Results matching “question in the digital”

The Associated Press suspended the use of US military photos on November 14th after the US Government body distributed doctored photographs of General Ann E. Dunwoody, the first female four star General in US history. This is the second hand out photograph that has been altered by the US army in a matter of months. The fact that a government institution would manipulate a photograph begs the question: can we trust what we see?

The Editors Weblog spoke to Santiago Lyon, the Director of Photography at AP about the events surrounding this suspension and the issue of photo manipulation.

First case - flag appears

Lyon reports that when Dunwoody was promoted, the AP searched for an image of the new General on a US military website that gathers photos of armed services personnel. Unable to locate a photograph, the AP contacted the website and requested a photograph and subsequently received a picture of the General by email. This photo showed Dunwoody with a US flag behind her (the photo on the right). The photo was immediately passed to the editing desk (all AP photographs go through at least one editing desk) where it was vetted and examined; it was then released onto the wire.  The San Antonio Express-News, a Texas-based local newspaper, contacted the AP alerting them to the fact that they had found a very similar image of Dunwoody on Google images, but with no US flag behind her (both photos shown above). Lyon and his team immediately investigated and discovered that a member of US military staff had added the US flag background and changed the number of stars on her uniform from three to four. The photograph was then immediately removed from the AP's wire.

Second case - superimposing a head
 
This was the second such incident involving the US army in a matter of months. The AP collects headshots of all the US personnel that have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and as part of this effort the AP received a photo that on closer inspection was not what it appeared. The army had the cut out the face of the dead soldier in question from one photo and superimposed it onto an existing mug shot with a uniform and an American flag in the background.

Lyon says, "Because this had been the second incident in as many months, we decided to suspend the use of US military photographs while we examined our own internal policies as well as have a conversation with the US military about what they were doing to these pictures and how this was unacceptable."

Army were, "at a loss to explain it"

Surprisingly when Lyon contacted the military to complain about this incident, it did not appear to accept the gravity of the situation. Lyon reports, "Initially they were a little bit defensive, claiming that this photo did not really alter the substance of the image. Our policy is of course zero tolerance, we do not accept that images be manipulated or that content be added or subtracted more specifically, unless there is a pressing need to for security reasons for example, and in that event we flag this." In further conversations, the army were, "at a loss to explain it." Lyon goes on to say, "I was shocked, but we wanted to deal with it as forcefully as possible and put it behind us."

The Pentagon later told the AP that they would redistribute their guidelines again to staff, which are also firm on the issue of manipulation. Lyon says, "They pretty much admitted that there had been a mistake and that they weren't proud about it, and that they wanted to work with us to try and ensure that this does not happen again."

As a result, the AP has now strengthened its internal policies with regard "hand-out" images (images that it receives from non-AP staff and external bodies). "We have instituted a more rigorous policy of examining those images now, at least two editors have to examine the images closely and if there is any doubt at all, the image is then held pending further examination." Previously, the standard procedure was to examine all images but not in the kind of minute detail that they do now with hand out images. Lyon reports that the AP receives vast numbers of these hand out images from various bodies, including the police, industry and so forth. AP staff know its strict zero tolerance policy for photo manipulation, but is it something that these external organisations adhere to?

In recent weeks not only do we have the AP case, but also the issue of a French Government minister and a disappearing and reappearing diamond ring. A Le Figaro front-page photo of Justice Minister Rachida Dati was doctored to erase a substantial diamond ring she was wearing. The practise of photo manipulation is nothing new: in 1942 Mussolini had a horse handler removed from a photograph of him sitting on a horse in order to make him look more heroic.

As long as there has been photography, there have been photo manipulations. However, with advanced technology and increased use of photo shop, it is now easier to achieve and harder to detect. Lyon says, "It is the click of a mouse and you can add or subtract things from a photo quite easily. What that means for an organisation like ours, whose whole reputation is based on the voracity of the information and telling the truth, is that we have to be ever vigilant." These incidences raise the question of how often these doctored images make it onto our front pages - unintentionally in the case of AP and intentionally in the case of Le Figaro  - as we generally only hear of this when the culprits are caught out. Can we now trust what we see? "You see images that are printed by others and are you always sure of the truthfulness of what you are looking at? It's hard to say. Sometimes you look at an image and you wonder," say's Lyon on the issue.

Lyon says that the Dunwoody image has highlighted the problem to AP. "What this has done is that it has shown us the need to be as vigilant and as careful as possible with hand out images from third parties whose provenance we cannot be 100% sure of. It has heightened our vigilance."

Today's newspaper reader is well aware that anything can be done with an image, even if it is just from their experiences watching the magic of CGI at their local multiplex. However, this is an arena where they expect the full trickery of the camera to be on display, the public does not expect it when they open the newspaper.

Due to the Internet and various other factors, "there has been a huge increase in the number of images that are being sent by international news agencies. 20-years ago we were probably sending 100 images a day in a 24-hour period. Now we are closer to sending 3,000 images in a 24-hour period. When you do the maths, the news agencies are handling close to a million images a year. That's a huge amount of imagery." This increase in distribution and use of photographs highlights the need for there to be strict rules on the doctoring of photographs. The role of a photojournalist is to capture a story for the reader, to bring a story to life, and to tell the truth. Just because we have the technology to do something, it  doesn't mean we should.

Source: AP, Straits Times, National Press Photographers Association, Ethics of Digital Manipulation, Daily Tech

Leonard Downie, Jr., longtime executive editor of The Washington Post recently discussed the ethical and moral obligations of journalists online.  Downie questions what journalism consists of in the digital world and how journalists can remain accountable.  These questions are becoming increasingly important when anyone can publish anything on the Internet.   

However, contrary to many, Downie believes that "the best professional American journalism may be better than it has ever been."  He feels that "journalists today are better educated, better trained and more expert in the subjects they cover. They use better technology and they work to higher professional standards."  In addition "the web has actually provided journalists with better tools for research and reporting, and it has enabled them to present their journalism in multimedia and interactive forms with greater impact than just print."

"Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," said Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for the Media at The Century Foundation, after a $125 million payout for publishers and authors who sued the major search engine for rights to digitize copyrighted books.

Despite the "myriad" of issues left to be resolved for the publishing industry, the event has called into question the use of news on search engines.

News and political websites have seen a surge in traffic as a result of the US election.

Politico.com has seen a 219% increase in unique users year on the year according to the ratings company Nielsen. The websites of the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Boston Globe, ABC and Fox News are up approximately 100%, and the New York Times, Google News and MSNBC Digital Network have seen traffic increase by around 40%.

"The web lends itself to immediacy, so when people have a passionate and visceral reaction to something they see, and they're thinking about it, they can go right to a website," says Chuck Schilling, the research director for agency and media analytics at Nielsen.

The question is, will these new users hang around after the election?  

Source: Guardian Media

"Lie by Lie," is Mother Jones' "history of the Iraq War." The editors explain the project was created to be "a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them?"

In his Web 2.Oh... Really? blog, Craig Stoltz makes some key observations about the interactive graphic, what follows is an edited version of his original post:

Why I love this work of journalism:

It's nothing fancy, hardly a data visualization at all. It's essentially a timeline navigation of information on the Iraq War. The only visual grace note is the roulettey spin of the date slider as you move it around. But the tool is functional: It permits navigation of the same data by topic, tags or search. It engages and it works.

It is an aggregation of content reported by others... Smart people knowledgeable about public affairs paid close attention to a huge amount of information, made careful selections and used available digital technology to make it accessible and flexible in a way no print publication could.

By virtue of its form, it surfaces new understandings that a reader of the original reports would not achieve. For instance, noodle around with the "Dick Cheney" tag and you'll discover, right at the top, this entry dated . . . over 15 years ago:

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, speaking to the Discovery Institute in Seattle, says the first President Bush was right not to invade Baghdad: "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that...we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."-Aug. 14, 1992

Stoltz also makes the necessary point that the reporting used in this project came from traditional media - The New York Times, The LA Times, The New Yorker. "The rub," Stoltz points out, "Is this original reporting cost a fortune. It was produced under the old, dying model of journalism, wherein investigative reporting is funded by advertisements for cell phones, new subdivisions, mattress-chain mega-sales, designer clothing, and so on....As Mother Jones has shown, people who are passionate about telling a story have powerful new tools at their disposal to do so. But without high-quality content-difficult, time-consuming, intellectually demanding, butt-numbing, sometimes actually dangerous reporting-the tools are just toys."

Source: Web 2.Oh...Really?

The blogosphere's interactive, communal spirit is shaking the foundations of print journalism, but traditional journalists should embrace the change, says Roy Greenslade. News, he says, is no longer "one-way traffic".

"We [print journalists] conceived it [news]. We gathered it. We published it and broadcast it," he writes. "Blogging turns that model on its head. It allows people to question the information we provide. It allows them to produce their own information. It offers them a space to air their own views."

Greenslade says he is no longer certain that his own model of the future newsroom - a core of "professional journalists" overseeing a fringe group of bloggers - is viable. The news organization, he says, is vulnerable.

"...More fundamentally, I wonder whether a news organization is as perfect a model as we might think...It is entirely conceivable that the digital revolution may, in the fullness of time, sweep the media mogul aside," he writes.

Not that this is anything to be afraid of. Greenslade is ebullient when talking about the liberating potential of the blogosphere.

"The joy of the digital revolution is that it is bloodless, and democracy is at its heart," Greenslade writes. "It is the lack of unity that makes blogging so vibrant, so critical and also so self-critical."

For traditionalists who still cling to the old model - journalists as providers, citizens as recipients - and fear relinquishing this power to bloggers, Greenslade has some advice: let go.

"There is no us and them," he writes.

Click here for more on the converging media.

Source: The Guardian (Greenslade) through Journerdism

Google News cannot be compared to other news sites like Yahoo News or CNN.com, according to PaidContent.org.

Google News gathers content with the help of computers who scan news on the Web and does not contain any ads. Meanwhile, other news sites like CNN.com create licensed material that passes through editors.

Google News groups articles by subject and ranks article by importance based on factors like  authority of publisher or placement of article in site. NYT writes that Google "packages the results as a set of links, sending readers to the sites where the articles appear."

According to the New York Times, Google executives claim that traffic is not the primary aim but that Google News "helps the company produce better search results and helps users find news sources that they might not know about otherwise."

According to the NYT, the growth rate of Google News is only 10 %, compared to MSNBC.com's 42 %, which got the site 10.4 million in traffic.

Dan Gillmor, who is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Arizona State University School of Journalism, said that he is surprised "how little" Google News "evolved, at least on the surface", NYT wrote.

Marissa Meyer, vice president for Google search and user experience, said that Google News is one of "the most innovative" Google features and that its users actively employ the  Google search engine  and other services, NYT wrote.

She also mentioned that news results do emerge on the main Google search page, alongside adverts.  According to Meyer, "it directly feeds the main business."

Google News is sometimes seen as a competitor to other news providers, even if it brings traffic to the news site. Industry executives, according to NYT, think that because Google News links to a remote article, the readers are not likely to stay on the news site.

According to Braig Moffett, a Sanford C; Bernstein & Copany analyst, the Internet "made it possible to aggregate news cheaply". Consequently, news providers stopped charging for content. "Google may be doing more to accelerate this trend than anyone, but they are not doing it out of malice,"  Moffett said.

Tribune Co. owner Samuel Zell accused Google of stealing news stories for their own gains. In Europe, Belgian prosecutors said that Google News had "violated copyright laws" without asking for permission to link to the articles, NYT reported.

Google said that the company wishes "to help, not hurt, journalism", NYT wrote. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that the company has "a huge moral imperative" to aid news outlets in becoming more "successful online", NYT wrote.

Last year, several features were added, such as different country and language versions of Google News. The number of "duplicate articles" is being reduced, as "authoritative" and "original" news stories are being displayed, according to NYT.

There is also the chance to personalize Google News, by focusing on local news and mapping the news event sites on Google Earth. Users can also post comments and search quotes.

Different sides to the same story are being provided by the news search engine, helping to make people "wake up and think," said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist behind Google News. "That's what makes people news junkies," she added.

NYT wrote that even if there have been some innovations, Google News "still lacks many of the flashier features that have attracted users to more conventional news sites, including interactive graphics and video."

Analysts have begun to question automated products and their limitations. Mark Glaser, PBS MediaShift editor said, "there is only so far you can go with an algorithm" because , "in the long run, people want a human touch."

Source: PaidContent.org, New York Times

See Also:

8 efficient and visual ways to present your online news
How to maximize your site's visiility in Google search ranking

Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, will speak during the session entitled "Will Web 2.0 give birth to Journalism 2.0?" at the upcoming World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 1-4.

In the last six months, AP has codified its news delivery process to follow the rule of '1-2-3 filing' for all of its stories. (This process was partly based on findings from AP's anthropological study of young digital news consumers, which will also be presented during the Forum.)

Under this process, "It no longer is an assumption that text is the default and only way to tell a story." said Carroll.

This doesn't (yet) put into question the predominance of text in newspapers and its efficiency as a medium. "It's the best way to get the fast word out," she said. Only now, AP reporters also think about the most appropriate media to tell a story, which will be of most use to customers.

In the '1-2-3' model:

- 1st: AP delivers a simple headline, in about fifty character, for quick breaking news updates
- 2nd: 'AP News Now' - the news agency produces a 130-word summary of the story, written in a platform-agnostic style "that can be read on the air by broadcaster, or used online, or even printed in some print publications," said Carroll.
- 3rd: AP editors and reporters then think of the best way - or media - to tell the story. In some cases, this is simply a 500-word story. In others, an interactive graphic or video are more appropriate. Some stories don't have a third step: the 130-word sum-up was sufficient. Others "blossom into many stories."

The second and third steps are most significant in taking the AP to 'Journalism 2.0'. "It doesn't sound radical when you say it out loud," she said, but it is "if you inject it into your daily news decisions."

For example, following the cyclone in Myanmar, AP produced a detailed interactive graphic, which was widely picked up and even used by US broadcaster MSNBC.

After the earthquake in China, AP decided to distribute a user-generated video shot during the earthquake (AP has regularly invited users to contribute content, particularly imagery, through portals such as SendtoAP.com).

"In that case, the video was the story," said Carroll. "There was nothing that we could write that was going to make that story more compelling than being able to watch two and half minutes of people falling off bicycles and running around as the ground shook."

Carroll will discuss these issues at the upcoming World Editors Forum. View other preview interviews here.

Source: Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President, Associated Press

In this section, John Zogby, CEO of Zogby International, and George Brock, World Editors Forum President and editor of the Saturday Times in the UK, comment on the results of the 2008 Newsroom Barometer. Both agree that the results show editors have opened to the new necessities of the digital age, while remaining strongly conscious of the possible threats to their newspapers and journalism.

(View the main results to this year's survey here.)

According to Brock, this year's survey points to the fact that "editors remain confident about a mixed-media future and have quietly got on with the business of integrating their newsrooms," but this is "tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future."

The path is clear for many editors: integrate the newsroom, think multimedia, train or hire a team of multi-skilled journalists. So are the threats: lack of investment, lack of training, lack of cultural change.

In the face of these deep changes for the newspaper industry and its organization, editors may often face managerial resistance to undergo these investments. But media companies must be bold. Their editors, for the most part, are ready to be. Said Brock: "I read the message of this year's Newsroom Barometer as an appeal from editors to their companies to be bold in the face of change and as a sign that they themselves intend to make the most of new opportunities."

For Zogby, who goes into more detail about the numeric results (see below), this year's results show that editors have adapted or are adapting to the current redefinition of the 4th Estate, the press, in light of the changes brought in part by the Internet.

"Perhaps the most important finding to emerge from the 2008 survey is that editors remain optimistic about the futures of their papers," as was the case for the previous edition of the Newsroom Barometer, wrote Zogby.

Yet this optimism shouldn't hide the urgency for newspapers to rethink their model. "For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall.  The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how.  Editors now know the solution:  Innovate.  Integrate.  Or perish."

Read Brock and Zogby's full comments below.

Comments on the 2008 Newsroom Barometer by George Brock

Editors remain confident about a mixed-media future and have quietly got on with the business of integrating their newsrooms. The optimism is not universal and it is tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future.

Newspaper managements might reply that investment remains risky when it isn't yet clear where the income from digital publishing is supposed to come from. But newspaper businesses are made by content which creates and sustains demand. The first newspapers did not come about when someone assembled advertising platforms, distribution networks and hardware and afterwards looked for content to put into that system.

The sequence of events was the reverse. Somebody wants to tell as many people as possible something of interest or importance, discovers a sustained curiosity in that information or opinion and eventually a publishing operation grows up to supply the demand. The chain reaction is sparked by interest in the story, view, picture, interview, column, cartoon that's on offer. Without that first moment of ignition, nothing else happens.

You think this sounds a little basic? It is. But you would be surprised how often this simple reality is forgotten as today's media businesses struggle to adapt to a world in which digital technology is rewriting the economics of news publishing.

Online news and opinion has now been with us for long enough to see that no prediction about the future of news which is based on technology alone can tell us the future. Newspapers are not just ink marks on squashed trees: they are what people trust, they amuse people, in short they are a collection of ideas and information with which a reader forms a relationship. Where journalism - whether professional, citizen or any mixture of the two - creates that relationship, something lasting is born and can be sustained. You can see examples of success and failure both online and in print. As the first flush of online innovation and enthusiasm wears off, we can see more clearly that some of the online successes will grow very big indeed, but that only the best will prosper. Making information available - and the web makes it available as never before - does not make it wanted. Newspapers which innovate and adapt will also survive because their qualities are more important than the medium. Some of the failures in both online and print will be terminal.

I read the message of this year's Newsroom Barometer as an appeal from editors to their companies to be bold in the face of change and as a sign that they themselves intend to make the most of new opportunities. Most editors are clear that the essential qualities of good journalism can adapt to a new medium. They accept as a fact needing no further debate that their papers will now reach their constituency by several channels and not by one.

Redefining the 4th Estate: Opinions of the Editors by John Zogby

In the 550 years since the first pages of print rolled off the presses in the Bavarian town of Mainz, printed news evolved relatively unimpeded.  Even the invention and proliferation of radio and television failed to stymie the growth of newspapers, largely due to the ability of newspapers to provide more in-depth coverage.
    
The centuries-long hegemony of the ink and paper news model today faces its greatest threat--the advent of an independent and free Internet-based media.  This threat was evidenced at the height of the 2005 British elections with the publication of the 'Downing Street Memo' by The Sunday Times.  That short but potent document presented potentially damning evidence surrounding the planning in the run-up to the Iraq War, and while British papers seized the story, the leaked memo made only slight ripples in the American print media.  It did create, however, a surge within the rapidly developing blog community who used the lack of traditional media coverage as a call to arms.

Now, as the Internet struggles to define itself in the shadow of the Fourth Estate, the question remains: will these two mediums continue to battle for supremacy or will they find stability in an integrated symbiotic relationship? To help bring clarity to this question, Zogby International was commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters to survey 704 newspaper editors worldwide for the second in a series of annual 'Newsroom Barometer Surveys.'

    Perhaps the most important finding to emerge from the 2008 survey is that editors remain optimistic about the futures of their papers.  As in the 2006 Newsroom Barometer, nearly all editors (84%) are optimistic about the future of their paper.  The editors surveyed are as aware of what the future may hold for their industry as they are unified in their recognition of the underlying threats and potential solutions.

The Future

    The majority of editors (56%) now believe that most news (print and online) will be free in the future--up from 48% in 2006.  Nearly two-in-three editors (63%) believe that within a decade the most common form of  news consumption will be some form of electronic media--whether online (44%), mobile (12%) or through newer electronic media like e-papers and tablets (7%).  Less than a third (31%) believe print will remain the most common form of consumption.

    The perception of editors with respect to the future is not limited to the news product itself.  The overwhelming majority (83%) agree that within 5 years their nation's journalist workforce will be expected to know how to produce content for all platforms (e.g., print, video, audio and web).  Still, perception of the future is but one dimension of the story -- the remainder is defined by the threats to the industry and  how editors address those threats. 

The Threats

    By-and-large editors agree on the nature of the threats posed to their industry.  The decline in youth readership (58%), the rise in Internet and digital media (38%) and the lack of editorial innovation (36%) all speak to the consensus that change is imminent.  These editors tell us their chief sources of pressure are from advertisers (22%), shareholders (20%) and political forces (19%).  All pressure, no doubt,  to confront the changing reality through innovation and integration. 

    On one issue editors paint a mixed picture--the current state of their newsroom.  For some (39%) circulation in the past year is up; for others (29%) it is down.  One-third of editors (33%) have added journalists, a quarter have lost journalists (24%) and for the rest (42%) the number of journalists on their staff remains unchanged from a year ago. 


The Solutions

    When a majority of editors (54%) report that they have an integrated newsroom, they may make such statements not necessarily based on the reality, but also out of necessity.  Regardless of whether integration has or has not occurred, nearly all (86%) agree that it will be the norm in the near future.  Editors also agree on the steps needed to address other threats.  Asked what investments they would make in their newsroom given the opportunity, the top two investments cited--training journalists in new media (36%) and recruitment of new journalists (31%)--demonstrate that editors are looking to make a commitment to the future.  And with the recognition that editorial innovation is needed, 69% of editors agree that opinion and analysis pages will play an increasingly larger role in the future. 


Yes, editors are optimistic about the future of their papers, but they are also aware of the potential danger on the horizon.  Less than half (45%) believe the quality of journalism will improve over the next year.  More than a quarter (28%) believe the quality will worsen; a finding reflected in the high level of importance editors place on the need for investment in training and recruitment. 

For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall.  The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how.  Editors now know the solution:  Innovate.  Integrate.  Or perish.


Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results