Results matching “conference news”

The British tabloid, the Daily Mirror has confirmed that it will launch its own stand-alone football website. Mirrorfootball.com will be up and running for the start of the next football season in August.  

Fans of the beautiful game can expect to enjoy a wealth of information and entertainment offered by the site.  As described by the Guardian when the news of the site broke last month, it looks set to offer a predominately visual, up-to date experience of football scene. Video and audio applications will convey live match reports and press conference broadcasts.  A new 'Football Spy" application will present a daily football agenda programme, match previews and reports and transfer talks.  

The Internet was responsible for Barack Obama's election to the White House, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post claims. Although this statement will inevitably incite dissenting views, in the context of Huffington's talk on the power of the Internet it does not seem wholly unreasonable. Huffington was speaking at the Activate Conference 09, convened to discuss the social implications of the rise of the Internet and technology.  

The conference reiterated discussions of technological and cultural trends, which are conditioning not only how news needs to be presented, but how these new forms of diffusion can directly affect politics and society.

Twenty-five American nonprofit news organisations have decided to come together to form an Investigative News Network, following a three-day conference at the Pocantico Conference Center in New York. Its mission is to aid the work and public reach of its members, and to foster the "highest quality investigative journalism" to hold those in power accountable.

The Pocantico Declaration anticipates an increase in the number of investigative news publishers, and hence seeks to establish "basic shared goals and news values." It identifies several different forms of potential collaboration. Firstly, editorial: meaning that nonprofits could carry out joint accountability projects. Secondly, administrative: organisations could exchange information about organisational functions and even possibly centralise some of these. Thirdly, financial, which could consist either of just sharing information and jointly fundraising, or even of "pioneering new economic models to help to monetize the shared, combined content of the member organizations, in order to achieve a more sustainable journalism.

The Washington Times is hosting a two-day symposium in New York today and tomorrow to discuss the topic of the 'individuated newspaper.' Peter Vandevanter, vice president of the Denver-based Media News Group, coined the term after researching ways that newspapers can resist the threats of the ailing industry.

"There are two kinds of content now. You choose it, or it's chosen for you. The idea here is self-selection of the news, delivered to any platform, at any time," Peter Vandevanter was quoted saying in The Washington Times today.

We live in a world, not a village

The directors of international journalism courses talked about the importance of internationalisation and giving students a chance to interact with other students from around the world in a bid to understand the effects of global media in a local context.

According to Eric Scherer at AFP, the future of journalism will lie in enterprising journalists and their efforts to come up with journalistic solutions that will facilitate the communication process and continuously revise the business models in place. He also believes that a new mindset will eventually need to replace the typical journalist's attitude of today, as well as in the value of a broad general knowledge base - something that internationalisation makes possible.

Tomorrow's journalists: multimedia experts, gadget geeks, engineers and entrepreneurs?

The afternoon was kicked off with a look at the way technological progress had irreversibly helped modify the journalist's job description, as well as society's expectations of the news and its relationship with this.

Everyone agreed that the Internet had become a vital part of the journalist's toolkit and Google was specifically singled out as an effective research tool, particularly as a powerful search engine. Although, Andrés Azócar, journalism director at Chile's Diego Portales University said that as students were becoming more reliant on Google, they were also becoming less capable of retaining information for themselves.

An opportunity for reinvention: from fortress to open house

According to Charlie Beckett (left), director of Polis, LSE's think tank on the role of media in society, in order to reinvent the content of journalism curricula and define the role of a journalist, journalism schools first need to determine what is meant by journalism. He said educators need to teach prospective journalists about the values of risk and experimentation and provide students with the ability to reconsider their idea of journalism.  He also rejected the idea of labelling this approach as 'theory'. "It's not theory anymore," he said, "it's tomorrow's practice."

Notwithstanding a traditional journalism background (Beckett started as a local newspaper reporter and gradually worked his way through the ranks at the BBC and Channel 4), Beckett advocates throwing out the rule book on conventional journalism wisdom. He argues that too many journalism institutions have become fortresses, too set in their old ways, with a foundation that leaves little room for flexibility.

As the controversy over the recent election in Iran and the subsequent media response have made abundantly clear, social media like Twitter are playing an increasing role in the world of journalism. While today's working journalists must learn how these tools will affect their jobs on the fly, j-schools have a great opportunity to instruct the next generation of journalists before they enter the newsroom.

In a column on Mashable, Vadim Lavrusik - himself a journalism student at Columbia University - outlines "10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media." Lavrusik spoke with professors and deans at some of the top j-schools in the US, who told him how their respective schools have integrated lessons about how new technology can assist in reporting and provide a tool for promotion and self-branding on the web. The questions Lavrusik raises regarding ethics and social media are perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the article, and could have real consequences for students.

On 19 June, Paris' Sciences Po École de journalisme played host to a selection of the world's leading journalism educators (Chile, China, Denmark, Jordan, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, UK and the USA) who were invited to discuss the "Challenges and Evolution of Journalism Education."

Opening the conference, Bruno Patino, dean of the Sciences PO School of Journalism, said: "The only thing certain is uncertainty," in reference to the news industry, which has seen advertising revenue across developed countries plummet in the wake of the economic crisis and the growing influence of the Internet.

The French government is to give all 18 to 24-year-olds a free newspaper once a week for a year as part of 600 million euro aid package for the press. The concept was originally outlined in January, when the government announced its plan to offer French teenagers a year-long subscription to the newspaper of their choice, commencing on the  day of their 18th birthday. The extension of the age range was  announced yesterday at the Ministry of Culture meeting of the États généraux de la presse.

The idea has proven to be a particularly controversial component of the government's package of financing and reform formulated to restore the health of the French printed press.  The Sarkozy administration has dedicated an exceptional 200 million euros a year, for a 3-year period, to aid the printed press. The Culture Ministry announced during the meeting that more than half of this year's budget had already been designated.

Adding credence to the notion that more than ever people are relying on the Internet as their primary source of news, the latest poll by Zogby International shows a majority of Americans view the web as the best source of information. When presented with a scenario in which they had to choose only one source of news, 56% of adults picked the Internet.

Where Americans are getting their news on the web is striking. Nearly half said the web sites of national newspapers are important and 43% said the same for national TV sites. Internet-only operations fared much worse. Less than 30% stated that blogs that shared their political views were important, and just 14% said the same for blogs with the opposite political view. And social networking sites? Forget it. Ten percent of adults named Facebook as an important source of news, and a mere 4% said the same of Twitter.

Politico writer Michael Calderone believes that Barack Obama and the White House are trying to win over the New York Times. Despite the new president's team's penchant for new media and social networking, Calderone feels that the White House "remains in the thrall of perhaps the most emblematic old media institution of all."

Calderone reminisces about an "earlier age, when the Times loomed like Olympus over elite journalism" and describes how although Bush's team seemed not to care particularly about the paper, the current White House has shown it great respect. He points out that senior Obama officials posed for Times Sunday Magazine portraits during the transition and that the magazine this month produced a major piece on health care, for which it was offered top-level access. Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai and editor Gerald Marzorati both said that there had been a significant change in attitude towards their paper with the arrival of the new administration.

"The future of online writers and journalism in the Gulf is very uncertain," said Saudi radio journalist Samar Fatany. Fatany arrived at this conclusion based on the outcome of a workshop organized by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) to address the challenges of mainstream media in the Gulf.

At the workshop, Gulf online writers, journalists and media professionals from Malaysia, Eastern Europe and the United States (such as senior newsroom editor of the Huffington Post) gathered to debate the role of new forms of media that are changing and reshaping public debate and discussed how to generate more revenue online. The date and location of the event is not disclosed in the article written by Fatany posted on Al Arabiya.com.

As the world's political and media spotlights focussed on the Iranian elections, the Internet was always expected to play an important role in keeping people up to date with developments, but little did we know the Web would also prove to be the scene of political unrest.

As news emerged that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had secured 62.6 percent of the 46.2 million votes cast compared to rival Mir Hossein Mousavi's 33.75 percent, tweets started circulating from a section of the country's disappointed and disenfranchised voters.

The Associated Press will start distributing watchdog and investigative journalism from nonprofit organisations at no cost to its member newspapers on July 1, it announced at the 2009 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference in Baltimore. It will be a six-month trial project involving four nonprofit journalism organizations, reported a press release.

The project is aiming to provide the nonprofits with an additional distribution channel, while making it easy for the AP's 1500 member newspapers to find and use this content. It will be provided via AP Exchange, the AP's web-based delivery system, at no cost to either the newspapers or to the contributing organisations. Exchange users will have the option of routinely displaying the nonprofit journalism in their news searches.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Labour MP Tom Watson go head-to-head on Twitter, as Watson and the Daily Mail accuse the centre-left paper of going too far. Last week, the newspaper went ahead with a front-page editorial urging the British PM Gordon Brown to resign.

Daily Mail obsessed with idea of Guardian 'putsch' (in collusion with BBC?). A question of media ethics, apparently. http://tiny.cc/7Wp3M"

And so went the tweet that started it all, with Rusbridger linking to the Daily Mail article, in which Stephen Glover asks "Was it [the Guardian] trying to orchestrate events so as to secure the resignation which it had called for in its editorial?"

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

A new daily newspaper serving the Detroit area will be launched within the next 60 days, it was announced Tuesday. The Detroit Daily Press, a project of the two experienced publishing brothers, Mark and Gary Stern, arose to compensate for the reduced home delivery of the city's two main daily papers earlier in the year.

"There is a definite need here," Mark Stern asserted at a news conference in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. "People are used to having a newspaper in their hand. ... That's what we're going to do -- provide a newspaper."

A thirteen-year old Scottish boy is one of the latest entrepreneurs to get involved in the web news business.  Six months ago, schoolboy Scott Campbell launched NetNewsDaily, a site which aggregates and summaries global news stories, "so that people with little or no time are able to read it without rushing".

In an interview with the Guardian, Campbell described the functioning of the site and how he maintains a good work-home balance.  The site reportedly receives around 1,000 to 1,500 uniques a day, a number that Campbell and his colleague Nathan Adam hope will triple within a year. To begin with, the project was funded entirely by the teenger's own pocket money, but now the site gathers around £150 a month in advertising.   According to Campbell, advertisers normally approach the editors via Twitter or email.  NetNewsDaily have also done several sponsored posts to boost revenue.   

In an interesting article published on the Guardian Media website, Jeff Jarvis (right) talks about the changing nature of journalism and advertising, with content generated not just by journalists but - thanks to the Internet - also readers.

"Advertising is failure," declares the American journalism professor in his opening sentence, adding that advertising is a last-ditch attempt to win over customers. "The media pray for such failure because it is advertising that will support them," he notes.

Fresh on the heels of a successful legal battle in which 55 Spanish editors denounced a press-cutting service for using articles without the express consent of the authors, the Spanish press has decided to launch another judicial fight, this time to reclaim work used by news aggregators.

May's ruling featuring a company called Documentación de Medios confirmed that newspapers are the rightful and exclusive intellectual property owners of their own work, in effect, giving them complete control over what can and cannot be published by third parties.

The Nielsen Company has carried out a 52-nation online survey on whether media coverage of the impending recession was adequate. The general consensus among consumers was that the media did not sufficiently inform the public, according to Nielsen Business Media writer Kenneth Hein.

In every region except Latin America, the percent of people who agreed or strongly agreed that media coverage was inadequate outnumbered those who disagreed by 2-to-1. Consumers were most dissatisfied in Europe and North America, with 48 and 51% respectively agreeing that coverage was inadequate. These are the areas which have been hit hardest by the current crisis.

A conference held by the Association of European Journalists (AJE), held today, June 3 in Paris, discussed the path forward for journalism which focuses on Europe as geo-political reality.   Aware that the concept of Europe, as reported in the mainstream press, often fails to capture the imagination of the public as well as many journalists themselves, representatives of initiatives currently striving to revive the issue met to debate its progress. The questions raised were broad: Is reporting on Europe a 'chore'?  How can the media inspire, entertain and inform on European issues?  Which are the principle perspectives and agents responsible for revealing what's actually going on in the EU?  And will European institutions be prepared to finance new organs of information?

Participating in the debate were: Renaud de Chazournes, Chief Editor of the monthly magazine, L'Européen, Eric Maurice, Chief Editor of Presseurop.eu and Matthieu Collet, President of EurosduVillage.eu. 

The deadline for the 2009 World Young Reader Prize, this year with two new categories on offer, is 15 June. It is also the last date to get a discounted registration for the World Young Reader Conference being held in Prague, Czech Republic 27-30 September.

This annual award from the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) recognizes newspapers that do the most to develop young readership. WAN has added a special press freedom category for 2009  to honour newspapers that teach effectively about the fragility and importance of press freedom in a democratic society.

Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference that took place in San Francisco between May 27-28, Google has unveiled Google Wave, a new online communication service.

Described as a "personal communication and collaboration tool," Google Wave allows users to chat and share documents including audio files, videos and photos in real-time.