Results matching “the right to reveal”

Media outlets have taken the Games as an opportunity to compete for audiences as sites reveal an array of Olympics-focused features. Google announced a series of new tools that were launched for the Beijing Olympic Games this year, such as a virtual 3D tour of the stadiums that uses a combination of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Other features include an Olympics widget that can be downloaded and added to a personalized iGoogle site in order to receive features that provide Olympics coverage, sports headlines, YouTube videos, daily horoscopes, weather forecasts and a Google News feature. Users may also add applications such as a clock or games, similar to those used on social networks like Facebook.
 

The New York Times has a prominent section on the homepage that provides stories, results, schedules, multimedia and an interactive Olympics Tracker that allows you to personalize.

USA Today has a colourful section on the Games, offering everything from stories and results to blogs and Twitter feeds. There is also an "Olympics: Looking back and ahead" section that discusses former games and upcoming games as well as a section with input from fans.

The New Zealand Herald's Olympics coverage entails a section that is easy to navigate, with features like "As our Olympic team a question" and "Weird Olympics" with unusual stories about the events (e.g. stories like "Spanish team defends 'slanted-eye' photo", "China opts for lip-synching in quest for perfect Olympic image").

Numerous newspapers around the globe have launched sites dedicated entirely to the Games, such as Russian gazeta.ru, Irish Independent.ie and Ecuadorian eltelegrafo.com.

Send us examples of your Olympics coverage.

Source: The Telegraph
 

Bruno Thomas, a French journalist working for Auto Plus, was charged with industrial espionage after his magazine published photos of a new Renault model that is to be released in three years and risks being imprisoned for five years, AFP reported.

Laurent Chiapello, Auto Plus's editor-in-chief, said that the matter was "blown out of proportion" and that the journalist was "simply doing his job, that is finding new information to better  inform the reader."

Police raided the Auto Plus Paris offices on Tuesday, taking away computer hard disks and photos. The reporter was then detained for two days by the police.

"Holding Thomas for 48 hours was outrageous, and charging him on five counts is just a ploy by the police and judicial authorities to get him to reveal his sources. Once again, a basic principle of journalism is being flouted," said Reporters Without Borders.

A Renault employee who helped Thomas get the photographs was charged on Friday.

Source: AFP, Reporters Without Borders

Generating - and maintaining - an online audience is the perpetual challenge of news websites. Whereas print readers report spending 16 minutes a day with their dailies, the average nytimes.com reader spends just 68 seconds a day on the site. 

Interactive features may be sites saving grace. USA Today's Candidate Match Game has drawn more than 2.5 million unique visitors since its launch last September, and Senior Designer Juan Thomassie reports the feature can keep readers engaged for five to six minutes.

The Poynter Institute recently interviewed Thomassie on the development and success of the project. What follows is an edited version of the transcript that appears on the Poynter Institute's website.

How did interactivity help to tell the story?

Thomassie: Some candidates had a very high profile and some were not so well-known. The candidate match game was a way to use some issues-related questions and multiple choice answers to help readers get an idea of which was closest to their views.

The presumption was that readers might not be so well-informed about candidates. We just posed them as a Q&A, a blind quiz. Each time you chose your answer, we'd reveal question by question which things matched.

We were surprised that most people who took (that version of) the quiz said, "I had no idea I agreed with this candidate."

How many ideas were on the table?

Thomassie: We actually drew up a few storyboards and kind of played around with the idea of a horse race theme. As you answered the questions, the candidates who you are most like would go farther on the track. We decided that idea was a little too light. It wasn't just a game.

The challenge for us was to find that sweet spot between newsy and informative and fun and interactive. We pulled back from the horse race and used the vertical bars format that we ultimately used.

What were the important talents involved in producing this interactive graphic?

Thomassie: A collaborative effort between the political editor, the producer and myself.

This represented many months of meetings, conceptualization, brainstorming, storyboarding, development of prototypes. As we'd get feedback from prototypes we'd rebuild things -- make significant changes to the model in key points in the process. But each time it got better and was a really useful process.

This is such an investment of resources. How did you let people know that the feature was there?

Thomassie: We promoted it heavily on the USA Today homepage, on the politics homepage and in the newspaper.

Then, thru blogs and word of mouth, it really started to get some play in the media. It steamrolled from there. We saw the match game discussed on a local TV station where they talked about how helpful it was. We saw a discussion on C-SPAN about it. It just caught on in political blogs, news blogs and interactive graphics blogs, and we were a bit surprised by the steady stream of traffic it was generating.

Again, something like this takes so much time. How do you decide what is worth the time it takes to create something like this?

If someone comes to the page, interacts with the graphic, spends time digging for more content -- spending at least 5 or 6 minutes on a page -- it's worth it. We can track that.

What about interactivity for daily publication?

Thomassie: On a daily basis, if it's a breaking news story, then there's a compelling push to do a news graphic. But to determine if it should be interactive, you have to ask if it will be of interest in two weeks or down the road.

With 14 months before the election date; We knew that there would be a long-term interest.

Though it took weeks of development, the results we got from this are a resounding "yes" when we get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, for months and months and months.

Source: Poynter Institute

A quick financial roundup for the NYT and Gannett, two main US newspaper publishers, according to paidcontent.org:

- The New York Times Co.'s online ad revenues grew 25.6% in April, although total operation's revenue was down 2.2% year on year. General ad revenues were down 5.1% over the same period.
- Gannett didn't reveal its online performance, but it said it had increased its unique visitors to 25.5 million, up 10.4% since last year. Unfortunately, Gannett's ad revenues decreased by 10.4% also compared to last year.

Although the growth rate of online revenues seems to be picking up again, these gains still aren't sufficient to compensate for print ad losses at this point.

Source: paidcontent.org

The 2008 Newsroom Barometer gathered the answers of more than 700 editors and senior news executives from 120 countries, and was conducted online in March 2008.

This was a relatively big increase from the 435 senior news executives who answered the Newsroom Barometer last year.

The goal is to conduct a Newsroom Barometer every year, in order to compare and contrast the newspaper industry's trends over a longer period of time.

Here's a quick view of this year's respondents:

Job Title / others:

A near majority of the 713 respondents were editors-in-chief (320), and there were 120 managing editors. All respondents were senior news executives, there were neither journalists nor managers, as was the case in 2006.

Three quarters of respondents were male, underlining a still existent gender gap among top newspaper editorial positions. Circulation at 28% of the surveyed newspapers decreased last year, compared to 39% whose circulation increased. These numbers are both reassuring at a time of widespread doom and gloom reports, but they also reveal the transition print newspapers are going through.

Age:

There were more younger respondents (23.5% under 40) than in 2006, although senior editors (age above 50) still constituted 42% of all respondents. The split is representative of the age range of newsroom editors throughout the world.

Type of newspaper:

Compared to 2006, this year's newspapers were more representative of the industry as a whole, as two thirds of respondents came from regional or local papers, compared to a third from national or international titles.

Print circulation:

Many editors from smaller newspapers participated in this year's survey. Nearly half of respondents worked for papers with a print circulation of less than 50,000 copies. 19% of respondents worked for papers with a circulation superior to 200,000 copies.

Website traffic:

For 66% of respondents, their daily website traffic was below 200,000 unique visitors per day, which is also representative of the world press on the whole. 6% still didn't have a website, compared to 9% last year.

More about methodology

The Newsroom Barometer is a purely online survey through the Zogby website (www.zogby.com). The poll was accessible by invitation only and was conducted in eight languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Japanese). To avoid answers from people who were not senior news executives, a tailored email was sent to editors-in-chief using the World Editors Forum database (www.worldeditorsforum.org), which counts 7,000 senior news executives' emails.

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results

When the Telegraph recently posted a sizable online traffic surge for the month of March, the paper attributed the success to better new stories and successful multimedia strategy.

That may be part of the explanation, but the Telegraph figures are also an example of the imprecise nature of online traffic measurement. According to MediaGuardian, audit certificates published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) reveal that the site switched its internal measurement tool between February and March this year, replacing HBX SiteCatalyst with WebTrends 7.

A source said that the site had been under-reporting its figures for sometime because certain page views were not being recorded. Richard Foan, the ABCe managing director, did not directly comment on the Telegraph's audit but confirmed that a publisher could be under-reporting its traffic if it had not tagged all the pages on its site.

Edward Roussel, the digital editor for the Telegraph Media Group, maintained however that the different measurement system had little effect on traffic figures because "both systems use the same methodology."

"The old measurement system missed some users, as did the new system. But the new system still showed rapid growth in user numbers," Roussel said. "There was leakage on both systems because we weren't able to tag everything with WebTrends during March."

Source: MediaGuardian

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of the Financial Times in the UK.

Click here to view all interviews in this series. Other titles include The New York Times, the Guardian, Fairfax Media, the Hindustan Times, etc. (full list at the bottom of the interview).


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"


- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We see ourselves as a news organization and we're becoming much more agnostic about our distribution channels. We're becoming much more interested in creating relevant information for our readers and much less interested in how it gets to the readers. Pearson, the parent company, clearly is an education company with a print publishing arm and an information division, which includes the FT. At the FT level, we consider ourselves to be a financial news business more than a newspaper. Our mission is to be the gold standard for global business news in print and online - and in any other formats.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

Largely but not completely. 10 years from now - 2014 may be slightly too short a time frame - we will still have printed newspapers, because people like reading  things in print. Newspapers, just like the book, are convenient to read in places you can't do with a computer; but my belief is that a lot of what will be printed will be analysis, comment, analysis and opinion. The actual news will be more or less online or in other more timely formats. In a way the FT will split in two, with FT.com for all the news that's breaking and some immediate reactions and  opinion. The more considered analysis will be almost an Economist-type publication. Maybe it wouldn't have to be broadsheet anymore, it could be tabloid or even magazine format. To put it very crudely, you'd have all the news online, and you'd have 12 pages of Martin Wolf the next day in print, and all the editorials, columnists, features and more.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

There's one thing that's old and one thing that's new. What's old and part of the continuum is that traditional companies are going online. Our journalists are now fully integrated and write online and in print. I'm sure that in 2 years time they'll all be carrying video cameras. We've gone from zero videos website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That's part of the continuum: it's us doing the same thing in different distribution channels.

What's new is the blogosphere, citizen journalists and the idea that anyone - people who are not qualified journalists, either experts in a narrow field or just interested citizens - can start a blog or website and distribute it. For the FT, you would think it's negative in the sense that there's more news and opinion and more competitors. In fact, that's not really true, it almost enhances the position of leading media brands for several reasons. One is we are trusted, people believe the news they read with us. Secondly, we select and edit, which becomes an increasingly crucial function as there is more information out there. The more 'over-informed' people are, the more likely people who want to know what's actually going on will turn to a few sources that tell them what s actually important. That's what professional newspapers do really well.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

I do believe in their increasingly active role of users: very often readers are more informed than us. If you look at an old format like the letters page in the newspaper, the amount of expertise that our readers have, who are often professionals in the City, is just incredible. They know more about it in certain aspects than our journalists. That's why we get CEOs, academics, lawyers, heads of accountancy firms and more writing in to us to say what's actually happening. They can do this online with comments or take part in Q&As, or print their views in the pages of the FT and FT.com. That sort of content is very helpful. We also have a function for any user to comment on the website's stories.

Is it a threat? Sure, to some extent. But as long as it's happening on our site or in the pages of our newspaper, it's been bundled, monitored, checked for quality and therefore is important. We're not going to turn into a place where we just repeat hundreds of readers' letters and have no journalists of our own. It's more of an opportunity for our journalists to become more informed and build contacts among readers. And it's amazing that all these readers are willing to give this information for free.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I don't know. That's a really hard one. I might say it's already past.

There's so much more information out there and it's so much harder for companies to hide information. Take the Northern Rock story, which was broken by BBC journalists, and there was a bank run as a result. It's harder to hide information. The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later - I don't think it works like that anymore. Journalists still have scoops and still break important stories, but it tends to be in a much shorter time frame. It tends to be a single development that they're breaking rather than a long series of connections.

But frankly, newspapers and media organizations are under pressure. It's hard for us to send a journalist or a group of journalists off three months investigating something - and if nothing works that's a shame but nevermind. We don't have resources to let people go off and do that for such a long time. I think The Golden Age of journalists working undercover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don't want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that's more likely. As soon as a tiny thing breaks now, it gets distributed so quickly that it's hard to see a journalist working undercover for a long time and gradually piecing something together without having it go public much earlier in the process.


Stay tuned for more interviews in our series. Among the other titles that have been asked to participate in these interviews are:

- The New York Times - Jonathan Landman (US)
- Financial Times - Dan Bogler (UK)
- Guardian (UK)
- Washington Post - Jim Brady (US)
- Globe & Mail - Ed Greenspon (Canada)
- The Times (UK)
- The Economist (UK)
- Gazeta Wyborcza - Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland)
- Le Monde (France)
- Die Welt (Germany)
- The Hindustan Times - Pankaj Paul (India)
- Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
- JoongAng Ilbo (South Korea)
- The Age / Fairfax - Mike van Niekerk (Australia)
- The Nation - Pana Janviroj (Thailand)
- Punch (Nigeria)
- El Tiempo (Colombia)
- Clarin (Argentina)
- Gulf News - Abdul Hamid Ahmad (UAE)

The Boston Globe has accepted at least 23 applications for buyouts from the newsroom and editorial staffers, according to a memo from editor Martin Baron. The paper has avoided layoffs and has reduced staff through "ordinary departures and frozen positions," reads the memo.

Baron writes that the list of those taking the buyout will not be disclosed "out of respect for employees who prefer not to have their names widely disseminated."

Adam Reilly from the Boston Phoenix concedes that this move is sensitive to the employees, but does not fully consider the readers who "may be wondering which of their favorite writers might be leaving."

Boston Daily has revealed some names: Steve Bailey left the Globe, though not through the buyout, and Jackie MacMullan took the buyout to spend more time with her family. The Daily also speculates that Gordon Edes will move to Yahoo! Sports, and that basketball writer Peter May will also leave.

The next few weeks, the Globe anticipates to internally fill positions that are necessary, giving "new opportunities for staffers," but also creating "some additional uncertainty," writes Baron.

Sources: Poynter Romenesko, Boston Phoenix through Poynter Romenesko, Boston Daily, Editor & Publisher

Two reporters for the United Daily News and one colleague from the China Times were subpoenaed to testify at the Ministry of National Defense tribunal, which was investigating Taiwan Goal, but they chose not to appear in court since they would have been asked to identify their sources for their stories. Thus, Kuomintang lawmakers proposed an amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure that would allow press workers to refuse to release sources of information.

The Taiwan Goal, founded last year, is the now-disbanded government-owned company responsible for purchasing weapons and equipment from abroad. It had signed contracts to "upgrade Lafayette frigates and purchase sophisticated arms from France before the scandal came to light in the run-up to the presidential election on March 22," according to AsiaMedia.

The three reporters believed that freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution, but such protection does not cover immunity to prosecution if reporters withhold their sources of information.

The proposed amendment, which would give that immunity to press workers and other professionals including medical doctors, midwives, priests, and attorneys, will be acted on next week.

Wu Chih-yang, a Kuomintang lawmaker, said "reporters should be protected against intimidation."

 "A few reporters have been held in contempt of court and fined for refusing to reveal their news sources. That goes against freedom of the press upheld in the Constitution," Wu said.

Source: AsiaMedia

A recent survey on newsosaur.blogspot.com revealed that the overwhelming majority of those surveyed preferred at least two editors to ‘vet’ a story before it goes to print.

Of the more than 400 respondents to the online survey as of Mon. evening, 55.2% favored two editors per story, 21.9% advocated three or more editors per story, 20.4% said a single editor was sufficient and a mere 2.5% said reporters didn’t need anyone looking over their shoulders. Clearly, the majority of voters favored multiple editors per story, reported newsosaur.


The question, 'can newspapers afford editors?' again arises as survey results reveal that readers think otherwise. Alan Mutter, a Silicon Valley CEO and former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, questioned the viability of maintaining such a stringent, and costly, editorial process when newspapers are struggling to cut costs and mind the bottom line.

While some readers criticized Mutter’s suggestion that newspapers should reconsider the economic feasibility of sticking to “traditional” methods of producing quality newspaper content at a time when traditional methods are proving too costly, Mutter maintained that he is just the bearer of ‘bad’ news.

“Take aim at the messenger if you like, but please understand that the staggering level of economic inequity is a real and indisputable problem threatening the long-term survival of newspapers as we know (and love) them,” he said.

Source: newsosaur.blogspot.com through Poynter Romanesko