Results matching “in wake of c”

Fairfax Digital's portfolio of BusinessDay websites attracts one-and-a-half million UBs, which is a 61% increase in the 12 months to September. This figure makes it the leading business site in Australia.

As Australians sought information on the unfolding turmoil in global financial markets throughout September, BusinessDay's traffic surged.

Pippa Leary, Fairfax Digital's Managing Director - Media, says, "As global finance markets have experienced dramatic developments in recent weeks, with important news each day, the demand for BusinessDay's expert reporting and commentary has sky rocketed."

Business sites around the world have seen their traffic surge in the wake of the current market turmoil, with the UK's FT.com also reporting increased traffic in recent weeks.

The site is both a stand alone site and a section of the Fairfax Digital news mastheads including smh.com.au/businessday, theage.com.au/businessday, brisbanetimes.com.au/businessday and WAtoday.com.au/businessday.

Source: Fairfax Media

Tribune Co. is dodging the crossfire in the wake of United Airlines chaos, and is pointing the finger of blame at Google's search technology.

An old Chicago Tribune story archived in the Web site of the sibling South Florida Sun Sentinel detailing a six-year old United Airlines story about how it entered into Chapter 11 was mistakenly circulated as a "new" story, triggering a frantic sell-off of United Airlines stock that sent the share price crashing by more than 70%. The autopsy of who is to blame has now been rumbling on for days.

According to the Tribune, Google's automated search agent, Googlebot, cannot, "differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers."

The Tribune also claims that they warned Google "months ago" to stop "crawling" its site. However, a Google spokesperson in a statement said, "The claim that the Tribune Company asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper Web sites is untrue."

A user looking up stories about airline cancellation policies late on Saturday night accessed the article in question from the archives of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

At such a time of night, that single hit made the six-year-old article move to the "most viewed" list by default. 52 seconds later, Googlebot crawled the story.

The Tribune went on to say, "Google provided a link to the old story on Google News and dated it September 6, 2008. Google's dating the story on Google News made it appear current to Google News users."

Source: Editor & Publisher

See also:

US: United Airlines chaos caused by human error and automation
US: United Airlines stock plummets after old bankruptcy story re-surfaces

What newspapers need to both survive and thrive is "excellent journalism, strong investment to stay on the cutting edge of technology, and aggressive marketing of the product", according to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"Anecdotal evidence suggests "Mo Jo's" (note: mobile journalists) are usually deployed to cover geographical rather than themed beats and tend to act as carpet sweepers, reporting and filing a stream of short, quick stories for the paper's website on minor or routine developments during the course of the day," the survey reported.

The study showed that smaller newspapers focusing on their communities are experiencing more stability.

The general trend seems to be declining specialized beats. Some editors assume that letting beat reporters go will not make much of a difference since the same story may be gotten from somewhere else.

"Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you've done," said one of the surveyed editors.

Because reporters find themselves focusing on more than one beat, the coverage is "thinner" and the quality of reporting has gone down, according to PJ Net

"The newspapers and their online editions seem to be leaning towards immediacy, local and short. That may be great for many readers, but not for me. I want that short stuff, but I want context, nuance, depth," wrote PJ Net's chief blogger Leonard Witt.

Source: PJ Net

See also:
US: Study shows newsroom cutbacks are hurting coverage Part 3
US: Study shows newsroom cutbacks are hurting coverage Part 2
US: Study shows newsroom cutbacks are hurting coverage Part 1

The National Union of Journalists general secretary Jeremy Dear is scheduled to meet Home Office Minister Tony McNulty to complain about the treatment of journalists and photographers by the police.

Dear said: "We will be raising our concerns about the harassment of photographers, particularly those covering demonstrations and public order incidents... We want a clear commitment that the Home Office will reinforce the message to the police that journalists' rights to carry out their work free from arbitrary restrictions, free from threats and intimidation must be respected."

Dear will also discuss the issues facing investigative journalists in the wake of new terror legislation. A case in point is Shiv Malik, who was forced to hand over notes for his forthcoming book on terrorism on a production order from Greater Manchester Police, issued under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Source: Press Gazette

In the wake of the swath of cutbacks at newspapers in the USA, a local newspaper subscriber is taking action. Keith Hempstead, a subscriber to The News & Observer (N&O) in Raleigh, N.C. is suing the paper for cutting its staff and for reducing the issue size.

Hempstead, a Durham lawyer and former reporter for the Fayetteville Observer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court.

"Plaintiff alleges fraud in that the newspaper announced changes in the coverage after procuring renewals from Plaintiff and other subscribers," Hempstead says in the complaint, according to the N&O.

The N&O repoorts: "He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages. The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper's contract with him...."

N&O executive editor, John Descher, appears unperturbed, saying: "We've had some really good papers recently, and they're worth more than the 36 cents a day that Mr. Hempstead is paying us ... In fact, he owes me money. So when he gets a lawyer, he can work with my lawyer and figure out how much he's going to pay me for the excellent coverage he's been getting recently."

Source: Editor & Publisher

Google News cannot be compared to other news sites like Yahoo News or CNN.com, according to PaidContent.org.

Google News gathers content with the help of computers who scan news on the Web and does not contain any ads. Meanwhile, other news sites like CNN.com create licensed material that passes through editors.

Google News groups articles by subject and ranks article by importance based on factors like  authority of publisher or placement of article in site. NYT writes that Google "packages the results as a set of links, sending readers to the sites where the articles appear."

According to the New York Times, Google executives claim that traffic is not the primary aim but that Google News "helps the company produce better search results and helps users find news sources that they might not know about otherwise."

According to the NYT, the growth rate of Google News is only 10 %, compared to MSNBC.com's 42 %, which got the site 10.4 million in traffic.

Dan Gillmor, who is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Arizona State University School of Journalism, said that he is surprised "how little" Google News "evolved, at least on the surface", NYT wrote.

Marissa Meyer, vice president for Google search and user experience, said that Google News is one of "the most innovative" Google features and that its users actively employ the  Google search engine  and other services, NYT wrote.

She also mentioned that news results do emerge on the main Google search page, alongside adverts.  According to Meyer, "it directly feeds the main business."

Google News is sometimes seen as a competitor to other news providers, even if it brings traffic to the news site. Industry executives, according to NYT, think that because Google News links to a remote article, the readers are not likely to stay on the news site.

According to Braig Moffett, a Sanford C; Bernstein & Copany analyst, the Internet "made it possible to aggregate news cheaply". Consequently, news providers stopped charging for content. "Google may be doing more to accelerate this trend than anyone, but they are not doing it out of malice,"  Moffett said.

Tribune Co. owner Samuel Zell accused Google of stealing news stories for their own gains. In Europe, Belgian prosecutors said that Google News had "violated copyright laws" without asking for permission to link to the articles, NYT reported.

Google said that the company wishes "to help, not hurt, journalism", NYT wrote. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that the company has "a huge moral imperative" to aid news outlets in becoming more "successful online", NYT wrote.

Last year, several features were added, such as different country and language versions of Google News. The number of "duplicate articles" is being reduced, as "authoritative" and "original" news stories are being displayed, according to NYT.

There is also the chance to personalize Google News, by focusing on local news and mapping the news event sites on Google Earth. Users can also post comments and search quotes.

Different sides to the same story are being provided by the news search engine, helping to make people "wake up and think," said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist behind Google News. "That's what makes people news junkies," she added.

NYT wrote that even if there have been some innovations, Google News "still lacks many of the flashier features that have attracted users to more conventional news sites, including interactive graphics and video."

Analysts have begun to question automated products and their limitations. Mark Glaser, PBS MediaShift editor said, "there is only so far you can go with an algorithm" because , "in the long run, people want a human touch."

Source: PaidContent.org, New York Times

See Also:

8 efficient and visual ways to present your online news
How to maximize your site's visiility in Google search ranking

In the wake of Tim Russert's death, we are reminded again that in the world of Wikipedia and Web 2.0, breaking news waits for no man.

Following the sudden death of Mr. Russert, the former moderator of "Meet the Press" and the chief of NBC's Washington bureau, NBC chose to withhold the news for over an hour, wanting to first inform Russert's family, who were vacationing in Italy.

"We were not prepared to say anything until all the family had heard," said Allison Gollust, an NBC News spokeswoman. "The last thing we wanted to do was to have the family discover this on the air." Gollust said NBC had asked the other networks to hold back and all agreed.

Russert collapsed from a heart attack in NBC's Washington newsroom around 1:40 p.m. and was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital at 2:23. The official announcement came from NBC's former anchor Tom Brokaw, on air at 3:39.

But almost 40 minutes earlier, the news broke on Wikipedia. Mr. Russert's page was updated at 3:01 p.m. -- adding the date of death and turning present-tense verbs into the past tense. "The entry was particularly influential since many journalists had heard of Mr. Russert's becoming stricken, but did not know the outcome," noted the New York Times. "If some turned to Wikipedia to refresh themselves about Mr. Russert, they found an article that seemed to confirm what many had been hearing."

The IP address of the editor traces to a "junior level" employee at Internet Broadcasting Services in St. Paul, Minn., which contracts Web services to local NBC TV stations. The employee, who posted thinking the information was public record, has since been fired.

Sources: The New York Times, The Daily Online Examiner

Following the International Press Institute (IPI) world congress in Belgrade, where a session focused on the limits of tolerance and the issue of publishing blasphemous content, such as the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, IPI will make a programme-length video about the issue of blasphemy.

This is a good initiative in the wake of the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed by 17 Danish newspapers, three years after the initial row.

"Deciding where to draw the line, or whether there should be a line, would be a major step forward, if it's done in a sensitive and sensible way," wrote the Guardian's Roy Greenslade.

The debate between proponents of unrestricted press freedom and those who advise cautious self-censorship will undoubtedly drag on, but IPI's initiative may help to throw light on these issues.

UPDATE: A Danish appeals court rejected today a suit filed by seven Muslim organizations against the editors of the Jyllands-Posten, which first published the Mohammed cartoons in 2005. The court found that the most controversial of the cartoons, depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, was "of a satirical nature" and "does not refer to Muslims in general or to the (plaintiff) organisations or their members," reported the AFP. The court also stated "that terrorist acts have been committed in the name of Islam, and it is not illegal for these acts to be made the object of satirical representation."

Source: Roy Greenslade

From our sister site the SFN Blog and journalism.co.uk: at the Google Zeitgeist conference last week, Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief Will Lewis said that with the advent of multimedia reporting, he considers CNN and the BBC to be the Telegraph's main competition.

"What has happened in our industry is that the traditional distinction between text and video is fusing and the Holy Grail is to now develop a content site or stream of content that is text and videos," said Lewis.

"Without being too highfaluting about it we see our main competitors as being people like the BBC or CNN.

"Both of which are trying to use video and text to enable users to decide how they find out about a story."

Unlike some other newspaper publishers, Lewis also defended Google, Digg and the like because they "bring an enormous amount of business to our door."

These comments come in the wake of the Telegraph's recent surge in online traffic, as it surpassed guardian.co.uk last month.

Source: journalism.co.uk through SFN Blog

Yesterday, following a historical newsroom strike at the print paper on April 14 (in the wake of a planned 129 layoffs), Le Monde's board discussed projects to save 1,000 pages of content per year.

According to CBNews, this will be achieved by a better distribution of pages between the mid-week and weekend print editions, as well as the "rebalancing" of supplements.

In reality, Le Monde will simply have less staff to produce content. Of the 129 job cuts, 89 will affect the newsroom, including 45 for staff in charge of producing written content.

Although many papers around the world have been forced to trim down their print editions in an effort to cut costs, the situation in France is critical: every year, quality papers cut back on content, thus giving less incentive for readers to buy them, leading to decreased revenues and further cost and content cuts...

Some of London's freesheets already carry more content than many of France's quality, paid-for dailies.

Le Monde's plan to restructure could also call on the currently non-integrated journalists to work both for the print paper, supplements and the online edition.

Update: Journalists at Le Monde voted in a general staff assembly today, on April 16, to stage their second one-day strike in a week, protesting against the planned layoffs. Le Monde is scheduled not to appear on Thursday, April 17.

Source: CB News (link in French), AFP

Russian investigators have said they have identified - but not caught - the killer of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, whose murder in October 2006 became a symbol of Russian repression against journalists critical of the government.

"The person who directly carried out the crime, the killing of Politkovskaya, has been identified. All measures are being taken to find and detain the person in question," said Vyacheslav Smirnov, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, according to Interfax news agency.

However, in October 2007, the investigator of the case had already mentioned that the presumed killer had been identified.

This news comes in the wake of two TV journalists being murdered in Russia, supposedly in relation to the work they were doing.

Russia and the Kremlin have regularly been criticized for muzzling the free press, as was the case during the last parliamentary elections.

Source: AFP Mail

Angry- and misinformed- online readers at the Daily Echo in Bournemouth succeeded in setting the paper's news agenda.

The Echo ran a story about seven local councilors on a twin-town visit in Israel when eight students were killed at a Jerusalem university. Online readers responded with a barrage of comments accusing the councilors of wasting tax payer money for leisure trips.

In the wake of the online comments, the Echo conducted interviews with the councilors, and ran a story revealing that the trip had been privately funded.

"Whereas previously [the readers] might not have been motivated to put a pen to paper, it's so much easier to hit a button on a computer," said Nick Rowe, Web Editor for the Echo. "It's the evolution in the way we communicate."

The episode at the Echo is a prime example of two-way communication between media and audience, a development which was recently identified by blogger Paul Bradshaw as one of the top 10 trends in journalism.

Source: HoldTheFrontPage


 

The Online News Association, a 1200-member group of online editors and reporters, has sent a protest letter to Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Allan Selig, in the wake of MLB's new restrictions on coverage of baseball games.

New restrictions include limits on the number of game photos publishable online, as well as the duration of videos. Only seven pictures can be posted while a game is in progress, and videos can last no longer than two minutes. Any live audio or video from game-related events is banned from 45 minutes before the start of a game through the end.

Restrictions apply to all media credentials for the upcoming 2008 baseball season, which will begin in April.

Source: Editor & Publisher