The Wednesday Wrap

Posted by Prof. Richard Sambrook

Our weekly take on what’s worth reading on the web from the last seven days:

1) Peter Preston in The Observer sees some further signs of hope in recent UK newspaper group results – giving them at least a chance to regroup in their fight to survive and flourish in a digital world.  The regional newspaper outlook is tougher. Results from Gannett in the US, and their UK subsidiary Newsquest, emphasise the difference between the two markets with US regional papers starting to grow but tough times continuing for the UK’s regional press.

2) You may like to kid yourself that constant checking of Facebook or Twitter is all part of the job in today’s media rich world. But chronic media multitasking seems to undermine productivity according to some academic studies. A round up of the latest research into multitasking here. Apparently, we can compensate by getting up at 4am every day. Hmmm.

3) Magazines are continuing to innovate on digital platforms with “digestible digital weeklies”. With Esquire Weekly and The Atlantic Weekly, two monthly legacy print publications are trying different formulas for getting compact editions in front of readers with a frequency they can’t achieve in print and a level of curation they can’t achieve online, according to Poynter.

4) Al Jazeera combined some old fashioned phone-bashing with data mapping techniques to draw this overview of the Syria conflict. It provides a valuable perspective.

5) Finally, the week’s biggest news story, a baby was born in west London. It seemed to attract some interest from Royal-watchers. To see how much, check this 360 degree panoramic shot of the media scrum as new father, mother and son left the hospital…

And that’s a wrap for this week. If you’ve seen anything else you think we should look at, please tell us about it.