As I told you, we are working on the final selection of the issues and cases to be included in the 2008 Innovations in Newspapers Global Report – which we have produced since 1999 for the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).
This weekend, I told Claude Erbse, co-editor of the report, that perhaps we will also need to cover the “online click fraud” that was reported on in-depth by BusinessWeek a year ago.
A few weeks ago, I read that Prisa (publisher of El Pais in Spain) was suing Nielsen in a New York court over the damage caused by the unjustified downward revision in the number of unique visitors to ElPais.com this year. El Pais and Prisa suffered serious damages in advertising, losing $1.4 million because of the downgrade. Now I wonder if this could make another chapter for our report.
News Web sites around the world are looking for an international standard and there is not one that is serious and reliable.
We need an ABC system for the online world.
Until then, cases like the one in Spain will happen all the time.