Recently by Alexandra Zeumer

The Evening Leader, North Whales Media title, is giving readers the chance to take the roles of a judge and jury in an online court through its website.

The online court website was launched in association with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and aims to raise awareness of legal procedures.

Real lawyers present their case to readers in a fictional court case through video. The viewers are given legal advice and then are asked to give their sentence. Finally, a real magistrate appears and explains what their decision would be.

In a press release, Christian Dunn, digital editor for the Evening Leader said, “this kind of working partnership shows great common sense by the CPS – they can use our website’s traffic to get their message
across and we can use their content to add more value to our site.”

A good example of a newspaper service that can benefit the public by taking advantage of the Web’s possibilities.

Source: journalism.co.uk

The Daily Mail’s online network’s popularity rose throughout January, up 31% from December to 17,9 million unique users, only 2 million behind Guardian Unlimited which totaled 19.7 million unique users.

The Guardian’s online network, which includes guardian.co.uk and observer.co.uk, also increased its unique users by 24%, up from 16 million in December.

Just under 5 million users to the Mail Online were from the UK, compared to 8.7 million for the Guardian.

Times Online, including timesonline.co.uk and www.sunday-times.co.uk, came in third place with 15 million users (up 35% from December), 6 million of which were from the UK.

Telegraph.co.uk did well last month by having a 17% rise in unique users.  The Sun Online network, incorporating thesun.co.uk, page3.co.uk and newsoftheworld.co.uk, stayed in fifth place. However, Sun Online
witnessed a 40% rise in unique users since January 2007.

The ABC altered the way the figures are presented this month. ABC reports no longer include data for page impressions.

Source: Brand Republic

As of March 7, The Oxford Times will change from a broadsheet to a compact format.

The property section will stay as a broadsheet however; the alterations will change the news, sport, jobs, and classified sections.

Editor of The Oxford Times Derek Holmes said: “This is a historic change. Our research tells us this is what readers want. It is also essential if The Oxford Times is to continue to attract new readers and maintain its place as Oxfordshire's leading weekly newspaper. We are changing the size of the paper, but our values will remain the same. We will explain more over the coming weeks.”

Source: Oxford Times

Launched on November 1, the Czech Republic's newest daily focuses on the country's growing Internet users, publishing exclusively online. The paperless newspaper, entitled Aktualne.cz, will be put out by Centrum.cz which is the largest Czech Web portal on the market in terms of visitors.

The Nation's (a US liberal weekly magazine) just hired MSN.com's Joan Connell as the magazine's web editor. This is a wonderfully smart move--Joan is as good as they get.

Editor in chief Katrina vanden Heuvel, says, "Connell brings many strengths to her new role as our first full-time web staffer. She's been a consistent trailblazer in the development of the Internet as a source of news and opinion--whether through the creation of blogs or through the increasing visibility of community journalism. We think she's the ideal person to help us make our website, which already receives 600,000 visitors a month, an even more vibrant part of our work.

A journalist asks Sussman why comments on his blog site aren't edited--Sussman explains the difference between editing comments and allowing discussion.
Another audience member remarks on how Google News is edited via algorithm and wonders whether the NY Times, BBC and others could do the same thing--use technology to make up the pages.
The discussion moves to the value of anonymous bloggers in dangerous and political situations--in developing nations for example--but them moves to the need for respondents in comments, for example, to have the courage to identify themselves.
Gillmor says "I would ask people reading things that are anonymous to calibrate fairly carefully what the reasons for that anonymity might be."

Nachison reminds the group that the blogging of these issues will go on--so pile in here and comments, folks.

Time to talk, post speeches--Let's see what the audience--and the speakers--have to say:
The panelists are discussing trust and reputation; Dan Gillmor and Joi Ito are describing how bloggers can build up trust and reputation over time, and that bloggers can--in particular circumstances--be (alm olst) as credible as mainstream media.
Krishna Bharat says that he believes in the need to rely on people "on the street, on the scene--you have to take your facts where they come from, and in ways that give you a fresh perspective."

Audience comments:
A Nigerian delegate asks about the emphasis of speed in posting--if bloggers post so quickly to the web, how can they cross-check their stories and get their facts right? Especially if they don't get paid? How can they afford to be accurate?
Nachison: This question applies equally well to mainstream media, where mistakes are published and corrected every day...this is a universal question.
Joi says: My main thing is fear--when I POST 100,000 people see it--when I make a mistake, people shred me to bits. I correct myself, and have a need to check--and `I find myself quite boring." (Susan: There, he finally said it!)
OH, Oh my new says: Articles are checked on staff, especially if they are sensitive. When our citizen journalists write they use their real names and they check themselves because their reputations are at stake as well.
Sussman: In the US, there are rules that indemnify publishers from operating forums that are platforms for free discussion, so I run open comments on my site for everyhthing but obscentity.
A Turkish journalist explains how carefully her newspaper builds their front page and says that Google News turns news stories into the equivalent of wire services because it takes their stories and builds its own front page.
Bharat respnds that Google News is not a newspaper and that it doesn't want to be one--it's a "neutral intermediary."
He restates his comments on the aggregation process, but the journalist's question is an acute one--whether Google means to build a page or not, they are making up a new front page--actually every 5 minutes.
A Chilean editor has a question for Google's Bharat--Aren't you acting as an editor when you arrange the clusters? Also, you say you want to be equal in your selection of news, but what sources do you include and what do you leave out?
Discussion gently rages...
(More in next post)

Japan's Joi Ito--Neotony CEO, investor, Technorati VP, and transparent media/digital blogger uber-guru is talking about web tools--creative commons licensing, video copyright issues, Techorati as a discovery and tracking tool.
Joi doesn't talk about famous he is, or the joi ito IRC channel he sponsors, or the wide discussion of his recent comments about being "bored" with blogging because of all the people who comment on every word he writes, but knowing the depth of his experience definitely brings resonance to his comments--until the moment he concludes with (another) hysterical video/web political remix--and the very serious news that parts of the mainstream media in the US are now blocking access to Bush footage, presumably because they DON'T want to see more re-mixing (and copyright issues) happening.
The audience gets his points loud and clear--and if they're really listening--they'll recognize Joi is not only talking about new tools, but about the new for new--and more--open--copyright news on the part of the media.

"I still am a journalist, I will always be one," says Dan Gillmor in his keynote speech.
Dan highlights some citizen journalism sites: Korea's Ohmynews.com, Northwestvoice.com in Bakersfield,CA; Lasica and Canter's Ourmedia.com.
Gillmor talks persuasively about the journalistic values he hopes to bring to Bayosphere, his citizen-journalism endeavor for Silicon Valley, CA, and his conviction that blogging as a marketplace for ideas will help the best ideas and quality flourish.
He closes by reminding the group citizen journalists (aka bloggers) are not enemies of the press, but readers who have become writers and joined what is now a global conversation.

Bonus link: Readmylips.com,http://www.atmo.se/zino.aspx?articleID=399

"I still am a journalist, I will always be one," says Dan Gillmor in his keynote speech.
Dan highlights some citizen journalism sites: Korea's Ohmynews.com, Northwestvoice.com in Bakersfield,CA; Lasica and Canter's Ourmedia.com.
Gillmor talks persuasively about the journalistic values he hopes to bring to Bayosphere, his citizen-journalism endeavor for Silicon Valley, CA, and his conviction that blogging as a marketplace for ideas will help the best ideas and quality flourish.
He closes by reminding the group citizen journalists (aka bloggers) are not enemies of the press, but readers who have become writers and joined what is now a global conversation.

Bonus link: Readmylips.com,http://www.atmo.se/zino.aspx?articleID=399

"I still am a journalist, I will always be one," says Dan Gillmor in his keynote speech.
Dan highlights some citizen journalism sites: Korea's Ohmynews.com, Northwestvoice.com in Bakersfield,CA; Lasica and Canter's Ourmedia.com.
Gillmor talks persuasively about the journalistic values he hopes to bring to Bayosphere, his citizen-journalism endeavor for Silicon Valley, CA, and his conviction that blogging as a marketplace for ideas will help the best ideas and quality flourish.
He closes by reminding the group citizen journalists (aka bloggers) are not enemies of the press, but readers who have become writers and joined what is now a global conversation.

Bonus link: Readmylips.com,http://www.atmo.se/zino.aspx?articleID=399

"I still am a journalist, I will always be one," says Dan Gillmor in his keynote speech.
Dan highlights some citizen journalism sites: Korea's Ohmynews.com, Northwestvoice.com in Bakersfield,CA; Lasica and Canter's Ourmedia.com.
Gillmor talks persuasively about the journalistic values he hopes to bring to Bayosphere, his citizen-journalism endeavor for Silicon Valley, CA, and his conviction that blogging as a marketplace for ideas will help the best ideas and quality flourish.
He closes by reminding the group citizen journalists (aka bloggers) are not enemies of the press, but readers who have become writers and joined what is now a global conversation.

Bonus link: Readmylips.com,http://www.atmo.se/zino.aspx?articleID=399

At the WEF conference, and the sessions are starting: Krishna Bharat(Google News) and Dan Gillmor (Bayosphere) are the first speakers, with our own Andrew Nachison moderating a session with Joi Ito, Barry Sussman, and others. WEF leader Betrand Pequerie is introducing Krishna Bharat, who speaks first.
Krishna started Google News, which he created two years ago, and is currently finishing up the establishment of an Indian office for Google in Bangalore. He's explaining Google's desire to organize the world's information, and their desire to be the information intermediary for users and says that Google News is basically that information applied to news. 'We're very keen for everyone to participate in all our projects,' says Bharat, "And we certainly want that to be true of news."
Two years ago, he wrote a program for himself that crawled and aggregated news; that project was the basis for Google News.
Bharat shows clips from Google that brings related stories together; he talks a bit about the clustering technology that groups stories, the crawler, and related links/terms. He explains there are algorithms that help to prioritize stories, and others that map a story to particular categories. He also talks about filtering technologies--how Google News can decide what a story is actually about, and what editions the story is slotted for.
The first version launched in Dec 2001; most recent upgrade was March 2005's customized news upgrades.
The attributes Bharat values include publishing multiple viewpoints from multiple sources, an objectivity that a local editor might lack (he says), and efficent ways to manage news flow via alerts, personalization and of course, clustering.
"I see us as an integral part of the news community, says Bharat. "We bring value to the news community, and our clustering removes the intertia that people have in going from one news site to another.
"Our relationship with newspapers is symbiotic; we sent traffic directly to the content provider and we do not have special relationships, and we amplify the amount of news being read."
"I am hoping, he says,|" to have all newspapers participate with Google News; for our readers we want an interesting debate that makes them think."

The audience is listening intently, and yet there are whispers in the corners that make me wonder if this is familiar information--or exotic jargon--to them.
(Applause)

In an opening speech for WAN this morning, Dae-Whan Chang, Chairman of the Korean Association of Newspapers, laid out a refreshingly pragmatic vision of how newspapers must adapt to survive and flourish. Rather than insist print will triumph forever, Whan told the 1,400 attendees of the WAN/WEF conferences that newspapers are facing their own "Media Big-Bang" and must embrace and meet the challenges of convergence, changing audience behaviors, and shrinking ad revenues.
Whan identified Internet, broadband, wireless, digital TV as very real threats to newspapers' long-term dominance of their markets, but urged newspapers to restructure and adapt.
Whan told the audience that Korean newspapers had to face the very real challenge of online portals publishing numerous news stories and taking audience away from the newspaper sites, and described how the papers worked together to form the Korean Online News Association (KONA), which in turn created a news portal that would help them retain market share.
He outlined his approach to mobile news, explaining his belief that newspapers needed to adapt a hybrid platform--print, web and mobile--to be viable information businesses today. Intriguingly to this Westerner, Whan demonstrated how Korean papers used barcodes --embedded next to a print story--to offer readers the chance to scan the data with a cell phone or other device and received enhanced information (this was amazingly cool).
Emphasizing that the wisest strategy for newspapers is to embrace those mediums that make the best use of relevant technology, Whan explained how Korean papers are exploring--and building--customized news portals for the phone, mobile television news downloads, and mobile personalized news alerts.
Newspapers need to understand they have to COPE--"Create once, product everywhere"--and offer ubiquitious solutions for always-connected audiences (and is he right!).
"We need to move from being news and information providers to creativity facilitators," Whan concluded, stressing that the keys to success were to create a hybrid platform, build for an ubiquitious enviroment, and make content creative.
Susan sez: This speech broke me out of my ex New Yorker cynicism and sent me right to the keyboard--clearly, OhMyNews is not the only organization in Korea that's doing some hard thinking about how the news business needs to evolve. There are lessons to be learned here that the US--and other countries--can benefit from, and progressive thinking that's clearly linked to the highly networked behaviors of Korea's educated classes.