International news translation platform Worldcrunch plans to expand its aggregation efforts in a big way—by enlisting the help of its contributors in finding “crunch" worthy articles from around the world, Nieman Journalism Lab reported.

Founded last year by Jeff Israely and Irène Toporkoff in Paris, Worldcrunch translates 20-30 articles per week written by its international news partners, which include French daily newspaper Le Monde and German daily Die Welt, as we previously reported. The articles, chosen by Worldcrunch’s team of journalists and covering topics such as politics to entertainment, are meant to provide English readers with broader perspectives of international affairs, as well as highlighting the viewpoints of citizens from the countries in question.

Worldcrunch has been touted as an appealing option in the face of reductions in foreign news coverage, as we previously reported. And the trend seems to extend past English-speaking readership: French weekly magazine Courrier International and Italian weekly Internazionale provide similar services for French and Italian readers, respectively.

Now, Worldcrunch wants to expand its curation capabilities. The company is in the process of developing a new function, called Crunch It, which will allow contributors to nominate an article or blog post for translation, “English-ize” it, and then vote for the best articles posted each day by country and topic, according to the website.

The concept is still in its planning stages, however, as there are several questions regarding filtering and platform construction that Worldcrunch must consider before launching, according to Nieman Journalism Lab. For example, Worldcrunch standards require not only that the article not already be available in English, but that the story not require a great deal of added context in order to appeal to an Anglophone audience, the article said.

Editors Weblog spoke with Worldcrunch cofounder Jeff Israely about the company’s plans for Crunch It and some of the platform’s logistical challenges.

Building a platform from the inside out

Israely said Worldcrunch has already begun transitioning into its new platform by publishing news briefs, or shorter segments of articles written by their newspaper partners, on the website.

“We’re building this platform one step at a time,” Israely said. “What we’re going to start doing now with Crunch It is to take that process of writing shorter pieces and bringing in content, and putting our own touch on original content, [and] do that with everything we can find out there in the press and on the internet.”

Israely emphasized that when Crunch It initially launches sometime this May, it will not be a full-blown crowdsourcing platform, but will in fact be curated by the Worldcrunch team and its contributors in order to establish a high quality of journalism. 

“It’s still going to be our professionals, journalists, and editors who are choosing the stories and producing them,” he said. “We’re going to see how it works.”

“In the past, there have been news crowdsourcing platforms launched in which the platform is created, and then they hope that the journalism follows,” he explained. “But, what has often happened is that these kinds of platforms either don’t get the traction, or don’t have the quality, or both, that can turn it into something that becomes an interesting and reliable source of information. And so we want to take it one step at a time and build the platform in a smart way, starting in-house and figuring out what the best way is to, step-by-step, open it up to journalists around the world and to readers, and part-time and would-be journalists and bloggers, around the world.”

Israely also noted that the team still needs to develop filtering mechanisms before accepting content from readers.

“We have to figure out a way to do it that makes it efficient, where we don’t waste a lot of our time sifting through bad quality content that’s coming in,” he said. “We want to first establish what we think, more or less, the content should look like, where it should come from, and set standards accordingly. And so, we’re going to begin to build it from the inside out, rather than just launch a platform and just open it up and get lost in the mountain of stuff coming in.”

A platform for journalists

Within the next few weeks, Israely said the team plans to transition from creating new content in-house to opening the platform up to foreign-language readers, who would be able to share articles with the staff that they find interesting. From there, Crunch It may go one step further and allow readers to submit pieces that they’ve translated themselves, transitioning into a platform that much more resembles crowdsourcing, he said.

Once readers become involved, he said, the platform will also take on social networking characteristics.

“In and of itself, the moment that you begin to ask readers to comment, to suggest, to share what they’re reading…that, in itself, is social, and so it’s inevitably a social media kind of process,” he said. At the same time, he said, “we want it to always have some real news value.”

Israely said that another of the goals for Crunch It is to eventually establish a network within the website for all of its contributors. At the moment, he said, Worldcrunch has a team page on the website which lists all of their contributing journalists, but he plans for each writer to soon have a “team member” page. Each page will list the contributor’s name, photo, bio, links to their Twitter and other social media accounts, and links to all of their content, including full translations and news briefs.

“What we do know is that we want to be a platform for journalists,” he said. “We want to be a place where journalists and foreign correspondents and translators who have an interest and an eye for news...can all do their work and make a living.”

Israely said that the team is still determining the economics of the platform, and that the company plans to launch Crunch It sometime in May.

“Over the next weeks, you’ll be able to see what this content looks like, who’s producing it, and how you can imagine Worldcrunch being a place where foreign correspondents can do their work,” he said.

Sources: Nieman Journalism Lab, Worldcrunch

In light of Rupert Murdoch's testimony for the Leveson Inquiry today, Mashable examined how three news organizations, The Guardian, Pro Publica, and BBC, have been using digital technology to report on the investigation into the News of the World hacking scandal. Some of the tools used include interactive timelines and live broadcasts of the trial.

Poynter reports that The McClatchy Co. lost $2.1 million in its first quarter, a loss in revenue of 5.1%.  Advertising revenue also fell 6.8%, the article said.

Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks source, is contending that the case against him should be dropped due to the government's witholding of evidence, Reuters reported. If convicted, Manning may be sentenced to life in prison for leaking classified US documents.

According to The Guardian, Johnston Press reported a loss of £144 million last year, a 6% loss in total revenue, after its new chief executive Ashley Highfield initiated massive job cuts. Johnston Press is the second-biggest regional publisher in the UK.

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

When Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock resigned from her position after making her second aggregation error in four months on blogPost, the Post’s breaking news blog, ombudsman Patrick Pexton wrote an opinion piece asserting that the paper had failed Flock as a young journalist; soon after Pexton’s column was published, a wave of criticism and concerns about the dangers of blogging surfaced, Poynter reported.  

According to Pexton’s article, Flock was often the only reporter writing for blogPost, writing an average of 5.9 posts per day on a wide array of topics. The blog was meant to achieve 1-2 million views per month, the article said.

Flock’s first error, which earned her a strongly-worded editor’s note criticizing her actions, was in reporting a viral but false story that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had used a slogan favored by the Ku Klux Klan in one of his speeches—without calling the campaign to confirm before publishing, the article said.

Flock’s second mistake was in failing to accredit her sources in an aggregated article about life on Mars, the article said. Discovery News, who originally ran the story, cried foul, after which Flock decided to resign, the article said.

Instead of denouncing Flock’s actions as plagiarism, though, Pexton claimed that the Post hadn’t done enough to properly train Flock and other young bloggers he spoke to.

“They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing,” he wrote. “Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said.”

In an interview with Poynter, however, Post Executive Director of Digital News Katharine Zaleski countered that the Post does in fact spend time training young bloggers, and that Pexton’s characterization of the paper’s digital policies was untrue.

“The ombudsman said there weren’t guidelines,” she said in the article. “We worked for months on guidelines. They have very clear sections on blogging, and it’s all about accuracy. There’s a lot of things here that have nothing to do with traffic goals.”

Indeed, the Post lists a set of digital publishing guidelines on its website that directly address issues of posting speed versus accuracy of content.

“While timeliness is crucial, the overriding concern for accuracy should always prompt us to consider whether additional reporting should be undertaken before publishing and how information should be presented and, in some cases, qualified,” the guidelines read. “In a major news event, readers may soon forget who first broke a story, but they are less likely to forget a devastating inaccuracy.”

Poynter also noted that some outside of the Post criticized Flock’s actions and accused the ombudsman as going soft on plagiarism. Others felt sympathy for Flock and the pressures she was under, but emphasized that that was no excuse for plagiarism, the article said.

This is not the first instance of a young blogger losing a position over aggregation issues; as we previously reported, a blogger from The Huffington Post was suspended for allegedly rewriting an article from AdAge without driving enough traffic back to the original post. Response to the HuffPo incident was similar to Flock’s case, with some, like Gawker, suggesting that young bloggers are just doing what the higher-ups tell them to do, and that the real blame lies with the editors who fail to give bloggers proper guidelines.

If anything can be learned from Flock’s story, it is the idea that young writers must be extremely careful what they publish on the web under their names, regardless of pressures they face from editors or publishers, Megan Carpentier of The Raw Story suggested.

She writes, “it’s easy to chase the pageviews — hardly anyone becomes a writer not to be read — and it’s easy to acquiesce to the demands of an editor who has less-than-your-best interests at heart as a writer when looking at his or her stats or the deadline ahead. But at the end of the day, it’s your byline on a piece, it’s your career and it’s your future in this business at stake…”

With the ever-increasing speed of the news cycle, as well as the predominance of aggregated content on the web, young journalists certainly have a lot to be cautious of.

Sources: The Washington Post, Poynter, Gawker, The Raw Story

The New York Daily News tabloid has launched a new online section which seeks to appeal to the city’s South Asian residents, paidContent reported.

The new section, called “Desi,” features South Asian news curated for an American immigrant audience, including stories about Bollywood, cricket and politics, the article said. The stories found on Desi are a mixture of original content and articles from the digital newswire Newscred, the article said. As we previously reported, Newscred filters content from more than 750 sources around the world, creating personalized bundles of online content for publishers.

NY Daily News Digital Senior Vice President Steve Lynas told paidContent that according to research conducted by the newspaper, second and third generation immigrants demonstrated an interest in South Asian News, but presented through an American lens.

Lynas also said that culture is more of a factor in determining what news people are interested in, implying that the notion of local news in general can be redefined, the article said.

“I don’t see a zip code as a good filter for community,” Lynas told paidContent.

Revenue from Desi is currently limited to display advertising, but the Daily News might soon explore other marketing options, the article said. If Desi does well, the paper plans to launch additional online sections for other cultural communities in New York, the article said.

The article also suggested that in the past, editors have struggled to successfully publish local news: “Local news has long been a white whale for media types and resulted in some spectacular failures such as Patch, AOL’s ill-starred hyper-local venture.”

As we previously reported, Patch is comprised of a network of hyperlocal news websites, each with an editor and freelance bloggers who serve communities of 20,000-50,000 people. Though some of Patch’s sites became profitable this year, and 'spectucular failure' seems to be somewhat of exaggeration, many are still losing money.

Putting aside the question of whether Patch has succeeded or failed, it does seem as though publishers and readers alike have expressed a resurgence of interest in hyperlocal news—and, unlike the Daily News’ approach, these hyperlocal ventures have been very much tailored to location. For example, the UK publishing group Extra recently launched three new hyperlocal print newspapers in Northamptonshire, emphasizing the fact that the papers would give voice to the communities of Corby, Wellingburough and Kettering, as we previously reported.

In addition, we reported that a national phone survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in April determined that 72% of Americans follow local news closely, which suggests that the desire for traditional local coverage is still quite strong.

Still, it possible that the Desi model will be just as effective, if not more so, than the traditional local news approach because of the vast diversity of the New York community it serves. Perhaps for more urban environments, where people with varying backgrounds and interests often live within close proximity to each other, the best approach may be to provide cultural news outlets as complements to traditional coverage.

Sources: paidContent, NY Daily News