Results matching “debate.php/11/the page 3 debate”

Under house arrest in England, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gave a long interview to Rolling Stone, talking about the future of journalism and the "battle" he engaged against the New York Times.

"Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?". Felix Salmon on his Reuters' blog reflects on the debate that was sparked by the New York Times's public editor Arthur Brisbane.

With 120 participants from across the Arab world and beyond, the three-day 'Forum for Media Freedom Defenders in the Arab World' kicked-off on Monday in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The Forum was organised by the Amman-based Center for Defending Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ), an organisation concerned with protecting Jordanian and Arab journalists and their liberties and rights, in addition to developing the Arab media sector. The event has been funded by The Royal Norwegian Embassy in Amman.

During the first two days, the Forum has conducted open discussion sessions on the role played by the media during the uprisings in the Arab world. The goal is to identify the challenges facing the Arab media and discuss how to create a better future for freedom of expression in the region. The last day of the Forum will be a closed workshop session where participants will form working groups to discuss how to "develop strategies and plans to assist in institutionalising mechanisms of defending media freedom in the Arab world".

Rebekah Brook's resignation from her post as News International Chief topped headlines today. The Guardian posted her resignation letter, where she said her desire to remain part of the company has made her the focal point of the debate and is "detracting attention from our honest endeavours to fix the problems."

A college journalist created SoundNote, an iPad app for recording interviews. Poynter interviewed David Estes, the student behind the invention. The app allows interviewers to sync their notes to the auditory recording. Later, they can search for a word and then listen to that point in the interview.

Google+ users top 10 million, reported ReadWriteWeb. Google CEO Larry Page announced that 1 billion items a day are being shared on the new social network and Google's gross revenue surpassed investor expectations.

Ken Doctor debunks the "myths of Murdoch". On his blog, he explains why the NoW scandal will not be Murdoch's demise and why the tabloid's closure will eventually have an impact on U.S. operations.

Owni.eu has conceived the Old Media and New Media distinction in a new way: an ecosystem. The extended metaphor categorizes information consumption into a food web. It shows that no media organisation is uniquely a producer or consumer of information, but participates in both to flourish.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

Privacy injunctions and super injunctions have made the front-pages of UK newspapers in the last few days.

Through a privacy injunction, a court prevents the news media from reporting on some information or details of a story. As the BBC explained, a super-injunction stops anyone publishing information about the applicant, which is said to be confidential or private - but also prevents anyone from reporting that the injunction itself even exists.

As a Media Laws' article explained, the "super-injunction" has been widely discussed in the UK since late 2009 when the oil-trading firm Trafigura wanted to restrict the Guardian from publishing a report relating to the waste dumping scandal in Cote d'Ivoire. 

US President Obama has given a statement confirming the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, killed by US Special Forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as the BBC News reported (you can find the video here).

The way that the news of such a dramatic, sudden development spread around the world provides an interesting impression of today's news landscape.

Unsurprisingly, before Obama's official announcement on TV, the news had already hit Twitter.

Reflecting the fact that Facebook is becoming an increasingly essential tool for news organisations, Facebook has launched a new page specifically for journalist: Journalists on Facebook.

The aim of the page - announced a note - is to serve as an ongoing resource for the growing number of reporters using Facebook to find sources, interact with readers, and advance stories. "Since we first launched these initiatives at the beginning of 2010," it claimed, "the average media organization has seen a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook."

"The Page will provide journalists with best practices for integrating the latest Facebook products with their work and connecting with the Facebook audience of more than 500 million people", it announced. 

It's April Fools' Day today and Journalism.co.uk reported hoax headlines from the UK media morning news.

EJC's Magazine reported on the curse of yellow journalism in Pakistan. "The rise of sensationalist media and yellow journalism in Pakistan has led to the emergence of a debate in various circles in the country about the accountability of the media and the journalistic profession", the article said.

Trinity Mirror has launched a premium royal wedding app featuring content from monarchy experts, NewMediaAge reported. The app, called Wills and Kate: A Royal Love Story, costs £1.19 to download and it features commentary by royal family expert James Whitaker and details the progress of Prince William and Kate Middleton's relationship.

Zimbabwe has a new newspaper.  The Mail has made its way to the streets, reported The Guardian.  The paper is apolitical, but rumors say that a political party financed it.  It is the country's 5th newspaper.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service

Social media and new technologies can be without doubt an important tool for politicians and governments to create a direct relationship with the public. Using Facebook, YouTube or even creating a personal blog to go direct to the people could be a step towards defeating the sense of distance people feel towards politics.

But could this turn out to be counterproductive for journalism?

Italian website LSDI raises these questions regarding the case of Matteo Renzi,  mayor of Florence.

"Facebook isn't going away, neither is Twitter, nor Tumblr. No offense to Tumblr but in a perfect world, we wouldn't have any of these platforms. In a perfect world everyone would have their own piece of the web that they own entirely".

So wrote Anthony De Rosa, Proposition Leader at Reuters Media, in January.  

"We live in a world of Digital Feudalism," he continued. "The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land."

"We know women write. We know women read."

By no means news in itself, this is a worthy, if blatantly self-evident, starting point to attempt to understand--as VIDA does in its statistical analysis of gender disparity in journalism--why it's now 2011 and there is still a gaping lack of women in the upper editorial ranks of such estimable publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and The Atlantic, as further explored by Elissa Strauss on her blog The Sisterhood as featured on Forward weekly newspaper.
 
According to VIDA's study, as corroborated by Strauss, to follow is a breakdown of gender representation in bylines at the aforementioned publications for 2010:

27 percent at The New Yorker
16 percent at The New Republic
15 percent at The New York Review of Books
21 percent Harper's Magazine
26 percent at The Atlantic
 
That's less than a quarter of the bylines from last year!

Freedom of speech is a basic principle on which democracy depends. But the right to say anything you want can teeter-totter between a sharp nod of agreement from some--with the underlying hope that people will use their best judgment in paying it heed or not--and a slow, quizzical shake of the head from others that suggests "I'd like to say yes, but ... some things are better left unsaid."  

NPR is of both minds, and currently struggling to strike the balance. To serve a broader interpretation of the U.S.'s first amendment, the radio news organisation is allowing more liberal use of language and tone on its Facebook page. American Journalism Review writes that in this forum, conversations tend to be more casual and offhand than on the official website. Rather than adhering to polite dialogue in the comment thread, "our Facebook users are snarky and swear like sailors" says Andy Carvin, NPR's senior strategist.

As for the more reluctant interpretation of free speech, maintaining civil dialogue is the priority, one that is contributive in nature with the intention of rounding out a story. NPR has been instituting tighter guidelines for its website, npr.org, since last October in response to what the American Journalism Review calls "barrages of inflammatory posts by trolls and spammers" that pollute the radio's discussion board. 

Many equate the invention of the Internet to the dawn of communication itself, and while this is largely inaccurate--human beings have been communicating ever since carving petroglyphs in the Stone Age--it has greatly enhanced our means of communicating, via digital networks that span the globe.

As applied to news making, the Internet, and more specifically accompanying social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, have enabled journalists to circumvent traditional barriers of communication to share what's happening in blocked off and censored environments. This is currently going on in Egypt with the help of satellite phones, reports Mashable.

Beyond the debate of whether social media is inspiring a social revolution (something aptly discounted in a recent article by Malcom Gladwell for The New Yorker), the heart of the matter for the news industry is this: advanced communication technologies that are linked to the Internet have created a gateway for public access to international news through journalists reporting on real-time events from across state borders and often embedded in communities of interest. This is what is happening in Egypt right now despite Mubarak's attempts to block access.   

The UK government's libel reform bill, anticipated in March, has sparked considerable debate about the impact that libel law (and reform) have on the public. The public's interest and ease of access to justice were the focus of the event "Libel Reform: in the public's interest?", held on January 11th by the Media Standards Trust together with Gray's Inn and INFORRM, the International Forum for Responsible Media. 
Chaired by the lawyer Helena Kennedy, the panel discussed the affordability of libel claims, the difference between individual bloggers and large media organisations and whether libel is too "claimant friendly", as well as standards in journalism and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. 

A newspaper in Maine is going to set up an "Intense Debate" online moderation system after online comments were violated a few days ago. Damon Kiesow, in an article on Poynter yesterday, states that the Portland Press Herald  website has re-enabled comments after they were shut down for a little less than two days.  The new comment section will have "newly installed moderation tools," according to the article.  Comments were disabled on Tuesday after Richard Connor, publisher of the site, said there were "vile, crude, insensitive, and vicious postings" on the Web site, which affected pressherald.com and the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal sites. 

Connor said the idea to shut down comments took "months of careful consideration" and was to protect readers from hurtful and vulgar comments. "We halted commenting for about 24 hours as we made the switch," said Connor to Nieman Journalism Lab. "We believe we will find a system that will correct 80 to 90 percent of the problems that can result from a totally open commenting system which we had."  Find out how other publications deal with online comments here.
 
In a letter on the site by Connor posted Thursday, he said comments would come back when contributors were able to become accountable for what they post.  A note on the site's Facebook page says, "The Portland Press Herald has ended a temporary suspension of online commenting."  The page also adds that comments will be accepted under a new system and will try to keep readers "on (their) toes" while commenting.            

How should news organizations respond to criticism by readers through social media?  According to the Guardian's Greenslade blog, the Washington Post has told journalists not to argue with readers through Twitter.  A memo was passed around to the Washington Post staff which said that "even as we encourage everyone in the newsroom to embrace social media and relevant tools, it is absolutely vital to remember that the purpose of these Post-branded accounts is to use them as a platform to promote news, bring in user generated content and increase audience engagement with Post content," states the blog.  The memo was distributed after the Post put up a controversial article by an "anti-gay activist."
 
The piece, which came out after the large number of teenage suicides, implied that homosexuality is a mental heath issue and this caused a gay activist group to complain on Twitter.  The Post staff then defended their publication to these tweeters.  "We sometimes engage them (the readers) in a private verbal conversation, but once we enter a debate personally through social media, this would be equivalent to allowing a reader to write a letter to the editor-and then publishing a rebuttal by the reporter," the memo said, "It's something we don't do."  

• - The paid website costs £1 a day to access or £2 a week (about £8.30 a month)
• - The iPad app is £9.99 a month. 
• - The print paper is sold for £8.20 a week or about £35 a month. 

The 17th World Editors Forum will take place this year in Hamburg, Germany from 6-8 October, focusing on mobile news distribution and new content platforms, content monetization, multimedia newsrooms and new media training, social networks and how to work with Google News.

Highlights include:

Paul Steiger, editor of ProPublica, will give a keynote speech on new ways to finance quality journalism. ProPublica, founded in 2007 with a large donation from the Sandler Foundation, is the largest investigative journalism outlet in the US and has been an inspiration to many others. Focusing on high quality journalism, stories which "shine a spotlight on abuse or power of failure to uphold the public interest," ProPublica offers its stories at no cost to news organisations, including the chance to cooperate in the later stages of reporting. A collaboration with the New York Times on hospitals in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina led to a Pulitzer Prize for ProPublica journalist Sheri Fink in April of this year.

ProPublica received a $1.01 million grant from the Knight Foundation in mid-2009 to help with its mission to create a sustainable business model. Going nonprofit is clearly not an option for all news outlets, but much debate has focused on whether donations and foundations could fund more public interest journalism than they currently do.

Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times Company, will also give a keynote speech where she will share details about the paper's upcoming paywall. In January 2010, The New York Times announced that it was to implement a metered payment model on its website in January 2011. Arguably a highly significant step for the news industry, given the paper's standing and its huge number of unique visitors to its impressive multimedia-filled website, it may well become a model for other papers if it is deemed successful.

The New York Times' proposed payment system - a set number of free articles per month for each reader before being asked to pay, is a less extreme paywall compared to the Times of London, for example, which will not let anybody past its home page without a subscription. Which model will prove effective in terms of promoting reader loyalty and boosting revenue?

At a time when the fragility of the print medium has been debated at length, Editor of Die Zeit, Giovanni di Lorenzo, will speak about "Why I believe in print." It would seem he has good reason to believe in the medium, as the German weekly has seen substantial subscriber growth over the last seven years.

Described by top newspaper designer Mario Garcia (who oversaw the paper's redesign) as possibly "the best existing example of the printed newspaper of the future," Die Zeit has won several prestigious awards from the Society of News Design. Its analysis and in-depth pieces, largely focused on politics and public affairs have given it a reputation for quality and seriousness. What can editors of daily papers learn from the experience of a weekly? In this age of immediacy of news, does a weekly review-style publication make sense?

If anyone wants a break from talking about the newspaper industry, the World Editors Forum offers participants the chance to attend a session with Nobel Prize winning author and playwright Günter Grass. Born to Polish-German parents in Danzig-Langfuhr in 1927, Grass fought in and was captured during the Second World War, eventually settling in Berlin as an artist and writer.

His best-known novel, The Tin Drum, was published in 1959. He has won many awards for his fiction, which is always imbued with social and political commentary, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, shortly after the publication of My Century (Mein Jahrhundert.) It is this work, an account of the 20th century told through personal experiences of many different characters, which he will speak about at the Forum.

According to the Greenslade Blog in The Guardian, journalists who work for the Miami Herald are not happy with the newspaper's "promiscuous use of tweets in its print edition stories."

So far, 23 staff members have signed a complaint and put it on the newsroom's memo board about others over-use and mis-use of Twitter.

For example, last month, there was a story about a 15-year-old girl and her mother, who were killed by the daughter's older boyfriend.  The story included a quote from Twitter, which said, "there was absolutely nothing good that could have possibly come from this relationship."

  

Much media coverage has been recently devoted to so-called 'content farms' such as Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com. The goal of these companies is to produce vast amounts of content on topics that readers have been searching for that will attract large numbers of readers, and they have been described at 'robotic' 'sweatshops' or 'factories' that produce work that critics insist is not journalism.

These content networks use an algorithm to study and analyse web searches and behaviour to identify what is popular and what gaps in coverage might exist, and it then commission their networks of freelancers to write on these topics. Demand Media, the most prolific, publishes its content on properties including eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.com and Cracked.com, among others.

Executive VP Steven Kydd described Demand's output as "service journalism, or sidebar content" in a speech at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in April, explaining that it does not hope to compare to serious investigative journalism. Demand Media freelancer Andria Krewson explained on ReadWriteWeb that "The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now." She added, "You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement."

Demand Media publishes about 7,000 articles a day, and the company's chief revenue officer Joanne Bradford told AdAge that over 50 million unique visitors per day see Demand content on its top site eHow.com. She insisted that every article is vetted and fact-checked, with 1,000 copy editors. CMO Dave Panos told AdAge that each piece of content is touched by "11 qualified professionals."

As well as filling its own sites with content, Demand Media supplies articles for others, including USA Today's travel section. In April the Travel Tips section of the newspaper's site was launched with about 4,000 items from Demand Media's freelance writers. Demand Media supplies the content and sells keyword advertising, USA Today is selling display ad inventory and the two are splitting the revenue, AdAge reported at the time. USA Today travel journalists still produce more in-depth, expert articles, but these are supplemented by those provided by Demand. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also uses Demand Media, but only for a story a week.

Associated Content, which was acquired in May by Yahoo!, produces around 1,500 pieces of content a day. Articles from AC contributors, including (according to the AC blog) "compelling personal stories and expert insights" are appearing throughout the Yahoo! network of sites.

A less well-known site is Suite101, a publishing platform that manages to product 500 new pieces of content per day on niche topics, focusing on beginners articles on thousands of topics. According to ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, who spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger, it currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites, with 24 million unique vistors per month going to the English language site. Berger told ReadWriteWeb that he did not see Suite101 as a competitor to traditional journalism, but rather as competing with "non-fiction publishing." Its articles answer users' questions about practical matters in their lives, rather than providing them with news. 

Giving the audience what it wants, and fast

The existence and swift growth of such sites has provoked much debate about what they mean for the future of journalism. The first issue is that of giving the audience the content that it wants: the Internet has made this far easier to do, but is it something that news organisations should be considering? As Nieman Lab recently pointed out, in any other industry, offering the customer what they wanted this would be an approach that no one would question. But in the news industry, the idea that the editors know best has always prevailed. Providing news is a public service, and only trained professionals are capable of deciding what is most important.

This is undoubtedly a valid principle, and the experience that comes with working in the news industry makes an editor's opinion extremely valuable. However, at news organisations there have always been concessions to giving the audience what they want. For many, that is what sells papers, and editors are fully aware of the necessity to sell papers.

Online it has finally become possible to track what readers actually read. And with news being effectively sold in micro-form, even if not directly, there is clearly an enhanced motivation to give readers what they really want to read. Who knows how many articles a print newspaper buyer reads and how many they discard? Now that it is possible to tell what people are reading, is it surprising that publishers want to give them more of this?

Clearly, just spewing out stories about Lindsey Lohan because they get a lot of hits is not an editorially ethical decision. But as Nieman Lab's Laura McGann points out, what the public wants is not always junk. She highlighted a Pew Research Center study that showed that the public's interest in coverage of the Gulf oil leak remained relatively high even when the amount of coverage dropped significantly in early-mid July. The same study reported that many people believed that news organizations were giving too much coverage to stories about Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James, however. 

It is not just 'content farms' that have come under criticism for looking at what readers want to read. In a recent article about Yahoo's blog 'The Upshot,' the New York Times discussed how the top-down editorial model was being 'inverted,' with reporters looking at search statistics to help decide what to cover. As the NYT noted, the Yahoo blog is focused on news rather than the 'how-to' topics that Demand Media and others specialize in. Editors at the Upshot were clear however that the information from analyzing search data is supplementary and does not "lead Yahoo content."

The shifting relationship between content creation and SEO

A related concern, as recently highlighted by the Financial Times, is that Google's algorithm is beginning to have a significant effect on content that is produced. In the quest to attract large numbers of readers, content-creators are not only looking at what readers want but at what appears high in search engine results.

Obviously news organisations all use search engine optimization to a certain extent, and it makes sense that if you have good content you should make it easily findable by your audience. But ideally content should come first, and SEO after, and the concern is that SEO, in particular how to manipulate the Google algorithm, is being prioritized over the content itself.

Low-paid journalists = low-quality work?

Contributors to 'content farms' are paid a low price for each article, and the companies make it clear that this is not intended to be a full-time job, but something to supplement your income. The pay at Associated Content (for at least some writers) is based on page views - $1.50 for 1000 views - and at Demand Media it is around $15 an article, with copy editors receiving $3.50 per article. Evidently the fact that writers can work from home and in their own time must be taken into account, but this figure is still low.

The idea, as  explained in a Wired article by Daniel Roth in November 2009, is that rather than "trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." CEO Richard Rosenblatt clarified to Jay Rosen that this is part of an attempt to build "a sustainable business model"

The fear, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington aptly put it, is that "anyone who spends their time and effort on their content is pushed out of business." Journalists will be paid less and less and journalistic quality will be forced down.

Despite staff's insistence that articles are fact-checked and edited, and the fact that writers are required to reference their sources, the general impression is that the quality of content at content farms is low, and the audience doesn't seem to mind that much.

But is this really "the end of hand crafted content," as TechCrunch concludes? Should professional journalists at established media outlets feel threatened by an excess of content on the Internet? Is it actually competing directly with what they do? The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational? Demand and others have found a hole in the market and they are seemingly successfully filling it, and news organisations should probably continue to focus on producing the best content they can.