Spot the difference: AFP withdraws ‘digitally altered’ missile shot

Agence France-Presse (AFP) has retracted a photo of Iranian missile tests published this morning, stating the image had been ‘apparently digitally altered’ by Iran’s state media, the New York Times’ Lede section reports.

It was too late for the print editions of the LA Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune and others, who ran the pic on the front page, and for the BBC, New York Times and Yahoo News websites.

Below - spot the difference between 1) the AFP’s image…

…and 2) an image later obtained by the Associated Press:

According to the Lede’s report, the agency said the fourth missile may have been added to mask a grounded missile that failed to launch during the test.

links for 2008-06-27

• Yahoo to Shareholders: Google Is Better for Us Than Microsoft - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
  In a new letter to its shareholders on Wednesday, Yahoo once again explained why a search advertising deal between Yahoo and Google is far superior to an alternate proposal that Microsoft had made to buy Yahoo’s search business.
  (tags: yahoo goole microsoft)
• How India aids ailing US newspapers | Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
  Further to my posting about a Californian newspaper testing the subbing facilities provided in India, here’s a much more significant example of US newspapers outsourcing to the sub-continent.
  (tags: greenslade india usa)
• Dutch editors-in-chief fire off angry letter to Mecom chairman David Montgomery | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Seven editors-in-chief from Wegener, Netherlands’ largest publisher of regional papers, have written a furious letter to Mecom chairman David Montgomery expressing their “grave concern” about the future of their titles a year after they were bought by his
  (tags: mecom holland DavidMontgomery)

AP facing boycott, to set blogger guidelines

An online petition has been set-up urging bloggers to boycott the Associated Press (AP), after the agency filed takedown notices against Drudge Retort for use of its content on the site.

The campaign run by UnAssociatedPress has gained 75 signatures since it was set-up on Saturday and encourages bloggers to make use of other agency’s material.

Since issuing the takedown notices to the Drudge Retort, AP vice president Jim Kennedy has said the agency’s tactics have been heavy-handed and a more thoughtful approach would be considered going forward.

According to the New York Times, the agency is considering a set of guidelines for bloggers on how to use their content.

In a statement he stressed the importance of bloggers in ‘the news conversation of the day’, but said the agency is concerned by wholesale reproduction of its content, which goes beyond reference.

Three spheres of relevance for news online

Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog - like the Times’ sub-site - draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

Shanghai Daily available on Amazon Kindle

China’s English language newspaper the Shanghai Daily has made its e-paper edition compatible with the Amazon Kindle.

According to the Daily, the paper is the first in Asia to launch an e-paper for the device - launched in November last year -  which downloads editions wirelessly and automatically.
The title joins other papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, which have developed editions for the Kindle.

Is Gawker losing it?

Gawker has been enduring a more tumultuous time than usual over the last couple of months, topped by reports this week that its Gizmodo blogger, Richard Blakeley, was banned from CES for attempting a prank to scupper sections of the event.

New York Times asked if the site had ‘Jumped the Snark‘ and reported that traffic for November was down. In the wake of this dip, boss Nick Denton placed himself as managing editor replacing Choire Sicha  as other leading editors left:

“There are certainly signs that Gawker, delivering a daily dose of gossip and commentary about the news business and selected celebrities since 2002, is in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil, which has led to a slide in its once-hypnotic influence on the news media world.”

More here.

Revamped Reuters business section on IHT.com goes live

Last month we reported that Reuters and the International Herald Tribune were partnering to revamp the IHT’s financial news offering online and launch a daily co-branded world business report in the newspaper.

The new section of the IHT.com site - renamed Business with Reuters - has gone live today and features news analysis and comment from IHT, Reuters and New York Times business writers and columnists.

New York Times T Magazine online offering

Just a quick follow up to the story we carried last week about the launch online of New York Times style rag - T magazine.

The online offering is very swish and flash-dominated - plenty of video, very little text - with content divided along peculiarly linear lines; the words, the images, the goods, the remix (whatever this is?), the videos.

Gawker and Media Bistro have already reviewed the site, focusing mainly on the dominance of Natalie Portman over the launch pages. It’s a bit of a statement really, sort of ‘this is the kind of intelligent celeb we’ll favour’

Well, here she is in all her intelligent celeb glory:

New York Times integrated newsroom vid

Beet TV has a nice succinct video piece about the redeveloped and integrated New York Times newsroom - but it did produce it and two other vids for the NYT Company, so you’d expect so.

Regardless, Jim Roberts, editor of Digital News and Jon Landman, deputy managing editor give some some nice little insights into joined-up digital publishing.

New blogs for New York Times and Times Online

NYTimes.com has unveiled its new television blog, TV decoder, which will deliver news of on-screen and behind-the-scenes developments. It also promises analysis of ratings figures and the inner workings of the industry.

Brian Stelter, who joined NYT as media reporter in June, will be its chief contributor following his success with his own blog TVNewser.com, which he founded in 2004 as an 18-year-old student.

Following suit, Times Online’s style blog, Style PS, launched this week, and already boasts plenty of news, gossip and glamorous snapshots from the world of fashion courtesy of The Sunday Times’ Style Magazine team.