Malaysian authorities suspend opposition paper

According to a release by the Canadian Press, the Malaysian government has suspended a newspaper run by their opposition, the People’s Justice Party.

Authorities allege the Suara Keadilan, or Voice of Justice, was printing false news that incited public unrest, adding to concerns that the government is “stifling criticism”.

The paper was due to have its licence renewed last week, but this was declined by the Home Ministry after an article was published claiming the state-run land development agency was in financial trouble.

The paper’s editor reportedly plans to appeal the suspension.

We want people to think. It seems that the government wants everyone to accept everything. They don’t want alternative views … The government is under tremendous pressure right now because people demand to know the truth.

This comes after officials banned three political cartoons criticising the government last week, citing them as a security threat.

Read the full report here…

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NewsLabs closes as founders admit overestimating potential

It appears that journalism startup NewsLabs, which created the NewsTilt platform, has been closed by its founders.

NewsTilt, which we reported on in April, aimed to provide a space where journalists could publish their work and increase direct interaction with readers.

But the founders have reportedly now put the site into “hibernation”.

According to internal emails from founders Nathan Chong and Paul Biggar, published by PoynterOnline, the pair suffered a “difficult post-launch period” which they felt they could not recover from.

In his message, Chong reportedly says they overestimated what they could achieve.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed not much has been happening with the site recently. I’m very sorry to report that this is because NewsLabs is ending.

(…) I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic). If I could rewind and start again then I believe the pitch for NewsLabs should have been simpler and much more realistic: we will build you a technology platform and strive to work hard for you as programmers… but we cannot magically generate you an online brand or guarantee traffic.

Biggar then adds his apologies to those involved in the project.

I’d like to chime in with my own apologies. I had high hopes for NewsLabs and NewsTilt, and am sorry we weren’t able to follow up on our promises.

In a message sent to members last night, Biggar confirms the rumours and says he will give more details soon.

We have indeed shut down; I apologize you heard it elsewhere, but we weren’t really ready to announce it widely when it was reported. I’m writing a piece about how and why we shut it down; needless to say its not a simple explanation, but a summary is: we realized it wasn’t going to work. I’m hopefully going to post the retrospective in a couple of days.

Requests for comment direct from the founders have so far not been answered.

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How ‘evergreen topic pages’ can bolster AdSense revenue

“Evergreen topic pages” – it’s a phrase which confused many when first used on the Online Journalism Review site.

Aiming to clarify the term and show how such pages will contribute revenue, Robert Niles has posted an explanation on the site.

The page does focus on a single theme. But neither a niche website nor a topic index on a general news website necessarily serves the function of an evergreen topic page. A optimized evergreen topic page ought to focus on a single element within a theme – not just sports, for example, but on soccer officiating in the World Cup.

I understand why this might be a tough concept for some news veterans. After all, what I’m asking you to create is in several ways the opposite of what we do on a daily basis writing for newspapers or broadcast reports. This is a different product for a news organization, but one much closely aligned with its core mission than fake front pages or coupon deals.

He explained that such pages are an aside to daily news updates, but can be used to supplement such coverage throughout time, with links to ‘evergreen’ topic pages which provide background information. The pages continue to fulfil online searches and provide a long-term additional income from advertising with limited maintenance.

I stumbled onto the value of evergreen content pages when I wrote my “statistics every writer should know” tutorial in 1996. I added AdSense ads to that site in 2003 and continue to earn several hundred dollars a month from those pages today.

Read the full post here…

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E&P: US military officials will now need permission for press interviews

According to a piece in Editor & Publisher, defence secretary Robert Gates has has demanded that military officials must now get clearance from the Pentagon for press interviews.

Gates allegedly sent a memo ordering military and civilian personnel across the globe to first gain permission before sharing stories with the media, which would prevent a repeat of the General Stanley McChrystal affair.

The order, issued by Gates on Friday in a brief memo to military and civilian personnel worldwide and effective immediately, tells officials to make sure they are not going out of bounds or unintentionally releasing information that the Pentagon wants to hold back.

The order has been in the works since long before Gen. Stanley McChrystal stunned his bosses with criticism and complaints in a Rolling Stone article that his superiors did not know was coming.

Read the full post here…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – human aggregation for your beat

Research: youedit.info is a useful aggregation service that groups links shared by its editors into topics. Promote yourself by becoming an editor of its journalism channel or follow another topic to find out what’s being discussed on your beat. Tipster: Judith Townend.

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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US newspaper publisher Gannett conducting ‘small-scale’ paywall tests

The Times finally took the paywall plunge today, but US newspaper giant Gannett has stopped short at dipping its toes.

The publisher is conducting a “small-scale test” by putting subscription services around three of its local titles, reports Poynter Online. The Tallahassee Democrat, Greenville (S.C.) News and (St. George, Utah) Spectrum will charge $9.95 a month for online-only access, fees for web-and-print bundles will vary.

Gannett had “weighed a lot of factors” in selecting three of the publisher’s 81 titles, vice president for news Kate Marymont told Poynter’s Bob Mitchell. “We didn’t want to start at our very largest properties.”

“[W]e know this is not the model,” Marymont acknowledged.

She said the company want to explore the revenue potential of niche content and the effect of paywalls in smaller markets.

“We want to test the idea that our journalism is more of a service than a product, and that we should give readers a selection of delivery methods.”

According to vice-president of corporate communications Robin Pence, the tests will help the company “develop a long term strategy for paid content”.

Full story at this link…

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Editors Weblog: Transforming the web with semantic technology

A post on the editorsweblog.org is looking at the way semantic technology could transform online news searches.

The technology is explained as having the ability to change the internet “from a massive searchable text file into a queryable database”, where related media, or facts, are linked together across independent websites.

For newspapers, semantic technology improves reader engagement by linking together related articles. For readers, that means more context on each story and a more personalized experience. And for advertisers, it means better demographic data than ever before.

Watch the video below, courtesy of editorsweblog.org, for more information on ‘website rules’ being created to make semantic searches more efficient in the future.

Read the full post here…

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‘The state of the journalistic art’: In defence of Rolling Stone’s Gen. McChrystal reporter

The furore following Rolling Stone’s General McChrystal feature doesn’t look like calming down any time soon.

Eric Alterman, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress has put together a great post calling into question some of the criticisms of RS reporter Michael Hastings.

Reporter after reporter has complained that by accurately reporting what McChyrstal and his aides said in explicitly on-the-record conversations to a reporter with a tape recorder and/or notepad in his hand, Hastings has violated the tenets of professional journalism.

One comment he refers to was from David Brooks, opinion columnist for the New York Times, who called Hastings a product of the “culture of exposure”:

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

But in Alterman’s view, the feature was the epitome of quality journalism.

(…) an almost picture-perfect example of skillful interviewing, smooth narrative writing, extremely exhaustive research, and finally (and perhaps rarest) thoughtful contextualizing of extremely complicated material. I recommend it to all journalism professors as an example of the state of the journalistic art.

Read the full post here…

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Bangladesh media concerned over law to prevent yellow journalism

Bangladesh media have raised concerns over Information Minister Abdul Kalam Azad’s announcement that the government plans to introduce new law to target “yellow journalism”.

Azad is reported to have said “newspapers and television and radio channels that are making false and misleading news to tarnish the image of ministers, lawmakers, the government and the country are in fact doing yellow journalism”.

In an editorial post on Dhaka’s Daily Star website, the author writes that the proposals, such as editors having to hold 15 years experience in journalism, will be “no guarantee that bad journalism will not be there.”

We are convinced that a new law for newspapers is a bad idea. It is fraught with danger and it threatens to put unfettered press freedom in jeopardy. We ask the government to jettison the entire idea in the larger interest of press freedom and by extension intellectual freedom in Bangladesh. We suggest that it utilize the existing mechanisms to ensure objective journalism in the country, especially the Press Council.

Read the full post here…

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Manchester Evening News lets football fans take over its masthead

Much has been written about the positives and negatives of personalised features on news websites, from user profiles to personalised homepages.

For me the Manchester Evening News has got its personalisation priorities right: registered readers can now choose between a blue masthead, designed for Manchester City fans; or keep the site’s traditional red colour theme if you a Manchester United fan.

(NB – for those of you that know my football allegiances please note that logging in as a blue was purely for work purposes)

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