Time Inc. and Conde Nast are doing it, Buzzfeed and Gawker have been doing it for awhile, and now even the venerable Grey Lady is stepping into native advertising as old-school brands up their digital prowess as print becomes less and less relevant. 

After a decade of declining ad sales, the 161-year-old New York Times saw ad revenue fall by half to $711.8 million in 2012 from $1.27 billion in 2006. “What we’re looking at is ways you can use journalistic storytelling techniques in how you could present a narrative for our clients without misleading or confusing the reader,” Todd Haskell, VP Advertising at the Times told AdAge. 

The Times just announced sponsored content in its Scoop mobile app guide to New York City for Citi Bike, the new bicycle-sharing program, with a feature that helps users find bike stations. “If most native advertising tries to make sponsor-provided content look a bit like a news article, this tries to make it look a bit like a regular ol’ tab in a mobile app," Poynter notes. “What’s interesting is that the 'content' here is less a collection of words and pictures than a real-time data service. It’s a callback to the classic news advertising idea—we assemble the audience, you provide the content, we make a match—in a mobile, apped-up world. It’s a compelling match."Continue reading...

The Wall Street Journal remains the top-selling US daily newspaper, while The New York Times has bumped USA Today for second place, largely due to digital subscriptions which now account for 19 percent of average US daily newspaper circulation, up from 14 percent in 2012, according to The Alliance for Audited Media’s (AAM) semiannual Snapshot report.

The report covers top-line circulation and audience figures from October 2012 through March 2013 for approximately 700 US and Canadian newspapers. In this case, the bottom line still tells a story of continued newspaper circulation declines despite gains across digital platforms. 

Daily circulation for the 593 US newspapers reporting comparable averages for March 2012 through March 2013 decreased 0.7 percent. Sunday circulation for the 519 newspapers reporting was down 1.4 percent.Continue reading...

It's no secret that the print news industry is suffering, but according to Pew's 2013 State of the Media study, consumers think that's no excuse for poor news quality. 

While the industry continues to throw its hands in the air, baffled by the onslaught of digital, consumers are getting more savvy—and critical—of coverage, which, according to Pew, is contributing to the dwindling number of readers. 31 percent of the 2,000 consumers surveyed said they stopped consuming news from a particular outlet because the coverage no longer satisfied their news needs, according to the study.Continue reading...

Of all the big brands making a marketing push at SXSW, Google may be the most popular. The internet giant is happily showing off the many capabilities of Google Glass, and has revealed the first set of app integrations available for the futuristic glasses (which are even adding prescription lenses).

At the Project Glass SXSW developer panel, Google has revealed some of the technology behind the unified "Timeline cards" interface, which displays bursts of information in a user's peripheral vision in combination with Google's Mirror API, which allows users to pull down the data. 

News headlines, photos and text can be delivered hourly to the Glass headset accessed via the "look up" head gesture. At the panel, Google developer advocate Timothy Jordan demonstrated an application that pulls in headlines and short news clips from various New York Times articles. Glass allows postings to Skitch, Evernote and Path, as well as Gmail, letting users respond to emails right from the headset. "You can still have access to the technology that you love, but it doesn't take you out of the moment," said Jordan, adding, "We want to choose services that improve your life."Continue reading...

Bid adieu to another legendary brand. The New York Times Company is rebranding its 125 year-old International Herald Tribune as The International New York Times as it strives to buttress its international presence. 

The change ends the 40-year-old IHT brand—which is perhaps most familiar to U.S. expats—and underscores the tectonic shifts in newspaper journalism and revenue streams wrought by digital and an increasingly competitive environment for readership.

Based in Paris, the rechristened paper will debut a new website this fall. “This recognizes our global reach and is an exciting and logical move,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times. 

Mark Thompson, president and CEO said in a statement there was “significant potential to grow the number of New York Times subscribers outside of the United States…The digital revolution has turned The New York Times from being a great American newspaper to becoming one of the world’s best-known news providers. We want to exploit that opportunity.”Continue reading...

More than 40 companies including Apple, Facebook and Twitter have been targeted in malware attacks linked to an Eastern European gang of hackers using an iPhone-developer website, iPhoneDevSDK. 

The hackers are mining for proprietary research and intellectual property they can re-sell underground, with their assault being called a “sophisticated attack” by Facebook and “extremely sophisticated” by Twitter.

RSA Security Inc. has called their tactics a “waterhole” attack, as victims are attracted to the source of the infection. This technique attacks a centralized website with many visitors and secretly infects vulnerable machines using an un-patched exploit. It differs from a targeted attack like emailing a malware-laden attachment to a specific user.

Apple said Tuesday in a statement, "We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network. There is no evidence that any data left Apple." Apple countered with release of a Java patch for OS X users and a tool that will sweep Mac computers for any Java malware and remove the offending software, which millions of Mac users must now install.Continue reading...

Personal news aggregation site Ongo launches this week, backed by some of the biggest names in the newspaper business.

For $6.99/month, Ongo offers ad-free access to stories from The Washington Post and USA Today, plus selected content from the New York Times — which is about to erect a paywall around its website — and the Financial Times.

Similar to how Hulu pulls together the "best of" programming from TV networks and movie studios, Ongo bills itself as a “service that gives consumers a fundamentally new way to read, discover and share digital news and information.”Continue reading...

In the wake of WikiLeaks, the U.S. Air Force has announced it will block its personnel from using work computers to access websites that have recently posted classified documents.

Members of the Air Force attempting to view online sites for The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian, Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel will receive the following: "ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored," and violators will be punished.

The order came down from the 24th Air Force, which has responsibility for maintenance of the Air Force computer networks. The Navy and Marines have not taken similar measures, nor has the Defense Department ordered any of them to do so.Continue reading...