WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

More news to add since my first post on THE DAILY, the News Corporation Tablet National Publication.

A newspaper?: No, a tablet-only publication.

A tabloid kind of publication?: Yes, It will be a bit like the New York Post, but national.

What about The Wall Street Journal Secret Digital Project announced by Robert Thompson?: It’s a separate project but could be a serious version of this “tabloid” one.

New Big Guns: Elisabeth Eaves as opinion editor, a former contributor to the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Slate; Avi Zenilman to cover business, from Politico and The New Yorker where he was online news editor; Chris Wilson, ex Maxim editor; Chris D’Amico, former managing editor of New Jersey’s Star Ledger has been named sports editor: Reihan Salam, a fellow at the New America Foundation, will be a columnist.

How many paid subscriptions they need?: at least 800.000

Annual revenue goal: around $400 million from readers and no clue about advertising, but $100 million could be a good start.

Frecuency: seven days a week.

Where are they now?: At the 26th floor of the News Corporation headquarters on Sixth Avenue, but very soon they will move to the ninth floor.

A New York-centric newsroom: no foreign bureaus.

Editorial voice: populist, and tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence.

Three managing editors: Mike Nizza, a veteran of The New York Times, AOL News and The Atlantic; Steve Alperin, a producer at ABC News, and Pete Picton, an online editor at The Sun in the U.K.

James Murdoch: “It’s a tablet-only product and it’s very exciting.You’ll hear more about that soon.” Yesterday in Barcelona during an investors conference.

More at our Harvard Tablets Summit.

Be there!

(Illustration by the brilliant Luis Grañena)

First, The Wall Street Journal confronted The New York Times.

So today Sulzberger launched his first main assault to Murdoch in his own British market.

With Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond, a 6,00- word story written by Don Van Natta Jr., Jo Becker and Graham Bowley, three big guns of The New York Times, Sulzberger tries to destroy the reputation (?) not of the News of the World, the Sunday gossip tabloid of News Corporation, but the reputation of Rupert Murdoch as owner of this popular paper.

The war is here.

My only question is this:

Why British newspapers, magazines, radio, television, blogs… didn’t cover the story in such a powerful way?

The New York Times is again the “solo” paper producing first class real investigative reporting.

A lesson hard to learn by other more complacent rivals.

(Picture by Lewis Whyld/Getty Images)

From a story about the prospects of today’s iPhone 4 press conference:

Nine paragraphs, yes nine!, ending with the same “music” written by YUKARI IWATANI KANE and NIRAJ SHETH.

The nine “familiar” endings:

1. Apple Inc. released its newest iPhone despite internal concerns about its antenna reception, and gave wireless carriers far less time to test the phone than is typical, according to people familiar with the matter.

2. The Cupertino, Calif., company has called a news conference at its headquarters to discuss the issue Friday. Apple doesn’t plan to recall the phone, a person familiar with the matter said.

3. Apple engineers were aware of the risks associated with the new antenna design as early as a year ago, but Chief Executive Steve Jobs liked the design so much that Apple went ahead with its development, said another person familiar with the matter.

4. The electronics giant kept such a shroud of secrecy over the iPhone 4′s development that the device didn’t get the kind of real-world testing that would have exposed such problems in phones by other manufacturers, said people familiar with the matter.

5. The iPhones Apple sends to its carrier partners for testing are “stealth” phones that disguise a new device’s shape and some of its functions, people familiar with the matter said.

6. Apple gave its carrier partners far less time to test the iPhone 4 before its launch and gave them significantly fewer devices to test than other handset makers, people familiar with the matter said.

7. As development on the iPhone 4 proceeded, field testing would have been limited because of Apple’s emphasis on secrecy, said people familiar with the matter.

8. The testing process usually takes a minimum of 14 weeks. However, Apple flies in the face of this norm, handing over iPhone prototypes to carriers with much less time, people familiar with the matter said.

9. Later versions, including the iPhone 3G that was launched in 2008 and the iPhone 3GS last year, also didn’t hold a signal as well as other phones and experienced more dropped calls, people familiar with the matter said.”

Oh, by, that’s a world record.

Editors and real sources needed!

Good visual journalist be alert!

How do you believe in these maps when the information is not very good?

Look at the first ones and you will see how unreliable they are.

This will be a great challenge for my infographic friends.

But they will end doing a good job.

You will see.

The BBC has done this basic one:

Anoher version with the same data posted by the European edition of The Wall Street Journal website from the U.K. Met Office with an illustration of the volcanic ash dispersion from the surface to 20,000 feet, issued at 6 a.m. on Thursday.

According to The Times of London the red line on this map of the level of ash shows the exent of debris between surface and 20,000 feet

A late arrival from The New York Times.

And The Telegraph included this picture from a real-time radar image showing all aircraft movements in UK airspace at 9.30am today.

The image from www.radarvirtuel.com shows how ash from the Icelandic volcano stopped all flights in the northern parts of UK.

Here you can see who is flying in Europe… with IUK air space as no-fly-zone.

Lainformacion.com in Spain has a bigger map with more or less the same data.

Lainformacion.com’s logo gets some of the ashes too…

El Pais in Madrid shows the Meteosat 9 images and this the best way to understand the size and impact of the volcanic ashes.

From AFP

And in Twitter going to ashes you can see this incredibly beautiful picture

The BBC offers this fantastic pictures saying:

An image made available by NEODASS/University of Dundee which shows the volcanic ash plume from Iceland, top left, to the north of Britain as received by NASA’s Terra Satellite at 11.39 GMT Thursday April 15, 2010. Photo: NEODAAS/University of Dundee/AP

More, later.

Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal Personal Technologies Guru, has been testing for one week the new Apple iPad.

His review is a strong endorsement of the new tablet.

With minor reservations, he writes:

“After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.”

Regarding media applications:

“I was able to try a pre-release version of The Wall Street Journal’s new iPad app (which I had nothing to do with designing), and found it gorgeous and highly functional—by far the best implementation of the newspaper I have ever seen on a screen. Unlike the Journal’s Web site, or its smart-phone apps, the iPad version blends much more of the look and feel of the print paper into the electronic environment. Other newspapers and magazines have announced plans for their own, dramatically more realistic iPhone apps.”

It’s a 9 of 10.

Watch here his video- review.

UPDATE: David Pogue came second with a lighter and less real test piece, that includes two separate reviews: one skeptical for techies and another very positive for you and me.

Today The New York Times launched his new marketing campaign “numbers” against The Wall Street Journal.

A very aggressive one.

Yes, the “numbers” are very impressive, but…

If you are a leader, you don’t start to look back over your shoulder…

Except if your follower is coming very fast.

And that’s the case.

So, the market reacted as expected: the shares of The New York Times went down almost 5 per cent.

Jonathan Stray checks for the Nieman Journalism Lab the real sources of the recent breaking-news story about the China/Google hacking case and finds that”

– Out of 121 unique stories, 13 (11 percent) contained some amount of original reporting. I counted a story as containing original reporting if it included at least an original quote. From there, things get fuzzy. Several reports, especially the more technical ones, also brought in information from obscure blogs. In some sense they didn’t publish anything new, but I can’t help feeling that these outlets were doing something worthwhile even so. Meanwhile, many newsrooms diligently called up the Chinese schools to hear exactly the same denial, which may not be adding much value.

- Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).

- Of the 13 stories with original reporting, eight were produced by outlets that primarily publish on paper,  four were produced by wire services, and one was produced by a primarily online outlet. For this story, the news really does come from newspapers.

So how are we going co cover real news without original reporting?

And who is going to pay for real reporters?

And real journalism?

Let’s get real.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, this video created by Coursesmart, a joint venture of five textbook publishers, shows how students might use tablet-based textbooks. It is based on their own renderings, not specific applications being developed with Apple.

CourseSmart plans to show this video at the Consumer Electonics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Founded in 2007, CourseSmart delivers new ways to access textbooks for instructors and students.

A eTextbooks reader with digital bookmarks!

See here the blog of CourseSmart.

A revealing graphic that show how The Wall Street Journal wins, and the New York Post loses.

(Via thewal)

It’s now the BBW magazine.

At a discount price, Bloomberg made a good deal.

The price was said to be near $5 million, plus assumption of liabilities, which were $31.9 million as of April.

Founded in 1929, BusinessWeek – once valued at more than $1 billion — will to lose roughly $40 million this year.

What’s next?

With a circulation of about 921,000, the new BBW will become a more targeted publication.

Massive cuts in the 400 people newsroom, yes more than 400!

The Bloomberg’s staff of 2,200 reporters, editors and photographers can do this magazine with just a few people from the old brand.

And the will make money, for sure.

Not doing another The Economist.

Right now he sells to The Economist readers many o the 280,000 Bloomberg terminals to subscribers paying upwards of $1,500 a month.

Norman Pearlstine, a former managing editor for The Wall Street Journal and Time Inc.’s former editor-in-chief will run the new show.

Pearlstine is now Bloomberg’s chief content officer and will become BusinessWeek’s chairman.