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The Press Complaints Commission today upheld a complaint against the Bristol Evening Post under Clause 5 (Intrusion into grief or shock) of the Editors' Code of Practice, after the local newspaper ran a story on the funeral of a young man who had committed suicide, the Guardian reported.

The complaint was made by the young man's mother who found the coverage upsetting and intrusive. The offending article included messages from flowers left outside the crematorium as well as photographs of the mourners, which were allegedly taken by a reporter hiding in the bushes in the surrounding area. The newspaper defended itself by stating that crematoriums were public events.

It has been a rough couple of years for the newspaper industry with the recession taking its toll on the financial stability of many organisations. In the past year alone at least ten publications have filed for bankruptcy and many have been forced to close their doors. With newspapers treading fast to try to keep their heads above water many have cut back funding for more costly types of news. One of the first things to go has been investigative journalism, considered by many publications to be a luxury. The time and investment of multiple resources in a single issue is something that many publications simply can no longer afford.

These cuts have raised alarm bells. The potential loss of 'the fourth estate' and 'government watchdog' have united many in the cause to protect the practice of journalism, even if the business and profitability of it is doomed to fail.

One method suggested to preserve this type of journalism is to run as a non-profit organisation. Seeking the status under the claim that journalism is a 'public good' publications are free from commerical pressures and the disappointment of dwindling circulation figures, relying only on donations from those who feel the cause worthy enough.

It is at this point that the Texas Tribune enters the scene. The online-only news site launched early last week as a non-profit venture in an attempt to fill a gap in quality local journalism in Texas. The Editors Weblog spoke with editor-in-chief, Evan Smith to look at Tribune's website and non-profit ambitions in closer detail.


The inspiration:
The big name in non-profit news is ProPublica. Led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, the organisation began publishing in June 2008 and has consistently drawn in large sums of donations, with key sponsor the Sandler Foundation contributing annually. ProPublica, which will write an article then offer it to a newspaper to publish, has carried out some impressive investigative feats to date, most notably its collaboration with the New York Times, published in August. The 13,000 word article which cost an estimated $400,000 to produce examined the events that took place at the Memorial Medical Centre following Hurricane Katrina. The piece highlighted the importance of such investigative journalism and made the need to save it even more apparent.
 
The Texas Tribune aims to achieve something similar on a smaller and more political scale, offering Texans a news source designed to compliment local newspapers that already exist: "We've made a point of not presenting this as a binary choice: A or B. We believe it's additive: A and B. Read your local paper and read us. In fact read as much stuff as there is out there" says Smith.

"We're simply presenting ourselves as one in a series of things that you need to read and listen to and view and access if you want to be a thoughtful and engaged Texan." 

In his first posting on the website Smith talked about what the Tribune was attempting to achieve: "What we mean to do on an ongoing basis is right there in our stated mission: to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern."

In ProPublica fashion, the Tribune has said that all the information published on its website is up for grabs for other media organisations as part of a content-sharing plan designed to aide other reporters who might not have the time to look into an issue in depth.  Matt Stiles, one of the Tribune's staff reporters writers told Poynter Online in an interview: "Ultimately, we'd like to tell every paper in the state, 'If you like this data set, just take it'."

"I hope reporters will come see the information, download it, remix it and be creative with it."

The build up:
In July this year Smith announced he was leaving his position as editor-in-chief of established Texas Monthly magazine to take up the post as CEO and editor of the Tribune. A few months later, the Tribune added Elise Hu, Emily Ramshaw and Matt Stiles to its list of experienced journalists.

In an interview with Poynter in September, Ramshaw talked of her decision to join the project: "I feel, and still feel, that the newspaper business is in serious crisis. I'm not content to cling to a deck chair and go down with a sinking ship."

Ramshaw worked for The Dallas Morning News for six years, the last three of which she was state investigative reporter.  "We're trying to prepare for the next incarnation of journalism. If this venture is going to work, it's going to work because serious, talented journalists were brave enough to take the risk," she said.

The Tribune has built up a selection of notable reporters willing to do this and Chairman and co-founder John Thorton had been quoted as saying: "We didn't hire journalists out of work. We hired reporters who their editors were pissed off that they lost them."

Smith and Thornton worked hard on securing donations, with Thornton himself donating $1 million to the Tribune. In early October the founders confirmed they had received a further $750, 000 in grants from the Houston Endowment and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Tribune is now only slighty short of the $4 million target it needs to continue running for two years, with a current total of $3.7 million.

The sum is considerable for a start up website, as paidContent's Staci Kramer has noted: "Unlike some of the new crop of local and regional news startups, the Tribune is launching with enough money for a well-paid staff of 16, including 11 reporters," referring to salaries of $315K for the editor in chief, and up to $90K for seasoned reporters.

As for promotion of the site itself, Smith told the Editors Weblog just how useful social networking sites have been. Regular updates for the public on the status of the site via Facebook, Twitter and the site's own newsletter built up a sense of curiosity over what exactly they had in store for last Tuesday's launch.
 
"We've been very aggressive on Facebook and Twitter both to promote the content and also to connect with our community of followers" said Smith. "We've also used both to aggressively push for funding. We've generated quite a lot of memberships in the Tribune which are much like memberships in public radio by pushing over Facebook and over Twitter messages that relate to our fundraising campaign, and they've been very successful," he says, citing the 1400 founding members who have given between $50 and $5000 to the Tribune out of their own pockets.

What does the site look like?
The website debuted with top stories on the mistreatment of disabled children in public schools, the Democratic lean of El Paso in an otherwise Republican state, and the results of a poll carried out by the Tribune and the University of Texas.

The site itself is divided into ten pages, the organisation of which differ from your average news website. Offering 11 databases under a section titled 'Library' for further reading, the databases contain information ranging from federal campaign donations, gubernatorial appointees and lawmaker spending. In addition to this there is a complete electoral directory of every Texan senator and governor- the site essentially offers a single space for complete personal and political data on the '242 occupants of the state's highest offices'.

It is clear that a lot of time has gone into collaborating this research, and according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the Waco Tribune-Herald has already taken advantage of the new resource and published some Tribune content. 

Aside from the databases, the site boasts eight of its own blogs and links to some 25 others; has a 'topics' section where stories can be found based on theme; a calender, where information about local events can be found or submitted; and a 'Tweetwire', a Twitter feed from all Texan politicians on the website's front page.

Compared to the recent launch of another local non-profit news website, Oakland Local, the Tribune's website is much more sophisticated. The Texan team have embraced the capacities of the internet and technology to their full, utilizing social media, widgets, videos, blogs and mobile applications- something Smith believes to be key to the way in which the use of media is changing.

"In consumption of media people are paying more attention to online media today then ever before," say Smith. "I look at my almost 13 year old daughter and how she consumes media and it's not at all in print it's almost entirely online and I think that's the trend line."

Smith suggests that publishers need to adapt to measure up to this changed method of consuming news: "You cannot simply go out and record the news, present that to people and believe that that's going to be enough. You need to give them the tools to better understand their world, to better know their state, to better know the people they elected, to better hold them accountable and that often is all not simply conventional reporting but the amassing and presenting of data that allows people to access the world in which they live from a more detailed level."

Why will the Tribune succeed where others have failed?
Whilst successful local non-profit news publications do exists, the Voice of San Diego and the MinnPost to name a few- there are also notable failures such as the Rocky Mountain Independent and InDenver Times, two online start-ups founded by Steve Foster earlier this year. How will the Tribune ensure that it doesn't suffer the same fate?

Smith says that the Tribune essentially has a better business plan, arguing that the RMI and InDenver Times failed because they were run by journalists, not business people and "didn't really have a plan for how to make the model sustainable."

Part of the reason the Tribune is choosing to remain online-only is because "the cost of printing a print publication for postage and paper and print facilities is so expensive that you reduce your overhead dramatically and therefore make it much more likely that your business model will sustain."

Of course the Tribune's has also managed to raise a healthy budget, further insulating itself against some of the problems faced by other publications. "Money is, as in all things, the mother's milk of your operation," Smith says, continuing on to mention that the having the financial capacity to buy the latest technology and hire top journalists will "go a very long way to allowing us to do our best work."

Smith's views bear resemblance to industry commentator Alan Mutter, who recently critized many online non-profit publications for not being business-minded enough. Mutter accuses these publications of "a suicidally stubborn determination on the part of the organizers to be in the business they want to be in, instead of attending to the business they need to attend to," and he argued early last month that, "A business, especially a start-up, requires far more than passion for the work. It requires close attention to the nuts and bolts of raising money, making sales and controlling expenses."

How will the Tribune navigate ethical issues?
A nagging question over the non-profit model is how publications will be able to resist influence from major donors. Smith argues that the seperation between donors and the editorial team is no different to the situation between advertisers and editorial: "I edited a magazine for nine years in which we had big advertisers who also happened to often be the subject of stories and the transactional economy that supports the operations of a for profit publication has no relationship what-so-ever to the journalism inside, or it shouldn't anyway, not at a good magazine and not at a good newspaper."

"Just because someone advertises doesn't mean you go easy on them or you go hard on their competitors."

Nevetherless, the non-profit news model is still in early stages and very dependent on the income from donors. Even for-profit news publications have not been immune to advertsing clients flexing their muscles in tough financial times, with a Detroit paper recently being accused of reporting on private health care following a request from client Humana (who subsequently purchased an ad next to the story).

What would Smith do if he was approached by a donor to cover a particular story? 

"Donors don't expect that were going to write about their issues or about their enemy's issues in a negative way, they're not looking for us to take sides- they're supporting the principle that hovers above all this activity: that journalism in the public interest has value."

"Any donor who is unhappy with the coverage we provide because of such an expectation is welcome to his or her money back," he says, adding: "I'd rather lose my funding then lose my integrity."

So are non-profits the next incarnation of journalism?
The wider debate on whether or not non-profits are the future of journalism has been raging for a while. Online magazine, Slate's Jack Shafer has weighed in for the negative: "In the current arrangement, we're substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately."

Thornton, the Tribune's chairman, hit back at the remarks: "I call it the Stockholm Syndrome. They are sympathizing with their advertiser-captors."

So who is right? Is the non-profit model the future of journalism?

Yes and no. It is unlikely to become a general solution for newspapers simply because of the huge sums of money involved, but for nieche reporting and more time/fund consuming journalism such as investigative reporting, it could definiatley be a viable option.

The idea compares favourably at least to the suggestion of government bailouts. As Thorton wrote of the "obvious fox-in-the-henhouse issues that arise--to mix animal metaphors--from government watchdogs funded out of government coffers."

As the first serious, state-focused news site with a decent enough amount of money behind it and what seems to be the right attitude toward embracing the capacities of the digital age and the changing face of journalism- whether or not the Texas Tribune succeeds will be key to the way in which the non-profit model is viewed.

As Tribune reporter Christe Hu suggests: "Journalism is at a crossroads right now. We're seeing not just survival of the fittest but a 'mutation of the species.' "

"I think the non-profit model has just as good a shot as anything else."

Good news for advertisers and their clients - the ad market is showing strong signs of recovery and growing business confidence, MediaGuardian reports of the quarterly Bellwether survey of UK companies.

Almost half of the companies surveyed (47%) reported improved financials in the third quarter, although 28% noted a decrease in advertising budget. This, however, must be compared to the 38% of companies who decreased ad spending in the second quarter. 15% reported a marketing budget increase.

This was the eight consecutive quarter in which Bellwether has found more UK companies reporting marketing budget reductions than increases. However, it is the smallest percentage of companies cutting spending in a year.

So despite recent disheartening analyses, News Corp CEO Murdoch was right; the advertising market is recovering, or at least stopping its decline. This is true mostly for the internet, the place to be in the UK advertising world these days, as it is the only sector that saw more companies (4.5% more) increase ad spending in the third quarter than in traditional sectors.

As the debate on whether or not to charge for online content heats up amongst publishers, Kachingle offers a different kind of solution: keep all content open but give readers the chance to donate. 'Kachinglers' would sign up to donate $5 a month which they could then split between different participating news providers of their choice.

MediaNews Group has expressed interested, as have Der Spiegel, Mother Jones, MinnPost and the Center for Public Integrity, amongst others. Publishers would need to integrate the Kachingle 'medallion' into their site, which their readers can click-on, and then once a month they will receive their share of revenue. (See previous posting for more information.)

Yves Huin recently came on board as European general manager and director. Huin told the EW that Kachingle is currently in an alpha test and the beta version should be released at the end of October. Prior to that, some publishers will have access to the necessary Java script so that they can decide the best way to use it. 

Kress reported that the German Press Council has reprimanded Germany's best selling tabloid newspaper, Bild and its website Bild.de for publishing what it has described to be "unsuitable and sensationalist content surrounding the death of Michael Jackson."
 
The newspaper, with its motto "independent and unpartisan," ran a front page showing Jackson lying on a stretcher and attached to breathing apparatus. According to the Press Council, the photograph, coupled with the headline "losing his fight for life," pertained to present the reader an image of a dying man, and amounts therefore, to a breach of human rights.


 

 

A concerned mother asked Joe Grimm whether or not her son, a recent journalism school graduate, has a promising future worth pursuing. She bears witness to her son's sincere but fruitless efforts to land a paying job as a journalist.

Joe Grimm is a visiting journalist at the University of Michigan who has addressed similar concerns in his live web chat and Ask the Recruiter column. Nearly a month ago he spoke on whether or not dailies are hiring given that they are laying off reporters left and right.

The proposed merger of two Polish dailies and the launch of an entertainment version of a political weely, both intended to conquer a new public and consolidate readership, have raised some doubts in the Polish newspaper industry.

Poland's largest business and legal daily Gazeta Prawna (87,000 paid circulation) will merge with the second quality news daily Dziennik (147,000 readership), in a 51/49% partnership between Infor Biznes and Axel Springer, their respective owners. The transaction, which will result in a combined newspaper strong in economics on one side, and politics, culture and sports on the other, is still subject to approval by the authorities.

Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds questions the growing movement of print papers to online-only, saying that moving readers to a publication's online version may not work while papers close or stop printing on some days of the week. He suggests that the daily print edition actually promotes the online edition and vice versa. "Maybe that better pumps up Web traffic than trying to force-feed the print audience an online substitute," he wrote.

Environmental journalism is currently in trouble, according to a panel on the subject hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC last week.

Speakers Mother Nature Network columnist Peter Dykstra, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, J-Lab Director Jan Schaffer and National Public Radio correspondent Elizabeth Shogren described how many environmental correspondents are losing their jobs, and blamed the situation on the economic downturn. Dykstra explained how environmental journalism becomes popular every few years due to a natural disaster, an oil spill, impending legislation or other similar factors, but then it loses the public's attention and dwindles.

The current Israeli-Gaza conflict has proved ground-breaking in terms of the way that news is being spread. For a start, Israel has blocked foreign journalists from entering Gaza since launching its air attacks on December 27, so although Al Jazeera has been reporting extensively as it had correspondents already inside, as does the AP, many media organizations have no reliable source of independent information.  It is the perfect time for blogs, Twitter, and other forms of citizen journalism to show their merits.

 

The average editor will follow the news about emerging electronic displays with amazement: the promises are mind-boggling, yet the practices so far rather poor. Will e-readers really be the saviours of the trade and if so, how come it is taking so long before a standard solution comes to market? To a large extent, the answer lies in the craving for effective breakthroughs of a beleaguered industry, much more than in the technology itself. Producing the versatile, flexible, crystal clear electronic reading pane is a formidable technological challenge. Several hardware producers are achieving promising results, but what they have launched up until now are at best pilot devices to test the principles and explore the market. However, the learning curve is steep and in a few years time the assessment will be much more positive.

It is difficult to foresee which technology will become the default application. A strong position is held by e-ink mounted devices that companies like Sony, PlasticLogic, iRex and content provider Amazon have embraced. Their e-readers progress from one version to another, often within a matter of months, with relevant but not revolutionary improvements. They boast splendid daylight readability and prolonged battery life, but remain black-and-white, static (no streaming) and cannot impress with their interfaces.

And the competition is gearing up from two sides. On the one hand even more advanced technologies are presently being lab-tested, such as electro-wetting (using thin liquid layers which can be manipulated with an electric charge) and OLED (using clusters of organic, light emitting diodes). These promise even more advantages - full colour, video, and foldability - surpassing the crucial black-and-white limitation that disadvantages publishers today. On the other hand, there is the revival of the 'classical' flatscreen LCD display, built into a new generation of mini-pc's (or ultra mobile PC's - UMPCs). These slim, lightweight, powerful and cheap devices finally close the gap between the PDA and the bulky laptop with a medium size, versatile handbag PC, ideal for people on the move. Frontrunner ASUS hit the mother load with its EEE series, and meanwhile has many followers in the competitive hardware sector.

The final verdict is as always in the hands of the consumer. Which tool will become the preferred 'universal mobile reading device'? First of all, size, price and nice determine the choice. Whichever technology is built in, the device must gently fit in everybody's travel outfit, be not too expensive and have a certain show-off value. Second, features are key. Connectivity, ease of navigation, customisation options - the mobile reader demands instant performance. And for the moment, easy access to an array of content also plays an important role: Amazon plays that card very cleverly.

At this point, the UMPC seems to have the advantage, with the e-ink based e-readers left behind being too limited and too expensive. Some manufacturers work in the direction of low cost hybrid solutions. The OLPC consortium (which stands for One Laptop Per Child) for instance has announced the XO-2 for early 2010, with a dual-mode display featuring a technology to 'freeze' the LCD screen to maximise readability in full sunlight, so far the most important e-ink selling point.

Besides the choice of hardware, software standardisation will determine how we will be reading our future electronic newspapers. In these early e-reader days, many players try to lock-in their customers in proprietary solutions: Amazon connecting the Kindle to its own portal, iRex with its distribution platform, operators like Orange and Telecom Italia with dedicated hard ware and software: a seemingly attractive business model in the short term, but a serious handicap for widespread adoption of the technology. A major step forward is the introduction of the epub format, adopted by a growing number of larger publishers that could become a de facto standard allowing various content sources to be read, customised and transferred across e-readers from most manufacturers. Anything goes on any e-device: we move in that direction, and newspapers should have their offerings ready for it.

Director of the Euorpean Centre for Digital Communications and long-time journalist, Jan Bierhoff is currently conducting studies on e-reader technology and the consumer trends that will define their use. 

La Jornada is now the fourth Spanish language publication available in London, Ontario. La Jornada joins two monthly Spanish language magazines, Revista Culturas and Prensa Latina, and another newspaper, Magazine Latino.

The biweekly newspaper includes local and international editorials and stories. There is also a small English section and a "Spanglish" page with an article translated in both languages, meant to appeal to readers interested in learning some English.

According to Statistics Canada, 8.000 Hispanics, mostly Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants, live in the city, making Spanish the second most important mother tongue.

Source: The London Free Press

Post by Anissa Ahamed

"Lie by Lie," is Mother Jones' "history of the Iraq War." The editors explain the project was created to be "a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them?"

In his Web 2.Oh... Really? blog, Craig Stoltz makes some key observations about the interactive graphic, what follows is an edited version of his original post:

Why I love this work of journalism:

It's nothing fancy, hardly a data visualization at all. It's essentially a timeline navigation of information on the Iraq War. The only visual grace note is the roulettey spin of the date slider as you move it around. But the tool is functional: It permits navigation of the same data by topic, tags or search. It engages and it works.

It is an aggregation of content reported by others... Smart people knowledgeable about public affairs paid close attention to a huge amount of information, made careful selections and used available digital technology to make it accessible and flexible in a way no print publication could.

By virtue of its form, it surfaces new understandings that a reader of the original reports would not achieve. For instance, noodle around with the "Dick Cheney" tag and you'll discover, right at the top, this entry dated . . . over 15 years ago:

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, speaking to the Discovery Institute in Seattle, says the first President Bush was right not to invade Baghdad: "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that...we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."-Aug. 14, 1992

Stoltz also makes the necessary point that the reporting used in this project came from traditional media - The New York Times, The LA Times, The New Yorker. "The rub," Stoltz points out, "Is this original reporting cost a fortune. It was produced under the old, dying model of journalism, wherein investigative reporting is funded by advertisements for cell phones, new subdivisions, mattress-chain mega-sales, designer clothing, and so on....As Mother Jones has shown, people who are passionate about telling a story have powerful new tools at their disposal to do so. But without high-quality content-difficult, time-consuming, intellectually demanding, butt-numbing, sometimes actually dangerous reporting-the tools are just toys."

Source: Web 2.Oh...Really?

A conference called "Will newspapers survive?" was held last week in Chicago, featuring prominent journalists who brought to surface the arguable future of the newspaper industry, the Chicago Reader's Michael Miner reported.

Monroe Anderson from EbonyJet discussed the newspaper industry as it was around three decades ago, saying that with time it became "very corporate, very structured' and "they're looking to the bottom line."

Anderson reminisced about a Tribune editor with an eight-grade education, something that today seems "unthinkable", Miner reports. This was "before the suits took over", Anderson said.

The Tribune's Bill Adee mentioned that the "business model is broken" and the Herald's Eileen Brown said that she has to convince "the business side" to look for new things so as to save the print newsroom.

The Hindalaen is a weekly hyperlocal paper from Illinois and its publisher, Jim Slonoff, said that "the old way still does work."

Miner pointed out that Brown thinks one of the problems of newspapers today is the "middle ground," those stories about national and international topics that can be read online for free.

Miner mentioned the Tribune and how "just that morning almost every story" he read there was valuable because he said he would never think of looking for it online and because it would never had been written had it not been for the paper's commission.

Brown said that print journalism continues to offer more revenue than online journalism. Advertisers are not comfortable selling ads online and "are in the ice age", according to Brown.

"So it's this weird transitional phase where you'd love to say 'OK we'll move everybody over here,' but you can't because you still have to feed the mother ship," she said.

Adee mentioned online success such as sites like YouTube, who are user-generated, and the Tribune will not get "anywhere close" to that, Miner reports, because its aim is to provide professional "house-generated" journalism.

RedEye is the "fastest growing paper in the country", according to Adee, since it provides the news to an audience that does not think about paying for them.

"People want what journalists do more than ever. They want it in different forms. They can accept it in amateur form, semipro form, or professional journalism," Adee said.

Soource: ChicagoReader.com

Video:

YouTube (part 1)
YouTube (part 2)

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Jaroslaw Kurski, first deputy editor-in-chief, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland.

The list of upcoming interviews will be updated as they are published (click here to view all interviews in this series). Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

1. How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We stopped being a newspaper-only company in 1993 when we launched our first internet discussion board. Today we have millions of boards. Our web portal website Gazeta.pl reaches now 6 million unique users per month. It is a magic figure, as it is also the total number of readers of the printed edition of Gazeta Wyborcza.

We started our company in 1989 with a newspaper, but today we are one of the leading multimedia companies in Central and Eastern Europe. We publish newspapers, magazines and books, we run networks of radio stations and an outdoor company.

And we strongly invest in digital media. Our board has an ambition that in three years time more than half of our revenues will come from other sources than print. Until now all our websites reach 44 per cent of internet users in Poland. This is an extraordinary outcome for a newspaper publisher like us.

2. At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Futurists like bold predictions, but as a journalist I prefer to look at facts.

Since 2003 there have been seven new national printed daily newspapers launched in Poland. So we faced a new competitor every single year. Is this rush any sign of weakness of the printed medium?

I believe that as long as we have something important to say and people here care to listen to us and talk with us, Gazeta Wyborcza will exist. The message is important, and the dialogue; and not the channel.

If print becomes irrelevant, we will spread our ideas in any other way. Newspapers will not die, they will change.

Last but not least: a Polish word for a newspaper - "gazeta" - does not have any "paper" in it. So even if futurists are right and print newspapers will disappear, Gazeta will remain.

3. In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

Journalism is about intelligible conveying of news and about telling stories of importance that move the community. I appreciate digital tools, they are great and helpful, but they are tools only. You still need a story, a teller and a community. So has anything really changed in journalism?

4. Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

This active role is more than welcome. Let me give you some recent examples from Gazeta Wyborcza.

Since 1996 we have been reviewing maternity wards in Polish hospitals; we wished to improve a quality of healthcare in our country. We could have sent there 100 journalists, but a single mother - who really gave birth in any hospital - can tell you more than reporters. So we asked young mothers for help. In 1996 we got 2000 (two thousand) letters by post. In 2006, thanks to the internet, we gathered 40 000 (forty thousand) personal reviews. We were able to review 423 or 96 % of all hospitals in Poland. We would not be able to do this without our readers.

When we recently reported a huge migration of Poles to the Western European countries after Poland joined the EU in 2004 - we asked readers for help. Hundreds joined our reporting effort.
When we called for saving Rospuda, a wild river in North-Eastern Poland that was sentenced to death by the government - we asked readers for support and thousands marched in the streets, hundreds protested on the spot.

When we discussed a crisis in pensions system - we asked readers for advice and published the best investing guides ever.

We see interaction with readers not as a column of letters on page number 86. It is about inviting readers to play a crucial part in the editorial process.

5. Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

Investigative journalism is a core of our editorial practice and as our world and lives become more complex, I see the need for this kind of public service rising.

We live in the world flooded with information, but it is served in bites, so many bites, that it is getting harder and harder to see the whole picture. We need wise journalists to solve this puzzle.
We live in the world of instant news, but it is often reaching only the surface of problems and challenges that we face. We need great journalits to show what was NOT on TV and the net. We need to understand what really happened.

We live in the world influenced more and more by professional public relations; it changes the way politics is done. We need clever journalists to see what's behind the curtain, to ask the hard questions, to watch hands of those in power.

We live in the world of global economy and large corporations that affect people's lifes and business. We need investigative journalists to provide us all with reliable information to make better decisions.

On Monday (March 10) we broke an exclusive news about a Catholic priest who reportedly sexually abused young boys and about three bishops who - although informed and alerted about the abuses - have been reluctant to investigate the case for 13 years! We publish Gazeta Wyborcza also to uncover stories like this.


Thanks to Kurski for sharing his views. And stay tuned for the next interviews in our series.

Reuters journalists have voted to ballot for industrial action, to protest against changes in their job roles as part of Thomson Corp.’s ongoing takeover.

User comments are becoming more and more popular on online news sites. Even the NY Times is now allowing moderated comments on selected articles. However, do these comments have a place in controversial breaking news stories?

David Dunkley Gyimah, an integrated multimedia video journalist, senior university lecturer and council member of the UK's broadcast-academic standards for universities and broadcasters, the Broadcast Journalism Training Council, talks about why journalism training is more important than ever today.

Many recent examples have proven that there has been a shift in power from professional reporters to the readers and audience and ethics are certainly a concern in this shift.

Lou Brancaccio, editor of The Columbian describes, as instructive rather than sensational, the paper’s decision to run a photo on the front page of a grieving mother who had just lost her son in a skateboarding accident.

Rachel Smolkin of The American Journalism Review has examined the covered of the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case and pulled out some salient, although obvious, reminders for journalists as to the necessity of prudent reporting in such an influential profession.

The imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao, winner of the 2007 Golden Pen of Freedom Award, has joined in the lawsuit against Yahoo, Inc. According to his mother Gao Qingsheng, Shi is claiming that the Sunnyville, Calif., Internet company’s release of information to Chinese government officials led to his arrest and subsequent ten-year prison sentence in 2005.

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist serving a 10-year prison sentence for revealing his government’s orders to newspapers to censor their reporting of the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary, has been awarded the 2007 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize from the World Association of Newspapers.