Since the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been about finding the best and most effective system for production and distribution of content. Gutenberg simplified the work but the digital revolution has opened a world of new possibilities.

In my eyes, too many of our colleagues listen too much to the companies that are trying to sell a product based on old ideas, instead of using some energy to figure out what they really need.

If you’re planning to start a war, it would probably be smart to invest in an aircraft carrier. But if you’re only interested in checking out the local waters or doing a spot of fishing, you’d be better off with a small speedboat or a canoe.

If you are a TV-station, a radio station or a newspaper with a tight budget, I would go for the speedboat. It is fast when needed, easy to manoeuvre and has small operating costs.

Go open source – unless you’re building the Eiffel Tower

I have worked with online media for about 15 years and haven’t seen many products that I really like. Very few of the CMS companies have shown a real interest in the needs of news organisations. I have seen a lot of great engineering, but we’re not looking to build another Eiffel Tower. We just need a publishing system that reporters can easily learn to operate and which gives us the ability to publish quickly to a (hopefully) fast-growing audience on smart phones and computers.  If it also is scalable and open to modern thinking, even better.

As a grumpy old man  I’m not even a big fan of WordPress, but I love the idea of WordPress being open source and it’s the first place to look. Second in line is Drupal, which is preferred in some markets – like Russia – because it is easier to find programmers.  Though there are some competitors emerging in the open source world, for now in most markets it will be wise to go for WordPress.

When I strongly recommend open source, it is – among many other things – about money. If you can save costs on technical investment and instead hire one or two people with technical skills to work with you in the newsroom, you’ve got a much better chance of seeing the kind of development you’re dreaming of.

Another good reason for choosing open source is that thousands of people are working for you; when they develop plugins for Drupal or WordPress, you can also use them.

A last point: choosing open source will also save you a lot of time. Instead of spending time on negotiating with a company that is trying to sell you more than you need, you can just start working.

The commercial option

If you insist on something more specialised for news production and with a higher possibility of finding help or support at all times of the day, there are companies that can deliver decent products. The stand-out reason for choosing a commercial CMS is guaranteed support.  However, while that might feel good, it can be expensive and rarely necessary.

The worst result of choosing a commercial CMS is that you will be lagging behind in development. Because you spend so much money to buy it, you probably won’t be able to afford to hire technically skilled employees, which means you will be stuck with a system that normally is not very flexible or open to new ideas.

It is when we can go outside the borders of a CMS that we can create the journalism of the future though, to be realistic, at least 90 per cent of our content will for years to come be produced and published inside the safe confines of a CMS.

Don’t build your own

The only thing you never should do is build it on your own. Some clever developers might explain that they can build something better than the CMS’s that are already out there. They might be right, but you don’t have the time and money for that. And you don’t want a system that is built so only one person knows how it really works, and only one person can maintain it.

What I’m looking for is more or less a blank piece of paper the reporters can fill with words, images and hopefully something that shows you are a website, not a newspaper or a TV station. If you do that wisely, including smart tagging your content, and are able to present the content on a nice front page or gain traffic through social media, you are well on your way.

It’s as simple as that. Later, if you can see that it works, that traffic is growing and ad sales or a paywall are creating good revenue, you can consider going to the next level and invest a little more in your software and hardware.

Change comes slowly to the print business

I have worked  30 years in the newspaper business. It is surprising how slowly it has developed, even if the technical evolution or revolution made many changes possible years ago.

It is a bit depressing to see that newspaper companies with a serious decline  in circulation and a nicely growing online business still spend more resources on discussing the situation of the declining  part of the industry, rather than discussing what to do with the growing part.

Luckily, in some areas of the world we can see growing newspaper circulation, but even there it looks like the future will be digital.  As they say, the future is already here, and digital means probably mobile.

From mobile, for mobile

Start thinking how you can best produce content for the mobile platform. Figure out how you can publish text, photos and video from mobile for mobile, instead of thinking how you can forward the content from today’s paper – that was written yesterday – to digital platforms.

Soon we will all be working in digital because that’s where the biggest growth will be. Even if the old media platforms are still providing a better business now, it looks like we will see digital growth for many years to come and we need to focus our efforts on the digital arena to see how we can build a viable business for the future.

And maybe we might even strengthen today’s core business and core products by spending more energy on digital development.

But there is no reason to over-invest in technical solutions. It is better to spend money on programmers and reporters, instead of paying for a product you only use a part of.

I had the pleasure to meet a group of Arabic reporters in Egypt a few years ago. I discussed web-TV with brave women, some with veils and some in smart European clothing,  and men, both in jellabiya and with a casual Western look. After a great day of journalistic work, some wanted advice on what camera they should buy, which editing system they should choose and which videoplayer to invest  in for their website.

I believe that’s the wrong place to start. You can make decent quality video with an old cell phone and fantastic video with a new smartphone without a lot of investment. You can edit it with freeware and you can publish it with YouTube and embed it on your site. Some of the reporters looked a little bit disappointed with my answer, but there is no point in investing heavily until you can see that there is growing interest. If you see that your users are enjoying it, you can move to the next level. Maybe buy a microphone and FinalCut or Adobe Premiere for the editing.

I mostly use an Android smartphone with a standard built-in video camera, but I have also seen impressive videos filmed and edited on an iPhone, published on YouTube and then embedded in articles.

This will unfortunately not give you the possibility of selling your own pre-rolls on the video, but you can move to that when you can see that your audience likes what you’re doing.

So, the same thinking applies to video or web-TV as to a CMS. Start simple and move forward to more complicated and more expensive products only when you feel the time – and money – is right.

What about the newspaper?

Many newspaper guys rolls their eyes when I complain about the old fashioned newspaper CMS. I get a lecture on the importance of stability, history, importance of archive systems and the danger of simplifying too much.

Well, it’s really just about writing and editing articles, storing them in a secure place and placing the articles and pictures on templated or designed pages so they can be printed, distributed and hopefully sold and read.

If you can use your online CMS  for all text-based content production, it should be possible to export it to a page-making system, maybe a cheaper variation of Adobe InDesign.

If we look a few years ahead, I’m pretty sure this will be the way we will all work. But then we will need old guys like me in media houses to forget about how things used to be and try to imagine how it might be in the future.

One good test is to ask yourself what you would do if you were starting in the news business tomorrow. That answer will probably be pretty far from how you are organised and how your technical set-up looks today.

Could your organization use Google docs for content production and storage, instead of something that comes with a multimillion cost? I know some have tried it and I know it worked out on some smaller projects. One of the best examples is Bangor News in Maine, USA. A very small Norwegian newspaper is now trying to copy the use of Google docs for writing, WordPress for publishing online and InDesign for the paper production.

Here is one early article on the project in Bangor News  and a search for Bangor, WordPress and Google docs will give you more inspiration and information, such as this article from the developer who helped create the system.

 In summary:

• Don’t ask the multimillion dollar CMS industry what they would like to sell you.
• Ask yourselves what you need and try to find cheap or free products that meet your requirements.
• Spend the money you save on programmers and reporters – and ad sales!
• Start simple and move on if you can see your traffic and business growing.
• Forget what is nice to have until you need to have it.

Remember that relevant content, published at the right moment and presented in a way that gets people interested is much more important than the technical solution. But remember that the content has no value if your site is unstable, so don’t take it too easy.

And you should still try to figure out how you would organize your business and what kind of hardware and software you would like to have if you were starting your media company tomorrow.

You can’t change from reality to your dream in a week, but you will be better off if you start moving in that direction.

No related posts.

Go to almost any online journalism conference and you’ll hear CMS war stories. Several years ago, Martin Stabe, an interactive producer at the Financial Times, wrote about some of these CMS horror stories, saying:

Gripes about the clunkiness of content management systems are almost universal among online journalists. At one conference I attended a few months ago, several editors compared how long it took to post just one simple story to their websites. One had counted 62 clicks to complete this most basic publishing process.

It’s important that your CMS is flexible both for technical staff and editorial staff – and you’ll definitely want to make sure that it doesn’t take 62 clicks of the mouse just to publish content online.

Here are some tips of what to do and what to avoid collected from news organisations that have lived through it.

Journalists have to be involved in the process

A CMS is a critical element to your future digital success. Dave Lee, a technology reporter for the BBC, looked at the issues surrounding CMS development a few years ago, and he wrote:

A bad CMS hurts. It means people cut corners. It means more time is given to fart-arsing about with HTML code than writing good editorial. It means time that should be spent refining headlines, opening pars and article structure is instead spent wrestling with ‘quirks’ that slowly sap away at a reporter’s motivation to do the job right.

When you’re doing any technical project, one key element is requirements’ gathering. For a CMS, you’ll have to think about what you want to deliver to your audiences and how you will deliver it. One key element in that process is how your journalists and editors will use the system.

It might seem odd to journalists and editors to want to be involved in developing the digital production method because, in the past, journalism and the production process were largely separate. Journalists wrote stories and handed them off to sub-editors and page designers. At broadcasters, the production system was focused on writing scripts and producing radio and TV stories.

However, in digital news production, journalism and production processes become more tightly integrated, and the workflow and process has to work for journalists and other editorial staff. This is true regardless of what stage you are at in the digital transition. In the early phase of the digital transition, newsrooms often have a single journalist transferring text from print stories or broadcast scripts into an online CMS. With a single journalist, you want the process to be as efficient as possible.

As your digital business grows, the process gets more integrated. Instead of a single journalist, many newsrooms eventually move to a system in which journalists directly write their stories for digital and print or broadcast platforms. Making sure that journalists are able to do their jobs most efficiently is crucial.

The industry is full of horror stories of journalists being left out of the process.

Stabe flagged up a fascinating collection of academic research, Making News Online, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo.

Domingo researched four online newsrooms in Catalonia in Spain. Martin highlighted the struggles journalists had with their CMS.

Reporters usually did not have the chance to participate in technological decisions and one of the strongest internal social conflicts in the newsrooms arose because of the frustrations with the technical features of the tools they used … CMS design did not always fit the needs of journalists, and discouraged them from routines that would have sufficed in other material conditions.

In other cases, they complained that technical routines were too cumbersome and time consuming, working against their wish for immediacy. This led to a relationship of distrust between the journalists and the CMS staff.

And Martin fears that this is feeding resistance from print staff to embracing digital media. He wrote:

I suspect badly-designed CMS backends engender resistance to the online medium among print journalists by leading them to assume that all this digital stuff must be frightfully complicated.

The key thing is to make sure that your CMS and the tools that your editors and journalists use on a daily basis meet their needs. To do that, editorial staff have to be involved.

Journalists must engage with the process

However, bad CMSs are often not a simple issue of journalists being left out of the process. Senior management need to make sure that journalists and technical staff or contractors work together effectively. This may take some effort, and to be honest, very few editorial organisations work effectively across editorial and technical departments. The handful that do have achieved this over years of effort.

Dave Lee looked at the frustrations and  problems surrounding CMSs, and he flagged up a number of issues including communication and collaboration, or lack thereof. Lee quotes a developer, John, who said they had invited the more than 200 users of their CMS to test new features. John said:

Almost nobody bothered – and when we thought it’s fine (because of no requests to fix something) and turned the old version off there was this shitstorm about some minor things not working properly (which could have been fixed in couple of days).

Small improvements could make journalists’ life much easier but if they don’t want to participate they shouldn’t expect much either.

This is a key management issue in the digital transition, and senior management need to make sure that editorial and technical staff communicate effectively and work together well. This is not something that happens without close attention and effort on the part of management, editorial and technical staff.

CMS solutions are increasingly modular

Content-management systems do not need to do everything, and often if you try to make them do too much, that is when the project becomes a mess including going over budget, not working as well as you’d like and leading to a complicated process that journalists hate. At the most basic level, web services can add services without having to modify your core CMS, such as social media curation service Storify or liveblogging tool Scribblelive.

However other services can also deliver key elements of your digital content strategy such as search. Newscoop is an open-source CMS focused on news organisations, and they have added support for the Solr open-source search. [Sourcefabric was spun out of the Centre for Advanced Media - Prague, a project of the Media Development Investment Fund. Knowledge Bridge is a project of MDIF.] The Solr search platform is used by major organisations including Nasa, the White House and The Guardian. Search is a key element in helping your audience find the content they want, and by integrating proven technology such as Solr, Newscoop is supporting organisations like Georgian independent news organisation Netgazeti to deliver a better search experience that will grow as Netgazeti grows, according to Sourcefabric’s Adam Thomas. [Netgazeti is one of the online components of Georgian newspaper Batumelebi, an MDIF client.]

Adopt existing systems rather create new ones

When news organisations look at their requirements for a CMS, frequently they come to believe that their requirements are so unique that they need a bespoke system. This is rarely a good solution especially for small, independent news organisations with small technical development budgets. More news organisations are taking existing systems and adapting them to their needs.

The School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Computer Science Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, created NiKA by extending the Drupal open-source CMS to make it easier for journalists to publish their own material as well as allowing members of the public to easily send in eyewitness information and tips via SMS and IM.

Harry Dugmore, a professor at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, told PBS MediaShift:

NiKa sorts SMSs and incorporates them directly into the newspaper’s system, automating what had previously been a manual process. The SMS pages let local citizens share their opinions, and see their words in print.

However, even relying on an existing CMS didn’t eliminate all of the technical complexity of the project. In another article about the NiKA project on PBS MediaShift, Dugmore said, “ the software, although open source and free, does need good tech skills to install.” And Michael Salzwedel, the online editor of the NiKA media partner the Grocott Mail, said that the goal was to simplify the requirements in setting up the system so that publishers could easily publish to print, the web and mobile.

This kind of integration is a difficult task, but as more news organisations bring together their digital and print or broadcast workflow, there will be new lessons both about the technology, workflow and organisation that will help you.

What are the lessons you have learned as you chose your CMS to publish to the web and mobile? What worked? What didn’t? What will you do differently the next time you have to change your CMS? Let us know in the comments.

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To put it simply, a good CMS will help you more easily and efficiently publish and manage text, images and audio-visual content to your website. Modern CMSs also make it easier to update and modify the design of your site to keep it fresh, and many CMSs also have packages to manage ads and to make sure that your site looks good and loads quickly, regardless of whether your audience is viewing the site on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone.

Here are the top ten reasons why a news organisation should use a web CMS:

1. A modern CMS allows journalists to focus on content instead of learning code. Writing a story will be instantly familiar to any journalist who has used a word processing programme such as Microsoft Word, and with a little training, adding images and even videos is not difficult.
2. You don’t have to go to an expensive web developer every time you want to make a minor change to your site. With a good CMS, most updates can be handled by editorial, not technical staff, which means you own your digital presence.
3. CMSs have or can be adapted to have a workflow that mirrors how newsrooms work. This will make it easier to fit the CMS into your current workflow. Content management systems also have different classes of users or roles so that you can more easily manage who has the ability to technically administer the site and you can allow external contributors or freelance staff to submit content for your review without being able to publish live to your site.
4. Most modern CMSs use flexible design elements that can be easily changed. They use style sheets, meaning that a handful of files control the overall design of the site. You can change fonts, spacing and other navigation simply by making changes to these few files rather than having to update the thousands of articles you have already created. Building on style sheets, design themes allow you to quickly change the overall look of your site with just a few clicks of a mouse
5. For open-source CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, if it doesn’t have a feature you require, they often have an extension or plug-in that will deliver the feature or function you want.
6.  A good CMS will integrate well with ad networks and ad management platforms. For open-source platforms such as WordPress, they often support plug-ins from major web and mobile ad networks
7. With the rise of mobile, popular CMSs often make having a mobile website as simple as installing a plug-in or using an appropriate design theme. For open-source CMSs, there are often mobile-ready themes that you can adapt
8. A good CMS can easily be integrated with social media and other external web services, allowing you to take full advantage of fast-changing social media platforms
9. A commercial or open-source CMS can be less expensive in the long run. You shouldn’t require a full-time developer to maintain your site
10. It will free up any development staff you do have to do editorially focused work that will differentiate you from your competitors.

When you’re choosing a CMS, you will want your CMS to empower, rather than frustrate, you and your staff. No CMS is perfect or infinitely flexible, and you will have to prioritise your requirements when choosing one. However, a smartly chosen modern CMS will save you time and money and deliver a platform that will help you keep pace with digital developments in your market.

Related posts:

1. Multi-platform projects: Focused experiments to get the best out of all platforms
2. Designing websites for mobile devices: Responsive design or mobile-specific?
3. How to harness audience data to drive better editorial and business performance

In a statement, Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media was transparent about the goal of the RM60 m (nearly $20 m) tie-up:

Digital marketing is the future; social media marketing is the apex of this future and is the fastest growing media category on the planet.

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave.

It is not just a general new media trend that Catcha is looking to ride but rather the group hopes to take advantage of Malaysians’ social media obsession. Says.com is a social news aggregator that crowdsources trending news items from social media users. It encourages these social media leaders to curate and share news items by paying them when they share advertiser-sponsored content. It’s a low-cost editorial model that differs greatly from traditional news sites, but it is a model that has attracted major global brands including Nike, Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

“Says.com is designed to put advertiser content at the centre of social attention, positioning brands to capture the new generation of consumers,” site co-founder and CEO Khailee Ng told Digital News Asia. Says operates country-specific sites, and Ng says the site is looking to expand to the Philippines, Singapore and India, according to the Next Web. Ng added that the two companies saw a number of opportunities for the “future of advertising” in combining Says.com’s model of social media distribution and Catcha Media’s content.

Catcha Media is building what it hopes will be one of the most profitable new media businesses across Southeast Asia, and Grove said that the Catcha Media will be considering an initial public offering in the next 12 months. It operates Microsoft’s online presence in Malaysia, including the MSN portal and Windows Live site. The group also has 15 national magazines, an Asian auto classifieds business and a luxury goods e-commerce site, Hauteavenue.com. The merger of content, classifieds and e-commerce mirrors the international strategies of other media groups such as Scandinavia’s Schibsted and South Africa’s Naspers.

The fight for advertising

While Says.com doesn’t look like or work like a traditional news website, its low-cost editorial model smartly leverages the intense social media activity in South and Southeast Asia.

One of the most damaging mistakes that news groups in developed digital markets have made was to underestimate the impact of non-traditional news sites like Says.com on the business of journalism. Too many editors, journalists and ad teams didn’t realise the competitive threat these sites posed, either because they defined their competitors too narrowly, seeing only other newspapers or broadcasters as competition, or because they sneered at what they saw as low quality content.

With this merger, it should be clear that Catcha and Says.com mean business, and they already count lucrative international advertisers as customers. In the digital era, anyone who competes for digital advertising is your competitor, and as publishers, media executives and sales team leaders, you need to be able to compete not just against your traditional competitors but also this new breed of business.

To respond to this threat:

• Think of how you can fight for the attention of social media users. Develop strategies to reflect, capture and retain the attention of social media users in your audience.
• Don’t narrowly define your competition for attention and advertising too narrowly as digital grows. Newspapers and magazines are producing more audio and video that could compete with broadcasters, and any ad-supported site is a competitor for digital ad revenue.
• Be creative with your advertising products and strategy. The business and advertising model of Says.com isn’t complicated, but it has obviously been attractive to advertisers. How can you make your advertising products more social?
• Know your audience, which in digital means investing in market research and analytics. It will make for stronger journalism and a stronger proposition for advertisers.

It’s also important in the early stages of the digital transition in your market to be proactive in developing not just your digital editorial but also your digital business. This will put you on a better footing to compete with national and international players when they enter your market.

Related posts:

1. Tempo Media’s Harymurti: the digital transition is all about the timing
2. Launching, evolving and sustaining your digital media product
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The study revealed that “internet users (in the country) are mainly from the ‘working middle class’, as opposed to upper (as defined by living standards measures)”, Joanna Wright wrote in the Media Online. Internet penetration is still low in the country, with upper estimates standing at 35.2 percent, according to the Stats SA 2011 Census. The Census also looked at where South Africans had access, either at home, at work, via mobile phone or some other location. It is important to note that twice as many South Africans had access via mobile phones, 16.3 percent, than had access at home.

However, while internet penetration might be low, this new study by online research firm Columinate, which was commissioned by the Digital Media and Marketing Association in South Africa, shows that use is expanding beyond higher income levels.

The Columinate study also challenged another assumption about the digital market in South Africa, that it is predominantly young. The study found that 11 percent of users were over 50 years old, and most, 60 percent, were between 25 and 49 years old.

“(It’s) not necessarily a youth market. You are accessing South Africans who work, who have disposable income,” said Elna Smit of Columinate, the online research group responsible for the study.

And internet users in South Africa are well educated. The research found that 13 percent of internet users in the country have a degree, while only one percent of the total population has a higher education degree.

Publishers need to leverage data to woo advertisers

Research like this is key to helping you win over advertisers who might be sceptical about the reach of digital advertising as your market transitions to digital media.

“Marketers often complain that digital won’t give them the mass market, the bulk of South Africans,” Smit told Media Online, but added that advertisers need to look beyond simple reach. “You should be asking: What percentage of the people who spend on your brand are you reaching?” Smit said.

To win over advertisers, you need the data to answer this question. In the early days of the digital transition, audiences might appear small when compared to traditional media, but if you have effective audience measurement tools, then you can show how targeting can deliver a more relevant message to a more receptive audience.

You can begin your audience measurement work by investing in services such as ComScore, and you can also monitor your social media metrics using Facebook’s built in tools or other social media metrics tools such as Chartbeat. Data is becoming even more important to ad sales as even real-time bidding or programmatic buying reaches larger emerging markets such as Russia and Malaysia.

Even as you grow your audience, you will still need to make sure that you speak not just of the size of your audience but the income, age and geographic distribution of your audience. News publishers and broadcasters who invest in knowing their audience will find it easier to win over advertisers and compete more effectively against targeted advertising from search engines and social networks.

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Russia has seen some of the fastest growth in digital advertising in recent years. Even though the torrid rate of growth proved to be unsustainable last year, digital advertising is capturing more advertising revenue, and the opportunity has attracted international investment in the classified advertising market.

News organisations, both print and broadcast, will need to monitor these fast-moving developments to develop an effective strategy to compete for digital advertising revenue with a range of new competitors.

Digital growth outpaces other media

Advertising continued to grow across most media in Russia in 2012, but while the rate of digital growth slowed, its impressive 35 percent rise year-on-year outpaced other media, according to the Russian Association of Communication Agencies.

Both print and television advertising continued to grow in 2012, but their respective growth rates of 2 and 9 percent was dwarfed by the growth in internet advertising, according to a report in East-West Digital News.

Internet display advertising only grew 17 percent. The real growth in digital advertising was driven by contextual advertising, which includes search advertising. It grew an impressive 45 percent.

In three to four years, it is predicted that digital advertising will capture a third of the advertising spend in Russia, according to a report in Vedomosti.ru. The rise of digital advertising comes at a cost for other forms of advertising. It is predicted that television’s share of advertising will decline from 48 percent to 46.4 percent this year, and print advertising will decline from 13.9 percent to 12.6 percent, according to the Vedomosti report.

Print advertising growth declined from 6 percent in 2011 to only 2 percent, but much of the coverage of the report focused on how internet advertising was cutting into television revenue.

Stanislav Povolotsky, RBC media holding’s commercial director, said that advertisers that had traditionally used television to reach consumers were now shifting to internet advertising, according to East-West Digital News.

In a widely reported sign of the shift from television to the internet, search engine Yandex almost overtook state-owned TV station Channel One in advertising revenue. In 2012, Yandex brought in 28.1 bn rubles, while Channel One earned 28.2 bn in advertising earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal. Of course, Yandex earns one out of every two rubles spent on online advertising in Russia, according to Immanuel Simonsen.

New advertising technologies such as real-time bidding are helping to fuel internet advertising growth in Russia, according to Michael Voschinsky, the managing director of Aegis Media.

Rise in digital ads attracts investment

With Russia offering such promising growth opportunities in terms of digital advertising, the market is attracting foreign investment.

In March, South African media house Naspers, struck a $570m deal to merge two Russian classified sites it owns, Slando.ru and OLX.ru, with their larger competitor, Avito.ru.

According to the Financial Times, the deal would create the fifth most popular website in Russia, with more than 100m page views per day, and the third largest classified advertising site in the world.

The move was seen as the beginning of consolidation in Russia’s online classified market, according to Ventures Africa.

Russia continues to experience rapid internet growth, with the number of internet users growing by a third every year, and the market is developing very rapidly. News organisations, especially print groups, will need to develop strategies to compete for internet advertising revenue or they may face stagnating revenues at best.

News groups will need to invest in audience intelligence in order to deliver better targeted advertising to compete with the contextual offerings of Yandex and the major social networks. Yandex poses a particular challenge to regional and local media as many of its advertisers are small and medium businesses rather than large national or international advertisers, and consolidation in online classified companies will put pressure on local media by chipping away at this lucrative source of revenue.

While search engines and online classified companies might not seem like competitors to news organisations, they will compete head-on with news groups for internet advertising revenue. News groups will need to develop strategies to face these new and growing sources of competition.

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Major news organisations including Reuters, Al Jazeera, CBS, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press have all made headlines in the past year after hackers took over their Twitter accounts. The attacks are always embarrassing and can negatively impact the reputation of your news organisation, but the attacks can also cause panic and real damage, as we saw recently.

The fake tweet posted to the AP Twitter account said:

Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.

Literally, within a minute after the fake tweet was posted, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 150 points. Bloomberg reported that the attack wiped out $136 bn of market value from the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. Within three minutes of the tweet being posted, AP journalists were posting on their own accounts that the tweet was a hoax and that the news organisation had been hacked.

While major international English and Arabic news organisations have been targets, the same tactics are being used by politically motivated hackers everywhere. In the lead up to the general election in Malaysia, the Twitter accounts of the independent news website Malaysiakini were hacked and taken control of by a group calling itself Sarkas-Siber. (For transparency, Media Development Investment Fund, which publishes Knowledge Bridge, has provided debt and equity financing and strategic advice to Malaysiakini.)

Twitter warned news organistions that the attacks will continue, and that journalists and news groups will “continue to be high value targets to hackers”. The microblogging platform is working on tightening security on its platform, but as it does, it offered up a number of recommendations for news groups to keep their accounts secure.

Victims of ‘spear phishing’

Like most hacks, most of these attacks against the BBC, The Guardian and the Associated Press weren’t technically sophisticated. Contrary to the movie stereotype of elite hackers defeating advanced computer security, the attacks didn’t rely on technical wizardry but rather on social engineering, which is just a fancy computer security term for scamming users out of username and password information. All three news organisations were targeted and successfully compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses western news organisations of spreading “lies and slander about Syria“.

All three news organisations say that they were the target of phishing attacks. Most people know phishing from the suspicious emails that appear from scammers trying to trick you out of your credit card and bank details. These attacks, often known as spear phishing due to their targeted nature, are much more targeted, more personalised and much harder to spot as frauds than the standard email fraud schemes. James Ball, the data editor at the Guardian, wrote on Twitter:

The guys doing the Guardian phishing attack I mentioned yesterday (it’s SEA) are really very good: sustained, changing, mails today.

He mentioned earlier that the emails were specifically targeting Guardian journalists. As one of the commenters says on a Naked Security blog post discussing the attack, “spoofing” an email – faking the sender’s email address – is trivial for most hackers. Both the AP and the BBC reported phishing attacks around the time that their Twitter accounts were compromised. According to the USA Today newspaper, the BBC warned staff about the suspicious emails:

The BBC’s email to staff said the “phishing” emails contained what appeared to be links to The Guardian newspaper or Human Rights Watch online and bring users to a fake webmail portal.

Twitter scrambles to respond

Twitter made a number of recommendations to news organisations to help them protect themselves. Some of the the tips are sensible online security such as changing passwords on a regular basis and having strong passwords. Twitter suggested that the passwords should be 20 characters long and a mix of characters and numbers or random words. Most security experts advise against using words that appear the dictionary, although a mix of random words would be more difficult to crack.

Other advice that Twitter offered news groups is impractical. They suggested that news organisations should have a dedicated computer to post to Twitter that they didn’t use to access email or the web.

Twitter did reach out to news organisations asking that they work more closely with the company. Twitter wrote in a memo to news groups:

Help us protect you. We’re working to make sure we have the most updated information on our partners’ accounts.

The advice is not just coming from Twitter but is also being given to Twitter to step up its own security. Specifically, a number of security experts have encouraged the company to adopt two-step authentication, something that Google rolled out after high-profile hacking attacks that were revealed in 2010. Two-step authentication often requires a user to register a mobile phone so that codes can be sent as a second step to log into an account on a new computer or device. Facebook, Google and Yahoo! all use the added security feature.

Protecting yourself against spear phishing

However, the best line of defence begins by educating all editors, managers and staff on security best practices. Hackers and phishers are always developing new ways to trick you into compromising your own security, and as Twitter says, journalists are now targets not only for politically motivated hacktivists but also by unfriendly governments.

We’ve all become more aware of scammers trying to trick us out of our credit card or bank details. We all know to take care when opening attachments or clicking on links in emails from people we don’t know. But it is important to understand the new and evolving techniques that spear phishers use to trick you into giving up your usernames, passwords and other important details. As the experts at Norton Security say:

The spear phisher thrives on familiarity. He knows your name, your email address, and at least a little about you.

As journalists we live in public, and it will be all that much easier for hackers to build up a profile to target us. Moreover, as Norton notes, spear phishers are stalking you on social networks. Think of all of the information that you post on social networks and how easy it would be for an attacker to dupe you into believing that they are a friend. Norton asks:

How safe you and your information remain depends in part on you being careful. Take a look at your online presence. How much information is out there about you that could be pieced together to scam you? Your name? Email address? Friends’ names? Their email addresses?

Norton recommends that if you receive an email from a friend asking you for a password or other sensitive information that you call them up to verify the email is from them.

As journalists, we’re trained to be sceptical, and it’s important to use that skill to bolster your electronic security. Be wary of emails purportedly from friends or organisations you know asking for or directing you to sites asking you for business sensitive information. That moment of caution could prevent your Twitter account from being compromised, your contacts from being stolen or your news organisation’s office network from being breached.

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Defying the print media crisis in many parts of the world, Latin American newspapers and magazines continue to enjoy rising circulation and advertising revenue due to growing middle classes and economies left largely unscathed by the financial crisis.

However, internet use is growing rapidly in Latin America, and traditional media groups are exploring digital paid content strategies to try to protect and consolidate their dominant position, especially in the face of competition from new digital-only news organisations.

For instance, the Brazilian newspaper Folha continues to enjoy sustained growth in print circulation while also developing a dominant market position online, and it has become the poster child for paywalls in Latin America with the launch of a metered paywall strategy in January 2012.

While metered paywalls, in which users are able to access a certain number of articles before having to pay, are one of the most popular strategies globally, it is just one approach in use in Latin America, a reflection of the diversity in media markets across the region.

Latin American media experiment with different models

Until 2011, digital paid content strategies were the exception not the rule for news websites around the world. In the US and in Western Europe, paid content strategies have been driven by a drop in print advertising and the inability of news organisations to make up for that fall with digital advertising. News groups had to diversify their sources of revenue. The major shift in the industry came after the New York Times rolled out its metered paid content strategy in 2011, signing up 668,000 digital subscribers, according to its most recent quarterly report. Since then, more than 300 newspapers in the US and newspaper groups in the UK and Germany have implemented paid content strategies, and many have followed the lead of the New York Times and rolled out metered paywalls.

This success has given important legitimacy to paid content strategies globally. But for Latin American news groups, the economic imperative to develop paid content strategies is less, as performance in their print business remains strong. As in other regions, digital media market conditions vary widely in Central and South America, and there is no one-size-fits-all paid content model.

In our last look at paid content strategies, we highlighted the wide range of models in use as news organisations move beyond the binary debate of paid versus free and experiment with a wide mix of models. To recap, the major approaches include:

• Hard paywall with no access to digital content to non-paying customers.

• Free online but paid on mobile.

• Hybrid paid and free networks.

• Freemium strategy where general content is free but specialist or premium content requires payment or subscription.

• Long-form magazine or investigative journalism is repackaged and sold on ebooks or tablets.

• All access bundles in which subscribers pay a single price for access in print and digital platforms.

• Metered paywall in which a certain number of pieces of content are free but payment is required above the limit.

Of these strategies, all-access bundles, metered paywalls or a combination of both are proving to be the most popular and the most successful, and often, all-access bundling is part of a metered paywall strategy.

Market conditions help guide the choice of the most appropriate paid content strategy, and with the diversity of markets across Latin America, media companies have implemented a number of different approaches.

All access bundle and metered paywall – Folha (Sao Paulo, Brazil) – Folha was the first newspaper to implement a metered paywall in Brazil in January, 2012. They initially charged only for their tablet and mobile phone apps, but in in June of that same year they included their website.

Folha gained 45,000 new digital subscribers during their first year. Since then, many other newspapers have either followed suit or are studying how to implement a similar strategy.

When Folha launched their paywall, the rules were that each visitor would have 20 free articles per month while the homepage, cultural schedule and a site for children remained free. After reaching the 20 article limit, readers would have to register some information, then they would have an additional 20 articles before they had to pay.

In March 2013, the limit was lowered by half to 10 free and an additional 10 after registering. The ability to change the number of free articles is seen as a strength by proponents of the metered strategy. Unlike the New York Times model, which does not count pages accessed via links from social media towards the monthly limit, Folha does not make this distinction.

Folha offers two types of subscription:

1) Those that subscribe to the print edition and have access to the digital products.

2) A digital subscription that enables access to the content on any of the platforms.

According to Roberto Dias, Digital Content Director, Folha’s website has 21 million unique visitors per month, with over 270 million pageviews. “Today, every article by Folha is read by a lot more people than 30 years ago. What we really need to do is to look for sustainable models for the journalistic production process, which is expensive.  I think every newspaper is going to find their own; we are looking for ours as well.”

Hard paywall – Reforma (Mexico) – Since 2002, the Grupo Reforma have had a paywall on their websites and charged online subscribers 20% less than a paper subscription.

This was a means of protecting the print business, according to Jorge Meléndez, vice president of new media in an interview with the Knight Center.

After nine years, Reforma has 50,000 online subscribers and its daily circulation reaches 300,000. Currently, they have 5,555 new users per year. However, when they started the paywall, traffic shrunk by 30% and it took one whole year for it to return to its original level.

They currently offer a digital-only subscription that is good for up to four devices and a paper subscription that includes access for up to six devices. Offering bundles that encourage readers to continue to receive the newspaper is common, especially because print advertising still commands a dramatic premium over digital ads.

Digital kiosks – This model, similar to Apple’s Newsstand,  is particularly prominent in Spain, where Orbyt, Vocento and Kiosko y Más are some of the market leaders. In most cases, these kiosks provide access to a PDF version of the publication (similar to the one in print) and people can buy one or more publication from the kiosk at a price that is on average 50% of cover price.

In Latin America, kiosks are a fairly new concept, though one that is being developed.  One of the first to operate in the region is a Colombian kiosk for magazines called Pasalapagina.com; they offer access to 30 Colombian magazines for a monthly subscription fee.  According to a market survey, the amount people are willing to pay at the kiosk in Latin America is about 50% of cover price.

Platform specific strategies in Colombian media –  Semana, a political magazine, is the only Colombian media outlet ever to charge for the content they offer to tablet users.  Initially, the magazine launched a free app that reached over 110,000 users. They then introduced a fee charging for the digital subscription.

El Tiempo and El Colombiano, two of the leading dailies, are also working on paywall projects that they hope to implement in 2014.  Currently, these newspapers have free access to their digital editions and rely on online advertising for revenue.  However, they also offer a product called e-paper (an electronic version of the newspaper) for a discounted price.

In March 2012, El Colombiano, located in Medellin, implemented in its tablet edition a ‘freemium’ model which, after registering, allows the user to download the newspaper in its PDF version and have access to other publications such as smaller neighborhood newspapers and magazines. During the first month they attracted 7,000 users.

Markets in transition

When developing a paid content strategy, publishers and media executives will need to consider the specific conditions in their market to determine whether a paid approach is appropriate and, if so, which strategy to choose.

Determining the market opportunity is key, and it is important to consider the unique market conditions in your country, both in terms of digital consumer adoption and digital market development.

The vast differences across Latin America help explain the wide range of paid content models being used. The overall level of internet penetration is currently at 42 percent in Latin America, but that only tells half of the story. Internet use varies widely, ranging from 66 percent in Argentina and 58 percent in Chile to 16 percent in Honduras and Guatemala, and 14 percent in Nicaragua.

Paid content systems involve costs in terms of development and infrastructure, and if internet penetration is too low, it might be difficult to generate meaningful revenue. There is also the issue that many Latin American consumers are not yet comfortable with sharing credit information online. However, it’s important to note the rapidly changing market. The online population of Latin America grew faster than any other global region in 2011, rising 16 percent to 129 m visitors in December 2011, according to The 2012 Latin America Digital Future in Focus report by comScore.

While Latin American internet users might be fewer in number than in some other regions, the intensity of their use to some extent counterbalances this. As in other parts of the world, social networking is driving much of the growth in internet use. Moreover, Latin America is home to five of the most engaged social networking markets worldwide.

As internet use continues to grow in the region, the digital market opportunity both in terms of paid content and ad-supported strategies will increase for news organisations, but so too will new digital competition.

Mobile segmentation strategies in which users pay for the convenience of accessing content on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, while being able to read it for free on laptop and desktop computers, face challenges in Latin America. Tablet use is lower and growth has been slower due to pricing, limiting the immediate opportunity to use tablets as part of a platform segmentation strategy. According to market research company GFK, it is estimated that in Chile there will be 400,000 tablets by the end of 2013, for about a 2 percent market penetration.  In Colombia, 7.4% of the population owns a tablet, but tablets rank first when it comes to desired possessions. In the poll, 20 percent of Colombians indicated they wished to have one, according to an IPSOS-Napoleón Franco poll.

Of course, mobile phone use is high and smartphone use is growing. It is important to remember there are great differences between countries in the region, so fragmentation will be key. In Brazil, there are 27 m smartphone users, and in Mexico there are 23 m smartphone owners. Mobile phone penetration is 55 percent across the region and much higher in individual countries, such as Colombia with 95 percent penetration.

Other challenges exist including limited bandwidth and the broad prepaid user base. In countries such as Guatemala, 94 percent of mobile phone accounts are prepaid, and even in  Brazil, 80 percent of subscribers use prepaid accounts, according to the GSMA, a mobile phone trade group. Prepaid subscribers tend to be more price sensitive

All of these factors need to be considered when building a paid content strategy around mobile phones.

Facing the challenge from digital content start-ups

The diverse market conditions make the challenge facing the industry a complex one.  On one hand, there are the opportunities presented by the increase of the potential audience both for the print edition and its digital counterparts. On the other, there is the risk of squandering them by cannibalizing their own print product. A premature move towards full digitalization at this time may sentence healthy print editions to an untimely death, but failing to develop digital products and revenue streams may cede future digital opportunities to new competitors.

The Colombian experience in this regard is interesting: fast-growing all-digital outlets such as La Silla Vacía and Kién & Ké are gaining ground on their traditional media counterparts, particularly in the younger demographic.

Most current strategies focus on differentiating the various digital products – online, on tablets and on smartphones – in order to serve the needs of the audience, while keeping an eye on the fierce competition from other digital-only media outlets. These digital competitors are probably betting on a faster rate of decline for the traditional model, especially as Latin America moves closer towards its development goals.

Audience measurement key to strategic choices

Many experts agree that traditional print products in Latin America still have a bright future ahead of them. In order to navigate the complex set of strategic choices across the markets of the region, newspapers and magazines have developed or need to develop tracking features to better understand their users and the ways they are consuming information.

For example, a newspaper might be interested in knowing their audience breakdown based on users in cities versus smaller towns, or what percentage of readers are coming from abroad.  Not all users are the same and not all of them are willing to pay the same; similarly, advertisers might favour a certain category of users or a certain pattern of online behaviour.

The next step for traditional media in Latin America is to figure out what kind of digital strategy is best suited for their particular publication. Technology will provide many of the tools to make this assessment and come up with creative ways to court the audience and develop digital products with a range of revenue streams.

The amount of information available and the level of depth of niche-specific content are also important factors when considering a paid content strategy.  For instance, sports content in Latin America is a type for which users have been more willing to pay; on the other hand, music and entertainment news content is rarely purchased.

In the end, innovation and creativity are a must when it comes to designing the models that will govern the region’s paid content strategies.  The question is, in the interim, while traditional newspapers still enjoy healthy circulation and advertising revenues, will they invest in integrating newsrooms and developing radically different models to stay ahead of the digital game, or will their current success lock them in a potentially obsolete way of doing business?

Related posts:

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Some news groups are reselling investigative pieces on eBooks, on mobile phones and print on demand. Photo credit: by Edvvc, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

With revenues under pressure and resources short for most independent news organisations, there is a widespread fear that in-depth, investigative journalism will suffer.

However, news outlets, entrepreneurs and journalists are displaying dedication and creativity in developing new economic models to support investigative journalism. Different models are taking advantage of unique opportunities and addressing the specific challenges that exist in different markets around the world.

French investigative site asks readers to pay

In the past, investigative journalism was just one part of a larger journalistic package, but in the digital era, we are seeing stand-alone investigative journalism organisations appearing. In France, a groundbreaking site, Mediapart, has found journalistic and even some commercial success with its subscription model.

The digital-only news organisation has just capped its first five years with the resignation and arrest of the country’s budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, due to one its investigations, and questions raised over the fundraising of former president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Cahuzac had earned the nickname of “Mr Tough” for his campaigns to cut government spending and fight tax evasion, but he was forced to resign after Mediapart uncovered secret offshore accounts. Cahuzac vehemently denied the accusations and filed two libel suits against Mediapart, but four months later, he finally admitted that for two decades he has hidden hundreds of thousands of Euros in an UBS account in Switzerland. Not long after, the site reported that Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former head of France’s far-right party, Front National, had also held a secret Swiss bank account. Le Pen admitted that the account existed but lashed out at Mediapart journalists, calling them “KGBists”, according to RFI. The investigations have put pressure on both the right and the left in France’s political establishment and helped challenge some of Mediapart’s critics who liken hard-hitting investigative journalism to vigilantism.

The site relies on subscriptions and it has 65,000 subscribers to support its 31 journalists and 14 other staff, according to an article in French newspaper Le Temps. The site carries no advertising and relies entirely on a €9 monthly subscription. Mediapart editor and co-founder Edwy Plenel described the site’s situation as successful but fragile, saying he would feel more comfortable with 100,000 subscribers. The success is even more notable as there is a relatively low level of interest in investigative journalism in France.

Syndication and partners

Mediapart’s success has inspired Spanish journalists to launch their own investigative news site, InfoLibre, and the two sites have created a partnership. Partnerships and syndication are another way that investigative news groups are working to achieve sustainability.

Investigative journalism organisations such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in the US have entered partnerships to help publish their investigative work. The Texas Tribune was launched in 2009 to help fill what its founders saw as a gap in investigative coverage of state politics. When the site launched, 90 percent of its funding came from foundations and major donors, but now that figure is down to 40 percent, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2012, the non-profit news organisation, now with an editorial staff of 17 and 15 tech, business development and administrative staff, turned a small profit, earning money from memberships, events, corporate sponsorship and advertising. It also used some of its start-up funding to buy the Texas Weekly, a subscription-only online political newsletter, another source of revenue. It is now launching a niche newsletter focused on water issues called Flow, and this could be just the first of several email newsletters focused on niche policy areas.

The site has always worked to build its impact by partnering with 27 newspapers and 11 television stations across the state. It also has a successful, ongoing relationship with the New York Times to help the national newspaper provide coverage of Texas state politics.

Partnerships can also help editorial organisations develop entirely new content areas. Slovak news weekly Týždeň wanted to build on its reputation for high-quality visual journalism that it had established in print, and took its unique style and expanded it online as part of its paid content strategy. The site has also partnered with the Slovak national broadcaster to produce a weekly live discussion programme. Partnerships can both increase impact and provide revenue, and may lead to a virtuous circle.

E-books: Developing a new market

A number of news organisations both in advanced and rapidly developing internet economies have been experimenting with packaging their longer (now frequently referred to as long-form) journalism in e-book formats – a relatively low-cost method of earning more revenue from existing content.

Amazon developed a specific format for shorter fiction and non-fiction pieces, including long newspaper or magazine articles, for its popular line of e-readers, called Kindle Singles. Several large magazines and news businesses such as The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and The Guardian, which launched Guardian Shorts, showcase their investigative journalism in this way. The Guardian launched the new effort with a Kindle Single version of its coverage of the recent phone-hacking scandal.

Long-form journalism on e-readers is also opening new opportunities for non-traditional publishers, such as the foundation-supported ProPublica investigative journalism group in the US. They have found success in selling their long investigations and it gave them a valuable outlet that didn’t rely on syndication via other news organisations or their website. Although a ProPublica piece on Pakistan and the Mumbai bombings was available free on its website, the piece, which sold for 99 US cents, reached number two in the top 10 Kindle Singles bestsellers, according to Harvard’s Nieman Lab.

News organisations pursuing this strategy have found that consumers often want the opportunity to subscribe to an investigative news service rather than buy individual pieces. While the opportunity to buy only the pieces they are interested in seems an appealing proposition for readers, news organisations such as the Toronto Star found that they sold only 100 to 300 downloads at CA$4.99. Sandy MacLeod, vice-president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, told Eric Mark Do of the Canadian Journalism Project that even to reach that level, it took “an intense amount of marketing”. With such marketing overheads, it’s difficult to see how the project would generate meaningful revenue.

To address the issue, the Star decided to adopt a subscription-focused model. Now for CA$4.33 plus tax, readers are emailed a link to the most recent piece, and they have full access to the back catalogue of dispatches. Non-subscribers can still buy individual pieces for CA$2.99. MacLeod’s goal is to sign up 10,000 subscribers by the summer.

mBooks and print-on-demand

The trend of repackaging and selling long-form journalism in e-book format is not limited to advanced internet economies. In South Africa, long-form non-fiction publisher Mampoer Shorts launched last year. The project publishes 10,000- to 15,000-word pieces on most major digital platforms including iOS and Android, the Kindle and Kobo e-readers, PCs and Macs, as well as for print out. Authors earn 30 percent of the $2.99 price of the books, and for its 70 percent of the takings, Mampoer Shorts handles traditional and digital publishing roles, according to South African website, Books Live. The project, launched by well-known figures in South African media, hope to sell 5,000 downloads of each piece.

“Paywalls are going up everywhere – people are becoming accustomed to buying quality content online, and I absolutely believe that the only way to create quality journalism is to get people to pay for it,” publisher and academic Anton Harber said at a launch event.

However, it’s important not to think just of tablets and e-readers, which are often scarce in developing digital markets. Creative entrepreneurs are using mobile phones and mobile social networks such as Mxit to distribute fiction and non-fiction. The popular African social network distributed the first mBook in 2009, and it has since distributed novellas targeting its young audience.

It’s important to think about mobile platforms as potential distribution channels, especially with the rise of phablets – large screen smartphones that are as much tablets as phones. In many markets, consumers will forego having a computer or a tablet and buy large-screen smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note.

While we often think of technology in digital terms, new technology has also revolutionised print media. You only have to think of the desktop publishing revolution that began in the 1980s to realise the changes digital technology has brought to print media. Mampoer Shorts are also distributed by South African print-on-demand pioneers, Paperight. Rather than build out a network of print-on-demand facilities, Paperight leverages the almost ubiquitous copy shops in South Africa.

While South Africa has a number of digital readers, the company can reach even more people in print via the copy shops. At a conference earlier this year, Paperight founder and CEO Arthur Attwell described the digital divide in South Africa, in which he also saw an opportunity:

I come from Cape Town, South Africa, and my background’s in educational publishing and e-book production. South Africa is like two different countries: about 2 million wealthy people who support the publishing industry (excluding schools publishing, where the state is the largest client by far), and about 48 million people who could never afford an e-reader, don’t have credit cards to buy things online, or can’t afford to physically travel to a bookstore. So to make it possible for most people to read books, we need to totally rethink how we sell books.

Using the internet, computers and printers available in most South African copy shops, he saw an opportunity to sell text books, literature and even long-form journalism such as Mampoer Shorts to the millions of South Africans without e-readers.

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When that many tweets are flowing by, it’s very hard to make sense of it all. Fortunately, there are a number of ways a journalist can manage Twitter as well as advanced search techniques to help them find the updates, photos and videos that they want.

Twitter search: The basics

When you first search something on Twitter, it will show you tweets, updates, that relate to your search.

1. Twitter first shows you “Top” tweets, tweets from people or accounts with a larger number of followers or tweets that have been retweeted often. You can also filter your search to people you follow or see all tweets.

2. If you look to the left of the updates that relate to your search, you will see accounts that relate to your search under the heading of people as well as images under the heading Top Photos and videos under the heading Top Videos.

When your search returns updates from prominent people, if you see a check mark in a blue rippled circle, this means that Twitter has verified the account. For instance, this is the official account of Malaysian member of parliament Anwar Ibrahim. That doesn’t mean that updates from prominent people without the check aren’t verified, but it does give you some confidence with well-known figures that you have an official account.

Twitter search: Advanced options

Similar to Google and other search engines, there are a number of advanced search options and some options unique to Twitter. Clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand reveals a drop-down menu with three options:

1. Save search
2. Advanced search
3. Embed this search

Before looking at the advanced options, we’ll look at the other two options. Saving searches can be helpful not only in keeping searches that you commonly do but also in applications that help you monitor Twitter and other social media services, such as Twitter’s Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Saved searches allow you to have a column featuring the results of that search.

For instance in Tweetdeck, below, you can add columns allowing you to monitor your favourites, your searches, replies to you or hashtags all at the same time. On the Twitter website, you can access all of this information, but you cannot have multiple columns with this information. Tweetdeck and other social media dashboard applications are commonly used by journalists monitoring social media.

To add a column to Tweetdeck:

1. Click on the plus symbol inside a button.
2. That will bring up a window with all of the options for columns you can add including columns of your saved searches, Twitter lists, direct messages or replies. You can also add a column with your Facebook news feed.

Tweetdeck and other tools are a very useful way for journalists to monitor social media, and we’ll cover these tools in future guides.

Now, looking back at the other search options in Twitter. You can embed the results of the search in another site using one of Twitter’s widgets. Note, the results of the search can be set to update as new results arrive. Search is only one widget that you can create. We will also cover the widgets in Twitter at another time.

Finally, we return to the advanced search options. The options are broken down into three different sections: Words, people and places.

1. Words

This section will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used the advanced search options common to major search engines including Google or Yandex. You can search by any or all words or an exact phrase. If you add keywords to “None of these words”, it will exclude words from your search. If you are seeing results unrelated to what you are searching for and have a common search term, you can exclude that term to deliver more relevant results.

You can also search by a hashtag, a keyword preceded by the # symbol that is used by Twitter users to organise updates around an event or topic.

One very useful element for international journalists is the ability to search by language. While not comprehensive, the search by language option allows you to search by all of the languages most popular on Twitter including Russian, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia, to name a few. One major language it does not include is Chinese.

2. People

You can also filter your search based on accounts, so you can filter you search from a certain account or accounts or that mention an account.

3. Places

The final option allows you to filter your search by a place. This can be especially useful if you want updates only from accounts near an event rather than people mentioning an event, such as during a disaster or bombing. Twitter uses information from where Twitter users say they are in their profiles or location added by phones with GPS or other location technology. Many Twitter users never change the location in their profile so the location would imprecise and possibly inaccurate. Try to contact the user to verify the location.

If you see a map pin, similar to the pins used on Google maps in a Twitter update, the location was added by a smartphone or added by an image that had location embedded in it. You can be more confident with the accuracy of the location of updates with these pins, and the location will be more precise.

Twitter: More advanced options

There are even more options that are only available by adding text options to your search. These options can be very powerful, but they are only available on a special search page that is not easily found on Twitter’s site. Here is their search option guide, available from the “operators” link on the search page.

Many of these operators are simply text versions of the advanced search options. For instance, putting two or more keywords in quotes, e.g. “Zambia elections”, will look only for that exact phrase. This will return the same results as the exact phrase option in the advanced search. Adding a ‘-’ in front of a word will exclude that word from the search, which is like the ‘None of these words’ option in the advanced search.

However, there are options that are only available using these text operators. For instance, if you use the options, since:2010-12-27 or until:2010-12-27, it will only show updates since 27 December 2010 or until 27 December 2010. There is no other way to filter by date using Twitter search except by using these operators.

Another option only available using these operators is the ability to filter by a more precise location. For instance, you can search for updates posted 5km from the centre of Jakarta with the following search, “near:Jakarta within:5km”.

You can also filter your search for specific types of media. You can filter updates that include links, photos or videos by adding the filter option. For instance, you can add filter:images to the previous search to find all updates with images 5km from the centre of Jakarta.

These search operators will have to be written in English, but you can use other languages as search terms.

With these search tools, you can quickly find the updates you want and that are relevant to the stories you are covering. You can tame the flood of updates and find what you want quickly and on deadline.

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