Editors Weblog: Search Results

Introducing Social Pulse: Reuters' new social media hub

Posted by Emma Heald on February 6, 2012 at 9:38 AM

Facebook's $5 billion IPO filing this week has left the world in little doubt about the growing importance of social media in our lives. Now, both adapting to this trend and looking at its power, Reuters has launched a social media hub with a special focus on the interaction between social media and business.

Social Pulse, as the new hub is called, contains a curated selection of news from across Reuters' social media networks. The top section, titled The Hit List, features the most popular stories shared by people followed by Reuters accounts and Reuters journalists on Twitter. In a blogpost about Social Pulse, Reuters stresses that it follows influential "newsmakers", to bring its readers stories popular with the people who are setting the news agenda. The section is managed through the curation company Percolate, also used by IPG and American Express.

For the rest of this article please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

China and India gaining prominence in international newspapers

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 27, 2012 at 4:24 PM

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.

Media links of the day

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 25, 2012 at 6:25 PM

Should reporters be aiming for print bylines? The Columbia Journalism Review reflects on why journalists still care about seeing their name in print.

The Knight Center's Journalism in the Americas Blog shares a list of crowd-sourcing websites from across Latin America. One example is the Mapa Delictivo, created by El Universal, which tracks crimes in Mexico City.

Poynter has published a discussion with Knight News Challenge winner Christina Xu about how microgrants can help fuel innovative journalism.

Nieman Lab reports that the Public Insight Network, American Public Media's network of sources, is hiring its own reporting team to turn more of the information that its members produce into stories.

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

The road to credibility in the Arab World

Posted by Emma Heald on January 24, 2012 at 11:27 AM

How can the media regain public trust as a credible source of news, participants contemplated at the 5th Arab Free Press Forum in Tunis. After years of propaganda, it is difficult for newly-free publications in the Arab World to establish themselves as trustworthy sources of news, particularly when facing competition from blogs and social media.

Hussam Eddin Muhammed, columnist for Palestinian-owned, London-based paper Al-Quds al-Arabi, said that respecting the reader and the viewer is very important. There are both journalists who risk their lives to bring accurate news to the public, and then there are media that just offer incorrect news.

Archant brings reader involvement into local coverage with Citizenside

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 17, 2012 at 3:57 PM

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.

The "Truth vigilante" debate: an obvious question or a challenging discussion?

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 13, 2012 at 6:00 PM

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.

Media links of the day

Posted by Emma Heald on January 6, 2012 at 6:02 PM

Who owns a journalist's Twitter account, the individual or their employer, asks Cleland Thom on Press Gazette's blog. If a journalist moves to another publication, can they take their account with them?

Tumblr is forming its own editorial team to help promote stories people write and share on the network, reported Business Insider after a meeting with the five-year-old company's 25-year-old founder David Karp. Tumblr raised $85 million in September and, as Business Insider said, it has a lot to prove in 2012.

Twenty-four journalists were killed in 2011, one of the most 'challenging and tragic' years for the countries of the Americas, said the Inter American Press Association in its 2011 review of the state of press freedom.

Social media is on the rise in India, according to a Nielsen report covered by Social Times.

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

Media links of the day

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 23, 2011 at 5:32 PM

SOPA: who is for and who is against the controversial American online piracy act? 120 companies have publicly shown support for the bill, whereas only 40 have declared they are against the bill.

Three years after receiving multiple complaints about a TV broadcast, new media privacy guidelines have been published in Australia.

The Argentinean government has taken control over the one and only newsprint manufacturer in the country, previously owned by two major newspapers. The president claims this will encourage media plurality by stopping the 15% mark-up charged to rival newspapers. Opponents say it will harm freedom of expression.

Anne Sinclair, wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, may become the editorial director of the French language Huffington Post.

The Eurozone crisis explained: The BBC uses an infographic to unravel the complex causes of the Euro's troubles.

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

Sources: The Associate Press, The BBC, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, TechCrunch

Al Jazeera English wins greater US recognition with duPont award

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 21, 2011 at 6:31 PM

Al Jazeera English has won its first Alfred I. duPont award for excellence in broadcast and digital journalism, announced the Columbia School of Journalism this morning. According to Columbia's website, the prize is the "equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes" for broadcast journalism.

The award recognises the quality of the report "Haiti - Six Months on", part of Al Jazeera English's Faultlines documentary series. The program examines the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010 and is praised by the Columbia School of Journalism as "an emotional, accurate and visceral report about the lack of progress in reconstruction".

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists expands members

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 21, 2011 at 4:32 PM

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project founded by Centre for Public Integrity, has announced the addition of 41 new members, which brings the total number 158 journalists positioned across the world, collaborating to uncover issues of corruption and abuses of power that span borders. In the interest of transparency, the ICIJ publishes a list of its member here.

The ICIJ was founded in 1997 and offers journalists access to the resources of the Centre for Public Integrity: computer-assisted reporting specialists, public records experts, fact-checkers and lawyers, for example. ICIJ members can then partner with journalists who operate in territories where resources are scarce or press freedom is limited, in order to investigate crime and corruption where it would otherwise go unreported. The ICIJ is also associated with a global network of non-profit journalism organisations and networks that can provide training and funding for investigative projects for those who need it.

Will printed newspapers be extinct in 5 years?

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 16, 2011 at 3:18 PM

A new study from the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future states that the majority of newspapers in the USA will cease to exist in printed form within the next five years. The report asked whether America had arrived at a "digital turning point" and examined the role of new, often disruptive, digital technologies in American politics, media, communication and the American lifestyle in general.

The report concluded that, as print circulation continues to drop, most newspapers will suffer, causing them to terminate printing operations altogether. Whether publications stand a chance of maintaining printed editions seems to be a question of size; large organisations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, could potentially keep their printed editions, whilst local weeklies presumably thanks to their small numbers of staff and dedicated readerships, could also keep their printed editions.

What the top 40 stories shared on Facebook say about journalism

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 15, 2011 at 4:02 PM

The top 40 most shared stories in America during 2011 have been revealed by Facebook. So what does America's 'most shared' list tell us about the state of media consumption and journalism in the US today?

The Huffington Post dominated topped the chart. 10 articles from the online-only news organisation feature in the list, more than any other outlet. The highest charting entry from the HuffPo was entitled: 'Michelle Obama dances 'The Dougie' & 'the Running Man''. Not exactly Pulitzer winning reporting. However, when it comes to all things political, HuffPo Politics was the most visited political news website in the USA this September, according to comScore.

Eric Eldon of TechCrunch judged the contents of the list to be "sensationalised" and "polarized" reporting, with few contributions from non-mainstream media outlets. It is interesting to note that provocative headlines like "Should the American flag be banned in America?", from Fox News made the chart at number 32 above MSNBC and CNN articles detailing President Obama's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death, which came in a 35 and 36 respectively. The CNN article reporting the news of Bin Laden's death entitled 'Osama Bin Laden, the face of terror, killed in Pakistan' charted at number four.

NPR granted $1.5 million by the Knight Foundation to fund digital journalism training

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 14, 2011 at 5:53 PM

It's not just print that's going digital, but radio as well.

NPR has been granted $1.5 million by the Knight Foundation to train staff at local radio stations to use digital media effectively. The money will be used to help member stations collaborate with each other as part of a news network and to grow the stations' audience across different platforms.

The Knight Foundation's funding will power a two-year program, training reporters at 70 of NPR's 268 stations. The scheme follows on from the $1.5 million grant that the foundation gave NPR in 2007 to improve its journalists' digital skills.

Hard times for the LA Times as editor stands down

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 14, 2011 at 1:48 PM

Times are tough for the LA Times as Russ Stanton, who has been editor of the paper for the past four years, is standing down amidst the expectation of more job cuts.

Stanton leaves the news organisation on December 23rd and will be replaced by managing editor Davan Maharaj.

The LA Times published a positive review of Stanton's achievements with the paper, noting that under his leadership the paper extended its digital reach to over 17 million readers and won three Pulitzer Prizes.

Ethical code for cartoonists?

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 12, 2011 at 3:42 PM

Plagiarism: it's an act that is strictly against various ethical codes and industry guidelines followed by many journalists the world over. However, recently the issue has become a problem not only for journalists, but for the cartoonists as well.

At the beginning of November, the cartoonist for Urban Tulsa Weekly, David Simpson, resigned after he was discovered to have plagiarised material from the late, great, Pulitzer-winning Jeff MacNelly.

Last week, another incident of alleged plagiarism occurred, in which the work of Jeff Stahler of The Columbus Dispatch bore a close resemblance to a piece published in 2009 in the New Yorker by cartoonist David Sipress.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) now has to decide how to react to Stahler's case, as he was suspended from the Columbus Dispatch on grounds that he lifted text and visuals from Sipress's work. The AAEC are currently consulting their bylaws regarding this incident.

The citizens agenda: Guardian US and NYU team up for election coverage

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 9, 2011 at 12:42 PM

The Guardian's US operations and New York University's Studio 20 programme have teamed up to ensure that the voices of ordinary American citizens are heard in the coverage of the coming presidential elections. The joint venture, entitled "Citizens Agenda", sees Amanda Michel, The Guardian US Open Editor, and Jay Rosen, Journalism professor at NYU, working together to over see project that aims to allow citizens to decide the focus of election coverage.

The two previously collaborated on The Huffington Post's "Off The Bus" project in 2008 that generated pro-am presidential election campaign coverage, and which was re-launched earlier this year in advance of the 2012 election.

Intermittent pay-walls - a tempting proposition?

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 8, 2011 at 1:40 PM

MediaNews Group has decided to cease printing Monday editions of some of its papers and, in compensation, the papers will drop their pay walls for twenty four hours.

Three California papers, the Times-Standard, The Reporter and The Times-Herald will cease printing and will try this intermittent pay-wall strategy, while the Oakland Tribune, The Argus and Daily Review will not be delivered to subscribers on a Monday but will be available for sale. Times-Standard print subscribers will no longer have to pay any additional cost for their online readership, as of January 9th.

MediaNews recently came under the leadership of John Paton and Digital First Media, along with the Journal Register Company. The decision to stop printing for a day is clearly a money-saving measure in a company that plans to put more emphasis on digital, and the dropping of the paywall could have interesting consequences.

A new look for StumbleUpon

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 6, 2011 at 1:38 PM

StumbleUpon has redesigned its website and the changes are of more than passing interest.

The 'social discovery engine', which asks users to register things they like and then guides them at random through to related sites, unrolled the changes yesterday.

The alterations follow a rise in visibility for StumbleUpon. In July GigaOm reported that StumbleUpon was sending more traffic to American websites than Facebook. Its number of regular users doubled in 16 months, now totaling more than 20 million. It boasts 33 million monthly unique visitors.

So what exactly is different?

Community marriage: Spot.Us merges with the Public Insight Network

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 1, 2011 at 12:50 PM

The community-funded news platform Spot.Us announced this week that it has been acquired by the Public Insight Network (PIN).

Spot.Us is site that allows readers to make microdonations towards journalism stories. The site displays journalist's pitches for public interest stories as well as readers' tips and suggested assignments. Users can donate to individual projects, and when the funding target is reached, the journalist who has proposed the story is paid to write it. To preserve editorial independence, there's a limit on how much individual users can donate. The finished story is licensed under Creative Commons, and Spot.Us distributes it to as many publishing outlets as possible.

Spot.Us was launched in November 2008 by David Cohn, with the aid of $340,000 of funding from the Knight News Foundation. Its business model has developed since its launch; in May 2010 it unrolled a "community centered advertising project" which allowed users to respond to market research surveys in exchange for credit to fund stories on the site.

PIN is part of American Public Media (APM), a non-profit organisation that is the second-largest distributor of public radio programming in the US.

Wikileaks: Cablegate, one year on

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 29, 2011 at 1:33 PM

"One year ago today we put our beliefs before our lives, released Cablegate and changed the world." WikiLeaks tweeted today.

The organisation has just won a major Australian prize for journalistic excellence, the Walkley Award for 'Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism'. The Walkley Foundation stated that Wikileaks has earned this recognition of its "courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of journalism: justice through transparency".

The release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is often viewed as one of the most radical events in journalism, with many supporters claiming that the information revealed by the cables contributed to the end of the war in Iraq and helped spark the Tunisian uprisings which then spread to become the phenomenon widely referred to as the 'Arab Spring'.

The success of Wikileaks has led to many people seeing this kind of online-based leaking system as a new model for journalism; but one that is not without its flaws.

Digital Mastery: the rise and rise of The Economist

Posted by Hannah Vinter on November 29, 2011 at 11:09 AM

Once upon a time, people may have stereotyped of The Economist as a dry, formal publication, which aged company executives would leaf through in their dusty studies. But if those days ever existed, they are certainly confined to the past now.

The international magazine currently has over 100,000 digital-only subscribers and more than a million monthly mobile readers. Economist readers have downloaded more than 3 million apps since their launch and online traffic has grown by 45% since September of last year. The publication now has 7 million online users.

These figures were reported in the interim financial report released by The Economist Group today, which shows a run of spectacular success for the publication. The report announces a 6% year-on-year rise in operating profits, totaling £26.2 million, and a revenue increase of 4%, to £164.3 million.

On the cutting edge: digital investigative journalism in Latin America

Posted by Hannah Vinter on November 24, 2011 at 10:09 AM

When it comes to press freedom, Latin America's reputation is less than stellar. Over the course of last week the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) reported an arson attack against a radio station in Argentina, two newspaper employees going missing in Mexico, a journalist being beaten and stabbed eight times in Bolivia, and an editor going on hunger strike in Venezuela to protest his imprisonment. And that's not even a complete list.

But despite the challenges, there are reporters who won't be deterred from chasing serious stories. Their work is independent, investigative, online - and thriving.

Plaza Pública

One of the most recent examples is Plaza Pública in Guatemala. This digital publication was founded in February 2011, and is partly funded by the Jesuit University Rafael Landívar, partly by the London-based Open Society Foundations. The paper's founder and editor in chief Martín Rodríguez Pellecer told the Editors Weblog that he was originally invited by the university to create an "in depth" newspaper that would be "different from Guatemala's superficial and more conservative media".

US court rules that Twitter users have no "reasonable expectation of privacy"

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 23, 2011 at 2:57 PM

Does the US government have the right to read you Twitter messages? Of course not, would be most people's reaction. Unfortunately, thanks to a US district court ruling made on November 10, the US government can now compel Twitter to release information that most people would deem private, such as your IP address, the content of your direct messages and your session times and activities, according to OWNI.

Why is this acceptable? The reason, the judge explained, was because in agreeing with the terms of service, Twitter users "voluntarily relinquished any reasonable expectation of privacy".

Twitter attempted to fight the ruling over a protracted year-long appeal process. However, losing the case has created a potentially dangerous precedent: the ruling could mean that any website with servers in the US could be asked to hand the data held on those servers to the government, without the need to obtain a warrant.

Yahoo! Livestand- will it sink or swim?

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 4, 2011 at 5:10 PM

"Yahoo!'s Livestand is like a pretty girl (or guy) in high school: looks nice, moves pretty well, but mostly empty inside" Tweeted GigaOm's Matthew Ingram on November 3. Not exactly glowing praise. The GigaOm review itself, by Darrell Etherington, wasn't that much better, opting for similar "awkward teen" analogies.

Generally, the consensus is this: visually, Livestand does not disappoint - but in terms of navigation and its lack of social features, it leaves something to be desired.

This is not great news for Yahoo!, who need to distinguish themselves from the broad field of digital newsstands, some of the most widely known of which are independent start-ups like Zite and Flipboard. Google's attempt at creating a digital newsstand has yet to become available to consumers, although the project is allegedly in the work. This initially negative reception is not going to encourage users to adopt Livestand over the competition.

Objectivity v Transparency - does journalism need a new ideology?

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 2, 2011 at 5:06 PM

What is the hallmark of good journalism? Objectivity would be one of the standard replies: neutral journalism that is not partisan and that steers clear of disseminating personal opinions.

Actually, the answer is just not quite as simple as that. Hang on to your hats, people, it's time for an ethics class...

Wait a second, I hear you cry, before you take me back to journalism school - what's wrong with objectivity? Here's the thing: now it's obligatory for every journalist to have their hand hermetically sealed to a smartphone so they can dutifully maintain a Twitter account. It is becoming increasingly essential and easy to maintain an online presence; you need a Facebook page, a Linkedin profile and a FourSquare account. These are all useful tools in their own way. However, all this social media activity means that it is becoming ever harder to deny the fact that journalists are people. Shocking, I know, but it's true. Journalists are people - and people are not objective.

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