Results matching “prepare to bid for”

"We've reached a point where we have to go beyond user comments as the sole means of interaction on news articles," writes Steve Outing. "It's time to integrate staff content and eyewitness reports supplied from your community."

User comments all too frequently don't add to a story. "Comment threads in many newspaper Web sites are filled with bad behavior, crude humor, and uncivil discourse, punctuated by the occasional worthwhile tidbit that adds to a story. We must do better," writes Outing. Gawker recently suggested cutting comment boxes all together; however, readers can add value - perhaps we just need to look outside the comment box.  

In his latest Editor & Publisher column, Outing argues, "most newspaper Web sites remain largely stuck in the we-tell-you mode of news," and that it's time to "get past that outdated strategy (and) integrate staff content and information from your community."

In its current form, reader-created content "is shuffled off to the side in its own area, set apart from the professional journalism."

Outing suggests that for any - and every - story, along side the reporter's piece is an "info-box sidebar ask(ing) people who were eyewitnesses to the accident to share any photos (or video) they may have taken, and to describe what they saw. Any content shared by eyewitnesses would be posted on the same page as the reporter's story."

Further, this feature should be included for all stories, big or small. "I argue that it's actually more interesting when applied to the smaller headlines," wrote Outing. "Because it serves the people for whom a 'small' story is actually big to them. Small stories often are reported by a small number of news organizations at a shallow level, so expanding them provides a powerful public service for those who want or need to know more."

For example, recently a local paper reported about a bear spotted in a neighborhood. Six users left comments, but most fell into the "smartass category." Outing writes, "By asking for eyewitness accounts... we'd actually get a look at that bear. After all, if you live in that neighborhood, you will be interested in that story... A wildlife expert reading the story might be prompted to post advice on what to do if you spot a bear foraging in your garbage cans."

Outing also suggests adding an story-specific email alert feature, so that as content is added, interested readers can stay up-to-date.

Reader involvement can even allow "big" stories to simultaneously be local, "for example, for the essential hurricane preparation story, local residents can be asked what they are doing to prepare... Retailers can be asked to report if they have essential preparedness materials like plywood available, to spare residents the hassle when trying to find something that everyone in town wants... For a personal-interest story about a specific family's losses, a call can go out -- accompanying the story -- to neighbors or friends of the family who may have additional information to share."

Outing cautions against creating "community content ghettos"  and instead highlighting user-generated photos, videos, tips and opinion. "This stuff is important and can be important to the overall coverage of a story, so don't bury it."

Last, Outing addresses quality control. "How do we know that the eyewitness account is for real? Has the user-contributed photo been doctored in Photoshop? If the submission is written really badly or is riddled with factual errors, are we supposed to run it anyway?"

Outing recommends both user registration (so editors may contact contributors to verify information) and a vetting system, perhaps run by the story's reporter, who filters any community-created content and can moderate these reports. Outing also suggests ranking incoming submissions, so that the most valuable contributions get put at the top of the page.

An interesting point Outing makes is not to "cherry-pick." "If you gain a reputation of only picking the best stuff that community members contribute (the old "letters to the editor" model), you may see contributions dry up. My answer to that is to publish everything that looks to be legitimate and doesn't violate your terms of service, but for the lesser stuff hide it behind a 'more' link for those who want to dig a bit deeper. Present the best stuff at the top layer."

Source: Editor & Publisher

Newspapers are making several preparations in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, trimming staff and putting increased focus on their online operations.

The Associated Press will provide newspapers with a service called Summer Games Plus, made possible by a deal with NBC that allows the AP to publish NBC-produced context.

According to New York Times Sports Editor Tom Jolly, the Times will utilize the AP's service "because we wanted the ability to fully cover things like lead-up events, lesser events we might not staff, and mostly agate events."
 
The Tribune Company's papers, which include the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun, will share reporters to provide the widest range of coverage.

The Boston Globe is among the papers sharpening its web coverage. According to sports editor Joe Sullivan, the paper is bringing "a full-time multimedia person...in charge solely of producing products for the Web."

The Globe will also bring a Chinese reporter "to help with the language and cultural stuff."

Check out some past coverage of the Beijing Olympics:

Human Rights Watch Guide for Reporting
BBC Coverage
Journalists Manage Expectations

Source: Editor and  Publisher

The Star Tribune announced that this summer, experts would train the Tribune staff to edit videos and produce programming. It said that the paper's staff has increased training in news production and entertainment videos to "enliven" the site, "diversify the news" and "prepare for mobile delivery."

Last year, Tribune photographers were trained to shoot documentary and breaking-news video. They were also trained to bring a basic video camera to shoot breaking-news.
 
"We're trying to transform a site that was once a newspaper on the Web into one that takes full advantage of the medium," Nancy Barnes, Tribune editor, said.

The Tribune's Rick Sennott is familiar with both photography and videography and he enjoys being a "one-man-band." His aim is to "produce images that act as a channel for true understanding and give a clear voice to the people being photographed."

The Tribune's site includes video content on issues such as gardening, health, sports and local news (see above). 

"While I'm still not crazy about seeing myself on the small screen, I really enjoy how video reporting can bring a story to life," Connie Nelson, Home+Garden editor, said, "You get the sights, the sounds. You can show rather than say. And you can make a personal connection."

Barnes expressed some concern over the increasing importance of visual journalism and how journalism has evolved to deliver more than just print news.

"It's no longer sufficient for a news company to put out a fine newspaper. We have to deliver the news anywhere, anytime, however the consumer wants it. Some days, this feels a bit like the old game where you see if you can jump up and down and pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Now, can you do it on one foot?" Barnes said.

This trend towards increased online vide content is what news sites like the Tribune or the UK's Telegraph are following.

Source: The Star Tribune

See also:
UK: Telegraph releases online video widgets
Opinion: Best practices for video journalism, with Travis Fox
UK: Telegraph's main competitors are BBC and CNN, in era of multimedia journalism
 

In an article from Wednesday's Financial Post, Eva Salinas writes about the newspaper's digital transformation and how Canadian journalism schools are adapting. According to Salinas, the Internet's growth is a mixed blessing for journalists.

"On one hand, it provides a wider audience and easier access to information...yet forging into the new online world also increases pressure for professionals to be more versatile and resourceful," writes Salinas.

Journalism schools are beginning to adjust, hiring professors with experience in online journalism in order to better prepare students for the evolving newsroom.

"If the medium of a different generation of journalism students was the newspaper or the six o'clock newscast, for this generation it's online," says Mike Gasher, director and associate professor in the department of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal.

Schools are also recognizing the potential of the online generation. According to Joyce Smith, associate professor and director of online curriculum at Ryerson University's School of Journalism, the burgeoning medium will open a slew of opportunities, and jobs, for future journalism graduates.

"What online has done is it's shaken everything else out of complacency," Smith says.

Source: The Financial Post

Here's a piece submitted to us by Chris McGillion, former Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He currently coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. In the following two-part essay, he reviews the pros and cons of journalism school programs today, and how editors, teachers and journalists can benefit from them :


Over the years that I've spent teaching journalism more than practicing it, I've had to take a keen interest in complaints from editors about the graduates of university-based journalism courses. I detect that some of these complaints reflect an antipathy towards university degrees by people who have risen to the top of their profession without one and I suspect that some complaints are nothing more than attempts to sheet the blame for bad appointments home to someone other than the hirer.

But other complaints are not so easily dismissed. Among these are the charge that university courses over intellectualize what is basically a craft, that curriculums more often reflect the interests of academics rather than the industry, and that journalism graduates have been taught how to communicate rather than what to communicate - that they lack, in other words, the kind of knowledge that is needed to get a handle on a round.

All of this is true but it is not equally true of all journalism courses. Many are little more than media studies courses parading as journalism courses. These produce graduates who (think they) know how journalism should be done rather than how it is done and for this reason often develop a disdain for the profession they are trying to enter.

Many universities delude themselves (and their students) into believing they are the breeding ground for senior and/or specialist journalists (investigative reporters, feature writers, even columnists) when in fact the industry is most often looking to recruit junior reporters who can put their hand to any story they are given.

Many journalism courses encourage an academic study of politics and history when editors want simply a solid grounding in general knowledge (dates, events, personalities) in order to be able to contextualize stories for their readers.

And many universities compound each of these problems by requiring staff to undertake PhDs and "peer-reviewed" research in order to get promotion with the result that good teacher-practitioners develop into academics far removed from the cut-and-thrust media world they are supposed to know about.

I would be the first to argue that the best place to learn journalism is on the job. Ironically that is how I and most of the journalism teaching staff I work with came to know what we know. But I would also argue that a journalism course, properly structured and taught, is the best way to prepare most people to learn quickly on the job.

One reason is that the best journalism courses involve students unlearning inappropriate skills - not just acquiring appropriate ones. Take writing for example: most students enter university understanding writing to be something you do for a small audience of people who know more about the subject than you do and who are paid to read whatever you write. I'm referring to teachers.

Getting students to understand - as a matter of reflex - that journalism involves writing for a broad range of people who expect the reporter to tell them something they didn't know and who won't read it unless the writing itself provides good reason means combating 13 years of schooling. Is the industry really prepared to take on that task?

Another reason is that a journalism student has generally had three years to think about whether or not they actually want to pursue a career in journalism. Whenever I've asked editors if retention rates are higher among journalism graduates than other graduates (or non-graduates), I'm met with a stony silence. No one seems to have done the research and yet the answer - which I strongly suspect is in the affirmative - would seem to me crucial in determining the investment of time and effort an editor makes in a recruit.

The other challenge I constantly put to editors is to work with those journalism courses they know produce the better graduates in order to help produce the best ones. Too few respond positively with internship placements, offers of industry-funded workshops, training manuals, etc. But until the firewalls between academia and the media are broken down in this way, editors must bear some responsibility for the graduates they get.

Source: written by Chris McGillion, who coordinates the journalism program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Before taking up his teaching position, he was the Editorial Page Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Last month, the Seattles Times announced its plans to adopt EidosMedia's Methode editorial and publishing software, becoming the first US publication to do so.

The Times chose Methode because it allows users to view content in different outlet formats, or "channels," such as a 20-inch story, an SMS text message, or a web article.

With Methode, The Times hopes to transform their workload so that reporters can prepare their stories at any time of the day with basic elements including a headline and photos. Methode would then automatically identify all the story elements and transmit them along with the story to the appropriate medium, ensuring that all pieces of a story are kept together.

Heidi De Laubenfels, assistant managing editor, visuals and technology said, "As you meld newsrooms these days and think about all of the different products, it's important as you try to train people that you have fewer applications to train them in."

Newsroom IT manager Greg Anderson added. "They can be more productive -- so it's our hope to use this to a greater extent across the newsroom and across the products."

Source: Newspapers & Technology

A press title, what more a gossip weekly, apologizing for breaking the scoop of the year? Pacific Magazines, publisher of the Australian magazine New Idea, said it regretted having broken the story about Prince Harry's deployment in Afghanistan.

It also said it wasn't aware an embargo existed, as was the case for many British news editors.

The story published by New Idea stayed on the magazine website until it was reprinted by German title Bild, picked up by the Drudge Report, and finally made public in the UK media.

However, the Guardian takes a critical stance towards New Idea's decision:

"No one in editorial checked the cuttings - had they done so they would have seen that not a word had been printed elsewhere about the prince's deployment, and that might have alerted them to check the story with the Ministry of Defence to verify that it was true."

But, as pointed out by a senior source at the magazine, it's hard to imagine the MoD didn't prepare for this scenario, and the story illustrates the difficulty of keeping a news embargo in the digital age (although the 10-week duration of the embargo also showed that mainstream media still have a powerful grip over the news agenda).

"The British press was on a voluntary news blackout but I'd be surprised if any other publication in Australia or elsewhere in the world was aware of it. This illustrates the challenge of marrying this kind of embargo with the 21st-century media."

The Guardian wonders "about who will carry the can at New Idea." But should anybody? Let us know your thoughts.

Source: Guardian

A local Virginia news station has been publishing since January a newspaper version of their show CrimeTracker.

The station, WSLS-10, is owned by Media General, a company with newspaper, television, and internet properties, and will work with Media General’s print holdings to produce the CrimeTracker newspaper.

It features local crime stories, and information concerning public events, such as child seat safety checks. The newspaper is distributed free at convenience stores.

According to John Carlin, the WSLS-10 anchor, the new venture will be relatively easy to pull off seeing that the show already provides most of the newspaper’s content.

“We already have stories. We gather those everyday as we prepare the television broadcast,” Carlin writes on his blog. “Because we post most of our stories on WSLS.com, they need to be converted from broadcast style to print style anyway.”

Source:  WSLS-10 through IFRA Executive News Service

It’s common practice to prepare obituaries of personalities long in advance. But news that the Associated Press already wrote an obit for 26-year-old pop star Britney Spears has led to controversy and a renewed debate about the practice.

The Associated Press is launching a new Q&A column entitled "Ask AP" in which it proposes to answer reader questions about the news.

The World Association of Newspapers has asked leading newspapers executives to identify the current trends they believe will have an impact on the future of their businesses. Some are profound and others are seemingly minor -- but all have the potential to shape the future of newspapers.

For the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, it’s been a year since they have walked the walk by building an in-house studio. Video has simply become essential. “We can’t do without it anymore,” said Malika Elkord, deputy editor of the Nouvel Observateur. Will video ever be dominant in the publication though? Not to be considered yet. “Video is only a plus, but it is still essential,” she said.

“Can today’s j-schools (…) prepare students for the new world of New Media? Of course not.” The answer is provocative but Pajamas Media’s Steve Boriss (who also blogs for The Future of News) offers his list of things journalism schools should be teaching.

Metro Poland published a special bloggers issue on Dec. 5. The MetroBlox supplement was distributed with the regular Metro edition.