July 2008 Archives

After Viacom and France's TF1, Italy's MediaSet is reportedly also filing suit against YouTube for illegal video and audio uploads. Mediaset is seeking at least $800 million. Spain's Telecinco (owned by MediaSet) has previously sued the video site.

YouTube sent a press release to Reuters, which states: "We respect copyright".

According to Bloomberg, at least 4643 MediaSet videos (which is equal to 325 hours) have been illegally used on YouTube. MediaSet said that they have lost "the equivalent of 315.672 broadcasting days."

Moreover, Italian Prosecutors said that Google will be charged for broadcasting a video of an autistic child being taunted by classmates. Google is the parent company of YouTube.

Source: paidcontent.org

Bhaskar, the Hindi business daily, is quickly moving forward after its launch in Indore (Madhya Pradesh) and Raipur (Chhattisgarh) earlier this month, and is launching editions in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.

The six-day daily (Monday-Saturday) pink broadsheet bears a cover price of Rs 1.50 and is targeted at entrepreneurs and businessmen.

Business Bhaskar copies would be covering ten cities over all, in the region - Chandigarh; Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar (Punjab); and Panipat, Hissar, Karnal, Rohtak, Bhiwani and Ambala (Haryana).

Business Bhaskar, which is expected to cover the entire Bhaskar region (Punjab, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) by the end of this year, is expecting to have a print-run of over 1,50,000 copies across.

Source: afaqs! via IFRA Executive News Service

The Sky News website has today published an insight into how its chief sub video editor performs his job. Shirish Kulkarni covers everything in his blog posting from editorial judgement to time management. It's a fascinating insight into a newsroom role.

Click on the link below for the full piece.

Source: Sky News

India's Revenue Minister Narayan Rane is launching a newspaper called 'Prahar' in Dussehra. Rane will be the 'Editor in Chief' of the Marathi newspaper, it was announced yesterday.

The launch will coincide with the traditional Dussehra rally of Shiv Sena.

Veteran journalist Alhad Godbole will be editor of 'Prahar'.

Source: Sahara Samay via IFRA Executive News Service

True Knowledge - the groundbreaking new search engine - announced today that it has received $4m (£2.02m) in funding today, which will enable it to develop its "answer engine".

True Knowledge relies on its own database of known facts, which the system then uses to compose an answer. Most search engines present a list of results based on keywords and phrases in the search terms.

Cambridge-based True Knowledge is complementary to traditional search because it operates as a more intelligent service that is capable of learning and assessing the information it delivers.

The site is in a private beta period with 10,000 testers and is preparing to launch publicly in the first half of next year.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

The Daily Banner - based in Cambridge, Maryland - will no longer be a daily publication from the 6 August. The local newspaper will be published on Wednesdays and Fridays and news that breaks between both editions will be published on its website.

According to Independent Newspapers President Ed Dulin, for an article in today's newspaper, the daily contains little news and few ads, a twice-weekly edition will be "stronger for readers and advertisers". US newspapers are suffering from "a flagging economy, rising costs and falling ad revenue", according to Editor & Publisher.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Journalists going to Beijing for the Olympics have just learned that China intends to censor internet access at the Olympic venues as they do in the rest of the country. And, in the run-up to the Olympics, China has time and again reneged on its promises to allow free reporting.

Journalists trying to do their jobs in China are not the only people concerned -- in recent weeks, some 3,500 newspaper readers have written to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao calling for the release of all jailed journalists in China.

Those readers were responding to public service advertisements from the World Association of Newspapers, published in newspapers in 20 countries, drawing attention to China's failure to honour its Olympic promises.

Something to think about as you watch the Olympics this summer: China is the world's biggest jailer of journalists, with 30 journalists and 50 cyber-dissidents behind bars.

Source: WAN

An alliance between Yahoo and more than 775 newspapers has helped the papers ramp up online readership, according to Yahoo.

Links on Yahoo, Yahoo Sports or Yahoo Finance facilitate access to newspaper websites such as The Dallas Morning News, which can receive up to 800.000 visitors in a couple of hours. According to its deputy managing editor, Anthony Moor, visits through Yahoo links represent "27% of the day's page views, and 65% of the day's unique visitors."

The New York Daily News has also seen its visits increase, its vice president Jon Beck acknowledges that Yahoo links brings "a steady growth of traffic" to their site.

For Yahoo, this alliance allows them to give their readers a "more valuable local perspective" according to Scott Moore, senior vice president and head of media at Yahoo.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Phil Bronstein, former Editor and current Editor at Large of the San Francisco Chronicle, said yesterday on Beet.TV that the integration of citizen journalism into mainstream media has not yet happened on a large scale.

During a discussion panel on Beet.TV about the issue, Charles Tillinghast, president and publisher of msnbc.com agreed with Bronstein that the integration of citizen journalism into mainstream media is yet to happen.

For the full debate on the issue click on the link below and watch the video clip.

Source: Beet.TV

Goldman Sachs' analyst Peter Appert has emerged as an unlikely supporter of those who are concerned that the recent job cuts in the USA could impact editorial quality.

During a conference call for A.H. Belo's earnings he asked CEO Robert Decherd: "How do you maintain editorial relevance and quality as you are doing such dramatic cuts in staff?"
 
Decherd had just announced that the company is going to layoff 500 more positions at the Dallas Morning News and its other papers. 

Decherd answered that while, "some products and sections are going to have to be fairly substantially re-geared," the right mix of material will keep "our products more than relevant, actually essential to the local news and information needs of our communities."

Decherd said during the call that he did not know exactly how much of the staff reduction would be in editorial.

Source: Poynter
 

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has signed a deal with Google, after a six-month trial, which will enable its journalists to access email and share documents and other information through Google's applications, journalism.co.uk reports.

This deal is part of TMG plans to move towards a "cloud computing" model."

"The flexibility of having applications online is of special interest in the media sector where journalists need to be able to collaborate with others on copy," said Robert Whiteside, head UK and Ireland for Google's enterprise division.

Source: cyberjournalist.net

Garcia Media recently interviewed Miguel de Lorenzi, a veteran designer, on the state of newspaper design in Argentina.

Lorenzi pointed to Clarion and La Nacion as the country's leaders, but expressed enthusiasm over the launch of Critica de la Argentina. "(Critica de la Argentina has) a very smart content strategy as well as a great design. Jorge Lanata, its editor, takes risks with a printed newspaper... at a time when all the voices around him form a choir to chant the disappearance of daily printed newspapers."

"Graphics add emotional impact to the printed newspaper which is difficult to achieve on online editions," said Lorenzi. "This is definitely a plus that printed newspapers have over their digital counterparts so far."

Critica de la Argentina's pages are filled with larger and more colorful graphics, but also seem cognizant of the text they partner with, and don't overwhelm or distract from articles.

"From its origins, simplified journalism has been nothing more than the sum of communication plus emotion.  We lost the way somehow, but, fortunately, we are now are getting it back both online and print."

Source: Garcia Media

India has a booming newspaper industry, but one cloud has been seen on the horizon, the explosion in television news channels. However, P.N. Vasanti, a director of New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies, states that there is an unexpected twist to this development: those who watch the news on TV are more likely to read a newspaper.

Essentially, the TV news provides what Vasanti refers to as an "appetizer effect", meaning they get the outline of a story from the TV and they look to newspapers for the full story.

Vasanti also reports that, "what most people, including many media pundits don't know, is that research increasingly shows newspapers are still considered as the more credible source of news."

Source: livemint.com

Nicolas Kristof, of the New York Times, recently posted in his On the Ground blog, "Here at The New York Times, we still have all of our foreign bureaus -- partly because our strategy is to compete for readers who seek international news and analysis -- but most newspapers and TV networks have been pulling back. Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks."

Demotix, a new citizen journalism site, has been launched to fill the gap created when the vast majority of news outlets rely on press releases and wire services.

The site, somewhat uniquely, is trying to position itself as an intermediary for photojournalists, a source bank where media outlets can select images, buy them (for between $80-$1,600) and the site splits the revenue from the photo with the citizen photographer who uploaded it.

Source: On the Ground, New York Times blog

In a recent On the Media interview with Carole Tarrant, the Roanoke Times editor defends the place of user comments online - an embattled subject in recent weeks, one taken up by blogging heads Gawker and BuzzMachine, alike.

While many have pointed to a void of thoughtful discussion in the comment box, as Gawker's Sheila McClear recently said, "...There is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers."

Tarrant disagrees, saying that users moderate themselves once the community has been defined.

"...When you've been doing it long enough, I think the community of people participating, they know what the ground rules are. And I really believe if you're a newspaper online and you don't allow this, you're not really online," said Tarrant. "We have a whole generation that's trained to expect to be able to voice their opinion, not just to read the news but to talk about it or share it, and that may be ugly or it may be really provocative, but I want to hear it."

Tarrant also points to the Virginia Tech massacre, a local crisis, that the paper felt necessitated creating a place for readers to share.

 "We initially put up just our generic message board (but) there were a few people that tried to hijack it and talk about gun control. So we pulled down that message board and we went to something called legacy.com, which is a vendor many newspapers use to post their obituaries, and attached to those obituaries are moderated message boards. And they are very much screened. Comments are not posted live. They're looked at by editors within legacy.com," explained Tarrant. "And we personally couldn't spend the time right then to look at those comments because we were so busy trying to cover the news."

Although figuring out a comment solution that worked took trial and error, for Tarrant, it was worth it. "To not have that just would have been a huge disservice to the community."

Source: On the Media