Great post from Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams on changes to production under the Financial Times’ Newsroom 2009 project and the Tele’s own trials with new sub-editing processes.
But, says Williams:
“What has and continues to hold this up is the technology. Editorial CMS suppliers continue to market products that, although making the process of web publishing easier and faster, still rely upon the buyers maintaining large production departments to manage the print pages.”
Spelling, grammar, style checks, page construction and more should be automated, he argues.
Wall Street Journal reporters Sue Schmidt and Glenn Simpson are leaving the title to set up a new firm, where they’ll conduct investigative work for private clients. A sign of the times?
UK newspaper industry groups, the Society of Editors and the Newspaper Society, have sent a list of points of action to culture secretary Andy Burnham.
The points include looking at ways to prevent Google profiting from third-party news content and investment of public funds in media training.
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has written to the heads of all political groupings in the European Parliament urging them to ‘put the survival of journalism at the heart of their election campaigns’.
Danish IT-journalist Dorte Toft used her blog to help reveal one of the country’s biggest business scandals in modern time. It won her both acclaim and criticism.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and, answering UK software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson’s call, over 1,500 blogger worldwide have pledged to write about a woman they admire working in technology. As I believe we sorely need new journalistic heroes and new myths who better illustrate the opportunities offered by our rapidly changing media landscape, I thought I would take this opportunity to put forward one such hero.
Dorte Toft is the programmer turned journalist whose blogging helped reveal IT Factory, named “Denmark’s Best IT-company 2008″ by Danish Computerworld, as one big ponzi scheme: according to Techcrunch, sources assessed that up to 90 per cent of IT Factory’s turnover had been based on non-existent or false contracts.
Toft, a blogger at Berlingske Business and freelance IT-journalist, started blogging about the company in December 2007 – almost a year before the company was declared bankrupt. The blog helped her solicit sources, tip offs and made her blog the natural place to turn to for those both in the know, and those wishing to understand more and talk about what was happening in the company.
For her work, which was the closest any Danish media came to reveal the IT Factory scam before the company was forced to admit it all, Toft has received several awards, including the e-Jour award for outstanding online journalism, but the story could have ended very differently.
Only a few days before the company was declared bankrupt, the IT journalist was preparing to go to court to defend herself against libelling IT Factory and its CEO Stein Bagger. He had sued Berlingske, where Toft writes her blog, for allowing several anonymous and libellous comments to be posted on the blog and was calling for damages to the tune of 10K.
Fortunately for Toft, events revealed several of the assertions made in these comments to be true before she had to go to trial – but the story illustrates both the extent to which libel law can be used to silence journalists; and the problems associated with talking freely, and often anonymously, on a blog.
However, this debacle led to Berlingske banning anonymous comments on its site. Steen Rosenbak, business editor at Jyllands-posten, and Jens Christian Hansen, business editor at Berlingske business, also published an op-ed in which they warned against using blogs as a journalistic tool, to which Toft replied: “Without the blog and the emails sent directly to me because of it, I would never have been able to prove that IT Factory’s products that were cited as the reason for its impressive sales had never reached the market.”
“[E]veryone knows what’s happening to traditional media and local newspapers are dying by the moment. But is there a very simple and easy way [for others] to start collecting audio data and using it?”
As the tool is developed – both by Audioboo’s team and third-parties once the API is released – there’s even more scope for using geotagged audio news reports.
You can see the possibilities from how it’s already being used by some Audioboo-ers:
“Although the big clubs are well catered for of an afternoon with live commentary we felt that the smaller clubs weren’t really in a position to service the information requirements of their fans who can’t make it along for whatever reason or those ex-pats who are keen to find out what’s happening from afar on a Saturday afternoon,” explains MacDonald.
“We pick up the information via feeds from Boo which automatically populate the appropriate section of our site.”
P&B has tried updating web pages using email to text gateways and experimented with SMS updates, but these were time consuming and failed to convey the mood of fans at the game, he adds.
“It’s early days but we feel this could be a really neat, low cost way, of getting information back from around the grounds to those unable to attend. We’ll continue to grow the trial and get a few users on it and see how it goes from there,” says MacDonald.
London SE1 Community Website
James Hatts, editor of community website London SE1, published by Banksidepress said the site is also experimenting with Audioboo and has uploaded newsworthy clips, such as updates on a local fire.
“I think AudioBoo has great potential for local reporting – it’s just so easy. No waiting to get back to the office, no transcribing endless recordings, no editing, no waiting for YouTube (for example) to process your video,” says Hatts.
According to Hatts, the ‘idiot-proof brilliance’ of the app is comparable to using a Flip camera and could make it an important part of a modern reporter’s kit.
However, using it in a way that makes economic sense is a key consideration for Bankside:
“It’s early days for Audioboo but at the moment there’s no way to drive traffic to our own site from a boo page, for instance,” explains Hatts.
“There are interesting future possibilities for using voice recognition software to display contextual adverts around the audio player (or even to insert relevant audio adverts).
“At the moment it’s great for novelty value and building an audience and building a brand, but even an operation like ours which is run on a shoestring needs to be able to derive some revenue from our content.”
Our Man Inside
Rock said Audioboo should be used to augment other reporting and that audio was an emotive medium – both ideas that seem to have been taken on board by ‘social media mongrel’ Christian Payne in his use of the app.
“[W]hile i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds,” he writes in a blog post.
“Combined with a photo attached to act as a catalyst for the imagination, the listener is not being force fed the story. They have to take a moment to let their imagination get involved in the media.”
Even the Newseum, the news museum in Washington DC, isn’t safe from job losses. The organisations was forced to make 13 job cuts last week as a result of funding cuts, reports Mediabistro (via WTOP.com).
