Results matching “moves to the w”

What happens when the image is the story? When you pick a story to pull from the image - rather than sort through a photo file to find one fitting the story?

It sounds, "exactly upside down," which is exactly how Brian Storm, founder of 2005 start-up MediaStorm, describes their business model for the production and distribution of photojournalism.

"They take still images, motion-picture and video footage, and audio tape, seek out the best story within that material, and then create a narrative through cutting and editing, adding voices and music," reports the Wall Street Journal. "[It's] something like a documentary movie, a TV segment, a book that talks, or a magazine article that moves."

The multi-media production company, which gets images from individual photographers as well as archives and partners like the National Geographic Society and Reuters, has proved highly successful. Of the 22 stories available on their website, many are award-winning. Among others, "Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War" and "Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster" have received numerous accolades from the news community.

"MediaStorm's stories are not predictable; none of them preach. In this way, its aesthetic is very old fashioned, mainstream, almost apolitical," said Mary Panzer, of the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to production, MediaStorm also offers workshops to train journalists in multi-media techniques, equipment and software.

Source: Wall Street Journal

At a time when any local or national news outlet can potentially become an international online brand, and as newsrooms adapt to a 24-hour news cycle, editors can learn from The New York Times' most recent attempt to 'kill' both birds with one stone.

Last week, top execs from The Times and the International Herald Tribune announced plans to merge iht.com and nytimes.com into a co-branded international section, in order to increase both sites' reach and appeal to international advertisers.

In this two-part series, the Weblog spoke to Jim Roberts, Digital Editor at The New York Times, and Martin Gottlieb, who was appointed to the newly created position of Editor, Global Edition.

Through these moves, The Times intends to accomplish at least four ostensible goals:

Part 1:
- Build an outpost for its Continuous News Desk in Paris, and eventually Hong Kong.
- Integrate operations, streamline some resources by increasing efficiency and avoiding overlap.

Part 2:
- Reinforce its international reach and further compete against the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.
- Use the strength of NYT's online brand while safeguarding the IHT's popular print brand name.

IHT: an outpost for the Times' continuous news

Although the proposed changes are currently undergoing a consultation process with the IHT's works council, as required by French law, the process of integration of both papers began ever since the NYT acquired full control of the IHT in 2003, and has accelerated in past months.

In Feb., NYT executive editor Bill Keller had already announced plans to integrate operations and develop an "organic, global, 24-hour news operation," in order "to create a Continuous News outpost in Paris."

In May, the IHT dropped its 142-year-old logo from its nameplate to replace it with the phrase "The Global Edition of the New York Times."

"That says, we are one, and we are," although both arms are managed separately, said Jim Roberts, digital editor at The Times.

Video: Roberts talks about the 'integration' of both newspapers. Footage was collected during an interview at the 15th World Editors Forum in Sweden.


Thanks to this outpost and the six-hour time difference, the NYT is now able to upload content to its site nearly 24 hours a day (from about 6am to 1am, New York time). The paper eventually hopes to establish a similar outpost at the IHT's Asian headquarters in Hong Kong in the next six months.

The creation of these outposts does not mean that the IHT is becoming a full-blown Paris bureau for The Times. "We have a Paris bureau," said Roberts, "and the newsroom of the IHT still has a print edition and right now they still have a website."

Integration, streamlining resources: evolution, no revolution

Since all proposed changes are undergoing a consultation process, editors couldn't give any firm preview of how workflows could be affected.

In the past, there has been "very regular contact between individual desks at the Times and corresponding desks at the IHT," said Martin Gottlieb, newly appointed editor of the Global edition. Many IHT editors come from The Times, regularly do edits on NYT pieces, and this past year IHT-written articles have appeared on nytimes.com with no distinctive byline.

However, there is no formal process of exchange between both newsrooms, and "There have been a couple of occasions when we've had IHT and NYT reporters covering the same thing," said Roberts.

The appointment of Gottlieb as editor of the Global Edition - note, no mention of the IHT in his title - is significant in that respect. In addition to fulfilling the role of editor of the paper, his mission will be to ensure that staff understands both papers are "two parts of one news-gathering operation, that should work in unison as much as possible in delivering the news 24 hours a day seven days a week," said Gottlieb.

A series of new editorial appointments at the IHT will be the symbols of this top-down integration. "There will be people coordinating the work of both staffs to, pretty much, make them as much as possible act as one staff," said Gottlieb.

For example, Alison Smale, who becomes European editor of the global newsroom, will be responsible for "coordinating the work of all NYT and IHT reporters in the region from the IHT newsroom in Paris," said the memo. To oversee the process, The Times also named Alan Flippen "Editor, Newsroom Organization."

It seems too early to say whether the planned reforms will lead to radical changes in workflows or content. Evolution, not revolution, said Roberts.

Currently, an IHT reporter based in Hong Kong might build upon a Times' story about the rise of airline fuel prices by interviewing Asian carriers, whose input might not have been as relevant to the core readership of the Times in the US. Likewise, an IHT story published in the Times might be fine-tuned to be more pertinent to the American audience (see the example of Der Spiegel in Part 2, looking at different newspaper approaches towards international editions).

Future workflows will likely build upon these current processes, rather than start from scratch. "It's continuing synergies that are taking place and maximizing them and regularizing them," said Gottlieb.

The planned changes can also be seen as an attempt to streamline resources - terminology often equivocated with cost cuts and layoffs. But according to Gottlieb, there are no planned newsroom layoffs at this point (this is subject to change during the next six months). It is possible that an online merger of iht.com and nytimes.com could lead to redundancies for some technical Web production positions.


Editors couldn't comment on any upcoming changes concerning the IHT's planned print redesign.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will examine The Times' international branding strategy, and how newspapers can grow a previously inaccessible international readership.


Source: New York Times - Media Bistro - Jim Roberts, Digital Editor The New York Times - Martin Gottlieb, Editor, Global Edition

Electronic paper technology, one of the newspaper industry's most exciting innovations, could be available to newspapers as early as 2009. Ryosuke Kuwata, vice president of E Ink Corp's Asia Pacific region, revealed today in an interview that developers are getting close to unveiling the technology.

According to Kuwata, newspaper companies have made "significant moves over the past year" toward investing in the electronic newspaper. The first commercial e-paper, he says, will be tested toward the end of 2008 and launched sometime in the second half of 2009.  

Kuwata says US newspaper companies have been ahead of the game, pursuing electronic newspaper technology before Japanese companies. European papers, he says, have "just began to move."

Click here to read about electronic paper and how it could revolutionize the newspaper industry.

Source: TechOn.com through I Want Media

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

Guardian News and Media (GNM) officially announced today that it will integrate its print and online platforms for News, Business and Sport journalism once it moves into its new premises at Kings Place, London, at the end of the year.

Journalists from those sections will work for the company's three platforms (The Observer, daily Guardian and guardian.co.uk) and will produce text, audio and video.

As gathered during the World Editors Forum study tour in the UK and during our talks with head of editorial development Neil McIntosh, the Guardian's integration was planned collaboratively in the newsroom, as opposed to a top-down model.

Said Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian and Editor-in-Chief of GNM:

"Our model for integrated working has been designed through a long period of collaboration and consultation. More than two dozen editors from across the three platforms have worked together to design the ways in which they want to collaborate in the future.  It's very important that desk editors themselves have taken the lead: the last thing we wanted to do was impose a model from above.

As has often been the case for other cases of newsroom integration (Fairfax in Australia, the Daily Telegraph in the UK, The New York Times in the US and many more), the Guardian's move to a new building - and thus to rethink its newsroom design - coincides with the formal integration process.

"The move to a new building is the obvious moment to re-arrange the way we work in a way which more closely reflects the patterns of how people read and react to news," said Rusbridger.

Also discussed with McIntosh, the newsroom will redesign will include 'pods', which will group specialists around specific topics. For example, on the International News desk, pods will group reporters by time zones and regions.

The good news is that the Guardian's integration isn't synonymous with layoffs (the company had previously said this could happen) - at least for the time being.

"We've done this without any reduction in headcount.  It is important that news organisations retain quality and trust while being at the forefront of the digital revolution," he added.

Source: Guardian press release

Early February, The Capital Times announced that would reduce its print to and shift most of its content to its website. On Saturday, the paper published its final printed edition with the headline "Beam Us Up."

WISC-TV reported that The Capital Times is down to a daily circulation of 17,000.

"(The circulation decline) really brought into focus for us a conversation about irrelevancy. How can we still be relevant if we have so few printed copies, particularly in a market of this size," said editor Paul Fanlund.

Its free publication will print twice weekly distributed within the Wisconsin State Journal with about 48 pages of in-depth stories, analysis, and commentary on Wednesdays with a circulation of about 80,000 and a revamped Rhythm arts and entertainment insert on Thursdays, with a distribution of at least 115,000.

"The sad part is being able to hold that newspaper in your hand, which for me, is going to be a big loss, personally," said Dave Zweifel, the newspaper's editor emeritus.

The Capital Times, printing since December 13, 1917, is believed to be the first daily newspaper to "make this kind of a transition to the Web," according to WISC-TV. "If it's successful, it's likely other struggling papers will follow suit."

For more information, visit our partner blog SFN.

Source: WISC-TV, Madison.com

Paul Bradshaw of The Online Journalism Blog had posited that the editorial process and workflows must change with the online world, following the "news diamond," which is based on speed and depth.

Here's how a news site implemented this process in practice.

Editor of NME.com, a news publication about the music industry, David Moynihan, said his own team has worked towards adopting the news diamond, describing his work as "a buzzing cross-platform environment that mirrors [Bradshaw's] theories."

Though he writes that print staff is trying to be more involved with web publishing, as a web editor, Moynihan finds "that the change in processes, skill sets and attitude is still much too slow. The theories abound, but the practice is much more sluggish!"

Moynihan gives an example of how the news diamond was applied, not only to NME's print magazine, but online as well: The Raconteurs rush-released a new album without the typical promotional and marketing moves, including reviews.  "It almost makes journalism redundant," Moynihan writes. "Fan can simply listen to the album online at legal Mp3 download sites - why do they need NME?

Said Moynihan: "Except they do, it turns out. To mark the release of the album we have done all of the following on NME.com and the traffic speaks volumes about users' needs:

       1. Daily news stories in the run up to the release, covering a number of angles from album artwork, to release details to lyrics.
       2. A Photo Gallery of the band to mark the release.
       3. An instant review online, written by our writers in 'blog' format during their first listen. The full in-depth review and a feature about the unusual method of release will be in (yep, you guessed it) NME magazine, out this week.
       4. Updated our Artist page.
       5. Streamed the album online with our radio media player.
       6. Video to go online as soon as it's released"."

Source: Online Journalism Blog (photo)
 

Type up to five keywords or phrases in Google's new Google Trends's search box and see how those topics compare to one another in terms of how often they are searched within Google by region, year, and language.

The benefit of Google Trends is to show which keywords people are using to search for sites. This allows you to optimize your site in search results by finding the terms you need to emphasize in your site's content and navigation design.

Google has also developed a "search within a search" tool that lets users stay on Google's webpage while browsing through another site. For example, one can type in "The New York Times" and search for Times's articles on Eliot Spitzer while still on the Google site. Though this feature helps users save steps and arguably offers a better search engine, it detracts advertising revenue from those sites. Futhermore, Google has ads from competitors on the results page, potentially drawing users to those sites instead.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, a former executive with the electronics retailer Crutchfield, now an Internet Consultant is skeptical about the new feature because it diminishes a Web publisher's role in helping users find potentially useful content. "You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content," he said. "This moves you further out of the loop."

James Spanfeller, Chief Executive of Forbes.com, "takes his hat off to Google." He said, "Google is probably trying to get additional usage out of their [name-brand publisher's] product and monetize those page views. Not to be cavalier about it, but sites like The Post and Forbes, which have strong enough brand names, won't lose more than a very small percentage of people who will go to other sites."

Google only has this feature for a handful of sites, and they have the option of turning it off but may not be able to reverse that decision.

Source: OJR, The New York Times through I Want Media

Bild, the most read daily tabloid in Europe, is officially moving from Hamburg to Berlin as of March 21, relocating a total of 500 employees. After World War II, most media moved to Hamburg, but Berlin regained its status as capital in 1999. Bild's relocation will supposedly initiate a movement of media outlets to the capital, though the weekly Der Spiegel is still located in Hamburg.

Source: Elmundo.es (in Spanish) through IFRA Executive News Service

Dow Jones & Co, recently bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, will no longer carry news from the Associated Press after 40 years because they failed to negotiate a price.

"We did not believe we were being adequately compensated for the use of our content on DJ Newswires," AP Chief Revenue Officer Tom Brettingen said. "We weren't able to resolve that with DJ, so we're going our separate ways."

The negotiations had been going on for over a year and the termination of the agreement also results in an end of sharing offices and close integration.

Dow Jones Newswires will now distribute general and political news from France-Presse, a French news service, and will also expand editorial staff. The company said the moves were "part of Dow Jones's broader strategy to invest in its global financial news operations."

Nonetheless, Dow Jones's Wall Street Journal and Factiva online news archive will still run AP news.

Source: Reuters.com

Including video into print journalism is a hot topic, and the attendees of the Digital News Affairs conference held on March 3 and 4 in Brussels believe that it is a revolution that will challenge traditional journalism techniques whether or not people accept it. Journalists from the European Journalism Center wrote an in-depth analysis of the different issues presented at the conference.

Michael Rosenblum, a video journalist pioneer, remarked in his keynote speech that technology is "irresistible and deadly" and "if you don't get the technology you will die."

"The moment Jacob Perkins invented the refrigerator, the ice business was over," he said. "And all the crying about the quality of 'real pond ice' wasn't going to change it. ... It was over in an instant."

One of the most pressing issues is finding the best means to integrate videos into existing news stories to serve both readers' and publishers' interests. But newspaper editors need to be sure that the videos don't imitate that of broadcasters.

In a presentation, Edward Roussel, a digital editor for the Telegraph Media Group, outlined strategies that make The Daily Telegraph one of the forerunners for implementing video onto its website:
- holding editors responsible for their section of the website
- financially compensating editors for a job well done
- assigning breaking news a "story owner" who plans, commissions, and monitors each story across all platforms
- a tight 4 hour schedule to handle breaking news

Though camera equipment and video-editing software are becoming cheaper and more available, print journalism will not die partly because of money-saving developments in the printing process, according to Reiner Mittelbach, CEO of IFRA.

He noted that "print-based companies do need to evolve into multi-pronged content providers" and that ""strategies must be interactive, converged, networked and personalized as consumption moves from push to pull."

Source: EJC through IFRA

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin has reduced its print circulation to twice-weekly, choosing to shift much of its content to its site, Madison.com.

In its new format, The Capital Times will be distributed to homes on Wednesdays in tandem with its publishing partner The Wisconsin State Journal, and will also be available for free in city newstands. The Times has also acquired an arts and entertainment tabloid that will be distributed on Thursday.

With the move to the web, The Capital Times will have a circulation of more than 80,000 compared to its current circulation of 17,000.

"Moving our resources to the Web is the wave of the future," editor Dave Zweifel said. "Putting the full force our newsroom on the site will extend the reach and relevance of The Capital Times for years and years to come."

Madison was one of the last American cities of its size (population approximately 200,000 in July 2006) to retain two daily newspapers. The paper plans to retain a staff of 40 to 45 ; however, according to Capital Times publisher Clayton Frink, job cuts of up to 40 employees are likely.

Sources : E-Media Tidbits, Fading to Black through IFRA Executive News Service, Wisconsin State Journal, City-Data.com