The winners of the 2011 Dart Awards, which recognise outstanding reporting that portrays traumatic events with accuracy, insight and sensitivity by US media outlets, have been announced.

The Boston Globe won for “A tormenting problem: An exploration of new-age bullying“, the Dallas Morning News for “Private battles“, NPR with the Center for Public Integrity for “Seeking justice in campus rapes“, and NPR with ProPublica for “Brain wars: How the military is failing its wounded“.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and WLRN reined honourable mentions.

Set up by Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1995, the award programme is open to teams with winning teams receiving a $5,000 cash prize.

• Arkansas Business: US TV journalists fired over YouTube news spoofs
• Press Photographer’s Year Award 2011 opens for entries
• Tracking Twitter – kind of like keywording
• AP: US military backs down on photography ban on soldier casualties
• Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter

Boston University has formed a partnership with the Boston Globe which will allow students to cover local news for Boston.com’s Your Town hyperlocal wesbites, according to a report on the Market Watch blog.

Students will carry out the work as part of their course at the university’s College of Communciation, with university professors working with Globe editors to coordinate the project.

David Dahl, the Globe’s regional editor said, “We’re delighted with this collaboration. It provides Your Town readers with even more local coverage and enriches the educational experience of BU’s students”.

The Your Town sites feature stories by their own correspondents, as well as links to area blogs, Globe stories, and user-generated content.

The project was launched in 2009 and now has 43 sites covering areas in and around Boston.

Journalism students at the university also write daily news coverage for newspapers in Massachusetts and New England through the department’s Washington and Statehouse programs.

• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta
• Journal Local: Birmingham journalism students launch hyperlocal news agency
• Emmy Award-winning UBC journalism students form new partnership with Globe and Mail
• Birmingham Mail looking at developing community-based sites
• Boston Globe joins New York Times in paywall plans

Not much of a surprise perhaps – the Boston Globe, also owned by the New York Times company, has announced plans for a new paywalled website in the second half of 2011.

The paid-for site BostonGlobe.com will feature news, features, photojournalism and full stories from the daily and Sunday editions of the paper; the current website Boston.com will remain as part of the subscription and registration model and will focus on sport, local news, arts and culture.

Full story on Media Decoder at this link…

• Christian Science Monitor: Boston Globe closure by New York Times postponed
• Financial Times: Clearance on BSkyB bid delayed by at least two weeks
• Media In Canada: Sun Media rolls out 32 newspaper e-editions
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’
• New York Times: Center for Public Integrity to launch investigative journalism site

A Boston newspaper is experimenting with mobile technologies by encouraging users to take part in a checkin-based scavenger hunt.

According to a report by Mashable.com, the Boston Globe is using SCVNGR, rather than Foursquare, to keep tabs on players, who will be asked to take photos, scan QR codes and check in at various locations across the city to complete five different challenges.

The Globe is reportedly hoping this use of mobile technologies to interact with users will appeal to old readers as well as drawing in new ones.

See the full post here…

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – newspaper lessons in using QR codes to drive traffic
• Sun’s mobile barcodes attract 11,000 users
• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta
• Boston University and Boston Globe partner on Your Town hyperlocal sites
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’

The Boston Globe has launched a daily news video update. The 90-second broadcast is available on the paper’s homepage, Boston.com, between 11:45 and 1:45 pm EST. As reported here earlier this week, the Globe’s sister paper the New York Times has also launched a midday video news update, TimesCast.

Globe Today is more of a traditional news broadcast than TimesCast, which takes a behind-the-scenes approach, and is significantly shorter, weighing in at less than a quarter of the length of the Times’ feature.

The other significant difference is that Globe Today also appears on YouTube, making it embeddable, meaning I can embed it for you right here:

• New York Times launches behind-the-scenes video feature
• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta
• NYTimes.com: Could Times sell Boston Globe?
• Boston University and Boston Globe partner on Your Town hyperlocal sites
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’

Thomson Reuters in the US has been referred to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by the Newspaper Guild of New York for planned cutbacks to the pay packages of journalists and other workers that are members of the union.

The reduced payments work out at roughly 10 per cent per worker, says the Guild, which has been in contract negotiations with the agency for more than a year, in a release.

In June 2009, Boston’s Newspaper Guild made a similar charge and challenged a pending 23 per cent pay cut proposed by The New York Times. The two parties reached an agreement in July with the pay cut reduced, but Guild members were left fearful for their jobs after the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for approximately 170 employees was also agreed.

But in this instance Reuters isn’t only facing charges by the Guild over changes to pay: the agency has also been brought to task by the Guild for its social media policy, which bans employees from updating personal Twitter accounts with posts which, in the words of the company, ‘would damage the reputation of Reuters News or Thomas Reuters’.

As the statement from the Guild points out:

A union activist was “reminded” of the policy after responding to a senior manager’s call to “join the (Twitter) conversation on making Reuters the best place to work” with a tweet that said: “One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”

• BusinessInsider.com: New York Times newsroom layoffs ‘looming’
• Largest four Spanish dailies cut 39% of staff between 2003 and 2009
• Malcolm Coles: Growth of newspaper Twitter accounts running out of steam
• Newsquest York journalists seal pay deal
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’

A good summary from a variety of sources by the Editors’ Weblog on the future of the Boston Globe.

“As the Boston Newspaper Guild and Boston Globe management take a break in negotiations until next week, speculation has been mounting on possible buyers for the paper and what its future might be. The union and owner the New York Times Co are trying to come to an agreement on how to make $10 million of savings following the union’s narrow rejection of a deal and the Times Co’s subsequent imposition of a 23 per cent pay cut for all staff. The company is also looking at selling the paper.”

Full post at this link…

• NYTimes.com: Could Times sell Boston Globe?
• Christian Science Monitor: Boston Globe closure by New York Times postponed
• Boston Globe launches midday video news update
• Boston Globe joins New York Times in paywall plans
• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta

Rupert Murdoch, in response to Berlusconi, claims he has little editorial influence at his newspapers; talks about the Boston Globe; and gives his view that all newspapers could be delivered digitally in ten years time: see video below.

“What we call newspapers today, I call ‘news organisations’. Journalistic enterprises, if you will. They’re the source of news.”

• Fox News report here
• Reuters’ selection of quotes here

• BBC News: Italian media group suing Berlusconi for defamation
• Video from Beet.tv: How Reuters used social media in Iran to source video
• Mashable: Reuters frees content with new API
• Reuters cameraman killed in Gaza
• Must-read: PEJ’s annual State of the News Media report goes live

Following our round-up of the Westminster students coverage of last week’s Journalism in Crisis conference, we’ll link to one final item:

Professor Todd Gitlin’s keynote speech, given via Skype, on the first day of the Westminster University / British Journalism Review Journalism in Crisis event (May 19):  ‘A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority, and Deference’.

Gitlin, who is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, talked about how four wolves have arrived at the door of journalism ‘simultaneously, while a fifth has already been lurking for some time’. These were the wolves no-one was expecting, because everyone’s been crying wolf for so long. Gitlin spoke mainly in regards to American journalism because ‘it is what I know best’.

He used quotes and statistics from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism ‘Changing Newsroom’ 2008 report, and also his own anecdotal evidence and academic references, to illustrate the predicament – which he feels is fair to call a number of ‘crises’ – that journalism faces.

Here are a few choice extracts:

• The four wolves at the door, and the fifth one lurking: “One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers.  The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention.  The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial – so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis – is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business.”

• Circulation of newspapers: “Overall, newspaper circulation has dropped 13.5 per cent for the dailies and 17.3 per cent for the Sunday editions since 2001; almost 5 per cent just in 2008.  In what some are calling the Great Recession, advertising revenue is down – 23 per cent over the last two years – even as paper costs are up.  Nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone.  Foreign bureaus have been shuttered – all those of the Boston Globe, for example, New England’s major paper.
• “I have been speaking about newspapers’ recent decline, but to limit the discussion to the last decade or so both overstates the precipitous danger and understates the magnitude of a secular crisis—which is probably a protracted crisis in the way in which people know—or believe they know—the world.  In the US, newspaper circulation has been declining, per capita, at a constant rate since 1960. The young are not reading the papers.  While they say they ‘look’ at the papers online, it is not clear how much looking they do.”
• “The newspaper was always a tool for simultaneity (you don’t so much read a paper as swim around in it, McLuhan was fond of saying) at least as much as a tool for cognitive sequence.  What if the sensibility that is now consolidating itself—with the Internet, mobile phones, GPS, Facebook and Twitter and so on – the media for the Daily Me, for point-to-point and many-to-many transmission—what if all this portends an irreversible sea-change in the very conditions of successful business?”

• The Clamor for Attention: “Attention has been migrating from slower access to faster; from concentration to multitasking; from the textual to the visual and the auditory, and toward multi-media combinations.  Multitasking alters cognitive patterns.  Attention attenuates.  Advertisers have for decades talked about the need to ‘break through the clutter,’ the clutter consisting, amusingly, of everyone else’s attempts to break through the clutter.  Now, media and not just messages clutter.”
• “Just under one-fifth of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 claim to look at a daily newspaper – which is not to say how much of it they read. The average American newspaper reader is 55 years old. Of course significant numbers of readers are accessing – which is not to say reading – newspapers online, but the amount of time they seem to spend there is bifurcated.  In roughly half of the top 30 newspaper sites, readership is steady or falling.  Still, ‘of the top 5 online newspapers -  ranked by unique users – [the] three [national papers] reported growth in the average time spent per person: NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, and the Wall Street Journal Online.’ One thing is clear:  Whatever the readership online, it is not profitable.”
• “The question that remains, the question that makes serious journalists tremble in the U. S., is:  Who is going to pay for serious reporting?  For the sorts of investigations that went on last year, for example, into the background of the surprise Republican nominee for Vice President, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.”

• Authority: “Journalism’s legitimacy crisis has two overlapping sources: ideological disaffection from right and left, and generalized distrust. Between them, they register something of a cultural sea change.  The authority of American journalism has, for a century or so, rested on its claim to objectivity and a popular belief that that claim is justified. These claims are weakening.”

• Deference: “We have seen in recent years two devastating failures to report the world – devastating not simply in their abject professional failures but in that they made for frictionless glides into catastrophe.  The first was in the run-up to the Iraq war (…) More recently, we have the run-up to the financial crisis (…) Given these grave failures of journalism even when it was operating at greater strength not so long ago, one might say that rampant distrust is a reasonable and even a good thing.”

• Resolutions: “The Project on Excellence’s conclusion is that ‘roughly half of the downturn in the last year was cyclical, that is, related to the economic downturn. But the cyclical problems are almost certain to worsen in 2009 and make managing the structural problems all the more difficult.’ Notice the reference to ‘managing the structural problems.’  They cannot be solved, they can only be managed.  The unavoidable likelihood, pending a bolt from the blue, is that the demand for journalism will continue to decline and that no business model can compensate for its declining marketability.  No meeting of newspaper people is complete these days without a call – some anguished, some confident – for a ‘new business model’ that would apply to the online ‘paper.’  The call has been issued over the course of years now.  It might be premature to say so, but one might suspect that it has not been found because there is none to be found.”
• “What I do know is that journalism is too important to be left to those business interests. Leaving it to the myopic, inept, greedy, unlucky, and floundering managers of the nation’s newspapers to rescue journalism on their own would be like leaving it to the investment wizards at the American International Group (AIG), Citibank, and Goldman Sachs, to create a workable, just global credit system on the strength of their good will, their hard-earned knowledge, and their fidelity to the public good.”

Full transcript at this link…

• Forbes.com: Circulation revenue is more stable than paywalls, says Scripps senior VP
• WAN Amsterdam: What have newspapers done to build new audiences?
• #soe09: Jim Chisholm – the five myths affecting UK newspapers
• Mashable: Online overtakes print as main news source
• Voluntary redundancies as Future Publishing focuses on digital

The New York Times has suspended a move to shut down the Boston Globe following an agreement with six of the titles seven unions.

The paper is reportedly set to lose NYTimes Co $85 million this year – but could it be saved and restructured to create a model for recession survival, asks Alexandra Marks from CSM.

Full story at this link…

• NYTimes.com: A vision for media survival
• Boston Globe joins New York Times in paywall plans
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’
• Daily Intel: New York Times to bring back pay wall?
• Nieman Journalism Lab: New York Times Co suspends grant foundation

‘State of Play’ is on the publicity circuit, a film – based on a BBC series – which follows events in a fictional newspaper, the Washington Globe.

“The film’s fictitious Washington Globe, like its real-life counterparts, is struggling for survival, and within its walls are plenty of internal battles. Old-school reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) resents the intrusion of young blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) into his investigation of a murder seemingly connected to a local congressman (Ben Affleck),” reports the Seattle Times.

Ben Affleck has shared his thoughts on the demise of the print industry with a group of journalists.

His lengthy comments can be found at Hitfix and over at Collider.com and About.com.

HitFix reports:

“”I think this is the last movie that will be set in a newspaper. I don’t know how this movie will be perceived, but I do believe that people will look back and say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the movie that came out right around the time the internet destroyed newspapers’,” Affleck appropriately tells a room of online journalists at the “State of Play” junket. “I don’t think the verdict is in on what that means or what’s going to happen or what the integrity is of one institution versus the other.”

Poynter’s Romenesko has also picked up on his comments about the Boston Globe: “”I was definitely shocked to hear about the Globe,” says Ben Affleck. “I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful newsgathering operation is going out of business.”"

• Marshall Fine: Press crisis on the big screen
• Boston University and Boston Globe partner on Your Town hyperlocal sites
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’
• NYTimes.com: Could Times sell Boston Globe?
• Boston Globe launches mobile social media scavenger hunt for readers

Parent firm the New York Times Company will close the Boston Globe unless staff unions agree to pay cuts and pension scheme changes, according to reports.

An ultimatum was delivered to union leaders last Thursday.

The company needs to save $20 million from The Globe.

Full story at this link…

Update: But, says Newsosaur’s Alan Mutter, reports of the Globe’s demise are exaggerated.

• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’
• Boston Globe launches midday video news update
• Boston University and Boston Globe partner on Your Town hyperlocal sites
• Affleck on the media: will ‘State of Play’ be the last film set in a newspaper?
• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta

Gatehouse is taking legal action against the Boston Globe, owned by New York Times Co, over its news aggregator site Boston.com, because the site has been using Gatehouse content.

• NYTimes release: New York Times and GateHouse settle out of court in linking case
• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta
• Boston Globe joins New York Times in paywall plans
• Editors Weblog: ‘What will happen to the Boston Globe?’
• Boston Globe launches midday video news update

This week saw the launch of a hyperlocal news map for the Liverpool Echo, as announced by Sly Bailey at the AOP Digital Publishing Summit (follow link for report in MediaGuardian).

It geotags news content so each user can search for news by postcode.

Nothing new there, web-savvy newshounds might think, but actually it is:

Though Archant announced plans for geotagged sites last October (it started with Jobs24 – a winner at yesterday’s NS ADM Awards – and Homes24 and has plans to roll out geotagged news content in 2008) to date we’re still waiting for the official launch of geotagged news.

Yesterday we reported that American site outside.in will be launching in the UK, which will link news with local areas (as localised as users specify). Outside.in thinks its opportunity has come about as a result of:

“The demand for personalized information on the web, and the failure of the newspaper industry to capitalize on featuring hyperlocal content” (Nina Grigoriev, outside.in)

Journalism.co.uk thought it was time for a bit of a run-down on the development of geotagging in the UK.

First, what is it?
Journalists record the locations referred to in each story and add their postcodes as metadata when uploading their copy to the web.

In that way, geotagged content allows users to prioritise the news they see online according to postcodes.

Where are we at in the UK?
The Liverpool Echo is the first site (of the large publishing groups) to do so in the UK. Although other sites have incorporated mapping into their sites, no other places has successfully incorporated news content as well.

The BBC plans to invest £68 million across its network of local sites, which will be decided upon by the BBC Trust in February 2009. Online Journalism Blog reported a sneak preview in January 2008, though the BBC have since asked us not to refer to the sites as ‘hyperlocal’.

Critics such as Trinity Mirror’s CEO, Sly Bailey, have voiced concerns over the BBC’s local video proposals, saying they will provide ‘unfair competition’ for the regional media.

Northcliffe is also developing geotagged content on its revamped thisis sites, and told Press Gazette in June the process has been difficult: “Because not all stories affect only one specific point, the company is finding geocoding challenging,” Hardie said.

According to the article: “The localisation functions will remain hidden until journalists have built up enough stories with postcode data.”

Back in July 2007 we saw reports of Sky geotagging its news, but it hasn’t developed at the same speed or as widely as in the US.

What’s happening in the US?
Everyblock is developing fast across the US. It’s a new experiment in journalism and data, offering feeds of local information and data for every city block in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, with more cities to come. Not in the UK yet, but watch this space.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post has used outside.in’s maps for their own site, while the New York Times’ Boston.com (the online Boston Globe) uses MetaCarta’s geographic search technology for maps.

So, what does this mean for UK based geotagging?
With the arrival of highly efficient US based sites such as outside.in (who said an UK based office is a possibility) maybe it’s time for Archant, Trinity Mirror and Northcliffe to get their skates on before it’s too late.

Please send us your examples of UK based geotagged content, from formal publications or otherwise, as we want to track it as it expands in the UK.

(Then we can make a geotagged feed and map of geotagging in journalism. Then our heads might explode)

• Boston Globe enhances local search with MetaCarta
• Flickr and geotagging: Part of the newsgathering model?
• Sneak preview of BBC hyperlocal web service
• Archant and Telegraph in geotagged search launches
• Boston University and Boston Globe partner on Your Town hyperlocal sites

A website tracking the frequency with which journalists use certain cliches has been set up with the aim of improving journalism.

Killthecliche.com, which currently tracks five US newspapers and the Financial Times, aims to show ‘how smart data analysis can help us improve media’ – so this is more than a naming and shaming exercise.

The site currently has 167 cliches in its database, which it scours the feeds of the newspapers for.

According to the results, insurgent is the all time top cliche used, while amid tops the polls for today’s and the week’s most overused word.

The journalists behind the cliches are also ranked, as are the papers – the Boston Globe is currently coming out worst.

Please submit your most cliche-ridden sentences below and let’s get this post on the chart!

• News.com.au: A last-ditch effort to find journalism’s worst cliches
• Not fit for purpose: the year’s most overused phrases in journalism
• TBC at high noon? Telegraph-Guardian spats
• Spiegel Online: Will media be a hobby rather than job, asks Chris Anderson
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 3-6 January