, and publishing. The publishing could pertain to books, magazines, newspapers, eBooks, podcasts etc. There will some things of technical interest but hopefully also a good discussion of ideas and content shaping media as well how technology mediates media. This will be a team blog and we will invite people who we think are expert and articulate. If you would like to join the team of bloggers please contact editor@ippgroup.in. You can suggest names of experts that we could invite. Alternately you can join the conversation with your comments.