May 2008 Archives

Press freedom is under serious threat from many sources -- gangs and corrupt officials in Latin America, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, conflicts in Africa, hostile governments in Asia, and from death threats and prosecutions in central Asia and Europe, the World Association of Newspapers said in its half-year review of press freedom.

The report, presented Saturday to the Board of WAN on the eve of the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Göteborg, Sweden, painted a grim picture of attacks, imprisonment and murder facing journalists in many countries.

Twenty-eight journalists have been killed since November 2007. Iraq remains the most deadly country, with 9 killed.

The report, with region-by-region details, is available here.

Source: WAN

Washingtonpost.com introduced Wednesday a housing widget that enables users to search for apartments near Metro stations. The widget is the Post's latest effort to spread its content beyond its domain site.

Ken Barbieri, director of business development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, says that such expansion is necessary. According to Barbieri, it is vital to "get your content to the place where people are consuming information."

The widget, the Post's 25th in 18 months, will utilize Google maps to provide users with customized visuals. It will be available on Washingtonpost.com, and distributed on Google's content network.

Washingtonpost.com's future projects, Barbieri suggests, will target the iPhone and Blackberry.

"Whether the consumer is on a social network or a mobile phone, we want to be there," said Barbieri.

Source: The ClickZ Network, through I Want Media

Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo recently completed a survey of 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.

When asked to name the top 10 missions of Arab journalism, participants named human rights, political reform, poverty and education as the most critical issues, trumping hot button topics like Palestinian statehood and the war in Iraq.

"Overwhelmingly, they wanted the clergy to stay out of politics. And, aside from the ever-present issue of Israel, they ranked 'lack of political change' alongside American policy as the greatest threats to the Arab world," wrote Pintak in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this week. "Many see themselves as agents of political and social change who believe it is their mission to reform the antidemocratic regimes they live under."

The results of Pintak's research will be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July.

Source: The New York Times

24/7 Wall St. has looked at the top 25 US newspapers and ranked their online business and finance sections, on an A-F scale.

Business and finance sections were selected because advertisers are often willing to pay a premium for space in a section read by readers "(that) have money that the readers of the sports sections may not." Given the readership and advertising potential, this should presumably be one of the best online sections of a news site.  

Overall, the results indicate there is room for improvement, with the news sites receiving a median grade of B-. 24/7 Wall St. reported many of the sites were difficult to navigate, lacked on content and were poorly designed. Of one they commented the site, "appears to have been designed giving no thought to the fact that the reader is looking at content on the internet and not in a newspaper. "

Yet among the 25, several stood out as having used their resources well to create straightforward site navigation, quality design and content - particularly content which catered to their readership, and foster interactivity through blogs, video and online forums.

Among the best, The Houston Chronicle was noted for excellent navigation, relevant blogs and columns and mix of major stories from wire services, coupled with "local touches like the Houston Stock Index and several Top 100 features." The St. Petersburg Times was also a stand out, with superb graphics and lay-out and interactive features on local companies.

Robb Montgomery commented earlier this year that in moving our focus online, "We are in a transition and transitions are bumpy and disorienting." Montgomery advises that digital journalism needs to be seen (and created as) its own product, unique from both traditional print journalism and traditional ways of consuming film and television.

Sources: 24/7 Wall St.

The Guardian's website drew 3 million online users in April, maintaining its position as UK's most popular newspaper website, according to Nielsen Online.

But its grip on the top spot is slipping.

Telegraph.co.uk, which holds second-place with 2.7 million unique users, experienced a traffic growth of 77%, dwarfing the Guardian's 24% increase.

Trailing Telegraph.co.uk were, in order, the Sun Online, the Times Online, and the Daily Mail.

Telegraph.co.uk owes its surge in popularity to a proliferating number of "light" visitors, users who spend less than five minutes on the website, said Stephen Brooks, UK managing director of Nielsen Online. According to Nielsen, light users now constitute 81% of all traffic.

"Analysing the Telegraph's audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site's improved visibility in search results," Brooks said.

Nielsen's announcement follows recent studies by ABCe and comScore Inc., each of which crowned a different newspaper - Telegraph.co.uk and Sun Online respectively - as most popular. PaidContent UK's Robert Andrews' advice: "You can pretty much pick your own winner."

Source: PaidContent UK, Brand Republic

Newspaper Le Figaro and mobile phone service Orange have partnered to offer a unique feature: it is the first live daily show about politics, entitled "The Talk," to be conceived exclusively for the Web and mobile phones.
The show will launch on Monday June 2 with French Prime Minister François Fillon. Every day, at 6pm, a political or financial celebrity will be interviewed by Figaro's star political reporter Anne Fulda or by Figaro.fr managing editor Laurent Guimier.
The show will be shot in the Figaro's own video studio (see the interview about their video studio) and will be broadcast live and for free on figaro.fr and on the news portal of Orange, both on the Web and on Orange mobile phones.
Truly innovative, this service will also be interactive, as Internet users can submit questions before the show and react to it live on the blog of "The Talk."
The show's business model is entirely based on its audience, thanks to banner ads sold on the sites of both the newspaper and mobile operator, for which both partners will share revenues.
The show's time, 6pm, was also geared to fill a 'news void' for the French audience, as they  are still at work or on their way home.
"There's on one side the best of content with Le Figaro, on the other the best of distribution with Orange. It's a win-win situation," said Orange President and Director, Didier Lombard.
Source: Figaro (here and here, links in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

The Chicago Tribune has partnered with digital video recorder specialist TiVo, for the video service to carry content from the Tribune's TV critic Maureen Ryan.

The recommendations of Ryan will only be available to those who sign up, among the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the Chicago area. TiVo's chief executive said he was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets.

The Tribune could benefit from the deal in several ways, including increased visibility of its brand name, but also potentially additional subscription revenue.

"Maybe we'll get a few people to do the unthinkable and subscribe to the newspaper," said James Warren, managing editor for features at the Tribune. This partnership comes as the Tribune is reshuffling its TV print digest, whose value is diminishing with the rise of online or on-screen guides. "He said the TiVo partnership seemed like a no-lose proposition," reported The New York Times.

The Tribune will also get a share of revenue from newly-subscribed TiVo users, if these came through one the newspaper's advertisements for TiVo.

 

 

Source: New York Times through I Want Media

Newspaper editors have a new reason to emphasize their video offerings - a ten-figure reason.

 

The number of people who watch online video could rise to one billion within the next five years, according to a study released Tuesday by technology research group ABI Research.

 

This means that the study expects the number of online video viewers to quadruple by 2013.

 

"As my boss, Jim Kerstetter, points out, it's unwise to put too much faith in predictions like this, but this isn't too much of a stretch," writes CNET News blogger Greg Sandoval.

 

Source: CNET News through I Want Media

Starting on Sunday June 1, the 15th World Editors Forum and 61st World Newspaper Congress will kick off and run through Wednesday June 4.

All of next week, read all the latest news, watch the videos and get exclusive summaries and interviews from one of the industry's biggest events.

The Editors Weblog team is currently travelling to Göteborg, Sweden, for the Forum. We will continue to give a share of our regular news coverage until the end of the conference.

The Washington Times unveiled Tuesday a preview of its revamped website, tailored to facilitate user interaction and allow readers a more personalized experience. The renovation marks the Times' switch from a "newspaper enterprise to a full media company offering news 24/7," said the Times' press release.

Most prominent among the new features is the News Cube, a design that enables readers to flip through articles in two ways: vertically, through general topics (Business, Sports - traditional news sections), or horizontally, through news themes adapted to specific interests (family issues, video games, the military). These news themes will include all stories written by the Washington Times since 1999.

The Times will also introduce a question forum and social networking communities monitored by citizens "who function as the bloggers-in-chief and moderators," said the release.

The prototype launched today will enable the paper to get feedback from readers before the print edition is relaunched on June 2, along with an e-edition of the print newspaper.

Source: Business Wire, press release

Copiepresse, a copyright group for Belgian newspapers, is suing Google for up to €49.1 million for displaying links to the publishers' content on Google News, the company's news search engine.

Copiepresse additionally requests that Google publish the court's ruling for 20 days on Google's Belgian website and news.Google.be. For each day Google fails to do so, Copiepresse seeks a €1 million fine.

Google News compiles links to news stories customized to fit users' searches, a service, Copiepresse complains, that allows Google to steal advertising profits away from the newspapers.

This is the second time in the past two years Copiepresse has sued Google. A February 2007 court ruling mandated that Google remove all links from its website and pay Copiepresse damages.

In related news, Google responded today to another grievance being brought against the company, Viacom's lawsuit against the Google-owned YouTube, calling it a "threat to the flow of information on the web."

Click here for further coverage of Copiepresse's lawsuit.

Source: Bloomberg News through EJC, Boston Globe

Two magazines, published by 8020 Publishing and based on an experimental user-generated model, are drawing the attention of traditional newspaper editors.

Everywhere, a travel magazine, and JPG, a photo journal, rely on citizens to create their content, greatly reducing the price of production, while managing to maintain a standard of high quality.

The magazines receive thousands of submissions online, which are then voted on by readers for publication. A small editorial team makes the final decision.

"Even in this Twittering digital age in which tens of millions of self-publishers have created their own blogs, there is still enough of a thrill in being published in a bound print publication," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

"After doing this for a bit, I'm still not seeing what professional travel writers do that our people aren't doing better," Everywhere Editor in Chief Todd Lappin says.

"Think about it. There's only one of them going to a place and there's potentially hundreds of our people already there."

Some editors have expressed reluctance to embrace a model dependent upon citizens - such a system would seem to cheapen the value of professional journalists. Sree Sreenivasan, in charge of new media program at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, recognizes the value of user-generated content, but also warns against community-based 'editorial' choices:

"'Create-your-own news sites' lose some of the serendipity of journalism. You're losing the stories that you might not see if there wasn't an editor looking out for them," Sreenivasan says.

The publishers of Everywhere and JPG are considering similar magazines for car fans and food connoisseurs.

It remains to be seen whether this user-generated model can be successfully and viably applied to news and newspapers. Initiatives at the Hartford Courant, or CNN's iReport platform, which now draws 10,000 user submissions per month, point in the right direction.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle through I Want Media

Welt Online, website of referential daily Die Welt in Germany, has chosen eScenic for its content management. Oliver Michalsky, deputy editor of Welt Online, will explain this choice at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, June 1-4.

"We thing that eScenic is a high performance content management system," he said.

The CMS is very fast compared to Welt Online's previous system: sometimes reporters had to wait for five minutes or more before a news item was published. "It was terrible for us," said Michalsky.

With eScenic, it is now both easy and quick to publish text stories, but also multimedia content such as videos and picture galleries, or interactive features like polls, said Michalsky.

Recent upgrades in eScenic also make it easy to manage Welt Online's community platform, where users can set up profiles and upload their own content; Welt Online began this project a year and a half ago with CMS Drupal, which offered better functionalities at the time, but will soon go through the process of adapting its community platform to eScenic.

According to Michalsky, staffers at Die Welt comfortably adopted the new CMS. It took about two weeks for all editors to learn how to use it. Not all reporters need to learn how to use it, but it has been very handy for reporters outside of Die Welt's Berlin headquarters.

Michalsky will discuss these issues at the upcoming World Editors Forum.

Read other preview interviews here.

Source: Oliver Michalsky, deputy editor, Welt Online

Read Write Web reports that the New York Times is to introduce an API on its website, opening its content for users to program and structure. The Times' decision will have ramifications for the newspaper industry; the API is considered to be the next stage in the evolution of the newspaper.

"[An API] will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web," Read Write Web's Josh Catone writes.

The API is the latest in a series of online innovations by the Times. Over the past year, the paper has created an RSS feed, a Facebook application, and its own news aggregator, Blogrunner. But the API will give users the freedom to personalize and organize content, a major step.

"The plan is definitely to open the code up," New York Times CTO Marc Frons says. "How far we don't know."

Click here to learn more about API.

Source: Read Write Web through I Want Media

In a blog post, Al Neuharth, founding editor of the leading US daily USA Today, reassures newspaper editors and publishers: 225 years after the first daily newspaper was published in the US, the newspaper is still a robust news medium (see a recent study) - despite current struggles in the newsroom.

A lot of doom and gloom reports about the newspaper industry have come from newspapers themselves.

"Sure, the slumping economy has made times a little tough for them. But most still have profit margins well above most other businesses," wrote Neuharth.

There are still a whopping 1,422 dailies and 6,253 being published in the US, and USA Today's circulation is at about 2,28 million copies daily, increasing every year in its 25-year history.

The Wall Street Journal is second, with just over 2 million copies.  (Neuharth noted: "Under new owner/boss Rupert Murdoch, it's the most improved newspaper in the country and likely to show significant sharp future increases.")

The transition to the digital age isn't easy, but newspapers are embracing it. Said Neuharth:

"Importantly, newspaper owners and editors have embraced the Internet and now are 24/7 providers of news, information, entertainment and advertising. The hunger for all that is greater than ever in history. That's why newspaper-oriented media companies have a bright future."

Source: USA Today Blogs through I Want Media

A tornado sweeping through the Colorado area Thursday prompted Poynter reporter Amy Gahran to search online for additional information. Thanks to a friend's warning on Twitter and visits to a couple of hyperlocal news sites, Gahran was swiftly informed of the tornado's path.

"I suspected that, like me, some other locals might have Twitter running on their computers (or alerts coming to their cell phones) but not be paying attention to mainstream media at the moment," Gahran writes.

Not that it would have mattered - Twitter had "broken" the story before the mainstream media had even altered their regular programming (remember the earthquake in China?).

Gahran suggests that journalists and editors join Twitter, identify local Twitter users, and learn how to use TweetScan, Twitter's search tool.

"Twitter's popularity has reached the point that it can be a valuable early warning system to nearly anyone," Gahran writes, "Including journalists and news orgs."

Gahran's story is a good example of the potential of Twitter and the benefits of hyperlocal news in breaking news situations.

Source: Poynter

The Journal and the Durham Times were the big winners at the 27th Tom Cordner North East Press Awards.

The Journal, a Newcastle paper, was named Newspaper of the Year for the second consecutive year. The paper also won six other prizes, including Magazine of the Year and Picture of the Year. The Durham Times, barely a year in print, was named Weekly Newspaper of the Year.

In other awards, the Northern Echo (picture left) won News Website of the Year, a new addition to the ceremony.

According to their website, the Tom Cordner Awards are the "largest regional media awards operation in the UK." The awards cover "newspapers, magazines, and their associated websites from North Yorkshire to the Scottish border."

Source: holdthefrontpage.co.uk
 

Public trust in journalists has fallen significantly, reports a YouGov poll published in the British Journalism Review.

Although trends within the industry remain unchanged - with broadcast journalists considered more trustworthy than print reporters - all but one of the seven categories of journalist have lost ground to the trust figures reported five years ago.

Trust in broadsheet journalism is down 22% to 43%, in mid-market journalism 18% to 40%, and in local journalism figures have dropped 20% to rest at 18%. While trust in other occupations, including police and teachers, has also declined, none so dramatically as journalists.

"The only group to emerge unscathed were the red-top journalists, whose reputation was so low it could hardly sink further," said University of Westminster professor of communications Steven Barnett.

YouGov's survey shows a marked difference from the results of silimar surveying in the US. The Readership Institute's 2007 survey found that while overall trust in journalism is declining, 75% of respondents still trust their local daily newspaper's reporting.

Sources: Press Gazette, The Guardian

Guardian News and Media is merging operations of its online and print outlets, The Guardian, Guardian.co.uk, and The Observer. The move replaces the traditional "funnel" structure of the newsroom - all stories going through one editor - with a new layout, dubbed "pods in a matrix" by Guardian Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

"The jargon is now, I'm told, we're a 'matrix' organisation. That means you will have to get used to the fact that you are working for two people [a section head and a head of news, sport and business]," Rusbridger says.

The new system will preserve some of the traditional positions in a newspaper, such as an overarching editor, but not all reporters will have to pass their stories through the funnel. Journalists working in "pods," or groups covering a common subject, will publish directly online.

"I've always thought that news editor on a newspaper is an impossible job - all your correspondents are trying to get the attention of this person. And in the end all their copy has to come through this tiny, narrow funnel.

"That's what I mean about releasing the creativity, so these people don't go home pissed off because they didn't get their story in the paper," Rusbridger says.

The Guardian's efforts offer a glance into the future newspaper's infrastructure, a system of micromanagement designed to facilitate media convergence, connect readers with the information they seek, and make the news as timely as possible.

"Everywhere you look in the world a similar thing is happening," Rusbridger says, "It's not seven-day publishing, it's going over to something much more ambitious."

Source: Press Gazette through IFRA Executive News Service

You likely have heard about US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's foot-in-mouth moment on Friday, but how did the reporters who broke it hear this unfortunate choice of phrase?

On a live news feed, streaming 1500 miles away.

The traveling press corps of about two-dozen journalists, photographers and camera operators who were traveling with the Clinton campaign in South Dakota on Friday, were not the reporters who broke the story - the story was broken by the New York Post, after hearing it in their own newsroom.

Last week Clinton, speaking to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, defended her choice to stay in the primary campaign, arguing there was historical precedence of primary campaigns running into June. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

When Clinton made this statement, the reporters traveling with the campaign were on a bus, en route to Clinton's second appearance at a local supermarket.

Although they were watching the same stream, their internet connection was spotty - but the New York Post's wasn't. The original N.Y. Post read: "She is still in the presidential race, she said today, because historically, it makes no sense to quit, and added that, 'Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June,' making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama."

Within minutes of Clinton beginning her second appearance, Blackberries around the room began to go off, calls coming in from editors who had seen a Drudge Report link to the N.Y. Post article. The conversation of the day quickly shifted to her remarks at the Leader, and within two and a half hours, Clinton had made a statement expressing her regret.

In this case, perhaps more interesting than the politics of Clinton's statement are the changing politics of communication that the incident highlights.

Within minutes, Clinton, who thought she was speaking at a small event in South Dakota - one too small for even the traveling press to attend - was a sound bite around the country.

Source: The New York Times

Although the Chinese government has promised journalists the unrestricted right of expression, avoid any preconceptions, warns the Guardian's Phil Harding. This past month, news about the earthquake in China and angry protesters have tended to overshadow the issue of press coverage during the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics.

In an article Monday Harding speculates whether the government can keep its word.

"In a country that keeps such a tight grip on its own media and which severely restricts access to its markets by foreign media companies...it is a guarantee that has been hotly disputed," Harding writes.

Harding quotes several journalists who echo this skepticism, including BBC Sport's Head of Major Events, Dave Gordon, whose network plans to film certain events with its own unilateral cameras in preparation for any media suppression.

"We don't want any editorial decisions made for us," Gordon says.

Harding is most curious about how the media will cover events off the field, and how the Chinese government will respond to any such scrutiny.

"If the Olympics are portrayed as a well-organized success, the media will be accused of falling for a Chinese propaganda exercise. On the other hand, if there are protests and they are properly covered, there will be accusations from the Chinese that the actions of an unrepresentative minority have been magnified out of proportion."

During the earthquake, many journalists in China reportedly enjoyed increased press freedom. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government will keep its word for the Olympics.

In April, the World Association of Newspapers organized a conference entitled "Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom," which featured Gao Yu, a Chinese journalist jailed twice for her reporting. Unfortunately, she had reported that, in the run-up to the Olympics, the conditions for journalists were "considerably more catastrophic" than they were 15 years ago.

Source: The Guardian

From our sister site the SFN Blog and journalism.co.uk: at the Google Zeitgeist conference last week, Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief Will Lewis said that with the advent of multimedia reporting, he considers CNN and the BBC to be the Telegraph's main competition.

"What has happened in our industry is that the traditional distinction between text and video is fusing and the Holy Grail is to now develop a content site or stream of content that is text and videos," said Lewis.

"Without being too highfaluting about it we see our main competitors as being people like the BBC or CNN.

"Both of which are trying to use video and text to enable users to decide how they find out about a story."

Unlike some other newspaper publishers, Lewis also defended Google, Digg and the like because they "bring an enormous amount of business to our door."

These comments come in the wake of the Telegraph's recent surge in online traffic, as it surpassed guardian.co.uk last month.

Source: journalism.co.uk through SFN Blog

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has recently come under the press' fire, after he and his party criticized AFP coverage. But political dissensions should by no means lead to inaccurate journalism, which is exactly what the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur did when it attributed these words to Sarkozy, during an informal meeting with a group of journalists:

"(expletive) guys, it's hot, let's go the terrace!" When asked about his visit in Tunisia and journalists there, the Nouvel Obs reported that Sarkozy had answered: "Don't give a damn, anyway, they're only a bunch of (expletive) who ask (expletive) questions..."

This would be crunchy content, especially knowing of Sarkozy's previous ethical missteps (a video shot by Le Parisien of Sarkozy insulting a citizen drew a million viewers in a day).

The problem is that this information was inaccurate, and that the Nouvel Observateur later admitted this information hadn't been verified and presented its apologies.

In fact, there wasn't even a Nouvel Obs reporter at the time of Sarkozy's meeting.

Let it serve as reminder to the press as a whole, in France and elsewhere, that a necessary degree of partisanship and political contestation shouldn't lead to inaccurate journalism.

Source: Le Monde (link in French)

The Dutch Royal Library began Monday to digitize its 8 million-page newspaper collection. The project is estimated to take three years to complete, and is part of the library's larger-scale effort to digitize its entire 30 million-item collection.

Source: DutchNews, European Commission

Timothy McNulty, the Chicago Tribune's Public Editor, responded today to the onslaught of "incensed" readers who have complained about conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's May 14 column. Many readers viewed the piece as thinly veiled racism.

Parker, who is syndicated by more than 400 newspapers, wrote: "'A full-blooded American.' That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with 'someone who is a full-blooded American as president.'" The column suggests that while all Americans may be immigrants, not all have paid their dues.

Janice Lindegard was one of many who responded to the column. "Using the term 'full-blooded American' to describe John McCain smacks of nothing if not white supremacy."

NcNulty echoed the Tribune's readers. "To write about bloodlines and claim it's not about race or ethnicity is nonsense," McNulty wrote. "Those are code words. I suspect most readers understand that."

However, he also noted that, "Printing a column is not the same as sanctioning it."

The editor emphasized the importance of printing and debating any opinion - regardless of whether it is popular or politically correct. "It is far better to honestly relate what people are saying and thinking--even if the sentiments expressed are racist--than to hide or pretend those attitudes don't exist."

Source: Editor & Publisher

Lemonde.fr organized an online chat with French new media and technology specialist Francis Pisani. The expert gave his views on multiple topics, including the future of the mobile Web, anonymity online, social networks, and the public's fear of a Big Brother digital society.

The following is an edited and translated version of what can be found on Le Monde's site.

Nowadays, massive social networks are becoming the norm on the Web. Will this continue or will there be new social networks that are smaller and more localized?

Both coexist and will continue to do so. I find the concept of the website ning.com very interesting. Instead of putting users in a global social network, it enables users to create micro networks.

Is anonymity online a defunct notion?

It's hard to say. Personally I think the possibility of being anonymous should be preserved, but the most important thing is to have direct control over information about us. This means that users should be able to know what kind of data a website has about them, and users should be given the possibility to destroy that data or migrate it to another site.

What are the trends for blogs in the future?

I think blogs will evolve in two directions: the 'old' one, which entails publishing postings in a Wiki-type database, which can be searched independently of chronology and categories.
But today Twitter, Friendfeed and others are showing us the good things of being able to include conversations, in which the predominant role of bloggers is minimized.

How will the development of the mobile Web influence the way we use the Internet?

There are two big notions at play: the importance of location, and the highly specialized technologies necessary to understand the context around one's location.

This essentially means that once we will have these technologies, content providers (journalists, TV stations, institutions...) will have to provide content adapted to these circumstances.

We will also have to adapt to a new preset: the fact that we are becoming more and more nomadic.

Which mobile format do you think is most promising for news and information? Cell phones like the iPhone, e-books like Kindle, video game consoles like the PSP?

I would add a fourth category, UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PC), a format that is starting to seriously grow in Asia, and that we will probably see in the US and European markets very soon.

At this point, I can't say which of these forms will win. In fact, the increasing number of these machines should enable a large number of people to choose whichever format is convenient for them.

Source: Lemonde.fr

A recent study by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants finds cause for optimism for the print newspaper industry. The study foresees the future growth of print media, but urges imminent action in order to ensure its survival.

According to Alexander Mogg, a partner in Roland Berger's InfoCom Competence Center, the time for action is now.

"With so many operational optimizations already successfully implemented, what needs to be done now is to set the strategic course for the next five to ten years," Mogg says.

For him, the future for newspapers is by becoming increasingly targeted and focusing on areas of strength (see a similar argument by Jim VandeHei and the Politico).

"Magazines and newspapers will only be able to achieve lasting success in multimedia competition if they really know their target groups and focus on the inherent strengths of print publications. We see growth potential in the premium reader segment and in other niches."

The study presents nine scenarios for the future of the newspaper and includes some strategies for success. Among the strategies:

    -- Frequent, thorough market research, in order to identify trends within readerships: "Print        media can only successfully compete with other media if they are clearly positioned,"            according to Roland Berger's website.

    --"In multimedia competition, print media will have to focus on their inherent strengths -            beyond quality, these include providing readers with an individual experience and the            deliberate choice to set aside quality time in their busy schedules."

    --Filling niche markets: "The mass market has been fully distributed, but niches still hold           growth potential."

    --Brand investments (this also includes "training" younger generations to adjust to print           media.): "Brand investments are generally worthwhile, because a strong brand is                   becoming more and more important in an increasingly fragmented media landscape."

View the full list by clicking the link below.

Source: RolandBerger.com through IFRA Executive News Service

Geoffrey Pereira, Head of Editorial Systems at Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), will explain why the group has chosen ATEX Hermes and IBM's Nica platform to be its content management system at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, June 1-4.

SPH began its long process of adopting a CMS in 2002-2003. After a year of evaluation, SPH chose ATEX, which was implemented in the last newspaper last October. (Note that some of these delays weren't related to SPH or the CMS, but to external factors such as the general elections in Singapore or changes in IBM's system).

The choice of Hermes and Nica over competitors was motivated by several factors including:

- The main reason was that these firms could provide on-site help throughout the entire process, and customize the CMS as it was being developed. For almost two years, ATEX provided a project manager and two staffers to work hand-in-hand with SPH, up to the roll-out. "What I don't want is to specify a product and when it comes back, if I have made a mistake, to hear 'sorry, no change requests," said Pereira. "When you ask for a big system like this, you don't (initially) know what you want in very fine detail."
This contrasted with other firms that built the CMS on their own site, then returned it after completion - with little possibility for the customer to modify initial requirements.

- Flexibility: thanks to Hermes, any changes in font for example can be easily implemented. Its ouput, in XML and PDF, also gives the possibility to easily create e-editions.

- Compatibility with Adobe.

- The training period for staffers was shorter than for other CMS: one week. In fact, a group of five people from SPH were trained by IBM's staff during three long months. This paid off. When this core group of "super-users" - not technical people, two subeditors and three reporters - returned they were able to train another ten people. This group trained all other 500 staffers in-house in a year, ending last October. By the end of the process, it only took two days to teach reporters, and four days for designers, how to use the CMS.

Pereira will discuss these issues at the upcoming World Editors Forum, during the session on content management systems.

View other preview interviews here.

(Disclaimer: ATEX is a strategic business partner in the World Association of Newspapers' Shaping the Future of Newspapers project.)

Source: Geoffrey Pereira, Head of Editorial Systems, Singapore Press Holdings

In Monday's Guardian Reader's Editor Siobhain Butterworth ponders a universal standard for evaluating citizens' requests for retracting their comments in published stories, noting the difficulty of creating such a measurement - especially in the digital age.

At the Guardian, "We usually resist requests for deletions of names and quotes that don't identify significant errors."

"Should users who ask for their comments to be removed from blogs be treated differently to people who request the deletion of their names and quotes from articles, or the removal of their letters?" Butterworth writes.

Butterworth mentions other factors involved in the evaluation process, such as timeliness and sensitivity. In the latter case, a rape victim's wish for anonymity is a suitable request. However, Butterworth questions whether "letter writers who in youth, anger or enthusiasm managed to get their missives published in the Guardian, but now wish they hadn't" are suitable requests to the former.

"If you gave a quote to the paper or had a letter published several years ago you may not have given a moment's thought to your digital footprint, but even before the advent of search engines people needed to think carefully about what they put on the record.

"The difference is that in the pre-digital age a letter to a newspaper or quote in an article, from someone who was not in the public eye, was less likely to resurface."

Butterworth's musings are not prescriptive but rather cautionary, warning users to be mindful of their "digital footprints." For the editors left to sift through user retraction requests, the directions are less clear.

How can editors deal with the delicacy of such requests without compromising the integrity of their newspapers? Butterworth doesn't say.

Source: The Guardian

How can newspapers curb Google's expanding reach into their digital profits?

According to BusinessWeek's Roben Farzard, the giant search engine "is the ultimate enemy of the journalism that we constitutionally cherish."

"For every dollar of traditional ads it displaces, Google's intermediation kicks back mere nickels to content providers...(Google) won't pony up the money to station and protect correspondents in Baghdad, nor will it pick up the martini tab when a reporter interviews a hedge fund manager's whistleblowing mistress."

According to Farzard, Google, will "either run or broker half of the world's $55 billion in online advertising" by next year.

To save news organizations, Farzard suggests implementing a profits tax on the search-engine giant, limiting its ability to commandeer the newspaper advertising market.

But is it really possible, as Farzard argues, to tax the search engine giant?

Source: BusinessWeek

The US Society of Professional Journalists - "an old-media organization" in the words of the Chicago Tribune - has chosen embrace the trend towards citizen journalism by organizing workshops to teach citizens about ethical and responsible journalism.

Until now, "Some major initiatives in this country have failed on both business and news-gathering levels," commented the Tribune.

Others, such as Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post, have strived.

In any case, the trend towards "citizen journalism" is here to stay and the SPJ has decided to conduct seminars around the country to teach the basics of journalism to "those who are, perhaps, more citizen than journalist," reported the Tribune.

For the first session, about a week ago, there were relatively few respondents. About 25 people signed up, at $25 a day for seminars on ethics, and about two thirds of them showed up.

"There are quite a few bloggers, particularly in larger cities, who do work on a par with any journalist," said Clint Brewer, the SPJ's president and editor of Nashville's alternative City Paper. "We're trying to sort of hang our shingle out in their world with this first step and let them know we welcome them as well."

For Geoff Dougherty, who left the Tribune two years ago and founded the Chi-Town Daily News (see their own news process involving citizens) and taught the reporting seminar Saturday, the SPJ's involvement is a positive sign for the industry.

"It's great that they're interested in kind of extending the professional standards that have been in effect for newspaper journalists to a completely new population," he said.

Source: Chicago Tribune - Technolo-j

The free business daily paper City AM in London is launching Quick Response (QR) technology, which enables readers to download financial news on their mobile phones.

When a picture of a QR code is taken from a mobile phone, the QR code provides a link to the mobile Internet referring to specific news pages.

City AM claims to be the first newspaper in the UK to make us of QR technology.

These codes have already been extensively used in Japan and China. In France, several magazines successfully tried using the smart barcodes last summer.

City AM already provides a 'mobizine', a mobile-friendly format for its news service.

Source: Brand Republic

Trinity Mirror continues its company-wide relaunch of regional newspaper websites as it revamps the Hounslow Chronicle in west London.

The redesigned site includes the hyperlocal community blog feature pioneered by the Evening Gazette in Teesside - the feature undeniably boosted the Evening Gazette's traffic and helped it engage its local community.

Users can contribute content to the hyperlocal sites, and the newspaper intends to use to reverse publish this content in print products (see today's example with The Hartford Courant in the US).

More and more newspapers around the world are implementing these types of hyperlocal community portals and then publishing users' content in specific print editions, a model which seems to be successful both as a business venture and an editorial product.   

Source: Press Gazette

Matthew Wall, the Technical Architect for guardian.co.uk, described in an audio interview some of the technical developments of the website, from an engineer's perspective, as the site continues to redesign.

The podcast is fairly long and "aimed at a software engineering audience so contains soft rock," wrote Wall in a blog post.

For those who wade through the technical jargon, you can listen to the podcast here.

Source: Guardian blogs

According to Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0, The New York Times is increasingly embracing link journalism - the idea that online journalism should heavily rely on one of the Web's main attributes, hyperlinking, to increase a story's editorial value.

Karp has been grappling with the idea of link journalism for some time (see his posts here).

The Times' Lede blog makes intensive use of 'link journalism'. In one of its posts, it links back to several external sources including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, USA Today, and an independent blogger.

But according to Karp, 'link journalism' extends far beyond the simple act of hyperlinking:

The Lede's posting "isn't just lazily linking to these stories -- he's read them, compared them, identified shortcomings, extracted key facts and issues, and connected the dots.

"In a traditional newspaper article, all of these facts and analysis would have been synthesized, but the reader wouldn't have had the opportunity to read for themselves the source material. This post does what journalism is supposed to do -- empower people with facts, understanding, and perspective about important issues."

The challenge for newspapers and their websites is to strike a balance, between remaining synthesizers of a wide mass of information (because consumers still expect journalists and editors to do so), while also becoming aggregators and relay points for news consumers who may want to access more in-depth sources on particular topics.

Source: Publishing 2.0

Following yesterday's ABCe results contending that telegraph.co.uk has overtaken guardian.co.uk as the most-visited newspaper website in the UK, web measurement standards are to be reviewed.

Rival publishers questioned the spectacular ascension of traffic to the Telegraph's website, which added 6.3 million unique users in two months.

The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, which advises ABCe on its measurement methods, has agreed to conduct a review of its measurement standards.

The credibility of ABCe measurements seems to have been undermined by the volatile figures it has produce.

In 2007, the Telegraph's claim that it had the UK's leading website had already sparked a row with the Guardian and other publishers.

Source: Guardian

According to Almar Latour, managing editor of WSJ.com, newsroom integration is a matter of newsroom culture and collaboration, rather than physical proximity.

Latour will explain how the Wall Street Journal has integrated its news operations - while remaining non-integrated in the restrictive sense - at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held June 1-4 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

"The overarching point of integration is that it should take place in the reporter's minds," said Latour. What's important is "changing a culture, going from a print news cycle to a 24-hour news cycle."

However, physical integration "is also something that is taking place" at the WSJ. Both print and online editors sit at the central news desk, which dispatches news to all platforms. "The newsgathering and distribution, the processing of news, is taking place centrally now - in an integrated fashion," said Latour.

Physical integration at the Journal - establishing the central news desk - only took a few weeks and some desk-shifting.

On the other hand, the integration isn't complete, since staffers from print and online remain platform-based. A team of WSJ.com staffers is specialized in Web-specific activities such as video, audio or online production.

As Latour said, the real challenge is to change staffers' mindsets, through practice.

For example, when the WSJ handed out video cameras to its bureaus 18 months ago, the initial results were very amateurish, and journalists sometimes confused. Now though, WSJ.com's videos have become a regular offering for the website, whether they're quality 90-second clips or full-blown 'documentaries'.

Among the steps followed by the Journal in that case:

- first, givz reporters access to the proper equipment
- successful examples of videos, which show other journalists the benefits of these forms of coverage. "A success story like that really drove home the point to the other reporters that you can and must tell stories in different ways," said Latour.
- a concerted effort to train - enthusiastic - people. WSJ used video editors from one of Dow Jones' companies to train reporters who were genuinely interested in learning video.

"That journey has been the one of real integration, the one that's still ongoing," he said.

Latour will speak at the upcoming World Editors Forum. See other preview interviews here.

Source: Almar Latour, Managing Editor, WSJ.com

The Hartford Courant in the US offers an interesting example of how a local paper can foster citizen journalism by gathering user-generated content online and then reverse publishing it into a print edition.

The Hartford Courant's feature, iTowns, is an online portal where readers can submit news briefs, post events, photos and videos.

In each of the 6 regions covered online by the paper, the Courant has a webhost and a local reporter who blogs about his zone and accompanies readers with their postings, in a pro-am process.

Six print tabloid iTowns editions are published every Sunday. The papers include a staff-written week-in review and two outdoor columns, but the rest of the content is entirely user-generated.

Furthermore, all user content is specific to the region covered by the edition.

For the covers of iTowns editions, the paper invites artists to submit their works, producing some beautiful front pages. The response was so good that the paper has created an online gallery for readers to submit their work.

Granted, as for any newspapers delving into citizen or pro-am journalism, this initiative has taken some reshuffling of staff.

"Believe me, I'm not bragging about the staffing part, that has been and continues to be tremendously difficult, it meant moving folks into roles they weren't terribly comfortable with and leaving holes in areas they once covered," wrote Melanie Shaffer, Director of Design and Graphics of The Hartford Courant.
 
But, "Overall, the response is terrific. We are giving the reader a place to give us their news and information, this is all the stuff we've been turning away for years for lack of space."

The Hartford Courant stands as a perfect example of a local paper engaging - and engaged by - its community.

Source: Visual Editors
 

French public broadcaster France 2 lost its case against Philippe Karsenty, after a court of appeal overturned a previous verdict that found him guilty of libel, in what has become known as a case of an individual fighting against the manipulations of big media.

We had interviewed Karsenty at the end of February - read the background story here. He claimed at the time that France 2's al-Dura "coverage is the media's biggest masquerade to have had such impact."

After having accused France 2 of manipulating its al-Dura footage, Karsenty had been found guilty of libel in 2006.

The new ruling will contribute to tarnish both the credibility of France 2, and of mainstream media in general.

"The al-Dura lie is an assault on our ability to think, to criticize, to evaluate, and finally to reject information - especially the right to reject information on which we base our most cherished assumptions," Karsenty said in a statement after his victory.

According to Honest Reporting, "Philippe Karsenty's efforts have opened up France 2 to scrutiny and serves as an example of how the media should be held accountable for their material and the consequences of their reporting,"

Source: Honest Reporting - Hot Air

This, just in from the alert-o-shpere.
New logo from IHT.com

The International Herald Tribune is dropping its ornate, 142-year-old logo for a more modern, simpler look. The detail-rich logo is being replaced by a phrase, "The Global Edition of the New York Times," highlighting that the paper is fully part of the New York Times Co. after a 2002 deal.

The "dingbat" first appeared in 1866 on the New York Tribune that later merged into the International Herald Tribune, wrote Richard Kluger in "The Paper: The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune." The logo has been altered over the years. The logo's panorama of symbolic images features pyramids and camels, an ox pulling a plow, a bridge, an hourglass, a soaring airplane and a bald eagle atop a clock showing the time of 6:12 -- for unknown reasons, Kluger wrote.

SOURCE: Businessweek.com

Two US newspapers have launched niche blogs in the last week, catering to mothers and Olympic enthusiasts, respectively.
 
On Monday Boston Globe Media launched BoMoms, a site designed by and for Boston mothers that features a searchable database of listings, a calendar highlighting events for kids, blogs written by women at varying stages of motherhood and ongoing forums on parenting.
 
"The goal of BoMoms is to be the ultimate local resource for busy moms -- because all of its recommendations come straight from the mouths of real moms who have tried and tested them," said Alexandra Hall, editor of the site.
 
BoMoms reflects newspapers' growing desire to capture the 'Moms' demographic, and is a nod to IndyMoms.com, launched by the Indianapolis Star in 2006.
 
The New York Times also announced today the launch of its 2008 Olympics blog, called 'Rings.' Rings will cover not only the summer Games (set for August 8 - 24), but also the social, political and economic issues entangled in the event.
 
The blog features analysis from sports, foreign and business reporters, who have already begun posting on issues including Web censorship by China's government, the details of the Olympic trials in the United States and the controversy over the torch relay, which has caused protests worldwide.
 
"We expect the Rings blog," explained Deputy Sports Editor Sandy Keenan, "to become a must read for those interested in all aspects of the Beijing Games."
 
Source: Editor & Publisher

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) released its 2007 annual report today, revealing a 20 percent increase in rulings in the past year. The PCC received a record 4,340 complaints in 2007.
 
For the first time, more complaints were made about online news articles than hardcopies.
 
One column in The Mirror about Madeleine McCann attracted 485 complaints alone.
 
Of the 4,340 complaints, the majority were complaints about accuracy; issues of accuracy also made up 75.4 percent of all breaches of the code.
 
There were also 245 rulings regarding privacy; 52.3 percent of these cases involved regional press.
 
The PCC credited the growth in rulings to an increased public awareness about what the watchdog does and the ease of complaining via email.
 
Source: Holdthefrontpage.co.uk

Telegraph.co.uk has overtaken the Guardian.co.uk as the UK's most-visited news site. According to the latest ABCe results, the Telegraph reached 18.65 million people online in April. Over the past year, the Telegraph's online readership has grown 153 percent; the Guardian's has grown just 22.25 percent.
 
The Telegraph online has a more international audience than guardian.co.uk, drawing just 34 percent of readers from the UK. By contrast, just over 41 percent of the Guardian's online audience is from the UK.
 
Other newspaper sites, which rely primarily on a UK audience, haven't enjoyed the same growth, including the Mirror Group's network of websites, such as Mirror.co.uk and SundayMirror.co.uk, which dropped 2.87 percent between March and April, to 4.28 million unique users.
 
Source: Brand Republic 

The Recovering Journalist recently blogged on the Norwich Bulletin's (Connecticut) brief adventure into user commenting - The Bulletin gave readers free range to comment on the site, only to find that comments that are entirely anonymous and unmoderated can quickly spiral out of control. Apparently posters were relentless even when it came to wedding announcements.

Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Group recently blogged on 9 Ways to Improve the Quality of Comments on your Website:

1. Have moderators and staff actively participate on the comment board; when staff post frequently they can help lead the discussion and improve the level of discourse
2. Require users to have one comment pre-approved before they can post freely
3. Filter out the profanity
4. Allow users to report inappropriate comments
5. Use other users feedback to bury or promote comments
6. Require registration for posting
7. Threaded comments foster discussion; when users can reply to a specific comment it allows for multiple lines of discussion to coexist
8. Let users ignore other commenters
9. Create a comment policy; transparency is always best

By following these guidelines news sites can reap the benefits of online user discussion, without the swear words.

Sources: Recovering Journalist through David-Black.org, The Bivings Report

Wall Street Journal Online has launched a new section, described by a Dow Jones press release as "a place where ambitious professional and executive women can come together to read and share ideas on work, family and the intersection of the two."

Two of the Journal's better known female columnists, Carol Hymowitz and Sue Shellenbarger, will write for the section.

The new section will also feature a blog called "The Juggle," which will examine the difficulties in balancing work and family life. 

Said WSJ Online executive editor Alan Murray:

"Our experience has shown us that there are a lot of business and professional women out there who crave not just fashion and beauty advice, but an intelligent news-oriented community where they can share experiences and swap ideas."

Source: Editor & Publisher

New media proponent Jeff Jarvis blogged last week about the "need to develop distributed strategies for news." In other words, not only are traditional news outlets increasingly aggregating relevant news from a variety of sources, they should also make their news available on those sites.

Jarvis suggests a few strategies to help this:

- creating widgets to embed your news on any other site
- establishing a platform strategy that enables people to build on your content
- a network strategy including blog networks

For example, Reuters recently opened its news content to the developer community, through Reuters Labs. Developers can now take Reuters news and build applications around it, or make the content fit existing applications.

"News cannot continue to think of itself as a destination. It has to think of itself as a feed that goes to where you are," wrote Jarvis.

Source: BuzzMachine through David Black

Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, will speak during the session entitled "Will Web 2.0 give birth to Journalism 2.0?" at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 1-4.

In the last six months, AP has codified its news delivery process to follow the rule of '1-2-3 filing' for all of its stories. (This process was partly based on findings from AP's anthropological study of young digital news consumers, which will also be presented during the Forum.)

Under this process, "It no longer is an assumption that text is the default and only way to tell a story." said Carroll.

This doesn't (yet) put into question the predominance of text in newspapers and its efficiency as a medium. "It's the best way to get the fast word out," she said. Only now, AP reporters also think about the most appropriate media to tell a story, which will be of most use to customers.

In the '1-2-3' model:

- 1st: AP delivers a simple headline, in about fifty character, for quick breaking news updates
- 2nd: 'AP News Now' - the news agency produces a 130-word summary of the story, written in a platform-agnostic style "that can be read on the air by broadcaster, or used online, or even printed in some print publications," said Carroll.
- 3rd: AP editors and reporters then think of the best way - or media - to tell the story. In some cases, this is simply a 500-word story. In others, an interactive graphic or video are more appropriate. Some stories don't have a third step: the 130-word sum-up was sufficient. Others "blossom into many stories."

The second and third steps are most significant in taking the AP to 'Journalism 2.0'. "It doesn't sound radical when you say it out loud," she said, but it is "if you inject it into your daily news decisions."

For example, following the cyclone in Myanmar, AP produced a detailed interactive graphic, which was widely picked up and even used by US broadcaster MSNBC.

After the earthquake in China, AP decided to distribute a user-generated video shot during the earthquake (AP has regularly invited users to contribute content, particularly imagery, through portals such as SendtoAP.com).

"In that case, the video was the story," said Carroll. "There was nothing that we could write that was going to make that story more compelling than being able to watch two and half minutes of people falling off bicycles and running around as the ground shook."

Carroll will discuss these issues at the upcoming World Editors Forum. View other preview interviews here.

Source: Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President, Associated Press

After a tour of The New York Times this week, blogger Robert Scoble discussed some interesting additions at the Grey Lady.

Gadgets coming out of the Research and Development department included:

-a prototype newspaper rack that could print out a customized version of the paper

-a thin book reader following a discussion of metadata being collected by the Times. Scoble writes, "They have these gadgets so they can develop new ways of delivering content to those devices."

-a display featuring the results of NYT's new partnership with Google Earth

He reports that The Times' new archive initiative, the Time Machine, which debuted late February in beta, will be released soon. Scoble also learned that a Mac version of the Times Reader will be available in the next few days.

Source: Scobleizer through Journerdism 

A labor union of the Agence France Presse organized a protest May 21 outside the AFP's Paris office, calling for participation from "all members of other media organizations and all other citizens who support freedom on the press."

The protest comes in reponse to government attacks on AFP's neutrality in early May, which then provoked accusations of governmental pressure intended to shape AFP's coverage (see a full description of the controversy).

Source: NouvelObs (in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

Further upping the local news stakes, Google has combined its news channel with Google Earth, mapping Google News articles according to location.  

The new initiative, announced on Google's Lat Long blog, will automatically take new articles from Google News and update the map. Using Google Earth, users can choose how far to zoom in on a given part of the world, thereby regulating how local the content of the displayed articles will be.

"By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide," said Google product manager Brandon Badger.

Google has a similar service in partnership with The New York Times, which maps NYT stories onto a Google Earth map.

Sources: CNET, Journalism.co.uk

The latest report from JupiterResearch has good news for online news publishers: internet users have not jumped ship.

Around 42% of internauts in Europe regularly visit online news sites, versus the 28% who habitually go to video sites and the 15% who frequent social networking services.

Even more comforting for news websites: the report finds that the 25-34 demographic, who news organizations continually fear losing to the next big thing, "are most interested in visiting their sites," reports PaidContent UK.

In all European countries except for Germany, branded news websites are more popular than portals or search sites like Google. However, this does not hold true for the 25-34 year-old set, suggesting that while they are interested in news, they also "want to read it on their own terms."

Source: PaidContent UK through IFRA Executive News Service 

The Associated Press will present the full results of its qualitative, anthropological study of young media consumers around the world at the 2008 World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden, to be held June 1-4.

The results of the 2008 Newsroom Barometer already revealed that the decline among young readership was news editors' biggest concern worldwide.

AP's study aimed to better understand the behaviors of young readers aged between 18 and 34 - and how news organizations can fight this decline.

For the study, AP commissioned a team of anthropologists to follow 18 young individuals around the world and examine their media habits.

"We looked for just regular people," said Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director for Strategic Planning at AP. "The only prerequisite was that we wanted them to be digital consumers."

Anthropologists quickly found that the digital news diet of this age group was very unbalanced, based mostly on 'facts' and 'updates' - two characteristics of email news. However, as opposed to some editors' conventional wisdom, the young consumers "wanted more than that. They wanted to find a path to the back story, and they wanted to find a path to what's going to happen next."

Among the other findings:

- The 18-34 demographic doesn't have a routine for news consumption, as was the case before with the printed newspaper.
- 16 of the 18 individuals consumed news through email, a popular and powerful platform that often tends to be discounted by traditional media.
- Almost all of them shared news with each other, through text messages, emails and social networks.
- "These young consumers are looking up to news as a form of social currency."
- "So (a way) to appeal to them... is to develop news that has social currency," said Kennedy.

The team followed individuals in six cities in the world, including four in the US (Philadelphia, Kansas City, Houston and Silicon Valley), Brighton in the UK, and Hyderabad in India.

Surprisingly, the study underlined few major cultural differences, according to Kennedy. "The young digital consumers in Hyderabad were very similar to the ones in Silicon Valley in the United States."

Kennedy will present the full results of the AP's study at the World Editors Forum.


Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, will also speak at the World Editors Forum about 'Journalism 2.0' and how the AP is adapting to the digital age.

Other preview interviews can be found here.

Source: Jim Kennedy, Vice President and Director for Strategic Planning, Associated Press

The Daily Mail is planning the launch of a website in India in order to "capitalize on the global potential of the Mail," said Lord Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust board.

Taking into account Audit Bureau of Circulation figures suggesting that almost 80% of the Mail's unique users are non-U.K. residents, the paper naturally sees a "huge opportunity" in the "global sphere."  

A move into India would build on existing partnerships with The Washington Post and India Today Group, which worked with The Mail to launched the print title Mail Today, reports Journalism.co.uk.

The Daily Mail, which recently debuted a revamped version of its U.K. website, is only the latest in a series of European and American media companies making inroads into the burgeoning media economies in the developing world.

Source: Journalism.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Three official news organizations in China launched Chinese and English bilingual websites May 20 to provide news about the earthquake in Sichuan province.

Following in the footsteps of Sina.com, the sites created by Xinhua News Agency (see image for the English and Chinese versions), the People's Daily and the China Central Television Station are intended give a global audience access to "the latest news on rescue efforts, the situation of survivors and infrastructure reconstruction," reports the European Journalism Centre.

 
The three English sites represent the latest step in the Chinese media's unprecedented level of openness; however, the increased press freedom does not indicate a drastic shift in media policy, as there have been indications of government spin in the earthquake coverage.

Source: European Journalism Centre

There will be 27 pre-press job cuts at two Newsquest sites, following the company's confirmation that it will outsource work to India.

The pre-press design and verification of ads will now be outsourced to Express KCS, a US-based firm also present in India.

Newsquest is owned by the US firm Gannett, which has already contracted Express KCS for some of its US titles (publisher McClatchy also has).

Although these jobs don't affect the newsroom, the trend towards outsourcing continues - this year's Newsroom Barometer showed that 64% of editors expect some editorial jobs to be outsourced in the future.

Source: Holdthefrontpage.co.uk

More and more newspapers in the UK are attempting to produce live, blog-style coverage. Following the Liverpool Daily Post's blog coverage of its editorial processes, the Lancashire Evening Post streamed live video yesterday, for a feature story on the state of the UK's pub industry.

Featured prominently on the home page, the Post featured live video interviews with customers of The Black Horse pub in Friargate.

The newspaper used technology from live streaming service Qik and shot video footage on an N95 Nokia mobile phone.

Readers were able to submit questions live and add their comments.

For this experiment, three staffers were sent to the pub, including digital editor Martin Hamer, a features writer who produced a story for the print paper, and a journalist who oversaw the camera work.

In the newsroom, a moderator monitored posts and comments by users.

"If this goes well, we can show the rest of the industry that there is potential for live video in the near future," said Hamer.

"With a handful of people over a two hour period, we can produce something that is exciting, dynamic and innovative, but at the same time of great interest to the public."

Until now, newspaper digital editors have remained divided as to the future of live streamed video.

Source: journalism.co.uk

Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp has produced a special report on how mobile reporting has and will broadly change the organization of the newsroom.

An increasing number of newspapers employ mobile journalists, otherwise known as 'mojos'. As the technology and gadgets to capture and transmit multimedia data on the go become more widespread, reporters spend more time on the ground, expected to quickly file stories for the Web.

Some editors worry that this will lead to less editorial oversight. "Being in an office where you can collaborate with others can be very beneficial," said Tim Franklin, editor of The Sun in Baltimore.

But it has become clear that reporters will increasingly be expected to work remotely.

The News-Press in Fort Myers has been at the forefront of mobile journalism (see this analysis piece with 'mojo' Chuck Myron).

The newspapers, with a circulation of about 70,000 copies, plans to outfit all 44 news staffers with mobile packs that include laptops, digital cameras and audio recorders by the end of spring.

"Everyone still has a desk, either here or from a bureau, as an umbilical cord," said News-Press editor Kate Marymont. "But at least 80% of reporters are just on laptops. It really spiked in 2007."

In many cases, 'mojo' practices lead to immediate filing of stories, often providing blog-type updates. Many reporters seem to enjoy returning to the field and being able to report instantaneously.

The idea is to get local news on the Web immediately, to get out in the community and get stories you wouldn't otherwise get," said Brian Howard, a mobile journalist at The Journal News in White Plains. "I have filed plenty from my laptop, in my car."

However, a number of editors and reporters are still concerned by the emergence of these practices. "I don't have the ability yet where I don't need an editor above me. I sometimes wish I had someone over my shoulder more," said a reporter at the Indianapolis Star.

And the costs can be dissuasive, according to Democrat & Chronicle editor Karen Magnuson: $15,000 for a mobile journalist backpack including a video camera, audio recorder, laptop, cell phone, and other gadgets.

Yet many newspapers are acquiring mobile kits at much lower costs, and despite fears of potentially deteriorating communications, the trend is towards mobile journalism.

Read Strupp's full story below.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Robert Thomson, former editor of The Times of London and recently appointed publisher of the Wall Street Journal, was named managing editor of WSJ last night, as "Rupert Murdoch tightened control of the world's top selling business newspaper," reported the Guardian.

Thomson replaces Marcus Brauchli, who quit last month. "In hindsight, we recognize it would have more been appropriate to have advised the Committee in advance of reaching an agreement with Mr. Brauchli. We have apologized to the Committee members," said Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton in a statement.

According to Dow Jones' parent company News Corp., Thomson's appointment had the unanimous approval of the committee that was set up to safeguard the Journal's editorial independence.

In addition to being named managing editor, Dow Jones Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced Thomson has also been appointed as editor in chief of Dow Jones.

Hinton will become publisher of the Journal, in addition to his duties as CEO.

Souce: Guardian - Editor & Publisher

Rue89, an online-only news site launched in May 2007 by a group of former journalists at Libération, has been one of the year's success stories in the French media landscape (over 650,000 unique visitors monthly, Nielsen).

Its founder, Pierre Haski, will discuss the site's path to success, as well as the new ethical standards that arise on the Web, at the upcoming World Editors Forum to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

(See our previous interview with Haski, who details the pro-am news process of the Web 2.0 site.)

According to him, Rue89 was launched in response to two crises of the press in France: the economic - structural - downturn of the daily press and the increasing disconnect between traditional journalists and their readers. "The idea was that there is (still) on the Web an essential role for journalists," said Haski. Along with his colleagues, who all had blogs, "We realized that blogs - and the Internet - were a way to reconnect and reestablish this (lost) link with readers."

Since then, the website has regularly come up with scoops and gained a solid reputation among traditional media outlets.

Haski will also discuss the new ethical issues that have arisen with online news. "The Web mustn't be a lawless, right-less arena," said Haski. "The rule ands laws that usually apply must also be applied to the Web," he said, citing the right to privacy and defamation. In other words, the - print - journalistic principles he and his team adhere to must be upheld online.

The difficulty, of course, is adapting these standards to the new practices of the Web.

A recent legal suit in France illustrates very well the range of new media issues that have yet to be resolved. In the Fuzz affair, as it is known, a French actor launched a suit against a flurry of blogs and sites, including buzz-aggregating site Fuzz.fr, after it linked back to a gossip story that claimed the actor was back in a relationship.

Fuzz.fr was eventually shut down, after the court decided it had served as a relay point for the contentious information.

Should aggregators be liable for the links posted on their site, even if generated by the community? According to Haski, although he has no definite answer, "It doesn't seem tolerable to hide oneself behind a robot that crawls the Web."

These new practices also affect traditional media's habits in some cases: a blogger, hosted by the site of the weekly Nouvel Observateur, was literally copy-pasting whole articles from Rue89. Because nouvelobs.com's traffic is significant, the blogger's posts actually ranked higher than Rue89 on Google. The blog was eventually shuttered, but only after Rue89 signaled this to the Nouvel Observateur.

"These practices are very surprising because they come from companies that are themselves very careful about their intellectual property," said Haski.

Although the blog was swiftly shut down, Haski was surprised to see that some traditional media loosen their editorial practices for content on the Web.

"Our starting point, and ending point, is that there are professional and deontological rules that exist on other platforms, which should also exist on the Web," said Haski.

"We set a rule at the start that no content would be published online if it hadn't been previously checked by a professional journalist."


Haski will speak at the World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 1-4. Other preview interviews available here.

Source: Pierre Haski, founder Rue89.com

You think your newspaper is at the cutting edge in terms of community involvement and bridging the gap with other types of media?

But have you launched a contest calling on readers' ideas for a televised series?

This is the initiative that has just been launched by regional La Provence in France, which is inviting its readers to contribute ideas for a show about Marseille.

Authors of the most original scripts will be invited to participate in a writing workshop in the newspapers' offices. They will then each sign a contract to authorize the shooting this summer of twelve mini-episodes lasting three to four minutes.

"What interested us was the link to the people of Marseille, who will write the show," said La Provence president Didier Pillet.

Source: LeMonde.fr through IFRA Executive News Service

A quick financial roundup for the NYT and Gannett, two main US newspaper publishers, according to paidcontent.org:

- The New York Times Co.'s online ad revenues grew 25.6% in April, although total operation's revenue was down 2.2% year on year. General ad revenues were down 5.1% over the same period.
- Gannett didn't reveal its online performance, but it said it had increased its unique visitors to 25.5 million, up 10.4% since last year. Unfortunately, Gannett's ad revenues decreased by 10.4% also compared to last year.

Although the growth rate of online revenues seems to be picking up again, these gains still aren't sufficient to compensate for print ad losses at this point.

Source: paidcontent.org

Thomson Reuters has released a 2.0 version of its semantic markup API, Calais. According to ReadWriteWeb's Josh Catone, the new version aims to be less business focused, which posed major problems in the initial release version.

Reuters says that Calais 2.0 will have an increased utility for "pop-culture publishers and bloggers covering the media, music entertainment and sports..."

In tandem with the 2.0 release, Thomson Reuters has also announced three plug-ins compatiable with Calais.

    -Calais Marmoset: allows users to create metadata for use with Yahoo!'s open search platform Search Monkey

    -Tagaroo: a Wordpress plugin that lets bloggers "automatically tag relevant people, places, and things in their posts"

    -Calais plug-in for the CMS Drupal

Source: ReadWriteWeb through Journerdism

In the days before the departure of over 100 newsroom staffers, executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and managing editor Phil Bennet assured employees via an internal memo that The Washington Post will "remain engaged in impactful journalism" and channel "reporting sources into coverage that matters most."

The departing staffers, who plan to take the paper's buyout, were among 230 staffers of the newsroom's 700-plus staffers eligible for the plan.

The memo stated: "The rest of us are entering a new phase in our transformation of the newsroom to meet the challenges facing us as an industry, as a news organization and as journalists."

The memo also highlighted future plans for the Post newsroom, including "accelerating the process of structural change" and "refining the editing model."   

Downie's future at The Post is also up in the air. The memo makes no mention of the final destination for the 66-year-old newsroom boss, director of the newspaper since 1991.

Source: Editor & Publisher 

The Guardian's push to integrate the teams of The Guardian, The Observer and Guardian.co.uk will maintain the independence of all three platforms and "unlock the creativity of staff", said Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

"The aim has been to keep the distinct voice of all the three platforms," he said. "We began this with [Observer editor] John [Mulholland] saying 'what do you think defines the voice of The Observer?"

Further elaborating on the integration plans, Rusbridger explained that writers will be organized into subject-specific "pods," eschewing the traditional newsdesk structure.

"I have always thought that the organisation of the newsroom should be more like how the website is organised," said Rusbridger. "We decided that it didn't make much sense to have separate digital brands.

"This has been defined by the people that are going to work for it - that has been part of the process thoughout. It will really unlock the creativity of what we do"

Source: Press Gazette through IFRA Executive News Service

News Corp.'s .Fox Networks has launched an international online ad network specifically geared towards financial news and advice.

Created with help from the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, the network, called Worthnet.Fox, comprises about 30 web site publishers, including WSJ, Barron's and MarketWatch.

The network is designed with the jet set executive class in mind: people "who spend time in myriad global regions at economic borders dissolve." reports Reuters.  

.Fox Networks is an online advertising network which markets unsold advertising space on websites outside of the U.S.

Source: Reuters through I Want Media

Sina.com, a Chinese news website with around 800 million page views per day, has launched an English version to meet the demand for news on last week's earthquake in Sichuan.

English.sina.com is virtually identical to the flagship Sina site, offering photo and video content, financial market information, and news on the upcoming Olympic Games. Both of Sina's sites are also sponsoring a fund raising drive for victims, and contain information on various NGOs assisting in the region.

At the moment the new site is primarily focused on coverage of the earthquake tragedy. However, Sina English is also making plans for the long terrm.

"We intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China related information and to have better understanding about modern China," said Sina president and chief executive Charles Chao.


Source: Guardian

Managing offensive journalists is easy; if the journalist pushes the envelope too far, terminate his or her employment. But since papers can't fire readers- nor would they want to - newspapers must learn how to manage the questionable user-generated content that inevitably comes with increased interactivity.

Guardian.co.uk's Sean Dodson looks primarily at the example of The Telegraph's MyTelegraph service, which gives readers the opportunity to publish their own stories under the paper's masthead. The service has won The Telegraph accolades, but the year-old service has also put the paper in the middle of the debate over how to best manage and develop UGC.

MyTelegraph, which will launch a redesigned version this summer, boasts some well-written, thoughtful blogs. It also has its share of users with extreme opinions, ranging from active members of far right party BNP to members of an anti-feminist "men's movement."

A statement from a Telegraph spokeswoman emphasized the inevitable fact that "a multiplicity of views will be expressed" on the site. She continued, "Our readers are entitled to their opinions and, within the scope of the law, they're entitled to publish on MyTelegraph."

What do to do though if the comments toe the line of legality? Or if they are just too extreme for most to stomach? Most papers now employ a team of moderators, although the moderation system varies from publication to publication. Newspapers also rely on their users to help moderate; The Telegraph, like others, has a flag offering readers to chance to report offensive material. Moreover, a poll suggests that almost half of internet users favor a voluntary blogger code of conduct in order to suppress overly offensive material.

What distinguishes MyTelegraph from most other UGC services at other newspapers (and what makes effective moderation all the more pertinent) is The Telegraph's rejection of the "gatekeeper" model. Most newspapers, like The Guardian's Comment is Free, allow only bloggers sanctioned by the newspaper to start user debates. But in the Telegraph model, users themselves can propose topics; "MyTelegraph unlocks the gate and hands over the key," writes Dodson.

Newspapers looking for a solution to nasty contributors can also look to Norweigen paper Daily Verdens Gang, which launched a service in 2005 allowing readers to set up their own blogs (25,000 bloggers have joined, 15,000 are fairly active).

"A minority can go too far outside of the legal borders but we have a good control system," said Geir Ruud, VG's online foreign editor. "If they continue to misbehave we kick them out."

Source: Guardian

News and financial information Thomson Reuters Plc. is expected to announce 1,500 job losses this week, a move that stems from the £8.7bn merger in mid-April that created the company.

Many of the cuts are to come from the technology operations division, although 100 jobs at the news wire service are on the line. However, reports on the exact figure of cuts have been conflicted.

Further cuts are expected by the end of the year, reports thisismoney.co.uk. An internal email from Peter Moss, global head of content, technology and operations indicates that his group alone will reduce approximately 600 to 650 jobs.

Sources: ThisIsMoney, Interactive Investor through IFRA Executive News Service

Press freedom in China has relatively loosened in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake in Sichuan, but the government is still heavy handed in directing the coverage.

Taking advantage of their unprecedented access, journalists have been generating a continous stream of updates from the disaster site, using a variety of tools including Twitter (see image). Citizen journalists as well have been active generating news from the province.

"I think we can say right now that Chinese media is reporting the quake with an intensity previously unseen," said David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project.

The openness is particularly striking when compared to the non-coverage of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, when China's press gave a short announcement that it had occurred and then fell silent.

However, according to AFP, China's journalists are by no means free from government interference. China's top propaganda director, Li Changchun, recently visited the major state-run media outlets "to deliver what appeared to be a stern reminder of the angles the press must take."

"The leadership's more open attitude toward reporting on the disaster so far is a very positive development. But it does not necessarily signal an epic shift in media policy," Bandurski said. Indeed, press repression in China has generally grown worse in the lead up to the Olympics.

Unlike Chinese journalists, foreign journalists have not reported any attempts to curb their coverage, representing what may be attempt to show a degree of openness in light of the Tibet protests.  

Sources: AFP, E-Media Tidbits 

Norwegian media group Schibsted has bought a 35% share of Metro International's Swedish edition for 350m Swedish kronor (€38m).

Schibsted's Aftonbladet paper will form a joint advertising venture with Metro Sweden. The new company will offer advertisers the chance to reach 4.2 million readers, reports The Guardian.

Schibsted, the publisher of Norway's biggest-circulation paper VG, said in a statement it would get two seats on the board of Metro Sweden. Aftonbladet will also close its freesheet Punkt SE immediately at a cost of 65 million kronor (€7m). Punkt SE, which had been posting losses, is only one of the many freesheets that are starting to see their revenues tail off.

Source: Guardian (here and here) through IFRA Executive News Service

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief of guardian.co.uk in the UK.

View all the interviews in this series here. (including The New York Times, Financial Times, Fairfax Media...)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We're not doing that already. We changed our names last year from Guardian Newspapers Limited to Guardian News and Media, so we're moving away from defining ourselves as a newspaper company.
But we are still news. We are news-oriented, we are a news media company.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

I 100% disagree with that statement. 2014 is so close, of course there will still be print newspapers; it is ridiculous to suggest that. Will there be fewer print newspapers in 2014 in certain parts of Western Europe, the US, etc? Yes, most definitely.

But clearly the futurists in Davos haven't looked at newspaper markets in emerging economies like India, etc. where print products are proliferating. They are increasing faster, in basic circulation and number of titles, than they are declining in markets with more mature print readerships. It's a sweeping and very narrow generalization, which is wrong.

We will definitely have a printed product in 2014. If you said 2024 or 2034, who knows, I would say that's far too far away to guess, and it's possible not. Don't forget Arthur Sulzberger said: "I can conceive of a time when we will no longer produce the print paper." Whether he retracted it or not, it's clearly crossed his mind.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief here, said he could foresee a time when we will be mainly a digital company and that we don't have a printed product. He actually said that the last printed presses that we bought would be the last ones that would ever be bought.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

It's a complete break. Not so much what happened with the advent of the Internet, but much more what's happened with various programming protocols since, what you would know as Web 2.0, which is the ability to allow the uploading of information by the local generation.

Flickr, blogs, etc. have completely changed the game, because it means all matter of information is exposed and is available to be manipulated, uploaded, reported on, etc. by a whole set of people who are no longer in control of a distribution bottleneck. Actually, what we were doing ten years ago was exploiting a Web publishing bottleneck, which was that we had the money to have the server space, the rack space, the designers - anybody can do that now.

That's completely different, it's not just another slight development of an existing cycle.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

Yes, the participation of users in news is inevitable. It is growing and is welcomed. It is a massive opportunity for professional journalists to enhance what they do. The closer you are, the more authentic you are, and the more knowledgeable you can be, then the more purchase you have with the community that will come to you, tell you things and point to your work in certain areas.
I think if you don't have that, in the future as a journalist, you probably don't have much of a future.

'Threat' is a good thing. It's not so much a threat. Now you've got the news event itself, and an immediate set of breaking news competitors like wire services, the BBC, or SkyNews in the UK.
There's another band of capability roundup, people who are actually experts in the kind of events that are happening and who bring knowledge and insight and can communicate near the professionals - the professionals' job is (still) to communicate the stories and make them relevant and understandable. I don't think that's going away.

But what's happening is that there are now other people who can answer who might not be professional journalists - they might be professionals working in the world that you're writing about. It's Dan Gillmor's phrase, "There's always someone better placed in the story than yourself."
If I'm a media journalist writing about what's going on at the BBC... somebody who's inside the BBC, who's not part of their press operations, could be writing with more authenticity, because I can only ever have the view of the outsider.

However, the person who's inside the BBC might not really have the requisites and right perspective to be able to draw the conclusions that perhaps an outsider might have. So I think there's some kind of a blend of insights and knowledge which skillful and professional journalists ought to be able to meld together.

The threat is journalists not being good enough at that. I think it's entirely healthy that there are specialist bloggers who are pushing journalists to be better at what they do.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I think it's going through a difficult transitory period. The funding now available for people to concentrate for long periods of time on single subject stories, which may or may not come to fruition, has been greatly undermined by the restructuring of professional media.

When I see institutes in the US that are funded specially for investigative journalism, those things are slightly depressing. The idea that news media can't sustain expensive investigative journalism is disappointing.

But it's not all over, there's a vacuum at the moment around serious disclosure. There are not as many (investigative) stories gaining traction, but I think in the future the tools are all there. One of the things that electronic media does is make it harder to hold onto an exclusive, because bits and pieces of the story tend to emerge from all sorts of different sources (ie: the Enron story initially broken by a Time journalist).

Once bits of the story were out there, it gathers momentum much quicker than it used to. So the value of the investigative story, as in keeping it as a brand-defining element, becomes harder and therefore a lot of businesses tend to say, "It's hard for us to keep control of the story, it's even more expensive to dig out, therefore why don't we step down our investment in it."

But there are organizations like ourselves and others such as The New York Times that are absolutely committed to making sure that doesn't happen.

View the other interviews in the Future of Journalism series here.

Source: Emily Bell, editor-in-chief, guardian.co.uk

A very significant change at the Los Angeles Times, which will certainly be emulated at an increasing number of newspapers, as the Times has created a new integrated Visual Journalism department.

This move comes as part of the LA Times' print and online integration, as well as the physical integration of its Continuous News Desk and AM Copy Desk.

"Today, we are also creating a fully integrated department in editorial that will serve our site and our newspaper, combining our print photo, Web photo and video operations into one new department: Visual Journalism," said LA Times editor Russ Stanton in a memo to staff.

The combination of the video, print photography and Web photography departments will help the paper deliver multimedia packages more efficiently.

Source: LA Times blog

While print newspapers may be seen to be declining in Europe, the printed word remains an aspiration in some developing markets, such as India, according to an article in The Independent.

"Anyone who can read or write is still looked at with a bit of awe" in many markets in India, says Rajesh Kalra, a veteran journalist who is now chief editor of IndiaTimes, the digital branch of The Times of India.

According to Kalra, many people want to overtly show they are literate and "the first thing you want to do is be seen to be reading a newspaper."

The literacy rate in India is currently at about 61% - but it is 76% for youths. And the print market is booming, so it isn't surprising that many western media are eyeing India for new launches.

"We do see a big potential in emerging markets," says John Ridding, chief executive of the Financial Times. The FT just launched a Middle East edition in Abu Dhabi, and it sees "big opportunities for expansion" in India.

One mustn't confuse expansion with amelioration though.

"In some of these new or fast-growing markets, absolute freedom of the press is untested, and unbiased news coverage is unfamiliar," reported the Independent, echoing a recent Weblog interview with Raju Narisetti, managing editor of Mint.

Source: The Independent (IHT)

According to the Guardian's head of editorial development, Neil McIntosh, guardian.co.uk needs to rethink its business model if it is ever to survive on its own, without the printed newspaper.

The statement, in itself, is fairly obvious: few newspaper websites could currently claim to be able to function independently of the revenues brought in by the printed newspaper.

However, it does show that Guardian executives are now openly thinking of a day when the print edition could be suppressed.

"Looking forward, there's a point at which you can say the model looks really challenging," said McIntosh. "It's not dreadful at the moment, but it's going to be a tough year this year and next.

"We need to have many millions more users to sustain the scale of operation and the way we work now. You couldn't switch the paper off and expect the website to sustain all that."

According to the Press Gazette, "Although the newspaper and the website were likely to co-exist for some time yet, McIntosh suggested that the eventual aim was a move away from print."

These words aren't far removed from our latest Future of Journalism series interview with guardian.co.uk editor Emily Bell, which will be published on Monday.

Source: Press Gazette

The Spokane-Review got the first prize for Innovation, an award inaugurated last week by the International Newspaper Marketing Association.

The Spokane was rewarded for a very user-friendly, comprehensive local business search directory.

Although BizFinderNW is not editorial per se, it does fit within the range of services that a newspaper should offer: helping readers and users to access local databases and relevant information about their community's businesses.

Local businesses can post a listing including their address, store hours, a map and a photo for free.

If interested, they can then get a better position on the list or enhance their description by paying for those services.

Launched in January, traffic to BizFinderNW is still limited: 4,000 unique visitors and 30,000 to 50,000 page views monthly. But the hard start-up costs for building the directory were less than $10,000, and the Spokane has already made double the amount in ad contracts.

Source: Poynter.org

According to paidcontent:UK, the Guardian is now considering the launch of new international online editions, following the launch of Guardian America last year.

At the Online Publishers Association Forum For The Future in the UK, guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell suggested, for future plans:

"You would certainly look to India; you'd probably look to the Middle East as a brand around comment and analysis. We're looking very much at the Anglophile world because it's a very simple step."

Thanks to a deal with Reuters in February, the Guardian has extended its advertising to the US already, and is looking to further internationalize its ad reach.

Source: paidcontent:UK

Although not directly related to newspapers, this is of interest in terms of larger trends : for the first time, Google has surpassed Yahoo as the most popular website in the US, according to comScore's unique monthly visitor rankings.

Until now, Yahoo's panoply of sites received more traffic that Google, although the latter has long been the Internet's leader in search.

The lead is very small, 466,000 visitors out of about 141 million unique visitors both for Yahoo and Google.

But the finding could be more significant in terms of Web trends as a whole. In April 2008, Google's unique audience in the US had grown 18%, compared to 7% for Yahoo.

Source: Yahoo News (AP) through I Want Media

As known for the past 24 hours, US broadcaster CBS is to acquire digital media content company CNET Networks for $1.8 billion.

The acquisition of CNET, owner of websites such as GameSpot.com and ZDNet, should boost CBS web traffic to 200 million monthly unique users, helping it to become one of the top 10 Internet companies in the US.

"The core businesses of CNET Networks and CBS Interactive represent near perfect category symmetry in premium online content," said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive.

For more information, view some of the sources below.

Source: paidcontent.org - Guardian - News.com - EJC

The Arab Media Group is relaunching its Al Bayan newspaper, the oldest Arabic daily newspaper in the UAE.

Changes include a new color layour, daily supplement, and two weekly supplements.

The 'Five Senses' daily supplement will carry local and global entertainment news. The weekly Friday supplement, 'Maraya', will carry news and editorial opinions on politics. The Sunday supplement, 'Masarat', will cover local and international cultural affairs.

"The relaunch comes in response to the evolution witnessed in all sectors of UAE society, as well as the unique combination of multiple cultures in the country. We recognized the need for a daily newspaper that is capable of understanding the needs of such a diverse audience," said Abdullatif Al Sayegh, CEO of AMG.

The goal of the relaunch is for Al Bayan to extent outside of the UAE and establish itself as an outlet for the region.

Source: AME Info through IFRA Executive News Service

See yesterday's report on the "China earthquake: Twitter didn't 'beat' the media - it was quicker," which nuances the AFP's report. Here, colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors gives his own vision:

The world had real-time news about China's massive earthquake as victims dashed out "twitter" text messages while it took place, in what was being touted Tuesday as micro-blogging outshining mainstream news.

That is the lead of Glenn Chapman's China Earthquake report for AFP.

Twitter is being used by more media groups both as a channel to distribute breaking news alerts as well as as a way to monitor fluid news events like disasters and elections.

Do you Twitter?

Twitter is a Web service that allows people to post short messages to update their friends about what they are doing - in 140 characters or less. Why would you want to do that? Twitter is geared for mobile and you can read updates and post with your mobile phone, your blog or via Web browser. You can also direct message friends, control your notifications on a friend-by-friend case and much more. To try it for a month is to know it.

Why does this matter?

IM is a method of communication that came from the underground, teenagers. Understand that a generation of teenagers have used their AIM "Away Messages" to update their buddies about what they were doing or where to meet next. Short message updates is a normal dialogue mode for this demo group and Twitter picks up on that behavior and makes the IM practice more practical, and powerful. We read stories now all the time about how younger people get their news from their friends. And when they do, they often get that news through status updates and the passing of Web links. I have dabbled with my Twitter account (Follow me!) over the last six months and have found it to be a useful way to connect with my global community of peers. For example, the most recent posts shown below are from my twitter stream (using a twitter widget that gives me the programming code to place into my post here)

 

Instant, means breaking, mobile means everywhere in the world.

Like AIM (Or any other Instant Message service) Twitter lets you update your 'AWAY MESAGE" or PRESENT STATUS" and invite your inner group of friend to "Follow" you anytime, anywhere. (You can share your micro reports either publicly or privately.) And when big news events happen, the local twitter community instantly become the eyes and ears on the scene. Some people predict Twitter will become the next Facebook phenom. It is fun and has real potential as a source as we start to get more journalists to understand the service and how people are using it. One thing that makes the service extra useful is that Twitter give you tools to put your tweets in your blog or any Web site.

Your blog or news site can post Tweets as well

You don't have to use the service to post micro thoughts as it was designed - you can have your blog feed into your Twitter stream as well. (I use Twitterfeed for this) And, if you wish, you can also get a widget that will show the updates from all the people and blogs who follow your Twitter feed. For example: Here are latest updates ( or "Tweets") from followers in the Visual Editors community.

 

 

Now, if you cruise that list of 'tweets' every now and then, you just might learn something or hear of a breaking news event ahead of everyone else.

So who wants to "Follow me?"

The twice-weekly Sonoma Index-Tribune in California is to convert to a "hybrid news medium" in the next six to 12 months, after launching an electronic edition in addition to its website.

According to its publisher, the move is motivated both by cost reduction and environmental concerns.

The community newspaper currently offers, in addition to its home-delivered print edition, a subscription e-edition, a paperless "SmartEdition" produced in partnership with NewspaperDirect (which also produces electronic editions for The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph in the UK or Le Figaro in France).

"We already use recycled newsprint and soy-based ink and recycle every bit of waste we can," said Index-Tribune publisher Bill Lynch.

"We cut back on the number of sections and pages we print and deliver by more than 30%. But the most important change, the one that can really make a difference, is getting our readers to join us in the biggest green revolution in the history of newspapers -- going paperless."

The e-edition already offers a number of useful features, according to Editor&Publisher: subscribers can read their newspapers from PCs and Macs, smart phones and iPhones. Suscribers will have access to up to 90 days worth of previous issues, can listen to news stories thanks to an audio function, and use an "add to my blog" function to reproduce content on their own outlets.

"NewspaperDirect's SmartEdition is loaded with features that will make this transition easier. But we know it will take time for many of our subscribers to get used to it," Lynch added. "The other part of the hybrid model is our Web site, which we will continue to improve as well."

Source: Editor & Publisher through IFRA Executive News Service

Reetta Meriläinen, editor-in-chief of the Helsingin Sanomat in Helsinki, Finland, will discuss the paper's print and online hyperlocal strategies at the upcoming World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

The Editors Weblog is carrying a few 'teaser' interviews featuring speakers of the upcoming Forum.

Meriläinen's presentation focuses on three essential aspects of hyperlocal news:

- hyperlocal is not only about geographic, but also mental proximity - covering issues that are close to readers' minds:
Newspapers "often think of hyperlocal as just a geographic term but it isn't just that," she said. Instead, "We are here to serve people and to try help them in their everyday life."
For example, if there's a problem with city traffic or issues about daycare, the Helsingin encourages people to voice their concerns and submit questions, such as "How to find daycare for my children." These questions are then forwarded to the mayor's office, daycare facilities, and any relevant policy group. The Helsingin also creates many forums to connect people around those issues.

- focus on hyperlocal news to build a community:
A soft news story with local focus can help build a strong community of readers, as was the case when the Helsingin wrote about Bubi, the owl that landed on the goalpost during a local football game - and stayed to watch the game.
Helsingin Sanomat's website features its own local service site, "Oma kaupunki," which means "my own city." This section of the site combines local and hyperlocal news, with reader services and forums. In effect, it's perfect for local search, both for news and as a local guide, according to Meriläinen. In the future, the Helsingin plans to open this platform to user-generated content.

- hyperlocal means moving from virtual encounters to real encounters:
Last summer, the Helsingin led a print and online campaign to restore the Kaisaniemi park in Helsinki, which was dangerous and badly kept. The paper encouraged people to find ideas for the park and submit them. It also organized events "to keep the park alive," including a fun fair, complete with stands, balloons, food and games, and a panel discussion about the issues. Whereas the paper expected between 1,000 and 2,000 people, a massive 5,000 showed up. This event helped to build a real relationship amongst the community, and the ideas that emerged during the whole campaign were sent to the municipal county. There are now plans for improvement of the park.

Reetta Meriläinen, editor-in-chief of the Helsingin Sanomat in Helsinki, Finland, will discuss in detail the paper's print and online hyperlocal strategies at the upcoming World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

There have been a few stories, following the earthquake in China, about how Twitter broke the news before mainstream media.

The AFP's story, particularly, is titled  "'Twitters' beat media in reporting China earthquake."

But this success can be misleading: this does not mean Twitter reports were of higher quality than traditional media, and Twitter shouldn't be seen as competing with traditional media.

Twitter reported the news first and live, "in what was being touted Tuesday as micro-blogging outshining mainstream news," wrote the AFP.

According to ReadWriteWeb, this was also the case earlier this year for the earthquake in the UK and the earthquake in China in March.

Twitter has now solidly established itself as a must-use tool for online journalists. Simply look at how the Evening Leader in the UK used Twitter to cover local elections and soccer games live, and its potential for continuous online coverage is obvious.

However, as pointed out by ReadWriteWeb, the AFP's story is problematic because it can be understood to imply that Twitter did a better job of reporting than did traditional media.

"Twitter reporting looks like this: "I felt an earthquake" -- "WOW: was that an earthquake??" -- "earthquake!!!!!!" -- "earthquake in Beijing so crazy!" etc," reported ReadWriteWeb.

But "The only thing Twitter does better than the traditional news is speed. It doesn't do depth, it doesn't do fact-checking, it doesn't do real reporting."

It doesn't give death tolls, information on the size of the earthquake and landscape, in-depth reporting...

As ReadWriteWeb smartly concludes, "Twitter will never outshine the mainstream press as long as reporters continue to do what they do best -- get on the ground, talk to the right people, find out what's really going on.

"Twitter will never be able to do that, but it can certainly play a major role in helping reporters get it done."

(Coincidentally, Twitter was initially designed by Biz Stone as a communication tool, after the programmer received a warning about a California earthquake as he was about to board a train.)

Source : Yahoo News (AFP) - ReadWriteWeb

Unrest at Le Monde continues as one of its staffers leaked an internal document, in which Le Monde outlined its plans for reorganization, to other French daily Libération, which published a summary yesterday.

To our readers, this document can be of great interest as it maps out a major daily's strategy when forced to reduce costs.

After analyzing Le Monde's financial situation - €20 million in losses in 2007 - the management aims to cut 1,000 pages in a year, the equivalent of about three per day. The daily had previously announced it would cut 129 jobs, leading to strikes in April.

Cutting Pages

The Culture section is trimmed down to two pages, the 'And You' service section will fit in one page. Le Monde's book review supplement is sharply cut down, from 12 to eight pages - "then to 4," according to the document.

"In rethinking its content and reducing the number of pages, the newspaper must concentrate on what's essential and original," explains the management in the document.

Understandably, this phrasing is a cause of concern for readers and editors (see also the case of the St. Petersburg Times' 'redesign').

Newsroom Organization

Some desks will be merged or grouped together, more or less logically: op-ed columnists and journalists from the 'Debate' pages will be together, which makes sense, but the staffers from the 'And You' section will be merged with those of sports.

All staffers for the daily will now be requires to write for Le Monde 2, a weekly magazine published by the Le Monde group. "The stakes of Le Monde 2 are high. Its editorial success will depend both on a significant growth of Saturday circulation and advertising revenues," read the document.

Management's objective is to "offer a newspaper that's shorter and denser during the week, and toughened up during weekends." In other words, Le Monde is edging towards more of a weekly structure.

Layoffs

The 129 job cuts are detailed section by section: the Culture desk will lose six journalists and four freelancers. The merger of 'And You' and Sports will lead to seven layoffs.

Two staffers will be cut from the Business section, two journalists and an assistant from the literary supplement, and more. Foreign correspondents will also be affected.

In the newspaper's administrative positions, 40 layoffs are expected. Management expects to save €9.4 million thanks to these job cuts.

Other Changes

Management is also considering the outsourcing of its call center and to raise the daily's cover price. It also evokes the possibility of moving into cheaper premises.

What do you think of these 'solutions'?

Source: Libération.fr

As was expected, The National, the Abu Dhabi newspaper launched by former Daily Telegraph editor Martin Newland last month, plans to become a seven-day operation by the end of the year, possibly October, reported the Guardian.

The National was launched last month, with such success that it sold out two days running.

The paper had been running six days a week (Sunday through Friday) because staff doesn't work on Friday, a holy day for muslims, and thus wasn't published on Saturdays.

The new Saturday edition could include motoring and traveling sections, as well as a color magazine.

Source: Guardian

The French socialist party has accused current president Nicolas Sarkozy of trying to intimidate the media.

Last week Sarkozy condemned five media, including the international news agency Agence France-Presse, for showing bias against him by failing to sufficiently highlight a court ruling against his former rival in the presidential race, Ségolène Royal. The issue has since become more heated, with other members of Sarkozy's UMP party hurling accusations of bias.

The French left sees the latest polemic on the press as nothing but a "smokescreen aimed at obscuring the government's errors and Sarkozy's record low popularity," said Socialist spokesman Faouzi Lamdaoui in a statement.

UMP spokesman Frédéric Lefebvre maintained, however, all the ruling party wanted was a "neutral" press.

AFP, however, rejected claims that its neutrality was compromised, saying that nowhere was it written that the press must relay every governmental communication. According to the AFP, the last press release brought no new information to the case.

"Being a journalist requires you to make choices, and decide what's news and what isn't," said AFP president Pierre Louette.

Further fueling the fire, the controversy coincides with the agency's financial negotiations with the French state, which partially assures the continued solvency of AFP. Although constituted to be an independent agency, the reality is that the government's is AFP's biggest customer. The agency is currently asking for an additional 20 million euros in order to add multimedia offerings to its repertoire.

Sources: MediaChannel, Le Monde  
 

The "local focus" mantra that has spread to so many U.S. and U.K. newspapers is also alive and well at Latin American newspapers, albeit with a different game plan for success.

In the view of Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald, who attended a recent seminar for senior editors of leading Latin American dailies, the reasons for going hyperlocal are essentially the same across the board: to combat the pressures of the internet.

In the U.S., local news is seen as "the one franchise that differentiates newspapers from any other media pretenders." In this conception, in order to survive the digital era, newspapers can create multi-media hyperlocal ventures, tying together a social networking model with what they do best, print, to encourage "constant refreshment of the web site."    

The American local model, however, does not whole-heartedly encourage a two-way dialogue between residents and newspaper. Dialogue is important, yes, but not in the same way as in Latin America. There, it is the foundation of what makes local news successful; newspapers view "their local efforts as ways to imitate the Web's interactivity and its encouragement of self-expression."

"People want to narrate their stories," El Tiempo Editor in Chief Ernesto Cortes Fierro said. "People want to resolve their own problems. It is two-way content, and in a way it is a mutual rediscovery of the newspaper and the citizens."

Readers are an integral part of the Latin American local news model; efforts have ranged from including neighbor hood residents on the board (El Tiempo) to equipping citizen journalists with cameras to get footage during protests against President Hugo Chavez (Venezuelan daily El Nacional).

Source: Editor & Publisher 

Nearly half (46%) of internet users favor the creation of a voluntary code of conduct for bloggers and online commentators, shows a survey by legal firm DLA Piper.

Bloggers were fairly evenly split: 32% supported the application of a code reflecting laws on defamation, intellectual property and incitement, while 34% were opposed.   

According to Duncan Calow, a DLA Piper media law specialist, there is a "dangerous perception" among web users that user-generated content is "immune to the law." Three-quarters of users who had posted comments or blogged online were oblivious to libel law, while only 1 in 3 had actually read the terms and conditions of the sites they frequent.

"The combination of confusion and complacency about the relationship between the law and UGC puts users at risk as they come under increasing scrutiny online," Calow said.

Although some users will inevitably ignore the small print, online sites, newspapers included, should perhaps make the possible legal ramifications more visible. The other option is proactively fighting bad behavior by commentators.

Source: MediaGuardian 

Newly-elected London mayor Boris Johnson is halting publication of the The Londoner, the monthly promotional newspaper published by the Mayor's office.

Johnson described the decision as a move to cut "unnecessary funding," and has pledged to put the savings, up to  £1 million per year, towards planting trees in London's underprivileged areas, according to Press Gazette.

The paper is currently distributed to three million homes across Greater London.

Source: Press Gazette

Jim Roberts, digital news editor at The New York Times, will speak of the newsroom integration process undergone by the paper of record at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held June 1-4 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

He'll describe the last 3 years at the Times, as "it has attempted to make what I consider to be a historic shift in its mission," towards a much more rounded and "almost platform-agnostic" approach.

Roberts isn't one of those online editors who have an instinctive aversion for print, to the contrary - he worked as a print journalist and editor, as well as a National news editor at the Times. Although he resists calling the Times 'print-centric', it's a fact that print still accounts for over 80% of the company's revenues, and that "our main mission still is putting out a print publication," he said.

One key factor in the NYT's integration process was the gradual approach adopted by the newspaper, instead of "a radical shakeup" - similar to the Guardian's approach in that respect.

"There was a change in newsroom culture and it had its rocky moments, I certainly can't minimize that," said Roberts.

But "We haven't ordered anyone to focus on digital journalism to the exclusion of everything else." Instead, "We've encouraged people to think of Web as one of an array of tools and outlets to report the news."

Here are some of the other factors that made the Times' integration approach successful, in Roberts' view:

- The creation of a Continuous News Desk, in 1999, first appealed to foreign correspondents. With the help of staff based in New York, the reporters could publish stories online that could instantly be read by their sources. This established the foundations for print reporters seeking the advantages of online.

- Not having evolved through edicts, but by engaging staff's brains: give the print reporters the necessary tools.

- Teaching journalists that the Web can mean more and better ways to tell stories.

- Two years ago, the Times 'planted' multimedia editors at each news desk. This led to increased print-online collaboration on stories and to successful enterprise-type projects, where the Web content complemented the print articles, and vice versa (see this multimedia project about prisoners that were exonerated by DNA evidence, which complemented ex-prisoner profiles in the print edition).

- Roberts' own print background, thus trusting relationship with the paper's reporters. "One of my chores has been to eliminate the fear aspect of it (writing for the Web)."

- Last but not least, tell reporters that if they don't report online, their competitors will: "If I could point to one thing that has really worked, it is appealing to reporters' competitive instincts."


Roberts will speak in the second session of the World Editors Forum, entitled "Are integrated newsrooms really working?" View other interviews in this preview series by clicking here.

Source: Jim Roberts, Digital News Editor, The New York Times

It seems that pictures published by Le Monde on May 10 (left, click to enlarge), accompanying a story entitled "Hiroshima: what the world never saw," weren't authentic, the paper revealed yesterday.

The pictures were likely to have been taken after the 1923 earthquake that devastated the Kanto plains near Tokyo.

"Why did Le Monde give credit to these pictures,"  asks Sylvain Cypel, from Le Monde, in yesterday's article.

The pictures had been unveiled and validated, on May 5, by the prestigious Hoover Institution of Stanford University, in the US. However, the paper wasn't able to reach the Hoover archivist prior to the initial publication of the pictures.

Three of the pictures had been used by US historian Sean Malloy in a book published in March, seemingly further validating their authenticity in the eyes of the journalists, who spoke to Malloy. However, neither Malloy, Le monde nor the Hoover Institution contacted the referential Hiroshima Memorial to validate the pictures.

And since then, emails from Japan and expert opinions point to the fact that at least some of the pictures aren't authentic.

Should Le Monde have published the pictures based on the supposed reputation of other institutions? Did the journalists gather sufficient evidence prior to the article's publication? The Hoover Foundation was to soon issue its statement.

What do you think?

UPDATE: In its statement to Le Monde, the Hoover Institution rejected any responsibility in the validation of the pictures, claiming the pictures weren't present on their website and that it was Malloy who chose to use them as such in his book. 

Source: Le Monde (link in French) - picture on LeMonde.fr from the Hoover Institution Archives and Capp Collection

Another newspaper catches on to the new media and social networks bandwagon: the San Diego Union-Tribune has launched a social networking platform dubbed sdBackyard.com.

Users can perform all the basic functions, including creating profiles, sharing with friends, uploading multimedia content and creating blogs.

However, unlike many previous newspaper experiments with social networks, the site seems to have thought of two key aspects:
- how to use the user-generated content within editorial packages
- how to make advertising revenues from this venture

The community print publications, which will compile content submitted by users, will be distributed on Fridays by home delivery (along with the daily). They will also be available for free at some retail outlets starting in June.

Users of the social network are required to register according to geographic location, which helps to put them automatically in touch with locally relevant content - and to serve them with targeted advertising.

"The unique geographic targeting allows small businesses, nonprofit organizations, clubs, and other community groups opportunities to promote themselves in print and online," said George Bonaros, marketing director for the Union-Tribune.

Source: Editor & Publisher

Broadcaster Fox Chicago launched LiveNewsCameras, currently in beta version, a site that attempts to collect, organize and feature a maximum of live video streams from news sites in the US and abroad.

"LiveNewsCameras.com brings together the resources of journalists around the world and makes live streaming video easy to find and use on your computer," says the site in its 'About' section.

The site's sources are mostly US-based so far, but it aims to gain international reach, already including feeds from broadcasters such as BBC World and Al Jazeera.

The site's editors are currently seeking newspapers sites that stream live video to link back to them on LiveNewsCameras.

For more information, you can also view a video by G4 here.

If you would be interested in experimenting with this, feel free to get in touch with us or with them.

Source: LiveNewsCameras

Today, The Liverpool Daily Post is giving its online readers a unique chance to peek into the paper's editorial process.

The Post will be running a live blog throughout the whole day, until next morning's edition goes the presses.

Thanks to technology from Bambuser and Qik, the Post's journalists will stream video of themselves via their mobile phones, as they conduct interviews or work in the office.

The day's main editorial conference was also streamed online.

Readers of the live blog can submit ideas for stories and questions for journalists, about editorial decisions, design and more, both for the print and online editions.

"The success of the live blog during our local election coverage proved that our readers enjoy being a part of the newsgathering process, asking questions and sharing information," said Mark Thomas, Liverpool Daily Post editor.

"Now we want to take this a stage further and invite people to get involved in the production of their newspaper."

Congratulations to the Post for this innovative way of engaging the audience in the news process and behind the scenes.

Go take a look!

Source: journalism.co.uk