Who? “Journalist, copywriter, media trainer, running man and Liverpool fan.”
Where? Dye is a freelance journalist and pops up in the journalist directory at this link. He is also the director of White Label Media. In July 2007 he joined the lucky few inducted to the The Hot Hack Blog.
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.
There are just 10 tickets left for news:rewired – the nouveau niche, Journalism.co.uk’s one-day event on 25 June for journalists working within a specialist beat or patch.
The price is currently discounted at £80 (+VAT), but will return to the full price of £100 (+VAT) tomorrow, Friday 11 June.
If you need more convincing, full details of the day are at this link. In summary we’ve got speakers from MSN UK, the Financial Times, Reed Business Information and the BBC discussing paid content, mobile, social media, data journalism and much, much more.
The source of the AT&T story claims he approached mainstream media titles before he gave the exclusive to Gawker…
Asked if Gawker paid for the scoop, Weev said the publication did not provide remuneration. “we did a benefit analysis and decided they could take our story viral the fastest,” he writes in an email.
Developer Phil Gyford has created a rather nice website featuring the day’s Guardian, using the publication’s open content API: http://guardian.gyford.com/
His aim? To make it “as easy to browse through today’s newspaper as it would be with the print edition”.
Gyford writes on his blog about creating better online reading, addressing issues of ‘Friction’; ‘Readability’ and ‘Finishability’.
Bowen said the BBC’s loss of self-confidence and introspection was not justified, and the corporation should be proud of its global and national status. Referring to the BBC Trust’s ruling that he was inaccurate in his reports on Israel, he said he believed he was accused “wrongly”.
Boris Johnson, mayor of London, then spoke (or boomed) on the shifting power game between politics and media; and managed a quick jibe on the BBC’s lack of accountability when it comes to its journalists’ own salaries. Johnson asked Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman how much he earns 14 times, but he didn’t get an answer. The short speech in full is an entertaining listen.
Most of Bowen’s and all of Johnson’s speech is recorded in the clip below:
Want to see newspaper front pages compared online? A new site that does just that has launched in beta. Find it at Holdthefrontpages.com/ Tipster: Judith Townend.
But that doesn’t mean he wants to see journalism die: it’s time to change the products and the platforms, he said. The future of journalism is dependent on journalists and other distribution platforms; not newspapers.
Picard, Hamrin Professor of Media Economics and director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre, at Jonkoping University in Sweden and fellow at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, claimed that print distribution is an expensive and inefficient way to spread news. “I think we’ll have paper for a while,” he said. For 20 years even, he guessed, but we’ll see more migration to screen.
He’s not at all nostalgic about news organisations’ bureaux spread out over the world, and says it’s time for newspapers to pool resources and become more efficient. As newspapers grew in the second half of the 20th century, they developed complex systems and bureaucracy, which has led to inefficiency, he said.
“You get very high overhead costs to support the corporations along the way, one of the big problems with success,” he said.
He encouraged news organisations to consider:
Smaller and more agile operations
A more entrepreneurial approach
More innovation in products and process
Alliances, networking and cooperation
Multiple sources of financial funding
Rethinking of entire business model of media and how it creates value for customers and itself
Something is wrong with the product, he said, when 40 per cent of public claim they don’t want to read the newspaper they used to read (source of stat not cited).
“I’ve been saying for 10 years – why in the world are newspaper printing stock tables?” It’s time to kill these, along with the television guides, he said, as consumers find with other ways of sourcing up-to-date information.
Stop simply reporting news and provide value to the consumer, he said. Consumer can get top ten headlines from internet services, so newspaper organisations have to provide something different than the “flow of information”.
Answering a question about the realities for newspapers, he speculated that while the Guardian is North America’s biggest news site (that it attracts the highest number of unique users in the region is a little known fact, he said), the newspaper itself (not the org, necessarily) is likely to die – along with the Independent. Newspapers don’t interest Picard at all – but saving journalism does.
Professor Picard recently sat on a panel between Arianna Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, who don’t like each other very much. Murdoch is saying we’ve got to save the business; Huffington is saying we have to destroy the business. Some place between Huffington and Murdoch’s realities is where we are, he said.
I spoke to Professor Picard afterwards. Here’s the clip:
In his inaugural speech on the media and digital economy yesterday, new Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt tied his colours firmly to the local TV mast:
New York has six local TV stations – compared to London which has not one.
Birmingham Alabama, an example some of you may have heard me use before, has eight local TV stations – despite being a quarter the size of our Birmingham that, again, doesn’t even have one.
Paris, Lyon and Marseilles have local TV. Why not Glasgow, Sheffield and Bristol?
Unfortunately even as politicians have paid lip service to localism, our broadcasting ecology has pursued the polar opposite model – with a large proportion of news beamed shamelessly from the centre.
research into the viability of local TV stations in the UK would be carried out.
He also outlined plans for the roll out of superfast broadband in the UK. His speech is available in full at this link, but a Wordle of the top 50 words used gives an overview of his priorities for media:
According to the New York Observer, major US publishers have seen a steady decrease in libel suits against their titles – grinding to a halt entirely, according to lawyers for the New York Times Co. and Time Inc. A recent US study suggests that the number of libel trials in America in the 2000s was 50 per cent less than in the 1980s.
But why, and what does this mean for freedom of expression and publishers’ freedoms?
Media lawyers have a few theories to explain the rapid decline. A track record of limited success for plaintiffs discourages people from filing such cases-clearly a good for media organizations. In addition, the web has allowed for quick corrections, heading lawsuits off before they are even filed. Some individuals now even post their own responses on the Web, allowing them to vent steam before heading to court.
On the darker side, some media pros wonder whether the declining finances of media companies may be limiting the type of journalism that used to anger subjects and produce libel suits.
There are just 10 tickets left for news:rewired – the nouveau niche, Journalism.co.uk’s one-day event on 25 June for journalists working within a specialist beat or patch.
