Results matching “the story for new”

Jonathan Stray from the Nieman Journalism Lab recently conducted an analysis of the amount of original news content found in news articles through Google. In conducting the analysis, Stray took a major headlining article in the news and then tracked how many articles pertaining to the subject contained original content.

The European Fund for Investigative Journalism, or Journalismfund.eu, launched in February 2009 with a plan to raise funding for investigative reporting that involved cross-border collaboration in Europe.

"In Europe we can see that politics, business, even organised crime all cross borders, while journalists and their coverage are often focussed purely on a national target group and are reluctant to cross borders," director Brigitte Alfter explained in an interview last year.

Just over a year on, two investigative stories have been published and eight more are currently being researched, with groups of two to six journalists working on each. The money raised by Alfter goes towards travel, advice, time and making freedom of information requests. 

Heading up the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, an independent investigation looking at the future of public life, Geoff Mulgan has branded the majority of online news as little more that  "recycled 'churnalism'", the Guardian reports. To combat this, the commission has proposed a tax on the likes of Google and websites using news that they themselves have not produced. It is estimated that the tax could generate £100m a year, which would be distributed amongst local newspapers feeling the pinch.

Newspapers are eager for the iPad to hit shelves April 3, but most iPad editions of newspapers are still just concepts, paidContent:UK reported.

Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf has posted its concept video on YouTube, while another publisher in the Netherlands said publishers have been having "secretive" meetings with Apple ahead of the iPad launch.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, the journalism nonprofit launched by Ariana Huffington in September 2009, has produced roughly 50 stories since its inception.

Nick Penniman, executive director of the fund, estimated that his editorial staff of nine publish between three and five stories a week. Some are "deep-dive" pieces, requiring months of reporting, while others are "quick-strike" articles that are less in-depth.

The fund's articles are posted on their website and can be distributed by other news outlets free of charge under a Creative Commons license.

The surge in social media has benefited journalists globally by offering them a world of information at their fingertips with powerful social networking tools and news aggregator sites. But this opportunity comes along with some risks as well. To lessen these risks, Reuters has added social media guidelines and principles to its handbook, Dean Wright, global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards at Reuters, announced yesterday in the Reuters Blog.

While Reuters embraces social media as a powerful informative tool and encourages its usage among journalists, they must ask permission from managers to use social media in conjunction with their professional lives, MediaGuardian reported.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

As a part of the Tribune Co.'s efforts to reduce costs and direct resources to focus on local coverage, the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia will outsource page design, formatting and editing pages to the company's flagship paper, the Chicago Tribune. This announcement came to the staff at both the newspapers on Monday, the Tribune reported.

The transfer of responsibilities from the Daily Press suggests elimination of copy editors and designers, Hampton Roads reported. The newsroom staff will likely be reduced by 15 percent, Digby Solomon, president and chief executive of the Daily Press, told the Tribune.

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When newspapers aren't grappling with the question of how to monetise online content, they are most likely battling against the hostile economic climate and advertising revenue downturn. Then, there is the age-old question of how to deal with competitors: Newspapers may be united in the preservation of print, but as the following story illustrates, each newspaper is its own separate entity:  

The SF Weekly will be forced to pay rival publication San Francisco Bay $21 million in damages, after a court ruling found the former guilty of lowering the costs of its advertising space with the intent of putting its rival out of business, The San Francisco Chronicle has reported.

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

Newsweek magazine is planning to launch an English-language edition in Pakistan in September, MediaBistro.com reported. Newsweek Pakistan will be the first licensed international news magazine for the country and the eighth local edition under the Washington Post Co.-owned Newsweek brand.

Pakistan has a population of 180 million and only about 100,000 copies of English-language publications sold in a day. Newsweek's Pakistan edition will offer both local and international content, and is expected to start off with a print run of 30,000 copies, according to the Financial Times.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

A recent poll conducted by the Megafon Institue found that the slight majority of Danes (51%) did not support the recent apology made by the Politiken newspaper for re-publishing cartoons negatively depicting the Prohpet Mohammed in 2008. Politiken's decision was largely influenced by Muslim organizations that promised to drop legal action if the newspaper published a public apology.  

Just last week the BBC came under fire from The Newspaper Publishers Association following news that the corporation is to launch three iPhone apps from April 2010. The NPA is adamant that such a move will step on the toes of traditional print publications seeking to generate revenue in the mobile news arena.

Perhaps then, the New York Times is looking to get one over on the broadcasting corporations muscling in on print territory. Daily Finance has reported that the newspaper is to launch a daily webcast in the same vein as the Wall Street Journal - which has been doing a twice-daily online newscast of its own, called The News Hub, since September.

Specific details regarding the New York Times' offering are still uncertain, although it is expected to go live in less than a few months' time. The daily newscast is expected to be transmitted around lunch time, when video traffic peaks. A face for the show has yet to be chosen, although a staffer at NYT has hinted that it is unlikely to be Jane Bornemeier, the newspapers current TV and Radio Senior Editor.

Source: Daily Finance

USA Today and Trinidad & Tobago's Newsday have entered into partnership and together launched the Trinidad and Tobago edition of USA Today, T&T's Newsday reported.

The first Trinidad and Tobago edition of the USA Today was printed yesterday in the El Socorro Pressroom and distributed to attendees at an event created around the new partnership. The new edition will be distributed directly to subscribers from Monday to Friday and also be made available at airports, airlines, hotels and several other sales outlets throughout the country, said Therese Mills, CEO and editor in-chief of T&T's Newsday.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

In a recent Washington Post article the FBI announced its decision to close all but a few of the most promising cases of the 108 cold case murders from the civil rights era.

The Post's story led The Civil Rights Cold Case Project in conjunction with the Centre for Investigative Reporting to issue a statement pledging their continued commitment to reporting on unsolved or untold stories from the Civil Rights Era.

As Fairfax Media restructures, adding a digital director with wide-ranging media experience is essential for the Australian media group's renewal, board chairman Roger Corbett told The Australian this week.

Corbett said he is talking to potential hires who will help strengthen the digital area. "We have pretty good traditional media experience in, of course, John Fairfax and (managing director) Brian McCarthy, but we certainly want to have a mind that understands media and helps us move into this broad new era and the changes that will happen," he said.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, believes that tablet computer devices like the iPad are going to sell millions in their first year and tens of millions after that, MediaBistro reported. Anderson was speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies in San Francisco.

Anderson believes that there is room for a  "long-battery, slim device" that is something between a phone and a computer. People are now becoming used to using their phones for activities that previously required a computer, and he suggested that a product that was superior to a phone for web browsing and writing long emails could replace a laptop for travelling, for example. 

Following the news that the BBC is to halve its number of web pages, cut 25% of jobs and 25% of its £112m budget, BBC director general Mark Thompson has made clear his reassessed priorities for the news organisation.

In at number one is providing the "best journalism in the world", a target that many, including Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, are adamant the BBC has been doing all along.

The Wall Street Journal has announced the appointment of Peter Wonacott to the newly-created role of Africa bureau chief. He is to be based in Johannesburg, and will work closely with the WSJ's parent company Dow Jones' newswire bureau in the city. He will report to Rebecca Blumenstein, international editor and deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

According to a press release, the creation of the role  "reflects the region's increasing importance as a business and geopolitical story and signals the launch of an expanded Wall Street Journal reporting network on the continent."

The BBC is to halve its number of web pages, as well as closing two radio stations and cutting spending on imported TV shows, the Times reported. The changes will be announced next month by director-general Mark Thompson, according to the Times, and Thompson will admit that the corporation has become too large and must shrink to allow its commercial rivals more room to operate.

The halving of the number of pages on the BBC website will be accompanied by a 25% cut in staff numbers and a 25% cut of its £112m budget. To appease rival publishers, it will pledge to include more links to articles from other news outlets, and not to produce news services at a more local level than it does currently. These latter elements do not signify a dramatic change in policy: last month, the BBC's director of news Helen Boaden asserted that the organisation was not looking to go more local, and the corporation's news website already provides a "from other news sites" section alongside each story where it displays links to similar articles on newspaper websites.

Newspapers are still the most used and valued local news destinations, and online is no exception, according to a new study from comScore and the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web sites are the "most used and valued sites for consumers seeking credible and trustworthy local content and advertising online," the survey found.

About 57 percent of the more than 3,000 respondents said local newspaper sites are their top online sources for local information - more than the totals for all other media. The percentage is higher for those with a college education (60 percent) and households with higher incomes (63 percent).

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Community-funded news site Spot.Us introduced several new features and a streamlined design yesterday in response to user feedback. The updated format provides readers with a more interactive role in the journalism they help fund. Among the changes are story updates, the ability to create "assignments" for other users, and a presence on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea behind Spot.Us is simple: Stories begin when readers submit tips or journalist pitch stories. A price is set for the proposed article and Spot.Us lets the public donate to fund expenses for reporting.

A British parliamentary committee issued their much-anticipated report on The News of the World today, accusing top executives at the newspaper of covering up the scale of the phone-hacking scandal.

In the 167-page report, MPs claimed it was "inconceivable" that Clive Goodman, the journalist convicted of hacking into the voicemails of royal aides in 2007, acted alone as a "rogue reporter" as the newspaper has previously argued.

T. Christian Miller of the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica recently won the prestigious 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Editor & Publisher reports that it was a collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit news outfit that produced Miller's winning report into abuses of insurance coverage for private contractors in war zones.

Just last week, the winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism - usually given to courageous and skillful reporting - were announced, NPR's On the Media explains. Among the usual big media winners was a surprising win - the anonymous Iranians or Iranian who captured the death of the 26-year old protestor Neda Agha-Soltan on tape in the violent aftermath of the Islamic Republic's contested elections of June 2009.

The Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists is arranging a 'speed dating' event for freelancers to meet editors, reported MinnPost. For $30 (or $20 for SPJ members), freelancers can attend 'Freelance Love' on March 11 and have five minutes of "guaranteed face time" with editors from the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press and several magazines, according to the MNSPJ website.

SPJ board member Amanda Theisen told MinnPost that "Many of our members have been asking us to do something along those lines. ... The freelancer can pitch a story idea, or simply introduce themselves to the editor and show them some of their work.  Then, after five minutes, the freelancer moves onto the next editor, then the next, then the next...you get the idea!" When they register, freelancers are asked if they are interested in working for newspaper, online, magazines, or with photography or video.

Should journalists have to pay to meet potential employers? It seems an unusual move but one that definitely offers convenience. As news outlets suffer from lack of ad revenue, more journalists are left out of work and looking for freelance assignments, and more publications are looking for freelancers to fill the gaps that shrinking newsrooms have left.

Source: MinnPost, MNSPJ 

Google has announced plans to take its Living Stories project open source, meaning that it will available to news outlets globally, The Guardian reported.

The project was originally developed with The New York Times and the Washington Post. It collects all the coverage of an ongoing story on a single URL. Articles on the story are listed in date order starting with the newest at the top. Topics include, for example, the politics of global warming or battling swine flu. Readers can view the story through text, graphics, timelines or quotes.

Google will now allow publishers to implement their experiment through its open source API. It also wants to work with web developers and journalists.