Results matching “editor of france s”

Yet another video of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, shot "off the record" in the studios of France 3 prior to his televised interview on June 3rd, has gone viral.

In this case though, the bigger issue shaking French media is whether this video should have been 'news' in the first place, or whether it's simply an example of media outlets rushing to create buzz, a phenomenon exacerbated by the rise of online news.

The video, which was first posted by the online-only news site Rue89 on YouTube, has already received nearly a million views (similar to a video of Sarkozy insulting a civilian captured by Le Parisien).

A renowned blogger, Laurent Goaguen, criticized Rue89's decision:

"I'm slightly ashamed that Rue89's newsroom release this dirty thing, acquired in dubious circumstances and that doesn't bring any information. When political engagement, sense of urgency and the race to scoops obscure, to that extent, the professional duties of journalists..."

Another blog, Caréagit, expressed its disgust for "gutter journalism."

Rue89 editor-in-chief Pascal Riché argued that "this video is rich in information concerning the President, his relations with media, and the atmosphere within France Télévisions."

According to Rue89, France 3 threatened a lawsuit if the site doesn't remove the video and give the names of staffers who leaked the footage.

Source: Le Monde - Rue89

On one hand, there's a 2007 report entitled "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal," written by William Powers, media critic for the National Journal. For Powers, all this talk about readers' migration to digital formats isn't taking into account the millennial virtues of "the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years."

On the other hand, there's yesterday's editorial in The Guardian, a major news outlet that still heavily relies on the strengths - revenues - of print, that assesses that readers "are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is."

Will we live to see a paperless world? Most unlikely. Are we slowly moving in the general direction of a less-paper world? Definitely - although the demand for paper and newsprint is constantly rising.

Some of the pros and cons for both formats are straightforward: paper is more tangible, more engrained in our habits, and it is still typically easier to manipulate and browse. e-paper is expensive but can be cheaper in the long run, friendlier to the environment, lighter, can network with other devices and carry animated graphics.

According to Powers though, "many of paper's affordances are rooted in its limitations - its physicality, the fact that it can only be in one place, etc." Citing a study by A. Sellen and R. Harper, Powers contends that paper has four 'affordances' that supposedly can't be matched by digital platforms: tangibility, spatial flexibility, tailorability and manipulability.

Traditional paper's overall ease-of-use is undeniable, as it remains and will remain the cheapest and most practical information medium in many regions in the world, for many years to come.

But a quick look at Sony's foray into e-paper (this was more than a year ago!) would tend to show that digital platforms already can - and will - yield some very impressive results, even in the four aforementioned 'affordances'. The developments brought by the i-Phone's touch screen also show how much the public is increasingly embracing the tactile attributes of digital readers.

A paperless world may still be inconceivable to us who've grown thinking through paper. As Powers notes, paper is not only a container for information, it is also essential in defining our relationship to that information, in the way we treat and interpret it (as are all media). The newspaper doesn't only store; it organizes.

But for future generations, for whom the digital screen could be just as common as its 'dead-tree' counterpart, who's to say they won't criticize the warmth of paper, its opaque texture, the fact that it's so easy to scribble upon, to tear apart - the very attributes we have appreciated for two millennia?

The point here is neither to vindicate e-paper, nor does it mean we're moving into a paperless world. Even less to presumptuously fix a date as to the 'death' of paper and the crowning of its digital successor.

A few newspapers have ventured into e-Paper, including business daily Les Echos in France, the Shanghai Daily using Amazon's Kindle, or the NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands. In May, French telecom firm Orange launched an e-reader that offered access to a range of books and French papers. But these experiments remain just that at this stage - experiments.

Responding to the 2008 Newsroom Barometer, only 7% of editors believed that e-Paper would be the standard news platform in their countries within 10 years (although a combined 18.5% thought it would be either mobiles or e-Paper). Likewise, when we visited the Göteborgs Posten in Sweden a week ago, an arguably innovative and new media-oriented paper, its CEO and editor Peter Hjörne made it clear he had no plans to particularly invest or research e-Paper solutions in the near future - for the next 15 years. This doesn't mean that Hjörne won't be keeping his eyes open for developments, as should any conscientious editor or manager.

But even in the digitally ripe Scandinavian market, consumption and distribution of e-paper on a mass scale remains a distant thought for editors and publishers.

In fact, some of the biggest brakes to the advent of e-Paper may be e-Paper manufacturers and media players themselves, as they battle to try set an industry-wide standard for a reader.

"It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely," reported the Guardian.

It's impossible, and would certainly be foolish, to set a date for the 'disappearance' of print paper. It will take years before its digital alternative becomes cheap enough for the mass public and really booms. And even then this will be limited to a few select regions.

But most importantly: the emergence of a new technology like e-Paper won't suppress the need for real paper - not for a long time. It's not an either-or situation.

Said the Guardian's editorial: "In the future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences."

For the last fifteen months, former journalists from the Journal du Québec have been publishing a rival free paper, in order to protest against the paid-for newspaper's plans for integration and the additional workloads of multimedia journalism.

The paid-for tabloid, Journal du Québec, published by Québecor, has enjoyed a comfortable situation in the sometimes grim North American print market. It has no website, a daily circulation that ranges from 105,000 copies to 200,000 copies, and churns out a few million dollars in yearly profit.

Since last year though, the paper's plans to - finally - build a website and turn its reporters into multimedia journalists (and increasing working hours from 32 to 37.5 with no additional pay) have been the cause of internal upheaval.

In winter 2007, a group of journalists from Journal du Québec prepared to roll out a competing freesheet, dubbed MediaMatinQuébec.

"On the negotiation table, we saw the requests and the attitude of management. We wondered how we could counter this. We couldn't imagine going on strike indefinitely (...) so we had the idea to launch this free daily," said Denis Bolduc, editor of the free paper.
 
In April 2007, two days after the staff of Journal du Québec went on strike and Québecor called for a lock-out, Bolduc and his team launched MediaMatinQuébec.

Against all expectations, the free paper has now strived for 15 months, boasting 40,000 copies in daily circulation.

"In the US, when there was the integration of print and online, there were debates, but never a conflict like this," said Florian Sauvageau, director of the Center of media studies at the University of Laval.

It is "difficult to think that journalists will accept to work more hours and online," he said, but they "must accept that in 10 years newspapers will be online."

According to Agence France-Presse, Québecor's profits have yet to be hindered by the rival free paper. Yet the giant publishing house is reportedly preparing the launch of its own freesheet, to compete against MediaMatinQuébec.

Source : Voilà.fr through IFRA Executive News Service
 

World Editors Forum - SEVENTH SESSION

With : Gianni Valenti, Deputy Editor, Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor, Mint, India Ignacio Escolar, Editor-in-Chief, Publico, Spain Pierre Haski, Founder and Editor in Chief, Rue89.com, France Dominic Young, Director of Editorial Services, Intellectual Property, News International Ltd, UK Chairman: Roy Greenslade, Media Columnist, The Guardian, UK

More video reports from Sweden

Second Session from the World Editors Forum

- VIDEO With : Javier Moreno, Editor-in-Chief, El Pais, Spain Jim Roberts, Editor of Digital News, The New York Times, USA Lisbeth Knudsen, CEO, Det Berlingske Officin, and Editor-in-Chief, Berlingske Tidende, Denmark Almar Latour, Managing Editor, wsj.com, Wall Street Journal, USA Svetlana Mironyuk, Editor-in-Chief, RIA Novosti, Russia Chairman: Bruno Patino, President, Le Monde Interactif, France.

>Will Web 2.0 give birth to Journalism 2.0?

Opening presentation by Nikesh Arora, President EMEA Operations & Vice-President, Google Inc., UK

Other panelists:

Kathleen Carroll, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, The Associated Press, USA

Pierre Bellanger, CEO and founder, Skyblogs and Skyrock, France

Bosse Svensson, General Director, MKT Media, Sweden

Chairman: George Brock, Editor, Saturday Times, UK

Xavier Vidal-Folch, Deputy Director of the Spanish daily El Pais, has been elected President of the World Editors Forum, the global association for senior newsroom executives within the World Association of Newspapers.

Mr Vidal-Folch was elected by the Board of WEF, meeting in Göteborg, Sweden, on the eve of the annual World Editors Forum conference. He succeeds George Brock, Saturday Editor of The Times of London, who served as WEF President for the last four years.

"It is an honour to be the successor of George Brock," said Mr Vidal-Folch. "Under his presidency, WEF became the voice of editors-in-chief through its Editors Weblog, and the attendance to our annual conference more than tripled.

"My task will be to transform the organisation into a truly digital organisation with more products and services available online. WEF wants to welcome more senior news executives through a new professional online network, useful worldwide, which will become a hub for the entire newspaper industry."

Mr Vidal-Folch has been Deputy Director of El Pais since 1989. He has been with the paper since 1982 and has served as Chief Editor and Brussels Bureau Chief.

Harald Stanghelle, the Political Editor of Aftenposten in Norway, was elected Vice President of WEF.

He has been Political Editor of Aftenposten since 2000. He previously served as News Editor of the paper and as Editor-in-Chief of Dagbladet.

Editors from four countries have been nominated to become new members of the WEF Board: Nadia Al-Saqqaf, Editor-in-Chief of the Yemen Times; Raju Narisetti, Editor of Mint, India; Marcelo Rech, Editor-in-Chief of Zero Hora, Brazil; and Gianni Valenti, Deputy Editor of Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy.

The Paris-based World Editors Forum (http://www.worldeditorsforum.org ) is the organisation of the World Association of Newspapers that represents editors-in-chief and other senior news executives. WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 76 national newspaper associations, newspapers and newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and ten regional and world-wide press groups.

Source: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr

Newspaper Le Figaro and mobile phone service Orange have partnered to offer a unique feature: it is the first live daily show about politics, entitled "The Talk," to be conceived exclusively for the Web and mobile phones.
The show will launch on Monday June 2 with French Prime Minister François Fillon. Every day, at 6pm, a political or financial celebrity will be interviewed by Figaro's star political reporter Anne Fulda or by Figaro.fr managing editor Laurent Guimier.
The show will be shot in the Figaro's own video studio (see the interview about their video studio) and will be broadcast live and for free on figaro.fr and on the news portal of Orange, both on the Web and on Orange mobile phones.
Truly innovative, this service will also be interactive, as Internet users can submit questions before the show and react to it live on the blog of "The Talk."
The show's business model is entirely based on its audience, thanks to banner ads sold on the sites of both the newspaper and mobile operator, for which both partners will share revenues.
The show's time, 6pm, was also geared to fill a 'news void' for the French audience, as they  are still at work or on their way home.
"There's on one side the best of content with Le Figaro, on the other the best of distribution with Orange. It's a win-win situation," said Orange President and Director, Didier Lombard.
Source: Figaro (here and here, links in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

The twice-weekly Sonoma Index-Tribune in California is to convert to a "hybrid news medium" in the next six to 12 months, after launching an electronic edition in addition to its website.

According to its publisher, the move is motivated both by cost reduction and environmental concerns.

The community newspaper currently offers, in addition to its home-delivered print edition, a subscription e-edition, a paperless "SmartEdition" produced in partnership with NewspaperDirect (which also produces electronic editions for The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph in the UK or Le Figaro in France).

"We already use recycled newsprint and soy-based ink and recycle every bit of waste we can," said Index-Tribune publisher Bill Lynch.

"We cut back on the number of sections and pages we print and deliver by more than 30%. But the most important change, the one that can really make a difference, is getting our readers to join us in the biggest green revolution in the history of newspapers -- going paperless."

The e-edition already offers a number of useful features, according to Editor&Publisher: subscribers can read their newspapers from PCs and Macs, smart phones and iPhones. Suscribers will have access to up to 90 days worth of previous issues, can listen to news stories thanks to an audio function, and use an "add to my blog" function to reproduce content on their own outlets.

"NewspaperDirect's SmartEdition is loaded with features that will make this transition easier. But we know it will take time for many of our subscribers to get used to it," Lynch added. "The other part of the hybrid model is our Web site, which we will continue to improve as well."

Source: Editor & Publisher through IFRA Executive News Service

Serge, a daily in Spain's Catalunya region, will launch an e-paper version this summer, compatible with ProtecMedia's E-Paper.

Similar to Holland's NRC Handelsblad, Serge will make the e-paper available through its website.
 
The electronic version will give readers access to the same content as the print and web editions, as well as possible exclusive e-paper content, such as audio, video and extra photos, reports Editor & Publisher.

France too is looking towards e-paper solutions, where France Telecom's Orange is offering a trial version of an e-paper reader which supports electronic versions of various French newspapers.

Source: Editor & Publisher

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)