Results matching “editors job bec”

Italian daily La Stampa is to integrate its newsroom, taking what its editor in chief Mario Calabresi has described as "a step towards the future". Calabresi announced the move, which will incorporate both physical changes and staff changes as well as a change in CMS, in a letter published on February 6. "A newspaper is a lively body that needs to be able to adapt itself to its environment," wrote Calabresi.

This step forward is reflected in the creation of three new job positions, which are intended to form a bridge between print and the integrated future. By introducing a digital editor, a web editor and a social media editor La Stampa hopes to make the transition to fully integrated newsroom a reality in terms of people and workflow. 

16-17 February 2012, Room IV, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France

The conference "The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World" aims to gather leading media representatives, professional and "citizen" journalists and media law experts to exchange views on these issues and to discuss good practices in traditional professional journalism and citizen journalism in the digital era.

With a stunning 2 billion persons estimated to be using the Internet and producing 156 million public blogs in 2011, there has been a surge of social networks, user-generated content and micro-blogging that has enabled all Internet users to become public communicators. Along with the spread of the Internet, WikiLeaks' release of a massive number of classified government documents and its initial collaboration with traditional news media has modified the media landscape and raised crucial questions for journalism.

"Thank God we've moved away from the time when you think you can just put television online," said David Hayward, head of the journalism programme at the BBC College of Journalism, opening a session on online video at news:rewired in London on Friday.

John Domokos, video producer at the Guardian, elaborated on this sentiment, explaining that a newspaper can't hope to beat TV for the polished version of a story, thoroughly edited with a highly-structured narrative, so it is better to focus on what it can do that is different and complementary. He often adopts a "microcosm" approach, aiming to create a three or four minute film that gives viewers a window onto a specific world.  

With video becoming increasingly important to consumers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have each announced they are launching new daily video programmes. The New York Times has launched a new daily business-related programme while The Wall Street Journal has started a new daily lifestyle show.

On 1 February, NetNewsCheck reported that the New York Times has launched a new program called "Business Day Live."

In a related press release, the New York Times stated that "the program is broadcast live from The Times newsroom, and offers the insights and analysis of reporters and columnists from The Times's business, media and technology desks."

by Hannah Vinter

Starting from the current issue The Economist will have a weekly section devoted to China, the paper's leader announced.

This is the first time since 1942, when the a US section was introduced, that the news magazine is dedicating an entire section to a single country, the article explained. Thematic sections and blogs as well as specific columns are usually focused on a geographical area, as Banyan, the blog dedicated to Asia, which takes its name from the Banyan tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment and Gujarati merchants used to conduct business.

The name for China blog has not yet been decided and the paper invited readers to send suggestions. It will ideally need to agree with the style and 19th-century origins of the other sections and columns names, from Bagehot, the column dedicated to Britain, which takes its name from Walter Bagehot, British constitutional expert and early editor of The Economist, to Baobab, the section focused on Africa and Middle East which owes its name to the African tree.

What are the differences between Story Visualizations and Answer Visualizations?

Why human filters are the future of the web: the importance of role of real editors rather than algorithms online.

Latest numbers indicate New York Times traffic is flat since the paywall was implemented, says BuzzFeed (via Poynter).

Reporters Without Borders reported that blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad, who had been detained for 10 months on a charge of insulting the armed forces, was released on 24 January. His release was reported on Twitter by his brother Mark.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

Six countries, six leading newspapers, a huge audience and one common theme: Europe, how to explain it better, how to understand it better, how to build it better. This is the aim of an editorial project which saw six papers joining forces to produce a joint special edition on the situation of the European Union.

"The state of the Union", echoing the State of the union speech US President Obama gave on 24 January, is the angle of the first issue of Europa (more will be expected in future) produced by El Pais, the Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gazeta Wyborcza and La Stampa.

This joint special editorial supplement aims to give a "more nuanced picture of the EU and explore what Europe does well and what not so well", as the Guardian explained.

Press freedom and freedom of expression remain under serious threat in the Middle East, despite the democracy revolutions and reforms that are sweeping the region, a panel of experts said Tuesday at the Arab Free Press Forum in Tunisia.

"The problem today is that you might not be afraid of the secret police, but you might fear the moral police," said Ghias al-Jundi, the Syrian Director of the PEN International Writers in Prison Committee and a member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange's (IFEX) Tunisia Monitoring Group.

While the dramatic democratic upheavals "have made steps in overcoming power and overcoming the kingdom of fear," the Islamist groups who were long barred from politics and are now emerging do not have a tradition of political interaction with other groups.

The 5th Arab Free Press Forum opened Monday in Tunisia with a celebration of the gains that have been made in Middle East press freedom, but with a reminder that much more needs to be done.

"If Tunisia is the country in the region that has most advanced in the construction of democracy, other countries in the region are still suffering under the yoke of authoritarianism," said Moroccan journalist Aboubakr Jamai, opening the conference on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). "Reporters thus face different situations. Some have won -- like their fellow citizens -- their freedom of speech, while others continue to risk their freedom and even their lives."

"Some are more advanced than others in constructing democratic society, but if the level of democritization differ, there is little doubt about the dynamics that have begun in our societies," said Mr Jamai, laureate of WAN-IFRA's Gebran Tueni Award. "There is a sense of history, one that leads to respect for liberty and dignity."

France, Italy, Spain: The Huffington Post is expanding to Europe. After having launched editions in the UK and Canada last year, Arianna Huffington is now taking her news, blogging and aggregation site into continental Europe and non-Anglophone markets. 

As reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, the French edition "Le Huffington" will be launched on January 23, under the editorial direction of Anne Sinclair, a well-known TV journalist (and wife of the former head of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn.)

It was announced today (via PrimaComunicazione) that HuffPost has also signed an agreementwith Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso to land in Italy. 

According to a graphic in this Sunday's New York Times (via Poynter), 7,282 reporters and editors are in the rarefied circle of the 1 percent.
Poynter's article explains - as Guardian's Roy Greenslade says too - that to be included in the graphic, at least 2% of people with these jobs have to live in households with incomes of $380,000 or more.

Le Huffington Post, the French version of Arianna Huffington's creation, has appointed Anne Sinclair, wife of the former I.M.F. director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as its editorial director L'Express reported. The French Huffington Post will be launched on January 23.

In its latest step to better control China's wildly popular Twitter-like websites, the government's propaganda and information arm announced that China will expand real-name registration for microblog users, Reuters reported.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

UK regional publisher Archant and citizen journalism photo news agency Citizenside have teamed up to launch iwitness24, a community news platform which will help "to bring the locals back to local news", a press release announced today.

Archant readers, divided into 7 regional sub-communities, can contribute content through the website - accessible through a one-click sign in with Facebook Connect - or the iPhone and the Android applications. This allows them to share geotagged photos, videos, and text articles directly with their local newsrooms.

The initiative, which uses Citizenside's Reporter Kit technology, aims to allow Archant to more effectively engage with its readers and foster the power of its local communities.

On January 12 Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times Public Editor wrote a post on his blog entitled "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?"

"I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they write about," he continued.

The community promptly reacted and the debate grew fast. Tweets gathered and readers, journalists and media commentators flooded the web with comments. Often sarcastic comments.

Even the New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson answered in a note that Brisbane appended to the update of the blog-post he wrote to clarify his original question.

Some Italian newspapers could be at risk due to the cuts in state subsidies that the new technocrat government is planning to implement.

The Financial Times reported last week that about 100 titles are facing closure as Mario Monti's administration confirmed cuts in public subsidies for the press from €170m to €53m budgeted for next year. These had already been proposed by the previous government led by Silvio Berlusconi.

At risk are wellknown papers such the leftwing Liberazione, Il Manifesto and L'Unità, the former communist party daily founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924 and the Catholic daily Avvenire. 

2011 was a big year for news in more ways than one. Reporters were amply tested in their coverage of big breaking news stories such as the death of Osama Bin Laden or Muammar Gaddafi, major disasters such as the Fukushima earthquake, and complex political unrest much of the Arab World.

Meanwhile, newspapers continue to seek an effective digital business model, to tackle the challenges posed by social media and community involvement, to create innovative tablet applications and respond to ethical dilemmas. Looking forward to 2012, what can we expect?

Social media - will Facebook remain the undisputed leader?

Social media sprang to the forefront of the global stage in early 2011, with many directly attributing the extent of the uprisings in the Arab World to the power of Facebook and Twitter. Citizen reporting and commentary on events using social media has also flourished in the Arab World, and Anglophones have followed Twitter coverage via NPR's Andy Carvin. Will this use of social networks to provoke and cover dramatic uprisings continue?

Facebook, with its 800 million plus users, has been a top priority for news organisations in terms of their social media strategy in 2011, dwarfing smaller players such as Foursquare and so far fending off competition from new arrivals such as Google+. Most publications now have at least one Facebook page and several are experimenting with new apps using Facebook's Open Graph initiative. So far, readership levels seem to be high and it is likely that more news organisations will be keen to tap readers through Facebook.

Will Facebook's dominance continue into 2012, or will a network like Google+ - which has just introduced changes to make it more appealing to brands and businesses - put up a worthy fight? Twitter is also planning to introduce brand pages - what impact will these have?

Already, many journalists have vast numbers of fans and followers of their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts - will 2012 see a growing divide between brands and individuals on social media?

Bringing the community into the newsroom

In the world of the overwhelming information on the Web, newspapers are struggling to sustain their role as a central hub for news, and in 2011 many started to focus on interacting more closely with their communities and encouraging conversation among their readers as well as between readers and the papers.

Readers have been invited to participate in the process of local journalism in JRC's Register Citizen's newsroom café, where the paper's new office allows the public into the newsroom on a daily basis to influence, comment on and enhance coverage. Involving readers in the daily editorial decision making process is also the aim of Swedish local paper Norran's live chat eEditor, where readers can discuss story ideas with journalists in real time. Becoming accessible also means becoming more transparent, which is what the Guardian set out to do by publishing the paper's newslist online.

Expect to see more of such attempts to put readers at the heart of the newsgathering process in 2012 as newspapers realize the benefits of a strong and loyal community.

Business model uncertainty continues

In March 2011 The New York Times launched its much-anticipated paid digital content strategy and others have followed suit. Metered, intermittent, or impenetrable: no single digital paywall strategy has yet proven itself as the best. The existence of multiple digital devices means that most news organisations who do charge offer various different subscription offers across platforms.

Monetizing app content brings further complications as it means dealing with those who control operating systems such as Apple, which takes a 30% cut of all App Store purchases. Expect to see more newspapers following the example of the Financial Times, which has launched a browser-based HTML5 app that allows it to bypass Apple's store completely.   

It's unlikely that a definitive solution to the digital monetisation question will emerge in 2012: expect to see newspapers continuing to experiment with new ways to strike the best balance between charging for content and not losing readers. Hopefully we will also see attempts to find new business models as news organisations realize that there might not be just one strategy.

Delivery methods

At the end of 2011, the word 'tablet' no longer necessarily conjures up just an image of the iPad, as it did at the beginning of the year. Apple still shipped more than half the world's tablet devices sold in the third quarter of 2011, retaining a 61.5% share of the global market, and no competitor claimed more than 6%, but cumulatively they have managed to make a dent in Apple's dominance.

In 2012 we can expect to see Apple's market share continue to slide and Android-powered devices becoming more common, although there is little doubt that the iPad will remain the most common device.

In terms of what news organisations offer on the tablet, we can hope that 2012 will see some innovative and exciting new products. Although some impressive exceptions exist (such as Ringier's the collection), many papers have adopted a straightforward approach to tablet apps that does not take full advantage of what the device has to offer.

Some news organisations have already taken big steps with HTML5 and by the end of 2012 it may well be common for papers to produce HTML5 products before native apps, both for financial motivations (see above) and for ease of developing.

The tablet market is growing but it is still tiny compared to the smartphone market - maybe 2012 will also see news organisations re-evaluating their priorities in terms of digital delivery and focusing on the phone as a key device.

Newsroom organisation: digital comes first
 
The digital first mantra advocated by John Paton of the Journal Register Company has led to the creation of a new company actually called Digital First, a result of the merger between JRC and MediaNews Group, and the subsequent roll-out of this philosophy at many local US newspapers. Digital first is not intended to imply neglect of the print product, but rather a recognition of the fact that digital must come first in the news cycle, and that digital surely is the future and it is worth investing in it now.
 
The Guardian has also expressed its commitment to going digital first "in philosophy and practice," a process which involves losing staff but also taking on more developers and others with digital skills.
 
In 2012, expect to see other publishers making steps towards digital first as there is a growing acceptance of the necessity to concentrate efforts on building a business out of digital news. Many are realizing that achieving true newsroom integration is a long and complex process that requires an entire overhaul of workflows, processes and mindsets in the newsroom if it is to be truly effective, so they are looking for next steps.

New skills in the newsroom
 
Data, data and more data. In 2011 we saw an explosion of data-powered journalism, often displayed through visualizations, infographics, and interactive maps and apps. New web tools have made an incredible flood of raw data accessible which can then be visualized, organized in searchable databases, aggregated in interactive tools and used to investigate complex issues such as the UK riots that the Guardian analysed with the Reading the riots project. ProPublica also makes impressive use of data. 

Non-linear forms of storytelling are likely to feature highly on the agenda of forward-thinking news organisations in 2012 and consequently journalists will have to keep up with the skills required to shape stories and make them comprehensible to the public. The data journalism handbook published during the Mozilla Festival in London last November could be useful in this.

Technical skills such as coding will likely become more and more essential for journalists entering the trade in 2012 and we may well see retraining of more experienced journalists so that they can make best use of what data has to offer.

A high level of competence in effectively using social media is also increasingly becoming necessary as its use becomes more and more integrated into reporting as well as communicating with readers.  

Phone-hacking - will this lead to increased regulation in 2012?
 
At the start of 2011, few would have thought that the year would end with one fewer national newspaper publishing in the UK, and the entire press under scrutiny with regards to its ethical conduct. The phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch's The News of the World dominated media news in the UK in the second half of the year, and made headlines around the world as the paper was closed down and News International executives resigned. With both publishers and editors called in front of a judge, any belief that newspapers can defy the law with no questions asked has been strongly shaken.
 
2012 will see the beginning of the wider impact of the scandal as the Leveson Inquiry unfolds and recommendations are likely to be made for a more thorough regulation system in the UK. The inquiry will consider to whom the press is accountable, and how far outside interference is necessary.  Will self-regulation be deemed sufficient? Will there be an impact overseas? Will the results for journalism be positive or negative?

by Federica Cherubini and Emma Heald 

Timu is a Swahili word which means "team:" team being the core principle of the new platform the Italian <ahref Foundation recently launched.

Timu is a publishing platform for crowdsourced information and its main feature is to apply a common research method which is then recognised by a specific icon that websites and blogs can display in their homepage, to declare they are following that method.

The Timu hallmark is an assessment of a shared working methodology based on the core standards for high quality information: accuracy, impartiality, independence, legality.