News

The Reynolds Journalism Institute will receive $15 million from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the foundation president said Friday.

Technologically progressive MU students and faculty from different departments have been playing nicely together. And for that they’ve been rewarded — or, rather, awarded — with a 2009 Campus Technology Innovators Award in information-technology funding from the national magazine Campus Technology.

DID YOU KNOW that 80 percent of American newspapers have a circulation of 15,000 or less?
Did you know that there are about 8,000 community newspapers in America that fit that description?

Are there economics to support a profitable newspaper edition on e-readers and tablets?

When taunters shriek that the American press deserves to go under for ignoring such obvious business principles, my visceral response has always been: surely it's not so simple. But researcher Esther Thorson has me wondering if maybe it is. When times were good, she says, the press barons slashed their editorial budgets and turned seed corn into corn syrup. And today, when times are terrible, they've doubled down on the same "myopic" strategy. Her research would tell them it's a bad idea, but "they don't know research, they've never supported research." Instead of studying data, "they throw things against the wall and see what happens."

In May 2008, Michael McKean, director of the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and chair of the University of Missouri’s Information Technology Committee, and his colleagues created a new Interdisciplinary Innovation Fund that leverages MU’s existing student technology fees, along with supplementary sources such as departmental contributions and/or corporate partnerships, to foster innovative technology developments and entrepreneurship.

Four University of Missouri students showcased their mobile phone application recently at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The students on Team NearBuy demonstrated a new way to deliver classified advertising as Apple Inc. unveiled a new version of its iPhone.

The University of Missouri-Columbia, in an annual survey for community papers, found high brand loyalty, a preference for the print product, and less Internet competition than at big city papers. The most recent study looked at weekly community papers located in markets of 25,000 or less.52

Think of it as updated Geritol, a tonic for an industry with tired blood.

Its founders call it Circulate, and it's the latest "solution" to address the woes of newspapers. It aims to get the blood flowing -- online -- by re-directing readers to more like content, newspaper content, by and large. If you haven't heard much about it yet, it might be because we're experiencing some early summer media fatigue. In addition, we've lately heard an alphabet's soup of "paid content" solutions. Much publicized was the NAA Chicago fly-in for publishers. There, Journalism Online, Attributor and ViewPass all participated in a Q and A, the better to keep anti-trust concerns away. Since then, the principals of each of those companies have been kept busy, pitching individual publishers; call it Newspaper Roadshow.

A team of veteran journalists and news technologists have joined forces to create a technology that they hope will enhance the Web browsing experience while creating a new revenue stream for content producers. Called Circulate, the tool has elements of social networking, intelligent filtering and subscription management. It basically learns from the user’s online behavior and delivers recommendations for content the user might like. People can easily share information with each other and Circulate will deliver notice of new information as it becomes available.

During the past two semesters I have brought together International advertising leaders with professors and students at the Missouri School of Journalism to study and promote the role of Advertising Ethics. My working proposition is that the proactive consideration of ethics in our ad campaigns will enhance consumer trust and brand loyalty, especially in this time of unprecedented consumer control over the commercial information they choose to receive.

It has been both an honor and a pleasure to have both regulated and represented the advertising industry during my professional career as a government lawyer and then advertising trade association CEO. I have come to understand the importance of advertising to the economy and to consumer purchase decisions. And, I have come to believe that enhanced advertising ethics is essential to building consumer trust and brand loyalty in the new global and digital economy.

CircLabs connects people with digital news, information and entertainment relevant to their lives and their communities.

Our first product, Circulate™, is aimed squarely at providing those connections. Circulate brings content you want without the effort or frustration of searching for it.

Circulate is available to you as a Web user at all times. It finds personalized content you want, based on your interests. It makes it easy for you to share news, video, blogs and other content with friends.

With the crisis of shrinking advertising revenues and dwindling profits that is facing our major newspapers, innovative new revenue ideas are emerging that promise to reinvent journalism in the age of the internet. One such concept was announced this week by Bill Densmore, director/editor of The Media Giraffe Project.

I mentioned about a new service called Circulate that promises to help people find more relevant news and information while helping the companies that produce that information find more ways to pay for it.

Paying for professional journalism is a question keeping news executives up at night during this recession, and I wanted to find out more about how the service hopes to answer that question.

Martin Langeveld, Jeff Vander Clute, Joe Bergeron, and Bill Densmore unveil CircLabs Inc., a concept to help sustain journalism. They will be exploring paid-content models for newspaper Web sites. Written details are here or you might want to hear Densmore in a Nieman Journalism Lab interview.

Stealth startup CircLabs launched in late May with the goal of “sustaining” the business of journalism by bundling content, social features and ads, while giving readers a single platform for subscriptions and micro-payments to multiple publications. Now, EVP Martin Langeveld offers some details on how the company plans to do it: with a browser add-on that pulls in users’ surfing data—along with any other info they choose to feed it—then offers content and advertising recommendations accordingly.

CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks your browsing patterns and information you give it to recommend content you might like. CircLabs promises publishers a variety of potential revenue streams off that model, including the ability to use Circulate as a pay wall or a micropayments engine.

CircLabs is currently developing software known as Circulate that will track its users' viewing habits and deliver news and ads tailored specifically for the user. The software monitors and transmits data back to the news service automatically allowing the news service to send customized news and advertisements.

You know timing really is everything. Just the other day, I explained the semantic web. At the time, I didn’t realize how many projects were already near completion to help those predictions about more intelligent computers to come true. Well, CIRCULATE is the product CircLabs of three entrepreneurs who want to take us into the POST-search world. The project is supported by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia.