Results matching “french media si”

French hotel chain Sofitel will now offer the daily press to its guests through an iPad application, "in a move that could mean a fresh start for the dwindling tradition of the morning newspaper in hotels," The Independent revealed today.

The newspaper service, called "The Kiosk," provides a selection of six publications per country. For now, there will be media from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United States, the company announced in a press release.

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Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

"Do we have an excess of daily press journalists? And, if so, how does the surfeit vary from country to country?"

Frédéric Filloux is a French journalist, academic and editor of a newsletter about business models of media and technology (full disclosure: Monsieur Filloux has in the past spoken at conferences held by WAN, which also owns EditorsWeblog).  In a report released earlier this week on MondayNote.com, Filloux has performed statistical analysis of data contained in the recent OECD report, "The Evolution of News and the Internet".  In his analysis, he looks at the relationship between the number of active journalists in a given country and  the gross circulation of newspapers in that country during the same time period.

RIA Novosti has recently released iPhone applications in English and French, reports the Novosti website. The new apps from the Russian news sources will allow for French and English readers to browse through Russian and international news, watch videos, view photos and infographics, and download and e-mail favorites.

Nicolas Sarkozy has a worrying degree of influence over the French media, according to an article in the Guardian today. Prompted by his "shocking" alleged interference in the recent sale of French daily Le Monde, Guardian writer Kim Willsher looked at the ways in which the French president influenced the media and discussed fears of the "Berlusconisation" of the media.

Sarkozy called in Le Monde's editor-in-chief Eric Fottorino before the sale of the paper to express his concerns about one of the takeover offers, which it seemed he feared might turn the paper against his government. This promptly led to criticism over the level of his involvement and possibly contributed to the takeover offer in question being approved by Le Monde's staff. 

Difficult times present many challenges, but they also offer many opportunities. L'Université d'Eté will give you the chance to learn and benefit from the worldwide experience of WAN-IFRA.

The Summer University will be 5 to 7 July at the Unisys International Management Centre.  Participation is limited.

All information at : www.wan-ifra.org/summeruniversity2010

Le Monde, the so-called "French Establishment Bible," has run into some financial difficulty. Like many other print publications, Le Monde is searching for ways to rake in more cash to avoid financial collapse. In light of its struggle, The Times reported today, that Le Monde may be on the verge of sacrificing some of its values in order to attract a larger readership. In a noted break from tradition, Le Monde is offering its readers a chance to buy classic, albeit licentious, works of literature like Casanova or the Marquis de Sade.

According to a recent survey, there are now more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. Spot On Public Relations found that there were more than 15 million Facebook account holders in the Middle East and North Africa region, while the total number of newspaper copies sold in the region in Arabic, English and French is just under 14 million.

Facebook's decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to many more people, said Spot On PR's managing director Carrington Malin in a summary of the report. 3.5 million Arabic users have joined over the past year, including 1.1 million in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. 50% of users in the region still use English as their primary language, however. The top five Facebook markets in MENA - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia, account for 70% of all users in the region. The region has a greater proportion of male users than other areas of the world: 37% of MENA users are female, compared to 56% in the US, for example. 

In the last year, Twitter has become a go-to social network for journalists either looking to research stories or ways to distribute their content online. News organizations, like Newsweek and Sky News, have amply incorporated tweets into their newsrooms and news stories, and last month, we learned that the NYT stories get tweeted at a remarkable rate of once every 4 seconds.

However, Twitter's status as a hybrid of social networking and news site has led some journalists to conduct themselves a bit more casually than they usually would on other media.

This week, Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, Matt Winkler, expressed his concern for how some of the financial news and data company's journalists were phrasing their breaking news posts on Twitter, according to an exclusive from Talking Biz News.

Consumers have given mainstream media only "middling grades" for their iPad applications so far, according to Alan Mutter, who looked at ratings on the iTunes Store. For the ten most frequently-downloaded news apps (in order of popularity: USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Associated Press, NPR, BBC, Reuters, France 24 and China Daily) the average number of stars was 2.8 out of 5. It must be noted that many news outlets have not yet released iPad-specific applications.

The apps with the most stars were three publicly-funded news outlets. France 24 was rated highest, with 4 stars. The French government-funded TV news channel offers news in English and Arabic as well as French. Next came the BBC and NPR with 3.5 stars. 

The Social Media Club France recently blogged about how the diversification of mobile devices which give readers access to the internet has obviously changed the way users access information. As a result, Social Media Club France recommends that journalists adopt a method of presenting news that is not only interactive but also adaptable to the non-linear diffusion of media.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is calling on publications world-wide to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, 3 May, by honouring journalists who are forced to flee their countries just for doing their jobs.

WAN-IFRA, which represents 18,000 newspapers, 15,000 online sites and more than 3,000 companies world-wide, is dedicating its 2010 World Press Freedom Day campaign to "Journalists in Exile",  and has produced editorials, advertisements, political cartoons, interviews and other materials for publication in newspapers and other media on or around 3 May.

Newspapers wishing to view, download and publish the materials, free of charge, can find them at http://www.worldpressfreedomday.org .

Not fifteen years ago, if a news consumer wanted to get in touch with a reporter or the rest of the community concerning an article in the paper, he or she would put pen to paper and send off a letter to the editor's desk.  That letter would be screened by the editor of the newspaper and, most likely, thrown into a trash bin never to find a place on the op-ed page.  But with the advent and increasing popularity of newspaper websites, any person can comment on just about any article, and many can do it with little thought, moderation or the need to identify themselves.

Such unfettered commenting has led to what William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia University's journalism school, called a "brawl."

"A lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher," he said to the New York Times.

These threads run hundreds of comments long and often stray off-topic or turn nasty.  Though most comment threads are equipped with the option for users to flag questionable content, as the discussion loses direction, offensive comments can slip through the cracks.  In response to out of control comment threads, newspapers have gone so far as to shut down commenting capacity until they were able to clean up the threads. 

Prominent French outlet Le Monde needs €125 million to get out of its debt condition, according to Electron Libre. The group must return €70 million in redeemable bonds, insure €30 million of its working capital and cover its €25 deficit. Le Nouvel Observateur suggested that Le Monde might "disappear" unless a solution is found by June 2010.

The newly reinvented French daily, France-Soir, is encountering difficulties in its attempt to reestablish itself amongst the French public, according to the New York Times. Using a "mass-market reach" the paper is attempting to "change how the French think about newspapers" with flashy headlines which the NYT's Eric Pfanner has likened to those found in tabloids.

Le Monde announced Tuesday that, starting March 29, it will be offering a new subscription package encompassing all media on which the top French newspaper is offered.  Currently, the site offers free access to much of its online content, articles from that day's print newspaper, which are relegated to a subscription-only archive the next day, and there is a free iPhone application, which has received over 1.4 million downloads to date.  Upon the implementation of a paywall, Le Monde's print edition will no longer be available online to anyone but web subscribers.

The move comes as part of an effort to create what Eric Fotterino, CEO of Le Monde, calls a "global brand."

"The different platforms, paper and digital, are not competing but complementary," he said.

Le Monde's print team and web team work mostly separately, which results in a disparity between the print product and the web product.  Though efforts have been made recently to bridge the divide between the two newsrooms, Le Monde the newspaper and LeMonde.fr the website are often considered two different products sharing one name.

The International Press Association, an organization representing all foreign reporters stationed in Belgium, is hosting a meeting today to discuss employment prospects for journalists reporting in Brussels.

The meeting, entitled "What does the future hold for Brussels-based journalists?" will attempt to address the exodus of much of the European Union press corps over the past five years and the diminishing presence of foreign press in Brussels.  According to a press release, the API "considers an urgent taking stock and a broad debate are imperative."  The group hopes to address three main concerns:

France-Soir, once one of France's most widely read dailies but now an influential blip in the French media landscape, was recently purchased by the 25-year-old son of a Russian billionaire Alexander Pugachyov.  Pugachyov has put a 50 million euro bet on the newpaper in hopes to return it to its former glory.

The paper, launched in 1944, once reigned as France's fourth most popular daily with a circulation of more than 1 million copies at its peak.  It has since fallen into obscurity, and before Pugachyov's investment it employed only 40 reporters with a much-diminished daily circulation of 23,000 copies.

Pugachyov has since expanded the newsroom to 100 reporters and is beginning a 20 million euro advertising campaign in the hopes of improving France-Soir's circulation to a robust 150,000 to 200,000 copies.  The paper will spare no expense to improve its standing, as Pugachyov plans to emphasize original photography, despite the costs that may incur.

Although checking sources is a fundamental rule of journalism, with the increasing pervasiveness of social media sites like Twitter, the temptation to discard this old rule can become too strong for some journalists to resist.

As the Press Gazette's Dominick Ponsford posted on The Wire, reporters for various newpapers in the UK used Twitter as a source for an article covering rumors of marital difficulties between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. The Independent's Steven Glover reprimanded the reporters for their failure to fact-check.

"A Twitter rumour alleging adultery on the part of a home-grown politician would not be taken up so eagerly by British newspapers," he said. "We apply more stringent standards to rumours about our own politicians."

Heading up the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, an independent investigation looking at the future of public life, Geoff Mulgan has branded the majority of online news as little more that  "recycled 'churnalism'", the Guardian reports. To combat this, the commission has proposed a tax on the likes of Google and websites using news that they themselves have not produced. It is estimated that the tax could generate £100m a year, which would be distributed amongst local newspapers feeling the pinch.