Results matching “on mobile journalism dev”

All reporters at the Journal-Register Co. (JRC) will get video cameras, under an ambitious plan to bring the newspaper into the digital age, the company's 3,100 employees have been told. The company's new CEO John Paton has also told staff that they now work for a 'media company', not a 'newspaper company'. Appropriately enough, he announced the news in a seven-minute slideshow, emailed companywide, the New Haven Independent reports.

"We're not looking to make any cuts," Paton told the Independent. "We need to improve [local coverage]. We don't need to make it worse." The company, which runs 19 daily and 150 other newspapers, including the flagship New Haven Register, filed for bankruptcy last February.

News applications for iPhone have met an undeniable success with French readers, but the task of monetising this through selling content, services and advertising still remains, according to Les Echos.

The director of electronic editions for Libération, Ludovic Blecher, said that the iPhone had revolutionised the consumption of news on mobile platforms. The Libération iPhone app was launched in the autumn, as was that of Le Figaro, and they have been downloaded 400,000 and 600,000 times respectively. "Around 30,000 people open it every day," Blecher said. Figures for Le Monde are even higher: it launched its app in November 2008 and has just reached 1.3 million unique downloads, attracting between 200,000 and 250,000 hits a day.

Journalism.co.uk reports that the website for not on the wires, a digital reporting social enterprise, has now gone live.

The multimedia cooperative of five journalists believe their chances of success and depth of involvement in covering event-based news stories are increased by working in collaboration - individually they are accomplished freelancers with varied areas of expertise.

After months of much hype and speculation, Steve Jobs finally took to the stage to unveil Apple's new highly anticipated tablet computer - the iPad.

With its official introduction at an event in San Francisco yesterday, Steve Jobs has finally laid many rumors about what the electronic device can do to rest, while igniting hopes about the iPad's ability to bring new life to 'old media' and to revamp the e-reader market.
 

 

A study carried out as part of an online survey by the research agency DECODE as part of an international benchmark project of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in 2008, has found that Dutch youth (based on 1,000 people between the ages of 15 to 29) are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper. They do, however, judge news media fairly positively.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study "Youth, news media and civic engagement," are in line with findings of a new study by IBM's Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

From dock connectors to web analytics to guessing the name of this elusive gadget, all speculation will reach its pinnacle when Apple's widely anticipated tablet is finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

The much-hyped iSlate (the name of the actual device has not been confirmed) is rumored to have a sleek 10-inch color display and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to deliver their products with an eye-catching design.
 

Editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger made clear his feelings on paywalls and the growing importance of social media during the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture yesterday, entitled 'Does journalism exist?' The Guardian reproduced the text of the lecture here.

Hugh Cudlipp was an editor at the Daily Mirror from the early 1950s to early 1970s,
a period in which, as Rusbridger pointed out, newspaper editors' key challenge was producing good editorial content, rather than trying to come up with a new business model, which is a top issue confronting all editors now.

The Financial Times (FT) will launch a new mobile app for Blackberry in the first half of this year, and an app for Android is in the works, managing director of FT.com Rob Grimshaw told Journalism.co.uk.

The FT recently launched a series of travel guide iPhone apps. And the paper already has an iPhone app, which has been downloaded 200,000 times, but has rejected charging for the app. "The fact is you only get one hit from that and then after that the revenue stream dries up," Grimshaw said. "We thought it would be much more sensible and favourable to make it part of the subscription model."

The subscription model has been successful for the paper, which now makes more from content revenue than from advertising.

New York Times executives Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive of the company, and Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations, have answered readers' questions about the upcoming paywall. It was announced on Wednesday that the US's premier general-interest paper was to launch a metered payment system in early 2011.

The paper seems to be taking the crucial issue of ease of use seriously, with the executives stressing that "we are determined to make subscribing as smooth and easy as possible" and they hope that the infrastructure of NYTimes.com will "provide our Web users with an uncomplicated, frictionless experience."

Much of the transformation in the newspaper industry is led by the big western players: The New York Times has announced it will charge for content, The Guardian has launched a paid news app for the iPhone, and the Apple tablet is eagerly anticipated.

But these changes affect other parts of the world, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reminds us. "In Egypt, we are also experiencing a seismic media evolution," Tarek Atia writes, in a considered op-ed on the state of the newspaper industry in Egypt and the future of media.

Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger ruled out erecting paywalls around The Guardian's website, expressing optimism about the future of the newspaper, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Speaking as part of the Coventry Conversation series, run by the Coventry University journalism department, he said the newspaper had no plans to put up paywalls, as Rupert Murdoch has planned to do for News International titles. "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things," Rusbridger said. He did agree, though, that it was good that journalism was "trying different things".

Amid all the buzz about the potential to make money from mobile news, news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has become the latest news organisation to launch an iPhone app.

The application also works on the iPod Touch and costs $1.99 from the Apple store.

"It gives access to the global news agency's multimedia content in English, Spanish, Portuguese and German, including breaking world news from wars and conflicts to politics, sport and entertainment, as well as the latest major developments in health, science and technology," AFP said in a statement.

New media skills are becoming key for journalists, as social media such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly used for sourcing information and distributing articles. So in the future, will all journalists need to know how to write code as well, The Guardian's Digital Content Blog asks?

One on level, coding appears lucrative, with former Daily Mail journalist Greg Hadfield founding football news website Soccernet and then selling it for $40 million.

After a natural disaster, some critical needs are evident, such as food, medicine and shelter. But it's easy to forget another vital need: that of information and communication. This helps aid workers to co-ordinate relief efforts, and keeps locals informed about where they can access such relief.

Some good news from Haiti this week, then, is that at least 12 radio stations broadcasting to the Port-au-Prince area and one national broadcaster are back on the air. A 300-watt transmitter that could broadcast almost 50 kilometres around Port-au-Prince is also expected to arrive soon. And the Digicel telecommunications network is also functioning again, and more and more users have been able to send and receive calls, text messages and email.

The international media development organisation Internews is deploying a team of specialists to the affected area. Its brief is to assess both media infrastructure damage and what is needed to help. Staff at Internews are attempting to contact the 41-member network of community radio stations, RAMAK, to assess the state of their infrastructure and broadcasting capabilities.

Greg Hadfield, Telegraph Media Group's head of digital development is to leave the newspaper group after only a year in the role. He made the announcement at the news:rewired event yesterday, organised by Journalism.co.uk. TMG today issued a statement saying: "Greg Hadfield was employed at TMG on a 12-month contract which expired at the end of last week. It was mutually agreed that this would not be renewed."

We're in a society that has moved from scoop to buzz, says Aurèle Lambert, new media consultant, speaking at the WAN-IFRA conference 'Using sports news to optimise your revenues'.

A scoop refers to new and exclusive information, while buzz refers to information that is easily reproduced through viral transmission. We've moved from an economy based on attention to one based on contagion, he says, where information attracts attention and is transmitted to other players. It's important to consider the relevance of new information and its singularity. He suggests finding ways to turn a scoop, which is both relevant and unique, into a buzz, which is relevant but highly visible, and thus can monetise information and create profit. To be different, it's important to show that you're not providing the same information as everyone else.

He distinguishes between two main kinds of bloggers. One is a community, such as Skyblogs, which can create a mass of information and increase a site's visibility. The other could be called star blogs, run by gurus, experts and opinion leaders. These are heavily involved in personal branding, and are used for visibility and loyalty, such as Pierrot Le Foot's blog on Yahoo France.

The buzz keeps growing and growing around tablets - electronic devices with a touch-screen interface, e-reader capabilities, as well as web browsing among others.

Rumors about Apple's tablet, or the iSlate, as it is now being called, have been gaining momentum as the elusive and innovative device that is supposed to look like a bigger version of Apple's iPhone, prepares to launch early this year.

Several other big high-tech players have also lined up to present their own versions of the slate. Just this last Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled the Hewlett-Packard yet to be named tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

News on your mobile phone is becoming ever more popular in the west, with The Guardian and The Daily Mirror the latest newspapers to release iPhone apps. But as The Guardian's Digital Content blog reminds us, mobile phones have been an important tool in news distribution in Africa for some time.

Rather than using bandwidth-hungry applications, though, text messages are used to disseminate news headlines, in a broadcast model that mirrors the widespread use of radio as a news medium on the continent. Newspapers are a less important news source outside urban areas, and access to the internet is not yet widespread.

As the debate between Google and news publishers rages on, an opinion piece in The New York Review of Books has proposed a different solution: that Google should fund a new journalism venture.

A variety of new ventures have been established in response to the tough times the newspaper industry faces. These include non-profit news publications such as the Chicago News Cooperative, California Watch and the Texas Observer. Other organisations including ProPublica, Spot.us and The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism receive funding from community or philanthropic sources, and use the money to support investigative or public-interest reporting.

Print newspaper circulation is down across the U.S., Editor and Publisher reports, in an article that examines reasons for, and responses to, the fall.

According to the October figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, weekday circulation is down just over 10% year-on-year, the first drop to reach double digits. Some newspapers suffered falls double that size. Sunday circulation is also down 7%.

The newest version of the Telegraph iPhone app allows users to contribute breaking stories or average everyday happenings to telegraph.co.uk.