Results matching “every citizen i”

With all the recent developments in media consumption on mobile devices, from state of the art e-readers and the sleek iPad to the advent of countless newspaper iPhone apps, it is no wonder technology has taken center stage among news companies.

Mercedes Bunz from Media Guardian spoke to executives from The New York Times and CNN, companies who have built remarkable online presences, about how to keep up with technology companies who usually figure among the biggest sources for news on the Internet.

The International Press Association, an organization representing all foreign reporters stationed in Belgium, is hosting a meeting today to discuss employment prospects for journalists reporting in Brussels.

The meeting, entitled "What does the future hold for Brussels-based journalists?" will attempt to address the exodus of much of the European Union press corps over the past five years and the diminishing presence of foreign press in Brussels.  According to a press release, the API "considers an urgent taking stock and a broad debate are imperative."  The group hopes to address three main concerns:

The New York Times' hyperlocal efforts will soon be supplemented by its new partnership with newswire Fwix.

Created 2 years ago by then-21-year-old Darian Shirazi, Fwix's CEO and founder, the newswire relies on a number of sophisticated search algorithms that pull together news articles and blog posts related to a certain area from across the web.  Fwix programmers also select local news sources and blogs to watch for relevant items to aggregate.

This allows for articles on the web to offer readers a series of related links pertaining to news from around that area.  A reader of an article about robberies in New York city's Chelsea neighborhood could theoretically be guided to further articles about Chelsea using Fwix's software.

Although checking sources is a fundamental rule of journalism, with the increasing pervasiveness of social media sites like Twitter, the temptation to discard this old rule can become too strong for some journalists to resist.

As the Press Gazette's Dominick Ponsford posted on The Wire, reporters for various newpapers in the UK used Twitter as a source for an article covering rumors of marital difficulties between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. The Independent's Steven Glover reprimanded the reporters for their failure to fact-check.

"A Twitter rumour alleging adultery on the part of a home-grown politician would not be taken up so eagerly by British newspapers," he said. "We apply more stringent standards to rumours about our own politicians."

Despite the dizzying amount of news content available online today, it seems many readers are reluctant to venture too far from their circuit of favorite sites.

According to a new study released Monday by the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, only 35 percent of people who use the internet to read news have a favorite website, and only 21 percent are "monogamous," or rely on only one site for news. Of the same audience, 57 percent rely on two to five sites for news.

Al Jazeera English - the English-language arm of the Qatari news channel - has teamed up with YouTube to cover a wide range of Iraqi voices and their opinion on their country's democracy on the day of Iraq's first nationwide parliamentary election since 2005, according to the Official YouTube blog.

The short videos give us an insight into the Iraqi voices that are rarely heard in news coverage coming from that area. One video shows one Iraqi who showed up for voting, but found out his name was not on the list. Another one shows another Iraqi complaining that not all candidates are honest.

In Janowo, an 850-person village in north eastern Poland, on a Monday last month, a dozen people - mostly teenagers or over 40s - were gathering in a multi-activity meeting hall. They were listening to Igor Hrywna, a journalist at Gazeta Olsztynska, the dominant newspaper in this "Warmia-Mazury voivodship" (Varmia-Masuria). That day he left his base in the regional capital of Olsztyn to meet this group for the third time in one month. With his assistance, they are learning how to contribute to the recently launched hyperlocal website janowo.wm.pl, covering the 3,000 people "gmina" (commune) centered on Janowo, one of the smallest of the region.

"There are fewer than 120 broadband Internet subscribers today. Our goal by the end of the year is to have at least 6000 unique users", explains Hrywna, who supervises Gazeta Olsztynska's commune portals. "To achieve this, we are organizing two to three hour long training sessions for citizen journalists. I also learn from them!" The training for citizen journalists always begins with the easiest things, like sending pictures with a short description. It includes how to search and browse in the website, how to write, and how to be accurate.

Gazeta Olsztynska's hyperlocal websites like Janowo's are typically 80% filled by local citizens, with user generated content (UGC) mostly on social events. Staff journalists provide the rest, through their assistance and through their own written and edited pieces. "Small communities know what kind of information they need. That is why we base our portals on civil journalism supported by our professional knowledge. The goal is to have the so far marginalized villages really exist in the social cyberspace," comments editor-in-chief Ewa Bartnikowska.

During the Janowo training session, a retired music teacher, Janina Sadowska, who has been a reader of the regional daily for a long time, explained that she was there for two reasons. "First, it is a natural prolongation of my habit of sending readers' comments to the editor. Second, I am at the head of a women's club, and we want to have a presence in our gmina's website."

The young aspiring journalists, between 12 and 18 years old, came from a nearby agricultural school. One of them was filming the reunion with a small camera, planning to post some sequences in the website. Another one, Przemyslaw Ciesielski, 18, explained in clear English: "We don't buy newspapers, but we are interested in news."

For Jarek Tokarczyk, the president of Edytor, Gazeta Olsztynska's publishing house, the involvement of the young in his online projects is critical, because "they already know the Internet, which is accessible at school, even in the most remote villages; through them we can also reach their parents for other publications." Bartnikowska added: "It is very important for us to have roots in print, even though we go at the lowest geographic or smallest community levels only online. This strategy for localism is also only possible if we have social and not only media projects."

Edytor is already managing 35 such hyperlocal websites, as a way to get closer also to small advertisers. In the villages, the biggest companies are often the bakery which employs only eight persons, or the hairdresser with a staff of four. "We want to reach the places where print is not profitable, asking our advertising salespersons to monetize potential markets which have been ignored until now. For this purpose we also train our print representatives to understand the web, setting online revenue goals for each of them," explains Tokarczyk. "We know that the number of Internet users in the country and small towns is going to grow. We have to do it now because tomorrow will be too late." This "deep in localities" strategy is timely with new legislation to be implemented in the coming weeks, for broadband access everywhere in Poland. There are also local governments elections in September, which will boost the interest for hyperlocal news.

Gazeta Olsztynska and its separate edition Dziennik Elblaski, covering an area integrated only ten years ago into the region, have a quasi-monopoly in Varmia-Masuria, one of Poland's 17 voivodships. National daily Gazeta Wyborcza has local editions, but they are read principally in the biggest cities like Olsztyn, where they have a weaker position. In addition to the Internet portals, Edytor controls 21 hyperlocal weekly freesheets, which encompass numerous news areas, social to e-commerce activities. Each has its online version, is available as a supplement of the daily, and corresponds more or less to a county ("powiat").

Janowo, for instance, is attached to the local newsroom based in Nidzica and covering a 35,000 people powiat. Weekly Gazeta Nidzicka's editor-in-chief Jerzy Grala is assisted by four reporters and three sales representatives. The portal nidzica.wm.pl is updated at least twice a day, and links to and sometimes feeds the central newspaper's website gazetaolsztynska.wm.pl. It is enriched by content provided by its communal websites, including janowo.wm.pl, which is updated a few times a week. Grala also posts occasional on his blog grala.wm.pl, which is easily accessible from his newsroom's portal.

There are 25 regional dailies in Poland in total, Edytor being an exception as an independent group. Most others are controlled either by Polskapresse (owned by Germany's Verlagsgruppe Passau) or Media Regionalne (owned by Great Britain's Mecom). The Varmia-Masuria voivodship is one of the less populated, with 1.4 million inhabitants, out of a total population of 38 million in the coutry (plus about 6 millions Poles living abroad). The region has a particularly high unemployment rate, exceeding 19% versus less than 12% on average nationally.

Given this context, Gazeta Olsztynska's intense efforts to develop online activities and "deep localism" are unusual. "We have over 30 equipped multimedia journalists covering the region, who already produce around 600 pieces of different information every month. With the contributions of the mobilized civil journalists, we expect to double within one year the level of 500,000 unique visitors we got last month," explains Bartnikowska.

Edytor is multiplying editorial and marketing projects, both in print and online, including 200 different supplements and freesheets, family service and obituary websites, a schools of excellence campaign (proposing pupils to write about their schools), celebration contests requiring payment via SMS, special publications promoting the natural wonders of the region and its lakes. "The wm.pl suffix that we use online [for "Warmia-Mazury"] is the most important brand here. We want to be a regional Google!" Tokarczyk says.

Another illustration of Edytor's focus on "hyperlocalities" are its Nowe Miasto operations. In this 11000 people town - or large village - about 85 kilometers far from Olsztyn, it publishes weekly Gazeta Nowomiejska, covering a population four times bigger. Its online hyperlocal news endeavours are already one year old, as shown in the "gminas" listed at the bottom of portal nowemiasto.wm.pl. Unlike in Nidzica, the newsroom is not based on a main central square, but its position may be more strategic. Gazeta Nowomiejska is located on a street in front of the church where, for deeply catholic Poland, mass sermons easily hit the headlines and a significant part of social life relates to religious activities. "The priest sometimes promotes our portal during the mass," says chief editor Stanislaw Ulatowski, also a local celebrity as a print journalism veteran.

His deputy, Lukasz Paczkowski, is a young online and multimedia reporter and Internet geek, who manages his blog paczkowski.wm.pl, which is also displayed in the front page of Gazeta Nowomiejska's portal. "We start updating the website before 10 am, when most people open their computer, until 8.30pm", he says. His partnership with Ulatowski also illustrates the complementary cross-promotion between the platforms. "The photo galleries encourage user generated content" comments Paczkowski. "Our online correspondents are very helpful, because our staff cannot be everywhere in the county, and they are more likely to create communes' portals. Then we print the most newsworthy pieces in the weekly."

To extend his team's expertise, Tokarczyk has built a partnership with the promoters of the C3 concept ("Complete Community Connection"), Chuck Peters and Steve Buttry in the United States (the former is the CEO of Iowa's Gazette Communications, and the latter just left this paper to be the director of community engagement at a high-profile, Washington DC based digital start-up). In spite of being based in a remote region of central Europe, Edytor is being very pro-active in looking for ideas directly provided by the world's top experts in its fields of coverage.

Along with the hyperlocal websites, the Gazeta Olsztynska team has also launched numerous thematic portals about students, community centers, and even an "ethnic" group recently. Website ukraincy.wm.pl is dedicated to the 60,000 strong Ukrainian community, made of descendents or survivors of the group displaced by force to this part of Poland in 1947. It is benefitting from and promoting the revival of their language and religion (Greek Orthodox). "Our aim is to have half of the community visit the portal at least once a month by the end of this year. It will be 100% UGC, and fun," says Hrywna, who is also Polish-Ukrainian.

The BBC will be teaming up with the non-profit blogging network of citizen journalists, Global Voices, to offer a "different range of perspectives and commentary from around the world," according to the BBC.

Content from Global Voices will be incorporated into the BBC's SuperPower season coverage, a special series on the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.

The BBC will be selecting and linking to some Global Voices stories, as well as asking GV editors to give their views on how the mainstream media handle the news. The editor of the BBC's News website, Steve Herrmann, explained that he believes Global Voices and the wide range of opinions they feature could add an "interesting dimension to some of (the BBC's) news coverage."

A Facebook group in Italy entitled "the dignity of journalists and the respect of citizens" and created on the evening of Saturday 27 February to protest an incorrect statement made by a journalist on the TG1 news programme the previous day has attracted almost 140,000 members in a few days.

The journalist's "false information" was that David Mills, the British lawyer involved in a legal battle for allegedly accepting a bribe from Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, had been acquitted. In fact, the case had been thrown out of a Milan court under Italy's statute of limitations because too much time had elapsed since the alleged crime. Mills was ordered to pay €250,000 to the Italian state for damaging its image, the Times reported.  A related corruption case against Berlusconi himself is likely to be thrown out also. 

T. Christian Miller of the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica recently won the prestigious 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Editor & Publisher reports that it was a collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit news outfit that produced Miller's winning report into abuses of insurance coverage for private contractors in war zones.

Just last week, the winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism - usually given to courageous and skillful reporting - were announced, NPR's On the Media explains. Among the usual big media winners was a surprising win - the anonymous Iranians or Iranian who captured the death of the 26-year old protestor Neda Agha-Soltan on tape in the violent aftermath of the Islamic Republic's contested elections of June 2009.

Paris-based French daily Le Parisien and its national arm Aujourd'hui have developed a user-generated section of their site, in conjunction with Citizenside, a citizen photo journalism agency that recently launched similar projects with the French branch of free daily Metro, and French radio station RTL.

The new site, You, invites readers to provide text, photo and video contributions, or to alert the community of a specific event.  Items are immediately published on the site, but Le Parisien staff will check the authenticity of contributions (using Citizenside's technology) and then mark them as 'verified.'

Carlo de Benedetti, president of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, whose publications include the daily newspaper La Repubblica and weekly magazine L'espresso, spoke in Paris about his support for paid content online and his belief that both Google and Internet providers should be pushed to share income with content producers.

De Benedetti gave a speech at SciencesPo university entitled "Internet and newspapers: the voice of democracy against populism," in which he outlined his belief that the Internet is crucial for spreading information more widely and is a force to be reckoned with, but that this does come with definite risks to democracy.

In terms of democracy, the fact that the Internet gives a clear platform to public opinion and allows any citizen to contribute to this, constitutes "extraordinary progress," De Benedetti said. However, there are serious dangers that accompany such a transformation, said De Benedetti, as such a system also gives a voice to the uninformed and the demagogues.

The importance of newspapers over other media

The vast abundance of information available online (although in many ways welcome) also leads to a complete lack of hierarchy of information. The fundamental role of newspapers, to organize and analyse the public debate, is threatened by this 'open-source' landscape.

Expanding on the importance of newspapers to a democracy, De Benedetti explained how unlike Internet or television, newspapers are capable of offering their readers not only information but the structure and context to allow them to come to their own conclusions on issues and events.

De Benedetti expressed concern and criticism about the state of television in Italy: as prime minister Silvio Berlusconi owns or controls a significant number of channels, and "commercial television imposes a kind of cultural hegemony." A citizen who stays informed only via television is weaker, he maintained, However, as De Benedetti noted, "television is already last century. It will continue to exist, but as a part of the Internet."

He does not believe that the Internet will soon replace newspapers, but suggests that newspapers can retain their traditional role as the "sherpas of information" on the Internet. "The presence of islands of quality news in the ocean of fragments of information... is absolutely necessary," he said.

Paid online content

De Benedetti is a strong supporter of paid online content. Consumers need to pay for news, he argued. Without the readers who were paying €1 each day for the print copy of La Repubblica, the paper would not have been able to carry out its ten questions to Berlusconi campaign, to which the prime minister eventually responded in November, hence proving its validity, De Benedetti said. "News that is free is worth nothing," he said: if you want your content to be valued you have to charge for it.

He admitted that what people require from a newspaper is changing, and that newspapers must embrace these changes and adapt their offering. "Now news is a commodity. You don't buy a paper to learnt what has happened: rather to understand why it has happened."

 "The news that goes deeper, that explains clearly, that verifies sources and adds context, is news that costs and as such, must be protected... whether on paper or on the web, on television or on the radio," De Benedetti said. Although the web has allowed newspapers to reach a large number of readers, continuing to offer news free of charge will soon "annihilate" daily newspapers and all quality news, he maintains. "Anybody can understand that paying for a good product is reasonable, even if it is online."

However, to make online content work, payment must be simple, De Benedetti stressed, something like Apple's iTunes. "Simplicity and 'automisation' of payment is absolutely key," he said. Journalism Online's Press+ has potential, he believes, as "it is difficult to imagine that consumers will willingly purchase content from multiple publishers who all use different platforms," and Journalism Online is offering a single payment system.

Charging online might have to be a gradual process, he explained, first involving making users pay for content that is not currently available online, and for content that is specially created for this aim, "if possible exclusive and elite."

Contributions from search engines...

Publishers should take a strong stance against search engines, De Benedetti suggested. "Google cannot exploit the content created by others without giving anything in return," he argued. "Aggregators do not respect the rules which protect intellectual property rights."

He pointed to the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency's scheme as something which could serve as a model for the industry regarding obtaining proper compensation for copyrighted content. The NLA works on behalf of the UK's newspapers and licenses businesses organisations to make paper and digital copies of newspaper content, its website explains. The collected fees are distributed to the publishers.

... and internet service providers

It's not just Google who should have to share revenue with publishers, believes De Benedetti, but also internet service providers, who he said "continue to exploit - just like the search engines - the traffic generated by quality news content." Paradoxically, he added, "the more content that is free, the more the revenue of internet operators increases, and the more that of the publishers who created this content decreases." Publishers must seek to persuade telecom companies to share some of their revenue linked to Internet access.

De Benedetti's views on the necessity for paid online content seem clearly in line with those of several other publishers as charging consumers online seems to be becoming an increasingly more attractive and feasible option, as the New York Times and other smaller newspapers jump on board.. L'Espresso group's star newspaper, La Repubblica, currently offers free online access, however, charging only for e-editions and archives. The paper just started to charge for its iPhone application, offering subscriptions for €4.99 per month or €44.99 per year.

His interest in coming to some kind of revenue sharing agreement with search engines and aggregators is also something which is shared by other publishers, some of whom are demanding more control over their content. As De Benedetti noted, Google has recently been presenting a more conciliatory face to publishers, by making its 'First Click Free' scheme more flexible, for example. The Internet giant also offers newspapers a revenue-sharing opportunity on Google News in the form of Fast Flip, and more user-friendly ways to display news, such as Living Stories or Timeline. But it seems unlikely that the company is planning to offer any direct cut of its main ad revenue to publishers in the near future.

Suggesting that ISPs also have an obligation to pay content providers appears more controversial, but it is an idea that has arisen before. Last year in France Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, suggested a kind of tax on ISPs which would then be distributed to content producers. The UK National Union of Journalists proposed a similar measure to support public service broadcasting in April 2009. Such legislation would be likely to face significant opposition, however.

Consortiums led by community publisher Glacier Media and National Post President Paul Godfrey are both preparing bids to buy the newspapers of bankrupt media giant CanWest Global Communications, the Globe and Mail reported Wednesday.

CanWest Limited Partners newspaper division owns 35 small community papers and eleven metropolitan dailies, including the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, and Edmonton Journal. They also control Canada's second most circulated national newspaper, the National Post. The pending sale was described as the "largest auction of media assets ever undertaken in Canada" by Grant Robertson and Susan Krashinsky of the Globe and Mail.

The Paris-based citizen photojournalism agency Citizenside has partnered with Metro International to launch a new website for citizen reporting.

The site, MetroReporter, allows readers to upload and share their news photos and video. All contributions are vetted by editors before being posted. If they are published in print or on Metro's primary site, the member is paid between €10 and €70. Membership of MetroReporter is free and Metro has agreed to purchase and publish user contributions on a regular basis. This means that an international publication has plans to regularly pay its audience to contribute content, rather than expecting user-generated content to be free.

Non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica is taking advantage of the Super Bowl to dig into the fundraising efforts of politicians, Poynter Online reports.

Reporter Marcus Stern planned to use the football game, held yesterday, to spot members of Congress who were attending and figure out how they obtained their tickets. But since he knew that trying to contact 535 members of Congress would be too big a task for one person, he turned the investigation into a crowdsourcing effort and asked professional journalists and the public to help collaborate.

"To some extent, this is going to be a test of the privacy or the openness of members of Congress when it comes to fundraising," Stern told Poynter Online.

It's a question that can get lost in all the talk of business models and content creation: how might journalism best serve the public?

In Australia, the latest group to ponder this is The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, directed by a group of journalists, editors, academics and members of the community. Part of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne, it is setting up a project called YouCommNews, modeled on the American site Spot.Us, which will allow the audience to commission the stories they want to see.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Dr Margaret Simons, chair of the foundation, and to David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

The Guardian has launched a new data search website, allowing readers to search government data from the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

After these different governments made their statistics available on individual websites, The Guardian has collected them in one place, at their new World Government Data website. This enables users to not only search the information, but also collect similar datasets from around the world, and find the best dataset by ranking them.

The more tech-savvy users will be able to transform the data into visualisations, mash-ups and apps. The websites invites users to post such creations.

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

At least some of the bankrupt newspapers owned by Canwest may have found a buyer, Editor and Publisher reports. A group of investors is preparing bids for three of the largest dailies: The National Post, The Montreal Gazette and The Ottawa Citizen.

The consortium includes Beryl Wajsman, editor of Quebec's largest English-language weekly, The Suburban; Raymond Heard, a former Montreal Star managing editor and former editor of the London Observer News Service; and Jerry S. Grafstein, a former Canadian senator and founder of the Toronto television station CITY-TV.

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

About a month ago, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, published a post on his blog about an idea that could make journalism better by allowing more people to participate in the journalistic process: ExplainThis.

Aware of the importance of context and research in the news environment, Rosen explained to the Poynter Online that his idea was based on a user-centric approach to news.

The Telegraaf Media Groep has the advantage of already having a significant presence in the news landscape of the Netherlands, and Brouwers hopes that his new network can collaborate with Telegraaf's more traditional properties. He realises, however, that his platform is going to be very different, and also that the Telegraaf newspapers will be careful about how much of their content they give away.