This liveblog will pick up the tweets tagged #newsrw at Friday’s news:rewired event. Follow here, or via news:rewired.com.
Tags: #newsrw, Journalism.co.uk, msn uk, news:rewired
Rolling Stone has come in for a fair amount of flak from media commentators for the way it handled its General McChrystal scoop. It’s a very big scoop, the fallout from the story has seen McChrystal, who was US and NATO Commander in Afghanistan, sacked by President Obama. And yet the magazine decided to hold back the story for its print edition, aiming instead to generate buzz online and direct the money to the newsstands.
Buzz successfully generated (as Roy Greenslade reports, the New York Times has led with the story since it broke, as have many other outlets), readers who logged onto the Rolling Stone site couldn’t access the article. In fact, the story was nowhere to be seen.”It is one of the best pieces of reportage I’ve ever read. In these digital days, how could Rolling Stone ever imagine it could keep such an agenda-setting story to print alone?” writes Greenslade.
The story is still not available in print, it hits the newsstands tomorrow. “Clearly, competitors can’t wait until Friday to pick up a copy, especially when McChrystal has already been summoned to the White House,” wrote former Politico staffer Michael Calderone on his Yahoo! blog that day. They didn’t need to wait though. Rolling Stone had provided advance copies to Associated Press and others as part of its buzz-generating exercise, and in an unauthorised move Politico made the full text available for download from their site hours before Rolling Stone conceded and published it online.
The story eventually went up on the Rolling Stone website at around 11:00am ET, the following (Tuesday) morning.
If you are a news outlet looking to break a big story in a similar way, Megan Carpentier’s TPM Livewire article includes a step-by-step guide. Some of the key points:
- Fail to publish even excerpts of the story on your own website, figuring that your promotion of the story will cause people to go out and buy the magazine.
- Go to bed and sleep like a baby after the story hits.
- Wake up to find out that Politico has published a reprint of the story you gave them, since you weren’t smart enough to put the story on your own site and despite the intellectual property violation.
Tags: Barack Obama, general mcchrystal, print, Rolling Stone, scoop
Interesting blog from the Online Journalism Review site, about the dangers to online publishers if internet service providers (ISPs) adapt pricing models based on usage.
According to the author Robert Niles, “the next great battle in the journalism industry will be the Battle of Bandwidth”.
Internet Service Providers clearly don’t want to continue offering a one-price-buys-everything option. ISPs have shown that they favor a pricing model where certain users have to pay more to use more bandwidth. While there’s some logical appeal to the idea of making the heaviest users of the Internet pay the most for their use, metered traffic online creates profound challenges for online content producers.
He concludes his blog with a plea to online publishers to support calls for the government to subsidise increased bandwidth for all.
Access to bandwidth is the issue that will nurture, or kill, online news and information businesses in the years to come. If you’re publishing online, you need to fight for your access to bandwidth – and your potential audience’s access to it, as well.
Tags: bandwith, internet service providors, ISP, Online publishing
Three young reporters have won the chance to cover the 2010 Youth Olympic Games, thanks to fast-food giant McDonald’s.
According to theurbanwire.com, the food outlet ran a Young Journalists Programme, supported by the Singapore National Sports Council, to search for young journalists to cover the games.
Clarissa Sih Shu Ning, Jean Yong Kaigin and Shehnaz Ameera Bte Mohd Salim were the lucky three.
But apparently this is not the first time McDonald’s has shown an interest in the journalism world, having sent three primary school children to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to document their experiences.
See the article in full here….
Tags: mcdonalds, youth journalism, youth olympics 2010
US-based ImpreMedia, the largest Hispanic print and online news publisher in America, has enlisted the help of behavioural tracking technology to better understand its online users.
The company will use DailyMe’s Newstogram platform to find out exactly what their users are reading online and then use the information to offer personalised news and “better understand their audience when comes to content, e-commerce and advertising”.
DailyMe said in a release that the technology allows online news publishers to “communicate with their readers on an individual level”.
Tags: behavioural tracking, ImpreMedia, personalised news, tracking
Viacom’s $1 billion legal battle with Google, over YouTube’s hosting of allegedly copyright infringing video clips, has come to a landmark conclusion.
The lawsuit was thrown out after a judge found the search engine giant’s video site had not breached the ‘safe harbor’ provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This enables online sites like YouTube to avoid liability if not given sufficient notice of the infringing material.
In a comment on their company blog, Google said the ruling will have a huge impact on the online communications world.
This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.
Reporting on the ruling on their news feed, Viacom say they will appeal the decision.
We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible.
See the full ruling below, courtesy of Scribd.com.
Read an analysis of the ruling here….
Tags: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA, google, Viacom, YouTube
News journalists may have faced criticism for churnalism in recent years, but imagine the same newspaper carrying the same news for decades, read by hundreds, seen by millions?
The High Definite has a great collection of images of just such a paper: a prop in films and US TV shows that replicates the same fake newspaper produced by the Earl Hays Press.
[T]he prop comes from a small newspaper prop company called the Earl Hays Press in Sun Valley, Calif. Started in 1915, Earl Hays is one of the oldest newspaper prop companies, and the paper in question was first printed in the 1960s (note the top-hat ad on the lower left) (…) The front is blank and can be customised, but the inside and back page are always identical.
Tags: Newspapers, The Earl Hays Press
Ahead of its Activiate 2010 conference, the Guardian has published a Q&A with Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social. Mishra, who helps build and grow online communities, talks about some interesting projects and sites with which he has been involved:
In the first paradigm of digital activism, you work with a disadvantaged group that suffers from limited access to even the most basic information and tools for self-expression. So, you use simple-to-use digital devices like Nokia mobile phones and Flip video cameras and simple-to-use digital technologies like text messages and online video to enable them to access basic information and share their own stories. Frontline SMS, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone and Video Volunteers are good examples of the ‘empowering with information’ paradigm of digital activism.
In the second paradigm of digital activism, you work with a group that is anything but disadvantaged. This group is at ease with using always on internet and mobile devices, both for instantaneous access to information and for self-expression and social interaction. Here, the digital activist isn’t trying to solve a crisis of capability, but a crisis of caring. Here, the aim is not to empower with information, but to engage with inspiration. Move On and iJanaagraha are examples of the ‘engaging with inspiration’ paradigm of digital activism.
Tags: 2020 social, Activiate 2010, Gaurav Mishra, guardian
While David Higgerson, head of multimedia at Trinity Mirror Regionals, welcomes the government’s open data initiatives, he raises a few concerns on his blog, asking how long it is going to flow, for example.
While I’m sure the Tories have little intention of suddenly closing down data access in the future, there are signs that levels of data collection may reduce in the future.
Take, for example, the announcement this week that the number of health targets will be reduced. On one hand, it’s a quick headline to announce a reduction in red tape, but it also means that less data will be collected.
Tags: Data journalism, David Higgerson, Open Data
Earlier this week we reported on a ‘hot news’ ruling from March 2010, in which Barclays, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley won a victory in the federal district court, resting on the “hot news” doctrine, that stops republication of the companies’ stock recommendations by the site flyonthewall.com.
Here’s an update from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, stating that a number of media organisations have filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief for the appeal (not in support of any party):
More than a dozen media organizations are urging a federal appeals court to recognise that “hot news” misappropriation claims are an important legal remedy to protect news organizations’ content from internet aggregators that do not conduct original reporting.
Agence France-Presse, The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post are among the organizations that joined a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City (2nd Cir.) in the case Barclays Capital v. Theflyonthewall.com.
Tags: hot news, rcfp
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