Results matching “years in the making”

Cardiff school of Journalism research fellow Andy Williams has written a highly critical piece on Trinity Mirror, in light of its management of two national Welsh papers, the North Wales' Daily Post and South Wales' Western Mail, which he describes as in "serious (some suggest terminal) decline." He argues that Trinity Mirror is more concerned with generating profits for shareholders than providing high-quality news.

He asserts that both newspapers have lost large amounts of readers, and comments that "Trinity seems to display little concern that readers are abandoning its titles in droves" and that "the effect falling circulations have on the quality of the Welsh democratic debating chamber could not be further from their minds." 

Italy is experiencing an almost complete 24-hour news blackout today as news outlets join together in a strike against a bill that proposes a type of gagging law which has become known as the Alfano law. The law would limit the ability of police and prosecutors to intercept and record phone conversations, and would stop journalists from publishing transcripts of these. Journalists fear that the law has been put forward to protect politicians from scandal, most notably the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"Italian journalists are called together to a type of extraordinary protest that will express itself in a 'loud' news silence on the 9 July, against the rules of the "interceptions bill" which severely limits the right of the citizens to know the progress of judicial trials, inflicting grave limitations on the free circulation of news," said the Federazione Nationale di Stampa Italiana (the Italian federation of newspapers.)

The news 'silence' is intended to represent the daily silences that such a law would impose on the press, the FNSI website explained. An editorial on the site of left-leaning daily La Repubblica specified that the initiative "is not a corporate strike, but a protest to protect the citizens, who are denied by law the right to be freely informed." Corriere della Sera echoed this sentiment, stressing that its journalists were giving up a day's salary not for economic reasons, but for a "civil battle," adding that by taken part in the strike "we hope to contribute to making our country and its politicians aware of the dangers represented by the proposed legislation to the democratic and constitutional rights of all our citizens who want to know what is going on around them."

Arianna Ciccone, co-founder and co-director of the International Journalism Festival told the Editors Weblog that she believes the proposed law "is using privacy as an excuse to try to protect a caste [of politicians]." She is one of a team of Italian journalists who have created a website called 'Valigia Blu' or Blue Suitcase, named after the bag in which she carried signatures protesting an incorrect statement made on a TG1 news programme. The site's editors decided to use the day of the strike to "post articles, recordings and videos that explain the law and what will happen to our freedom if it is definitively passed."

La Repubblica editor-in chief Ezio Mauro explained to the EW that cases take a long time to come to trial in Italy- four to six years, sometimes up to ten - which means that if the law were to pass preventing reporting on ongoing cases, this could mean such an absence of information that the public could end up voting in an election while having no idea if the candidates involved had been charged with a crime. He believes that with this law, the government is trying to "break the circuit between those in power, the magistrates who investigate, the newspapers who provide the news and the citizens who get informed, and can therefore understand and judge."

As well as participating in the strike, La Repubblica has appeared with the front page blank, and encouraged young people to send in photos of themselves with post-it slogans representing gags to protest the law.

TG1, a news channel from the state-run RAI network, is also participating in the strike online, but is broadcasting its 13.30 and 20.00 news shows.

Il Post, an online-only news site founded earlier this year joined the newspapers in striking, though with some reticence about the method chosen. A note on the site explained that "we would have preferred more constructive and exemplary protest initiatives, but suggestions made to this end were not taken on and therefore we are adhering to the decision taken, as we share the reasoning." The site is instead offering readers a selection of articles from the press over the years, to demonstrate the value of good journalism and "because a strike is not only an absence."

La Stampa's management was also unhappy with the method chosen as it denied citizens of news for a day, and appealed to the FNSI to find an alternative. FNSI secretary general Franco Siddi replied that he believed a strike was the type of protest which most effectively made the seriously of the situation evident.

Il Giornale, owned by Berlusconi's brother Paolo, is the only national daily to appear on the newsstands and to update its website today. Editor Vittorio Feltri explained in a video clip on the newspaper's site that although Il Giornale also disapproves of the gagging law, it believes that the "biggest mistake in responding is to put the gags on ourselves." He continued, "the newspaper is on the newsstand for the readers, but also for the journalists who work here and don't want to relinquish the right to express themselves."

Is striking a legitimate protest to such a law? The symbolic significance is clear, but should citizens be deprived of news for a day? What if there was a major disaster or similar event? The argument that it is the only way to bring the public's attention to the implications of the law is valid, but it is unclear whether it will have the desired effect.

The Italian media is one that is largely dominated by television, with Internet access at a lower level compared to several other western European countries. Berlusconi controls, through direct ownership or influence on the state run channels, a large proportion of the television network available. He has a confrontational relationship with the press, having called for boycotts from readers and advertisers of papers which are critical of his policies, and having sued several papers. Various press freedom demonstrations have taken place in the country, but as yet little has changed.

The recent debate over the gagging law seems to have led to support for pushing for better press freedom from an unexpected corner. Gianfranco Fini, co-founder of Berlusconi's ruling party the Popolo della Libertà (Freedom People) said earlier this week during as speech to the Italian media regulation body Agcom that  "a great democratic country needs to have strong, free and authoritative news and in a great democratic country, the press is never free enough." He continued "we still need to introduce ... further rules to protect access to sources of information."

Will Italy's tenuous press freedom status be improved?

What is a newsroom? Offices, computer terminals, journalists, talent, an ambition to belong to the "Fourth Estate"? A bit of all of that, but particularly a collective intelligence that manages to produce quality information within a given time frame. This type of intelligence, founded on the gathering together of individual talents at a single location, is confronted today by a three-fold threat:

-    the crisis in the newspaper industry that is leading to job cuts,
-    technology that allows the creation of other forms of collective intelligence, e.g. in networks,
-    readers and users who contest the monopoly of power of the journalists and want to act as players in the information production process.

A certain type of newsroom has existed for the last two hundred years - from the beginning of the 19th century - but this model is dying before our very eyes and we are struggling to envisage what the newsroom in the year 2020 or 2030 will look like. In order to obtain a clearer picture, a distinction must be made between three phases in the design and organisation of newsrooms.

1) The pyramid model

It took Europe more than half a century to develop its newsroom model, from 1785, the founding date of the Daily Universal Register, forerunner of The Times of London, to the widespread availability of the "penny press" with The Daily Telegraph and Courier in 1855. It was during this period that there arose the distinction between the editor and editor-in-chief, the organisation of the newsroom into desks and the introduction of the practice of holding editorial meetings in the morning (to decide the content of the following day's paper) and in the evening (to put together its front page).

The pyramid information model also emerged from this period, with the printers in the basement, the linotype operators and advertising on the ground floor, the desks on the various floors and the management offices at the top. This is how the newsroom of the New York Inquirer was depicted in the Orson Wells film Citizen Kane, and is a good reflection of the power set-up at a classical newspaper: everything begins and ends with the chief editor, there is no other authority and the news production cycle is vertical between the base and the summit.

This model has lasted nearly two hundred years and has been implemented all over the world.

2) The centralised production model

The pyramid model was not contested up to the beginning of this millennium, but it gradually began to disappear with the emergence of a convergent newsroom with responsibility for the Internet as well as new information distribution platforms.

Thus the major buzzword of the new millenium is "convergence." The challenge is to integrate two newsrooms that have little in common: different readers, different working rhythms, different news selection criteria, etc. And the "hub and spokes" model that prevailed at the beginning of the 21st century features, symbolically, the chief editors together in the middle and all the desks arranged on the periphery. Two elements differ radically from the pyramid model: firstly, the idea that all journalists work (officially) for all platforms with a proximity between traditional journalists and new media journalists; secondly, the obligation for the desk heads to "play together" and to work to multiple deadlines throughout the day.

Often in this environment, a centralised and productivist model emerges, as at The Daily Telegraph in 2005. Centralised, as it does not really break with the pyramid model of the 19th century: you find the same desks (foreign politics, social affairs, etc.) and the same philosophy of content production. Productivist, as all integration policies have led to job cuts, from 12 to 20% of the payroll. The unspoken understanding among all newspaper groups is that "modern" equates to "staff reductions." This in itself is not reprehensible, as new content management systems permit significantly increased productivity.

Nevertheless, this model remains ambivalent. On the one hand, it largely resolves the question of integrating two newsrooms and two news production methods. On the other hand, it remains attached to the traditional model of collective intelligence that dictates assembling of hundreds of journalists in one place. It is exactly this "hub and spokes" model that is facing upheaval, making it the last classical one rather than the first of a new generation.

3) The virtual newsroom in 2015

Though we are not there yet, all the technological, human and conceptual elements are in place to create the new form of collective intelligence that will continue to call itself the "newsroom", but will be much more digitally-oriented than today.

Four changes to watch:

A - It will no longer be necessary to assemble the content-generating reporters in a single location, i.e. those who produce the articles, postings, videos, contents. Mobile technologies will allow them to spend nearly 100% of their time in the field and to format and distribute content from their computer or mobile phone. Likewise, consulting with their section heads or the morning conference with their colleagues can be carried out virtually.

The era of the "virtual newsroom" will arrive on the day when the journalist's phone will be his office.

B - The second revolution is already under way. This concerns an end to solely relying on material produced by journalists. Whereas in the past, a good article used to be one written by a member of the editorial team, in the future a good article will be closer to a wiki (collaborative work) because it will integrate elements beyond the work of one journalist: alerts, comments, multimedia elements, etc.

This development will mark the emergence of working in a network together with "readers-content producers". It will empty the newsrooms a bit more because all these casual contributors will obviously not be physically present in the newsroom. But it will be necessary to have a dedicated professional team to carry out fact-checking.

C - Who will be left in the slimmed-down newsroom of 2015? The senior editorial staff of course, but also all those not involved in purely journalistic input. Let us call this new category "dispatching and repackaging journalists" - those responsible for finishing and distributing the information. Such journalists do not generate the information, but they make it available on all the platforms operated by their media group. Their creative input will focus mainly on developing applications for the tablet computers and e-readers that are re-inventing the "daily me" or the personalised newspaper. This category of journalists will represent between one third and half of the editorial staff.

D - The fourth probable development will affect the location of the video studio in the newsroom: today - except at the Financial Times in London - it is situated in a corner and regarded as a nice-to-have, but minor element in the information production process. Tomorrow, the widespread availability of high-speed Internet and smartphones will make it a central and unifying element in a newsroom. Some newspaper organisations will become producers of video material or animated images (Flash) and distance themselves from the production of written material, both for the web and for paper.

In fact, this virtual newsroom exists perhaps already on a small scale, for example at the Huffington Post. This will be the subject of our discussion on 7 October at the 17th World Editors Forum in Hamburg , Germany (see www.wefhamburg2010.com).

As climate change and environmental issues take a continually higher place on the global agenda, many news organisations are reconsidering their reporting strategies. One useful source of news and resources on the topic is AlertNet's Climate Change section, from the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Editors Weblog spoke to Laurie Goering, editor of AlertNet's Climate section, about the project and the issues associated with climate change reporting.

AlertNet aims to provide information in humanitarian crisis situations. The Reuters Foundation, now the Thomson Reuters Foundation, created AlertNet in 1997, after reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 spurred the news agency into looking what could be done to remedy this. As Goering said, "Good, accurate, reliable information can be a form of aid, saving lives," and it is this aid in the form of information that the Foundation decided to provide.

As AlertNet's website explains, "Reuters has traditionally been strong in handling fast-moving information" and its online focus " is particularly well-suited to alerting services." AlertNet pays particular attention to 150 nations around the world which are seen as particularly vulnerable to humanitarian crises. Such crises could be health, sudden-onset, food-related and conflict, and the site specifies that because of Reuters' commitment to track all such emergencies as far as possible, the service provides coverage of those which might not receive much coverage elsewhere.

AlertNet aggregates Reuters material from around the world and specific AlertNet staff are based in London, Bangkok, Delhi, Bogata, Nairobi and Dakar. Membership is open to national NGOs working in emergency relief.

The fact that AlertNet, which deals with crises, has created a specific climate change section is testament to the importance that the Reuters Foundation places on the threat from climate change to humanity.

For the climate page of AlertNet, Goering has recruited a group of about 20 developing world freelance writers who specialize in environmental, development and science topics. Their pieces are edited by Reuters staff, and are added to those gathered from Reuters bureaux around the world.

"I think our most important work so far has been focusing on how climate change is affecting communities today, not in some hazy future," Goering said. She believes that AlertNet is crucial in highlighting "how climate change figures into so many kinds of existing concerns: security considerations, migration and displacement, agriculture and food security, health, poverty reduction efforts, conditions facing women and justice issues, to name just a few."

AlertNet offers a free 45 minute eLearning course "designed to help journalists connect the dots between climate change and humanitarian emergencies," testing journalists on their knowledge and offering potential story angles on the humanitarian side and clean energy.  It also groups together a large number of reports on key climate change issues as a resource for journalists.  

Climate change is a difficult topic to cover, given the controversy that surrounds it. In addition, as a conference last year noted, public opinion plays an important role in influencing political leaders and the public, in turn, is influenced by the media. "It's certainly a complex topic and a controversial one, where getting things right and putting them in the proper perspective is important," said Goering.

In March last year, the chairwoman of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, Katherine Richardson, declared that the task of informing the public about climate change should not be left to journalists. She argued that journalists work for organisations that are more interested in making money than clearly presenting an accurate interpretation of climate change. Instead, she believes that communicators within the scientific community should be trying to get the message across.

The issue of climate change reporting is complicated by the question of how to deal with climate change skeptics. Journalists always seek to present a balanced argument, taking different points of view into account, and therefore end up giving significant space to climate change skeptics, who in fact make up a small minority of scientists compared to those who believe that the environment is threatened by climate change.

Much debate arose in October last year after a blog posting by BBC climate change correspondent Paul Hudson entitled "What happened to global warming?" made it onto the official BBC News website. The article outlined the arguments of climate skeptics and although it is not entirely one-sided, the reader is left with the impression that global warming might well not exist. This would not be problematic for an opinion piece, but the article was not clearly labeled as such and hence some readers could have concluded that the BBC was supporting the skeptics.

Goering said that she thinks media outlets are struggling with the issue of balance. "Reporters want to balance stories, and a note of caution about climate modelling figures, for example, is probably called for, both in terms of them potentially understating as well as overstating the coming problems." She sees room for improvement and believes that "most of us haven't done an adequate job pointing out the ties between climate sceptics and some of their corporate funders, or figuring out how to balance a flood of virulent blog comments or letters to the editor from climate sceptics with more mainstream and representative comments."

Goering also commented that "coverage has been generally building over the last four years now, which is a good thing," but that there was still a tendency for "wild swings" in the amount of coverage, with a huge amount of attention directed at climate change before the Copenhagen summit last year, for example, but then a significant drop off afterwards.   

Recent climate change coverage initiatives include the Guardian's EnivronmentGuardian.co.uk, which has 19 staff working on a project to "provide unrivalled news coverage from around the world alongside practical tips and analysis on green living," and the Climate Desk, for which several American news outlets have come together to produce articles exploring climate change issues.

The growing awareness of the need to cover climate change and other environmental issues effectively and thoroughly is a positive sign, and hopefully the work of AlertNet in this field is helping to provide aid where it is needed.     

In the past, media mogul Rupert Murdoch has lambasted search engines and news aggregators on various occasions for making profits off of content they did not produce. At a lecture to celebrate copyright's 300th birthday at the University College London yesterday, Murdoch's son and News Corp EMEA CEO, James Murdoch joined in his father's footsteps and criticized search engines for not making any contributions to newsgathering.

"Search companies and aggregators skim content from a thousand sources, sell it to clients, scoop up advertising revenues and put little or nothing back into professional newsgathering."

Paid Content reports that Murdoch criticized the long-standing status quo that most content online "wants to be free," adding that this imbalance between search engines and aggregators needs to be redressed.

The theme that emerged from the first session of the Press Gazette Local Heroes conference was the importance of engaging with your community as much as possible in order to be successful in the hyperlocal news arena, and the necessity to go as local as possible.

William Perrin, founder of a very local King's Cross-focused site and Talk About Local, an initiative that trains people to found their own hyperlocal sites. Perrin was inspired to get involved with his community several years ago and when he started attending meetings of local initiatives he realized that there was an overload of information and that it was hard to locate it all. His solution was to start a blog covering news and issues in the mile long by half mile wide area around King's Cross station. The site costs £10 a month to maintain and he and the other writers work as volunteers. Kingscrossenvironment.com hosts more than 900 articles so far, having been founded nearly four years ago.

The UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism hopes to fill in the holes left by the recent media crisis and subsequent corner-cutting that has taken place over the past three years, reports Journalism.co.uk.

The Potter Foundation-backed venture employs 17 freelancers and full-time staff members and boasts a budget of £2 million to support multimedia investigative ventures.  Managing editor Iain Overton claims the bureau has a collaboration agreement with the Financial Times, a commission from Channel 4 News, and interest from at least three other news venues, including television and radio.

One of the main goals of the bureau, said Overton, is to provide freelancers with fiscal support to pursue investigations that mainstream media organizations may have an interest in but are unable to support.

While many news websites focus on improving their pageviews and unique users, Gawker Media, producer of nine popular news and gossip sites including Gawker and Jezebel, is banking on the readers that keep coming back for more.

As Gawker Media's head of advertising and marketing operations Erin Pettigrew puts it, the company hopes to strengthen its "core readership."

"This core audience -- borne of a compounding of word of mouth, search referrals, article recommendations, and successive enjoyed visits that result in regular readership -- drives our rich site cultures and premium advertising products," she said.

With much pessimism in journalism, from decreased advertising income and a lack of model for online publishing, the news media is in crisis.

But, does that mean news is over?

Not exactly, according to George Brock, former president of the World Editors Forum, current board member of WEF, and professor and head of Journalism at City University London, who recently gave an inaugural lecture on March 17 at City University on where journalism is right now and where it's heading.

His lecture not only explains what developments have led to the current state of media, but what to do to ensure news media survival "for they are in need of help."

With all the recent developments in media consumption on mobile devices, from state of the art e-readers and the sleek iPad to the advent of countless newspaper iPhone apps, it is no wonder technology has taken center stage among news companies.

Mercedes Bunz from Media Guardian spoke to executives from The New York Times and CNN, companies who have built remarkable online presences, about how to keep up with technology companies who usually figure among the biggest sources for news on the Internet.

Nikkei Inc., the Japanese newspaper publisher of Japan's five largest newspapers, has announced it will launch a paid digital edition for its business daily, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (known as The Nikkei), on March 23.

Access to the publisher's previous newspaper website, Nikkei Net was free of charge. However, after March 23, access to part of the content of the new website will be limited to paid subscribers only, The Asahi Shimbun reports.

Nikkei President Tsuneo Kita said in a news conference that the company is approaching "this project from a different concept than the conventional perception that information on the Net is free of charge."

The New York Times' hyperlocal efforts will soon be supplemented by its new partnership with newswire Fwix.

Created 2 years ago by then-21-year-old Darian Shirazi, Fwix's CEO and founder, the newswire relies on a number of sophisticated search algorithms that pull together news articles and blog posts related to a certain area from across the web.  Fwix programmers also select local news sources and blogs to watch for relevant items to aggregate.

This allows for articles on the web to offer readers a series of related links pertaining to news from around that area.  A reader of an article about robberies in New York city's Chelsea neighborhood could theoretically be guided to further articles about Chelsea using Fwix's software.

The European Fund for Investigative Journalism, or Journalismfund.eu, launched in February 2009 with a plan to raise funding for investigative reporting that involved cross-border collaboration in Europe.

"In Europe we can see that politics, business, even organised crime all cross borders, while journalists and their coverage are often focussed purely on a national target group and are reluctant to cross borders," director Brigitte Alfter explained in an interview last year.

Just over a year on, two investigative stories have been published and eight more are currently being researched, with groups of two to six journalists working on each. The money raised by Alfter goes towards travel, advice, time and making freedom of information requests. 

T. Christian Miller of the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica recently won the prestigious 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Editor & Publisher reports that it was a collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and the non-profit news outfit that produced Miller's winning report into abuses of insurance coverage for private contractors in war zones.

Just last week, the winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism - usually given to courageous and skillful reporting - were announced, NPR's On the Media explains. Among the usual big media winners was a surprising win - the anonymous Iranians or Iranian who captured the death of the 26-year old protestor Neda Agha-Soltan on tape in the violent aftermath of the Islamic Republic's contested elections of June 2009.

How much would you pay for an opinion article by Paul Krugman? How much would you shell out for an article on a new RNA discovery?

As newspapers ponder the move to making readers pay for access to news content online, with many announcing that they will start to do so soon, the costs of running a newsroom and the value of news articles take center stage. With many wanting us to pay for content, we cannot help but to wonder how much that content is really worth.

From the loss of advertising revenue for newspapers to the emergence of a slew of multi-functional, deluxe e-readers, times are changing for the print industry - and they are doing so quickly.

So, what can we expect for the future of the printed word in the next couple years? Some media insiders spoke to CNN to offer some insight on what could be in store for newspapers.

Newspapers have not only lost significant advertising revenue in the last couple of years, they have also been losing government support in the form of subsidies in the last forty years, concludes a new study by the University of Southern California.

According to Poynter, a new study of historic subsidies and emerging trends tracks various tax breaks, reductions in postal subsidies first enacted in 1792, and upcoming cutbacks in public notices that government regulations have traditionally forced into American newspapers. The study provides valuable insight, if not clear-cut recommendations for print media to follow, about the thorny issue of government funding for media.

Greg Hadfield, Telegraph Media Group's head of digital development is to leave the newspaper group after only a year in the role. He made the announcement at the news:rewired event yesterday, organised by Journalism.co.uk. TMG today issued a statement saying: "Greg Hadfield was employed at TMG on a 12-month contract which expired at the end of last week. It was mutually agreed that this would not be renewed."

Identify what you can offer that is unique, was Matt Kelly's advice to participants at the WAN-IFRA conference on using sports news to optimise your revenue. Digital content director at the Mirror Group (part of Trinity Mirror), Kelly led the creation of MirrorFootball.co.uk, a standalone football-focused site that has gained the paper new readership.

Kelly explained that despite a successful redesign of the Mirror's website in 2008 which resulted in a significant increase in readership, the implosion in advertising rates meant that he and his team started to think about ways to re-engage with their readers.

Online news publications in France will share in state aid for the first time, to the tune of €20 million, Le Monde reports. Eighty per cent of the aid will be in the form of subsidies, while the rest will be in repayable loans.

This news follows the controversial state subsidies of the French press, which totalled €1.2 billion in 2008 and includes a free newspaper scheme for young people. A new body representing online news publishers, Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante d'Information en Ligne (Spiil) has been debating whether or not to accept similar subsidies for some time.

U.K. newspaper The Times celebrated its 225th birthday this week, making it the English-language record holder for longest continuous daily publication.

The paper was launched under the title The Daily Universal Register, then renamed The Times three years later to avoid confusion with other newspapers with "register" in the title.