Nominations open for Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards 2010

Index on Censorship’s 10th Freedom of Expression Awards are still open for nominations.

There are three categories: ‘Journalism’, ‘New Media’ and ‘Law and Campaigning’, honouring the ‘individuals who are leading the fight against censorship in all corners of the world’.

JOURNALISM AWARD: Recognising investigative journalism of dogged determination across a range of media including print, online, radio and television, taking into consideration impact, originality and revelation.

NEW MEDIA AWARD: Recognising innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship, fostering debate, argument or dissent.

LAW AND CAMPAIGN AWARD: Recognising lawyers or campaigners who have fought repression, or have struggled to challenge political climates and perceptions. Special attention is given to people using or establishing legal precedents to fight injustice.

The nominations must be submitted at this link by 18 December.

The award winners will be announced in March 2010.

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Patrick Thornton: Journalism’s beacons of light can’t even make it

Patrick Thornton, the US-based ‘beat blogging’ enthusiast, has decided to move out of full-time journalism, to a position as community and social media manager for a conservation organisation. His blog post announcing the move reflects on the wider industry; despite having only worked in journalism full-time since 2006, he was already depressed:

“Loss and destruction has been almost all that I’ve ever known in journalism. Sure, there has been great work along the way, almost always at the individual level. But many of those innovators that I chronicled at BeatBlogging.Org moved on to other jobs and other fields.

“And that was depressing. These were our beacons of light, and they couldn’t make it. The journalism industry has lost a lot of journalists, and many of those that it has lost were the best, brightest and most innovative.

“But the real problem isn’t a journalism problem. Journalism is moving forward. It’s a business model problem, and that something I can’t help that much with.”

Full post at this link…

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#FollowJourn: @martinjemoore / MST director

#FollowJourn: Martin Moore

Who? Director of the Media Standards Trust.

What? Moore, a regular blogger and media commentator, heads the Media Standards Trust, a UK-based media research organisation.

Where? Find out more on his blog: http://mediastandardstrust.blogspot.com/

Contact? @martinjemoore.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – journalism education advice

In journalism education? Check out Steve Buttry’s thorough blog post offering some curriculum advice for journalism schools at this link. Tipster: Judith Townend.

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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Guardian iPhone app goes live

The Guardian’s new and ‘official’ iPhone app went live this morning, priced at £2.39: http://www.guardian.co.uk/iphone.

Most Guardian content is available via the app. Video is among the features not yet available, but according to an FAQ more will be added in future.

Like the Telegraph’s latest iPhone offering, the Guardian’s app has an offline mode.

GNM product manager Jonathon Moore wants users’ feedback, he said on Twitter.

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New editorial and media job vacancies on Journalism.co.uk

Here’s the latest editorial and media job opportunities posted this week on Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board:

To sign up for free as a jobseeker, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/113/

To sign up as an advertiser, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/

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The Telegraph’s Christmas Calendar – a social media-led competition

[And following on from our last post on how not to treat online communities when it comes to photographs...]

A photography competition and a charity calendar using the images – standard fare for a newspaper appeal?

The Telegraph has just announced the winners of its charity calendar competition sponsored by Photobox – but it seems this competition had a social media twist.

The winners were voted for by readers and users of Telegraph.co.uk and the competition itself was only promoted via social media, not in the paper or elsewhere on Telegraph.co.uk, communities editor Kate Day told Journalism.co.uk.

The calendar has grown out of a series of weekly competitions run on the Telegraph’s culture blog asking users to send in their photos on a different weekly theme.

“Readers vote for the theme each week which involves the audience from the beginning of each week. Flickr and Facebook groups provide space to discuss the format of the competition on an ongoing basis so that we can resolve problems such as spam in the Flickr group together,” explains Day.

“Comments from readers also prompted me to arrange specific Terms and Conditions for the competition and to set up an email subscription so that they don’t miss weekly announcements.”

But running a competition and a participatory online event in this way has brought wider benefits, she says:

“Inviting participants to join in via social media has enabled the competition to spread across the internet as a kind of giant, ongoing conversation. It’s also reached an audience who love photography but may not usually read the Telegraph. It’s very exciting that a project that has been led by the audience so directly is part of this year’s Christmas Appeal. I hope that the calendar demonstrates that this kind of collaboration can produce very high quality content that can strengthen the rest of what we do as journalists.”

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Commenters accuse Mail of image misuse – a bigger missed opportunity for publishers?

Mail Online is coming under renewed criticism for its use of online images, following a story on ‘moneyfacing’ (people using banknotes to create self-portraits).

A tweet from @alisongow alerted us to the Mail’s article ‘Creasing up: Banking on a funny photo with the ‘moneyfacing’ craze sweeping the web’ on which commenters have alleged the paper has used the images central to the story without permission.

Comments include:

“As the photographs are a pretty intrinsic part of this so called feature, I’d say that asking permission to use them is the very least this so-called newspaper should’ve done.”

The creator of the images, Thom Shannon, has now reposted them to Flickr with a watermark protecting them, adding he has never felt the need to use watermarks before, but that requests to the Daily Mail to remove the photos have not been answered.

The Mail isn’t the only site making use of the images: the Sun has a 12-image slideshow and Telegraph.co.uk features just one image, though it does give accreditation for this to a website (something Shannon has disputed).

This is not the first time the Mail’s use of online images has been challenged, but issues of copyright aside, Kevin Anderson suggests that there is a bigger opportunity being missed by newspapers at large (scroll down to the comments):

“[T]his is another example of the news industry missing an opportunity to build community around what they do. When I use Creative Commons photos from sites like Flickr, firstly, I honour the terms of the licence. Secondly, I drop the Flickr user a note letting them know that I’ve used a photo on our site. It’s not only a way to use nice photos, but it’s also a way to build goodwill to what we’re doing and do a little soft touch promotion of our coverage. It takes a minutes out of my day to create that email, but instead of a backlash, I often get a thank you. They let their friends know that the Guardian has used their picture. It’s brilliant for everyone. There are benefits to being good neighbours online, rather than viewing the internet as a vast repository of free content.”

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‘Be slinky’, photojournalism students told at new LCC exhibition

Young photojournalists at London College of Communication (LCC) were this week told to ‘be slinky’ to stay afloat in the industry today.

The advice came from a debate, ‘The New Ecology of Photojournalism’, on the first night of the degree show for this year’s MA Photojournalism students.

American photojournalist, Ed Kashi, told graduates they needed to be ‘slinky’ and that adaptability was a key skill for succeeding in the media at the moment. He said: “Photojournalism has never been more exciting than now.”

Other panellists included: Lucy Davies, the Telegraph’s photography critic; Simon Norfolk, photographer; David Campbell, professor of geography, Durham University.

All the panellists gave a positive outlook for photojournalists, but also advised young photojournalists not to rely on editorial photos and magazines for their income. Norfolk gave the example of British photographer Stephen Gill who makes his own photography books and sells them on eBay.

One of the students on the MA is Ian Buswell whose collection, ‘Silence in the Salween’, is part of the exhibition. The photos give a glimpse of life for the persecuted Karen community of Eastern Burma.

He said: “This is my first exhibition in London. I’ve spent three years in south east Asia as a freelance photographer, but sometimes felt isolated in Bangkok. In London, I’ve been exposed to more photography and had the chance to get better involved with the city’s art scene.”

The exhibition, called ’28 Stories’, runs from 10 – 23 December and 4 – 15 January, 10am – 5pm, at the LCC, Elephant and Castle.

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PDA: ‘Algorithms will replace journalists’

Heavy-going for a Friday morning, but an interesting read: PDA has an interciew with Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he says:

“With the internet, we are experiencing the industrialisation of information and communication. Algorithms are used more and more to produce information that used to be created by journalists, or humans in general. More and more of these algorithms are being used to find out what people are thinking.

(…) The path we face in journalism is one in which there are fewer humans and more machines – and if you look at all the inaccurate news reports already, that is grotesque.”

Investing in ‘the human factor’ – and therefore not succumbing entirely to algorithms – will mark out the successful media companies of the future, argues Schirrmacher.

Full interview at this link…

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