Results matching “syndicated by major n”

A new investigative journalism project, InvestigateWest, has been set up by a group of journalists who worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which went online-only and shed many of its staff earlier this year. The new site aims to provide "high-quality investigative journalism about environmental, health and social justice issues across the West," according to a press release.

InvestigateWest is nonprofit and will produce work for online, print and radio and TV stations. It will distribute its multimedia content through individual partnerships with media organisations and through its own syndicated service. A core group of six journalists, who between them "have won or been finalists for every significant national journalism award for investigative and narrative work," will be supplemented by a network of correspondents throughout the West.

Brian Till, one of the US's youngest syndicated columnists, had an epiphany during his discussions about the decline in American journalism.  

Although he spends "hours a day reading news," and has countless resources at his disposal, he has only purchased "bout a dozen American papers in the last year." Till finds that, ipso facto, his actions have helped diminish the newspaper industry.  

"I am the murderer of news," he writes, along with his generation, who has failed to recognize the role they've played. Growing up with free news, Till writes, has left his generation clueless to the fact that they were the "free riders killing the industry."

US newspapers have recently begun working together on content sharing deals on an unprecedented scale. There has been much speculation that the driving force behind these agreements is dissatisfaction with the recent changes at AP. The most recent announcement came from five papers in the Tri-State area of the US last week.  

Content sharing deals vary and although many are just starting, a group of three papers in Florida - the Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald - started content sharing about three months ago.  However, there is one group of five papers in New Hampshire who have had an agreement in place for the past 15 years.

In an effort to understand the inner workings of content sharing, how it will affect the future of newspapers and journalism, and if these deals are related to AP's actions, the Editors Weblog spoke with Dave Solomon, the vice president of The Telegraph of Nashua in New Hampshire, and Anders Gyllenhaal, senior vice president/executive editor of the Miami Herald.

The Florida Method

Three months ago the Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald began to share content. What is most striking about this deal is the complete shift in mentality that has accompanied it. These three papers have been fierce competitors for the past 100-years and now they find themselves posting each other's stories.  According to Gyllenhaal at the Miami Herald, the shift is not designed to change the competitive relationship between the three, but it has changed the way they work together.

What was the trigger for such a change after so many years? Gyllenhaal believes that the increasingly challenging newspaper market has necessitated a more mutually supportive relationship. For the Herald, it began on the business side, "with a distribution agreement. In the case of the Herald and the Sun Sentinel, the Sun was circulating the Herald in its prime territory, and we were circulating their paper." After this, "the newsrooms began to talk, and we have come up with the initial step, a way of trading routine content between the three papers."

The papers follow a strict guideline of what content they can and cannot use. Gyllenhaal believes that "websites are where the news competition exists" so in an effort to preserve this, "you cannot pick up a story from another website and put it on your website but you can put in the paper the next day." Gyllenhaal goes on to say, "It's a defined group of stories, which are events that happened in the last 24 hours or are about to happen, and as a rule we are picking up a couple of items a day from each others websites."

Gyllenhaal reports, "What we can't pick up are things that kind of define an individual paper - in the sense of their franchise elements, their personality elements, you can't pick up columnists, major investigative pieces the things that define, the more important pieces."  This aspect of the agreement maintains the competition, therefore Gyllenhaal does not see this changing anytime soon.

What next for the Florida method?

As for the future, Gyllenhaal confirmed plans for individual departments to start working with each other across the three titles for specific stories.  He gave the example of when a sports department cannot make it to a game; they will make arrangements to get the story from one of the other papers who would be at the game. 

When asked about the possibility of expanding partnerships statewide or across the nation, Gyllenhaal believes that it is possible, but complicated.  He notes that in order to grow such a partnership it would require a different system than they have put in place.  However, there are plans to extend the content-sharing deal to two papers north of Palm Beach, but he confirmed that it is probably as far as they will go for now.

The New Hampshire model

The Nashua Telegraph has been content sharing with five of their neighbor newspapers since 1993. The deal here is different to Flordia's method as the papers are not in direct competition with each other. However, their approach does provide some insight into how such a system can work for a sustained period of time.

 
According to Solomon at The Telegraph of Nashua the system started as a means, "to get feature stories and in-depth stories from the other papers for our then-new Sunday editions that we were struggling to fill state copy."

Unlike the Florida papers, "anything and everything is available for reuse," whether on the website or in the print edition, a routine story or an in-depth investigative piece as long as they credit the newspaper of origin.

The five papers involved in the deal extended the agreement to two other papers in the state that are not part of the full open-content sharing deal.  

As for their readers, Solomon believes that they, "appreciate the better reporting." He gave the example of a hypothetical airport accident in a near-by town, Concord.  If it were to happen, the "Concord Monitor is going to write a very thorough story. They are going to give it to AP and AP is going to flatten out the language, neutralize the tone and convert it to about eight inches. I think our readers are better served by the Concorde Monitor coverage."

Are these agreements a reaction to the changes at AP?

Such content sharing deals seem to be becoming increasingly popular just at a time when a growing chorus is criticising AP: are the two related?

Gyllenhaal said that the Miami Herald's agreement had, "nothing to do with AP. We are taking a different route than those other papers, so this is unrelated to that."

The Telegraph filed a termination notice with the AP in April, so between now and 2010 the Telegraph is looking for alternative vendors.  

Solomon explained that the Telegraph's reason for terminating their AP contract was monetary, it spends around $130,000 a year on AP copy. However, this expenditure does not correlate with the amount of syndicated material that they actually use since they are so, "intensely local."

In addition to the AP, the Telegraph spends another $30,000 on syndicated copy from Scripps Howard, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Soloman is, "convinced a newspaper our size should only be paying half of that or less given the amount of syndicated material we use.  So unless I see a package where we can get AP and combo of other syndicates for half as much as what we are currently paying, I don't see any alternative but to move forward.  I don't expect that by canceling AP we will have a net savings of 130k, but expect to come out of it spending about half as much."

For Solomon, the AP is a "great institution that does remarkable work." However, he believes that "there has been a deterioration in state report over the years. Through no fault of AP personel, but through the continued reductions in staffing at the state offices."  

Solomon believes that the AP has, "demonetized world and national news because they give it to the pure play sites like Google and Yahoo."  

Solomon also pointed out that the daily news reports from most AP bureaus are 50 percent member contribution and 50 percent AP staff generated. Solomon further highlighted that this "is certainly not the case in New England, I would estimate its 80 percent member generated and 20 percent AP staff generated."  So for the Telegraph, this is another reason why the AP is not a vital contributor to its news operation.

Where will these newspapers get additional content from?

Since the Telegraph has been content sharing for the last 15 years, it is nothing new to them; however, now that they have terminated their contract with the AP, things are going to change for them.  

Solomon emphasized his hope that the Washington Post and LA Times will "seize the opportunity and become more aggressive in realizing breaking news, where they are certainly not comparable to AP at this point.  But they have the capabilities to do it."

The Telegraph will also have to find sources for sports news, photos, world and nation coverage, Nielsen ratings, top ten movie releases and so forth.  In order to do so, Solomon said the Telegraph is looking into other options that can provide content for them and even expanding upon "the state-wide cooperative that has been in existence for so long."  

What can other newspapers learn from the Miami Herald the Telegraph?

The two models for content sharing demonstrate that anything is possible when it comes to expanding a newspaper's coverage capabilities.

For some newspapers the AP will continue to be an essential part of their operation, but for others this relationship will end or significantly change. According to Solomon, the AP must not see content sharing as a threat, but what happens if this system grows?

To compound to the woes at the AP, many have voiced opposition to its new "boldness" when reporting, with some headlines that stretch far from the AP's position as a "a neutral arbiter of the news".

Whether AP sees content sharing as a threat or not, it is certainly an innovative and positive step for newspapers in the US. These newspapers are demonstrating a willingness to break down old rivalries in pursuit of more comprehensive coverage; content sharing may well be a key step on the long and difficult road to restructuring the industry for the changing industry-wide and global economic climate.

After The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland announced a "partnership" with the Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), where AAMC paid the paper to provide all the content for the newspaper's health page once a month, two major journalism groups have responded, issuing a joint warning to news outlets on the ethical complications of creating to cozy of a relationship with hospitals, according to Editor & Publisher.

In March, on the Capital's website, the paper explained, "... Partnering with the hospital on the Health page seemed to make sense. We don't have a health reporter to write about medical issues and often use stories from syndicated services that quote doctors from other cities.... Instead of generic stories originating from another city, the reader will have local news featuring people they recognize (and) doctors they use."

In their release today, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists state they "are concerned about news media that publish or broadcast stories, reports, news releases and interviews prepared or paid for by hospitals."

"The ethics codes of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists call for fair and accurate reporting and editorial independence. But editorial cutbacks, along with pressure on hospitals to market profitable services, may be eroding these standards."

Despite these challenges, the groups asserted, "our journalistic mission requires us to hold doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies accountable to the public. In doing so, we commit to fair and transparent reporting of medical issues.

The statement also included these guidelines of media outlets to abide by:

• News organizations should fully disclose the source of any editorial information not independently gathered, whether video, audio, photograph or print material.

• News organizations should not run prepackaged stories produced by hospitals unless they are clearly and continuously labeled as advertisements.

• News organizations should not favor advertisers or sponsors over competing health-care providers when choosing sources or story topics and should strive to employ a wide variety of sources.

• News organizations should develop guidelines for the public disclosure of sponsors and advertisers.

• These guidelines should prohibit news personnel from appearing in or participating in sponsored programming or advertisements.

Source: Editor & Publisher

The St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Institute, is going through a major revamp on May 19, in an effort to emphasize content valued by readers and cut down costs.

The daily features section, Floridian, will be published on Sundays only. The business section will merge with the B section metro news.

TV listings, comics and games, and some other syndicated elements from the features section, will be moved to a new section called Baylink.

As mentioned though, the move is (primarily) aimed at cutting costs, and a few elements will disappear from the paper, including items such as stock listings (many papers have eliminated them), the Parenting column and the Working section.

Staffers have worked to create "a more streamlined paper during the week, eliminating material readers may not value so much, and, in the midst of a serious recession, cutting costs," wrote Times media critic Eric Deggans in a blog post.

As Deggans is honest enough to admit, "It's a tough spot for a media critic to negotiate; I'm not an ombudsman with a contract guaranteeing employment no matter what I write, so I've tried to respect the organization's need to plan while pulling together this blog post."

In the end, it seems that even newspapers with a nonprofit model (the Times is in fact for profit, but has a peculiar ownership structure) are getting hit by the struggles of the US newspaper industry.

"We're not insulated from the pressure, and these changes are evidence of that fact," said Deggans.

A good share of comments to his blog post came from unhappy readers.

Source: TampaBay.com The Feed

A Washington Post piece written by David Simon, entitled “Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore,” has caused quite a lot of uproar among the public and news industry insiders. Is the general audience as removed from news as some may claim, and “isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone?”

Mochila, the online media marketplace, has found a new content provider, the citizen photojournalism agency Citizen Image.

Small to mid-size dailies such as The Post-Bulletin (circulation 45,000) of Rochester, MN, are enjoying climbs in print readership as well as an increased Web presence by reworking their content based on results from the Readership Institute.

There has been a degree of alarm amongst newspapers as it is realized that it’s no longer just about the written product. Audio and Video can provide a huge opportunity if embraced in the right way.

Although recently put into effect, several major newspapers, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, The San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman, have already begun syndicating and displaying high-quality blog content on their web sites.

 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!

An article by Jemima Kiss at journalism.co.uk entitled "Newspapers: an industry in crisis" and based on last week's workshop of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Digital Technologies project, not only declares the printed word dead, but continues to slam newspapers' attempts at adapting themselves to the internet. Although Ms. Kiss makes a couple of good points, her "predictions of doom" can be discussed. First the good points:

1. "Management teams that are unwilling or unable to understand the internet environment" - One of the representatives at Cambridge last week commented that newspapers' resistance to change 'borders on pathological' and that the entire industry is in 'profound denial' about its problems. Because of these problems with their management, website teams have not been permitted to take full advantage of the opportunities the internet provides. At a higher level, Ms. Kiss says that newspaper executives are lost when it comes to the purpose of the web, asking themselves, "So it doesn't make money, and it's not a back up for the newspaper?"

2. "... most site traffic will be generated by syndicated news content... To remain competitive, sites will have to provide versatile news for a wide variety of platforms" - RSS and aggregators will certainly become more influential as recognition of their convenience spreads. Although it may sound contradictory, these technologies pander to the needs of niche markets on a universal level, meaning information about very specific topics from sources around the globe can now be easily compiled to satisfy a reader's needs, a phenomenon previously next to impossible, if not unimaginable. In order to maximize readership potential, newspapers will have to branch out to cater to these interests, something facilitated immensely by the internet.

And now for our problems with her arguments:

An article by Jemima Kiss at journalism.co.uk entitled "Newspapers: an industry in crisis" and based on last week's workshop of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Digital Technologies project, not only declares the printed word dead, but continues to slam newspapers' attempts at adapting themselves to the internet. Although Ms. Kiss makes a couple of good points, her "predictions of doom" can be discussed. First the good points:

1. "Management teams that are unwilling or unable to understand the internet environment" - One of the representatives at Cambridge last week commented that newspapers' resistance to change 'borders on pathological' and that the entire industry is in 'profound denial' about its problems. Because of these problems with their management, website teams have not been permitted to take full advantage of the opportunities the internet provides. At a higher level, Ms. Kiss says that newspaper executives are lost when it comes to the purpose of the web, asking themselves, "So it doesn't make money, and it's not a back up for the newspaper?"

2. "... most site traffic will be generated by syndicated news content... To remain competitive, sites will have to provide versatile news for a wide variety of platforms" - RSS and aggregators will certainly become more influential as recognition of their convenience spreads. Although it may sound contradictory, these technologies pander to the needs of niche markets on a universal level, meaning information about very specific topics from sources around the globe can now be easily compiled to satisfy a reader's needs, a phenomenon previously next to impossible, if not unimaginable. In order to maximize readership potential, newspapers will have to branch out to cater to these interests, something facilitated immensely by the internet.

And now for our problems with her arguments:

An article by Jemima Kiss at journalism.co.uk entitled "Newspapers: an industry in crisis" and based on last week's workshop of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Digital Technologies project, not only declares the printed word dead, but continues to slam newspapers' attempts at adapting themselves to the internet. Although Ms. Kiss makes a couple of good points, her "predictions of doom" can be discussed. First the good points:

1. "Management teams that are unwilling or unable to understand the internet environment" - One of the representatives at Cambridge last week commented that newspapers' resistance to change 'borders on pathological' and that the entire industry is in 'profound denial' about its problems. Because of these problems with their management, website teams have not been permitted to take full advantage of the opportunities the internet provides. At a higher level, Ms. Kiss says that newspaper executives are lost when it comes to the purpose of the web, asking themselves, "So it doesn't make money, and it's not a back up for the newspaper?"

2. "... most site traffic will be generated by syndicated news content... To remain competitive, sites will have to provide versatile news for a wide variety of platforms" - RSS and aggregators will certainly become more influential as recognition of their convenience spreads. Although it may sound contradictory, these technologies pander to the needs of niche markets on a universal level, meaning information about very specific topics from sources around the globe can now be easily compiled to satisfy a reader's needs, a phenomenon previously next to impossible, if not unimaginable. In order to maximize readership potential, newspapers will have to branch out to cater to these interests, something facilitated immensely by the internet.

And now for our problems with her arguments: