Sub-editing: Want to brush up on the basics of sub-editing work for online publication? Check out our two-part guide that covers the main points you should be considering including headlines, keywords and formatting. Tipster: Laura Oliver.
Of those Americans surveyed (around 1,506 in July this year), 29 per cent said news organisations ‘generally get the facts straight’; 63 per cent said news stories are often inaccurate.
The independence of news organisations and their ability to concede mistakes were also rated at an all-time low, according to the study, which also looks at local news coverage and the public’s reaction to the closure of news outlets.
This week’s Job of the Week on Journalism.co.uk is Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd’s vacancy for an assistant producer.
Closing date: 08/11/09 Salary: Up to £26K Location: London, Covent Garden Hours Per Week: 40
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd is the European subsidiary of Travelzoo Inc. (NASDAQ: TZOO), a global Internet company. With more than 17 million subscribers in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, Travelzoo® publishes offers from more than 1,000 advertisers. Travelzoo’s deal experts review offers to find the best travel deals and confirm their true value.
2.4 million travel enthusiasts visit our European websites each month, and in November 2008, Travelzoo.co.uk was voted the third best travel website by readers of The Daily and Sunday Telegraph.
The assistant producer will be part of the production team and have following responsibilities:
* Research, develop and source outstanding travel deals
* Writing news-focused, compelling travel deal content explaining the details for each outstanding deal
* Assisting in the management of client campaigns, including monitoring campaign performance, providing campaign reports, negotiating offers
* Developing and fostering client relationships
* Working with colleagues from offices in Paris, Munich, Hamburg and Barcelona
Candidate profile:
* First professional experience as editorial assistant or online content manager or online marketing assistant, ideally acquired in an online media company or in a similar fast paced work environment
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* Strong project management, problem solving and organizational skills
* Ability to multi-tasking, working with deadlines
* Passion for travel, knowledge about travel media content would be a plus
* Proactive and self-starter attitude
* Bachelor’s degree minimum
* Knowledge of other languages (French, German, Spanish) would be a plus
What we offer:
* Competitive salary
* Excellent global career opportunities in a high growth company
* Ask about our travel perk!
Glyn Mottershead teaches newspaper journalism at the University of Cardiff. He blogs at http://egrommet.net/ and is @egrommet on Twitter.
Journalism will survive – but there’s no simple solution for how it gets there, or who is going to pay for it. That was the key message that underpinned the Future of Journalism conference at the Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Cultural studies last week.
Delegates from 42 countries gathered in the city to hear over 100 papers looking at the industry from a range of aspects:
New media technologies, blogs and UGC;
Sources; Ethics; Regulation; and Journalism practice;
Global journalism;
Education, training and employment of journalists; History
Curran’s plenary focused on different views of the future: the survivalists, the new media romantics and those who believe there is a crisis of democracy afoot.
Being passive is not an option for the industry or academics, he argued. It is futile to try and predict the future: the focus should be on moulding and shaping the future where the two can work together to keep journalism alive.
Bettina Peters of the Global Forum for Media Development questioned whether it was appropriate to try and export business models from the developed world to the developing world. She discussed the need for collaboration between the northern and southern hemispheres. Journalism needs to be looking at mixed funding models, she said.
She too was concerned that journalists and educators needed to engage in a global discussion to share ideas and solutions and that the conversations shouldn’t just be about money or tools – two key strands of current industry discussion both on- and off-line.
Conference organiser Professor Bob Franklin, of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, was keen to stress that this wasn’t an academic talking shop – but a key place where journalists and those studying journalism can get together to share research and ideas from around the globe, something crucial given the massive changes taking place in the industry.
His view was that the conference showed there is no single future for journalism. This was echoed in roundtable talks with journalism educators who were finding it difficult to determine what media organisations need, while journalists in the room stated that the media didn’t know what it wants.
Professor Franklin, like many others at the conference, believes the key to the future of journalism depends on the platform and location: while newspapers are in decline in Europe and America they are thriving in India, and there is a rise in daily tabloids in urban South Africa – with a thriving market in used copies of newspapers.
“The conference was about the future of journalism, and that future looks very different from where you are standing,” said Franklin. “We were talking about possibilities, not about sowing gems of wisdom. There is a future for journalism, but it is a very expansive future.”
Video: Professor Alfred Hermida on the Future of Journalism
This is another story which asks serious questions of the quality and professionalism of the processes of journalism in our national media – following on most recently from the Baltimore spoof. In turn this asks the question whether there is actually much material that is worth putting behind firewalls – and whether discerning readers will be willing to pay for it for long.
It also highlights how digging by bloggers can help uncover stories, which then get wider attention than is currently delivered in the UK by blog sites.
Finally, I’d note that bloggers can have exactly the same biases as newspapers for stories which fit in with our own opinions, and none of us are immune to that – including me. So we need to pay attention to all the traditional disciplines of good journalism – multiple sourcing, sanity checks by a third party if we have a concern, and the separation of reporting from opinion.
Frédéric Filloux analyses key components of a modern paid-for system for news sites.
“In recent weeks, several suggestions for moving from wish to implementation have popped up. The latest one comes from Google. The company proposes to give a boost to its not-so-successful Checkout service by harnessing it to online newspapers interests.”
In an interview with the Guardian, BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, said that executives are considering the part- privatisation of the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Thompson also said that the provision of free BBC online news was ‘utterly non-negotiable’. “I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it,” he told the Guardian.
