Adobe halts mobile Flash development; News sites must adapt

By Alex Endress
Adobe has said that it will not develop the mobile browser flash program any further. ZDNet.com’s Jason Perlow relayed an in-house Adobe announcement on the news:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Geoff Duncan of DigitalTrends.com says that by deciding to not add Flash capabilities to the iPhone or iPad, Apple played a very large part in the decision to discontinue Flash for mobile platforms. However, Duncan believes that Microsoft produced “the straw that broke the camel’s back” by resisting the addition of Flash support to the Windows Phone and Windows 8 Metro.

The Daily Texan starts offering advertising through its Social Media

By Oscar D. Gomez

In its search for new revenue streams, The Daily Texan has just started selling another form of digital advertising, beyond its web edition. Now, ads for the social network channels used by The Texan are also for sale.

The initiative is on its way to become a trend soon, in an environment in which no idea is a bad idea if it can bring much-needed revenues. After learning that other college media, like Cal-State Fullerton, were helping fund their news outlets by embracing this practice, The Daily Texan staff had a meeting and after evaluating the pros and the cons they launched their social media advertising service in September.

This new way to seek revenue basically involves inserting Facebook and Twitter posts promoting products or services. Advertisers can buy a certain block of Social Media for that purpose. The most basic package, includes two Twitter posts and two Facebook posts a week through a 15-week semester. The posts content is subject to editorial approval, to make sure that we do not antagonize our users by tweeting irrelevant, offensive, or inappropriate content, Every post is accompanied by words like “advertising” or “sponsor” and the hashtag “#ad” in the case of Tweeter.

Entrepreneurs must fail in order to succeed

By Brenda O'Brian

In a post in VentureBeat's Entrepreneur Corner, blogger Brin McCagg writes of the five lessons learned in entrepreneurialism in the digital age. Of those five lessons, the first focuses on "Follow-through is essential." Despite the massive amount of cash raised for startups in a short periods of time, which has only expanded in the last few years, only a small percentage of startups move beyond the planning stages and find success. 

On average, about one in five startups actually succeed the first time around, according to the Journal of Financial Economics. In this research, entrepreneurs are encouraged to show persistence in their performance in creating and executing entrepreneurial ventures, as "first-time entrepreneurs have only a 21percent chance of succeeding and entrepreneurs who have previously failed have a 22 percent chance of succeeding."

Seen Magazine – Trying to Take User-Generated Content to the Next Nevel

By Mario Carrillo

Alex Earle, vice-president of sales marketing for Austin Fit Magazine, understands that user-generated content is becoming more popular for many publications. In fact, Budget Travel Magazine dedicated its entire June 2008 issue to user-generated content. Users were allowed to generate all of the text and photography. But according to Erik Torkells, former editor of Budget Travel, publishing a user-generated issue is neither cheap nor easy.

But for Earle, the idea for a user-generated magazine began when Austin Fit’s art director suggested the idea of adding user-generated content to the magazine. But after thinking about it more, Earle thought,

“Maybe we can make a whole magazine created with user generated content. So we talked about that further and we ended up building a website, beinseen.com and the whole magazine is user generated — every single page with the exception of the advertising pages.”

ESPN and the Longhorn Network: The Future of Sports Journalism?

By Mario Carrillo

The self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, ESPN, made waves earlier this year after agreeing to pay the University of Texas $300 million over 20 years to be able to produce the Longhorn Network. The network launched on Sept. 1 and provides wall-to-wall coverage of all things Texas sports, including the exclusive rights to two Longhorn football games.

The network has struggled to find its way to viewers, but now it’s ESPN's credibility that is making headlines.

ESPN looked to the renowned Poynter Institute to act as its journalism watchdog and is also employed as its ombudsman. Just two weeks ago, Kelly McBride of Poynter released a review project that analyzed ESPN and its “walking conflict of interest.”

ESPN is, first and foremost, a business. It has contracts with other college football conferences that provide the schools with millions of dollars. From McBride’s report:

Jeremy Caplan's Seven Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

By Diego Cruz


Starting your own journalistic business may be a risky task full of unknowns but that does not mean there are no guidelines to help along the way, according to Jeremy Caplan in a webinar hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas on Oct. 12.


Caplan, the Director of Education at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, discussed seven steps to follow in creating a sustainable entrepreneurial journalism project, saying it could be useful not only to journalists starting their own ventures but also professionals in traditional media seeking to improve their organization.

Dallas Morning News' declining reliance on ad revenue improves newspaper's prospects, publisher tells academics

By Ian Tennant

The Dallas Morning News has reduced its reliance on advertising, which accounted for more than three-quarters of its revenue in 2007, a development that appears to give publisher Jim Moroney III hope that the essential service provided by a major daily newspaper — public service, watchdog journalism — will continue.

In a presentation to journalism students and professors at the University of Texas at Austin on Nov. 3, Moroney outlined business decisions that have transformed how the Morning News is funded. Although advertising, display and digital, still accounts for the majority of revenue, that number dropped to 54 percent in 2011 from 78 percent in 2007. Picking up the slack are circulation, up from 18 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2011, and production and distribution, which increased from four percent to seven percent in 2011.

Apple holds unfair policies for news publishers

By Priscilla Pelli
Advances made in communication technologies have truly revolutionized the ways in which readers and users consume media on a daily basis. More specifically, the advances made in the creation of Apple Products, each a legacy of Steve Jobs creativity, have held a substantial impact on the business side of news publishers. To be more specific, these Apple products gave a new hope for news publishers to continually expand their business profits further through the new changes that apple had innovated….the app.
 
With the creation of iPads and iPhones came apps, and newspapers scrambled for ways to use this new technology to increase their user engagement and encourage users to read their content on other mediums. In doing so, news outlets would be able to charge users for content and fill a revenue gap that traditionally advertising always filled. But was Apple’s new innovation really a technology that would help traditional news mediums expand and survive in the evolutionary media market or would it prove to be no benefit at all?