Results matching “are french medi”

According to a graphic in this Sunday's New York Times (via Poynter), 7,282 reporters and editors are in the rarefied circle of the 1 percent.
Poynter's article explains - as Guardian's Roy Greenslade says too - that to be included in the graphic, at least 2% of people with these jobs have to live in households with incomes of $380,000 or more.

Le Huffington Post, the French version of Arianna Huffington's creation, has appointed Anne Sinclair, wife of the former I.M.F. director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as its editorial director L'Express reported. The French Huffington Post will be launched on January 23.

In its latest step to better control China's wildly popular Twitter-like websites, the government's propaganda and information arm announced that China will expand real-name registration for microblog users, Reuters reported.

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

The UK phone-hacking scandal, that involves Rupert Murdoch's tabloid News of the World, is blowing up relentlessly. Revelations come out continuously and the news media is trying to follow them with breaking news updates.

Two are the main news of the day.
Firstly, the announcement by James Murdoch of the upcoming closure of the News of the World, compromised in its credibility and abandoned by advertisers, after 168 years.
The paper published the statement on its website.  
Poynter's Rick Edmonds reflected on why shutting down the newspaper was a good business decision here and Guardian's Roy Greenslade collected what newspapers said about the closure here. 

Although Google has occasionally rubbed the press the wrong way in the past, it is now launching a new partnership with a French journalism school to encourage digital journalism. 

In the U.S., Google's relationship with the press has previously been strained. The company aggregates news stories from around the world on its Google News feature. The press has taken issue with it before, such as the incident two years ago when Google was under scrutiny for profiting from content produced by news editors, magazine publishers, and the Associated Press.

The International Bureau for Epilepsy (IBE) and UCB, a biopharmaceutical company, started a joint initiative called the Excellence in Epilepsy Journalism Award. The award will be given to journalists who have excelled in reporting on epilepsy. More information can be found on IBE's website.

Al Jazeera announced at the BBC Social Media Forum that it would start providing training for citizen journalists. The network is creating tutorials but no dates were yet announced for the program launch, IJNet reported.

Why should smaller publishers look into publishing on the iPad? PaidContent listed some reasons, highlighting the fact that costs of digital publishing are coming down.

Roy Greenslade highlighted in the Guardian how New York tabloids have been making use of puns about the French in their DSK coverage.

Charlie Beckett, POLIS director, takes a look at new media ethics.


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

On Saturday May 14 Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and until then the favoured Nicolas Sarkozy's challenger in the next presidential elections in France, was arrested in New York and charged with the sexual assault of a housekeeper in his suite at the Sofitel Hotel.

In addition to the consequences the case is having on international politics, international relations and French politics (Strauss-Kahn resigned on May 19 as head of IMF), it is also enlivening the debate within news media.

To sum up, of course simplifying, the French press is blaming the US media of being too unscrupulous in covering the news, neglecting the right to be considered innocent before being proved guilty. On the other hand, the US press is blaming the French press of being "reluctant" in covering the case in order to protect Dominique Strauss-Kahn's private life.

Tumblr launched a "share on Tumblr" botton, which allows publishers to add a button encouraging users to share their content on Tumblr (just paste the javascript tag into your source code), TechCrunch reported.

According to data released by the OJD, the organization for the control and the diffusion of news media, Le Parisien appeared to lead the ranking of the French regional newspapers' websites, with 22 million unique users, as reported by Journalismes.info. It is followed by Ouest-France and Sud-Ouest, with, respectively, 8.7 million and 4.6 million visitors.

In the eyes of Europe, Turkey's jailing of journalists and limits on Internet access raise serious questions about freedom of the press as the country's entry into the EU remains in doubt, Hurriyet (via WorldCrunch) reported.

According to what Katie Vanneck-Smith, News International's chief marketing officer, said speaking at a City University seminar, it seems that the Sun is not going to follow the other three Wapping titles by charging for access to all of its online content, Guardian's Roy Greenslade reported. For media details look here.


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

What do the Nobel Committee, Google, a Tunisian novelist and a Mexican journalist on the front lines of a drug war all have in common? They all have contributed to a package of editorials, essays and other materials being offered to newspapers world-wide to commemorate World Press Freedom Day on 3 May.

The wide ranging editorial and advertising materials, provided to newspapers and other media for publication on or around 3 May, are offered free of charge by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Thousands of newspapers publish WAN-IFRA materials each year to remind readers of the central role a free press plays in democracy and in economic, cultural, social and political development.

On February 7 AOL announced its plan to buy the Huffington Post for $315m. The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world. It is the largest merger in American business history.

Reflecting on the Huffington Post's story, Marco Renzi, on the Italian website LSDI, asked some provocative questions about the Italian situation of online-only experiences.

The Huffington Post was born in 2005 as Internet-only news site with an initial investment of one million dollars. Six years later, the site now employs more than 200 people and reaches 25 millions visitors every month, also thanks to a really wide network of bloggers and contributors.

"There would be similar examples in Italy... but the structural differences are so evident that rather than provide hope, they provoke outrage and bafflement", Renzi wrote, "What publishing company would nowadays invest one million euro in a blog?" 

French news site Mediapart has launched a website dedicated to the publication of information of public interest which would otherwise remain hidden, it announced yesterday. The new site is based on the principle of access to information and the free circulation of information, which is an elementary right for every citizen, they said.

The site is called FrenchLeaks, with a direct reference to Wikileaks, Mediapart has partnered with, meaning that it is allowed to access to the cables.

In public affairs, exposure should be the rule and secrecy the exception, Mediapart states, because it's up to the public to judge and to form an opinion (that's the concept of public opinion, isn't it?) on choices made and actions taken by the government and those in power. 

French daily Libération and weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur are looking at ways to cooperation, it was widely reported in the French media. Last Friday, Libération vice president Laurent Joffrin was asked by Claude Perdriel, president of the Nouvel Observateur group, and Edouard de Rothschild, Libération's main share holder, to study all possible forms of cooperation, reported Le Nouvel Observateur.

Joffrin will spend three months in deliberation, Agence France-Presse reported. As a former director of Le Nouvel Observateur, he is very familiar with both publications. It had recently been speculated  that he was to leave Libération, which is currently undergoing a recapitalization process, and re-join Le Nouvel Observateur. Both are left-leaning but non-communist publications.

The ease and low cost of publishing content on the web has meant firstly that anyone can do it, and secondly that companies have taken advantage of this ease coupled with people's desire to publish their writing to generate income. These 'content farms' - such as Demand Media - churn out large amounts of content a day, which is highly optimized for search and therefore consistently appears high in search results, leading to criticism from newspaper publishers that they are threatening traditional journalism.

One company that offers a similar service to writers is Vancouver-based Suite101. But Suite101 is not a content farm, said its CEO Peter Berger. "We see ourselves as a service for writers and contributors," and "we see the writers as the core of our company, so we look at where they can create value."

Editor-in-chief of Suite101's French site, Jérémy Reboul, described said that if anything, the business as "a free range content farm." The main difference between Suite and content farms "is our relationship with writers," he added. "It's something I think our competitors don't have."

Suite101 only accepts writers whose work meets its quality standards. In practice, this is 20-25% of applicants at the moment, Berger said. Prospective writers must send a writing sample, and then write a first article for the site as a further check.  

Articles are only published on Suite101's site, unlike Demand Media, for example, which puts articles on a variety of Demand-owned platforms. Suite101 has online exclusivity of the content for a year.

Writers can write on any topic they desire: there is no algorithm like Demand Media's that suggests what topics might be most popular online. All content is edited post-publication, within 24 hours of going on the site.

"Our site has quite a colourful mix of content," Berger said. "We have a very large range of articles."

The French branch of Suite101 has 11 editors, most of whom are working journalists, and they work closely with the writers. Editors are available to answer questions from writers by phone, and also call the writers they work with most to make suggestions. Editors focus on one or two different sections, such as economy, finance, cooking or fashion. Forty to fifty articles are published a day, and editors look at six to ten articles each in a day.

Writers are paid based on how many clicks the ads alongside their articles get. This means that they have no guaranteed income, but that once an article is published, it could well pay monthly dividends for years to come. Income is usually steady. There are no limits in terms of participation. Suite101 might look at alternative monetization methods in the future, such as micropayments, Berger said.

What are the advantages to a writer of working for Suite101?

You can write about what you want, and you may or may not make money. So the question arises: why not just write on your own blog? Reboul listed several reasons why a writer might prefer Suite101"

• -    You have editors
• -    Educational materials are provided on how to write online and journalistic standards
• -    There is a sense of community, through editorial forums
• -    The brand - Suite101 is well-ranked on Google
• -    Your reader ratio is 50x bigger than with your own blog.

"We try to help them achieve their goals, whether those are audience building, monetizing, or simply publishing content," said Berger.

Search vs destination

"Our site itself is very well optimized for SEO, but we don't believe in SEO tricks," Berger stressed. "Our core strategy is to create the articles that people what to read, so we try to help readers to find the areas within their expertise where they can create value."

Reboul believes that the writers are indeed writing for their readers, as if Suite101 were an online magazine. "We tell them that all the time - write for your readers, not for Google," he said.

The work produced by Suite101 is not a threat to news organisations, Berger said, describing this suggestion as a 'red herring.' "News is a completely different space," he said: "News works for a destination audience with a known brand, which is typically the opposite of search." Reboul was in agreement, commenting that "I think there is room for us and for classic news sites."

Journalists feel threatened by the web, and they see sites like Suite101 or Demand Media becoming successful, but this shouldn't mean that they come to the conclusion that it is the 'content farms' who are posing a threat, Berger said.  

The area that might well actually be threatened, Berger said, is traditional advice publishing, as people start to look to the web rather than books to find answers in this area. 

Reboul suggested that rather than seeing new media publishers as the enemy online, traditional publishers should see what they can learn. "I think everyone can get ideas from us - news organisations don't know at the moment how to monetise and maybe we can offer an example of that."

All news can be global and local, declares the website of new start-up WorldCrunch, whose mission is to provide English translations of news articles from around the world. "What we're looking for is to provide a global view of the world," co-founder Jeff Israely told the Editors Weblog, explaining that global news should always be relevant in a local sense also.

Israely and his business partner Irene Toporkoff, both based in Paris, have just launched an alpha version of the WorldCrunch website, inviting interested users to sign up via email.

What is it?

The goal is to bring together a selection of articles from around the world, maybe 20 to 30 a day, carefully chosen by knowledgeable journalists, that will deepen the Anglophone public's knowledge of global affairs. It will be a general news site, covering topics from politics and economics to culture and entertainment, the only criteria being that stories have value for a global reader.

This value, Israely said, could come from the fact that they are exclusive, particularly timely, very deeply-reported, or simply because they provide a fascinating perspective. How Obama's recent visit to Indonesia was covered by the Indonesian or Chinese media, for example, could provide an intriguing contrast to English-language coverage.

What papers around the world are saying about Anglophones might well be popular, Israely said, noting that this is of particular interest to readers of Courrier International, a French weekly magazine that provides a similar thing in print, focused on particular themes. An Italian weekly, Internazionale, provides the same kind of offering for Italian readers.

The articles will not necessarily be directly translated, but will be tweaked for the global reader to provide the necessary explanations. While it remains imperative to have human expertise, translation has become faster and less expensive due to advances in technology, Israely noted, which is helpful in the challenge to provide content swiftly.

It will be necessary to have eyes and ears in each area covered, Israely said, but mentioned the possibility of a crowd-sourcing element at some point in the future.

Partnering with traditional media

Clearly, partnerships with the publications who can provide the content are essential for such an initiative to work. Israely said that discussions so far have been positive, and stressed that WorldCrunch provides a potentially significant opportunity for publications to see their content read by new audiences, and create a new revenue stream with no investment in new resources. "We think we've got a smart way to help papers get their content out there," he said.

Israely, former Time correspondent in Rome then Paris, described the feeling of liberation he felt when he decided to take part in the new landscape of the news media. (He explains the process of launching a start up in a series of posts on Nieman Lab.) "The opportunities in the news business will be in creating new things." He sees his project as "a kind of bridge between traditional and new media:" it is helping old media move into a new arena.

WorldCrunch could play an important role in promoting the importance of good quality journalism, Israely added. "We need to find ways to remind readers that we still have the model for covering and informing the world."

He stressed the importance of seeking the right business model as well as having the journalistic imperative. He is open to the idea that WorldCrunch's model might develop and evolve to include revenue from readers, advertising and syndication. "I don't believe that information wants to be free," he said, but said that whether World Crunch ends up free or paid or a mix of the two is ultimately up to the market.

What is the future of foreign news coverage?

There has been increasing concern about reductions in the number of foreign correspondents as news organisations face financial challenges and cannot afford to maintain bureaux abroad. A recent study by the Media Standards Trust in the UK noticed a significant drop in the number of foreign stories appearing in several UK papers between 1979 and today, both a result of fewer correspondents and an increasingly UK-centric approach to news. Coverage of international politics has fallen the most dramatically, the study found.

In the US, such concern prompted the creation of Global Post, an online-only news outlet that also syndicates its content, produced by freelance correspondents around the world who are required to have lived and worked in the country they cover for a certain period of time. The goal is to plug holes in the amount of international reporting available in the US and the initiative represents faith in the model of the foreign correspondent. Undoubtedly, however, the role of the foreign correspondent is changing.

"I'm convinced that foreign reporting is not going to disappear," Israely said, noting that as the world gets smaller, news from afar indeed becomes more and more relevant. "Global stories are local because the world matters," he said: news from abroad appeals to a level of general curiosity that cuts across class and level of education.

From a journalistic point of view, the service that WorldCrunch hopes to provide is admirable: offering readers access to more content about issues which they might otherwise not be familiar with and offering newspapers access to a wider audience. It may well be optimistic to hope that foreign news will be more popular than a niche product, especially if it is paid-for. However, if WorldCrunch can be innovative in its offerings and find an effective business model, maybe it can break out of the niche. And even if not, it will hopefully contribute a valuable offering to the international news scene, particularly in light of reductions in coverage.

Is the future of news online-only? It's a trend that has caught on in the US and France, for example, and now Italy has also begun to see the appearance of pure online news projects.

One of these, Lettera43, was launched on 7 October as a new online newspaper. Lettera43 is a newspaper run by a young newsroom - the average age is 30 - with a magazine-style approach. It combines news and analysis, and it offers readers a summary of each article that they can read before deciding whether or not to read the extended version. "To be fast and multimedia doesn't mean being superficial," said editor and co-founder Paolo Madron, former editor of Panorama Economy and former correspondent for IlSole24Ore. 

The Editors Weblog spoke to Madron about his aims and hopes for the new publication.

EW: What was the motivation behind launching a new newspaper in 2010? Is this a good time given that, on the one hand, the press is encountering a crisis, symbolized by the Philip Meyer's prediction that dates the last printed copy of the New York Times to 2043, and, on the other hand, thanks to the Web, we are over-exposed to the media?

Madron: First of all, Lettera43 is not a printed newspaper: this greatly changes the perspective of the problem. Today it would be crazy to launch a printed newspaper, even though Il Fatto Quotidiano has done it with success. Setting aside this exception to the rule, the reality is that to set up a new print paper today has a high chance of failure, due to the cost and because of the situation of the market. Online is different: the investment the web requires in terms of infrastructure is smaller compared to print and, whatever whatever you think about it, the Web is the medium where news is going. So, I chose the future and I've launched a new online newspaper.

Talking of the future... the name of the paper brings together the past, by referring to the popular typewriter of the 1970s and 80s, the Lettera 22 (famously used by Indro Montanelli, founder of Il Giornale,) and the future, through the prediction of Philip Meyer: where do the two realities meet?

No matter the medium you use, if you don't have content, you are ineffective. Content is the meeting point. Going on the Web doesn't guarantee in itself that the initiative is good: what matters is whether you are able to effectively provide news. The most modern and advanced technology will never be enough. I think that [Marshall] McLuhan's "the medium is the message" is a paradox. With regards to the Internet, this could be true for some aspects, but the journalism, the good journalism, is something that expresses itself timelessly. When the journalism does its work, gives the news, investigates and inquiries, it is valuable on paper as well as on the Web. It is obvious starting a new project right now, we chose the most promising medium.

Following an international trend, Lettera43, a pure online newspaper, represents something new in the Italian news landscape, where online news sites are often digital versions of a printed version they share the brand with. How do you think Lettera43 will tackle this situation?

We decided to take a gamble as the French did. I have spent a lot of time in Paris and I studied the experiences of Slate.fr and Rue89, which is probably the most similar to us. The Italian market is very different from the French one: the web versions of the big printed papers (Corriere.it, Repubblica.it) dominate the market. In my opinion, there is the space for a new, independent, pure online newspaper.

Repubblica.it and Corriere.it have no freedom from their printed version because that is the one that provides three-quarter of the proceeds. Lettera43 has no paper prerogatives to safeguard and therefore can concentrate all its attention to the web site.

Lettera43 has chosen to be completely free to the reader and to rely on advertising, showing a belief in the democracy of the web. At the other end of the spectrum here is the approach of the French Mediapart, for example, which carries no advertising and whose content, apart from the homepage, is subject to a paid subscription. This reflects, in that site's opinion, the belief that the subscription fee is the only way to guarantee editorial quality and true independence. Quality information has a value and therefore a price, they say. What does your choice to be totally free mean?  

As a general principle, I don't believe in Internet with a fee. I am in favour of it only when a newspaper sells content with a very high additional value, like financial news coverage. It makes sense that the Wall Street Journal website is subscription-based, but we can't say the same for a generalist newspaper. Readers have many different ways to access news, and payment is justifiable only when the content offers high specialist value.

So, you trust in a total recovery of the web advertising market.

The advertising market online has never suffered a real crisis: it has continued to rise while the advertising market as a whole has fallen, even if, of course, it is a small section compared to the entire advertising sector.

In addition to the advertising revenue, a web site like Lettera43 could also provide content to third parties, as Rue89 and Slate.fr do. News aggregators or big companies with a domestic information network might be interested in buying a production of news content service.

How is the newsroom organised? How many people are involved? How many articles appear on the web site every day?

We have been online from 7 October, just over a month. At the moment about 50-55 articles go online every day, when we reach full capacity there will be about 100. There are 20 journalists in the newsroom plus three senior positions, an editor-in-chief and an editorial editor. The average age of the staff is 30 and they all vary in their backgrounds: some are "www-addicted" and others are journalists who grew up in the press. But they are all able to use multimedia, such as edit a video.

What is your business plan and when do you hope to break even or become profitable?

The plan is to break even between the third and the fourth year, because three years is the average time of a start-up. [Lettera43's main shareholder is Banca Sator.]