January 2006 Archives

An interesting article from Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune, who gathers together media executives' views on the 'ideal approach' to starting a 'new media empire from scratch' at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries have come together to explore ways to challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.

A task force of global and European publishers organizations, led by the World Association of Newspapers, has agreed to work together to examine the options open to publishers to assert their rights to recognition and recompense, and to ultimately improve the relationships between content creators/producers and news aggregators and search engines.

The New York Times reports that popular US blogs Gawker.com and postsecret.blogspot.com are both considering moving into video. Gawker posted an invitation on January 19th for involvement in its Guerilla Video Project, "suggesting videos documenting Manhattan power lunches and book parties."

Source: The New York Times  

The New York Times reports that US company Time Inc. is set to cut approximately 100 jobs, 10 of these will be eliminated at the company's flagship publication Time magazine. Both editorial and business side job cuts will take place at a number of the company's other US magazines, including Money, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. 

Dawn Bridges, spokeswoman for the company, explained that "The current round of cuts is largely because of reallocation of resources as the company increases its online presence and consolidates some of its business functions ... we're moving from being a magazine publishing company to a multiplatform media company, and we have to reallocate our assets."

Source: The New York Times 

The New York Times has launched a free daily podcast hosted by one of its reporters, James Barron, which will be a round-up of the day's top stories. The podcast is currently only available via i-Tunes. 

Source: Micro Persuasion 

The largest Danish daily, Jyllands Posten, has issued an apology for cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that caused an uproar in the Muslim world (previous postings here and here). The row suddenly resurfaced a few days ago after having subsided at the beginning of January thanks to an agreement between the Arab League and the government of Denmark.

The Spanish paper El Correo has launched the country's latest and arguably most comprehensive citizen journalism project, integrating reader contributions into its printed pages. The paper will publish a two-page daily section entitled enlaCe dedicated to citizen journalism but will also mix content from the public into all sections of the paper.

The Muslim world is again in uproar over cartoons of Mohammed published in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, with the secretary of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference vowing to "ask the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution banning attacks on religious beliefs."

Fifty-eight journalists and other media workers were killed world-wide because of their professional activities in 2005, with 22 of them killed in Iraq, by far the most dangerous place for journalists on the planet, the
World Association of Newspapers said Monday.

Associated Newspapers, publishers of The Daily Mail, which is to launch an Irish edition next week (see previous posting), plan to start a price war with Independent News and Media, publisher of the largest circualted Irish paper The Irish Independent (164 000 copies).

Libya is set to open up its media market, under government control for the past thirty years, to private newspapers, radio and television. The project is to be coordinated by a new company called 1/9, to be run by leader Moamer Kadhafi's son Seif-al-Islam.

In order to expand his newspaper group, the British invester David Montgomery, with his Mecom Group and investment firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, bought the German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost, reports Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Montgomery bought the Hamburg-based tabloid from its publisher Ernst Balach and editor Josef Depenbrock. The deal still needs approval of cartel office, the value of the deal was not released. 

Online content producers at The Los Angeles Times will be moving to "regular newsroom departments" such as national, foreign, or business, reports Frank Barnako of Market Watch in his newsletter.

Additionally, Joel Sapell, executive editor/interactive at the paper, announced that the paper's online department will be putting a focus on delivering more to the reader: "We need to create a different kind of online news operation, one that recognises the changing expectations of readers who consume news on the Internet." To achieve these aims, web reporters will have to: "think creatively every day about the extras we can give online visitors so they can stick around our site longer."

Source: Market Watch  

Wikipedia is not usually mentioned in the same breath as leading newspaper companies such as News International or Axel Springer, but they will come together in Moscow in June at the 59th World Newspaper Congress, 13th World Editors Forum, and Info Services Expo 2006, the global meetings of the world's press.

The events, organized by the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, will bring together leading executives and companies from both the traditional and new media worlds. First speakers announced for the programmes include Jimmy Wales, Director and Founder of the on-line, participatory encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Les Hinton,  Chairman of News International, and Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer.

Editor and Publisher reports that the US Society of Professional Journalists has called for "an urgent national conversation about how to preserve public-service journalism in light of the likely sale of the Knight Ridder newspaper company."

Editor & Publisher writes an educational and somewhat humorous article about those newspaper pages dedicated to the recently deceased. Turns out, the obituaries themselves were probably not recently written at the time of printing.

The BBC has expressed concern that Iranian authorities have blocked access to their online news service BBC Persian.com, the largest internet site in the language.