Editors Weblog: Search Results

Guardian, FT and Mozilla on how to tackle online video

Posted by Emma Heald on February 6, 2012 at 4:46 PM

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

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

Media links of the day

Posted by Emma Heald on January 27, 2012 at 6:51 PM

The Washington Post has launched a new section on its website titled to publish links to the best coverage of the US election. The Post gathers links shared by Twitter users tweeting with its hashtag #campaignreads.

Facebook hires Bloomberg's Dan Fletcher as its new managing editor, reports Forbes.

The Guardian has published a map, based on the research project How Africa Tweets, showing Twitter usage across the African continent.

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

South African appointed director of World Editors Forum

Posted by Hannah Vinter on January 25, 2012 at 3:13 PM

by Larry Kilman

First Woman to Head Global Organisation of World's Editors

Cherilyn Ireton, a South African editor and successful senior manager at some of the country's top newspapers, has been appointed Executive Director of the World Editors Forum, the global organisation for editors within the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

Ms Ireton is the first woman to head the organisation, which was created in 1994 as a unique global network for exchanging ideas on newsroom management, editorial quality, online strategies and press freedom issues. More on the World Editors Forum can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/microsites/world-editors-forum.

The Huffington Post arrives in Europe

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 19, 2012 at 4:10 PM

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

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

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

Will a boom in traffic help Patch to profitability?

Posted by Emma Heald on January 12, 2012 at 9:35 AM

When AOL bought the Patch network of hyperlocal news sites in 2009, it made a gamble. Towards the end of 2011, it looked like that gamble was not paying off, or at least not as quickly as the internet giant had hoped.

However, according to a press release published today, the number of unique visitors to Patch sites has more than tripled between December 2010 and December 2011.

Business Insider reported last month that it estimated the hyperlocal network had lost about $100 million over the last year. This was despite Patch's target for its first sites to reach profitability by the end of 2011. While a Patch spokeswoman flatly denied Business Insider's figure, reductions to Patch sites' freelance budget last October and the fact that the company was encouraging its editors to work more closely with sales people could be see as a sign that the hyperlocal network was coming under financial pressure, even though Patch President Warren Webster insisted that the changes were not driven by financial conditions.

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

Media links of the day

Posted by Hannah Vinter on January 11, 2012 at 6:46 PM

The Daily became available on select Anroid devices today. News Corp's tablet app used to be iPad-only, but now it can be downloaded on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, reports Paid Content.

The New Haven Register, owned by the Journal Register Co. announced today that it will outsource its printing to Hertford, laying off 105 workers. According to publisher Tom Wiley, the move will allow the Register to start a new "open newsroom", enabling residents to participate in local journalism.

A French cameraman working for France-2 TV Television was killed in an attack in the Syrian city of Homs today, reports The Independent. A Dutch freelance journalist has also been injured.

This week's column by the Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton about too much innovation going on too fast at the Post caused an uproar online. Jay Rosen on PressThink asked him to better explain what he meant.

The Huffington Post has lost its no. 3 key editor Nico Pitney. Forbes tells the story here.

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

Media links of the day

Posted by Federica Cherubini on January 10, 2012 at 6:10 PM

The Wall Street Journal launched today its German edition.

The 1st International Workshop on Open Data (WOD) will be held in Nantes, France, on May 25, 2012. It aims to facilitate new trends and ideas from a broad range of topics concerned within the widely-spread Open Data movement.

Spying on journalists is easy, a CJR article says. Journalists Ben Elgin and Vernon Silver produced a series for Bloomberg News called "Wired for Repression," reporting that western technology companies like Nokia, Ericsson, and Hewlett Packard, to name just a few, are selling surveillance technologies to countries with very poor human rights records, who then use these tools to spy on dissidents, the article reported.

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

Publishers start singing to Piano's tune in Slovenia

Posted by Emma Heald on January 10, 2012 at 2:01 PM

A piece of music sounds normally sounds better when all the parts are played together. And Slovakian start-up Piano Media argues that, when it comes to paywalls, news publications are also better off when their strategies work in harmony.

Piano Media, founded in May 2011 by Tomáš Bella, former editor-in-chief of SME Online, the digital division of Slovakia's largest newspaper, has persuaded most of Slovakia's major media outlets to sign up to a single-payment system. This means that the country's major news sites share a paywall, and split the revenue between themselves - 40% goes to the news site where the reader bought his or her Piano subscription, 30% goes to the site where a reader is spending his or her time online and 30% goes to Piano Media itself. Its system makes the users' experiences easier by offering a simple pay plan and by reducing the feeling that readers are paying one company for content that they could get for free elsewhere.

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

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.

Twitter redesign: more curated, visual and user-friendly

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 9, 2011 at 12:35 PM

"Twitter is the newswire now."

This was Mathew Ingram's message to the Associated Press, after they controversially chastised their journalists for publishing events on Twitter before they had gone up on the newswire.

Now, as Jeff Sonderman at Poynter points out, Twitter has moved one step closer to functioning as an actual wire, as a major design overhaul is set to launch a new "discover" section, which curates a personalised selection of stories based on your location, current events and who you follow.

Media links of the day

Posted by Katherine Travers on December 8, 2011 at 6:07 PM

Mobile media in India: 59% if India's internet users access the web only via a mobile device.

Gannett to erect pay-walls on their sites while The Chicago Sun-Times and 39 other affiliated titles also start charging for content .

How a volunteer news brigade broke through Libya's Internet black out.

Neville Thurlbeck, former News of the World chief reporter, tells Leveson Inquiry that the paper withheld information about phone-hacking.

Top Ten Twitter stories of 2011: The Fukushima disaster and the death of Osama Bin Laden top the charts.

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

Sources: The Guardian, IJNET.org, Journalism.co.uk, Penn-Olson.com,

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?

Dawn Williamson: 'data's not a report to read, it's an environment to live in'

Posted by Hannah Vinter on December 2, 2011 at 11:13 AM

What does journalism today have in common with the 1960s steel industry? Quite a lot, argued Dawn Williamson of Chartbeat, speaking today at "Les Nouvelles Pratiques du Journalisme" conference, hosted by the Ecole de journalisme de Sciences Po, Paris, in collaboration with Columbia Journalism School.

Before the 1960's the steel industry was dominated by big, inefficient, expensive steel plants. But then something changed. The industry was revolutionised by the introduction of "mini-mills" - smaller, cheaper, faster plants. Yet the big steel companies didn't want to adopt minimills, says Williamson. They were suspicious of the quality of their new competitors.

Today, Williamson argues, news sites like The Huffington Post, Gawker and Business Insider are the "mini mills of the journalism industry". Through a combination of news aggregation, blog hosting and user engagement, they're producing a journalism product that's faster and cheaper.

Less is more for tablet apps?

Posted by Hannah Vinter on November 30, 2011 at 1:16 PM

When it comes to designing tablet apps, can news organizations sometimes be too smart for their own good?

Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist, recently told the Editors Weblog "Tablet users seem to be particularly keen on reading text, and for long periods."

"That, rather than bells and whistles, is what our apps provide, and what our readers seem to want," says Standage.

Old news is good news: how Facebook is breathing new life into old stories

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 28, 2011 at 3:45 PM

News today is all about being first; 'real time' is king; users want the latest information in the quickest possible time delivered straight to their mobile device so they are constantly kept abreast of unfolding world events. Right?

Well, yes... and no.

It seems that Facebook is producing something of a Lazarus effect for old news content. Stories that were written more than a decade ago are increasingly becoming viral phenomena thanks to the new 'frictionless sharing' system introduced by the social network in September.

Taking a look in the mirror: how the US mainstream media uses Twitter

Posted by Federica Cherubini on November 14, 2011 at 3:48 PM

It's a matter of fact that Twitter has become part of the regular news workflow. And this is also the case for mainstream media outlets.

But how do they really use it? And how often? What's their underlying strategy? Is Twitter used by traditional media as a self-promotional channel for their own links or has it become a real, independent reporting tool?

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs answered these and other questions in a study that analysed the relationship between 13 major U.S. news outlets and Twitter.

It emerged from the study that news organizations mainly use Twitter for auto-referral. In fact, their use is primarily limited to disseminating their own material, rather than developing real engagement with followers or adding to the general debate by sharing external content.

Newspapers on social networks: who's most visible in the UK?

Posted by Federica Cherubini on November 10, 2011 at 3:39 PM

As often underlined, there's a battle out there for news sites to find a way to stand out of the hullabaloo of the web, reach a wider audience, attract more readers and stay profitable.

In the race, social networking and bookmarking sites are playing an essential role. As it was recently reported, in fact, the boundaries between social media and news are increasingly thinner.

A recent survey in the UK analysed data on the links from twelve UK newspaper web sites to see how visible they are on social networks. The study, conducted by Searchmetrics, analysed how often content from the 12 leading newspaper sites in the UK was shared on six popular social networking and bookmarking sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google+.

How to avoid trolling: anonymous vs. identifiable commenting

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 7, 2011 at 2:52 PM

"Engaging the community" is a phrase that is increasingly thrown about by editors, particularly social media editors. Nowadays, "engaging the community" refers just as much to dealing with an online assemblage of people as it does to dealing with a physical, geographical community.

This is all well and good; social media referrals and commenting drive traffic to news sites - but what happens when the people you want to engage start disrupting debate instead of contributing to it?

The practice of delivering threatening or aggressive comments on the Internet is often referred to as "trolling", therefore its practioners are logically named "trolls". "Trolls" seem to find news websites particularly fruitful locations to stick their heads out from under their bridge, deliver some abuse and then return to their daily business.

Financial Times sees 1/5th of all online traffic from mobile sites

Posted by Katherine Travers on November 3, 2011 at 3:59 PM

The Financial Times has adopted a bold digital strategy: it refused to tow the line when it came to Apple's policy that takes 30% of sales revenue for sales through the iTunes App Store, instead launching an HTML 5 App which can be downloaded from the paper's own website.

This potentially risky move may well be paying off.

The Pearson Group, that publishes the FT, said that the paper is now receiving over a fifth of its online traffic from mobile devices, such as smartphones and iPads, with a healthy 250,000 digital subscribers across all its subscription packages. According to The Next Web, 100,000 of these subscriptions come from a base of 2000 corporate licences, rather than sales to independent individuals. It was also revealed that the FT Group had recorded overall revenue growth of 6%.

Sharing not stealing: issues of plagiarism in the new media landscape

Posted by Hannah Vinter on November 2, 2011 at 6:22 PM

"Thou shalt not plagarise". This phrase surely must be somewhere near the top of the ten commandments of journalism.

Hence in 2005, when David Simpson, then-cartoonist for The Tulsa World, was found to have redrawn somebody else's work, the paper's publisher Robert E. Lorton III dismissed him, saying he had committed "the cardinal sin of a newsroom". The story was reported at the time by the AP and picked up by Sign On San Diego.

Still, there's no peace for the wicked; history has repeated itself. After his dismissal from The Tulsa World, Simpson was hired by the Urban Tulsa Weekly but, as Poynter reports, he was fired yesterday for further instances of copying other people's work.

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.

Too many ads with your news?

Posted by Hannah Vinter on October 31, 2011 at 5:58 PM

"Web design is in bad shape. In the applications boom, news-related websites end up as collateral damage."

This is how Frédéric Filloux, general manager of the French ePresse consortium, opens his article on advertising on news websites, just published in the Guardian and Monday Note.

Filloux argues that great design has gone into news apps, but the traditional web has been left behind. "The graphic evolution of the web must deal with two negative forces: its language framework doesn't evolve fast enough, and it faces the burden of messy advertising," he writes.

UK editors give evidence at superinjunction committee

Posted by Katherine Travers on October 31, 2011 at 5:26 PM

Editors from British publications are giving evidence to the joint committee on privacy and injunctions in an effort to revise British privacy law.

In Britain, there are two types of injunction that can prevent the media from reporting the details of a person's private life. Obviously, there is the standard injunction, which bars the media from mentioning the names of individuals in connection to certain events in any article or broadcast. The superinjunction, however, was a concept that many British people were not aware of until recently when said super injunctions began creating controversy in 2010.

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