MediaMemo: Time Inc. on paywall plans and print/iPad-only content

As reported by Nieman Journalism Lab, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon noticed late last month that a Time Magazine story he had followed a link to online wasn’t there, instead there was this message:

To read TIME Magazine in its entirety, subscribe or download the issue on the iPad.

The next morning the story reappeared in its entirety.

Yesterday reporters at Nieman noticed that “nearly every major article” on Time Magazine’s website was no longer available in full:

Check out the current issue of Time Magazine at Time.com. Click around. Notice anything? On almost every story that comes from the magazine, there’s this phrase: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010 print and iPad editions of TIME.”

This afternoon MediaMemo has confirmation from parent company Time Inc. that there are title-by-title paywall plans and content across its publications will increasingly be print and iPad only. Spokesman Dawn Bridges outlines the publisher’s policy:

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content [SIC] from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

Full story at this link…

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People aren’t black or white, they’re human, says Rutgers professor

There’s a thought provoking blog by Benjamin Davis on the Online Journalism Review, looking at our use of ‘black’ and ‘white’, to describe race.

He brings attention to the issue by referring to a question he often poses to his own students.

I ask a “white” student if he or she has “black” friends. If they do, I promise I will give them $100 for an introduction. With the same promise I ask a “black” student if he or she has “white” friends. Every time the answers are enthusiastically affirmative to having “black” and “white” friends. They salivate looking forward to the cash as any college student would. You should see them preparing to text their friends on their cell phones.

I then approach the very same students holding a white piece of paper and say, so your friend is the color of this paper, yes? Holding a black object to another student I state, so your friend is the color of this black object, yes? At that point the students realize what the journalism community as a whole refuses to acknowledge and that is, there are not “black” and “white” people. The students understand that they mistakenly lied because they were lied to by society and the journalism world.

He therefore calls for mainstream media to update their stylebooks and report the “truth”.

There is only one race. It’s called human. That’s a simple fact that any anthropologist would support. Again, it’s about telling the truth and mainstream media have their collective heads in the sand.

Read the full post here…

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Looking back on the 7/7 bombings and the birth of user-generated content

Five years on from the 7 July bombings in London, Matthew Eltringham from the BBC College of Journalism remembers the day that sparked the future of user-generated content.

[W]e ‘stuck a postform’ on the first take of the News website’s story and waited to see what would come in. Within minutes our email inbox was out of control – it was clear that something was happening, but we had no idea how to manage the huge number of emails we were receiving and the information they were giving us.

By the end of the day we had received several hundred images and videos along with several thousand emails. It was only with hindsight that we were able to make sense of them and the impact they were likely to have on our journalism.

Since then, the UGC project has grown to a team of more than 20 people, working around the clock and developing “an incredibly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the ‘who, what, when, where and whys’ of ‘social newsgathering’ or put another way, ‘finding good stuff on the web’.”

There have been many lessons along the way too, leading the BBC to ruthlessly check every piece of user content which gets sent their way.

We always check out each and every image, video or key contact before we broadcast them, to make sure they are genuine and to resolve any copyright issues. When it’s impossible to do that – such as with content sent from Iran or Burma, when contacting the contributors is very hard to do or might put them in danger, we interrogate the images, using BBC colleagues who know the area and the story to help identify them.

Read the full post here…

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Metro launches iPad app

National commuter favourite The Metro has launched an iPad app, offering readers bitesize news, sports and showbiz.

The newspaper already has an iPhone app available, launched earlier this year.

[advert]The Metro joins other national newspapers, including the Financial Times and Express Newspapers, who have launched iPad apps this year.

In a release, Metro says it was created “with a newspaper in mind, offering digital news in a paper-like experience”.

“It gives readers the chance to swipe between individual headlines and full stories with a single finger, whilst moving between the different sections, including News, Showbiz, Sport, Weird, Music, Film, TV and Tech, using a dual finger swipe,” they say.

The Metro worked with digital design agency Fjord and mobile agency Bluestar, to create the app.

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Embarrassment as AOL breathlessly swallows spoof Raoul Moat report whole

Not a good morning on the AOL News Surge Desk, AOL’s breaking news channel, after a story on the police search for alleged gunman Raoul Moat cited a satirical news site as a source.

Quoting spoof news site The News Grind, which suggests local residents are enjoying the live drama of the manhunt, the Surge Desk ran with the headline:

Raoul Moat Manhunt: Britain Breathlessly Awaits Bloody Shoot-Out Between Raoul Moat, Police

The AOL piece included large chunks of The News Grind article:

As officers and dogs move in, citizens from around the isle are anticipating a swift and gruesome conclusion to the national drama. Some are even clamoring for it, calling it the best live entertainment they’ve seen in some time.

News Grind paints a vivid picture of the mood:

“I can scarcely wait for the climax,” confirmed Elsie White, 77, as she raced back to her house after picking up some toffees and copies of today’s paper from a local newsagent featuring the blood-soaked face of a police officer allegedly shot by Moat.

“We haven’t had a live event like this to enjoy for quite some time and there’s only old Doctors episodes on at this time of day.”

Families have been collecting children from schools and nurseries throughout the day so they could watch together, as expectations reached fever pitch that a violent firearms confrontation was imminent. Over 800 schools have closed across the country as a result.

The Angry Mob has a screenshot of how the original article appeared on AOL.

AOL News Surge Desk Contributor Carl Franzen has issued an apology this morning and amended the story. Hats off to him for explaining what’s happened, where the mistake was made and not just taking it down:

An earlier version of this story included information from a false report from another site. We’ve updated to correct the record and explain what happened.

While residents of Rothbury have been described as scared and worried as the police continue their search for the accused killer, the situation is far different than what we reported in an earlier version of this post, which relied on false information from what turned out to be a satirical news site.

(…) We bought the quote as authentic – hook, line and sinker. We deeply regret the error.

Unfortunately the page title and URL still allude to the title of the original article:

Robin Brown, who wrote the satirical piece for The News Grind, sums it up:

A mistake anyone could have made? Perhaps, in these days of rolling news and slapping on content and the rush to be first with a report – the news grind, if you will.

But even that old chestnut about Americans and irony doesn’t wash – the US is the home of The Onion, the finest satire site in the world, after all.

Maybe it’s just a sign that, in these information-saturated days, even the news is beyond satire?

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Women at war: Profiling the female foreign correspondents in Iraq

Despite the legions of women that have covered conflicts, whenever a female war correspondent is profiled the phrase ‘one of the few women to have made their name as a conflict reporter’ constantly creeps in. It creates a false impression that we are the few. Editors these days are as likely to send a woman correspondent into combat as a man.

A fascinating article looking at the network of female foreign correspondents reporting from Iraq, in particular Hannah Allam, a veteran reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, who is five months pregnant.

Full story on NPR at this link…

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Forbes.com: Journalism, mobile, and the ‘fifth wave of computing’

From last week, but well worth a read – Forbes’ columnist Trevor Butterworth on the opportunities for news groups and journalism provided by “the fifth wave of computing”: “the massive ramping up of the mobile internet and the evolution of mobile phones into ‘life devices’ through 3G, cloud computing, GPS and second generation barcoding”.

Newspapers and magazines with luxury goods supplements and sections could be the testing ground for a new kind of advertising built on mobile interactivity (…) All of this technology exists – mobile devices with sufficient camera resolution to scan barcodes have been shipping for the past year -and these capabilities appear to augur well for service and local journalism, upon which hard news will need to collaborate if not piggyback.

But the real challenge in taking advantage of this new wave is whether news organisations can work together and stop thinking of themselves as “insular, completely self-sufficient” operations with full control over their distribution, says Butterworth. It is this “bold thinking” that will master the mobile world, he says.

Full article on Forbes.com at this link…

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#followjourn: @pdouglas – editor

#followjourn: Paul Douglas

Who? Editor at TechRadar.com

Where? Paul’s handywork can be found over at TechRadar.com, which has its own Twitter account at @techradar. He became editor in August 2008.

Contact? @pdouglas

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 – why metadata’s good for news

The semantic web: Fascinating article from Poynter that helps explain why the semantic web and metadata are useful for journalism and online news – and what it all means. 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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ProPublica photographer followed by BP employee, detained by police

Police in England have come in for a fair amount of criticism recently for their treatment of photographers (see here and here), but their US counterparts have received some attention too after detaining freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield, who was working for ProPublica at the time.

Rosenfield was driving away after taking photos of a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas when he was followed by a BP employee, blocked off by two police cars and detained. Rosenfield had remained in a public space outside the refinery while working. The police reviewed his pictures and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information. According to Rosenfield these details were then shared with BP.

Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, said:

“We certainly appreciate the need to secure the nation’s refineries. But we’re deeply troubled by BP’s conduct here, especially when they knew we were working on deadline on critical stories about this very facility. And we see no reason why, if law enforcement needed to review the unpublished photographs, that should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company.”

Full story at this link…

via Fishbowl NY blog

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