E-Publishing

When Movieline.com launched last April, it "opened" well (to borrow a Hollywood phrase), logging 8,355 visits on the first day -- neither blockbuster hit nor flop.

Cut to the present and Movieline.com, which revives the legacy of popular print publication Movieline Magazine (folded almost a decade ago), is approaching 1 million unique monthly visitors, fairly remarkable for a site just six months old.

ComScore.com numbers for October show Movieline.com with 930,000 unique visitors, or 30,000 per day. That's up from more than 700,000 in September, and represents almost quadruple growth from the site's debut numbers. Certainly before year's end, Movieline.com will have more than 1 million unique monthly visitors.

Owned by Jay Penske's Mail.com Media Corp., Movieline.com is all about movies, television and Hollywood stars. It features a lively mix of news, reviews, opinion, interviews and video clips. (See screen grab below.)

General manager and editorial director Charles Runnette, a veteran of Hollywood Life and television documentaries, oversees a small editorial staff whose members come from places such as NYTimes.com, Defamer.com, TheWrap.com, VanityFair.com and Variety.com.

"We keep it a lean operation," Runnette says. (Who doesn't these days?)

Seventy percent of Movieline.com's audience, Runnette says, "aren't in the business. They're people who want to find out what's happening in television and film before anyone else."

Runnette says Movieline.com's prime editorial directive "is to engage people. I feel like all the writers have excellent taste and they understand we're trying to appeal to a broad audience."

While that mandate rules out F-bombs, Movieline.com's writers deliver a steady stream of edgy and entertaining content that continues to find a larger audience.

Like nearly all publications dependent primarily on ads, Movieline.com is facing revenue challenges. "We're not profitable just yet," Runnette says, "but we're on our way."

Perhaps trying a bit too hard to make it sound like this is a good change, the editors of DoubleX, Slate's six-month-old online magazine for women, announced Monday that the separate site will become a section of Slate.com.

Here's the post from Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon bearing the news:

After some deliberation, we have decided to fold DoubleX back into Slate. The site will now become its own section, with our XX Factor blog, articles, and special projects already in the works. Our aim is to create a more intimate version of the community we have built, with many of the same voices and passions.

Sorry, but "a more intimate version of the community" reminds me of Spinal Tap's manager explaining that the smaller venues on the band's latest tour mean "their appeal is becoming more selective."

For many of you, this won't much change your experience of reading us. We will have many of the same bloggers and writers, and Hanna and Emily will continue to run the project. The decision is being made for business reasons rather than as an editorial judgment. In fact, it's the editorial quality of the site, and the way in which it so perfectly embodies the Slate DNA, that makes this a natural next step. This is a new phase, not an ending--since we came out of Slate, where we started XX Factor, it's a return to our roots.

As we've learned many times (most recently from CNN.com Live), when a publication or network announces it will cut down on the amount of content produced, layoffs aren't far behind. The two additional clues here are 1) "We will have many of the same bloggers and writers" (but not all) and 2) "The decision is being made for business reasons rather than as an editorial judgment" (it's about bottom-line numbers, which by definition are going to change). Unless something dramatic happens (like a big influx of unexpected revenue), it's just a matter of how many layoffs, and when. Let's just hope the staffers and bloggers who may be affected are keeping this in mind.

Slate.com is owned by The Washington Post Company.

Fresh off a relaunch of its entertainment site, iVillage last night celebrated another relaunch, this one of its culinary site, iVillage.com/food, at a party in New York's SoHo district.

FishbowlNY's Blake Gernstetter got the story (and, we hope, a good meal). She writes:

"This is a community-centric site, not a user-generated site," said Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBC Universal's Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks. It's "a big, rollicking portal that behaves like a series of niches."

"You have to be able to adapt and keep up with the way women use media," said chief content officer Angela Matusik, who says the revamp is meant to "modernize the message board" with new tools and ways to contribute to the conversation. Next up to go under the knife? The Astrology channel, followed by Health, Beauty and Family. And stay tuned, Matusik added, for a new iVillage social media community platform set to launch sometime in 2010.

Gernstetter writes that the pièce de résistance of the redesign "is the 'Kitchen View' feature, where users can pull up a recipe in a full-screen mode resembling flash cards for step-by-step guidance in the kitchen. This feature is also being developed as a free mobile application, coming soon."

Aggregation without compensation is aggravating, any online journalist and publisher will tell you.

Now a San Francisco start-up named Fwix hopes to shake up the online content and distribution model with what it calls the first monetizing local newswire.

With an eye toward the expected 5% increase (to nearly $14 billion) in local ad spending next year, Fwix's new AdWire brings all local news together, then marries it with relevant local advertising.

Publishers can add AdWire to their sites, display whatever local news they want, and earn ad revenue. Here's where it gets really interesting: The original authors of the articles being displayed by Fwix also get a cut of the revenue.

"Our vision is to bring local news content together and reward the major parties involved with the revenue and audience they deserve," Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi said in a prepared statement. "With AdWire, we have developed an intelligent and efficient revenue model that now supports both content creators and publishers."

AdWire takes only a few minutes to add to any Web site, Fwix says, and publishers who use Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress or Tumblr will find it even easier to install AdWire into their blogs.

One beta tester of AdWire has been political blog RawStory.com. In a statement, publisher John Byrne said, "The return has been great. AdWire is competitive with other ad networks, but absent the headaches of banner advertising."

Content creators and journalists can register with AdWire to get a piece of the revenue.

The Sunday New York Times has a fascinating article by David Carr on The Texas Tribune, a 12-person web-based news operation dedicated to covering "the politics and policy of Texas state government."

How focused is the staff on this mission? So much that it decided not to cover last Thursday's deadly shootings at Fort Hood, just 82 miles or so north of Austin -- right next door in Texas scale.

"It wasn't our story. Should we have just been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood? I don't think so," said (Matt) Stiles, who joined the Web site from The Houston Chronicle.

It was an important early test of how dedicated the web site is to its mandate. Debuting last week, The Texas Tribune is led by former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith and staffed primarily by newspaper refugees. Here, as Carr writes, is what sets the site apart from most news organizations:

The Tribune is a nonprofit attempt to use a mix of donations, sponsorships, premium content and revenue from conferences to come up with a sustainable model for journalism that neither depends on nor requires a print product. ...

The theory is that a group of well-compensated editors and writers (including Mr. Smith, who makes $315,000, with 15 percent of it deferred for two years) will create valuable reporting shared by citizens and other news media outlets, a kind of digital version of public radio.

Obviously it's too early to tell how this will play out, but so far The Texas Tribune has scraped together $3.7 million in donations from private investors, a venture capitalist, the Houston Endowment and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Carr writes.

But it's not all just straight reporting and sober analysis: The Texas Tribune has some fun with it. Below is a video of a new site feature called Stump Interrupted, based on the old VH1 show Pop-up Video:

Talk about setting the bar high.

The Webby Awards today announced a free daily newsletter that organizers say will deliver to subscribers "the Internet's most brilliantly useful things."

Dubbed "Netted," the newsletter is intended to "introduce and steer subscribers to the online tools that make life better, more fun, and more productive," according to a press release. Examples of the tools we can expect to read about include "a site that lets users skip the robotic menu when calling large companies to a service that instantly turns photos into postcards and mails them anywhere in the world."

In a prepared statement, David-Michel Davies, executive director of
The Webby Awards, said, "Netted is about helping readers use the Internet to master modern life in ways both big and small. Think about the first time you found Fandago or used Skype. Our goal is deliver those types of brilliant but practical tools to inboxes every day."

Netted's editor in chief is Peter Hyman, a former Vanity Fair staffer and editor at Men.style.com. Publisher is Chris Green, senior vice president of business development for The Webby Awards.

You can sign up for the newsletter at the link above (or here, if you're too lazy to scroll back up). They'll ask you for your zip code, gender, age and whether you recommend "a life changing Internet site, app or product you think we should cover." Sadly, you must wait a day for the brilliance to begin.

I signed up, and will judge them by the high standards they've set. I'm also curious as to how they'll choose what to send based on the demographic information you provide, so later I'll sign up with a different address, fake my gender and age, and see what turns up in the email. I am so tricky!

OK, he didn't say exactly that, but it certainly was the driving sentiment behind longtime Newsday contributor Saul Friedman's decision to quit after 13 years of banging out a weekly column on aging for the Long Island daily.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Friedman, who had written a column for Newsday since 1996, quit last week over the paper's decision to require some readers to pay for access to its Web site.

Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered. But Newsday recently announced that everyone else will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge.

Friedman, 80, has been writing for newspapers for more than a half-century. He previously served as a staff writer in Newsday's Washington bureau before taking on the Gray Matters column as a freelancer.

More details from Friedman, via Jim Romenesko's blog at Poynter Online:

The new owners of Newsday, Cablevision, have shut off access to its web site, even to me. It is available only to Newsday subscribers or to subscribers to Cablevision's ISP. Thus I cannot send my columns to people who don't subscribe to Newsday.

So a guy who has a long and illustrious career in print journalism -- a 1963 Nieman fellow and, even better, a charter member of Richard Nixon's enemies list -- can't get access to his own column online without paying for it? That's so lame.

Friedman will continue to write about aging issues at Times Go By, a blog created by longtime journalist Ronni Bennett.

Here's a link to Newsday's paid-subscription policy, which would cost $260 a year to non-print and cable subscribers. I love how they present it:

The new newsday.com

Now available at no charge to Newsday and
Optimum Online® subscribers

And previously available to everybody at no charge! They seem to have left that part out.

Local news and information site Examiner.com, which now covers more than 150 U.S. cities, on Thursday will launch a Canadian version.

Examiner.com initially will provide localized content for five cities -- Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

CEO Rick Blair said in a prepared statement, "Examiner.com Canada will provide a showcase for Canadian writers and experts, allowing them to build their audience and provide valuable insights to Examiner readers across the country."

The company says it expects to have more than 100 Canadian writers and photographers by the time the site launches later this week. Examiner.com currently has more than 18,500 writers (or "Examiners") covering 155 (and counting) U.S. cities. The company plans to expand next year into the United Kingdom and other countries.

Salon has unveiled a beta version of its redesigned website...I think.

I hedge only because if you click on the link above, you may be taken to the new beta version -- or the familiar current version. The URLs are the same, but sometimes I get the new version and sometimes I get the old. Salon, you toy with us so!

If you happen to get the new version, the main differences you'll notice are that the subject category on the left is gone, the front page is more graphics-heavy, and there are links to popular features (such as excellent and uncompromising columnist Glenn Greenwald) across the bottom of the banner. I know this stuff is subjective, but I like the new look.

If I see the beta version come up again, I'll do a screengrab and add it to the bottom of this post.

Update: An anonymous reader sent me a link to a screengrab of the Salon redesign, which you can view below. Thanks very much for your help!

TownNews.com, which publishes interactive content for newspapers, will use hNews templates in its new BLOX Web-content-management system following the completion of the first draft of the microformat specification by The Associated Press, the two parties announced.

The nonproprietary, standards-based hNews microformat was developed by AP and British nonprofit Media Standards Trust to help the news industry adopt consistent news formats for online content.

AP vice president for technology and director of the AP news registry Todd Martin said:

hNews provides a consistent and higher-fidelity way of presenting news online and enables the semantic interpretation of news for humans and machines. It also enables news publishers to add enriched metadata—or tags—to their content to improve the user experience, attract audiences and advertisers and facilitate searching for specific types of content.