Results matching “uk editorial to”

Brazilian regional newspaper Correio da Bahia has announced a makeover last Wednesday that includes optimized graphics and better visual aspects, such as improved images and more color.

The re-designed paper also has a new price, a new motto ("What Bahia wants to know"), a new Berliner format and a new editorial formula that includes the sections "24 Hours", "More", "Life" and "Sports."

Source: Innovations in Newspapers through IFRA Executive News Service

Fairfax Media are planning to outsource much of the editorial production for its two flagship Melbourne and Sydney newspapers to a subsidiary of the Australian Associated Press, called Pagemasters.

Since last year Pagemasters has handled the bulk of rival newspaper group APN News & Media's sub-editing and design function in New Zealand. The hiring of Pagemasters is a key factor in Fairfax deceision this week to reduce headcount by 550.

Pagemasters will take over the production function for several Herald fixtures. According to a memo by Lloyd Whish-Wilson, Fairfax's chief executive for metropolitan publishing in NSW: "The layout and sub-editing of some sections and special reports will move to ... Pagemasters. This will enable us to reduce the current extensive reliance on casual editorial production staff."

Asked if Fairfax's Age and Sunday Age newspapers would follow the same Pagemasters route, Fairfax spokesman Bruce Wolpe said: "I don't have anything definitive."

Journalists at the paper said yesterday the outsourcing of production had created problems at other newspapers that had gone with Pagemaster due to loss of control and variable sub-editing quality

Fairfax owns 46 per cent of Pagemasters through its AAP stake.

Source: The Australian

Lippo Group, a substantial Indonesian conglomerate, announces the launch of The Jakarta Globe, an English language daily newspaper that will be available both in print and online.

Bhimanto Suwastoyo, who worked with the AFP for over 20 years, is to be the paper's deputy editor. The editorial team also includes Ahmad Pathoni, who previously held senior positions at both AFP and Reuters, and A. Lin Neumann, former executive editor of the Hong Kong Standard and editor-in-chief of South Korean daily JoongAng.

The Globe will be released in the next two months and will be aimed at both Indonesians and expatriates. It will receive funding through advertisements and subscriptions.

The paper intends to be in competition with The Jakarta Post, Indonesia's prominent English-language paper.

Source: Brand Republic

A UK Government counter-terrorism unit is using news websites including the BBC to channel messages and plant volunteers in internet forums in an attempt to "taint the al-Qaida brand".

The Guardian newspaper broke the story after seeing a secret Home Office paper. The Guardian reports that government unit is deliberately targeting the BBC and other media organisations as part of a global propaganda push.

The operation is being conducted by the research, information and communication unit (RICU), which was set up last year by the previous home secretary John Reid.

The Guardian quoted directly from the secret paper, entitled 'Challenging violent extremist ideology through communications'. It said: "We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg, a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters. And a restricted working group will communicate niche messages through media and non-media."

The unit has been set up due to the government's belief that al-Qaida's popularity is waning worldwide and is vulnerable.

The paper also reveals that the propaganda is aimed at "overseas communicators" in embassies and consulates around the world, people that work with influencers and opinion formers.

This unit's existence and actions raises serious questions question about editorial control and freedom in light of this government attempt to manage the media.

Source: Brand Republic and The Guardian

Yahoo! News may be considered as a news organization, according to Jessica Barron, director of editorial programming. Unlike online news outlets that aggregate news content from the Web, Yahoo! is not only investing in its own journalists but is also signing agreements with wire services and "traditional" sources.

"Our aim is to reach these bigger names and use our reporting talent to break news. We are really going for the kinds of questions that will make news," said Barron."We have been doing a lot of original reporting and we are going to be doing a lot more."

The original reporting she refers to include interviews with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, US leader George W. Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Yahoo!'s global audience of 500 million helps to formulate its news judgement, since the outlet pays attention to what stories get most traffic. According to Barron, online readers have shown that they are interested in both hard facts and the human value of stories.

Barron intends to make Yahoo! the premier independent online news source.

Source: AFP through IFRA Executive News Service

The Star Tribune announces that it is transforming its online edition into a blog that will allow for the site to be updated regularly and for interaction between readers and editorial staff to be increased so as to "reinvent" print and online opinion journalism, reports StarTribune.com.

"We have two products, the Web-based one and the newsprint one. The newsprint one doesn't change during the day, because it can't. The Web-based one can, but it doesn't, because we use it mainly to present a snapshot of what we were thinking and writing about yesterday. I realized we could turn that model on its head by making the Web version change throughout the day and letting the newsprint version handle the snapshot,'' said Eric Ringham, the paper's commentary editor.

On weekdays, the Opinion Exchange section will feature a summary of daily Editorial Board meetings and encourage readers to provide their opinions, which may "inform" and possibly "influence" editorial views. "Traditional" editorials will be posted alongside opinions that evolve throughout the day, such as columns and YouTube videos.

The "best" of Opinion Exchange will be published in the following day's paper, writes SrtarTribune.com.

Source: StarTribune.com

Over the years, tabloid content in the US has shifted from "bloody car accidents" and "gruesome mutilations" in the 1950's to celebrity gossip in the 1960's, reports TIME magazine's Kate Pickert. However, it may be the Web that seems to have reversed editorial efforts as some tabloids like the Weekly World News have had to shut down.

Tabloids experienced a circulation growth in the 1980's, Pickert writes. However, television in the mid-90's took focus away from US tabloids and made circulation plummet by 30%, after broadcast coverage of OJ Simpson's trial "eclipsed anything that could be done in print". Today it is the Internet that is "impinging on tabloid's turf", wrote Pickert.

The "supermarket" tabloid the National Enquirer decreased the quantity of horrific imagery and began to feature more material on "alien abductions" and "medical oddities", in order to draw in more housewives.

By the late 1960's as titles like the Enquirer, the Globe and Rupert Murdoch's Star all began to focus their attention on celebrity gossip. Weekly World News, self-dubbed "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper", continued to write about "weird" material such as "zombie sightings".   

Although celebrity print publications have gained popularity in recent years, it is mostly in the "glossy" version that Star adopted around four years ago.

Source: TIME

London-oriented daily free newspaper The London Paper expects to re-launch its site in early 2009, as a revamped version that will feature a variety of user-generated content "as part of a shift towards providing users with more interactive content" as well as restructured editorial material that is more efficient, reported NMA.co.uk.

The paper has content agreements with around 20 companies and has also prolonged a mobile service deal with messaging provider Sponge.

Its dating service Lovestruck, which persuades users to send a text message asking for a date, remains popular despite being inaccessible on the mobile reception-less subway, where most Londoners read the paper.  

For the time being, thelondonpaper.com has nearly 330,000 unique users per month, according to NMA.co.uk.

Source: NMA.co.uk

To further challenge the social networking site Digg, Yahoo! announces that it developed its "Buzz Up" content recommendation service so that it features more publishers, who can now add the feature's button to their web sites and have users vote on articles.

If sites aren't equipped with the "Buzz Up" button then links to the content can be submitted through Yahoo!. "Buzz Up" allows for users to vote and to share content like videos, blog entries and news stories, similar to the way in which Digg works.

Yahoo! said it will have some editorial control over the articles, so as to avoid releasing content that is "lewd, violent, or capable of exposing the company to legal liability", reported Business Week.

The "social content voting" system of the Yahoo! service could help less popular sites get more visitors, writes the European Journalism Centre.

Since the service's launch in February, the number of publishers has quadrupled from 100 to 400, the main focus being the US. Outlets that have already signed up for the service include USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly.

Source: European Journalism Centre, Business Week

After its parent company Trinity Mirror opted for centalized production and a reduction in editorial staff, the Birmingham Post announces that it will re-launch itself as a Monday to Friday tabloid this autumn, putting more emphasis on business coverage as well as having a mobile site.

"Moving to a new format gives us the opportunity for the print version of the Post to follow the website in attracting a new generation of younger - but no less serious - business readers," said Mark Reeves, the Post's editor.

The latest ABC figures (July 2, 2007 to December 30, 2007) show that the paper has a circulation of 12,997 from Monday to Friday, out of which 3,841 copies are given away. The Saturday edition, which will no longer be published after the re-launch, sold 10,329 copies, 2,289 of which were given away.

Source: Press Gazette, ABC.org

Trinity Mirror reports that it is forming two integrated multimedia newsrooms in Birmingham and Coventry that will make use of a new digital content management system, offering editorial content for five of its titles as well as page production for 30 weekly publications.

There is an increasing demand for web video amongst numerous media outlets like magazine sites, according to Ashley McKenzie, CEO of MyVideoRights, a start-up firm that gathers video content and grants the right to commercially exploit them.

MyVideoRights hopes to act like a middleman between "smaller" content owners who might not have the ability to negotiate with bigger firms and "smaller" publishers whose audiences might not be large enough. The company may become "the Getty Images of video entertainment".

The start-up intends to syndicate videos to outlets and to adjust the application programming interface (API) of media players so that video clips are available to editorial staff. McKenzie wants to provide immediate "rights-cleared, advertiser-friendly content".

Source: Paid Content

BBC News is experimenting with external links within the main body of its text to provide users with more external information. The trial will last for four weeks and is only available on the UK website.

The 'in-page links' direct users to background information about the topic of the article from across the BBC News site  and to other external sources, such as, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and external news organisations' sites.

External links are identified by symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page.

Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor says of the trial: "We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources."

He went on to say, "We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to, the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible enough for pretty much anything."

The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which implemented a similar feature for the WashingtonPost.com.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

Tom Cheredar, of newassignment.net, argues that it's time to open up weekly editorial meetings. In most newsrooms, the once a week meeting where stories are pitched and assigned, is a crucial time to get everyone up to speed, and provides an opportunity for everyone to provide feedback.

Chererdar, acknowledging there may be some need to guard sensitive stories and feature pieces, wrote, "Everything else should be wide open to others in the community. I'm talking about literally taking a web cam and broadcasting weekly editorial meetings in real time streaming video."

One way to do this is a free service offered by Ustream.tv.

Below, an edited version of the how-to Cheredar provides. Read his full recommendations here.

How to do it

Create a budget that does not include exclusive feature stories or other sensitive piece, then split those budgets into categories: education, Crime, City governement, etc. Each of those sections can be turned into individual channels on Ustream thus allowing a somewhat manageable group of outsiders to participate through the live chat that is up during the meeting.

Why It Should Be Done

"Scooping" is a thing of the past, as most readers don't care where they get their news from... Soon the only thing that will matter is a dedicated community. Ustreaming makes the community a part of the newsroom. Don't look at it as a peeping tom looking over your shoulder... think of it as multiplying your newsroom by 10 in every department.

Live, Streaming Accountability

Opening up the staff meetings to members in the community will improve journalism by adding a much needed dose of accountability into the mix.

"There is much more value," says Cheredar, "in acknowledging your community than there is with keeping it exclusive for the sake of tradition."

This sort of "transperent newsroom" has been higly successful at The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash. The Spokesman-Review hosts a blog on the inner workings of the paper, including editorial decisions and meetings, an opportunity for visitors to the website to comment and ask questions and editors explanations of news gathering methods and more.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

After The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland announced a "partnership" with the Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), where AAMC paid the paper to provide all the content for the newspaper's health page once a month, two major journalism groups have responded, issuing a joint warning to news outlets on the ethical complications of creating to cozy of a relationship with hospitals, according to Editor & Publisher.

In March, on the Capital's website, the paper explained, "... Partnering with the hospital on the Health page seemed to make sense. We don't have a health reporter to write about medical issues and often use stories from syndicated services that quote doctors from other cities.... Instead of generic stories originating from another city, the reader will have local news featuring people they recognize (and) doctors they use."

In their release today, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists state they "are concerned about news media that publish or broadcast stories, reports, news releases and interviews prepared or paid for by hospitals."

"The ethics codes of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists call for fair and accurate reporting and editorial independence. But editorial cutbacks, along with pressure on hospitals to market profitable service