Launched barely a month ago, the new longform website beststory.ca is nothing if not journalistically ambitious.

According to its founder, Warren Perley, the Montreal-based site is unique as a platform for quality, exclusive stories offered to readers on a pay-as-you-go basis. The site carries no advertising, neither does it follow a news agenda; instead freelance journalists contribute the stories they want to write. After extensive editing, the published stories earn them a royalty of 25 per cent.

The project has been in the making three and a half years, and the founders have invested a significant amount of time in developing the proprietary software that makes possible a magazine-style layout with quality pictures appearing perfectly in tablet form.

Perley says that he and his partners have also made a ‘substantial’ financial investment in the business, although he doesn’t want to reveal how much. But the company did, he volunteers, turn down offers of outside investment in order to maintain editorial independence.

The decision was a reflection of the thinking that has underpinned the project since its conception. Now that the advertising model that has sustained journalism for the past hundred years is broken, argues Perley, the task is to re-educate readers about the need to pay for quality writing.

But at 40 cents – US or Canadian, depending on where the reader is – the fee per story is remarkably low. Readers are offered three packages, the lowest a bundle of three stories, and the highest ten dollars’ worth of articles, including some yet-to-be published.

The corollary of such pricing is that the writers’ earnings will be similarly low.

‘We have to keep the price exceptionally modest, because first we have to get readers used to the idea of paying for intellectual content,’ says Perley.

He adds that, once the readership has built up and the site developed a reputation, prices – and therefore royalties – may go up. In the meantime, the priority is to establish a new paradigm for digital publishing in which people are prepared to pay for quality reading matter.

The beststory model, he agrees, combines old-fashioned publishing values with a determination to make digital content pay. In the meantime, it is clearly not going to generate anyone a living wage any time soon.

‘Will it be a financial success?’ asks Perley. ‘We’ll see. I think it could be. But I only know one way to do business, and that means producing quality.’

Research by Forrester, the US based consultancy and research firm, shows how profoundly the acquisition of an iPad changes users behaviour.  Around a third of those answering the company’s questionnaire said that they read fewer books and used their personal computers less frequently after buying an iPad.  One in four say that the number of newspapers and magazines they read fell, and 20% found themselves using their MP3 players less.

Part of the reason for this appears to be that iPad users have different attitudes and expectations compared to other device users – one survey in the US found that among all computer users just 5% were willing to pay for news, rising to 12% among iPad users.  Murdoch’s The Daily, which is not available in the UK, might not have been a runaway success, but the 120,000 subscribers that they reported last October is a respectable and growing base. And surprisingly, most opt to subscribe for a year at a time, rather than on a rolling daily basis.

In 2011, 56 million people found themselves owners of a new tablet computer.  Forrester predicts that global sales will rise to 375 million by 2016.  Taking into account those that are discarded, broken or lost, this suggests 760 million tablets in use around the world by 2016, a third of them by business and 40% of them in emerging markets.

As Ken Doctor, author of Newsenomics has noted, “surveys show that people seem to like reading news on tablets, with many saying they prefer the tablet experience to that of the newspaper. As tablets become cheaper to buy, it’s merely a matter of time before newspapers flip the switch and stop printing altogether in favour of digital editions”.

At one level I suspect that he is right – not least as I am among those iPad newspaper subscribers.  However, I have been exercising my political-activist muscles this past few weeks by indulging in that bedrock of electioneering – delivering leaflets.  It is a miserable and thankless job.  Apart from the chance to examine unfamiliar neighbourhoods at walking speed, delivering to letterboxes is without relief.

With time on my hands for thinking, though, I could not help but wonder whether there was not a better way to get messages to householders?  Surely email, Facebook and Twitter could replace shoe leather when it comes to identifying potential voters?  Could my leaflets not be simply ‘pushed’ to the putative voter iPads.

I discussed the idea with my local party organiser – a talented electioneer of long experience, who travelled to the US to work on Obama’s first election campaign.  He did not give me much hope that my days of expressing my commitment in shoe leather were coming to a close.  “Social media has some uses among activists, it is good for getting messages out quickly and I have even managed to recruit on Twitter.  For communicating with the electorate itself, however, it is all but useless.  However high the take up, we are nowhere near the point where half the electorate can be reached by electronic means (apart from the telephone).  For so long as that is the case, electoral politics will always start with leaflets and printed election addresses”.

These twin truths appear to place us in a strange an paradoxical position.  On the one hand the rush to new media will quite properly be the main concern for most media companies.  In this respect, tablet formats that retain clear editions and create a clear revenue stream, will be the rightful preoccupation of many.

However, there will be a mass analogue market for many years to come.  Eric Gordon’s optimism about genuinely local papers – expressed here – might sound backward looking.  But I suspect that even now there are a few journalists entering the trade even now, who could see out their careers committing their words to ink –  albeit they are likely to be at the resolutely local end of the game.

The prospect of machines taking over the world, either as our servants or our masters, has long fascinated, appearing in sci-fi novels and books for at least half a century. But while intelligent robots capable of household management may yet be some way off, a new breed of automated authors, revolutionising the world of journalism, has already arrived.

Its strongest representative comes in the form of Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that develops software able to convert large quantities of numerical data into readable prose. The company, whose strapline boasts that it ‘transforms data into stories and insight’, tends to cater for niche markets in finance and sport. It numbers among its thirty clients the business information giant Forbes, for whom it has created a platform able to predict company earnings. Naturally, the customisation of the software requires considerable human input: the staff at Narrative Science input the range of stories and angles along with the preferred house style, but thereafter comes a reliable flow of mass-produced stories tailored to each client’s needs.

As astute commentators have pointed out, the implications of such a development for writers trying to earn a crust by hand and brain are double-edged. The obvious threat to traditional journalists that accompanies the attraction of cheap, plentiful copy for publishers, are cogently expressed by Evgeny Morozov:

‘First of all, it’s much cheaper than paying full-time journalists who tend to get sick and demand respect,’ he writes in Slate. ‘As reported in the New York Times last September, one of Narrative Science’s clients in the construction industry pays less than $10 per 500-word article—and there is no one to fret about the terrible working conditions. And that article takes only a second to compose. Not even Christopher Hitchens could beat that deadline.’

On the other hand, in an article published in the Atlantic earlier this month, Joe Fassler argues that in taking the drudgery out of writing, robot-writers could improve the journalist’s lot, freeing them up to concentrate on more creative, interesting projects. ‘In theory,’ he writes, ‘Narrative Science could change that, working like a team of cheap interns to scour the dross, find the gems, and deliver insight. With bales and bales of mind-numbing government and corporate documents to sort through, Narrative Science could eventually help writers find the needle in the haystack.’

Context, of course, is all: for this to happen, journalists would need to keep their jobs and, it’s important to note, lone freelance operators would not be able to afford the services of the likes of Narrative Science.

But it’s in the less obvious implications of automated authorship that the real threat to the human lies, both commentators suggest. As the trend towards personalisation continues, with information-providers more and more driven to tailor their products to the needs of the individual, the robot-writer will dig ever-deeper into the privacy of the reader, harnessing her tastes for its own, commercially-motivated ends:

‘The real threat comes from our refusal to investigate the social and political consequences of living in a world where reading anonymously becomes a near impossibility,’ writes Morozov. ‘It’s a world that advertisers—along with Google, Facebook, and Amazon—can’t wait to inhabit, but it’s also a world where critical, erudite and unconventional thinking may become harder to nurture and preserve.’

Meanwhile, Fassler, having interviewed the folk at Narrative Science, is a partial convert to automated writing, concludes that fears about the threat to the other end of the creative process – the writer’s – are unfounded:

‘Even our simplest moments are awash in data that machines will never quantify—the way it feels to take a breath, a step, the way the sun cuts through the trees. How, then, could any machine begin to understand the ways we love and hunger and hurt? The net contributions of science and art, history and philosophy, can’t parse the full complexity of a human instant, let alone a life. For as long as this is true, we’ll still have a role in writing.’

The weekly download comes out a couple of days after each Friday’s edition and contains around half of the usual 48-pages of content.  Available in Apple’s Newsstand, it is free, as is the paper’s printed edition.

Lizzie Edmonds is the editor.  “When we upgraded the version of Quark that we use we noticed that it included a lot of iPad tools, so we thought that we would give it a try”, she explains.  The package – Quark 9 – made their work very easy, says Jack Dearlove, the paper’s digital editor, who did much of the work on app.  “The package is very design-focussed.  Putting the iPad edition together is a ‘drag-and-drop’ exercise”.

The current edition, and well as the news and features one might expect, includes a live blog, audio interviews the candidates standing for election to be the next editor of Leeds Student, and impressive galleries of sports photography.

There have been iPad versions of the past five weekly papers, and editions have now been downloaded by around 1,000 users, more than 600 of whom are in the UK.  The paper variant of the title has a print run of 5,000 and is thought to be read by around 15,000 of Leeds university’s 35,000 students and 8,000 staff.

“It is the more well-off students who tend to have iPads, at the moment”, concedes Dearlove.  “You do see the devices around campus, but they are not as common say, as mobile phones”.

The aspiration for the iPad edition was partially to create something that is still about in five or ten years time, and part to make their content accessible to ‘older students and staff’ who are more likely to use Apple tablets.  Edmonds and Dearlove both cite The Times digital edition as an inspiration and would like to include more multi-media content, if they were able.  They are dismissive of publications that offer readers ‘a pdf version’ of their print edition. “They totally miss the potential of the iPad”, says Dearlove.

“I don’t see us abandoning print anytime soon, though”, says Edmonds, who receives a salary to edit the newspaper for a sabbatical year.  “Students still enjoy the paper edition and most are able to come into the Union to pick up a copy.  A time might come, though, when we go entirely digital.”  They also say that the potential to raise advertising revenue from the iPad edition has not yet been realised – but as the paper relies on such revenue, that will be a focus in the future.

Around 40 students work on producing each week’s edition of the paper.  Dearlove and Edmonds alone adapt it for the iPad, a job which takes them six or seven hours a week.  With an ‘educational’ licence for their version of their software, they pay Quark a £25 fee for each iPad edition they create.  A commercial venture would pay around £250 per edition.  It was with this software that they created their ‘app’, which had to be submitted for approval to Apple, who took something over a month to give the students the thumbs up.  Each week, the upload a single file of content to a server, from which it is distributed.

Edmonds, 23, who has now graduated in English and Classics and Dearlove, 21, who is in his third year of a degree in broadcast journalism, would, with more resources, like to see the iPad edition come out simultaneously with the print edition.  Android, Kindle and other platforms are also aspirations, albeit ones dependent on software making the creation of multiple editions less time-consuming. For the time being, both are content to bask in the glow of their memorable first – and hope that it provides a useful springboard for the careers to which they aspire in the professional media.

Review by Alex Klaushofer.

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

As other reviewers have pointed out, Turing’s Cathedral, the book which documents the fulfillment of Alan Turing’s vision of a ‘universal machine’ capable of thought, is a sprawling entity, full of detail and digression that frequently threaten its coherence.

Part history of the building of one of the first computers in Princeton in the 1940s, part biography of the key figures involved, the real interest of the book is perhaps the way it bridges the esoteric mathematical world which spawned digital life and the implications for humankind. In this respect, it presents an educational remedy for the fact that, despite their ubiquity, few lay people have a grasp of the principles underlying computers.

And while the initial sections contain paragraphs whose mathematical content gave your arts-graduate correspondent a strong urge to weep, in the third part of the book, this is done with admirable clarity. Recounting Turing’s attempts to put mathematical logic into the service of everyday tasks, Dyson writes: ‘After Turing, numbers began doing things.’ (p 250) He goes on to explain how an internet search unites deterministic replication with human choices to realise Turing’s conception of an ‘oracle machine’ capable of achieving more than was ever possible previously.

At this point, things get really interesting. ‘Are we searching the search engines, or are search engines searching us?’ asks Dyson. (p 264) He suggests that we are now on the brink of a computer-led future, which, depending on depending on your point of view, is either visionary or dystopic: ‘Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms.Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?’ (p 291)

In his subsequent commentary, Dyson argues that the prospect of computers taking over from humans the tasks we are manifestly so bad at – running countries, etc – could only be welcomed by any sensible person. A visit to the best example of digital utopia so far – Google’s headquarters in California, where everyone was ‘youthful, healthy, happy, and exceptionally well-fed’, impresses him hugely.

If that strikes you as eerily Brave New Worldish, it also occurs to Dyson that the age of computers may have a dark side. What, he asks, if the price of machines that think is people who don’t? Or, to put it in a way that he doesn’t, can computers really live our lives for us?

It’s all more complicated than the simple opposition of utopia/dystopia allows. Thanks to the developments detailed by Dyson, an era of unprecedented change may well be underway, but we’re only just beginning to understand it.

A later blog will examine developments that evoke the possibility of computers replacing the human writer.

Report by Alex Klaushofer.

A growing number of journalists are bucking the downturn in the media by taking up work in the beauty sector, New Model Journalism has learnt.

A sample survey conducted by the site suggests that up to 7.8 per cent of journalists are tapping into the boom in the nail bars. Nail bars are increasingly dominating the high street, growing by 16.5 per cent in 2011, according to a survey by the Local Data Company.

Typically, a media worker will start by doing shifts in their local nail bar, gradually acquiring the full set of skills needed to become nail professionals.

‘Initially, I didn’t know one end of an emery board from another,’ said Andrew Hoffman, a former photographer. ‘But I quickly grasped the importance of filing from the outside in, and of following the right stages when giving a French manicure.’

Some entrepreneurially-minded hacks are going even further and establishing their own nail bars in prominent high street locations.

‘I couldn’t have done it without the help of the NUJ’s Diversification Organiser,’ said one, who wishes to remain anonymous until his re-branding is complete.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some journalists are developing specialisms in the way that, in former times, they would have specialised in areas such as social care or the aviation industry. Fish pedicure bars, which are opening faster than fishmongers, offer one potentially lucrative specialism.

And, with brow and lash bars becoming increasingly fashionable in the States, it looks as if there will be plenty of scope for media-weary hacks to carry on diversifying in future.

A string of positive recent headlines suggest that paywalls will be with us for some time to come, however regressive some consider them.  The New York Times a few days ago announced that it has 455,000 paying online news users – and reduced the amount of free content available on its sites.  News International released figures showing a 20% growth in digital subscribers over the past year and, Gannet announced that in the US it plans to restrict access to 80 of its titles.

The Daily Mirror says that it plans to launch a sub-£10 a month iPad edition.  And, The Australian sold 30,000 digital subscriptions in the first six weeks of erecting a paywall around its content.  In the US, 43% of daily papers now restrict all or some portion of their web content.

None of which has quietened those such as Clay Shirky, who argues that paywalls have a future that is about as promising as that enjoyed by audio cassettes as a means of listening to pre-recorded music.

In the long-run Shirky may just be right – although I am sceptical.  What he seemingly refuses to accept in the here and now is that those who are charging for their content (such as The Times and The Sunday Times – the latter of which I continue to be a regular contributor to, incidentally) are sanguine about the ‘lost millions’ of readers from their pre-paywall metrics.  The Times tally of digital subscribers has almost certainly now passed the daily circulation of The Independent, so can’t be dismissed too easily.  With almost no costs of distribution or printing, and most of its content garnered from the paper’s print editions, it surely represents a sustainable model?

There has also been a significant shift over the past five years to an acceptance that it is necessary to pay for digital content.  Apples iTunes currently has two hundred million credit cards registered – a massive customer base of customers who have accepted the need to pay.   Add to that the four million who are thought to have bought Kindles, and will consequently paid for their content, the case that sufficient consumes will never pay to sustain digital editorial products seems increasingly hard to argue.

Of course that does not mean that everything in the garden is rosy.  Research by the Pew Centre, which has been mentioned on this site before, shows just how hard it is to replicate ‘print-size’ revenue with that from digital.  Today’s trickle may never turn into gush, but that is not to say that it won’t sustain a good few media business in the coming years.

Report by Alex Klaushofer.

Where are all the women? That was the question behind an NUJ fringe meeting at last week’s TUC women’s conference.

A wide range of women gathered from all sections of the media. Shadow media minister Helen Goodman, citing the coalition government’s plans to relieve Ofcom of the duty to promote equal opportunities in TV and radio, concluded: ‘Things are moving backwards. Things are getting worse’.

NUJ activist Jess Hurd gave some depressing examples of the naked sexism that still prevails in newsrooms and the photography business.

New Statesman journo Helen Lewis reported on the rise of online misogyny which leads to women writers getting violent threats and personal, sexualised abuse. A fuller account is here. She argued that such threats and intimidation need to be taken more seriously by employers and police if society is to convey the message that using the internet for such abuse is not acceptable.

Veteran activist Linda Bellos said she still gets responses to her articles whose ‘vitriol, [the] hatred reminds me of the reaction to the formation of the feminist movement.’

But there were reports of positive things being done.

Broadcast magazine editor Lisa Campbell and Lis Howell, head of broadcast journalism at City University, outlined the reasons for their joint Expert Women Campaign, based on research which highlights the gender imbalance in media experts. Radio 4′s Today programme has a ratio of six male experts to every female, for example.

They’ve launched a petition asking for a modest 30% representation of women. (‘We’re not even asking for equality; we’re not that daft,’ said Howell.) Sign here now.

Meanwhile, frustration at not seeing women’s views represented adequately led Alison Clarke to found Women’s Views on the News, which covers under-reported stories such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s endorsement of the view that ‘men are fundamental, women are second-rate’.

Sadly, being entirely run by volunteers, the site suffers from the same absence of a business model that afflicts older feminist sites.

I banged the drum I started thumping on this site in November, and puzzled over the fact that, amid all the experiments currently being conducted in making journalism pay, few pioneers seem to be women. Did the internet, with its adrenal, long-hours culture, I asked, foster and reward a kind of ‘digital machismo’?

Members of the audience helpfully suggested other contributory factors: the techy nature of many of the new business models, and the enduring fact that women carry the larger burden of care in families, and so have less time and energy to be entrepreneurial.

Whatever the case, it seems that there’s plenty for the latest phase of feminism – I forget which wave we’re on – to address in both old and new media.

With exceptions, the picture that emerges is this.  For every $1 that these papers gained from new digital ventures, they lost $7 from traditional print revenue.   Some lost revenue from both sources last year.  As well as crunching a lot of figures, the Pew researchers also interviewed many senior executives –and the picture that emerges from them is as fascinating as it is depressing.

For the moment, the bulk of newspaper revenue comes from traditional print sources.  Having long enjoyed local advertising monopolies, their business operations find it difficult to turn their attention from the large, if declining receipts from this source.  Digital income might be growing, but until it forms a larger proportion of those newspapers’ incomes, it is unlikely to be the focus of their activity.

The risks of waiting for this to happen, however, are considerable – as David Parkin has shown with thebusinessdesk.com.  He was able to attract advertisers from his old employer The Yorkshire Post, with a dramatically cheaper ratecard and the absolutely dependable metrics of click-through.  Pew characterise the ‘heritage’ media as suffering ‘cultural inertia’ when trying to shift the focus of their businesses.

There are glimmers of light in the Pew report.  One of the papers that generated most digital revenue, was selling targeted digital advertising that was customised around customers online behaviour.  The company in question considered this to be its biggest likely growth area – but was the only one of the 38 papers selling this kind of smart advertising.

Another company was buttressing its traditional newspaper business with a consulting business to help its advertisers and other businesses to position themselves in the digital landscape.

The scale of the mountain that newspapers need to climb can be gauged from The Guardian’s sometimes frenetic efforts to dramatically grow its digital revenue – after a decade of trying.  Its latest volley of initiatives, including massive above-the-line brand advertising, Facebook apps, and a version of the newspaper being offered on tv.  These come with the stated ambition of doubling the £45m revenue that the paper currently generates online.  Given that GMG, The Guardian’s holding company, made trading losses of £46.2m in 2009/10, the urgency of this task is obvious.

No doubt more newspapers will survive the next decade that some naysayers allow for.  I suspect that the ones that are most likely to endure will be those that transform their businesses so completely that they are scarcely recognisable to those who know them in their current forms.

Interview by Alex Klaushofer.

Marc Herman couldn’t have been more surprised by the success of his Kindle Single The Shores of Tripoli.

‘The interest in the topic completely shocks me,’ he says. ‘I went over there to talk about Libya, and ended up being seen as something of an expert in electronic publishing.’

Within weeks, the book was in the top 300 of Amazon’s rankings, and Herman was being sought after as a speaker – not about inside story of Libya – but about the nuts and bolts of writing a short, journalistic book and selling it direct to readers via Amazon.

The deal, which was arranged with by his agent, gets Herman a royalty of 70% on a publication priced at $1.99.

‘That’s a fair price,’ he says. ‘I don’t expect someone to spend more for one story than an entire magazine. You can sell 99c bagels or entrees at $30. My tendency is to sell bagels.’

The ‘bagel approach’, as we might now call it, has obvious attractions for a time-poor but world-curious reader with only a couple of hours to spend reading about a conflict in a far-off country.

For the journalist, Herman thinks he has discovered the makings of a model that – while not being able to fund an entire living – forms a viable element of a portfolio of projects covering foreign stories. Three months after publication, the book has earned out its research costs and, with new sales every day, is now paying its writer a retrospective wage.

At the same time, the simplicity of the new publishing model is refreshing after the rigours of traditional publishing: ‘We didn’t have to hack our way through New York or London,’ says Herman. ‘A lot of the appeal is that it’s an alternative publishing culture you can try.’

Yet, while journalists are desperately seeking new ways of funding their reporting, and the publishing world is conducting a lively conversation about the implications of going digital, Herman doesn’t see much dialogue between the two: ‘It feels a bit like the right and the left hand are not communicating with each other.’

So could his success herald a new breed of journalists working entirely independently, as growing numbers of authors are now doing?

Herman doesn’t see much future in a journalist going it entirely alone. ‘I’m not sure it’s necessarily going to produce good journalism, because you can’t do everything at the same time,’ he says. ‘I think it’s more likely that small groups get together to work in teams – that’s really exciting.’

From his base in Barcelona, he is already working with another two other journalists on a documentary project looking at the youth unemployment in Spain, which is now approaching 50%. In line with the trend towards ‘enhanced books’, the project will be multi-media, offering readers pictures and a video as part of the package.

He anticipates that, in time, the group will become a kind of coop along the lines of the small agencies formed by photographers when they realised they were better working together rather than (competitively) alone.

And, as the models of digital publishing get more established, creators will need to protect their interests in the face of giants such as Amazon, he adds.

In the meantime, it’s clear that these pioneering days carry all the excitements and disappointments of experiments in early air travel:

‘I feel like I’m in the films of all those people who were trying to invent aeroplanes before the Wright brothers, and struggled to get them off the ground. I’m one of those guys.’