Results matching “all reporters with mult”

The Sacramento Bee has been using Qik, a technology that streams live footage from videophones to a flash player on a website or blog, to broadcast live videos of protests against the Olympic torch procession in San Francisco.

Qik allows reporters to cheaply document an event with more flexibility than a big TV video camera offers. Reporters capture action with a mobile phone, which is then sent to Qik's website where desk staff can download the content and add it to the newspaper's own video player.

"Our goal is to try and create an immediacy for our online video, it's [using Qik) experimental, we have been using it for just the last two weeks," Mark Morris, director of multimedia for the Bee said. "We see it as a way of posting editorial content immediately online, I think we had something posted on our site within 15 minutes of everything being transmitted into Qik."

Citizen journalists have already taken advantage of Qik's technology to give immediate footage of events, a phenomenon called "street journalism." People have been documenting events such as the U.S. presidential elections and Israelis have been using mobile video phones to capture evidence of missiles.
 
Source: Journalism.co.uk

Despite the slim down of newspapers, Birmingham, Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI) is continuing to pay for investigative stories in its 90 plus daily newspapers using corporate resources, since the small papers would not be able to supply in-depth reporting themselves.

This program, started two years ago, is called the Elite Report-ing Fellowship Program, and is headed by Bill Ketter, CNHI's vice president of news. The first report was on April 2006, a three-part series on gambling addicts. Following series dealt with topics such as the "Interstate Highway System's crumbling infrastructure." All stories have a national focus, "a direct relevancy to communities," according to Ketter, and emphasis on human interest.

"We felt very strongly that good journalism is good business," says Ketter. "There's been so much negative publicity in our craft about the demise of in-depth journalism, and this more vigorous journalism has almost been eliminated. [The fellowship] creates a regular flow of high public service journalism."
 
The Fellowship program accepts applications from all CNHI reporters. Once accepted, the reporter is assigned a topic and released from newsroom duties for the duration of the project, which can last from a month to six weeks. They are supplied with audio and video equipment, which their papers can keep as benefits.

The program has also influenced many of CNHI's papers to incorporate more multimedia. The Iowa based Ottumwa Courier is now listing multimedia and live blogging as a priority.

"I'm a believer in the watchdog role of the press," Ketter says. "We're a guide dog and we're a watchdog. Every newspaper, no matter how small, has to fulfill those roles."

The stories are also available on the websites, accompanied by graphics and videos.


Source: AJR through IFRA Executive News Service

"How could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin?" Paul Gillin asks on his blog Newspaper Death Watch - which vies, perhaps hastily, for the death of the newspaper industry. According to him, in the post-Watergate era, US newspapers excessively focused on chasing Pulitzer prizes, thus diminishing their much-needed local coverage.

Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger's 2007 farewell piece puts the start of the decline in the post-Watergate period when journalists began to revel in excess, refusing to travel any other way beside first-class, and according to Gillin, "Steiger's piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises."

Eric Alterman's recent article in The New Yorker adds that papers lost their focus on local journalism and their readers during post-Watergate as well. Papers edged towards increased impartiality, and the scramble to win Pulitzers to duplicate the Washington Post's Watergate success cost newspapers millions of dollars on large Washington bureaus and overseas correspondents.

Another trend that began in the 1970's was the rise of the "insider journalist." In Gillin's view, reporters became celebrities with access to powerful people, who learned "to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well."

According to Gillin, newspapers didn't make any changes because they had healthy and predictable profit margins, and their investors were happy. However, most big companies, according to Gillin, "often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under."

Gillin's concludes that "it's too late for the newspaper industry to save itself."  He forsees massive consolidations, more layoffs and the emergence  a new form journalism which uses blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, and search engines.

But although the newspaper industry may have been slow to transition to embrace new media formats, it is actively doing so now, through blogs, social networks, multimedia projects and the inclusion of readers in the news process. Up to them to prove Gillin wrong.

Source: Newspaper Death Watch through Journerdism

There is a major shift from traditional media toward online media, and journalists should consider the journalistic possibilities of social networks, YouTube, and other new technology instead of using them for fun and socializing.

Readers of online news is up to 71% in 2007 from 60% in 2000 and 37% said they went online for news "yesterday" compared to the 22% in 2000, according to Project for Excellence in Journalism.

MediaShift journalist Mark Glaser outlines "The New Rules of Media" with this shift:

1. "News is a conversation, not a lecture"
Traditionally, reporters had the answers and told the rest of us what was going on in the world. In reality, the audience and its "collective wisdom" knows more and can be experts on a subject. Thus, news is a conversation that may begin with a journalist but extends its form online where audience can help with ideas, comments, corrections, updates, etc.

2. People control their media experience
People are now listening and watching to what they want on the devices they want, whether it be podcasts, radio, TV, etc. This allows more control over media experience, and people are "no longer slaves to programmers," according to Glaser. But what people lose are shared experiences: watching shows or sport events together or at the same time. Now with TiVo-ing or taping shows for later, people no longer can immediately talk about these shows until everyone has finished watching them.

3. "Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer"
Anyone with a cell phone or video camera can capture and share experiences, and these devices and editing software are becoming increasingly affordable. Amateurs are noticed by the work they post online, which has the power to change the agenda in politics. However, anyone can create or remix their own media, but skills to use these tools are required to stand out from the millions of others who are doing the same thing.

4. "Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die"
Because of the speed of innovation and change in technology and its importance in news dissemination and analysis, the media business must live by this same rule, originally a Silicon Valley mantra.

In the mid-'90s, the New York Times launched online-only publication called CyberTimes which later had a pay wall around its archives in order to increase diminishing print subscriptions, rather than innovate online. Eventually the Times opened all online archives and began blogs (though opposed to them in the beginning) after learning that "traditional media must live in the digital world on its own terms."

Traditional media must evolve by changing their mindset first, before adding new features.

5. "Despite Censorship, The Story Will Get Out"
People have the knowledge to get a story out around repressive governments, for instance, when China blocked YouTube because of the videos of conflict in Tibet, people viewed the sites through Google cache. Also, people can get around new technology that cannot be suppressed, for example: the music business shut down Napster, but people are still sharing music online.

As Glaser puts it, "Once the technology genie is out of the bottle, there's no way to put it back in."

6. "Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together"
With the distinction between the bloggers and journalists becoming blurrier, the animosity between the two should end, and theyshould learn from one another. Bloggers can learn about "being fair and having ethical standards" while journalists can "learn the 'incremental journalism' of bloggers, adding facts, analysis and aggregation over a period of time."

7. "Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform"
Journalists need to learn the skills of broadcast, print, and photojournalism to reach different audiences. Becoming a community moderator, a freelancer (as journalism jobs are no longer stable), learning how to design or run a website are all essential skills to acquire.

Ultimately, journalists need to understand the basic journalism skills before knowing the new technology.

Glaser writes, "It's crucial that those skills, those ethics, that fairness, is not lost in the rush to new technology...This is the best time in history for new journalists to make their own way, start their own media outlet and get noticed."

Source: PBS through I Want Media

At the beginning of March, Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, unveiled two video studios in its new Sydney headquarters. Fairfax hired some broadcast consultants to help with the construction, which lasted about six months (with a previous four months of planning). Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, explained why newspapers shouldn't focus on TV-type bulletins, how journalists can manage the extra workload, and why newspaper video is financially viable.

The top floor studio is smaller, integrated within the Herald's newsroom. It is equipped with broadcast-quality HD cameras and 2-3 people can be on camera at once.

A larger studio on the downfloor, which can fit a car, was designed to be used by all Fairfax Media outlets. It is equipped with six editing suites with Final Cut Pro, and Fairfax has installed a fiber optic cable to enable quick transfers: all videos shot in the studio are centralized in a database which is made available to the various platforms.

The new building for The Age in Melbourne, which is to be ready towards the end of 2009, will also be equipped with two similar studios.

For Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, Fairfax and its newspapers can be at an advantage for online video, compared to broadcast TV professionals. Because they are not tied to a traditional broadcast news schedule, they can often bring breaking news online faster.

They can also benefit from the newspapers' core coverage, by using a "short video story associated to a much more in-depth newspaper story." In other cases, a news video can be the main story, if it has more impact or is more illustrative than a text report.

Fairfax's video and digital production team counts 18 staffers, 10 of whom are dedicated to news video. Each major city (each major newspaper newsroom) counts two or three videojournalists, one or two staff supporters and a local multimedia editor. Fairfax Digital news sites have been drawing about 6.5 million unique users monthly, with up to 3.4 million monthly video views, delivering video to over 800,000 unique browsers.

What type of video content works? Not TV news bulletins

Fairfax produces two main types of video content:
- video news reports, short and local
- everything else that can't be considered 'news', which consists mostly of sports, panel shows, thematic reports...

Fairfax's video content runs along the spectrum of newspaper video offerings, whether it's in-house studio footage, a TV review program with occasional guests, punctual shows focused on sports events, local news reports shot by specialized videojournalists or Fairfax journalists, or one-minute interviews with journalists about a topic in their field of expertise.

However, Vaile and Fairfax have already experimented with online video and TV-type content (see similar lessons from Le Télégramme) and have a clear view of the type of content that works. Vaile's words speak for themselves:

"The studios will make it much faster to turn around news from the newsroom. We are unlikely to do typical TV news bulletins for some time because they don't work online."

"The typical TV short bulletin didn't work online. That's because online people can choose to watch the stories they're interested in and don't want to watch the stories they're not interested in. The normal linear TV news bulletin fails online."

Even for typical broadcast channels, such as ABC in Australia, where Vaile previously worked, online TV-type news reports weren't successful online, "although they worked very well on mobile phones," because "the navigation on mobile hardware is so much more difficult" than online, so "people are much more willing to adopt a linear viewing platform."

"So it will be some time before we go to making digital TV news bulletins again."

Fairfax will try other online video alternatives, "the kinds of things which use newspaper journalists who are specialists in a particular area and have very high credibility," to produce specific reports.

Do multimedia journalists work more? No, if workflows change

As mentioned above, under Fairfax's integrated approach, local news video reports could potentially be shot by Vaile's digital production team, or by a regular reporter, or by a combination of both. In some cases, the reporter will simply take a few minutes to walk to the studio and provide some comment. In others, the text reporter will be expected to shoot video, perhaps even edit it himself (this year Fairfax is making available in every newsroom a couple Canon Tx-1 cameras, a hybrid between a still and video camera, which cost about 400-500$, for reporters to take while on the ground).

Does this mean more work journalists?

"That's a problem that has yet to be fully resolved," Vaile said, admitting that "inevitably it's more work and / or different work to what they have been doing."

For Vaile, management must make "space in their working day for them to do this work without it being on top of what they have to do already."

"Working as a cross-media journalist means that you are expected to work in many different platforms, on the paper, for online, potentially for radio or for video, but you clearly can't do all those in addition to everything else."
"The working day has to be planned bearing in mind that each of these things takes time and precludes you doing something else. Because this is all new it's a balance that has yet to be fully worked out."

In some cases, the idea of multi-skilled journalists can also be counter-productive. For some aspects of video production, such as editing, it can be much more efficient to have specialists rather than waste hours of reporters' time.

Audience and business: is video viable?

The construction of the studios was "a very significant investment," in the range of "several million dollars," said Vaile.

Traffic to Fairfax Digital news sites (mainly those of The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald) have been averaging about 6.5 million unique browsers and 214 million page views monthly. In contrast, there have been roughly only 3.4 million monthly video downloads, for over 800,000 unique video browsers (so roughly 12-13% of the total audience watches video, about 4-5 times monthly on average).

About 50% of video traffic goes to news items, while 'the rest' draws the other half. Interestingly though, Fairfax is attracting significantly more advertising revenues for segments within 'the rest', as advertisers are more interested in a less scattered, more targeted audience, such as for sports.

High traffic goes to news, high value advertising goes to the rest, according to Vaile.

Ads consists mostly of display advertising, pre-roll ads, as well as sponsorships for shows, However, sponsors "have no say in the editorial content in the programs," said Vaile, following standard editorial independence practices of newspapers - and quite unlike TV. In 2008, major advertisers are starting to flock towards online video, such as LandRover which will sponsor a 28-part travel program that launches at the end of March.

Future of newspaper online video: HD, streaming, tapping the TV market

In the future, "we are ready to go broadcast in HD, should we need to do that," said Vaile. "There's no question that at some stage in the near future we'll be delivering something in HD format, whether it's podcasts or products going into a very high bandwidth environment."

Vaile also believes "very much" in the future of live video streaming. Fairfax has already had a few successful experiments with live streaming, including coverage of a ship that ran aground last June thanks to cameras from the local surf patrol boat, as well as live streaming from the victory speeches of last November's federal elections in Australia. Fairfax has equipped a few of its reporters with 3G kits, which enable live video wireless streaming.

But considering the significant investments and costs of newspaper video online and badnwidth, is the current business model viable?

"Yes, definitely," said Vaile, although "we're at the very beginning of seeing the benefits of a business model which is based on display advertising around online video."

Although Fairfax doesn't have the same resources or content as a TV network, many traditional broadcasters aren't sure how to approach online video, and many traditional TV media buyers are hesitant to buy into the much smaller online audiences. So Fairfax Digital's longer term goal is to eventually tap into some of TV's advertising budget, both in news and non-news areas.

"The intention is that by providing a comprehensive video news service during the day, we will remove a share of the people who watch broadcast news bulletins at night."

Source: Ian Vaile, Director Fairfax Digital Productions

In August 2007, a European newspaper aggregator venture, dubbed Imooty.eu, was launched in beta version (read background here, based on a profile by the Online Journalism Review). Over the weekend, Imooty has launched a new headline aggregator widget for newspapers to implement on their sites (pictured left - see their widget platform here).

Imooty's "plan is really to develop a powerful tool for news syndication," said co-founder Kristoffer Lassen (who founded the site with Blaise Bourgeois). "The purpose is to democratize access to the most important mainstream information sources of Europe." The site now aggregates RSS feeds with latest headlines from about 450 newspapers in 19 European countries.

Imooty.eu, a newspaper and blog aggregator

Unlike services such as Factiva or LexisNexis, which are geared towards professionals and have costly fees, Imooty aims to provide a mainstream and free news search resource. Newspapers' RSS feeds that are featured on the homepage are generally chosen for their prominent size and influence, but sometimes also for their known expertise in a particular domain (Morgenbladet in Norway for its 'Culture' coverage).

Users can conveniently view latest headlines by country, newspaper, or category of news. A tab enables users to view recent blog headlines - about 700-800 have enrolled so far. Users can also customize search fields by these same criteria.

Does it still make sense to distinguish 'News' and 'Blogs', at a time when some blogs do original reporting and some traditional news brands are turning to lighter, blog-style news?

"It's basically to make a distinction between news brands as we know them today and independent reporters," said Lassen. The line between both may be getting blurry - especially concerning newspaper blogs, but Lassen believes the news consumption and expectations are different between blogs and news sites, although both may be news.

Pros and cons of Imooty for newspapers

Imooty has launched a specific section called 'Newspaper Universe', so that partnering newspapers can directly upload their feeds and customize them. "You decide how your newspaper brand will appear on the  Imooty platform."

Pros:
- Reach: Imooty "puts newspapers in touch with users who normally wouldn't use them," said Lassen. Through Imooty, readers who are geographically distant, or on the other side of the political spectrum, can discover new titles.
- Mobile: Imooty offers a mobile platform that can be of interest to newspapers.
- Revenue share: Imooty's revenue model will be based on redirecting readers to newspapers' premium (archived) content, and it will share revenues with papers.

"Cons":
- "I can see how, under the old news paradigm, some newspaper people might feel threatened by the model, because it's possibly taking away from local focus. But then again, these are new times, and people relate to media in different ways," said Lassen.



No editorializing, unlike major online news portals

News featured on the homepage is ranked by 'clicks' for individual newspapers and recency for headlines: there is no editorializing of content or of the RSS feeds by Imooty. But as Lassen said in his OJR interview, "readers now demand concise information that directly addresses their personal "need to know" requirements in an age when people are swamped by news sources." So why not give readers editorial guidance?

"That's the role of the big Internet brands. Google does this, by editorializing their pages," said Lassen.

"Our philosophy is to show the user the way news is from the different publications. We don't editorialize. The purpose is to give a panoramic view of what's actually out there."

News aggregation and Imooty: a resource for news professionals

In that respect, Imooty may be of greater use to news junkies or journalists than to the general public, at least in its first steps.

"You really have to be a news-interested person to be interested in Imooty, but it can be a starting point for ordinary news users as well."

"A lot of people like to have a pre-packaged news product," said Lassen. Although the trend towards news aggregation is increasingly visible, newspapers' role is also to provide their news judgment to sort news in an organized manner.

Future developments

Imooty is working to develop its multimedia offerings, including its mobile platform, podcasts and IPTV. According to Lassen, "this is also the direction newspapers are going in," because text-based content will be less prominent on mobiles. Imooty has launched a mobile site in beta.

According to Lassen, Imooty now has about 15,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views monthly.

Imooty is still in full development and is still in the process of signing on official newspaper partners. This weekend it launched its imooty headline aggregator widget, which can be implemented by news sites that wish to open up their doors to other relevant sources.

Source: Kristoffer Lassen, co-founder Imooty.eu

In the past, reporters used to follow US presidential candidates by car or bus, but today with candidates flying from city to city, coverage of the presidential election becoming too expensive for newspapers, with fares up to $2,000 a trip or $30,000 per person a month.

Papers such as USA Today and the Boston Globe used to cover candidates on a day to day basis, but with newspapers already in financial troubles, they are covering the campaign from television or using wire service reports from AP or Reuters.

"We'd all like to be able to be out there, but given the reality of the costs and other priorities, it just isn't realistic," said Senior Political Editor of USA Today Lee Horwich.

This year the only papers that have full-time correspondents following the candidates are The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and the NY Times. Newsweek is the only publication with a full-time reporter on both Clinton's and Obama's trails.

Traveling campaign reporters say that anyone can watch speeches on YouTube, so instead of repeating raw information, reporters try to track the evolution and growth of candidates by identifying inconsistencies or dishonesty. Bloggers are also taking the reins by posting their thoughts on candidates' speeches and adding information from conference calls with the candidates' press aides.

Los Angeles Times's Mark Z. Barabak, who has been riding political buses since 1984 observed, "What you have lost is the benefit of getting 6, 12, 15 different perspectives. Now you may get three or four. They may be very good."

On one hand, US newspapers are diminishing election coverage. On the other, AP has recently hired 21 additional staff to bolster entertainment news. They say that they will provide what sells and as of now, celebrities are what the people want.
 
US consumer magazines increased ad revenues by 7% last year with those focusing on entertainment and sports personalities did particularly well.

Philip Stone from Follow the Media wrote, "People Magazine and OK! publish first pictures of Jennifer Lopez and twins and pay millions for the privilege while most US newspapers while most US newspapers cannot afford the $1,000 - $2,000 a day to send a reporter on presidential candidate planes."  

Richard Desmond who publishes both OK! and the Daily Express newspaper, noted that advertisers are already "vying for space" in OK!'s special issue on England footballer Wayne Rooney's wedding, which they paid a record $6.4 million for the rights.

Daniel Becker, newly appointed director of Entertainment Content, wrote a memo declaring that AP photographers will not become paparazzi, but instead use their "journalistic talent and unmatched network of  resources to produce high quality, multimedia coverage in an area of growing interest," thus becoming the "trusted authoritative voice on entertainment."

Is the future of quality journalism celebrity gossip?

Sources: The New York Times, Press Gazette, Follow the Media (picture)
 

Editor announces plans to shake up the editing culture in Washington newsroom