The Evolving Newsroom

Trinity Mirror's Teesside Evening Gazette is recruiting 1,000 citizen journalists over the next 12 months to boost content on its network of hyperlocal news sites, according to journalism.co.uk:

The postcode-based community websites, which were rolled out from January last year as 'cousins' to the paper's Gazette Live website, feature content written and posted directly by a combination of non-journalists and the Gazette's editorial team.

While the 22 sites currently have around 400 registered contributors, the paper is planning to recruit a host of new bloggers and community correspondents, Darren Thwaites, editor of the Evening Gazette, told today's Regional Media Research Forum's Insight Day.

It's a question newspaper sites eventually face: do we or don't we charge for access to our archives? Assuming, of course, that they have a searchable archive.

Times Online, the website of the Times newspaper in the UK, launched its archive in June on a free trial basis and has just announced it is putting much of it behind a paywall, according to the Guardian:

An email to users described the first three months of the archive as the "free introductory period" and explained that although featured articles on the archive homepage would remain free, access will be charged at £4.95 for one day, £14.95 for one month and £74.95 for one year.

"On Thursday September 18, the free introductory period will end, so we're writing to let you know how you can continue to enjoy this wonderful resource," Times Online told its readers.

"All the featured content on our archive home page and on Times Online will remain free to view, but if you wish to search the archive there will be a charge to view the results."

Times Online editor-in-chief Anne Spackman said,"The trial allowed us to see what [kind of content] people were coming in for."

The archive attracts around 80,000 unique users each month, she said, with each visitor accessing between seven and eight pages on average.

Spackman said between 3,000 and 5,000 articles would be available for free at any one time, linked from an index page that connects archive stories with current events, such as the Wall Street crash.

"The only people who will be paying are the people pursuing a personal journey," said Spackman, adding that the new rates for the archive would be less than the Guardian with special offers for existing newspaper subscribers.

The 200-year archive includes news stories from 1785 to 1985 including the Battle of Waterloo, the arrival of convicts at Botany Bay and the execution of Marie Antoinette, all in the original page layout.

Times Online, as with other online newspapers, has had to decide whether to monetise its extensive archive by opening pages for free and relying on advertising, or whether to stick to traditional business-to-business revenues from libraries.

Introducing paid access to consumers means sites can preserve their existing contracts with library firms, while keeping the service available to consumers and is likely to be seen as a more stable revenue stream in the current economic climate.

The move follows a major announcement by Google last week, which is working with 100 newspaper partners, mostly in the US, to digitise and index their archives.

If you haven't caught up with the appointment of former Observer editor Roger Alton as editor of the UK's Independent, here's a nice piece from the Guardian's Peter Wilby.

And then comes this blog post from Richard Addis with a few suggestions for Alton as to what he might do with the Indy once he gets his shoes under the desk:

Launch a daily magazine instead... The paper is already half magazine. The famous ‘viewspaper’ covers are straight from the magazine world. The consumery parts (50 best etc) and the promotions (mini-books) would sit comfortably in many a magazine package.Drop the idea of covering news at all, at least in the conventional way.

Instead you could transfer 85% of the staff to features duties and retain 15% to provide an excellent and intelligent news aggregation service that would be printed, say, in a single column on page one.

As for the website, apart from becoming the central exchange for directing readers to news sources, make it a TV station. All those new feature writers, not to mention educated readers, will have so much to say, so many background stories to tell and will so quickly learn to take a camera with them everywhere that you can see the Indy becoming a upmarket mini-You Tube in just a couple of years.

Simon Jenkins, a former Times editor, told The Lords Communications Committee that blogs were like 'bar room chats' and couldn't be taken as seriously as newspaper columns, reports journalism.co.uk.

A blogger himself, he said he found the flexibility of writing a blog stimulating but wouldn't want blogs to replace 'old-fashioned' newspaper columns.

As far as I'm aware, no one is currently considering doing so.

Andrew Neil, meanwhile, raises an interesting view: "The rise of blogging and opinion outside of the mainstream has caused newspapers a problem, because quite often these blogs are more interesting than the editorials in the newspapers."