Most Swedish newspapers have experienced receding advertising revenues during the last years and are now searching for new ways to profit from their online editions. We have conducted three future workshops with both management and end users to envision possible new services that could be profitable for the local newspapers. Furthermore we have conducted an online survey with users selected from a previous study. The objective of this paper is to describe these services and to give a user response to them. We have identified three kinds of services: advertisement services, intermediary services and news services. The results show that the end users preferred the intermediary services and that there is an interest for advertisements in a new setting.
Denna uppsats handlar om IT, ett begrepp som for manga ar svart att forsta. Syftet med uppsatsen ar att definiera begreppet IT, att kartlagga dess anvandning och organisatoriska paverkan i tillverk ...
The four papers included in the conference proceedings for this year's minitrack on Genres of Digital Documents demonstrate wide range of research questions dealing with genre theories and models as well as the genres themselves-their nature and their function in communication, society, and work, as well as our ability to exploit genre information for enhancing the representation and retrieval of digital documents.
The online newspapers entered the Internet in the mid-nineties and since then it has become more and more common to read news online. There is a long tradition of designing newspapers in print but today there is a demand from both academics and practitioners for more knowledge about how to design user friendly news sites. The challenge is to design the online newspaper, in this rapidly changing media, to be the same familiar, user friendly and universally accepted product as the printed newspaper. We have designed a study in three parts to address this challenge. The overall research question is: How can design for a media in rapid development be communicated within a genre? The purpose of the first part of the study, presented in this paper, is to build a framework for identifying genre characteristics and to describe the Swedish online newspaper genre of today. We have conducted a front page analysis on the total population of 85 Swedish online newspapers. We suggest a quadruple of the genre concepts and a grid to handle positioning when building the framework. To describe the Swedish online newspaper genre we have used the taxonomy for the evolution of cybergenres together with the so called broadsheet metaphor. Aiming at a more comprehensive understanding of the online newspaper genre we modified the model by adding the leaf node 'progressed'.
In this paper we look into earlier empirical research on the barriers to electronic commerce (EC) for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We look into research conducted in the context of information and communications technologies (ICT) in general, as well as EDI and Internet based EC. We divide the barriers, inhibitors or factors slowing down the diffusion of new technologies found in literature into those internal to an organization, and those imposed by external forces. The basic premise of this paper is, that technologies advance or change, but the barriers for SMEs to adopt them do not.
"Firms, markets and relational contracting are important economic institutions. They are also the evolutionary product of a fascinating series of organisational innovations." [1] Small and medium sized enterprises (SME) are at a disadvantage when competing in a global environment. This paper looks at the need for specialised and adequate tools for the small and medium sized enterprise. These tools are comprised of both human and technical elements if they are to be successful in providing SMEs with the wherewithal to compete efficiently on the global marketplace.
Today online newspapers are putting a lot of resources into their news sites without profiting from them. They have to find ways to gain from them in order to keep them going. Lately there has been a move from print to multimedia, i.e. news is only a part among other services at the news sites and is presented as audio and video as well. We have conducted interviews at nine local newspapers in Sweden about their current situation and future plans. We have also used a cooperative scenario building technique aiming at finding new online services that could be profitable with both newspaper management and end users. The objective of this paper is to describe the current situation for these newspapers and to discuss possible new future services. Examples of services from the workshops are e.g. advertisement on demand and intermediary services.
Taking a genre perspective on design, this article proposes eight design recommendations for online newspapers. These recommendations are based on features that mediate a specific purpose and use between publisher and audience, which we describe as genre rules in terms of purpose, form, and positioning. They are also based on genre change regarding design, and the heritage from print regarding form and shared content elements. We have a) studied genre change through a web page analysis of nine Swedish online newspapers in 2001 and 2003, using the genre concepts content, form, functionality and positioning, and b) derived genre rules through publishers and audience understanding of the genre. We have interviewed managers, designers and editors-in-chief at the nine newspapers as well as 153 members of their audience. We show that in the design process for digital documents, it is useful to have genre awareness, i.e. to be aware of the genre characteristics, the producer's design purpose and the audience recognition and response.
