Results matching “follows guardian in publish”

A new web-only daily newspaper has launched in Scotland, The Guardian reports, after being expected for some weeks.

Called the Caledonian Mercury, the paper takes its name from one of Scotland's first news journals. It is edited and largely written by former staff from The Scotsman who departed after deep budget cuts at the paper. They will work as freelancers, and will be paid partly according to the "value" of their copy to readers and advertisers. How this will work is not yet clear.

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.

Looks like it's not just newsagents that are paying for free newspaper the London Evening Standard. Some shops in suburban London are charging consumers to cover their costs, The Guardian reports.

In October, the paper dropped its 50 pence cover price and went free. Since then, it has more than doubled circulation, from 250,000 copies to just fewer than 600,000 copies. There are plans to increase this number even further, to 800,000 or even 1 million.

The trade-off is that it also cut back on the number of its distribution outlets, particularly in the outer suburbs of London. Demand from newsagents and consumers in suburbs outside its new distribution area has been strong enough, though, that the newspaper is trialling delivery to two new areas in north-east and north-west London.

At the Press Freedom Round Table in Hyderabad, Chris Elliot, managing editor of The Guardian, said that in order for a newspaper to be of value it must have a thorough commercial strategy.

Elliot said that The Guardian, like other media outlets, must reexamine its financial models to maintain journalistic standards. He stressed that newspaper success just is not possible without a sound financial base.

UK publisher Haymarket will close two of its media-focused titles this week. Twenty-five year old Mediaweek will cease to publish immediately with today being its final day in print and Revolution, a monthly publication will now become a give away quarterly publication within marketing.

The decision is part of a wider restructure of Haymarket's marketing and advertising trade titles and is expected to see 18 out of 58 editorial jobs slashed.

The BBC is creating a new 'social media editor' position, the Guardian is reporting, amidst growing interest in the value of web services such as Twitter and Facebook to news publications. The BBC's decision comes as part of a wider campaign announced last month, designed to relaunch its websites with a greater social media focus.

"Like a lot of other news organisations, we are at the beginning of something very exciting, " said Nic Newman, the BBC's future media and technology controller, journalism. "We recognise social media plays an important part. With the new position we are co-ordinating best practice. We think that the decision to appoint a social media editor is the best way to understand what works."

In his upcoming documentary, Starsuckers, due to premier this month at the London film festival, filmmaker Chris Atkins dupes mainstream English tabloids into publishing untruths and made up stories about celebrities, MediaGuardian reports.

For the first time in the Guardian's memory the paper has been prevented from reporting public governance proceedings, although last spring a court injunction required them to remove certain sensitive documents from their website after publishing.

In what has been described as a violation of the 1688 Bill of Rights, the Guardian has been gagged from reporting on yesterday's Commons order paper, which contains a certain question to be answered by a certain minister. The Guardian has been prevented from publishing what the question is, who asked it, who will answer it, and where the question can be found.

WikiLeaks believes it is the following Parliamentary question: "Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) - To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura."

The Association of Online Publishers annual survey found that 70% of newspaper, magazine and TV publishers will charge for their online content and 50% of media outlets polled use Twitter to publish new information.

"We have all been talking about a tough year for the industry and particularly for publishers ... a strong vote for mobile and mobile apps is encouraging," said the AOP's director, Lee Baker. "And the use of Twitter is a particularly interesting development in terms of use of new mechanisms to publish content."

33% of those who plan to charge for content will enact some sort of micro-payment scheme, 26% for special reports and apps, while 80% believe the iPhone has revitalized and presented great opportunity in the mobile market, MediaGuardian reports.

This suggests a marked change in media companies' attitude toward paid online content (only 46% planned to charge in 2007), flying in the face of statistics suggesting that few would pay for online news and aligning with media giant News Corp's inevitable move to charge for all its online content.

Source: MediaGuardian

The latest Morgan Stanley report on the media has caused somewhat of a sensation: it is a document on how teenagers consume media, written by a 15-year-old boy. Matthew Robson was interning at the bank for two weeks when he was asked to compile some thoughts on teenagers' media habits, and his boss was so impressed by the report that he decided to publish it.

Much of what the teenager said was not particularly ground-breaking, but his youthful frankness and the seriousness with which Morgan Stanley took the report seems to have made people think. Head of the banks team of European media analysts, Edward Hill-Wood, told the Financial Times that the report had generated five or six times more feedback than usual. The document was reportedly discussed at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference in Idaho.

Poynter's Steve Myers has conducted a thorough interview with Amanda Michel, who is ProPublica's editor of distributed reporting, charged with developing crowdsourcing and collaborative journalism methods to report on the impact of the federal stimulus bill. In the interview she explains how she is building a network of citizen journalists and how this is operating.

Michel explained to Myers how she is building "a corps of pro-am journalists" to be part of the ProPublica Reporting Network, launched in May, and how they are being integrated into the work of ProPublica. She plans to coordinate "collaborative reporting projects," which will mean allocating specific assignments to citizen journalists that will draw on the insight and experiences of many people.

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

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

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

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

Following the Iranian election on 12 June, which both sides claim to have won, Iranians and the rest of the world wants to know the truth about the results, as well as wanting to follow protests and other developments. But this has proved more difficult than anticipated given the restrictions on reporting, both by Iranians and foreigners, and the occasion proved to be an opportunity for citizen journalism to show its value.

Reporting restrictions

Mainstream media has been suffering from severe restrictions in Iran, even tougher than during last year's Zimbabwean elections, foreign editor for Channel 4 News Ben de Pear told the Guardian. Foreign journalists first had to get special press cards and were closely monitored, then on the Tuesday following the election, foreign journalists were banned from reporting on the streets. The BBC's correspondent has been asked to leave the country after the broadcaster was accused of supporting rioters. And it is not just foreign reporters who are suffering: now even reporters of Iranian nationality are being confined to their offices. According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), 26 Iranian journalists, editors and bloggers have been imprisoned since June 14.

Citizen video becomes a symbol

In the absence of an abundance of professional reporters, amateurs have stepped up. One of the most watched and discussed videos to come out of the tragedy, and one which is emblamatic of the role of citizen journalism in reporting from Iran, is that of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman who was walking near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators when she was shot. The video has prompted international outcry and the girl's death has since come to represent the tragedy of the conflict, a "symbol of the anti-government movement," according to the New York Times. It was taken, not by a reporter with a camera, but by a bystander on a mobile phone, and posted on Facebook and YouTube after the man sent the 40-second clip to a friend who then forwarded to friends and news sites in Europe and the US.

A Twitter revolution?

Talk of a Twitter revolution swiftly spread as Iranians and others in the country used the social network Twitter to get their news out to the world, and it has been used extensively by the media. Twitter is particularly effective as a method of spreading news as it is harder to censor, given that it can be accessed via various different applications on computers or mobile phones, as well as via the website. #IranElection has been the top trending topic on Twitter for days, with thousands of updates an hour using the hash tag to get included in the feed and direct interested observers to text, image or video content. Following a request from US President Obama, Twitter decided to delay maintenance to the site in light of the important role it was playing in keeping people informed, carrying it out during Tehran's night rather than daylight hours.

Twitter is clearly not immune to censorship, however. The following message has been passed around Facebook over the last few days amongst Anglo-Saxon users:

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH: If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on."

Amateur issues

Clearly, there are problems with relying on information generated by amateurs. Benoit Hervieu of RSF told Editor & Publisher that one of the main problems is that because many people want to remain anonymous, it is harder to verify information. And indeed, it seems that much false information has been circulating. After Twitter was hailed as the voice of the revolution, a backlash quickly emerged asserting its unreliability. There is always the possibility, after all, that interested parties might deliberately try to misinform, or might be so personally involved in the debate that they cannot maintain impartiality. And one of the disadvantages of a campaign such as that mentioned above, encouraging international Twitter users to set their locations to Iran, could end up misleading journalists searching for information on the network.

So how are citizen journalism agencies dealing with these risks and challenges?

Checking for reliability is a top priority for those trying to sell their content to traditional media companies. Citizen journalism agency Demotix has obtained many images from freelancers and amateurs portraying events in Iran, including two pictures which have appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Demotix COO Jonathan Tepper emphasised that Demotix understands the importance of reliability of sources and "believes that serious citizen journalism needs to take all the ethics of traditional reporting and build on them, such as verifiability and protection of sources." All submissions go through a vetting procedure which includes looking at the metadata in photos.

Citizenside, which specializes in citizen photo journalism, has managed to get hold of some good images which have been published by mainstream media outlets, but co-founder Matthieu Stefani said that it has been "really hard" both to establish contacts in Iran and to receive images from these contacts. "The big issue is that most of the contributions we've received were sent through proxies, with most of the time no way to contact our contributors as cellphone networks don't work really well," he explained, and therefore his team is extremely cautious about what they accept. He said that the photos that the agency has been pushing most to its clients were received from known and trusted members in the UK who were sent them by close relatives in Iran.

The Observers, a project run by TV news station France 24 combining citizen journalism with professional editing, has been active in its coverage of Iran. Founder of the initiative Julien Pain told the EW that what makes their coverage particularly useful is the fact that they already had trusted contacts in Iran before the election, and hence they have fewer problems with establishing the reliability of sources of information, particularly when using proxy servers. "We worked with these people before the situation was tense," he explained, "so we know them." He gave the example of a girl who has recorded a video describing how the censorship works, with whom he and his team had already worked. Prior to any major election, Pain added, the Observers tries to enlarge its network of contacts, which in this case proved particularly useful. Even using trusted contacts, Pain said that the Observers still cross-checks information as far as possible.

Amra Tareen, CEO of AllVoices, a project that aggregates professional and amateur news on one site, has a different approach: publish everything and let the reader decide. She said that the site has received more than 1,000 submissions, in English and Farsi, since the election, gathered via proxy servers as the AllVoices site is blocked. She stressed that submissions have tackled both sides of the issue and that this is one of the most crucial aspects of citizen journalism and of her site in particular: that anyone can be heard. "we're neutral and anyone can have their voices heard on our platform--that's key for the credibility of citizen journalism; bias will undermine the concept and keep citizen journalism and citizen journalists from ever being taken as seriously as they ought to be."

Generally it seems that such a situation where media access is severely reduced has provided citizen journalism with a significant opportunity to prove its importance. Tareen commented that "we really want to use this opportunity to show that Cit-J is not only about massive amount of non-qualified content, but also good "pro-am" work that we have been promoting for years now," said Stefani.

Getting pictures on the front page of a major daily is likely to be a huge boost to Demotix in terms of fame and credibility. Tepper was clear that Demotix is trying to supplement mainstream media rather than replace it, but said that "we think our reporting can sometimes be more accurate than the mainstream media" because "most of our users record what is known to them, in their city or country" and therefore "Demotix images provide a more accurate representation of the subject from a local perspective."

For the Observers, the situation has provided an opportunity for collaboration with the TV station on an unprecedented level. Usually, Pain said, he would publish a video on the Observers website and offer it to TV, now he has been working more with programming at France 24 to supply them with videos first before putting them online, to offer a period of exclusivity. "We've really moved a step forward here," he said. "We have learnt how to work together, and it's not going to be the same any more."

Although amateur 'citizen journalists' do not have the knowledge or expertise to analyse developments the way a professional journalist could, they can certainly witness and record events, and when traditional media coverage is limited, this is a valuable service. In terms of providing a true news service, amateur contributions must be verified so that readers can trust them, which is a priority for citizen journalism agencies. As opportunities continue to arise for citizen journalism to prove its value, the mainstream media is likely to incorporate it with increasing frequency and develop new ways of working closer with citizen journalism agencies.

The Daily Telegraph will publish uncensored details of each of the 646 MP's expenses in a free supplement along with its print edition on Sat., June 20.

The much-anticipated, 68-page magazine supplement, The Complete Expenses Files, arrives just two days after the House of Commons published its own heavily censored list of MPs' expenses on June 18. The list of the members of Parliament and their respective budget, allowances and expense can be seen at the UK Parliament website.

Following the Telegraph's publication of the expense claims of British MPs from the past five years, there has been much attention given to how the publication obtained their information, and if the process was indeed ethical. Whilst the Telegraph itself has so far remained silent on the matter and refused to confirm whether or not it paid for the data, there has been a stream of information about the origins of the data coming from other sources.

Two names have now been put forward as the intermediaries in the sale, ex-SAS man John Wick and Henry Gewanter, managing director of an American PR firm. Whilst Wick has so far been unavailable for comment, Gewanter has essentially confirmed his involvement. He is keen to clear up one of the greyer areas of the saga; "No criminal acts have occurred. No criminal charges can be brought. I don't deal in stolen goods... I can tell you it was not stolen"

According to what appears to be a Wall Street Journal article published on Post Bulletin earlier this week, America's local newspapers are faring better than the country's national titles.

The article, entitled "Smaller newspapers dodge the downturn" refers to a series of interventions on the part of some wealthy individuals who have offered to buy local newspapers in a bid to save them from apparent closure.

Press Gazette, after facing its near closure, has been bought by Mike Danson's Progressive Media group. They will continue to publish both their monthly magazine and online; meanwhile, the current owners, Wilmington group, will retain control of the British Press Awards (where most of the magazine's revenue comes from).

Citizen photojournalism comes into question once again with the aftermath of G20. As citizens are increasingly equipped with gadgets that photograph and video, surveillance of society also increases. Some argue that they should own the rights to their image and others say we should have the freedom to take and publish pictures of anything. One thing is sure; there are more photographers out their doing the work of watchdog.

During the G20 protests, a policeman knocked a man, Ian Tomlinson to the ground, who died a few minutes later. If the death was caused by the fall, nobody knows for sure, but there are several pictures of Ian Tomlinson that day that captured him hours before the push, during the push, and even after. In another epoch this would have been a highly difficult reality, but today with millions of citizens equipped with cameras, this is even commonplace at an event like G20.

The Guardian has revealed that subbing duties at the Independent will, from today, be given to desk editors in a move similar to one made by the Financial Times, which earlier this month asked its reporters to sub edit their own work.

The decision to cut down on subs follows a spate of redundancies overseen by publisher Independent News & Media earlier this year.

Guardian readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth addresses the issue of the differences between reader responses and feedback to news in printed media as opposed to online forums. Prompted by the libel action brought by Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman against the New York Times, which settled last week in a negotiated resolution that included space on the newspaper's website for her lawyers' commentary on the lawsuit, Butterworth examines the changes in the reader's "right of reply" in the digital age.

The Metro group, worldwide distributor of free newspapers has announced that they are shutting their Spanish edition, affecting 7 cities across the country.

Metro International has said that the decision has been made due to the "unsustainable losses" which its publications are encountering in Spain, although the Spanish Metro is not as loss-making as some of its other free competitors in the country.  However, the company said that "the worsening Spanish economic downturn, which during the beginning of 2009 has resulted in a collapsing advertising market" means that continuing to publish is not a viable option.

Another free daily hit by news of its imminent departure is the Baltimore Examiner, which according to vice President and CEO Ryan McKibben is unable to continue due to "the economic dynamics that have ravaged the print media industry".

Source: The Guardian, Baltimore Sun