The video gaming industry has been changing in recent times and due to its digitization it is facing a disruption. This creative destruction resembles the changes the music industry underwent with the rise of Napster and the digitization of song files, Charles-Axel Dein wrote (via OWNI.eu) quoting EA Sports' Peter Moore.

"Thanks to mobile devices and social networks, games are reaching new customers. Publishers target these "casual gamers" with simpler gameplay, no required continuous commitment (you can play in short bursts) and new business models (low pay-per-downloads price or free-to-play)," he wrote.

Games have been recently growing in popularity with the news too - with expressions like the "gamification of the news" creeping into our vocabulary.
Dein referred to the expression meaning "to instil some game dynamics in [their] software".

Robert Quigley on Old Media, New Tricks explained it as "taking video-game style processes and applying them to everything, from the way we educate our children to the way we keep up with what's going on in the community".

The article cited some examples of news organizations that are trying to add game mechanisms to online news, hoping for broader their online community and gaining reader loyalty. "Users can earn points by reading articles or play HuffPo's "Predict the News" feature, which launched at the end of last year", it reported.

Other news outlets have also introduced some forms of game, as the Cincinnati Enquirer did through the app Porkappolis, or using Foursquare and Tackable, which both incorporate game mechanisms to encourage user engagement.

Another news-related social gaming experiment is on Philly.com, the website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, where users earn points for some activities they do, such as visiting the site, reading articles, sharing content, and leaving comments.

The goal of social games - to encourage deeper engagement and participation - is nowadays fundamental for news organizations to build a loyal community and therefore readership. However, some in the news industry probably will turn up their noses at the idea of "games" being incorporated into their work.

As Philip Trippenbach said at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week, talking about the "G word", many will probably say "Oh you want to turn my really serious story into a game...".
Trippenbach is the editor-in-chief of Citizenside, a citizen photo and video journalism agency based in Paris.

"The most powerful interactive form is gaming, in terms of interactive journalism, that is where the win is. When you talk about gaming baked right into the heart of a package, that is very profound", Journalism.co.uk reported him as saying said.

"I loathe the word 'gamification'. It's often bandied about in an attempt to sound cutting-edge, but it's a glib summation of a deep principle, and too easily dismissable. There's no magic sprinkling of game chocolate sprinkles that will turn a crappy site into a deeply rewarding user experience. Game dynamics are deeper than that", Trippenbach wrote.

Journalists have a lot to learn from games, in Trippenbach's opinion, as in terms of interacting gaming can be extremely powerful.

Citizenside, he explained in Perugia, has a point-based game system and users get points based on how many activities they do, from submitting photos, to making comments as well as depending on the number of users viewing their images.

This encourages users to be involved in the community and at the same time it helps the Citizenside editorial team to assess and verify the quality of information that users submit.
People are motivated by reputation within communities and the points-system creates a ranking of reliability. The more you are engaged in the community, the higher is your level and the more is trustworthy your contribution.

"If we get a picture from a level 35 user, well, it takes a long time to get to level 35 or 45, and the Citizenside editorial team know that that user has demonstrated commitment to our values," he said.

Trippenbach also focused on the differences between stories and issues. Not all the important things people should know are stories, actually many are not, he underlined. Many are just issues and issues are difficult to be told in a normal storytelling written article. "Many things, like global climate change, aren't stories. They're issues that can manifest as stories in specific cases", he wrote. And play is a powerful way of learning.

Gaming doesn't necessarily mean the fully-fledged computer games we play on a PlayStation, it can be the simple interactive engagement of the Guardian MPs expenses app, or the New York Times' Budget Puzzle interactive, in which you attempt to solve the deficit, Journalism.co.uk noted.

Another example of how news organizations have implemented news and factual games in their site is the American Public Media's (one of the nation's public radio producers) Budget Hero, whose aim is to seek to provide a values- and fiscal-based lens for citizens to examine policy debates during this election year. The budget model, policy impacts and pro/con arguments have been rigorously researched, expertly validated and represent non-partisan options, the site claims.

Gaming is just one of the possible ways to try go beyond the "normal" article format and to find different ways to tell stories. Data journalism, as the Guardian MPs expenses app showed, is one of those.

"We are telling stories from different information. The data desk has moved into the newsroom: that's where we get involved in the news", Simon Rogers, editor Guardian Datablog and Datastore said in Perugia.

Data journalism and data visualization could also learn something from game design, Philip Man wrote (via OWNI.eu). The purpose of visualization, he wrote, is to give insight and to increase our ability to perform cognitive processes like discovery, decision-making and explanation. Man tried to apply the concepts of involvement, motivation and narrative, key concepts of game design and 3D learning environments, to the data visualization. You can find the whole article here.

Sources: OWNI.eu (1), (2), Old Media, New Tricks, Journalism.co.uk, Trippenbach.com (1), (2), Budget Hero
Images source: MyEyeSees and garryknight @ Trippenbach.com

The 2011 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, April 18, and for the first time, a web-only piece won one of the coveted awards.

Other peculiarities this year included the fact that no newsroom dominated the Prizes - 11 split 13 awards between them - as Poynter underlined. And despite the jury recommending three finalists, the Pulitzer Board decided not to award any news organization for the Breaking News Reporting category.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times won two prizes each, and surprisingly the investigative report award went to Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for a property insurance investigation.

Most interesting is the prominence of online-only news organizations, as the independent and non-profit ProPublica took home its second Pulitzer. As Nieman noted, unlike the last year prize, won by Sheri Fink for Investigative Reporting, which was published in partnership with The New York Times Magazine, this year's prize was for a web-only series and it didn't move through a partner newspaper.

"This was the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to an online news organization. This year's Prize is the first for a group of stories not published in print", wrote ProPublica's founder and editor-in-chief Paul Steiger.

"ProPublica reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their stories on how some Wall Street bankers, seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients and sometimes even their own firms, at first delayed but then worsened the financial crisis. We at ProPublica are delighted by this award, and deeply honoured", he continued.

Given that radio reporting is not eligible for the award, Steiger has publicly acknowledged the contribution of the public radio's programs "Planet Money" and "This American Life", with whose teams ProPublica partnered for the story.

On the increasing importance of online-only content, Nieman noted that it's also worth noting that more projects are entering the awards that include a digital component. In this year's journalism entries nearly a third featured online content, which is up from just one quarter last year.

Three were the finalists named for the Breaking News Reporting category (Chicago Tribune staff, a joint staff entry by The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald and staff of The Tennessean, Nashville) but the Board, which decides after juries in each category makes their recommendations, reached no consensus on it and they weren't able to reach the majority vote necessary to win.

"While it is the first time that we did not have a winner in this category, it is the 25th time the Board has not awarded a Prize in a category" Poynter reported Sig Gissler, Pulitzer Prize administrator, as saying. "I am sometimes told by editors that they are doubtful that they have covered a large enough disaster in their community to win, " Gissler added.

As the Columbia Journalism Review noted, the coverage of the role of Wall Street in the financial crisis, even if the crisis is three years old, still gained a prominent place in the award. ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein's stories for example - the article highlighted - represent a model for how to turn arcane financial stuff into a story that everybody can understand.

Moreover, Talking Biz News noted that four winners and five finalists are form of business journalism, rom investigative pieces to commentary to editorial writing about business and economics news and issues.

Joseph Rago of The Wall Street Journal won the editorial writing prize for "his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama", the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's story won for investigate reporting and David Leonhardt of the New York Times won in the commentary category for "his graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions, from the federal budget deficit to health care reform."

David Leonhardt of The New York Times won in the commentary category for what the committee said was "his graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions." The Times's Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry won the prize for international reporting for "their dogged reporting that put a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia, remarkably influencing the discussion inside the country", the paper reported.

You can find the full list Journalism and Letters, drama and music categories here.

The Prizes are awarded by the Columbia University and were awarded for the first time in 1917. As the site states, for the Journalism competition, entrants may be of any nationality but work must have appeared in a U.S. newspaper published at least once a week, on a newspaper's Web site or on an online news organization's Web site.

• - The only U.S. president to be awarded a Pulitzer was John F. Kennedy in 1957 in the Biography category for his book "Profiles in Courage".
• - The correct pronunciation is "PULL it sir."
• - You can find the biography of Joseph Pulitzer here.

Sources: The Pulitzer Prizes (1), (2), (3), Poynter (1), (2), Nieman, ProPublica, CJR, Talking Biz News, NYT
The image is the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal which was designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French.

"In times of economic pressure, sending a foreign correspondent who expects to be treated like a TV star is too expensive."

"Foreign correspondents tend to report just from their perspective and from the one of their audience."

"Foreign correspondents are out of date, we have Twitter and social networks, blogs, aggregators now providing news from everywhere and moreover we can just hire local journalists. We don't need to send correspondents to cover news anymore."

These are some of the criticisms raised regarding the role of the foreign correspondent in this day and age.

So we do still need them?

This provocative question opened the panel "Death of the foreign correspondent?" yesterday at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.

Charlie Beckett, director of the think tank POLIS at the London School of Economics, Mimosa Martini, correspondent for the Italian Channel 5 News, Mort Rosenblum former Associated Press correspondent and Richard Sambrook, until March 2010 director of the BBC's Global News division and author of the book "Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?" discussed the subject.

"This is a jet-age tower of babel. Everybody's talking, nobody's listening", said Mort Rosenblum. "Anyone that has covered Middle East for twenty minutes knows it's not a domino effect, it's more complex, it's backgammon. We need people who can explain, someone prepared to explain us what's going on. We need professional correspondents."

The role that Twitter and other social media played in the Arab World uprisings is significant. But Rosenblum noted that it's not enough: "we have got to be in place, know the story before it happens. We have to understand,"he said.

Martini agreed that only the experience and the preparation of a long-time foreign correspondent could provide a fully context comprehension, distinguishing between facts and propaganda.

However, she said, citing cost-cutting for reducing the role of the foreign correspondent, it's in part just unfounded as new technologies allow journalists to do their job for cheaper. She cited her experience in Egypt, when she remained without her cameramen and she managed to produce reports single-handedly with her computer and her camera.

The role of foreign correspondent is changing fundamentally, however. As Richard Sambrook said, "we need to be farmers rather than hunter-gatherers of information". The answer to the title of his book ["Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?"], he said, is not no, but rather "no, but".

Social media can now to an extent compete with news outlets and because of globalisation it has become more difficult to be a foreign correspondent. But they still play the important role of cultural bridge - between what they are reporting on to whom they are reporting too. Even if he/she has to adapt himself to changing times, the foreign correspondent is needed now as much as they have ever been. Sambrook also agreed on the role Twitter is playing. "Connections are fundamental, but they are not presence. You need to have a proper background to be able to verify news on Twitter."

Then we still need an accurate witnessing of events, deciphering and setting them in local context and interpreting of what is going on in this particular place, at this particular time, in a broader comparative and historical frame. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Guardian, "Witnessing, deciphering, interpreting".

Sources: IJF, Guardian

The New York Times' paywall has now been up for two weeks and Mashable analysed what impact it has had on the website's traffic. The article said that Experian Hitwise thinks it has the answer. The research and intelligence firm analyzed traffic data for NYTimes.com from before and after the paywall was erected. According to its data, traffic has declined overall by 5% to 15%.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose battle with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg became the focus of the Oscar-winning film The Social Network, have lost an appeal over the size of the compensation paid to them, Reuters (via the Guardian) reported. A US appeals court ruled on Monday that the Winklevoss twins must accept a cash and stock settlement with the social networking site that had been valued at $65m. The twins argued the deal was unfair because Facebook hid information from them during talks, the article said.

Reuters Canada reported a source familiar with the matter said that Facebook is evaluating the Internet market in China, but that the social networking giant has not signed a business deal with any companies there. Shares of Chinese Internet company Baidu Inc rose more than 4 percent to $147.93 in Monday U.S. trade after media reports that Facebook and Baidu had formed a partnership.

Guardian's Roy Greenslade reported (via AFP/AllAfrica.com) two pro-opposition newspapers in north Sudan, the bi-weekly mouthpiece of the Sudanese communist party Al-Maydan and the daily Ajrass Al-Hurriyah, which is linked to the ruling party in south Sudan, have suspended publication in protest at government censorship and distribution blockages.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service