Dorset Echo reporter Miriam Phillips scoops young journalist award

Photo: (left to right) Neil Glass (Judges Award), Melanie Vass (Reporter of the Year), Martyn Benn (chairman of the judges), Miriam Phillips (Young Journalist of the Year) and Richard Crease (Photographer of the Year).

This year’s Hammond/Whiteley Awards, which were launched 1983 in memory of two senior Bournemouth Daily Echo journalists, John Hammond and Carl Whiteley, were presented this week at Bournemouth university.

Miriam Phillips, Dorset Echo reporter, scooped the Jane Hayward Memorial Trophy, which honours the young journalist of the year, for a second time.

Bournemouth Daily Echo journalists collected two awards: reporter of the year going to Melanie Vass and photographer of the year to Richard Crease.

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Helium community earns more than $1 million

Contributors to Helium, the citizen-journalism/amateur writing site, have broken the $1 million mark for total earnings.

The site has 150,000 members earn cash from upfront payments and as part of a revenue share.

“We have about 10,000 who have proven to be talented writers. This is the group that are earning on our site,” Mark Ranalli, CEO of Helium, told Journalism.co.uk.

“Some of our best writers are making $5,000 per year already, and these sums continue to climb as the site continues to grow.

“This milestone represents definitive proof that there is a real market for writers to be compensated for their work online. In the midst of increasing volatility in the traditional media industry, Helium is attracting thousands of publishers and connecting them with high quality subject matter experts on a regular basis,” added Ranalli in a press release.

Helium already has a technology partnership set up with Hearst Newspapers and its members are now allowed access to The Society of Professional Journalists.

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Telegraph.co.uk: BBC spends £17.5m on staff bonuses

The BBC paid £17.5 million in bonuses to a total of 9,777 staff, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Informaton act.

The overall figure for bonuses was less than in previous years, however. A pay freeze for senior executives at the corporation was announced in November last year.

Full story at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – monitoring social media sites

Social media: Want to see who’s talking about a topic across a range of social sites? Use spy.appspot to search for a term – in real-time – on Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and more. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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OJR: Search engine optimisation tips for online news start-ups

Round-up of Danny Sullivan’s, editor of Search Engine Land, tips for new online news organisations on SEO. Including: creating standing pages for popular ongoing stories and issues; and discovering relevant search terms and keywords linking to your site.

Full list at this link…

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Centre for Journalism: Top 10 must read books for journalists

Some Friday fun here – John Saunders’ list of 10 great books for journalists. How many have you read and what’s it missing – tell us below.

1. Unspeak by Steven Poole
2. Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapusckinski
3. The Search for Al Qaeda by Bruce Riedel
4. Real England by Paul Kingsworth
5. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
6. The Cult Amateur by Andrew Keen
7. The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock
8. The Age of Consent by Geogre Monbiot
9. The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
10. War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres

Full synopses can be seen on the CfJ site.

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PostGlobe: Former Seattle P-I online producer on unemployment and journalism’s future

Interesting piece from last week: Jake Ellison, former designer, reporter and online producer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reflects on his decision to take redundancy when the title’s print edition ceased.

“I, like most bloggers and formerly employed journalists, am now writing for free, and that is not a sustainable social model for finding, investigating and sharing information about the powerful, the greedy and the downtrodden,” he writes.

Full story at this link…

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Folio: Publishers relishing iPhone apps

Magazine publishers are realising the potential of iPhone apps to promote their content and title, but also to create innovative revenue streams.

Full story at this link…

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Carter Ruck release: Mail on Sunday apologises to MP over Dale story

Tom Watson MP has published a release from law firm Carter Ruck in full on his blog, after false allegations were made against the politician in a Mail on Sunday article by political blogger Iain Dale.

Dale’s piece alleged that Watson had been copied into ‘smear’ emails sent by former Downing Street aide Damian McBride.

Associated Newspapers, owners of the MoS, has accepted the allegations were untrue, apologised to Watson and paid him ‘substantial damages’ and costs.

Full release at this link…

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Reason Magazine: Can PRs take on investigative journalism?

As the number of investigative journalists and the resources to work on such projects reportedly dwindles, Tim Cavanaugh asks if this work can be supplemented by public relations professionals.

“[T]hough it’s considered wise to believe the contrary, these communications types are not constructing all these news items entirely (or even mostly) by lying. Flackery requires putting together credible narratives from pools of verifiable data. This activity is not categorically different from journalism. Nor is the teaching value that flackery provides entirely different from that of journalism: Most of the content you hear senators and congressmen reading on C-SPAN is stuff flacks provided to staffers,” writes Cavanaugh.

Full story at this link…

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