San Diego Union-Tribune offering free paper to users who ‘check-in’

Print news publishers looking for ways to integrate location-based technology may be interested in this new strategy from the San Diego Union-Tribune: The paper is offering a free copy of its print edition to those who ‘check-in’ via their mobiles at the newspaper offices or Union-Tribune kiosks.

According to the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog, users can simply show their mobile phone to kiosk workers across the city to get their free paper.

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Journalisted weekly: Obama, bomb plots, and housing benefit

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources. From now on we’ll be cross-posting them on Journalism.co.uk.

For the week ending Sunday 31 October

• President Obama appeared in more articles than all UK politicians, bar one
• Housing benefit covered extensively, thanks in part to Boris Johnson’s ‘Kosovo’ comparison
• Brazil’s presidential election, and a spat on the North-South Korean border, received little coverage

The Media Standards Trust’s latest report ‘Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the British press’ is now available to download

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

Covered lots

• President Obama, whose party is predicted to take heavy losses in the US midterm elections, 416 articles
• Cuts to housing benefit, with fears of ‘social cleansing’ and suburban flight, 224 articles
• Another plane bomb plot with suspected terrorist links to Yemen, 150 articles

Covered little

• The Brazilian presidential election, with governing party candidate Dilma Rousseff elected as the country’s first female leader, 24 articles
• North Korea and South Korea, with shots reportedly fired across the border, 10 articles
• Google, the focus of a parliamentary debate on privacy and the internet last Thursday, 8 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

• David Cameron : 527 articles (-8 per cent on previous week)
• George Osborne: 231 articles (-71 per cent on previous week)
• Vince Cable: 171 articles (+27 per cent on previous week)
• Nick Clegg: 168 articles (-30 per cent on previous week)
• Ed Miliband: 155 articles (+9 per cent on previous week)
• Gordon Brown: 117 articles (-3 per cent on previous week)
• Tony Blair: 89 articles (-9 per cent on previous week)
• Theresa May: 81 articles (+160 per cent on previous week)
• Iain Duncan Smith: 61 articles (-16 per cent on previous week)
• Philip Hammond: 50 articles (+43 per cent on previous week)

Celebrity vs serious

• Wayne Rooney holidaying in Dubai, having agreed to stay with Manchester United, 86 articles vs. WikiLeaks, having published almost 400,000 documents about US military actions in Iraq, 87 articles
• Cheryl Cole, X Factor judge, 109 articles, vs. an earthquake triggering a tsunami off the coast of Sumatra, killing over 400 people, 57 articles
• The ‘Emperor’ stag of Exmoor, rumoured shot dead by a foreign trophy hunter, 51 articles vs. the EU summit, with Chancellor Merkel striving for EU law reform to help with bail outs, also 51 articles

Who wrote a lot about…’Yemen’

Duncan Gardham – 7 articles (the Telegraph), Chris McGreal – 6 articles (the Guardian), Gordon Rayner – 5 articles (the Telegraph), Vikram Dodd – 5 articles (the Guardian), Dan Milmo- 4 articles (the Guardian)

Long form journalism

• 5,136 words: ‘Letters from lifers’, Simon Hattenstone, the Guardian, 30th October 2010
• 4,162 words: ‘Mark Twain: not an American but the American’, Sarah Churchwell, the Guardian, 30th October 2010
• 3,988 words: ‘The lampshade that drives its owners mad: Strange truth behind 20th century’s most disturbing object’, Robert Chalmers, the Independent, 31st October 2010

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Washington Post buys #election hashtag for midterms

The Washington Post sponsored the Twitter hashtag #election as part of its coverage of the US midterm elections this week.

Explains Poynter:

The Post’s sponsorship of the term #Election means that it will appear at the top of the list of Trending Topics on Tuesday. When users click on that topic, one of the Post’s tweets will appear above other tweets with the #Election hashtag – giving the Post prime real estate to promote its coverage and updates.

There were rumours flying around as to how much the Post had spent on the ‘promoted tweet’ service from Twitter, but a spokeswoman for the title said it would not comment on the cost.

Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of media partnerships, told Poynter that this was the first time a news organisation had used Twitter in this way.

Using new Twitter, the Post also hosted a live video stream, which it called an Election Day Twittercast, on the @washingtonpost handle.

“The Post will solicit questions from Twitter users as it simultaneously airs on the platform. The Post is among the first news organisations to be able to embed live and taped video on the new Twitter platform,” a release from the Post says.

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Harlow journalism students to hold 40-year anniversary reunion

This shipshape crew are on the look-out for long-lost comrades from a year-long expedition to Harlow nearly 40 years ago.
The class of 1971/72 on the NCTJ pre-entry journalism course are marking the 40th anniversary with a reunion in the town next autumn.

This picture of Christine, Geraldine, Celia, Pippa and Gill was taken by the Daily Express at the London Boat Show on a course assignment, but never used.

Former Harlow College student Andy McLardy, who is helping classmate Sky News’ Simon Bucks organise the event, told Journalism.co.uk:

I had not seen Simon for many years when, with impeccable timing, he turned up as I was walking out of the front door to go to work. Fortunately we were able to meet up again the next day and discussed holding this reunion. Neither of us had changed a bit! We have both stayed in touch with a few old colleagues and are now hoping to trace others who would be interested in meeting up on a Saturday lunchtime at one of our old drinking haunts.

To get in touch for the reunion contact harlow7172 [at] gmail.com.

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Extinction timeline: UK newspapers given nine years to live

Newspapers in the UK will be “extinct” in their current form by 2019, according to predictions by futurist Ross Dawson.

Earlier this week, Dawson has created a ‘Newspaper extinction timeline’, which suggests that while newspapers worldwide will exist in their current form beyond 2040, the US will be the first country to lose the printed paper in 2017.

Factors driving the pace of newspaper extinction on a global scale, according to Dawson, include: changes in newsprint and production costs; increased cost performance of tablets and e-reader; and the development of high performance digital paper.

On a national level he has taken economic, demographic, political and technological factors into consideration. More explanation is given on Dawson’s blog.

Dawson’s predictions have provoked some strong reaction on his own blog and elsewhere. But there’s a thoughtful response from INMA’s director and CEO Earl Wilkinson:

What I like about Dawson’s nudge is that it reminds us that the clock is ticking. We can’t work fast enough at the corporate level or the industry level to develop digital platforms that connect with readers and advertisers. We can’t work fast enough to build multimedia companies where print, online, mobile, iPad and others each play to their strengths and interact. Just as we were warned in the 1990s that classified advertising could disappear and we need to prepare for that, we need to be preparing today for an all-digital future – whether that comes in 2025, 2050, 2100, or some year beyond the reach of our great-grandchildren.

Here’s an interesting exercise for your management team: pick the date Dawson says your country’s newspapers will be “insignificant” and work backward. What would you need to do between today and that date to transform your business model and generate enough revenue to preserve today’s level of journalism at a sufficiently profitable level? We may all make similar choices, but my guess is the sense of urgency is more intense in the United States than India.

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How many US newspaper blogs are edited?

US media ethics project StinkyJournalism has done some digging into the issue of blogs on newspaper websites and whether these posts fall under the same editing process as other items on the site.

During the recent financial downturn, some US newspapers, including the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, have stopped publishing print editions altogether, opting for online-only editions. All major US newspapers have a representative internet presence and publish much more content online than they could fit into their print editions. Along with this change, social media as an integrated tool plays a role in the news landscape now more than ever. However, these changes also raise questions about ethics, legal issues and journalistic standards.

Therefore, StinkyJournalism thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about how newspapers manage blogs published on their websites. We looked at 10 major US newspapers and their 591 published blogs. We categorized the blogs based on their content and took notice of the blogs’ authors. Some of the results were unexpected, even surprising.

You can read the full results of the study at this link on the StinkyJournalism site, but some key findings were:

• 404 of 591 (68 per cent) blogs published by newspapers were edited, according to the newspapers themselves;
• Only eight of the 591 blogs – 1 per cent – dealt with traditional news;
• Seven of the 10 newspapers studied said they edit all blogs.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using QR codes

Lauren Rabaino offers five ideas for ways journalists can use QR (Quick Response) codes to tell stories in different ways, over on the 10,000 Words blog. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.

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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Thirty-nine new media vacancies, freelance leads and job opportunities for journalists and PRs on Journalism.co.uk

These are the latest editorial, PR and media job opportunities from this week on Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board

Freelance journalists
We are looking for freelance journalists to join our talent pool based in Central London and support our media work during Red Nose Day 2011, to be contacted as opportunities arise during the campaign.
Salary: DoE
Comic Relief
London, England

>>more
Environmental markets reporter
We are currently seeking an experienced reporter on a permanent basis to boost our coverage of Europe’s carbon and renewables certificates markets,
Salary: DoE
Montel
London, England
>>more

Editorial assistant
Digital Spy is looking for a dedicated and lively individual to join the team. Working on this fast-moving website, your job will be to assist the editorial team with a variety of duties.
Salary: £9.07 per hour
Digital Spy
London, England
>>more

Sub-editor
Upstream, the world’s leading international oil and gas newspaper, is looking for a sub-editor for its busy production desk in Oslo, Norway.
Salary: DoE
Upstream
Oslo, Norway
>>more

Production editor
We are looking for a highly experienced and competent production editor – with a proven record in managing workflow within tight timeframes and to rigid deadlines – to work across an expanding portfolio of accounts (UK and International).
Salary: DoE
Global Listings
London, England
>>more

Sales manager
ITP Business Publishing (part of the ITP Publishing Group based in Dubai) is looking to recruit a sales manager responsible for selling advertising into its business magazines.
Salary: DoE
ITP Publishing Group
Dubai Media City, Dubai
>>more

Reviews editor
TrustedReviews is looking for an experienced journalist to review products for the UK’s finest source of consumer electronics reviews.
Salary: DoE
IPC Media
Berkshire, England
>>more

Editor
An exciting opportunity for an editor has arisen to join Athene’s expanding editorial team on a new magazine, Insolvency Today.
Salary: DoE
Insovency Today
London, England
>>more

Online editor
UpstreamOnline is seeking an editor to lead its worldwide team of reporters reporting on the energy industry.
Salary: DoE
Upstream
London, England
>>more

Managing editor
Capital’s ambition is to become the number one brand for hit music in the UK. We are looking for a successful, proven Interactive/Website Editor to help us create the most compelling music product around and excite a whole new audience.
Salary: DoE
Global Radio Services Limited
London, United Kingdom
>>more

Production editor – Mini Magazine
Are you a production assistant looking to develop your career, or a talented sub-editor looking for a new challenge?
Salary: Competitive
Future Publishing Ltd
Bath, England
>>more

Energy market reporter
Argus Media is seeking bright and experienced journalists to join its growing editorial team. As a market reporter, you will cover fast-moving energy markets to identify prices and write stories and market commentaries for daily market reports.
Salary: DoE
Argus Media
London, England
>>more

EU editor
Argus Media is looking for an experienced business reporter to monitor and write about European energy affairs, with an emphasis on regulation.
Salary: £50K-£65K DoE
Argus Media
London, England
>>more

Staff writer
3D World covers everything from special effects to game design, from anime to architecture and we are now looking for a staff writer to join the team
Salary: DoE
Future Publishing Ltd
Bath, England
>>more

Technical editor
Do you have solid knowledge of CG and VFX techniques? Can you use multiple 3D packages? 3D World is looking for a technical editor to take on a pivotal role in the team.
Salary: DoE
Future Publishing Ltd
Bath, England
>>more

Business editors
You could be starting out in journalism, or someone with a few years experience looking to make the next move in your career. You must be able to produce clear and concise copy, have an eye for detail and be full of ideas and enthusiasm.
Salary: DoE
ITP Publishing Group
Dubai, Dubai
>>more

Freelance financial reporters – Turkey & Greece
Freelance reporters wanted – Turkey & Greece
Salary: DoE
SNL Financial
Home based in Turkey and Greece, Greece
>>more

Senior photo editor
We are now searching for an experienced in-house senior photo editor. The position will report into the vice president of production, Europe
Salary: DoE
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd
London, England
>>more

Associate producer
Based in London, the associate producer, UK, will research travel deals, manage client campaigns, work with Sales Managers and write travel deal contents.
Salary: DoE
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd
London or Manchester, England
>>more

Assistant producer
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd is the European subsidiary of Travelzoo Inc. (NASDAQ: TZOO), a global Internet media company. We are now searching for an Assistant Producer to join our UK production team.
Salary: DoE
Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd
London or Manchester, England
>>more

Freelance financial reporters – Eastern Europe
Freelance reporters wanted – Eastern European countries
Salary: DoE
SNL Financial
Home based, Poland / Russia
>>more

Editor – EMEA Commodity Markets
Bloomberg News is seeking an experienced editor for its Commodity Markets team in London.
Salary: Competitive + Benefits
Bloomberg
City of London, London, England
>>more

Journalist
Excel Publishing is looking for a talented and ambitious journalist to join its respected business team.
Salary: DoE
Excel Publishing Company
Manchester, England
>>more

Advertising sales executive
Keen, enthusiastic, fresh, driven media sales executive required for media company publishing music and marine titles, based at our Devon office.
Salary: DoE
Oyster House Media Ltd
Nr Exeter, England
>>more

Features writer (Arabic section)
A native-standard Arabic speaker with good command of English is required for this customer publishing position with the national airline of the UAE.
Salary: DoE
ITP Publishing Group
Dubai Media City, Dubai
>>more

Sub-editor
Do you sub-edit tube posters while waiting for your train? Are you passionate about punctuation and a stickler for spelling? Future Plus produces a variety of titles for clients, including Oxford Today, ODEON magazine and Sky Movies magazine.
Salary: Competitive + Benefits
Future Publishing Ltd
London, England
>>more

Community manager
Full time Yelp employee growing the community of active yelpers in Bristol. Working out of your home, you will lead success in your city with support from Yelp HQ in San Francisco.
Salary: Competitive
Yelp
Bristol, England
>>more

Sub-editor
Sub-editing on the production desk at Investment Adviser – a weekly trade magazine for retail financial services industry and fund management – part of FT Business.
Salary: DoE
Investment Adviser
London, England
>>more

Assistant editor
The company is looking for an ambitious and experienced journalist to take over responsibility for commissioning editorial for its range of print titles – along with all of its online media.
Salary: DoE
Cognitive Publishing
Manchester, England
>>more

Managing editor
An exciting role has become available at one of Manchester’s leading publishing houses for a managing editor
Salary: DoE
Cognitive Publishing
Manchester, England
>>more

Sub-editor
Law Business Research publishes legal books and journals. We are looking for a sub-editor to imminently join our small production team for a period of 6-9 months.
Salary: £18K
Law Business Research
London, England
>>more

Online editor/deputy online editor
Nursingtimes.net, the most-visited nursing website in the UK, and HSJ are each seeking a talented online editor or deputy online editor (depending on experience) to join its team.
Salary: DoE
Emap Ltd
London, England
>>more

Web editor
Sport360 is looking for a web editor to join our team covering international and regional sport events in the United Arab Emirates.
Salary: DoE
Sport360
Abu Dhabi, Middle East
>>more

Freelance writers
Freelance writers wanted for the official PTA Magazine.
Salary: DoE
PTA Magazine
Turners Hill, England
>>more

Energy reporter
LNG Unlimited, an electronic publication covering the liquefied natural gas sector, is seeking an energy journalist to cover this growing industry.
Salary: DoE
LNG Unlimited
London, England
>>more

Editor – The Countyman’s Weekly
Editor required for The Countryman’s Weekly, the UK’s leading newspaper for country sport. Applicants must have a thorough knowledge of and experience in this field.
Salary: DoE
Diamond Publishing
Plymouth, England
>>more

Reporter – Gas and power
We are currently seeking an experienced markets reporter on a permanent basis to boost our coverage of European gas and power markets.
Salary: DoE
Montel
London, England
>>more

Editorial positions
Key full-time editorial positions available at specialist music publishers, Oyster House Media.
Salary: DoE
Oyster House Media Ltd
Exeter, England
>>more

Producer
This is a rare opportunity for an experienced TV and/or radio producer to work in a creative and specialist communications role delivering high impact PR campaigns for a range of clients.
Salary: DoE
TNR Communications Limited
London, England
>>more

To sign up for free as a jobseeker, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/113/

To sign up as an advertiser, please go to http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/

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Follow tonight’s Paul Foot Award ceremony

Journalism.co.uk will be at the Paul Foot Award 2010 tonight, and will endeavour to cover the result on @journalism_live and @journalismnews.

This year’s shortlist for the investigative journalism award is:

• Jonathan Calvert and Clare Newell (Sunday Times) – on MPs and peers seeking cash for influence
• David Cohen (Evening Standard) – on the plight of the poor in London
• Nick Davies (Guardian) – on phone-hacking at the News of the World
• Linda Geddes (New Scientist) – on evidence that DNA tests are not always accurately interpreted
• Eamonn McCann (Irish Times, Belfast Newsletter, Guardian) – on the cover-up of the British army’s actions on Bloody Sunday
• Clare Sambrook (numerous publications) – on the detention of asylum seekers’ children

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ONA Conference 2010: What’s next in online journalism

This article was originally published by the European Journalism Centre. It is reposted here with permission.

The 2010 conference of the Online News Association (ONA) pushed further the debate on how technology is shaping the future of journalism in the evolving web media landscape. The event was held in Washington DC, the US capital, between the 28-30 October, 2010.

Founded in 1999, ONA now has more than 1,600 professional members, both American and international, who are active in the business of gathering, producing and disseminating news through the Internet.

Jane McDonnell – Executive Director Online News Association from European Journalism Centre on Vimeo.

Since its first edition in 2004, the association’s annual conference has been the premier global arena bringing together highly engaged digital journalists, multimedia producers, content editors, technologists, programmers, designers and newsroom decision-makers from major media markets, independent websites and leading academic institutions.

Also this year hundreds of participants converged from all around the world to meet and learn about the latest software and hardware tools for content management, search and distribution platforms, to discuss advancements and challenges in the industry and to network face-to-face in order to share best practices.

After the official inauguration on 28 October, the following two days featured an intensive marathon of thematic sessions where prestigious speakers reviewed the current state of art in all aspects of online journalism.

APIs and social networks: The revolution of news distribution

Day 1 took off with the latest fashion of technology-driven collaborative journalism: ‘Contents-Sharing through APIs’. This was the title of the panel with Delyn Simons, director of platform strategies at Mashery.com, leading provider of customised platforms through which online media can enable third parties to re-use and present their contents in all kinds of new ways, thus expanding visibility and users.

Delyn outlined case-studies of news organisations using Mashery services, such as the New York Times, USA Today and, in particular, the Guardian which has just launched its Open Platform Webfeed. By logging in with a personal API key anybody can access and organise data from the British news daily, and possibly remix them with her/his own data, in order to create original online products for either a personal web platform or the Guardian’s website.

The parallel session ‘Rethinking Online Commenting’, moderated by Alicia Shepard, ombudsman at National Public Radio site NPR.org, discussed newsrooms’ policies for users’ engagement. The same topic was covered in a more technical detail at the panel ‘Social Media Storytelling’ where Zach Seward, social media editor at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), unveiled the secrets for a successful use of Twitter and Facebook when reporting a story.

“One of the first steps we take is trying to identify what the potential community or audience is. Usually that is as simple as me asking a reporter about groups and existing communities around his or her subject area”, Zachs says, “Then it’s figuring out how to get in front of and be a part of that community. That’s doesn’t mean you have to have Facebook, Twitter or a Digg account for every project or reporter”.

Zachs made the concrete case of the Facebook page created by the WSJ to document a Haitian-American’s mission to rescue his family in Port-au-Prince soon after the earthquake. “Our foreign editor had an idea to tell the story in real time. We thought of the best way to make that happen, and a Facebook page with its status updates seemed to be particularly useful”.

How to preserve news quality in the online environment

Besides enhancing contents distribution, technology can also help improving contents production. One of the most powerful examples is ContentCloud.org, a new open-source semantic-web platform which makes primary source materials easier to scour, annotate and share.

At the panel named after his own company, Jeremy Ashkenas, lead developer at DocumentCloud, showcased a number of investigations conducted by news outlets across the US through using DocumentCloud as a workspace where reporters upload documents, share them with their team and do structured searches and analyses based on extracted entities: The people, places, and organizations mentioned in the text of the documents.

In-depth journalism was also the theme of the panel ‘The New Investigative Journalism Ecosystem’ where Charles Lewis and Kevin Davies, respectively founder and CEO of the new InvestigativeNewsNetwork (INN) explained how the number of global non-profit reporting organizations (many of them INN members) has exploded, from three in 1990 to more than 30 today, and how they use web tools and platforms to collaborate and make public interest journalism available to an increasing number of online users.

But how accurate reporting can survive at a time where journalists can use more and more online sources which are not always reliable? An attempt to answer this challenging question was made by Solana Larsen, managing editor at GlobalVoices, at the panel ‘Tools for Crisis Reporting’.

According to Solana, journalists often belong to two opposite and extreme categories: On the one hand, you have those who rely too heavily on social networks without doing any background checks or speaking with real people; on the other hand, you have those who rely on official sources only and don’t look for unreported local voices scattered across the web.

GlobalVoices platform intends to fill this gap through helping journalists use alternative sources of information in an appropriate way. How? “Unless you talk to somebody who knows well enough the blogosphere of a given country you cannot understand if what is published on a specific blog is representative of a general trend or not”, Solana says, “GlobalVoices aggregates comments on each issue from all local blogs in order to provide a more accurate and diversified picture”.

More HiTech, more news

Day 2 was marked by the panel ‘Ten Tech Trends in ’10′ where Amy Webb, CEO at her own consultancy company Webbmedia Group, highlighted the latest digital tools and their application to online journalism.

Let’s start with what is called Geofencing. “Network mobile applications can now literally locate people in a defined space”, Amy says, “That implies a radical change for hyperlocal journalism. Today people go to a website, type a zip code and get local news. Tomorrow, with Geofence, people can run a mobile app which allows their phone to be identified in a given space and receive automatically news updates related to that specific location. Users will no longer follow the news. The news will follow them anywhere they go”.

Locating people is also possible through Sensor Technology. “Just put sensors in cloths and coffee cups to keep track of everything people are doing”, Amy says, “There are a lot of opportunities for reporting, but also a lot of privacy concerns. Data can be uploaded on the web where reporters can look for them and use them to write their stories”.

Once you have got the information you were looking for, the next step is delivering it to your users according to their specific needs. “Flipboard.com is a dynamic content generation platform which allows users to select twitter feeds, Facebook accounts, and other web sources on their favourite topics and creates automatically paginated online magazines displaying updates on such topics”, Amy says.

The last sessions focused on news apps, including those which help make public data available in a more users-friendly way, tools for data visualization and techniques for video-shooting, which completed the hyper-tech-gallery which already included web design and search engines during Day 1.

Stefano Valentino is an Italian journalist based in Brussels. Since 2008 he has been operating his own EU online customised information service EuroReporter.eu. In 2008 he founded the no profit association Reporters for an Interactive, Cooperative and Specialzied Information (Ricsi).

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