A journalist from our rival newspaper the South London Press has admitted assaulting a senior Lambeth councillor at a glittering charity fundraiser.
Chief reporter Greg Truscott pushed Councillor Mark Bennett at the Mayor of Lambeth’s annual fundraising dinner, held on a cruise boat on the Thames on Wednesday, March 3.
He was cautioned by police after admitting an offence of common assault on the cabinet member for community safety, when interviewed at Brixton police station last Wednesday.
Lambeth Council has now banned him from all its buildings and events – including the town hall and the borough’s leisure centres.
I’m sure we ordinarily consider ourselves above such things, but, as it is Friday afternoon on the Journalism.co.uk blog, here is a pretty regrettable subbing error from the Telegraph to brighten up your (rainy, if in the south of England) day.
I managed to grab a few minutes with both the Knight Center’s Dan Gillmor and BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit 2010 to talk about the future of community generated journalism.
Rory Cellan-Jones thinks that “the place where citizen journalism is actually triumphing is Wikipedia”.
“It is becoming an instant news agency as well as a kind of journal of record and deep explanation of events, in a way the newspapers might find difficult to compete with.” But speaking as a journalist, he finds unpaid contribution based models, such as the Huffington Post’s, a “difficult” concept.
This and more (on Spotify and predictions for 2011) in this AudioBoo:
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, and advisor to crowd-sourced site Spot.us, says there are questions to raise about unpaid models and sustainability. “People who run these sites should of course be fully aware there will be an ebb and flow of active users, that some people will start and then give up, and then some will be highly committed.” Citing fellow panellist iVillage network general manager Rebecca Miskin’s experience, he described how some unpaid community moderators eventually become paid employees.
Heard of the Young Turks? No? Well, according to its founder you will soon, because it’s going to demolish the mainstream media in America. In fact, it could win an online poll against Jesus, he said.
The ‘first live, daily webcast on the internet,’ the alternative show has had over 207 million views on YouTube. It charges $10 a month for its full content option; and takes $2.5 for every 1,000 views on YouTube.
During one of the liveliest parts of the day at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit, at the final keynote roundtable, Cenk Uygur said:
“Old media is a lot of trouble. It’s a question of what’s going to survive and what’s not going to survive. Are newspapers in America going to survive? Hell no, no way.”
Newspapers might have only ten per cent of the advertising revenue next year (down from around 50 per cent in the 1950s, Uygur said) but that was too much in his opinion: “It shouldn’t be anywhere near 10 per cent. As they say here in Britain that’s mental.”
Shaking off a heckler, Uygur said that his online talkshow’s content could easily compete: “NBC’s content is nowhere near as good as mine”.
But the best quote: “Our viewers are awesome; we call them the TYT army: we can never lose an online poll. We can do an online poll against Jesus and we will win.”
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.
Richard Titus was shocked to discover that one of Associated Northcliffe Digital’s portfolio businesses was just throwing away its transaction data, when he first started as CEO.
They told him they wiped it each week: ‘well, hard drives are expensive’.
“It’s very hard to copy; it’s very hard to steal; it’s very hard to pirate and it has incredible large scarcity.
“Data with its scarcity is one of the most important assets most businesses have today. Most businesses give it away; don’t collect it; they wipe it off their hard drives.”
AND, the digital consumer division of DMGT, looks after Associated and Northcliffe digital media sites, as well as online classified sites such as Jobsite.co.uk, FindaProperty.com & Primelocation.com. A significant part of its business is in Eastern Europe, Titus said, where its classified sites are ‘market leaders’.
Its new hyperlocal network Local People was focussed around bringing community-oriented information to groups of 20-30,000 people.
Titus, who previously worked for the BBC, also emphasised the potential to make advertising money out of small and medium enterprises, he said.
Titus said that the “the thing that most matters in digital today is your relationship with the customer”.
Journalism.co.uk is attending today’s Digital Storytelling conference – a free one-day event looking a new tools and techniques for multimedia and online journalism. If you’re interested in following the day, use the liveblog below or follow the hashtag #ds10 on Twitter. You can also watch live coverage using the video player below.
We’ll try to share the best bits of the day on the site.
Last week Journalism.co.uk attended a roundtable discussion about the future of video – for publishers, journalists and advertisers. Those gathered around the table, including representatives from the BBC, the Financial Times, the Economist and Thomson Reuters, were adamant that online video news and analysis is an important part of the multimedia mix and can be a source of revenue for “publisher broadcasters”.
Contrast this view with that of several regional website editors I spoke with at a recent meeting of the Digital Editors Network in Preston: investment in kit and training done, many admitted they’d axed news channel-style video on their websites, because of a lack of demand and now resources to keep it up. Some admitted their approach to video had been wrong – e.g. trying to replicate TV bulletins on a newspaper website – while others said dwindling resources had removed video from their web priorities’ list.
But there is clearly demand from advertisers and viewers for web video as a format – look no further than YouTube and the week’s latest viral videos.
And those providing the technology and options for advertisers to get involved are part of a burgeoning market if an announcement today from Videoplaza, which provides technology for serving up ads in and around online video, is anything to go by: the Scandinavian company has secured a $5 million investment round.
The investment will mean that Videoplaza, which already works with Incisive Media and myvideorights.com in the UK and La Vanguardia in Spain, can expand into new markets – both geographically and technologically, founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli told Journalism.co.uk yesterday.
This week the company signed its first Russian client and moves into Germany and further expansion in the UK and southern Europe are also on the shopping list, he says.
When it comes to making money from video on new platforms, publishers need to be prepared and have the options in place to take advantage of these new screens and viewers when they reach critical mass, he explains, adding that Videoplaza has been working with publishers to produce business plans for their video strategies to show to management where the money lies.
“I think there’s only a few carefully selected publishers who are seeing return on video. There’s a lot do and only part of that do we help them with and that’s the technology. But technology is an enabler in the end,” he says.
“We have experience from a lot of different clients in a lot of different markets so we can help our publishers come up with a lot of interesting packaging strategies, for example, working with a local newspaper, we’re not working with Proctor & Gamble and national ads, we have to do something more creative that will get the local car dealership on board.”
Key to Videoplaza’s strategy is making clients look at where video fits in with their wider business strategy. As such, the firm helped one radio station customer to develop an in-house video production service for advertisers, using their existing resources; elsewhere, with a TV client, a system has been developed where TV programme sponsors must sponsor related content online – a good example of helping advertisers bridge the gap between old and new media, says Tavakoli adds.
Sometimes with video advertising ideas you have to go backwards and educate advertisers and clients rather than push them into ‘the next big thing’ – creativity can then be sneaked in, he adds. Video advertising can be disruptive by its very nature, he says, and creating a good user experience while making as much money for the publishers as possible is a difficult balance to strike. One solution the company has introduced to a client is the option for viewers to turn off a pre-roll ad on videos after seven seconds – giving the user control, but the publisher’s advertiser a guaranteed timeslot.
But perhaps more significantly the company wants to use fresh investment to develop its products for ‘new tv’ – the myriad of screens and platforms through which people are now viewing online video and in particular the idea of connected TV. While there may only be a few publishers currently seeing returns on their investment in video, with ‘new TV’ comes new opportunities, says Tavakoli. The firm has already experimented with some forms of interactive advertising on La Vanguardia’s mobile videos and Sweden’s TV4 iPhone app.
We see a big change in consumption of video from ‘old TV’ to ‘new TV’, where the old TV is a big black box that receives a broadcasted signal that everyone else receives as well; where new TV is something a bit more unique and screen independent and more plentiful in terms of types of content. The ‘new TV’ needs an advertising platform built for it and we’re trying to build that platform.
From the publisher’s perspective – here’s Stephen Pinches from the FT on opportunities for publishers and IPTV:
