Results matching “us why young pe”

In Janowo, an 850-person village in north eastern Poland, on a Monday last month, a dozen people - mostly teenagers or over 40s - were gathering in a multi-activity meeting hall. They were listening to Igor Hrywna, a journalist at Gazeta Olsztynska, the dominant newspaper in this "Warmia-Mazury voivodship" (Varmia-Masuria). That day he left his base in the regional capital of Olsztyn to meet this group for the third time in one month. With his assistance, they are learning how to contribute to the recently launched hyperlocal website janowo.wm.pl, covering the 3,000 people "gmina" (commune) centered on Janowo, one of the smallest of the region.

"There are fewer than 120 broadband Internet subscribers today. Our goal by the end of the year is to have at least 6000 unique users", explains Hrywna, who supervises Gazeta Olsztynska's commune portals. "To achieve this, we are organizing two to three hour long training sessions for citizen journalists. I also learn from them!" The training for citizen journalists always begins with the easiest things, like sending pictures with a short description. It includes how to search and browse in the website, how to write, and how to be accurate.

Gazeta Olsztynska's hyperlocal websites like Janowo's are typically 80% filled by local citizens, with user generated content (UGC) mostly on social events. Staff journalists provide the rest, through their assistance and through their own written and edited pieces. "Small communities know what kind of information they need. That is why we base our portals on civil journalism supported by our professional knowledge. The goal is to have the so far marginalized villages really exist in the social cyberspace," comments editor-in-chief Ewa Bartnikowska.

During the Janowo training session, a retired music teacher, Janina Sadowska, who has been a reader of the regional daily for a long time, explained that she was there for two reasons. "First, it is a natural prolongation of my habit of sending readers' comments to the editor. Second, I am at the head of a women's club, and we want to have a presence in our gmina's website."

The young aspiring journalists, between 12 and 18 years old, came from a nearby agricultural school. One of them was filming the reunion with a small camera, planning to post some sequences in the website. Another one, Przemyslaw Ciesielski, 18, explained in clear English: "We don't buy newspapers, but we are interested in news."

For Jarek Tokarczyk, the president of Edytor, Gazeta Olsztynska's publishing house, the involvement of the young in his online projects is critical, because "they already know the Internet, which is accessible at school, even in the most remote villages; through them we can also reach their parents for other publications." Bartnikowska added: "It is very important for us to have roots in print, even though we go at the lowest geographic or smallest community levels only online. This strategy for localism is also only possible if we have social and not only media projects."

Edytor is already managing 35 such hyperlocal websites, as a way to get closer also to small advertisers. In the villages, the biggest companies are often the bakery which employs only eight persons, or the hairdresser with a staff of four. "We want to reach the places where print is not profitable, asking our advertising salespersons to monetize potential markets which have been ignored until now. For this purpose we also train our print representatives to understand the web, setting online revenue goals for each of them," explains Tokarczyk. "We know that the number of Internet users in the country and small towns is going to grow. We have to do it now because tomorrow will be too late." This "deep in localities" strategy is timely with new legislation to be implemented in the coming weeks, for broadband access everywhere in Poland. There are also local governments elections in September, which will boost the interest for hyperlocal news.

Gazeta Olsztynska and its separate edition Dziennik Elblaski, covering an area integrated only ten years ago into the region, have a quasi-monopoly in Varmia-Masuria, one of Poland's 17 voivodships. National daily Gazeta Wyborcza has local editions, but they are read principally in the biggest cities like Olsztyn, where they have a weaker position. In addition to the Internet portals, Edytor controls 21 hyperlocal weekly freesheets, which encompass numerous news areas, social to e-commerce activities. Each has its online version, is available as a supplement of the daily, and corresponds more or less to a county ("powiat").

Janowo, for instance, is attached to the local newsroom based in Nidzica and covering a 35,000 people powiat. Weekly Gazeta Nidzicka's editor-in-chief Jerzy Grala is assisted by four reporters and three sales representatives. The portal nidzica.wm.pl is updated at least twice a day, and links to and sometimes feeds the central newspaper's website gazetaolsztynska.wm.pl. It is enriched by content provided by its communal websites, including janowo.wm.pl, which is updated a few times a week. Grala also posts occasional on his blog grala.wm.pl, which is easily accessible from his newsroom's portal.

There are 25 regional dailies in Poland in total, Edytor being an exception as an independent group. Most others are controlled either by Polskapresse (owned by Germany's Verlagsgruppe Passau) or Media Regionalne (owned by Great Britain's Mecom). The Varmia-Masuria voivodship is one of the less populated, with 1.4 million inhabitants, out of a total population of 38 million in the coutry (plus about 6 millions Poles living abroad). The region has a particularly high unemployment rate, exceeding 19% versus less than 12% on average nationally.

Given this context, Gazeta Olsztynska's intense efforts to develop online activities and "deep localism" are unusual. "We have over 30 equipped multimedia journalists covering the region, who already produce around 600 pieces of different information every month. With the contributions of the mobilized civil journalists, we expect to double within one year the level of 500,000 unique visitors we got last month," explains Bartnikowska.

Edytor is multiplying editorial and marketing projects, both in print and online, including 200 different supplements and freesheets, family service and obituary websites, a schools of excellence campaign (proposing pupils to write about their schools), celebration contests requiring payment via SMS, special publications promoting the natural wonders of the region and its lakes. "The wm.pl suffix that we use online [for "Warmia-Mazury"] is the most important brand here. We want to be a regional Google!" Tokarczyk says.

Another illustration of Edytor's focus on "hyperlocalities" are its Nowe Miasto operations. In this 11000 people town - or large village - about 85 kilometers far from Olsztyn, it publishes weekly Gazeta Nowomiejska, covering a population four times bigger. Its online hyperlocal news endeavours are already one year old, as shown in the "gminas" listed at the bottom of portal nowemiasto.wm.pl. Unlike in Nidzica, the newsroom is not based on a main central square, but its position may be more strategic. Gazeta Nowomiejska is located on a street in front of the church where, for deeply catholic Poland, mass sermons easily hit the headlines and a significant part of social life relates to religious activities. "The priest sometimes promotes our portal during the mass," says chief editor Stanislaw Ulatowski, also a local celebrity as a print journalism veteran.

His deputy, Lukasz Paczkowski, is a young online and multimedia reporter and Internet geek, who manages his blog paczkowski.wm.pl, which is also displayed in the front page of Gazeta Nowomiejska's portal. "We start updating the website before 10 am, when most people open their computer, until 8.30pm", he says. His partnership with Ulatowski also illustrates the complementary cross-promotion between the platforms. "The photo galleries encourage user generated content" comments Paczkowski. "Our online correspondents are very helpful, because our staff cannot be everywhere in the county, and they are more likely to create communes' portals. Then we print the most newsworthy pieces in the weekly."

To extend his team's expertise, Tokarczyk has built a partnership with the promoters of the C3 concept ("Complete Community Connection"), Chuck Peters and Steve Buttry in the United States (the former is the CEO of Iowa's Gazette Communications, and the latter just left this paper to be the director of community engagement at a high-profile, Washington DC based digital start-up). In spite of being based in a remote region of central Europe, Edytor is being very pro-active in looking for ideas directly provided by the world's top experts in its fields of coverage.

Along with the hyperlocal websites, the Gazeta Olsztynska team has also launched numerous thematic portals about students, community centers, and even an "ethnic" group recently. Website ukraincy.wm.pl is dedicated to the 60,000 strong Ukrainian community, made of descendents or survivors of the group displaced by force to this part of Poland in 1947. It is benefitting from and promoting the revival of their language and religion (Greek Orthodox). "Our aim is to have half of the community visit the portal at least once a month by the end of this year. It will be 100% UGC, and fun," says Hrywna, who is also Polish-Ukrainian.

The South Florida Times, a weekly newspaper serving the counties of Miami, Broward and Palm Beach, has announced that it is to collaborate with students from Florida International University's J-School in an effort to improve media coverage of the northwest corner of Miami, known as the "Liberty City community", frequently the subject of negative reports.

The project, Liberty City Link, will see students illuminate "family businesses and community leaders," as well as "examinations into how failing schools can be improved, after-school programs that keep young people off the streets and mentoring groups that pair people from older generations with youth and events at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center" reports South Florida Times' Juliana Accioly.

All journalistic training schemes are designed to challenge their participants, but it seems that young reporters in the Western world may have it easier than some of their counterparts around the world. The Los Angeles Times has written about a 'boot camp' for trainee reporters in South Korea, describing the grueling routine that the aspiring journalists are subjected to.

It is a round-the-clock programme, involving supervision by minders, little sleep, little food but a lot of alcohol, and production of stories at high-speed; as the LAT put it "it's a sink-or-swim test of willpower and stamina designed to prepare young wire service, newspaper and television writers for survival in South Korea's no-holds-barred news culture."

Not every news outlet participates, but many send all their new hires to the camp for up to six months, and each outlet can specify the degree of severity of the training, the LA Times reported.

Source: Los Angeles Times

T. Christian Miller of the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica recently won the prestigious 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Editor & Publisher reports that it was a collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit news outfit that produced Miller's winning report into abuses of insurance coverage for private contractors in war zones.

Just last week, the winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism - usually given to courageous and skillful reporting - were announced, NPR's On the Media explains. Among the usual big media winners was a surprising win - the anonymous Iranians or Iranian who captured the death of the 26-year old protestor Neda Agha-Soltan on tape in the violent aftermath of the Islamic Republic's contested elections of June 2009.

Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle will not be the new editor of the Independent after its acquisition by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, the Guardian reported last Friday.

The decision to look elsewhere for new leadership was taken by Lebedev and Simon Kelner, editor-in-chief and managing director of the Independent, last Thursday after more than nine months of negotiations with Liddle.

The Twitter feeds of White House staff are quickly becoming required reading for political correspondents around Washington D.C., according to an article in Politico.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs created an account on the microblogging site last Saturday, joining colleagues like deputy press secretary Bill Burton, and White House director of new media Macon Phillips who were already members.

French daily newspaper France Soir is planning a redesign and will launch its new format in mid-March, it was widely reported in the French press.

The goal of the redesign is to create a popular and quality daily newspaper that can compete with Aujourd'hui en France, which is the national edition of Le Parisien.

The directors of the paper plan to go further than a simple redesign and create a completely new newspaper, accompanied by the addition of well-known figures to their editorial staff. The paper has announced that three former television presenters are on board: Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Thierry Roland and Laurent Cabrol.

The London Evening Standard's readership has gone from 556,000 in April to September to 1.37 million in the last three months of 2009, Stephen Brook from Guardian reports.

These positive readership figures follow the newspaper going free in October of last year and more than doubling its circulation to 600,000 copies in the process. The London Evening Standard was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebeveb in 2008, and his decision to drop the paper's 50p cover price was made in the hope that boosted circulation would increase advertising enough to make up for the lost revenue of having no cover price. His move towards the freesheet format prompted speculation that other London quality newspapers may drop their cover price as well.

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, according to a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group. The study's full findings will be reported in coming weeks, and may mean the newspaper industry needs to decide even faster how to make its online offerings economically sustainable, Dorian Benkoil reported in Poynter Online.

Young people aged 18-24 were the only segment that recorded a year-on-year drop for any digital media category, specifically for online newspapers. In 2008, around 64% of those surveyed said they had read a newspaper online in the last year, while by 2009 that figure had fallen to 54%.

Reading newspapers on Amazon's e-book reader the Kindle is less appealing than reading the print version, a new study by the University of Georgia has found. But portable e-readers that feature colour, photographs and touch screens could win readers back, particularly among young adults.

Over the course of a six-month study, participants read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Kindles, and then provided feedback through focus groups and interviews.

The readability of the Kindle screen impressed adults of all ages. Similarly, nearly all respondents, regardless of age, found the $489 price tag too high.

Working closely with advertisers can help newspapers to establish a good brand image, says Paz Alvarez Sanchez-Arjona, Market Intelligence director of Marca/Unidad Editorial in Spain, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

She has worked closely with marketing and advertising teams. This was satisfactory for the advertisers because the campaigns were distinctive and became well-known. This created loyalty and gave her brand a good, dynamic image, as well as revenue.

Marca is the leader among newspapers in terms of readership in Spain. It has 2.8 million readers, far more than any other newspaper in Spain. There are 40 million people in the country, with four national sports newspapers. Marca is located in Madrid and focuses a lot on Real Madrid and football, although it covers all the sports. In the last few years, a number of local papers have popped up, focusing on local teams. These detract from Marca's readership.

Sports betting is a very fashionable topic, says Christian Kalb, the founder of CK Consulting, France, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'. Sports have always hoped to benefit from new sources of revenue and sports betting is one opportunity to do so, he adds.

He points out that gaming revenue, the total amount of money that people have bet, is not all profit. Gaming operators have to pay taxes, and these vary widely between countries. When this is taken into account, total sports gaming revenue is around €400-500 million globally.

Today, thanks to the internet, there are no borders, he says. People can gamble in a more interactive way with more forms of betting, including live betting, which enables bets to be placed even after the game starts. The number one target is young urban active males, a little more affluent than others and more likely to bet. Even in the most evolved markets, though, gaming operators can reach no more than 13-14% of the population. Only one country is higher - Finland at 20-30%.

A Scottish MP has called for a free newspaper scheme, offering young people in Scotland a newspaper of their choice for free and for a year.

In an opinion piece in The Scotsman, Scottish Labour's culture spokesperson Pauline McNeill refers to the current transformations in the newspaper industry as "the biggest crisis in its history". She calls for yearly subscriptions to be offered to teenagers on their 18th birthdays to encourage them to become long-term readers.

The German publisher, M.DuMont Schauberg, which owns the daily newspaper Berliner Kurier, has announced its intentions to launch a news supplement aimed directly at a younger audience later this year. The exact date of publication is not yet known.

The move comes after news magazine Spiegel successfully launched Dein Spiegel last year, a separate publication from its news magazine and aimed at young readers between the ages of nine and twelve. Since its debut in September, with the first edition focusing on the then hot topic of Germany's general election, the publication has enjoyed considerable success and now lines the shelves of newsstands across the country. 

Morning freesheet Metro Herald, created by the merger of freesheets Herald AM and Metro Ireland, has launched in Dublin today.

The merger, announced last summer, was widely expected as both papers were believed to be running at a loss, according to The Guardian.

Online news publications in France will share in state aid for the first time, to the tune of €20 million, Le Monde reports. Eighty per cent of the aid will be in the form of subsidies, while the rest will be in repayable loans.

This news follows the controversial state subsidies of the French press, which totalled €1.2 billion in 2008 and includes a free newspaper scheme for young people. A new body representing online news publishers, Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante d'Information en Ligne (Spiil) has been debating whether or not to accept similar subsidies for some time.

A half-dozen young men and a few women dressed in long Muslim outfits are sitting in an open space, repeating a few words in English. The instructor, a lady wearing a distinctive veil, sends one of her students to the board, and he starts writing a few words that his "schoolmates" have to repeat. We are in Hyderabad, India. Their native language is Urdu, a mix of Hindi with Arabic script, spoken by many Indian Muslims and widespread in Pakistan.

A recent post on Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has rasied concerns over the potentially devasting impact the current financial crisis in the newspaper industry could have on the willingness of students to choose journalism as a profession.

Mutter argues that in a time where employment opportunities are shrinking and those who do manage to secure jobs are paid a pittance, a 'substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists' could be wiped out in a movement he dubs 'journicide'.

The Times head honchos realize that they must innovate to create a desirable and competitive product before they can put up paywalls. 

In an innovative project from the Netherlands, the Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science has managed to gain support from the Parliament for more funding for journalism.

It's not in the form of government subsidies for newspapers, though, which have been criticised by various industry insiders including media mogul Rupert Murdoch and editor Frédéric Filloux. Instead, the Dutch government will finance two-year contracts for 60 young journalists across 30 titles in the country's press, reports Media Trend.