Journalism.co.uk will be at the Press Awards from 7pm onwards and will endeavour to report the winners of each category live via Twitter from @journalism_live.
You can also follow a livestream of the event on the Press Awards website and keep up to date on Twitter by following the hashtag #pressawards.
More details on the shortlisted entries can be found at this link.
Tags: Awards, Events, newspaper of the year, Press Awards
A senior member of editorial staff at the Wolverhampton-based Express and Star, which began charging for digital content yesterday along with the Shropshire Star, has said the launch “went relatively well and interest has been high”, and added that a subscription model should not be seen as a paywall.
“In a way, we don’t see this as a paywall because if you’re an existing six-nights-a-week newspaper reader, then you get access to the premium website, smartphone app and iPad app for free,” deputy editor Keith Harrison told Journalism.co.uk.
In a statement about the newspaper’s new charging model, Harrison said: “Effectively, only people who want the digital-only package will come across a conventional paywall, giving them access to far greater depth of content than has previously been available on our non-subscription expressandstar.com site, which will remain alongside ’24′.
“Obviously, the new site will evolve as time goes by and, as always, we will listen to feedback from our readers.
“Overall we’re excited to be trying something innovative, both strategically and technologically, and we’re confident it will be a success.”
Tags: express and star, paywall, shropshire star, wolverhampton express and star
ReadWriteWeb reports Twitter has plans to create brand pages, much like Facebook’s, which will provide more space for brands – such as news organisations – to communicate, outside of the structure of 140 character messages and short profiles.
“Branded pages on Twitter could be interesting, although Twitter is more flow-based than page based,” says Rick Mans, Social Media Lead at Capgemini, a technology consulting service based in Paris, France with 110,000 employees across 40 countries.
Would users recoil at increased brand messaging on Twitter? Might it lead to the MySpace-ification of Twitter profile pages? Making customized profile pages a paid product for verified business owners could help prevent that from happening. It may be difficult to imagine how users would react – but it’s very clear that business users would love to take a shot at it.
ReadWriteWeb’s full article is at this link.
Tags: Facebook, media brands, ReadWriteWeb, Twitter
Twitter has made changes to its ‘who to follow’ function, the company has announced on its blog. The function could be used by journalists looking for people or organisations to follow in relation to a subject or geographical area.
This new approach helps you find the Twitter users that will best help you follow your interests. For example, if you’re interested in hip hop, chances are that you’d like to follow hip hop artists. Searching for “hip hop” now surfaces accounts like @common and @questlove. (Previously, we typically showed accounts that have “hip hop” in the name.)
The blog entry is at this link.
Tags: Twitter
The National Union of Journalists is urging the BBC to safeguard material, including footage, gathered during the demonstration against spending cut on 26 March.
According to the NUJ, a number of BBC journalists have received emails regarding police attempts to secure un-broadcast journalistic material from the demonstration. “At this stage it appears to be a police ‘fishing trip’ seeking all material,” said NUJ secretary general Jeremy Dear in a statement.
The NUJ has written to the BBC to ask for “assurance the BBC will ask that the police follow proper procedures and seek to secure a court order if they wish to obtain any journalistic material in the possession of the BBC or its employees”.
Writing shortly after protests against rising tuition fees, photographer and blogger Mark Vallée had this advice on protecting journalistic material.
Tags: BBC, nuj
The Guardian is reporting that 8,000 broadcast journalists will descend on London for this month’s royal wedding, which is expected to attract 2 billion viewers worldwide.
Despite the severe strain placed on newsgathering budgets by the recent glut of major foreign news stories, UK and overseas broadcasters have committed considerable manpower and resources in one of the world’s most expensive cities to cover the Westminster Abbey wedding. “This will almost certainly be the biggest team of broadcast crew and reporters ever assembled for an outside broadcast in London,” says a senior BBC source.
The Guardian predicts around 140 OB trucks will be stationed in Green Park, the media hub, plus cameras will film from vantage points in commercial buildings which have been rented out for up to £120,000.
All broadcasters will be reliant on the pooled live feeds inside Westminster Abbey provided by the BBC, Sky News and ITN, which will share the costs and the rights income. But they will have their own reporting teams and cameramen outside the abbey and there is certain to be fierce competition to provide the best commentary, get the first live shots of particular incidents and find the most compelling human interest stories.
The Guardian’s full article is at this link
Tags: Broadcast, royal wedding, The Guardian
Two councils have axed publications, less than a week after a new code was approved by parliament which limits councils to publishing a maximum of four newspapers a year.
Hammersmith and Fulham’s H&F News has announced it is publishing its last newspaper today, due to the new revised Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity and, as Jon Slattery had reports, Hull City Council has axed its monthly magazine Hull in print in a cost saving move and, in an on the council’s website, says the way forward is online.
Hammersmith and Fullham council reports “an agreement was approved with Trinity Mirror Southern to publish future council advertising” which will see “public notices and other display advertisements published in the Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle every week”. Simon Edgley, managing director of Trinity Mirror Southern, welcomed the development. “We are not only absolutely delighted to sign this agreement, but also that our titles and websites will play such a significant part in ensuring that residents of Hammersmith & Fulham remain appropriately informed,” Edgerly said in a statement on the council’s website.
H&F News was first published as a monthly paper in 2006, and went fortnightly in 2008.
Councils have no legal obligation to follow the new code, which comes in to effect shortly. Last week Tower Hamlets Borough Council’s newspaper East End Life said it is continuing to publish weekly while a review is carried out.
Tags: Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity, east end life, H&F News, Hull in print
Part-paywalls have gone up at the UK’s biggest-selling regional daily, the Wolverhampton-based Express and Star, and at sister title, the Shropshire Star. Breaking news will remain free but other content, such as football reports, are now behind the wall.
But will Wolverhampton and Shropshire pay?
At £2.19 more a month than the Times, is £12.18 too high a price for a monthly digital-only subscription?
Last week the Times, which went behind a paywall last summer, announced that it has 79,000 digital subscribers and the Financial Times, which has been behind a metered pay model for 10 years as of yesterday, also claims success with 210,000 subscribers.
But the Times and FT have their own reasons for tens of thousands of digital subscribers. The Times had a huge push to create high-value content as it went behind the wall and the Financial Times is perhaps best seen as a specialist publication with a wealthy readership prepared to pay for financial news.
Paywalls put up by UK regional newspapers have been less successful. Johnston Press trialled a paywall in 2009, testing it on some of the group’s smaller websites, the Southern Reporter in Scotland, the Northumberland Gazette and the Whitby Gazette, charging just 40 pence a week for access. The wall was dismantled after three months as it was deemed not viable.
There is a difference in the Express and Star’s approach and Johnston Press’ tactics though, in that the Wolverhampton and Shropshire titles are trying to push their print subscriptions, adding digital as an optional extra and are charging just 40 pence a week more for the print, online and smartphone deal than digital-only.
The exact cost may not be the deciding factor in whether readers decide to get their credit cards out. The Johnston Press paywall was very cheap – just £1.71 a month – but few paid. The New York Times, which went behind a metered-paywall last week, believes readers will pay up to $35 a month, which is the cost for a combined online, iPad and smartphone subscription (though readers were eased in with a £0.99 a month charge).
The Express and Star has taken the bold step of becoming the first major regional newspaper in the UK to go behind the wall. If it invests in high value content, makes payment easy, has an engaged audience already and can convince advertisers a quality rather than a quantity of online readers is more important, then the wall might work. If not, then the wall may come tumbling down.
Tags: paid content, pay walls, paywalls, shropshire star, wolverhampton express and star
The International Press Institute (IPI) claims a report from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has indicated at least 57 journalists are currently in prison in Turkey, which the IPI says is “apparently more than any other country”.
While Iran and China topped lists last December by reportedly jailing some 34 journalists each, Turkey, a candidate for membership in the European Union, has nearly doubled that number five months later, raising questions about the country’s commitment to freedom of the press and the legitimacy of its democratic image.
Last year Journalism.co.uk reported that restrictions on freedom of expression in Turkey had given the European Commission “cause for concern” according to a progress report released in November.
In the annual report, produced to assess progress in European Union membership candidate and potential candidate countries, the commission claimed a “high number” of violations of freedom of expression in Turkey are still being submitted to the European Court of Human Rights.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists the number of journalists in prison worldwide as of 1 December last year, had risen to its highest level since 1996. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, the CPJ found that 145 reporters, editors and photojournalists were in jail in 28 countries at the time of the report.
Tags: detention, European Commission, jailed journalists, press freedom, Turkey
As Jeremy Vine, in the foreword to a new book about journalism titled Face the Future, describes returning to the Coventry Evening Telegraph to find the editorial staff cut from 85 to less than 20, ‘facing the future’ feels more like ‘facing the music’.
I think we all felt sad, standing across the road in the chill wind and looking at the bedraggled giant we had abandoned two decades before. But a sense of the inevitable takes the edge off any sadness: it had to happen, didn’t it?
Yes, it did. Journalism is shifting inevitably away from the printed word toward the digital future, and regional newspapers were always unlikely to be ahead of the game. But despite the nostalgic, forlorn reflections of the opening few paragraphs, the editors of Face the Future: Tools for the modern age have assembled a collection of essays that look unequivocally forward. From one BBC veteran to another, Peter Barron sets a different tone in an early chapter, titled “Staring into the crystal ball, and seeing a bright future for journalism”.
Barron, who nailed his colours to the new media mast when he left the BBC for Google in 2008, doesn’t see anything very new about the disruption caused by digital media.
In this chapter I will argue that, rather than seeing the looming extinction of journalism, we are seeing its reinvention. It will no doubt be a painful reinvention, but you need only look back to the advent of radio, television and cable news to see that disruption caused by technological innovation is nothing new. So, what might this future for journalism look like?
Twitter, hyperlocal, SEO, coding, crowdsourcing, WikiLeaks, real-time data, personal branding, all terms that many industry folk are well accustomed to but all ideas and technologies still in their comparative infancy. They form the focus of some of the chapters in the book, which features contributions from the likes of Paul Bradshaw, Alan Rusbridger, Malcolm Coles, Oliver Snoddy, Josh Halliday, and former Journalism.co.uk senior reporter Judith Townend.
Along with our former editor Laura Oliver, Townend will be appearing alongside Raymond Snoddy and Kevin Marsh on a panel at the Frontline Club tonight to launch the book, which was edited by Coventry University senior lecturer in broadcasting John Mair and University of Lincoln journalism professor Richard Lance Keeble.
Mair and Keeble collaborated on another book of essays last year, Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines. See extracts from the book on Journalism.co.uk at this link.
Face the Future: Tools for the modern age is available now priced £17.95. ISBN: 978-1-84549-483-4.
Tags: Coventry University, face the future, Frontline Club, Jeremy Vine, John Mair, Peter Barron, Richard Lance Keeble
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