Results matching “new media 07 n”

This week, a tax break for newspapers in Washington state went into effect, giving print publications a 40 percent reduction in the state business tax. One lawmaker stressed the tax cut was "not a bailout." It is interesting to note Washington already offered equal exemptions to the aerospace and timber industries, both of which are critical to the state's economy.

In a year which saw the Seattle Post-Intelligencer make the move to online-only and the Seattle Times cut 500 staff members, many publications will welcome any relief they can get. However, others wonder whether the measure will be enough to revive struggling papers and what such aid means for the publications' journalistic independence.

Local and regional newspapers will have the opportunity to further develop the visual content on their online editions, with use of a new multimedia wire service. Tradeclips.com, which launched this week, aims to facilitate the streaming and sharing of online video content between news providers subscribing to the reasonably priced service.  

The service will offer free uploads and downloads of video, audio and still files, for which storage is offered at a fee. Registered users will also have access to a sizeable trove of archived multimedia footage.

The British tabloid, the Daily Mirror has confirmed that it will launch its own stand-alone football website. Mirrorfootball.com will be up and running for the start of the next football season in August.  

Fans of the beautiful game can expect to enjoy a wealth of information and entertainment offered by the site.  As described by the Guardian when the news of the site broke last month, it looks set to offer a predominately visual, up-to date experience of football scene. Video and audio applications will convey live match reports and press conference broadcasts.  A new 'Football Spy" application will present a daily football agenda programme, match previews and reports and transfer talks.  

The Economist magazine is refashioning its image through a major new advertising campaign to appeal to a wider readership. It has launched a cinema commercial, its first in eight years, to dispel preconceived ideas about the magazine's content and ethos.  

The commercial is part of a repackaging drive to boost circulation in the magazine's birthplace, the UK, and to emulate the popularity that it enjoys in the US.  The campaign calls upon the "intellectually curious" rather than any specified demographic to "let your mind wander".

The Washington Post has decided to cancel its plans to host private, off-the-record dinner parties for political lobbyists at the home of its publisher after criticism from the newsroom at the suggestion that their services were effectively been sold. Publisher Katharine Weymouth was to host dinners that would give paying lobbyists and business leaders access to officials from the Obama administration and Congress, as well as Post journalists.

Politico first reported the story yesterday after obtaining a flier promoting the events that had been given to a healthcare lobbyist. The flier was entitled "Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate" and advertised events with a maximum of 20 guests to discuss major White House policy initiatives, which participating firms could co-sponsor for $25,000 per event, with up to two sponsors per session. There was also an offer for 11 for the price of 10. The theme of the first July dinner was to be health care reform, and WaPo guaranteed the attendance of Obama administration officials and members of Congress as well as reporters.

Russian news agency, RIA Novosti, is investing in training programmes to improve staff skills as an anti-crisis measure, it was announced in a press release.  

In January and June of this year, the news agency ran a series of lectures and seminars to train staff in multimedia technology for video recording and photo imaging, infographics, Internet search engines, "black PR" and legal risks in the media. The training culminated in two-week multimedia courses held at a summer school in the Moscow region. The classes, which started on June 20, are being held in the form of business games. "While the agency like anyone else is affected by the negative consequences of the economic crisis, we cannot allow ourselves not to invest funds in improving the skills of our staff," RIA Novosti Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk said.

In this digital age where technology lends itself to information at one's fingertips, one interactive website shows that American reporters and correspondent wannabes may not find their dream jobs quite so conveniently. That is of course, unless their hometown is Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles or New York.

WANTED Technologies, a site specialized in measuring hiring trends, reports that Los Angeles is by far the most lucrative locality for job-hunting journalists with a total number close to 2,000 who secured jobs in May.  Atlanta and Dallas tied for second place as the safest bets for media related work. Both cities boast 700 sealed deals, with Atlanta's score for supply and demand being slightly higher than in Dallas.

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.

 

Do you speak Twitter? Come on, Tweeple... It's time to get with the program. Yes, you Tweeple, people of the Twitter universe, or Twitterverse. Whether you are a newetter (a new tweeter), an occasionitter (an occasional Tweeter) or a seasoned reportwitters (you guessed it, reporter-style twitterer), an entire range of Twitter vocabulary has arrived. 

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.

There is a crisis in trust and communication between the British public and the mainstream media, a new report has concluded. The gulf between public expectations of news provision and the actual nature of articles, which oscillate between esoteric or irresponsible, leaves readers feeling confused and excluded.

The report, entitled 'Public Trust In The News' was conducted by researchers from Manchester and Leeds Universities and was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It investigated the dynamics of news production and consumption, to ascertain if there is a difference in what "the public expects from news media and what journalists mean by serving the public".  The paper highlights the underlying causes of an apparent widespread disenchantment with the media and the detrimental effects this is having on the standards of reporting and civil participation in democracy. Thankfully, the report offers several propositions for a new journalistic direction, which could refresh the reader-writer compact.

Two recent university graduates have decided to stop updating the fake Twitter account they created for UK foreign secretary David Miliband, the Guardian reported. The fake account attracted attention when several news outlets including the Guardian, AFP, the Times and the Telegraph picked up the Miliband impersonators' tribute to Michael Jackson, once again highlighting the need for verification when journalists deal with social media.

The quote "Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael" was published in several papers. Rory Crew and Knud Noelle claim that they were not aiming to trick the media, but think that journalists "learned something" about not taking such things at face value. They wrote in an email to the Guardian that "It does highlight the importance of the verification of sources, which is clearly becoming more difficult in the web 2.0 era." Crew expressed disappointment in the media and said he believes the mistakes were made as a result of newspapers cutting sub editors and hence falling behind on fact checking.

Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachery M. Seward interviewed Spot.Us founder David Cohn about the project's plans for expansion. Spot.Us is an 'experiment' in locally funded journalism, which calls for readers to suggest and fund story ideas about the San Francisco area. Since November, the site has funded and published 20 stories written by freelancers, supported by donations from readers.

Cohn explained to Seward that one of his three-month goals is to replicate the Spot.Us model in other communities, such as Los Angeles or Seattle, or maybe Boston, Philadelphia or New York. To do this would call for "a more careful analysis of what's really required from the organisation," he said. He is currently a volunteer and would probably have to stay that way for some time, the site does not bring in anywhere near enough money to fund a full-time employee.

San Diego is set to be home to the new Watchdog Institute, which will provide "data-driven investigative journalism" to media outlets.  The venture is being led by Lorie Hearn, a senior editor of the town's only printed daily, the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Institute and the paper will collaborate closely.  The details of the project were illustrated by in an email sent by U-T editor Karin Winner to newspaper staff last Friday.  The Institute team is comprised of the director, Hearn, two reporters and a data specialist, who will work closely with the newspaper staff on 'long and short projects'.  

Would expanding US copyright law to incorporate news articles help protect newspapers from unfair competition online? Several columnists and commentators have come out on both sides of the issue in the past week, raising questions on the role of online aggregators and the efficacy of any action regarding copyright.

First off, US Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner proposed on his blog that copyright law should be changed to "bar access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing online content without the copyright holder's consent." Essentially, that would mean news aggregators like Google News would have to ask permission each time they linked to a newspaper article. Posner argues that traditional media lose so much revenue by these "free riders" reusing content it will eventually drive newspapers out of business.

Members of the UK Parliament have spoken out against the police force's 'dismissive' treatment of journalists covering protests. They issued a reminder that the police should adhere to the guidelines of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) which outlines how the forces should treat registered members of the press.

The study of police-journalist relations was contained in a report investigating policing methods used to contain protesters outside the G20 meeting in London last April. The report was released today by the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. 

The news outlet MSNBC has developed its own application for the Apple mobile devices, iPhone and iTouch. It has collaborated with the mobile phone application developer, Zumobi to produce an application, which offers a breaking news service, audio and visual components Twitter streams.   

The Twitter integration streams will allow users to track Twitter feeds from NBC News and MSNBC anchors and easily share sites. 

Citizen photojournalism agency Citizenside has partnered with French free daily 20minutes to launch a citizen journalism portal on the paper's website 20minutes.fr. In the area "la une des lecteurs" (the readers front page) there is a new section called "vos images" (your images) where readers can upload their photos and see them sorted and published.

Hélène Fromen, new media editor at 20Minutes said in a press release that "putting this contributative platform in place "confirms 20minutes.fr's capacity for innovation." She added that "with this service, we are deploying a true participative ecosystem around 20minutes.fr that treats our Internet readers as a potential new source of verified information and gives value to their contributions."

Average time spent per visit decreased for more than half of the top 30 global news websites in May compared to last year, according to the latest Nielsen data. The trend mirrors the drops seen at the top newspaper sites.

The biggest gains came from two non-traditional news sources. Google News upped the average time spent on its site to over 22 minutes, a gain of over ten minutes from May 2008. Similarly, the average visitor stayed on the Huffington Post for about 15 minutes, an increase of more than six minutes.

The British national, the Independent, is launching its own mobile site.  It is the latest in a string of newspapers to recognise the future importance of mobile news and the need to tap into this potentially large market. A mobile site could capture a wider readership and provide an additional flow of revenue for publishers, New Media Age reported.

Bill Swanson, digital MD at The Independent, said:

"The growth of the internet has invoked an enormous change in the world of publishing and now the ubiquity of mobile devices and the evolution of the commercial model surrounding them has finally made the medium a viable one for publishers," he said.

Twitter asks its users one question: "What are you doing right now?" It is a simple enough concept; 'tweeters' answer this question and their response enters the real time feeds of those who follow them, but it is becoming increasingly useful for reporters and papers as the social network attracts more and more users. Essentially, journalists can use Twitter in three ways: to find stories and other information and to track events, to publicise their work, and to connect with readers.

A real time feed of breaking news and thought

Twitter is an extremely useful journalistic resource: reporters can use it to watch for breaking news, follow sources and search for information. "It's like monitoring another wire service," said Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors. It can be used to get an idea of which topics are attracting interest and what people are talking about right now. There is a list of top 'trending topics' on the Twitter home page. It is a real time search, ahead of even Google in terms of timeliness.

The useful information can sometimes be hard to find amongst multiple messages about what users had for breakfast, or what they thought about last night's TV show, but as Noam Cohen said in Global Journalist "it turns out that when a million people stare at their navels, more than a few of them will also notice that the ground is shaking, the plane is nosediving, the police are shooting." Twitter is particularly relevant during events that involve large numbers of members of the public, and a shining example of its effectiveness arose after a US Airways flight landed on the Hudson River and the first picture of the plane was posted to Twitter by an observer. Online news editor at Sky News Jon Gripton, discussing his reasons for appointing a Twitter correspondent, said "it is effectively another news feed. It helps us source eyewitnesses and photos and other people who are on the scene of an event." It is also crucial for following conferences, for example.

Applications such as Tweetdeck allow users to sort their contacts into groups and to search more and more easily for Tweets on specific topics. The custom of adopting hash-tags to make searching easier has been widely adopted: if a user is tweeting about a particular subject they can add a tag into their tweet, such as #IranElection, #Mumbai, #Gaza. The hash or pound symbol distinguishes the tag from random mentions of the same word, and is a custom developed by Twitter users.

Twitter's fame as a news source grew curing the terrorist attacks on Mumbai last November, and during the ongoing conflict in Iran following the election on June 12, Twitter has come into its own, with those inside Iran using the social network to stay in touch and communicate with the outside world while phone networks are down and many websites are blocked. News outlets turned to the service for the latest updates, as they were forced to abandon the principle of only relying on their trusted sources for information due to what the New York Times described as a "news vacuum."

Questions about the reliability of Twitter have also been highlighted by events in Iran. Clearly, it is impossible to judge the authenticity of Tweets from a non-trusted source. During 'normal' circumstances, a journalist would be able to contact the 'Tweeter' for more details and verification, but that is currently overwhelmingly difficult. Journalists who incorporate news obtained by Twitter into their reporting should always be careful to stress their uncertainty about the source.

Publishing: one-to-many

According to a Harvard Business study, there is a small group of very active Twitter users: it found that "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets."  Researchers Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski concluded that "Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network": in other words, perfect for journalists looking to publicise their work. It is simple enough to use as a publicising tool: send a link to the story with a Twitter-friendly headline, which should generally be casual and chatty, even more so than web headlines.

It is without doubt a good way to attract extra readers. One of the advantages of Twitter to spread the word is that it is viral, users frequently "re-tweet" the links that they have enjoyed. A CNN breaking news feed, not actually started by CNN but purchased by the news outlet when it gained substantial recognition, was the second Twitter feed to reach one million followers and now has well over 2 million. The New York Times main feed has 1,238,673 followers at time of publishing, and the Guardian has 25,009 on its main feed, though far more on its Guardian Tech account: 782,662. Many news organisations now have multiple Twitter feeds for their different sections. Montgomery stressed the need to "explore" the best policy for your newsroom when deciding whether to stick to one or split them

Some feeds are generated automatically, and for many journalists and bloggers it has become second nature to 'tweet' an article immediately after publishing. Robb Montgomery believes that the "more successful Twitterers have moved beyond auto-tweeting their RSS feed" to make their tweets more personal. "You want to show that there's a real person there."

A social tool for branding

As well as using Twitter as a one-to-many publishing mechanism, journalists can also take advantage of the social element of Twitter, using it to connect with their readers and to receive feedback on articles. It is a contact point between reporter and reader, making the journalist more accessible. "You can run quick polls, get a pulse, get some ideas," said Montgomery. Twitter can be used as part of a journalist's own personal branding, to develop their own network of followers, depending on their personality as well as their reputation as a journalist. This could be particularly helpful for freelance journalists and bloggers.

Newspapers' advice to staff

Many news outlets have become concerned about the way that their employees use social networks such as Twitter. New York Times executive editor Bill Keller called for a "zone of trust" after reporters Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Luo and Brian Stelter sent 'tweets' on what executives were saying about the how the paper might charge for online content, amongst other things during a staff strategy meeting. Shortly after, the New York Times announced the appointment of social media editor Jen Preston via Twitter. She is to concentrate "full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers," including, it seems, policing Twitter use.

The Wall Street Journal's advice on Twitter in a staff memo is that "business and pleasure should not be mixed" and although "common sense should prevail," staff meetings should not be discussed on social networks. The Washington Post's guidelines also mentions its reliance on reporters' common sense. The AP's new rules tell reporters "Don't report things or break news that we haven't published, no matter the format, and that includes retweeting unconfirmed information not fit for AP's wires."

Embracing Twitter seems to be essential for journalists and newsrooms in today's media landscape. This does not mean that all reporters should be tweeting all day long, and certainly does not mean that they should believe everything they read, but they should familiarise themselves with the site and work out how they want to use it. A newsroom policy might be necessary to encourage or warn journalists with regards to how the paper would like to see it used, and if possible, a social media expert could monitor and coordinate the paper's efforts. It is not necessary for journalists to embrace every aspect of Twitter, but most who try it find something beneficial.

On Tuesday 30 June at 15.00 London time, Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors will be speaking at a WEF webinar on "How the real time web can improve your newspaper's journalism." More details here.

YouTube today launched its Reporter's Centre, an online educational platform where journalists offer advice on reporting and news gathering techniques to would-be citizen reporters.

The centre offers a selection of how-to videos with some of the industry's leading figures giving seminars on core reporting methods, such as how to conduct interviews, how to verify facts and, lessons on maintaining standards and ethics. (See below for a list which reads like a who's who of the news sector.)

The media coverage of the shock death of Michael Jackson has served to highlight press dynamics, raising interesting questions concerning the nature of breaking news reporting, the cult of the celebrity and the relationship between newspapers and their online news rivals. Has the fact that most newspapers were delayed in the initial reporting of the death emphasised the widening gulf between print and digital channels of breaking news? Conversely, has the death been exploited by the printed press as a facile, reader guaranteeing hit?

The news of the performer's death, in terms of rumour, confirmation and reaction has been overwhelmingly 'digital' in expression. The scoop belonged to the Los Angeles based celebrity website, TMZ, which confirmed the death an hour after it aired whispers of a suspected heart attack. The reporting was rapid fire: time of death: 2.26pm, LA time, time of update: 2.44pm. 

Who says the younger generation has no interest in traditional media? More than a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 20 reads a daily newspaper, according to the new Nielsen report "How Teens Use Media." In comparison, 45 percent of all adults pick up the paper on a daily basis.

About a third of 18- to 20-year-olds reads the Sunday paper, compared to 50 percent of all adults.

In November 2008, the New York Times' investigative journalist, David Rohde, was taken hostage by the Taliban not far from Kabul, the Afghan capital, where he was conducting research for his book.  His driver, Asadullah Mangal, and local reporter, Tahir Ludin, were also kidnapped. Rohde and Ludin escaped earlier this month and their freedom, say the press, would not have been possible without the self-imposed media blackout.

Thanks to the efforts of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, for seven months news of the kidnapping did not enter the public domain. Fellow newspapers understood that lives were at stake and nobody was willing to compromise Rohde's safety by breaking the media silence. "But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia," says one New York Times journalist.