E-Publishing

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.

Trying to turn adversity into opportunity, a group of journalists has founded Zester Daily, a news site created to cover "all aspects of the culture of food and wine."

Founded by former Los Angeles Times writer Corie Brown as "an online destination for food and wine enthusisasts," Zester Daily is advertiser-supported and free.

Brown, who recruited colleagues from the decimated Times as well as cookbook authors, wine critics, health, environment and political writers, said in a prepared statement that Zester Daily uses an "innovative financial model."

"Zester Daily upends the traditional publishing hierarchy by offering journalists the support of a dedicated team of editors, marketers and technical advisors, while allowing them to work independently," Brown said. "This is not citizen journalism; rather it is a professional association where members are rewarded based on their reputations and their ability to find an audience for their work."

Among the site's contributors are:

Clifford Wright, author of 17 books (including Mediterranean Feast)

Mary Engel, former Times writer who was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005

Martha Rose Shulman, specialist in healthy cooking and author of more than 25 cookbooks

Phil Gallo, entertainment journalist and former editor with Variety

Here's a screenshot of the site:

Time Inc.'s health and wellness web site, Health.com, today announced a strategic partnership with RightHealth.com, another health site.

The sites will combine next year as Health.com Integrated Solutions. (Did they focus-group this name?) In a prepared statement, Time Inc. officials said the combined entity will "dramatically expand the reach of Health.com's successful content approach by integrating it within RightHealth.com's comprehensive topics pages."

Kosmix, a content aggregator and portal, launched RightHealth.com in September 2007. Health.com re-launched in May 2008.

Our sister site GalleyCat today has a write-up and a Beet.TV video related to Simon & Schuster's announcement that it is publishing four digital books that contain links to short videos.

These digital book/video hybrids are called "vooks," and they were created by a multimedia company called Vook, which was started by former newspaper business columnist turned Internet entrepreneur Brad Inman.

Vooks can be read on any browser-based computers or the iPhone/iPod, the company said. Ironically, the New York Times notes, vooks won't work on Amazon's Kindle or Sony's Reader because those e-reading devices don't support video. Yet.

The inaugural four Vooks, all priced at $6.99, are Jude Deveraux's "Promises"; "The 90-Second Fitness Solution" by Pete Cerqua; Richard Doetsch's "Embassy"; and "Return to Beaty" by Narine Nikogosian.

The books will be distributed under Simon & Schuster's Altria Books imprint. In the Beet.TV interview below, Altria publisher Judith Curr discusses the creative premise behind the vooks -- each genre calls for a different approach -- and hints at what will be required of media professionals in the publishing world of tomorrow. One quote:

"I want my editorial staff to have the skill set for the future, which is no longer just going to be about looking at linear text. They have to be involved in video creation and assets and things so that there's a different way to tell the story."

Mediabistro.com on Wednesday announced the first eBook Summit, a conference and trade show designed to help content creators and publishers find opportunities in the changing digital publishing industry.

eBook Summit is scheduled for Dec. 15-16 at the New Yorker Hotel in New York City. The event focuses on innovations in digital publishing, including eBooks, eReaders, e-commerce, and publishing on-demand.

Among the sessions scheduled include "The Business of Free" (a topic we're all familiar with); "The New Book Club: Social Networking"; and "Print on Demand."

Speakers to date include:

Brandon Badger, Product Manager for Google Books
Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
Steve Haber, President of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division
Katty Kay, BBC World News America Washington correspondent and author of Womenomics

Mediabistro.com's eBook Summit is for media professionals involved in creating, distributing, marketing, or selling content -- from the publishing industry to literary and talent agencies, as well as broadcast and online media. The vendor area will be a marketplace for organizations that provide devices, tools, technology, services and infrastructure for all aspects of the digital publishing world.

Click here for more information and to register for the conference.

Seeing an opportunity in the book industry's traditionally slow publishing timetable, the founder of news aggregation site The Daily Beast wants to accelerate the process.

From New York Times writer Motoko Rich:

In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers -- first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books. ...

"There is a real window of interest when people want to know something," [Beast Publisher Tina] Brown said. "And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle."

While the typical book-publishing cycle can extend up to two years (from when the first words are typed to when the book is for sale), the intention of Beast Books is to have authors write for one to three months, after which the manuscript would be available for sale as an e-book within another month.

But don't rush out those pitches just yet. Brown told the NYT that Beast Books would choose authors from the mother website's stable of talent.

The Daily Beast is owned by IAC (IAC/InterActiveCorp), whose CEO, Barry Diller, just yesterday told Katie Couric that the time is coming for paid online content.