Results matching “story from a blog”

The surge in social media has benefited journalists globally by offering them a world of information at their fingertips with powerful social networking tools and news aggregator sites. But this opportunity comes along with some risks as well. To lessen these risks, Reuters has added social media guidelines and principles to its handbook, Dean Wright, global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards at Reuters, announced yesterday in the Reuters Blog.

While Reuters embraces social media as a powerful informative tool and encourages its usage among journalists, they must ask permission from managers to use social media in conjunction with their professional lives, MediaGuardian reported.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Community-funded news site Spot.Us introduced several new features and a streamlined design yesterday in response to user feedback. The updated format provides readers with a more interactive role in the journalism they help fund. Among the changes are story updates, the ability to create "assignments" for other users, and a presence on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea behind Spot.Us is simple: Stories begin when readers submit tips or journalist pitch stories. A price is set for the proposed article and Spot.Us lets the public donate to fund expenses for reporting.

Will consumers pay for online news and entertainment contents that are now free?

According to a recent Nielsen survey which covered more than 27,000 consumers across 52 countries, 85 percent said they would like free content to remain free. However, when asked based on specific types of content, survey participants are more likely to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have ever done so, the research company said in a blog post.

For more on this story, please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe has resigned from the newspaper amid allegations of plagiarism.

Several instances of "apparent plagiarism" were first brought to the attention of the Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, last Friday in a letter from the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson. Thomson pointed to six sentences that Kouwe had lifted from an article written by Journal reporter Amir Efrati on February 5th.  Kouwe's article in the Times' DealBook blog appeared almost two hours after Efrati's article had been published on Dow Jones Newswires and the Journal.

6 and a half years ago, Michelle Leder was a business journalist running an obscure website with juicy tidbits about the financial disclosures that publicly held companies are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, Michelle Leder is a businesswoman: she sold her website to Morningstar, the giant, Chicago-based publisher that sells nearly $500 million a year in research and advisory services to large and small investors.

As Alan D. Mutter from the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reports, her story shows that a modern journalist no longer needs a job at a major media outlet to build a satisfying and remunerative career. All he or she needs is a dose of entrepreneurial journalism and time.

Gerald Posner, chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast, has a history of plagiarism, according to Jack Shafer in an article published yesterday in Slate. Shafer and a Slate reader found eight separate examples of plagiarism from publications like The Miami Herald, Texas Lawyer, and a blog run by the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Shafer broke the initial story last week, uncovering seven sentences Posner had copied from an article that first appeared in the Miami Herald on February 2nd. During an interview with Shafer, Posner acknowledged that he had plagiarized. The Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal confirmed it was plagiarism and removed the copied text from the website.

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

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

 

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

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

On January 12 last year GlobalPost was launched, a new international news service focused on getting the context behind the headlines, hoping to combat diminishing foreign reporting in the US. Its number of foreign correspondents is second only to the Associated Press and they are expected to provide both text and visual reports.

A year on, and the news outlet has made considerable progress in terms of covering a wide range of international stories, establishing a significant audience, and implementing a successful business model. The Editors Weblog spoke to President, CEO and co-founder Philip Balboni about his first year at the helm of this project.

Balboni was clear that he considered GlobalPost's first year a success. "It has been an extraordinary year, it has exceeded any reasonable expectations that I could have had when I started out on this journey," he said.

"To a large degree, the stories on GlobalPost are ones that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere," said Balboni. As one of GlobalPost's aims was to fill the gaps in the reporting of traditional outlets, this must be satisfying.  The news outlet has also remained true to its original stipulations: its reporting has broad geographic diversity, and consists of a wide range of types of stories and topics.

And much of this reporting has had the potential for considerable impact. Balboni highlighted a recent story on how the Taliban have been taking a cut of funds supplied by the Indiana National Guard to local Afghan contractors for development projects in Afghanistan's Khost province. The issue of the Taliban skimming American aid in Afghanistan is one to which GlobalPost has dedicated much coverage over the past few months.

Such investigative pieces are accompanied by more entertaining reporting, such as an article from Paris about how the French are rediscovering the joy of wearing berets. Correspondents also write ample blog entries.

GlobalPost adopted a relatively unique correspondent model, hiring country-based, part-time reporters who could produce one article a week. The compensation level - a monthly salary plus shares - has proven "very successful" and working for GlobalPost seems to be a popular job: the news service now has correspondents in more than fifty countries and "we have far more people who would want to work for us than we could possibly hire."

The correspondents work with regional editors based in Boston and Balboni said that so far this system has been functioning "with a remarkable degree of smoothness."

Building an audience from scratch

Developing an audience is "really more important than anything else," said Balboni. "We could have the most spectacular content in the world but if you can't build an audience for it then you can't succeed, right?"

The news outlet's highest-traffic month this year was November, when more than 750,000 people visited the site. This exceeded Balboni's goal of 600,000, set before the launch. In addition, "we are retaining more than 50% of all the visitors," he said.

The target for 2010 is to top one million unique visitors, and Balboni mentioned the company's "very sophisticated marketing strategy" aimed at audience building.

Prize partnerships

Building a brand on the web with no support from legacy media has been a considerable challenge, and GlobalPost's partnerships with other high profile brands have been very helpful in doing this, and "particularly important in the validation of GlobalPost as a brand," Balboni said. Such partnerships have helped present the outlet's content as authoritative, and often "raising our visibility is more important than any compensation we might achieve." From the beginning, GlobalPost has sought to present itself as a complement rather than a competitor to newswires and newspapers.

The partnership formed with CBS in September, for example, is a syndication deal, with CBS paying GlobalPost for help with foreign reporting. But having a broadcast news partner was also something that Balboni and his team considered a high priority in terms of brand-boosting, and such a deal "certainly goes beyond" purely syndication. He sees the recent partnership with PBS NewsHour as a "significant achievement" and mentioned that GlobalPost has upped its video production so that it might have the chance to forge other broadcast partnership. 

Compensation is obviously an important consideration, however, and syndication is one of GlobalPost's major revenue streams, the other two being advertising and subscriptions. Currently, advertising comprises about 70% of GlobalPost's income, but Balboni hopes that over time this share will fall to around 50%, with syndication and membership rising to make up the other half.

Passport to premium services

The most unusual of these revenue streams is the subscription, or membership, scheme called Passport. For $99 a year (discounted to $50 for students, academics or seniors), readers can have access to conference calls with GlobalPost reporters, the chance to suggest stories, global and country briefs and newsletters. There is also the option to commission custom research projects, something Balboni said he was "very excited about." One client, for example, has ordered a series of ten reports for the coming year. "It takes careful shepherding but it's very interesting and I think it could scale up to be a meaningful part of our Passport financial strategy," he said.

"I am very bullish on the membership aspect," Balboni said, "I think it's the hardest one but if you want to point to one thing that could be a potential salvation for quality journalism then it's that." He always wanted to encourage a subscription or membership scheme, but explained that as a new little-known media brand it would have been foolish to put up a paywall immediately.
 
Passport does not offer pure paid online content, rather additional editorial services. "My hope and my expectation is that GlobalPost will remain free and open to all but we need to find more effective ways to get all of the people who are most engaged to help support our mission," he said, specifying that GlobalPost was likely to continue to ask for, rather than to require, reader contributions. He does think, however, that it would be "entirely fair" for a news organisation to demand payment.

So far, Passport has 450 - 500 members: "just not enough," according to Balboni. He hopes to increase this by making "a strategic shift in how we market our membership" and by using some new technology starting this spring that will help the membership base and subsequent revenue to grow. Currently, visitors to the GlobalPost site can read about Passport but there is no chance to test it out first and they have to "take a leap of faith" if they want to subscribe, Balboni said.

From a purely financial standpoint, 2009 was "a decent year," especially given the global economic recession. Balboni specified that the $1 million revenue figure that was reported in November was not accurate, but described the amount as "consequential." The company's original business plan projected profitability in 2012, and Balboni thinks this is still likely.

What's next?

GlobalPost seems to have demonstrated that there is an audience for more international news and has set up a structure to cover this that works. As Balboni explained, its challenges now are to build that audience into the millions and (like almost every other news organisation) to shift its business model so that it depends less substantially on advertising.  

"Blogging is the biggest change to BBC journalism", Kevin Marsh, the head of the corporation's College of Journalism, said at the Journalism rewired conference. He added that blogging by senior figures like Robert Peston and Nick Robinson has helped to fundamentally change the way BBC delivers its news.

Kevin Marsh told conference attendees that in the last couple of years, the BBC had shifted its news focus away from its traditional TV bulletins, adopting a "live and continuous" model centered on multimedia content on the web, according to the PressGazette.

Most of Google's news tools are fairly self-explanatory. Fast Flip enables users to flick through different news sources. Living Stories collects all the developments about a single story on a single URL. And of course Google News aggregates news, and has been a source of ongoing conflict between Google and news publishers. But Google Wave notoriously confuses its first time users. There's even a gently mocking website dedicated to things that are easier to understand than Google Wave.

First launched as an invitation-only preview, Google Wave is billed as both a conversation and a document. It's a little like email, but also real-time and collaborative. One potential use of the tool is as a platform for collaborative journalism: different participants could add notes, information and images to a story.

It can also be used for community building, and the blog Journalism 2.0 has offered one possible example of what this might look like. A guest post by Hilary Fosdal, the interactive content manager for Barrington Broadcasting in Illinois, explains the way that the Chicago Tribune's RedEye website uses Google Wave.

Lauren McCullough has been named as the new manager of Social Networks and News Engagement for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times has reported.

Her role will include helping reporters to reach online communities, finding story material on social networks, informing editors of high interest topics within social networks, and promoting AP stories on social networks and in the blogosphere.

She will head the Social Network Center, one of the four sections of the new AP Nerve Center, or headquarters, in New York. The other components are standards, production, and the news center. The new heads of the News Center, Sally Buzbee and Tamer Fakahany, were announced this week.

California Watch has launched a new website, with a focus on enabling readers to learn more and take action on the investigations its team pursues.

The new website includes investigative stories by journalists from California Watch, which is a non-profit investigative news project of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), and a blog related to the beats that its reporters cover.

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

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

Google announced Monday that it will now be streaming updates from social networking sites in real time as search results. When a term is typed into a Google search, the lead result will now be a section of constantly updating social network, news site, and blog postings pertinent to the topic. 

In a recent post on Poynter Online, Paula Morton has looked at the lesson that newspapers could take from the history of their generally trashier, less respected cousin, the tabloid.  

"A tabloid story sells," she writes, "I admit: when I am caught behind a long line at the Publix checkout, I read the headlines of the National Enquirer. "Senator Caught with Hooker!" "Stars with Cellulite!"... shouting from specially designed pedestal racks positioned exactly at eye-level on the checkout counter."

The newspaper business model is powerless to compensate for falling print ad revenues, and the problem is not going to go away. The print model cannot and will not migrate to the Internet, where there is a "revenue black hole," in which 76 percent of all online revenues go to Google and Yahoo!, Timothy Balding, co-CEO of WAN-IFRA, told the 62nd World Newspaper Congress today.

"To compete, you will need to retain control of your content. In 2013, combined print and digital revenues will be less than print revenues in 2008," he said, citing data from ZenithOptimedia and PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Should we allow aggregators to build their business on the back of our content?"

For more on this story, visit our partner site, the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.

Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy and a Times journalist, Colm Kenna, have been forced to pay a legal bill amounting to 600,000€ between them, despite winning a case in which they were defending their right to refuse to reveal sources. 

The Irish Times reports that the pair were ordered to pay the costs because of "exceptional circumstances" in the case, which arose after the tribunal sought a court order compelling Kennedy and Keena to answer questions relating to the source of an article about financial payments to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

Chase Carey, News Corp COO, is unhappy at the state of the Wall Street Journal's online paid content arrangements, despite it being one of the few profitable and successful paywalls.

Carey specifically referred to the fact that readers can view WSJ content for free through a google search but have to pay if they go directly through the site. By merely copy-pasting the headlines of articles behind the paywall into google, readers can freely access content that others pay for.

"We don't want people going though a backdoor, or other channels," to access the Journal, says Carey, who did not comment on when or even if he would change the current WSJ structure.

Readers who have come to rely on sports journalist Tom Boswell's quality baseball coverage for the Washington Post, might not have been quite so impressed with Monday's offering: His column, covering Sunday's World Series game, was sent to the printers awash with typos, grammatical errors and misspellings; generating a number of complaints.

Some readers asked for full 75 cents refund, whilst one reader hit the nail on the head, writing: "Please, rescue Mr. Boswell from the pressure of the midnight deadline. Give him, and your readers, back your copy editors."  Another added: "There is no excuse for such a shoddy product. It's completely unprofessional; more errors than one would see in a high school or college newspaper."

A hyperlocal project the Seattle Times is taking part in, is already showing results, writes Linda Hersey for Poynter. The "Networked Journalism" program was introduced across the country by American University's J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and has united the Times with five neighbourhood blogs and news sites: West Seattle Blog, Next Door Media, CHS Capitol Hill Seattle, Rainier Valley Post and Local Health Guide/Seattle.

"Seattle has become a hotbed for neighborhood and niche blogs," said Kathy Best, the Times' managing editor for digital news and innovation. "As we watched our own newsroom resources shrink, we began talking about how we could tap into that hyper-local community movement to create partnerships that would allow us to continue to offer quality coverage in key areas."

CNN.com has revamped its international website today with a greater focus on video and photography and less text clutter. The redesign comes as many news organisations, including the BBC, attempt to keep their homepages up-to-date with changing technologies, the advanced capabilities of the Internet and a general shift in the way people consume news today.

Speaking about the new presentation, Nick Wrenn, CNN's vice president for digital services said: "It's a design change that gives us a more contemporary look, with a new focus on video that brings the site to life."