Results matching “western media coverage con”

Executive Editor Bill Keller of The New York Times, who filed some unexpected reporting on the Iranian elections, reveals his motivations in a couple of emails to Editor & Publisher. When the post-election uproar developed into sensational riots, Keller admits that it was his instincts that led him to take the plunge, leading to his notorious front-page editorial "Memo From Tehran (June 13). 

And plunge in he did. What with his front-page editorial this past Sunday, Keller's bold move to run a rare commentary on the politcal climate in Tehran (where he was most likely writing from), puzzled many newsroom pundits.

Andrew Stroehlein, communications director of the International Crisis Group has written an article in the Christian Science Monitor to express his concerns about cuts in international media coverage, which he believes are not being taken seriously enough. Recent moves include the BBC's cuts in Paris, Moscow and Brussels and the Chicago Tribune's decision to close its bureaus in Rome and Jerusalem. Stroehlein cites two recent developments to illustrate his argument.

First is the situation in Somalia, which Stroehlein feels has been neglected in the Western media, particularly in the US. The recent attention given to the capture of a US vessel by Somali pirates focussed on the fact that "a new president with the world's largest military at his disposal could defeat a handful of lightly armed thugs," and gave little attention to the arguably more important issue at stake: that "piracy is a symptom, not the disease, and lawlessness off the coast of Somalia will continue as long as anarchy is allowed to remain on land."

Following negative press coverage of his diplomatic gaffes at the recent G20 and Nato summits, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi appears to have threatened journalists with reprisals, even implying that he is considering a government-inspired boycott. The most reported faux pas were skipping an official Nato photo and snubbing German Chancellor Angela Merkel by finishing a mobile phone conversation while she waited to greet him, and shouting out to Barack Obama during a photo call at Buckingham Palace, causing the Queen to look round in annoyance.

Speaking to reporters in Prague on Saturday, Berlusconi accused journalists of "defaming me and misinforming readers," and claimed that the Italian press had "no other aim than that of saying the prime minister has committed faux pas or gaffes." He seemed to threaten a news blackout: "I will no longer talk to you... I will no longer give news conferences," and went so far as to admit that he was tempted to call for "direct and tough action towards certain newspapers and members of the press." When asked to explain further he warned, "If I say 'don't watch a TV channel' or something, do you think that no one in Italy would follow me?"

To mark the relaunch of the Editors Weblog and the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Blog, the World Editors Forum is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. This week, we looked at the Tampa Tribune, which has radically revamped its newsroom, and some examples of Editorial Outsourcing, a trend which many news publications have adopted. Below, editors from around the world share their own thoughts about EDITORIAL OUTSOURCING.

AFRICA
Azubuike Ishiekwene, Executive Director, Punch Nigeria
Editorial outsourcing is not an immediate problem for Punch, but we're already looking down the road to that moment. We think that before we reach that bridge, regular and forward-looking review of content (especially print content), and the continuous evaluation of job schedule of journalists across platforms might help us keep cost down and decide how best to apply our resources.

LATIN AMERICA
Marcelo Rech, General Product Director, RBS Group, Brasil
Due to labor laws in Brazil, it's difficult to outsource staffers, but I think the ideal newsroom would be the one with a "hard nucleus", made up of editors, assistant editors, page designers, some videophotographers and some reporters, and a broader staff of reporters, columnists and image producers working under specific tasks. In this way, we could have more diversification, flexibility and cost managing.

In my view, the newsroom looks like a tree: the trunk is the team of editors, the branches are the assistant editors and page designers - those are the structure of the newsroom, and must be very close to the general concepts for the product.

The leaves and fruits are the reporters and columnists. A tree without a healthy and strong trunk would die, but in the end are the fruits what people pay for. 

EASTERN EUROPE
Roman Gallo, Director of Media Strategies, PPF Financial Group
First, newspapers must target their product as specifically as possible. They shouldn't be developing products or writing articles which others could do better. To complement this strategy, newspapers should have a completely integrated newsrooms with skilled and competent staff that can produce material across all platforms. With a staff like this, editorial functions will not have to outsourced.

Newspapers can also tap into the community of Readers for content to supplement that of their newsroom. If the newsroom is looking for extra help, this can be a better means of gathering content than outsourcing because the readers are immediately familiar with the community.

WESTERN EUROPE
Espen Egil Hansen, Editor-in Chief, Verdens Gang Multimedia, Norway
 I don't think the key question should be "How to do more with less", but rather does the new technology and new market situations give us some new opportunities?

In VG Multimedia we spend some time and energy studying two companies outside the traditional media business that might inspire some change: Apple and Ryanair.

Can we learn from Steve Jobs and his Iphone?
Not only is the Iphone in itself a great product, in what appears as a stroke of genius Apple opened up, enabling everyone to create applications for the phone. Teenagers, programmers, and creative people around the globe develop great products for the Iphone - without pay. With no cost for Apple there has been added more than 15 000 applications to the company's Appstore   and they have already been downloaded more than 500 million times! For every new application and for every new download the value of the Iphone rises for the end users. And best of all, from Apple's perspective, since the company controls the distribution of these applications it gets a cut of every sale.

In Norway the 15 year old Knut Ørland has outperformed media companies developing the most popular TV-guide for Iphones. From his boy's room in a little city on the west coast of Norway he launches Iphone applications and earns a profit most teenagers can only dream about. For every sale through the Appstore he gets to keep 70%. The boy is of course happy, Apple is happy because it gets to keep the 30% and the end user is happy because the product is great. By the way - there is no need to buy a newspaper or go online to check what's on TV right now. Not all Iphone applications turn into a success, but if it does, Apple is guaranteed its share. Smart!

Media's approach to product developing has by contrast always been this: We want to do everything ourselves. If we are to make a new product - let's say a new travel section in the Sunday paper - our approach is always more journalists and more purchased freelance material. Smart?

Electronic media is by nature communication and cooperation. If we don't start to understand this we will be forced to ask the same question over and over in the years to come: How can we do more with less?

Can we learn from Ryanair?
While most airlines focus on how to charge as much as possible for each ticket, the low cost airline Ryanair has great success with going the opposite way: How can we charge less? The company compensates lower fares by turning what used to be costs, into new revenue streams. While the tickets are cheap you have to pay extra for food, baggage or boarding the plane early to pick your favorite seat. Together with a long range of cost cuts and commission based products like care rental and hotels, Ryanair has used this approach to become one the most profitable airlines in Europe.

The question newspapers should be asking themselves is: Are there costs in our company we can turn into revenue?


NORTH AMERICA
Ed Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief, Globe and Mail, Canada
We have not experimented, at least not yet, with very much in the way of editorial outsourcing of layouts I a major way.  We remain very interested in the experiences of others but a bit wary.
Of course, to some extent, we have always outsourced.  We tap the talents of a large number of freelance contributors, some of them highly-specialized.  We also have a few standardized pages, such as our comics and puzzles page and our stock listings, produced outside the newsroom. But we haven't ventured into outsourcing the kind of dynamically designed, valued added and pages that speak to our brand message on a given day.
In the opinion field, we tend to go outside in order to compliment our own columnists with more specialized contributors. In other areas, such as multi-media, we tend to use agencies for more commoditized news, thus freeing up staff journalists to focus on the value added material that distinguishes and differentiates us. Thus we have a small Globe Docs unit, which works with our staff to produce high quality video companion pieces to major print features, and sometimes vice versa. Our award-winning Talking to the Taliban is one such example.

Terry Eberle, Executive Editor and Vice President, Fort Myers News Press, Florida
We are using more freelancers and are partnering with other newspapers for certain sports coverage we once produced ourselves. We also are talking about partnerships with television stations to see what makes sense there. As we look for ways to cover more with fewer resources we must keep in mind that the quality of our information can not decline. We must guard against taking shortcuts that hurt readers and our image.

Four journalists from different media companies in different locations demonstrated how link journalism is the key to efficient news coverage. Using Twitter and a couple of links, they collaborated from different newsrooms to cover the floods in western Washington, Publishing 2.0 reported.

To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

8, 000 miles away from the White House, a nation is celebrating President-elect Barack Obama's historic election win as a victory for a son of their country. 47-year-old Obama's father was born in Kenya and the celebrations following his win are ongoing from the streets of Nairobi to the village of Kogelo where Obama's grandmother still lives. Reflecting the importance of his victory, President Kibaki has declared a public holiday in Kenya to celebrate. The Kenyan media has reported every twist and turn of this nail-biting campaign, and its newspapers have covered this story on a scale never before seen for a US election.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Ian Fernandes, the head of Nation Media's Digital Division, about how Kenya's leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, followed the campaign, its importance to Kenya and the newspaper's future coverage of the USA.

Fernandes begins by saying that this election has captured the imagination of the entire country: "it has dominated the headlines for the past couple of weeks...the fact that someone who has his roots in Kenya can actually end up becoming the President of the United States." As victory was declared, inhabitants of Kogelo began singing "Jakogelo Yiengo Piny", which translates to "the one from Kogelo shakes the world".

Coverage online

From just a quick glance at the home page of the Daily Nation online edition, it is clear how important this election has been to Kenyans. The front page is dominated by a picture of President elect Barack Obama and his family taking to the stage for his post-victory speech under the headline "Win brings pride to Kenyan diaspora", with a lead article discussing the impact this victory has had on Kenyans across the USA. Feeder articles follow, as do photos of the election night and video footage from the Nation Media Group's NTV channel. Under the toolbar is a link for dedicated coverage, including the campaign, Obama's victory and the reaction in Kenya and the US.

The Daily Nation has an advantage on many news organisations in that it is part of media conglomerate, Nation Media Group, and one of the branches of this modern news organisations is a TV station: footage from the station has been an important edition to the Daily Nation's coverage.

Telling the story from a Kenyan perspective

Fernandes reports that the country and, in particular the village of Kogelo, has been inundated by news teams from across the globe. Expanding on this point, Fernandes says that most of these correspondents are based in London and only arrived in the country after the story had unfolded and thus found it difficult to cover it comprehensively, whereas the Nation's reporters were on the ground from the get go. The Daily Nation felt it was important to tell the story of Obama's campaign and victory from a Kenyan perspective, for example, the video footage section on the web edition not only includes Obama's speeches and footage of American reactions, there is also extensive coverage of the celebrations in Kenya following the result and reactions from Kenyan politicians. The small village of Kogelo in Western Kenya was at the heart of the Daily Nation's coverage and the site features interviews with Obama's grandmother and other members of his family who have had to rapidly get used to the media spotlight.

Increased resources, and now he has won?

During the campaign the Daily Nation had three reporters in the United States. Fernandes explains, "I think in order for us to be relevant - and just like foreign media houses having a presence in Kenya during the election - we decided that we should actually have our journalists in the USA, one following the McCain trail and one following the Obama trail, to know and to tell the story with a Kenyan perspective."

The newly elected US President will continue to be of interest to Kenyan citizens and Fernandes reports that the newspaper is considering maintaining a permanent presence in the US in the form of a full-time reporter or "at least a correspondent". He also confirms that the USA will now garner more attention from the Kenyan media, as citizens will want reports on how the new president is progressing.

Readership spike

Fernandes reports that 50% of the Daily Nations' readership is from the Kenyan diasporas across the USA and Europe.  The Daily Nation average 45,000 - 50,000 visits a day but it picked to about 90,000 visits on 4th November. The Daily Nation's coverage of an election thousands of miles away not only managed to cater to the audience at home, but also generated traffic from Kenyans located across the globe who sought a trusted name for the story of how a son of Kenya won the election to run the most powerful country in the world.

While print newspapers may be seen to be declining in Europe, the printed word remains an aspiration in some developing markets, such as India, according to an article in The Independent.

"Anyone who can read or write is still looked at with a bit of awe" in many markets in India, says Rajesh Kalra, a veteran journalist who is now chief editor of IndiaTimes, the digital branch of The Times of India.

According to Kalra, many people want to overtly show they are literate and "the first thing you want to do is be seen to be reading a newspaper."

The literacy rate in India is currently at about 61% - but it is 76% for youths. And the print market is booming, so it isn't surprising that many western media are eyeing India for new launches.

"We do see a big potential in emerging markets," says John Ridding, chief executive of the Financial Times. The FT just launched a Middle East edition in Abu Dhabi, and it sees "big opportunities for expansion" in India.

One mustn't confuse expansion with amelioration though.

"In some of these new or fast-growing markets, absolute freedom of the press is untested, and unbiased news coverage is unfamiliar," reported the Independent, echoing a recent Weblog interview with Raju Narisetti, managing editor of Mint.

Source: The Independent (IHT)

Launched in February 2007 as a joint venture between Hindustan Times Media and The Wall Street Journal, Mint, India's English-language business daily, has quickly grown its circulation (from 80,000 at launch to 122,000 copies) and readership, and soon plans to launch new editions in Delhi and Mumbai.

However, according to Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, Mint has had to develop several quality editorial practices in order to distinguish itself from the average newspaper market in India, where some standards of editorial independence and quality reporting lack - and paid editorial content is common practice.

Narisetti will describe Mint's doings at the upcoming World Editors Forum to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

To face these ethical dilemmas, Mint implemented several strategies, including publishing a clearly stated corrections policy and code of conduct, easily accessible on the website.

Recently Narisetti wrote an editorial that recapped the number of errors that had been made (mostly factual: gender, titles, dates...). "A lot of papers make errors, we are the only ones who are honest enough to admit it," he said.

"The credibility of media is pretty low in India," said Narisetti. "One of the largest media companies in India actually has a rate card where you can buy coverage."

Some companies, partly held by equity stakes, openly publicize their owners' brands in their publications.

So how can Mint, and the Indian press as a whole, revamp its credibility?

"I'm sorry to say that, but the general consensus in India seems to be that readers don't care, so it doesn't matter."

"Until Mint came along, nobody covered media as an industry, he said."

"There was a gentleman's agreement that you won't write about another newspaper, so that allowed a lot of people to get away doing whatever they want."

Despite his skepticism, Narisetti said: "one of the hopes is that as a lot of western companies form media partnerships in India... that they will also bring in standards and ethics."

No doubt this hope is partly fueled by his own experience. Prior to editing Mint, Narisetti had a 14-year stint at the Wall Street Journal, where he became Editor of Wall Street Journal Europe.

Thanks to this heritage, he remains confident Mint's emphasis on quality will pay. "It's not an easy sell per se, but it's worth doing it because I think long term credibility of the industry is much more important than taking shortcut measures."

Source: Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor, Mint

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

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


But here are a few more results that may have gone under the radar.

If provided resources to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated two clear concerns for editors, which superceded all others: their staff needs to be attuned to new media (36% of the respondents would first train their staff in new media), and they need more journalists to produce quality coverage (30%, up from 22% last year). As more newsrooms face layoffs and tight budgets, editors are increasingly seeking to safeguard one of the main conditions to quality journalism: a team of qualified journalists.

For editors from newspapers whose number of journalists had decreased, their main priority was to recruit more journalists, at 50%, while also recognizing the necessity of new media training, at 31%. Even among newspapers whose staff had increased, 26% of editors wished to recruit more journalists (36% new media training).

This clearly shows that, in the view of editors, cutting staff and journalistic resources is not a solution - to the contrary - to resolve financial concerns a newspaper may have.

Overall, what do you view as the two greatest threats to the future of your newspaper?

57% of respondents saw the biggest threat to the future of newspapers coming from declining readership among young people. One of the greatest challenges faced by newspapers today is structural, linked to a change in habits among readers, as they become consumers of alternative forms of media.
Tied to this, a good share of respondents (37%) saw the Internet and digital media as a threat. This was closely followed by lack of editorial innovation (36%) and lack of investment (29%), which are also inter-related.

The results showed a split between perception of threats as being external, due to contextual evolutions of the market (young readership decline, digital media) and internal, due to lack of newspaper innovation - or the financial means to innovate.

Now looking specifically to your newspaper's editorial independence in the future, what do you view as the principal threat?

Perceived threats to editorial independence ranged relatively closely from 13% who listed 'other' concerns, to 23% who thought the biggest pressure would come from advertisers, through 19% who listed political pressure and 20% shareholder pressure (20%). Still, a combined 42% perceived the main threat as being related to newspapers' financial dependence, whether on shareholders and advertisers.

Where newspapers were heavily capitalized in the stock market, such as in Western Europe and North America, shareholder pressure was strong, 35% and 23% respectively, but political pressure didn't pose any threat - 3% for both.

Inversely, in many other regions, financial pressures were less important, but lack of press freedom led many editors to fear political pressure.

Do you think that in the future opinion and analysis pages will:

The results were stable compared to 2006. Two thirds (67%) of the respondents believed opinion and analysis pages would increase: many foresaw the upcoming evolution of newspaper content, which will be less about factual news and more about analysis and commentary.

An astonishingly small number of respondents from North America (50%) believed analysis and opinion would increase, compared to 76% for Western Europe (and 78% Eastern). This large difference underlines a divergence in editors' perception of the function their newspapers will have in the future, whether these increasingly focus on constant breaking news or instead turn to more analytical, magazine-type content. These results also reflect worries by American editors about having the proper resources to increase their opinion and analytical content.


If you would like more information about the Newsroom Barometer, don't hesitate to contact us. And let's not forget that the bright revelation of Barometer, as was the case last year, was that 84% of newspaper editors are optimistic about their newspaper's future, despite frequent doom and gloom reports...

The blog L'Observatoire des Médias posted world maps of attention paid to the media in 164 countries in the world and received links from Gawker and Boing Boing.  The numbers included the blogosphere as a whole and 10 media organizations, including the New York Times and the Economist.

Each country is either stretched or shrunk on the map, depending on its share of media attention. The cartogram to the left is an analysis for the Wall Street Journal, showing a flattened Africa and South America and an augmented Western Europe.


Blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril retrieved the numbers by manually searching the Web sites of 10 news organizations and Google Blog Search for articles containing the names of countries. He also counted and mapped the search results. He expects this process to be automated in a few months, using data scraping, to run more trials.

The numbers ran for each country against a model that Kayser-Bril constructed to approximate that country's importance, including: the country's Human Development Index, area, population, GDP, budget expenditures and number of U.S. soldiers present, accounted for more than half of the variation in countries' media coverage, according to Kayser-Bril. 

There were challenges, for example distinguishing new stories about the African nation of Chad from the rock singer Chad Kroeger. Kayser-Bril instead used capital cities for Chad, Georgia, and Jordan, and then multiplied the results by five (the typical ratio between search-engine hits for a country and for its capital, according to Kayser-Bril.). Another example: Not every article about the U.S. contains the search term  United States."

Kayser-Bril concedes that the algorithm is not very accurate:
- It counts each article equally, no matter the length or prominence.
- Search engines are not reliable. He noticed that "when you do the same search twice, you don't [get] the same numbers."
- The maps can be misleading, because it "makes countries with low population density, such as Mongolia and Canada, appear to be getting short shrift."

Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the work is important for showing how undercovered some countries are: "When you're not paying attention to a country, you don't trade with it; you don't send relief to it; you don't have to intervene in it."

Source: WSJ through Cyberjournalist.net

Media coverage of cyclone Sidr, which devastated Bangladesh, left hundreds of thousands homeless and killed at least 3,100, has been extensive, as is now the tradition in cases of major natural catastrophes. However, in comparison to coverage of the recent Californian wildfires, one can also wonder whether the differences in coverage of these two events can be representative of the digital gap widening.

Recently, more and more Americans have been looking across the pond for reliable sources of news and information, and British papers are hoping to attract the readers and the advertisers that come with them. 

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist serving a 10-year prison sentence for revealing his government’s orders to newspapers to censor their reporting of the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary, has been awarded the 2007 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize from the World Association of Newspapers.

In this section, John Zogby, CEO of Zogby International, and Jeff Jarvis, new media proponent and founder of Buzzmachine, comment on the results of the Newsroom Barometer. Both found that editors’ optimism and open-mindedness to new media was a clear indication that newspapers were embracing the digital revolution, yet Jarvis fears that may not be enough…

While western mass media refused to air footage of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s execution, millions of people have already viewed a video of the execution, on YouTube and Google Video. Will traditional media coverage ensue?

According to BBC Monitoring, Pro-Putin oligarch Vladimir Potanin, owner of the Prof-Media holding who in the past focused on ownership of print media and avoided TV and the internet, is reversing strategy, selling off his main newspapers and buying TV channels and websites.

Since early 2006, he has bought three small TV channels and in late October bought the big Rambler Media company, which owns the prominent internet news site Lenta.ru and the popular search engine Rambler.ru.

Traditionally, newspaper coverage – from Japan or around the world – has been focused on the United States and Europe. But now Japanese media are becoming increasingly involved in the world’s next big thing, China.

200 leading journalists gathered in a recent conference in Johannesburg, and agreed that western media do not grant Africa fair coverage, failing to report positive economic and democratic news. "Every time a country like South Africa is reported internationally, we are reminded about escalating crime and diseases such as HIV and AIDS," said Tim Modise, a presenter at Johannesburg-based South African 702 Talk Radio.

A group of developing countries, including mostly poor countries but also more developed countries like Singapore, Malaysia and India, have started an Internet-based news service that pools their media resources to give readers an alternative to “unfair” news coverage by the Western media, said the International Herald Tribune.

 

Al-Jazeera International is in the works to launch a new English-language news service by the summer. The service is still undergoing technical tests on what managing director Nigel Parsons said is going to be “the most complicated broadcasting operation ever.”

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

The Polish regional daily NTO, published in the South Western Opole region, launches its new format today. NTO will retain its tabloid format, but the content of the newspaper will change. The objective of this change is to interact better with readers, attract a younger readership and improve coverage of local issues.

A new report entitled “Western Perceptions About Islam and Muslims”, released last week at the NewsXchange conference in Amsterdam, reveals that Arab Muslims are typically portrayed in a stereotypical and negative fashion by the media in Western Europe and the United States. 

The report is the result of a study, commissioned by the Kuwaiti government and undertaken by Communique Partners of San Francisco, which involved a survey and a series of interviews with media experts.

In May, The Los Angeles Times published a study finding that very few photos of dead or wounded American service members were printed in 6 major U.S. newspapers during 6 months. According to Editor & Publisher the survey "found almost no pictures of Americans killed in action at a time when 559 Americans and Western allies died; the same publications run just 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during the same period." One primary reason is assumedly logistical: sometimes there might be no camera or it is too dangerous for photographers. Other photographs might be too late or never reach newspapers due to different rules which embedded journalist have to obey as The Detroit News suggests: "A complex machinery sifts out many other images before they reach print. Photographers embedded with the U.S. military agree not to use photos that show the dead or wounded if faces can be recognized. A rule requiring notification of family members means that some photos are held for so long that they lose their immediate news value. In other cases, stateside photo editors rule pictures too graphic for publication."