Results matching “social environm”

The Guardian published today the first of planned daily Chinese language translations of several leading articles to coincide with the release of its China focused mini-site, reported www.pressgazette.co.uk.

Citizen photo journalism outlet Citizenside has teamed up with FrontView Production to launch FrontView Report. The site is a collection of photos and videos from social, humanitarian and environmental activists who witness and record key events from around the world. "Some of them find in photography and video a powerful means to express and document their commitment and feelings," explains the summary on the site.

The photos and videos the site is designed for record "dramatic events and larger than life stories that need to be told". Uploaded photos and videos are then sold on to media companies via the site. Photos accepted have to meet the site's criteria; they must display a situation or activity with visual impact, and their content is more important than their quality. The site is a way for photographers, both professional and amateur, to profit from their work - increasingly difficult given the wealth of pictures distributed for free online.

Source: FrontView

According to Pew's State of the News Media 2009 report, the younger demographic, between 18-24 and 25-34 have the lowest levels of daily newspaper readership and 49% said they get their news online. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, owner and founder of Facebook, announced the 200 millionth active user on the networking site, one third of which are in the young age group that has limited exposure to news on a regular basis. That said, there are two new experiments in action to get the news to young Facebook users: mndaily.com and Hot Dish. Both efforts are funded by the Knight Foundation and are powered by NewsCloud, a news sharing website.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

The World Economic Forum is using several social media tools to promote and coordinate discussion for its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters in January 2009, according to the Guardian.

WEF has launched tools on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and an OpenForum wiki for discussion, as well as a photo group on Flickr and videocasts and press conferences on their Web site and Mogulus and Qik.  

The tools invite web users to "discuss key issues on the economy, US politics, business ethics and the environment" in the weeks leading up to the forum.

The forum has also opened a YouTube channel for the second year and will broadcast some of the most popular comments during sessions at the meeting.  

The first year of the forum's social media initiative was a success, with more than five million video views and responses from leading politicians such as Israeli president Shimon Peres and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

Source: Guardian via EJC

As far as niches go, mothers represent one of advertisers' most coveted groups. Now, some newspapers are joining the chase.

Newspaper companies, including the New York Times Co., Journal Communication, and Gannett, are launching hyperlocal websites geared toward mothers. Billed as community centers, the sites hope to attract mothers looking to review restaurants, arrange play dates, or just meet other mothers.

"They're [mothers] using the Internet to reconstitute the social capital that would come from physical interaction in a dense urban environment," said Clay Shirky, an Internet analyst and adviser to MeetUp Inc., a social networking business.

For advertisers, the appeal of these sites is enormous. With such an active core - 86 percent of moms go online at least once a month - advertisers are almost guaranteed results. But the market for mom sites is crowded; similar ventures (see BabyCenter or CafeMom) already exist.

Newspapers, however, show no signs of conceding the market to pre-existing competition. Gannett has gradually increased the number of its mom sites, and hopes to unify them soon into a nationwide network; the Boston Globe, owned by the NYT, released BoMoms.com last month; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Dayton Daily News are creating similar sites.

As the competition stiffens, the key to success for mom sites, says Stacy DeBroff, founder of Mom Central, a marketing consulting firm, will be maintaining the sites' hyperlocal appeal.

"People in different cities are really looking for different kinds of information," Debroff said. "If moms don't sense the sites are truly localized, then they'll find another place that is."

Source: Wall Street Journal, New York Times

In this short interview with Gianni Valenti, deputy editor of Gazzetta dello Sport, the world's largest 'sports' newspaper and leading daily in Italy, he explains how the paper has balanced its focus on sports with coverage of the protests against China and the Olympic Games in general.

Should sports sections concentrate on the actual events, and leave the rest to the politics desk? Can they really get away without putting sports into context?

As a newspaper focused on sports, Gazzetta dello Sport evidently has vested interest in the upcoming Olympic Games. How have you balanced coverage of sports and of the protests?

Gazzetta dello Sport isn't only a sports newspaper anymore. It's a sports newspaper that includes a general news section. The paper naturally is in favor of the Olympic Games, but it has dedicated entire news pages to the events that took place in Paris when the Olympic torch went through.

For the last six months, many pages have gone to coverage of social, political and environmental issues in China. In preparation for the future, a team of reporters will be dedicated to covering social issues. But the Gazzetta will not make a distinction between sports and social issues and reporters from both desks will collaborate.

Was the Gazzetta's coverage of the protests factual or did the newspaper take a stance?

The paper has special correspondents covering the International Olympic Committee and China. Its coverage remained factual on those aspects and the exactions in Tibet. Regarding the Olympic Torch, the Gazzetta took position, to an extent, arguing that the torch should pursue its route throughout the world. In practice, the Gazzetta did 'equidistant journalism' about the protests, recapping both the pros and cons.

After the events in Paris and London, there was lots of debate online. The Gazzetta created forums to host these discussions, but it didn't advocate a particular political stance for Italy - this was at the time of general elections in Italy.

However, now that the government is in place, and when a real debate will be engaged about whether Berlusconi should go to the Olympic Games or boycott them, then the newspaper will take a side - which is yet to be determined. But I predict that most political leaders will end up going.

How substantial will be Gazzetta Dello Sport's coverage of the Olympic Games?

We will have 23 journalists who will travel there. It will be the biggest coverage the paper has ever given to the Olympic Games, and it will involve collaboration between both print and online.

Source: Gianni Valenti, deputy editor Gazzetta dello Sport

Through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, people can keep updated with their friends by posting messages back and forth or by checking status updates. But imagine if the social networking world became 3-D. Based in Menlo Park, California, Vivaty has been creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that people can add to sites where they spend most of their Internet time.

Users will choose pre-existing avatars to represent themselves as they do on services such as Second Life, and navigate through a gothic urban warehouse, seaside villa, or another of the dozen environments. Users will also be able to create their own environment wherever HTML code can be imbedded. Vivaty plans on allowing companies to construct their own virtual rooms with their own décor and messages.

In this virtual space, users may see Facebook photos hanging from walls or a YouTube video playing on a TV. A maximum of 15 users can enter the same room at the same time for "text-based live socializing." This technology does not require downloading any programs.

"We want to take all your content on the Web and move it to a more visually immersive, immediate experience," said Keith McCurdy, Chief Executive at Vivaty and a former Vice President at the big game maker Electronic Arts.

Vivaty has been working on its technology for three years, and this week it will launch a private test period on Facebook.

If this technology is successful, newspapers will also have the opportunity to integrate itself into these 3-D environments, either creating their own spaces or displaying headlines within other environments.

Source: The New York Times

What can readers do when they discard their free papers? Tossing them in a recycling bin is one solution. Building a house is another.

Earlier this year, London's freesheets began to actively participate in recycling efforts, forced by a Westminster Council decision last year.

A Londoner found another way to express her annoyance with the amount of waste caused by freesheets - and waste in general.

Karen Janody, along with colleagues Gillian McIver and Sumer Erek, are building the skeleton of the Newspaper House in East London with free newspapers, between March 3 and March 8. The house is located in Gillet Square Hackney.

Thanks a £15,000 contribution from the arts and social change Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, this should be the first construction of several, in cities across the UK.

The house will be dismantled afterwards to be sent to recycling.

"I am confident the project will be a big hit with the public and hope it will be able to tour the UK, involving the public and making a contribution to environmental awareness in a truly adventurous way," said Gulbenkian director Andrew Barnett.

Source: The New Zealand Herald

The Associated Newspapers' Metro has announced the launch of its first mobile service and two new online portals.

User-generated content is described by SFWeekly.com’s Matt Smith as “getting people to write for free.” UGC blogs, which are usually not edited, could cause more problems for newspapers than they are worth.

Paul Bradshaw of The Online Journalism Blog (OJB) and creator of the “news diamond,” which rethinks the editorial newsroom process in terms of speed and depth, has now come up with what a 21st century newsroom does after a story is published.

The 2007 winners for the first edition of the Social Environmental Responsibility World Journalism Prize, jointly organized by the World Forum de Lille and the World Editors Forum, have been announced.

Veosearch, a new search engine, offers to redistribute 50% of its ad revenues – generated by users’ searches – to agencies promoting social and environmental development.

On September 24, 2007, the Social and Environmental Responsibility World Forum, in partnership with the World Editors Forum, will name the three top articles pertaining to social and environmental responsibility around the world. 

On September 24, 2007, the Social and Environmental Responsibility World Forum, in partnership with the World Editors Forum, will name the three top articles pertaining to social and environmental responsibility around the world. 

On September 24, 2007, the Social and Environmental Responsibility World Forum, in partnership with the World Editors Forum, will name the three top articles pertaining to social and environmental responsibility around the world. 

As Earth Day approaches, several US newspapers and publications have launched environmentally-friendly websites and features. As Green increasingly becomes an issue for investors and companies, newspapers seem to be tapping into the market.

Friday 24^th of November, a good 80 Dutch and Flemish editors and researchers gathered in the European Journalism Centre, Maastricht, Netherlands, to assess and discuss several prototypes of novel newspaper products or services. All are web-based one way or another, and ready for the Web 2.0 publishing environments. The in total six demonstrators feature remote reporting tools, video content based on strategic alliances with non-journalistic partners, e-paper trials and online reader communities. Most were developed in close cooperation with specialised R&D centres. Together, the prototypes reveal the contours of the future electronic newspaper.
Al least half of the demonstrators will make it to real applications, the other are subject to further testing in living lab conditions.
General conclusion of the event: we need further experimentation to capture the essence of digital presence. In the conference report, the applications as well as the editors’ appraisal are described more in detail.

While Bertrand is off basking in the glorious Dubai sun at the Middle East Publishing Conference, I've been asked to post some of the conference's developments from here in dreary old Paris. Here's a press release talking about press freedom in the Middle East.

While Bertrand is off basking in the glorious Dubai sun at the Middle East Publishing Conference, I've been asked to post some of the conference's developments from here in dreary old Paris. Here's a press release talking about press freedom in the Middle East.

Here, in totality, is an important and creative piece about media ethics and black Africa written by Claude-Jean Bertrand, the editor of presscouncils.org. It reminds us all that our responsibility toward journalistic ethics extends past recent plagiarism and fabrication scandals, and proposes a sort of "adopt-a-newspaper" program between newspapers in the developed world and in Africa: "On Press Freedom Day (May 10), economist Amartya Sen repeated that there are no famines in democracies with press freedom. May I add no genocides either and few civil wars or mass epidemics ? News media in emerging democracies can help avoid such disasters. And news media in established democracies should help their less fortunate brethren...

Technology is driving or enabling profound changes in how individuals access, assess and respond to information. These changes, and emerging technologies that will propel them further, are visible now.
We see the mobile lifestyle becoming dominant in Asia and Northern Europe; around the world we see online news, social networks, blogs and other forms of participatory journalism challenging newspapers, television and all forms of traditional media – both for revenue and for audience time and influence on consumer purchasing decisions.