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Largest four Spanish dailies cut 39% of staff between 2003 and 2009

October 14th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Business, Editors' pick, Jobs, Newspapers

Spain’s four largest newspapers have reduced staff jobs by 39 per cent since 2003 a report by PRNoticias claimed this week, according to the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog.

The publications El Pais, El Mundo, ABC and La Razon have removed 906 jobs between 2003 and 2009 from the 2,325 positions which existed seven years ago.

El Pais, which continues to be the largest employer, has reduced its payroll by 43 percent from 891 employees to 507. According to PRNoticias, the reduction does not mean that all the jobs have been lost because the Prisa Group transferred some of the newspaper’s divisions to other parts of the company.

However, the steeper reduction was introduced by ABC, which cut by half its personnel from 774 to 375 staff members. El Mundo also has less staff as it reduced its staff by 35 percent from 446 people.

The SFN blog also reports that 6,500 Spanish journalists are currently recorded as unemployed and it is predicted that this will increase to almost 10,000 by the end of the year.

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Greater Manchester Police tweeting a day’s crime

Greater Manchester Police is using Twitter to update followers on all the incidents reported to them within a 24-hour period. Speaking to the BBC today, GMP chief constable Peter Fahy said the experiment, which is being conducted on a series of accounts including @gmp24_4, was in part a response to the media’s coverage of police work.

“The media doesn’t understand the nature of day-to-day policing,” he told a BBC News report.

Speaking on Radio 4, Fahy also talked about local media:

[W]e find it more difficult to get out information particularly with the decline in local newspapers, so it’s very much about public information. But it’s also to give a better picture to the public of the reality of police work. Crime is obviously an important part of what we do, but it’s only one part and so we’re trying to show the variety of police work but also the way that so many of our incidents are realted to wider social problems.

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Inforrm: Important privacy hearing begins over image publishing

October 14th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Editors' pick, Legal

The potentially important privacy hearing of Von Hannover and Springer v Germany began yesterday at the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the publication of photographs by the media. The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog has provided a copy of the second media intervention in the case from the Media Legal Defence Initiative, the International Press Institute and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

In the submission the organisations detail the current protections for privacy and freedom of expression across Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Poland and Sweden, as well as touching on New Zealand as a comparison.

They conclude that the court should “focus on the principles adopted by domestic courts in balancing Articles 8 and 10 … while affording a wide margin of appreciation to Council of Europe member states in determining the precise balance between such rights in individual cases”.

In particular, the organisations submit that, unless the weights attributed to the factors taken into account by the national courts in performing this balancing act are manifestly inappropriate and therefore result in a decision which clearly falls outside the member state’s margin of appreciation, the findings of local courts in favour of free expression should be “set aside” only if they are shown to be clearly arbitary or summarily dismissive of the privacy/reputational interests at stake. To do otherwise would be wrong in principle, for the reasons given, and would have severe practical consequences for parties, the Court and the domestic implementation of the Convention through national measures.

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Making data work for you: one week till media140′s dataconomy event

October 14th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in About us, Data, Editors' pick, Events

There’s just one week to go before media140′s event on data and how journalists and media can make better use of it. Featuring the Guardian’s news editor for data Simon Rogers and Information is Beautiful author David McCandless, the event will discuss the commercial, ethical and technological issues of making data work for you.

Rufus Pollock, director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Andrew Lyons, commercial director of UltraKnowledge will also be speaking. Full details are available at this link.

Journalism.co.uk is proud to be a media partner for media140 dataconomy. Readers of Journalism.co.uk can sign-up for tickets to the event at this link using the promotional code “journalist”. Tickets are currently available for £25, which includes drinks.

The event on Thursday 21 October will be held at the HUB, King’s Cross, from 6:30-9:30pm.

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Guardian: Murdoch’s media fightback over letter to Cable

October 14th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Broadcasting, Business, Editors' pick, Politics

A letter signed by numerous media organisations including the BBC and sent to business secretary Vince Cable earlier this week, calling on him to intervene with a planned bid by Murdoch for the remainder of BSkyB, has sparked quick responses from Murdoch’s other media outlets.

According to a report by the Guardian, it was first an editorial in News International’s The Times yesterday, which claimed that BBC director general Mark Thompson had made a “serious and surprising error”.

By lending his name to the campaign to prevent News Corp from purchasing those Sky shares that it does not already own, Mr Thompson has made a serious and surprising error. He has embroiled his taxpayer-funded organisation in a political and commercial battle that it should have nothing to do with.

Then today the Sun’s columnist Kelvin MacKenzie added that Murdoch should be encouraged, not stopped.

The fact that Sky is so successful is due to his three-word mantra: invest, invest, invest. When you look at the list of business duds opposing him, what’s quite clear is they have chosen to survive by three other words: Cut, cut, cut. …It’s hard to know why Vince Cable wouldn’t nod the deal through as Rupert has always run Sky thanks to his near 40% equity ownership and the right he has to pick the chief executive.

… The reality is that Sky owns very few of the channels it broadcasts and many of the stations have minute audiences – especially compared to the state monopolists at the BBC. The issue for our nation should not be how to stop Mr Murdoch investing in Britain but how to encourage him – and many more like him.”

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – journalism students’ starter pack

October 14th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Top tips for journalists

Journalism students: The Online Journalism Blog has prepared a “starter pack” of RSS feeds for student journalists from industry news feeds to the top five sites for multimedia, data and media law. 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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GoAdv rebrand to reach European markets

October 13th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Business, Editors' pick, Search

Online media company GoAdv has announced it plans to rebrand itself as a European content farm called Populis as part of its attempt to compete with US content farms in Europe, according to paidContent:UK.

The company is reportedly “uniting its content production engine to a Demand Studios-style platform called Populis Create”. This will then send out articles through its brands’ sites which include Excite, Nanopublishing and Italian blog network Blogosfere.

Speaking to co-founder Luca Ascani, paidContent:UK reports that content farms have to adjust their methods within the European market.

Ascani says many tools to identify search trends – which articles are written to satisfy – do not account for searches done in European languages. That, he says, means the idea of creating a single how-to super-site like Demand’s eHow guide is less likely to succeed there; so GoAdv has created a network of 500 niche sites for individual topics, right down to swimming pools in France.

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TechCrunch: Amazon opens e-reading to short form with Kindle Singles

October 13th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Editors' pick

Amazon will open up its Kindle e-reading platform to shorter pieces of work with the launch of Kindle Singles. Writes TechCrunch:

It sounds like anyone can submit a story or piece to be included as a Kindle Single, and Amazon is using the announcement as a “call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers” to submit writings.

Full story on TechCrunch at this link…

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Creative Commons releases new mark for public domain content

Creative Commons has released a new label for works that are free of known copyright restrictions. The Public Domain mark will make it easier for internet users to find copyright-free material and CC says it will increase the value of the public domain.

The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality … Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC’s licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible.

Full post on Creative Commons at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – embedding tables

October 13th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by in Top tips for journalists

Data: Want to embed a table of figures or information into your online article? Use tableizer to convert tables to html code. 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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