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The Associated Press (AP) and Yahoo have renewed an agreement for AP stories, photos and videos to appear on the Yahoo website, it was widely reported. This is in contrast to the AP's negotiations with Google and Microsoft, which have not yet concluded. New AP content has not been hosted on Google News since December 24.

Neither party has offered details of the agreement, so it is unclear whether they have achieved their financial objectives. The deal had previously been expected to set a higher price for AP's stories and impose tighter restrictions on them.

The AP has previously argued that agreements providing relatively inexpensive access to a broad range of its content only devalue its news offerings. The New York Times reported that the AP was asking news websites for more money, but that aggregators have been arguing that news content is less valuable than it used to be because advertising is down.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

Covering major sport events is becoming more and more complex: with more "media rights" being sold every day and for every event, the straightforward businesses of news-gathering, providing news services and running commercial programmes alongside news coverage can be difficult.

In response to this, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN) has set up a special Master Class to help news executives navigate complicated "media rights" issues and avoid legal red tape when providing coverage of the 2010 football World Cup and other events.

The Master Class will include the expertise of a sport news executive, Juan Ignacio Gallardo, Deputy Editor of the Spanish sports daily Marca, who can catalogue the numerous restrictions he and his team face on a daily basis in covering sports events, along with the contribution of Andrew Moger, Executive Director of the News Media Coalition, an expert in media rights with long-standing experience as a journalist, who will describe the current regulations and help participants deal with the current rules and issues

The IASN Master Class will be held on 5 February next at the state-of-the-art Olympic and Sport Museum in Barcelona, Spain. Full details can be found at http://www.press-iasn.org, or email Rosarita Cuccoli (rcuccoli@press-iasn.org).

Is sports coverage news or entertainment? "Everyone in this room would say both," says Larry Kilman, Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs for WAN-IFRA, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

The traditional partnership between sports and media is collapsing, he says. Sports organisers aim to extend intellectual property rights to their matches, which will affect news coverage, and what is paid and what is free. If newspapers become betting companies, the lines are blurred, he adds.

Can an event be copyright? French draft law would give sports organisations extra copyright protection, and a French court has ordered Unibet to pay the French Open tennis event €300,000 in recognition of ownership rights. Proposed British legislation calls for stricter licensing as sports bodies want the government to ensure a fair return for them. And the Sports Rights Owner Coalition, composed of international and national sports bodies, is lobbying for sport-specific intellectual property protection.

The Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

The deal that could be reached in the next few weeks could set a precedent in the resolution of an increasingly urgent issue in he media industry: how news organizations deal with the major Internet portals, which some news publishers say unfairly profit from their work and cost them tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Towards the end of last year, Rupert Murdoch, head of News International, spoke out against news aggregators. In an interview with Sky News Australia, he condemned the likes of Google as nothing more than "thieves", intent on stealing content from his newspaper's websites for their own benefit. The media mogul has long wielded threats of removing all News International articles from search indexes and implementing stringent paywalls around all his websites by the end of 2010.

It's only January, but Murdoch has already set about putting his plans into action: On Friday, the Guardian reported that News International is to prevent the aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from linking to content found on the Times Online website, by changing its search engine settings via the robots.txt protocol.

The newest daily newspaper in Zimbabwe, NewsDay, will be launched online six months before it appears in print, as the political situation in the country stabilises.

NewsDay will be Zimbabwe's first independent daily newspaper in six years and is projected to create 300 jobs.

Newspaper proprietor Trevor Ncube told South African technology website TechCentral that the Zimbabwean government has not yet issued the licence they need to start printing. Although he has been waiting for the licence for almost a year, he hopes that a deal being finalised between Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change will allow current restrictions on media to be lifted.

Sarmayeh, Iran's major reformist and economic newspaper was shut down by a government-run press supervisory branch on Monday, reports AP. The daily was apparently closed because its content strayed from business topics, according to the official IRNA news agency.

"The supervisory board cancelled the licence of Sarmayeh... due to repeated offences," read the report, which cited a statement by the media section of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of the recent "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," moderated the 'Free AND Paid Content: Business Models That Work' discussion on Tuesday night in the Condé Nast building in New York. The discussion, intended to focus on whether book and news consumers would pay for online content, quickly turned into a tense intellectual slugging match between John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishing, and Anderson.

Anderson championed the future of free content, or 'freemiums,' explaining that free content could bring books and print back into 'cultural conversation' while emphasizing that consumers could not be expected to being paying for something they can get and have gotten for free. Anderson's 'new economy' of the freemium is based in the digital world where 90% of content is free and 10% is sold, and is a radical departure from the control of the "beneficiaries of a 20th century oligopoly" (speaking of himself and the panelists) for whom "what the Internet did is ruin our party."

While he received support from panelist Gary Hoenig, ESPN Publishing's general manager and editorial director, who offered the evidence of his own site's doubling subscriptions simply by "improving the quality of the content," Anderson was strongly opposed by Sargent, who consistently cast a grim outlook for publishers and was tepidly backed by Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive online editor of the Wall Street Journal. Citing the Journal's robust business coverage and successful charging for online content, Murray called the panel's central question of whether people will pay "silly." The problem he brought up is that newspapers prematurely decided they would give away content over a decade ago; readers got used to reading their papers for free, thus "devaluing their own content."

According to documents obtained by Stars and Stripes, a controversial public relations firm contracted by the American military routinely reviews the coverage of embedded journalists in Afghanistan and categorizes the work as "positive," "negative" or "neutral." This information is then used to steer reporters towards certain stories or sources in order to produce more positive coverage.

Pentagon officials and representatives of The Rendon Group, the PR firm, had previously denied such a practice still existed, stating journalist profiles were now conducted to determine accuracy and familiarize the military with new reporters. However, the leaked documents showed the ranking system existed at least as late as May of this year.

Recent changes to media laws, which have given accredited journalists permission to observe family court proceedings, are causing much confusion within the courts. That there is much uncertainty surrounding the meaning of the laws was demonstrated last week at the family courts at London's Royal Courts of Justice. Journalists were refused entry into the courts as court staff were apparently unaware of the changes to the law, while lawyers and other parties came out as explicitly adverse to press presence.

This week, Slate performed "a highly unscientific experiment" to determine who is better informed: those who get their news only from newspapers, or those who rely solely on the Internet. For three days, the four volunteer subjects were forced to consume as much news as they could in one hour from their assigned medium, then report back on their findings.

Slate recruited Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist and blogger, and Sam Howe Verhovek, who once worked at NYT and the Los Angeles Times, for the two print-only subjects. On the web side, there were Slate online reporters Emily Yoffe and Seth Stevenson. The print people were confined to four newspapers available in their respective geographic locations (in this case, Seattle), while the "webbies" had to stay clear of newspaper websites and all online news aggregators (from Google News to the Huffington Post).

As News International started to fight back against the Guardian's phone-hacking accusations directed at the News of the World journalists and the director of public prosecutions examines the case, the affair has been discussed in depth by news outlets in the UK in a conflict that seems to be becoming increasingly personal: the Guardian vs News International.

The Guardian has passionately covered every angle of the phone-hacking story, and stressed repeatedly that this issue is about "Murdoch journalists." News International released a statement on Friday in which it described the Guardian's allegations as "irresponsible and unsubstantiated," denying that there is any evidence that News Group staff hacked into mobile phones or accessed individuals' voicemail, either personally or via private investigators. It also refutes that there was "systemic corporate illegality by News International to suppress evidence." An article in the News of the World on Sunday declares that the paper "was the subject of some ferocious and, at times, hysterical attacks on its credibility, integrity and journalistic standards."

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.

The regional press in America is in the midst of a whirlwind of stylistic, managerial and media development, to the extent that its face is changing beyond recognition.  That evolution is a necessary but merciless concept has been demonstrated by the disappearance of many regional daily newspapers and the unpredictable life span of modern ventures.

Michelle Ferrier, the former managing director of the development team of the soon-to-be late hyperlocal community site, MyTopiaCafe.com, laments the failure of the initiative of the Daytona Beach News-Journal. The experiences of the Daytona project have been shared by other now redundant initiatives of media organisations eager to offer new services while drastically cost-cutting and downsizing. Hyperlocal, however, is not necessarily a prematurely defunct form of community news provision. The problems were symptomatic of the approach, warns Ferrier, yet lessons can be learned.

Following the Iranian election on 12 June, which both sides claim to have won, Iranians and the rest of the world wants to know the truth about the results, as well as wanting to follow protests and other developments. But this has proved more difficult than anticipated given the restrictions on reporting, both by Iranians and foreigners, and the occasion proved to be an opportunity for citizen journalism to show its value.

Reporting restrictions

Mainstream media has been suffering from severe restrictions in Iran, even tougher than during last year's Zimbabwean elections, foreign editor for Channel 4 News Ben de Pear told the Guardian. Foreign journalists first had to get special press cards and were closely monitored, then on the Tuesday following the election, foreign journalists were banned from reporting on the streets. The BBC's correspondent has been asked to leave the country after the broadcaster was accused of supporting rioters. And it is not just foreign reporters who are suffering: now even reporters of Iranian nationality are being confined to their offices. According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), 26 Iranian journalists, editors and bloggers have been imprisoned since June 14.

Citizen video becomes a symbol

In the absence of an abundance of professional reporters, amateurs have stepped up. One of the most watched and discussed videos to come out of the tragedy, and one which is emblamatic of the role of citizen journalism in reporting from Iran, is that of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman who was walking near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators when she was shot. The video has prompted international outcry and the girl's death has since come to represent the tragedy of the conflict, a "symbol of the anti-government movement," according to the New York Times. It was taken, not by a reporter with a camera, but by a bystander on a mobile phone, and posted on Facebook and YouTube after the man sent the 40-second clip to a friend who then forwarded to friends and news sites in Europe and the US.

A Twitter revolution?

Talk of a Twitter revolution swiftly spread as Iranians and others in the country used the social network Twitter to get their news out to the world, and it has been used extensively by the media. Twitter is particularly effective as a method of spreading news as it is harder to censor, given that it can be accessed via various different applications on computers or mobile phones, as well as via the website. #IranElection has been the top trending topic on Twitter for days, with thousands of updates an hour using the hash tag to get included in the feed and direct interested observers to text, image or video content. Following a request from US President Obama, Twitter decided to delay maintenance to the site in light of the important role it was playing in keeping people informed, carrying it out during Tehran's night rather than daylight hours.

Twitter is clearly not immune to censorship, however. The following message has been passed around Facebook over the last few days amongst Anglo-Saxon users:

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH: If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on."

Amateur issues

Clearly, there are problems with relying on information generated by amateurs. Benoit Hervieu of RSF told Editor & Publisher that one of the main problems is that because many people want to remain anonymous, it is harder to verify information. And indeed, it seems that much false information has been circulating. After Twitter was hailed as the voice of the revolution, a backlash quickly emerged asserting its unreliability. There is always the possibility, after all, that interested parties might deliberately try to misinform, or might be so personally involved in the debate that they cannot maintain impartiality. And one of the disadvantages of a campaign such as that mentioned above, encouraging international Twitter users to set their locations to Iran, could end up misleading journalists searching for information on the network.

So how are citizen journalism agencies dealing with these risks and challenges?

Checking for reliability is a top priority for those trying to sell their content to traditional media companies. Citizen journalism agency Demotix has obtained many images from freelancers and amateurs portraying events in Iran, including two pictures which have appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Demotix COO Jonathan Tepper emphasised that Demotix understands the importance of reliability of sources and "believes that serious citizen journalism needs to take all the ethics of traditional reporting and build on them, such as verifiability and protection of sources." All submissions go through a vetting procedure which includes looking at the metadata in photos.

Citizenside, which specializes in citizen photo journalism, has managed to get hold of some good images which have been published by mainstream media outlets, but co-founder Matthieu Stefani said that it has been "really hard" both to establish contacts in Iran and to receive images from these contacts. "The big issue is that most of the contributions we've received were sent through proxies, with most of the time no way to contact our contributors as cellphone networks don't work really well," he explained, and therefore his team is extremely cautious about what they accept. He said that the photos that the agency has been pushing most to its clients were received from known and trusted members in the UK who were sent them by close relatives in Iran.

The Observers, a project run by TV news station France 24 combining citizen journalism with professional editing, has been active in its coverage of Iran. Founder of the initiative Julien Pain told the EW that what makes their coverage particularly useful is the fact that they already had trusted contacts in Iran before the election, and hence they have fewer problems with establishing the reliability of sources of information, particularly when using proxy servers. "We worked with these people before the situation was tense," he explained, "so we know them." He gave the example of a girl who has recorded a video describing how the censorship works, with whom he and his team had already worked. Prior to any major election, Pain added, the Observers tries to enlarge its network of contacts, which in this case proved particularly useful. Even using trusted contacts, Pain said that the Observers still cross-checks information as far as possible.

Amra Tareen, CEO of AllVoices, a project that aggregates professional and amateur news on one site, has a different approach: publish everything and let the reader decide. She said that the site has received more than 1,000 submissions, in English and Farsi, since the election, gathered via proxy servers as the AllVoices site is blocked. She stressed that submissions have tackled both sides of the issue and that this is one of the most crucial aspects of citizen journalism and of her site in particular: that anyone can be heard. "we're neutral and anyone can have their voices heard on our platform--that's key for the credibility of citizen journalism; bias will undermine the concept and keep citizen journalism and citizen journalists from ever being taken as seriously as they ought to be."

Generally it seems that such a situation where media access is severely reduced has provided citizen journalism with a significant opportunity to prove its importance. Tareen commented that "we really want to use this opportunity to show that Cit-J is not only about massive amount of non-qualified content, but also good "pro-am" work that we have been promoting for years now," said Stefani.

Getting pictures on the front page of a major daily is likely to be a huge boost to Demotix in terms of fame and credibility. Tepper was clear that Demotix is trying to supplement mainstream media rather than replace it, but said that "we think our reporting can sometimes be more accurate than the mainstream media" because "most of our users record what is known to them, in their city or country" and therefore "Demotix images provide a more accurate representation of the subject from a local perspective."

For the Observers, the situation has provided an opportunity for collaboration with the TV station on an unprecedented level. Usually, Pain said, he would publish a video on the Observers website and offer it to TV, now he has been working more with programming at France 24 to supply them with videos first before putting them online, to offer a period of exclusivity. "We've really moved a step forward here," he said. "We have learnt how to work together, and it's not going to be the same any more."

Although amateur 'citizen journalists' do not have the knowledge or expertise to analyse developments the way a professional journalist could, they can certainly witness and record events, and when traditional media coverage is limited, this is a valuable service. In terms of providing a true news service, amateur contributions must be verified so that readers can trust them, which is a priority for citizen journalism agencies. As opportunities continue to arise for citizen journalism to prove its value, the mainstream media is likely to incorporate it with increasing frequency and develop new ways of working closer with citizen journalism agencies.

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.

Andrew Stroehlein, communications director of the International Crisis Group has written an article in the Christian Science Monitor to express his concerns about cuts in international media coverage, which he believes are not being taken seriously enough. Recent moves include the BBC's cuts in Paris, Moscow and Brussels and the Chicago Tribune's decision to close its bureaus in Rome and Jerusalem. Stroehlein cites two recent developments to illustrate his argument.

First is the situation in Somalia, which Stroehlein feels has been neglected in the Western media, particularly in the US. The recent attention given to the capture of a US vessel by Somali pirates focussed on the fact that "a new president with the world's largest military at his disposal could defeat a handful of lightly armed thugs," and gave little attention to the arguably more important issue at stake: that "piracy is a symptom, not the disease, and lawlessness off the coast of Somalia will continue as long as anarchy is allowed to remain on land."

A one-off summit at the House of Commons on local media has been described as "both dull and brilliant", but nonetheless a "breakthrough moment in history" by media commentator Roy Greenslade.  In the ongoing troubles of the UK's regional media, the summit was attended by representatives of all types of UK media, and speakers included culture secretary Andy Burnham and Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.

The main point of note from the summit has been the unprecedented level of cooperation show by all sides. Greenslade describes how the summit was "was all the better for the absence of fireworks, the lack of point-scoring and even the rather obvious and well-rehearsed contributions from some of the representatives because it revealed a welcome trend towards co-operation."

Thanks to Commodore Frank Bainimarama, coup leader (pictured below), Fiji is currently embroiled in a press freedom of information war, in which the media has been banned from reporting any news which may cause "disorder", "disaffection", "public alarm" or "undermine" the current military-led government.

The Guardian's Toni O'Loughlin has reported that a native of the island, Edwin Nand, was himself detained by the authorities for simply writing about the imprisonment of journalist Sean Dorney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who is to be expelled from the country along with two New Zealand journalists.

The Huffington Post's latest business model combines the for-profit online publication with the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund. This week founder Ariana Huffington announced the launch of the Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million partially funded by the HuffPost in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors.

The investigative group will be lead by American News Project founder Nick Penniman, and though the group's investigations will be published on the Huffington Post, it will both remain a separate legal entity and also make its work available to other publishers. These provisions are absolutely necessary to maintain the Fund's nonprofit status.

Critics of Senator Benjamin Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act are concerned that the bill will stifle freedom of speech. On Tuesday Cardin proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt non-profits with 501(c)(3) status. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt and contributions to the papers would be tax deductible.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, reporter James Taranto points out that, though the bill expressly permits nonprofits to publish newspapers, there is no existing legislation that prevents them from doing so now. Some newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor, currently operate as non-profits, the difference being that under Cardin's bill the nonprofit papers may sell ad space free of taxation as long as sufficient space is provided for editorial content.

The Financial Times has discovered that seven chief executives of the UK's top regional newspapers held a secret meeting with communications minister Lord Carter on February 2nd. The aim of the meeting was to impress upon Carter just "how serious the financial circumstances affecting their industry were", and also to ask for the strict merger restrictions surrounding the regional press to be relaxed. According to those present, the communications minister responded that "the group had a strong emotional case, but needed to prove empirically that the government should intervene".

Present as part of the Local Media Alliance were the chief executives of Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press, Newsquest (Gannett), Northcliffe Media (DMGT), Guardian Media Group, Archant and DC Thomson. Combined, the seven companies can lay claim to 72% control of the UK market - such industry collaboration is unprecedented. Roger Parry will step down as chairman of Johnston Press later this month, and has been appointed the chairman of LMA. He described the alliance as "a way for the regional press to act quickly and efficiently to provide information and responses to government in a fast-moving situation."