Results matching “post bloggers paid ex”

In the past, reporters used to follow US presidential candidates by car or bus, but today with candidates flying from city to city, coverage of the presidential election becoming too expensive for newspapers, with fares up to $2,000 a trip or $30,000 per person a month.

Papers such as USA Today and the Boston Globe used to cover candidates on a day to day basis, but with newspapers already in financial troubles, they are covering the campaign from television or using wire service reports from AP or Reuters.

"We'd all like to be able to be out there, but given the reality of the costs and other priorities, it just isn't realistic," said Senior Political Editor of USA Today Lee Horwich.

This year the only papers that have full-time correspondents following the candidates are The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and the NY Times. Newsweek is the only publication with a full-time reporter on both Clinton's and Obama's trails.

Traveling campaign reporters say that anyone can watch speeches on YouTube, so instead of repeating raw information, reporters try to track the evolution and growth of candidates by identifying inconsistencies or dishonesty. Bloggers are also taking the reins by posting their thoughts on candidates' speeches and adding information from conference calls with the candidates' press aides.

Los Angeles Times's Mark Z. Barabak, who has been riding political buses since 1984 observed, "What you have lost is the benefit of getting 6, 12, 15 different perspectives. Now you may get three or four. They may be very good."

On one hand, US newspapers are diminishing election coverage. On the other, AP has recently hired 21 additional staff to bolster entertainment news. They say that they will provide what sells and as of now, celebrities are what the people want.
 
US consumer magazines increased ad revenues by 7% last year with those focusing on entertainment and sports personalities did particularly well.

Philip Stone from Follow the Media wrote, "People Magazine and OK! publish first pictures of Jennifer Lopez and twins and pay millions for the privilege while most US newspapers while most US newspapers cannot afford the $1,000 - $2,000 a day to send a reporter on presidential candidate planes."  

Richard Desmond who publishes both OK! and the Daily Express newspaper, noted that advertisers are already "vying for space" in OK!'s special issue on England footballer Wayne Rooney's wedding, which they paid a record $6.4 million for the rights.

Daniel Becker, newly appointed director of Entertainment Content, wrote a memo declaring that AP photographers will not become paparazzi, but instead use their "journalistic talent and unmatched network of  resources to produce high quality, multimedia coverage in an area of growing interest," thus becoming the "trusted authoritative voice on entertainment."

Is the future of quality journalism celebrity gossip?

Sources: The New York Times, Press Gazette, Follow the Media (picture)
 

Will bloggers go on strike in the future, just as Hollywood writers currently are? The question may seem strange at this point, but this will increasingly become an issue as popular bloggers churn out profit and traffic for parent media organizations – with little or no monetary compensation.

Last week, Wide Open, the political blog of The Plain Dealer was suspended after learning that two of the contributors to the blog had donated money to political campaigns. This raises the issue of credibility and the standards held to non-journalists. Should non-journalists be unbiased and held to the same standard as journalists?

        The print press has given lots of attention to Minnesota Star Tribune’s former editor (1983-92) and publisher (1992-98), Joel Kramer, since he announced the launch this fall of an online-only, non-profit news publication, MinnPost.com. Both print and online news organizations will be watching its first steps to answer their own existential concerns. How can editors adapt their ‘print journalism’ to make it work online? Is it streetwise to focus on quality coverage and less so on multimedia? Can the online-only, non-profit business model be sustainable?

At the ‘New Media: The Press Freedom Dimension’ conference in Paris last week experts in Blogging and Citizen media discussed the evolution of this new media and press freedom dimensions. Here, Declan McCullagh of CNET looks at the discussion of the legal divisions and rules between journalists and bloggers.

The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism.

Citizen journalism media and local news websites offering user-generated content influence their communities and are here to stay, according to a report released by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. Traditional Media companies are coming up against these citizen journalism sites so it’s imperative to understand how to set them up, the secrets to success and how they can work hand in hand with newspapers.

The Huffington Post, a successful political website that groups renowned bloggers, hired Melinda Henneberger, former journalist for Newsweek magazine, as its political editor. This wave of transitions from print to online maybe means more about the evolution of journalism than it does about online’s obvious better prospects.

If you missed our last posting, we argued that true amateurs will never be able to perform true journalism. Still, newspaper websites nowadays are doing everything in their power to integrate the interactive capabilities inherent to amateur blogging they once dismissed. But should they?

Syndicated blog service Blogburst was recently launched, delivering commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers. Blogs, which are now increasing in popularity as well as a credible source of communication, are becoming increasingly a part of mainstream media.

As more newspapers insist that their journalists contribute to or start their own blogs, a new hierarchy of pay seems to be emerging, not always for the benefit of all journalists. Last week it was revealed that many journalists that blog for the Washington Post do not receive extra compensation for their time, whereas others who write for blogs under their own name see additional money in their paychecks.

The third annual State of the News Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details two phenomena crippling the newspaper industry which, through further inspection, are more closely related than they appear. The first, which the report refers to as the “new paradox of journalism,” destroys content. The second, spawned from the Internet, destroys revenues. This may not sound promising. But by understanding, embracing and combining innovative ideas with these perceived destructive forces, newspapers should be able to solidify their futures in the new media economy.

US RSS technology company Pluck is set to launch a new service called Blog Burst, which will distribute content from pre-approved blogs to newspaper websites. Blog Burst charges publishers for this service, and there are also plans for a compensation system for bloggers.

 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 act of hyperlinking, adding a link from one webpage to another, is now a standard practice among bloggers. Newspapers, on the other hand, have been rather slow to adopt the practice. But some journalists are catching on. If it becomes more common, hyperlinking could have the potential to change the way in which newspaper journalists write.

Lately, the newspaper industry has been worried about the 18-34 demographic, one that they are losing to new media and which advertisers, who consider this generation their primary target, are following. But have newspapers been concerned with the habits of the next age group down, 12-17 year olds? According to a new study, they should be.

The New York Times' paid wall experiment raised a lot of fuss in the online media world back in September and still gets on the nerves of the blogosphere.  But is it really all that hard to find those hidden articles?  What about other paid subscription sites?  Do paid walls work?

Time to talk, post speeches--Let's see what the audience--and the speakers--have to say:
The panelists are discussing trust and reputation; Dan Gillmor and Joi Ito are describing how bloggers can build up trust and reputation over time, and that bloggers can--in particular circumstances--be (alm olst) as credible as mainstream media.
Krishna Bharat says that he believes in the need to rely on people "on the street, on the scene--you have to take your facts where they come from, and in ways that give you a fresh perspective."

Audience comments:
A Nigerian delegate asks about the emphasis of speed in posting--if bloggers post so quickly to the web, how can they cross-check their stories and get their facts right? Especially if they don't get paid? How can they afford to be accurate?
Nachison: This question applies equally well to mainstream media, where mistakes are published and corrected every day...this is a universal question.
Joi says: My main thing is fear--when I POST 100,000 people see it--when I make a mistake, people shred me to bits. I correct myself, and have a need to check--and `I find myself quite boring." (Susan: There, he finally said it!)
OH, Oh my new says: Articles are checked on staff, especially if they are sensitive. When our citizen journalists write they use their real names and they check themselves because their reputations are at stake as well.
Sussman: In the US, there are rules that indemnify publishers from operating forums that are platforms for free discussion, so I run open comments on my site for everyhthing but obscentity.
A Turkish journalist explains how carefully her newspaper builds their front page and says that Google News turns news stories into the equivalent of wire services because it takes their stories and builds its own front page.
Bharat respnds that Google News is not a newspaper and that it doesn't want to be one--it's a "neutral intermediary."
He restates his comments on the aggregation process, but the journalist's question is an acute one--whether Google means to build a page or not, they are making up a new front page--actually every 5 minutes.
A Chilean editor has a question for Google's Bharat--Aren't you acting as an editor when you arrange the clusters? Also, you say you want to be equal in your selection of news, but what sources do you include and what do you leave out?
Discussion gently rages...
(More in next post)