Results matching “international h”

Provider of online sports news, The Sports Network (TSN), has announced that it will launch a new service that will provide sports content to newspapers.  The cost of the service will be based on newspaper circulation.

According to a TSN announcement, the service will offer "within its sports, such needed items as national and international stories, sports columns, agate that can be customized but which already includes standings/major results/schedules/stats and more." 

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.

 

More and more newspapers are being forced to reorganize and reduce the size of their papers in an effort to cut costs.  The most recent one to follow this trend is the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska.

The paper will now be made up of two sections rather than four smaller ones.  The first section will consist of local news, national and international news, business, stocks, obituaries and the editorial pages.  The second section will consist of sports, features, classifieds, comics, weather and TV.

Forecasts for 2009 are, unsurprisingly, relatively pessimistic for traditional media and more positive for new media developments. But not all commentators were as determined as Jeff Nolan that "if 2008 was bad for newspapers, 2009 will be devastating," and many saw hope in the possibility of changes in content and format.  

Qatar based news network, Al Jazeera has announced a partnership with Sony Ericsson.  The partnership will allow Al Jazeera to provide built-in AJ RSS feeds on Sony Ericsson phones in the Middle East and North Africa, according to journalism.co.uk.

The RSS feeds will offer daily international news updates in both English and Arabic on certain models of Sony Ericsson phones.

In the run-up to the 16th World Editors Forum being held in Hyderabad, India March 22-25, 2009, the Editors Weblog is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. The first of the series studies newsroom integration at the UK daily, The Guardian, which has recently moved into a new building with intentions to combine its print and online staff.

Guardian News & Media recently integrated its print and online operations, The Guardian, The Observer and the website Guardian.co.uk, having moved to new premises last month.  The Editors Weblog spoke to Paul Johnson, Guardian Deputy Editor and overall head of news, business and sport, and Nick Watt, Chief Political Correspondent, to find out details.

Changing offices was essential to the integration process.  Paul Johnson emphasized how "we couldn't make the big leap until we moved to the new building." Previously, five different buildings housed the Guardian's 1400 staff, including around 850 journalists. Guardian News & Media has now taken three and a half floors of the new King's Place development: a brand new building also housing a concert hall, with notable green credentials and which is, as Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger described it, "a thing of beauty." Nearly all journalistic staff are now sitting together on one floor. 

The Guardian's new building is a "thing of beauty", according to Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger.

However despite the integration, staff will work hard to maintain the different voices of the two papers and the website. According to Johnson, "we recognise that a distinctiveness is necessary. We are not attempting to bulldoze this into a flat surface." The Observer will retain eight dedicated journalists who will write for the Web but who will focus on the Sunday paper, and under the platform-neutral "heads of" there will be separate section editors for each platform which each subject area.

A group of 111 journalists, plus management staff, were involved in developing ideas for integration as part of what Johnson described as "a bottom-up, consensual process," very different to that of The Daily Telegraph, for example. One of the methods used to spark ideas was inventing different story scenarios and making journalists tackle them; from this it emerged that "we didn't necessarily have the right resources in the right place at the right time and we built around that," Johnson explained. 

Centralised but devolved

'Platform-neutral' is one of the key terms of the new newsroom: heads of national news, international news, business and sport are all described as 'platform-neutral.' Key to integration is the new newsdesk, which deals with both print and online and centralises operations. "It's a real hub," Johnson commented, seating 19 people, including both web and paper heads for national news, international news, and business news. Nick Watt explained how the very fact that these people are sitting together makes a huge difference, as when he is working on a story with the home news editor and the business editor, he now only has to call one number and the decision making process happens much faster. "You get rid of the 'us and them' element.

"Being in one building means greatly improved communication, said Johnson, "compared to being on four or five different sites, you feel a lot closer." A major communication point for the day is an open door morning meeting. Following a small meeting for senior staff in Rusbridger's office, anybody who wishes to can come to a larger meeting, which is broadcast on screens around the office. Incidentally, a management consultancy firm hired to help with integration recommended against the word 'meeting', so these gatherings are now known as 'checkpoints'. 

The devolved aspect of the newsroom, equally crucial to the integration process, is the "pods" system. Print and online journalists have been grouped together by area of specialization such as health, education, politics or media and technology, into so-called pods, which can then publish autonomously straight onto the Web site. The pods range in size from five people to 28, and usually include reporters, sub editors for the paper, site editors for online, and a head who is platform neutral. Nick Watt explained that the political journalists now all work in one pod and report to Will Woodward, head of politics, who works for all three platforms and decides which stories to follow and where they will go. 

In the "pods" system, print and online journalists of the same specialization are grouped together and are able to publish straight to the web.

This is a significant change from the traditional "funnel" structure of the newsroom where all stories would go through a single editor. Nearly all of the pods are in the main newsroom, a couple are on the floor above and some members of the politics pod are still based at the House of Commons. All of the arts journalists sit together in an area known as the culture hub.  

Multimedia focus

A multimedia training day was offered to all staff in advance of integration, and according to Johnson, the take up has been "extremely good in terms of numbers." Possibly surprisingly, it has not been just the younger staff who were enthusiastic; "some of the people who have been the best exponents of different styles of journalism have been some of the more experienced journalists and correspondents."

The new building houses what Johnson described as "a fantastic multimedia suite", with seven recording studios and 24 editing desks. And he says that so far staff have been showing a considerable "appetite for video, picture galleries and interactive graphics which are vitally important for us." The pictures desk is now fully integrated, and most of the photographers and a lot of the reporters are now trained in video. Video production is being taken seriously: in 2008 the Guardian was the first newspaper to win a Royal Television Society award.

No cost-cutting

An extremely positive side to the Guardian's integration process is that unlike, unfortunately, many other integrating newsrooms, the merger of print and Web teams has not resulted in layoffs. There have been some voluntary redundancies, but total staff numbers have not been reduced. "It's not a cost-cutting exercise," Johnson stressed. He explained that "we wanted to make this change within budget, without cutting our headcount."  The essential detail to grasp is that it is about reallocation rather than reduction: "what we have done is repositioned resources towards the web." Rather, the measures taking have been to maintain "journalistic excellence, and to free up some of the resources we have got to focus on getting our work out there." 

Success?

Johnson was very confident that integration is going well so far. The necessary changes in mindset were largely made over the year of preparation prior to the move, particularly during two integration "dry runs" which were implemented for the Olympics and the US elections. He claimed that "people seem to be embracing the changes and people have been very positive about it across the board."  One of the main reasons for this, he explained, is that journalists love to see their work published "in different forms and in different ways." After all, it is exciting to file a story and see it appear on the website almost immediately. Nick Watt was also enthusiastic about the changes: "it's much more collaborative and much more efficient."

It will be interesting to see whether the publications succeed in maintaining their distinct voices, and what sort of increase in multimedia content there is. As the Guardian is in the fortunate situation of being highly successful and run by a trust which reduces financial pressure, integration is a choice rather than a obligation, and the necessary time and effort has been spent to ensure a smooth transition.

The Kansas City Kansan has announced that it is to discontinue its print edition and move to online only.  The final print edition will be on January 10 and the paper will launch a revamped Web site on January 7.

 

General Manager Drew Savage explained that the move to online only was to save on overheads and allow for more investment in electronic media.  He insisted that the Kansan would continue to thrive with "a lot more content than we have ever had," and pointed out that online readership is ten times greater than for the print edition. 

 

AsianWeek, a San Francisco free sheet aimed at Asian Americans has also announced the demise of its print edition, with the final copy to come out on Friday.  It will continue to publish online, and its editor and publisher Ted Fang attributed the move to economic hardship.  

Cox, publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Austin American-Statesman and 15 other papers, was the latest in string of publishers to announce that it would be closing its Washington bureau.  

Cox's bureau will not close until April 1 but others such as Advance Publications, owner of The Star-Ledger of Newark amongst others, and Copley Press, owner of The San Diego Union-Tribune, have already closed.  And many who remain have significantly cut back on both Washington staff and coverage.  The Tribune Company has merged the bureaus of its various papers, reducing staff numbers to 32 compared with 70 a year ago.  

This may seem surprising considering the upcoming inauguration of an eagerly anticipated new president, but in light of newspapers' severe financial difficulties, many are choosing to focus on local coverage rather than national or international events, as the latter can always be more easily found online. Besides, bureaus in Washington are expensive.  

Nielson Online is reporting that the top 10 newspaper sites saw an increase in visitors last month, supporting the case for publishers to "continue to invest online and realign their business focus," communications director Alex Burmaster said.

Media Week is reporting that, on average, the UK's leading newspaper websites saw an increase in page views by 23% than November 2007, and "outperformed the wider online marketplace."

Despite the grim outlook for print publications, online versions have been thriving this year, Burmaster said.  The panel-based research comes following the report by Deloitte predicting that one in 10 newspapers will either cut print frequency, move entirely online or shut down in the next year.

The Guardian was the leader with 3.4 million unique UK visitors, followed by the Telegraph with 3.1 million visitors.  News International online versions of titles The Times and The Sun, followed by the Daily Mail, rounded out the top five.

Source: Media Week

Brazil's Metrô News, the oldest Metro publication in the world, has been redesigned.

Launched in Sao Paolo in 1974, the paper has overcome an August 2008 strike and is now distributing 120,000 copies daily.

Metro International and Destak, both in Brazil since 2007, are publishing editions in Sao Paolo with a circulation of 150,000 each.

Source:  Newspaper Innovation

European Union leaders are considering a €200 billion economic rescue plan which includes €1 billion to bring high-speed Internet access to rural areas.

The proposal will be considered during a two-day meeting of EU government leaders beginning today, and support of the plan is "not assured," according to the International Herald Tribune.  The proposal, if passed, would undoubtedly provide an opportunity for greater mobile media connectivity.