The BBC has won a Digital Emmy Award for the Virtual Revolution – its multi-platform series looking at the impact of the world wide web on daily living.
The prize was awarded to the project’s production team who consulted viewers before and during the production process.
Journalism.co.uk’s Judith Townend talked to the team in March about how the award-winning series was created.
Tags: BBC, Digital Emmy, Emmy award, Virtual Revolution
A Spanish court yesterday threw out a case against executives from Basque newspaper Egunkaria, accused of belonging to the terrorist group ETA.
Five newspaper executives, including the paper’s editor, were accused of links to the terrorist group and the paper was closed in 2003 after allegations that it was part-funded by ETA and followed instructions from the group.
But judges in court yesterday suggested that Judge Juan del Olmo, who had ordered the paper’s closure, had “overstepped the limits of his powers and that prejudice against the Basque language had played a part in the prosecution”.
Tags: Basque, Egunkaria, ETA, press freedom, Spain
In 2009, blog network Gawker Media introduced a new, stricter commenting system in an attempt to free the site from certain readers who were dominating comment threads. Nieman Journalism Lab has the full rundown of how the system now works, which includes trusted commenters having greater access to discussions and most recent comments placed at the top rather than bottom of threads to steer discussion.
“We’ll be able to encourage the kind of discussion that *we* want – not one that is dominated merely by the most prolific of our commenters. It’s our party; we get to decide who comes,” wrote founder Nick Denton at the time.
A graph on the blog of Gawker Media chief technology officer Tom Plunkett shows an initial dip in comment volume when the changes were first made, followed by a steep incline:
Though there were some calls to do so, purging commenter accounts is not a solution for the out-of-control commenter community. Nor is a large moderation staff. We believe pruning, and a commenting platform as we have implemented, will lead to increased participation, while at the same time encouraging quality. This data, and the subjective opinion of many, seem to back this assertion.
Full Nieman Journalism Lab report at this link…
Tags: commenting, Gawker, gawker media, Nick Denton, reader comments, Tom Plunkett
Social media: Need to convince a colleague or boss that using social media can benefit your work? Show them this piece from Mashable on ‘How journalists are using social media for real results’. Tipster: Laura Oliver.
To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Tags: blogs, mashable, Online social networking, social media, technology
Thomson Reuters is planning to launch a series of new web products and overhaul its markets division as part of plans to streamline the company and reach growing audiences of younger, web-savvy readers and smaller business customers.
Among the developments:
Tags: Business, business journalism, data, eikon, finance, financial journalism, markets, project insider, reuters, thomson reuters
Anna Wintour, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue is offering you the opportunity of a lifetime! Just being near her will make you chic.
Chic, perhaps. Out of pocket, most certainly. For this “opportunity of a lifetime” (read: one week’s work experience at Vogue) will set you back at least the current bid of $12,000 (£7,850).
Now in this instance, and in the unnerving number of instances that have preceded it, the winning bid will be donated to charity. In the current climate it seems unlikely that a mainstream media organisation in the UK would have the temerity to simply charge outright for an internship. But, as this article in the Times revealed in February, should it happen, there will be those willing to pay:
[C]ompanies have sprung up offering UK students the chance to hone their skills by paying for an overseas placement in their chosen profession. Clea Guy-Allen, a London journalism student, paid to work on a newspaper in India last summer. “I paid £3,000. My parents helped out but I used savings. The whole experience was good. I was in India for three months and did learn a lot, but not necessarily from working on the paper.”
How much longer will this practice remain too ethically unsound? With unpaid, full-time internships of three to six months eagerly undertaken by the great recently-graduated, will the media industry slip past that particular point on an already slippery slope?
(Via Mediabistro)
Tags: Anna Wintour, ethics, internships, vogue, work experience
Paper.li, a new (but not officially affiliated) Twitter application, has launched in alpha.
It creates a ‘newspaper’ using links that have been shared by both the specified user and the people they follow – from the past 24 hours.
Paper.li calls the Twitter account the ‘editor-in-chief’ and the people being followed by the account the ‘contributors’.
It comes with a small disclaimer: “As we are in alpha, we may have to turn off any new creations on short notice to make sure we can correctly scale our systems.”
The user’s live stream is shown at the side of the page and the main page displays content around related subjects. Google ads are placed at the right hand side.
H
ere’s a section of what the @journalismnews’ page, or paper, looks like. I wasn’t sure what to expect given that we’re following quite a diverse mix of people, but it’s actually quite tailored to our patch, journalism and media, with a live #journalism stream as well. But as you scroll down, the links become less relevant, with a ‘Switzerland’ section at the bottom of our page.
Tags: paper.li, Real-time web, Technology/Internet, Twitter
On Sunday the Edinburgh International Science Festival event ‘Journalism in the Digital Age: Trends, Tools and Technologies’ posed the question: Can journalism survive in the digital era?
There to address the issue were a panel of speakers from the worlds of journalism, academia and public relations, each of whom gave a five minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A.
Sarah Hartley, who oversees the Guardian’s new Beat Bloggers initiative, pointed out that people are “no longer happy to passively receive” information. She suggested that news organisations now have to accept that it is “the end of us and them”, and factor in audience interaction as an integral part of their workload. She also pointed out that creating web-specific content is essential rather than merely recycling print content on the web.
Kate Smith, media lecturer at Edinburgh’s Napier University spoke on the role of educational institutions in helping trainee journalists prepare for the future media environment and suggested that the basic principles and values of journalism should still be emphasised. Video games and PR expert Brian Baglow, who gave a presentation on citizen journalism, echoed her sentiment, assuring journalists that they had “skills and understanding that most bloggers don’t” and were still needed for their “expert investigation and analysis”.
Iain Hepburn, digital editor at the Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail shared his love of podcasting, praising the “intimacy” of audio and the “visceral appeal” of video. Hepburn went on to claim that affordable, easy to use products like Flip cameras were allowing journalists to make “documentary quality” films without any prior expertise, and described how a smartphone can now be used to cover events where previously several pieces of kit would have been necessary.
Finally, Martin Belam, information architect for Guardian.co.uk, took us through a potted history of journalism, beginning with the very early years, when “storytelling was concentrated in the hands of some monks”, to today’s world where even local newspapers such as The Belfast Telegraph can reach a global audience. He also spoke about the increasing demands on journalists for real-time coverage, the effect of social media/online pressure groups on news, and the potential of the semantic web.
It wasn’t until the Q&A session that the thorny issue of the industry’s financial future was raised, with one journalist in the audience asking: “How are we going to get paid? Mercedes don’t give away cars, but you are all giving away content everyday online.”
The panel had no concrete answers, but Rupert Murdoch’s new paywall model and Jeff Jarvis’ arguments in favour of a link economy were given serious consideration.
There was also some hope that a proven willingness to pay for mobile apps could lead to more substantial subscription based models for e-readers such as the iPad.
Milo McLaughlin is a freelance multimedia journalist specialising in arts and technology. He blogs at milomclaughlin.co.uk.
Tags: beat blogging, digital journalism, Edinburgh International Science Festival, iPad, Jeff Jarvis, paywalls, Rupert Murdoch, The Guardian
Dan Nguyen, a developer/journalist for ProPublica, the non-profit investigative news organisation, has shared four tutorials that would:
…guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites.
Four-part series at this link…
Tags: coding, Dan Nguyen, journalists, propublica
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has a special report on Ahmed Omar Hashi, a Somali journalist CPJ has helped through its assistance programme.
He’s been threatened and targeted for death. He’ seen his colleagues and friends killed. Now, like other Somali journalists, Hashi struggles in exile and hopes one day he can resume his work.
Tags: Ahmed Omar Hashi, Committee to Protect Journalists, cpj, Somalia
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