New York City police to issue press passes to bloggers

This week New York City Law Department issued press passes to bloggers for the first time. In its new rules, to be adopted by the New York police department, will “expressly incorporate online-only media such as blogs”.

The changes follow a lawsuit filed in November of 2008 that challenged the existing credentials system, as reported by Journalism.co.uk at the time. In January 2009, three bloggers received press accreditation after suing New York City, following the Police Department’s refusal to give them press credentials because they work for online news outlets. Rafael Martínez Alequin – (Your Free Press), Ralph E. Smith (The Guardian Chronicle) and David Wallis (featurewell.com) launched the action after being denied credentials in 2007.

Following this week’s announcement, Norman Siegel, one of the attorneys involved in the lawsuit, said the department had “streamlined and improved” the press accreditation rules. “The new rules will enable journalists to gather and report news in a more successful manner than before. Online journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio journalists.”

The detail:

Under the proposed new rules published today, to obtain a press credential, an applicant must show that he or she has covered, in person, six news events where the City has restricted access, within the two-year period preceding the application. In addition to employees of traditional news gathering organisations, the new rules cover self-employed newspersons and other individuals who gather and report the news. The new press card will be issued every two years.

A press card allows its bearer, with the approval of police, to cross certain barriers established by the City at news events. Many non-City entities also rely on the City press card to distinguish who is a member of the media.

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Liverpool Daily Post hosting its own online literary festival

The Liverpool Daily Post will run its own online-only literary festival from 15 March.

The LiveRead festival will run from 15-19 March and feature liveblogged chats with authors and live writing workshops with Merseyside writers.

The Post is also tapping into its community of Flickr users by asking them to submit images of reenactments of their favourite literary scenes.

As part of the festival the Post will also use online storytelling tools Xtranormal and Storybird to encourage amateur writers to create their own multimedia stories.

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Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)

On Monday 8 March, it’s International Women’s Day, a global day “celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,” partnered by Thomson Reuters.

To mark the occasion, Sky News is having a day of female-led broadcasting. The broadcaster announced:
“From sunrise to midnight, the news channel will be presented and produced exclusively by women in support of the globally renowned day, which honours the economic, political and social achievements of women with hundreds of events around the world.”

Reuters will be liveblogging here: http://live.reuters.com/Event/International_Womens_Day_2010_2

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on media owners “to take steps to raise women’s profile in the news, both as professionals and as news topics,” ahead of its survey to be released in Bahrain on Monday.

“The situation is deplorable,” said Aidan White, IFJ general secretary. “Media organisations remain dominated by men the world over. Women must be given equal access to leadership. When that happens it will create a sea change in the news agenda and the way media professionals are treated.”

Here at Journalism.co.uk (where the editorial staff is predominantly female anyway), we thought it might be fun to host some themed comment on our blog. If you (male or female!) have a relevant post you’re burning to write, please let us know and we can publish it here – or link to your site/blog. Please contact judith [at] journalism.co.uk or leave a comment below.

• Which parts of the industry are particularly male-dominated? Does it matter?
• Has online technology helped balance the gender-split?
• What would you like to see change within the industry?
• What are your observations of male-female divide in the workplace?

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#BeMyGuest – a call to guest bloggers

Journalism.co.uk is taking part in #BeMyGuest – a month-long initiative to encourage bloggers to swap posts.

Set up by PRs Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle, the criteria for participating are simple. You must:

1. Write at least one post for someone else’s blog;
2. Feature at least one guest post on their own blog.

But to create some new collaborations, the pair are asking would-be guest bloggers to swap details via Twitter:

All you have to do is use Twitter to tweet out your blog details and the hashtag: #BeMyGuest to let people know you’d like to take part.

Your tweet might look like this:

“I write a blog about #media called The Media Blog (insert your Blog link) and I’d like to take part in #BeMyGuest (http://bit.ly/bemyguest1)”

As such, a quick Twitter search for the hashtag shows the bloggers putting themselves up for a guest slot. If you fancy doing a swap, add @journalismnews to your tweet and we’ll see how we get on.

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Hull Daily Mail publishes update in ‘investigation’ linked to rival website

Yesterday the Hull Daily Mail and its website received fierce criticism from commenters following a series of articles on Paul Smith, the founder of community news site for the Beverley area, HU17, and designer of pornographic websites.

Several readers suggested that the Mail was being overly critical of Smith’s profession, which as the articles stated is not illegal, because of his involvement with a rival community site.

Today the Mail has published another story on Smith – this time with a more balanced approach. Headlined ‘Beverley Minster virger backs web publisher’, the piece notes the support for Smith voiced in the Mail’s article comments. It also adds a comment from Beverley and Holderness MP Graham Stuart, who was a client of Smith’s web design business and mentioned in the previous articles:

Mr Stuart said: “I think it’s absolutely disgraceful and appalling to run a story like that mentioning me in the second paragraph without getting in touch with me. It is a sleazy unpleasant story that attacks a bloke running a Beverley website.”

But the new piece has done little to appease readers – asks one commenter on today’s piece:

Once again HDM are continuing in their persecution of this poor guy and alienating their readers,are they trying for the most complained about article of the year?

The articles also continue to feature adverts for the Mail’s own local website for Beverley – whether this is automatically generated by the mention of Beverley in the pieces aside, it doesn’t seem to be helping the paper’s case.

In a post on community site HU17.net today, Smith said he has lost business as a result of the articles and has suggested he could close the Beverley website as a result. He also challenges several claims made by the Mail’s investigation into his business, in particular denying that he had agreed to make a website for ‘client’ created by the Mail.

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LPA: Social media incentives for photographer members

Interesting initiative for members of the London Photographic Association (LPA): existing members who bring in new paying recruits to the organisation will receive promotion by the LPA through social networks.

This will include:

• Member’s biog and link to your LPA portfolio posted on LinkedIn LPA discussion page;
• One week of Twitter updates with links to your LPA folio;
• One week of Facebook posts with images from portfolio and a link to your LPA portfolio page.

Could this kind of promotion package be adopted by other member organisations or indeed members clubs on news sites or is there a danger in allowing a third-party to part-manage your professional profile on social networks?

Full details at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – manage your site’s feed to social sites

Social media: If you want to distribute your website’s stories via multiple social sites, Hootsuite provides a handy way to set-up and feed Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. 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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Greenslade: Tindle to launch four ‘hyperlocal’ London papers

Sir Ray Tindle will reaffirm his commitment to the future of printed newspapers with the launch of four new weekly, local titles by his group.

The new papers will launch in London later today and underline his belief in a hyperlocal print product, as well as the group’s continued expansion during the recession.

Full post at this link…

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NewsTrust.net: The hunt for bad journalism

US professor Howard Rheingold and his Stanford University students have been reviewing coverage of politics by US newspapers, broadcasters and news sites, assessing levels of trust and bias in news stories, opinion pieces and coverage by media watchdog organisations.

This ‘News Hunt’ looked at stories published between 18 February and 2 March:

For this News Hunt, NewsTrust editors hand-picked stories for review, focusing mostly on political topics covered by mainstream sources, with the goal of highlighting flawed or questionable stories from some of the news outlets that people read and watch most (e.g. cable news and talk radio). We also took great care to feature stories representing political viewpoints from the left, right and center. What we wound up with is not a “worst of the worst” list, but a round-up of stories from a variety of media that our staff and community found to be examples of bad journalism.

Read more about the News Hunt’s findings at this link…

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Big numbers vs local audience – what should regional newspapers chase?

The conflict between chasing huge web traffic figures or meeting the demands of a core local audience online is one of the key challenges facing regional newspaper websites, according to a group of digital editors, who gathered last week at the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLAN) Digital Editors Network meeting.

Coming together on the same day as the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures for the regional press were released, assessing current strategies for building web traffic was certainly topical. January had been a record month for the Lancashire Evening Post, digital editor Martin Hamer was proud to say with 8,215 user comments on articles on the site and 4,121,621 page impressions for the month beating the previous record of 3 million.

Average time spent on the site per visit had never been more than 6 minutes, but had risen to 6 minutes 15 secs in January, said Hamer.

Crucially 85.65 per cent of those visits came from within the UK – a figure the Post is keen to increase and several of the editors present said they had abandoned promoting content via social sites such as Fark, which had previously been used to drive traffic to websites from an international audience. With some local advertisers said to be in need of some digital hand-holding, the group suggested that guaranteeing a strong local online audience would be crucial in securing ads.

Web analytics are helping digital editors to understand the casual nature of most reader’s experience of their websites, added another journalist, whose group of sites sees 32 per cent of visitors only looking at one page, but a core 5-10 per cent looking at 10 pages in one sitting or visiting several times a week.

Growing that 10 per cent and make their engagement deeper and monetise it should be the priority, he added, and there have been some big shifts in the thinking around this recently: several groups admitted to cutting back or dropping video and podcasts entirely.

Instead building interaction using social media was encouraged and, as part of this, not chasing big numbers on these platforms, but rather focusing on engaged, local users and improving the service to meet their demands. Focusing on who those followers are and responding to those users who engage with the paper via those platforms will be more of more value in the long term.

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