Image: CNN

On Friday CNN will air a one-hour documentary which looks at the “challenges and dangers” its team encountered while reporting from the Syrian city of Homs.

The broadcasting of the documentary, called ‘72 Hours Under Fire‘, comes two weeks after two Western journalists – Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik – were killed in the same city, after a building they were in was shelled.

According to a release, in the CNN documentary the broadcaster’s journalists who reported from Homs and the news executives “tasked with keeping them safe” will discuss the dangers taken as part of their aim of “getting the story out of Syria”.

The experienced team CNN sent into Homs included Beirut-based correspondent Arwa Damon, photojournalist Neil Hallsworth and security risk advisor Tim Crockett. 72 Hours Under Fire chronicles their journey into and out of Homs, the dangers they faced while newsgathering and reporting there and why this assignment was different than previous ones.

Below are two videos which have been published online by CNN ahead of the documentary:

• Al Jazeera to broadcast Syria documentary filmed entirely on iPhone
• #followjourn: @NeilHarmanTimes – Neil Harman/journalist
• Breaking news coverage on Twitter of fire in East London
• The Drum: Newspapers ‘could introduce football Twitter reporter role’
• Former Times and Sunday Times journalist in documentary debut at Edinburgh Film Festival

CNN this week unveiled its new iReport site which, according to a blog post about the changes, will offer greater personalisation, an enhanced community through “groups” and a “favourite button”.

iReport is CNN’s platform for user-generated content, where non-journalists submit video stories, the best of which are broadcast on the news channel.

The update comes five years after iReport was launched and, according to CNN’s post, now has a community of “nearly a million people”.

Last month at news:rewired – connected journalism, CNN digital producer Dominique van Heerden shared some interesting statistics on iReport, such as that CNN had published 912,000 iReports since its launch, with 15,000 iReports published on average every month and 2.4 million unique users in June 2011.

In an article on the new version iReport, lostremote’s Natan Edelsburg said the aim was “to create the largest ‘social network for news,’ according to Lila King, participation director at CNN”.

Read lostremote’s report here.

• CNN’s iReport marks second birthday with 175,000 contributions
• CNN launches badge system for iReporters
• CNN launches first iReport citizen journalism awards
• NYTimes.com most visited newspaper site in US last month
• CNN’s iReport attracts nearly 4,000 submissions on Iranian elections

In this week’s podcast we speak to two journalists with remarkable stories to tell of their experiences of 9/11, one of them having been in the World Trade Centre when the first plane hit and the other being the only journalist in Afghanistan with a video phone to report live at the time.

In interviews with Journalism.co.uk Stephen Evans, who was the BBC’s North American business correspondent at the time (now Berlin correspondent for the broadcaster) and Nic Robertson, senior international correspondent at CNN, describe their experiences of 9/11 and reflections ten years on.

Stephen Evans was on camera when the first tower began to collapse:

CNN will be broadcasting live from New York, Washington, Shanksville, Afghanistan and Pakistan on Sunday. More details on its live programming is available here.

Meanwhile on the BBC on Sunday Stephen Evans will be interviewed on Radio Wales for ‘Ten Years On: The Welsh Journalist at 9/11′.

• BBC College of Journalism posts memories of 9/11 coverage
• BBC Radio 4: Sami al-Hajj on his return from Guantanamo
• Mirror.co.uk: Tribute to Sunday Mirror correspondent killed in Afghanistan
• BBC announces special swansong for Russian-language broadcasts
• Live streaming from Norwegian journalism event

Mashable has Q&A with CNN’s general manager of digital, KC Estenson, and CEO of Zite Mark Johnson explaining why the broadcaster has acquired the personalised iPad magazine.

Zite, like Flipboard, is an iPad app that allows users to aggregate news articles from feeds including Twitter and Google Reader to create a fully personalised magazine of the content of interest.

CNN announced on it’s blog yesterday that Zite will remain fully independent, a fact Estenson confirms in Mashable’s interview saying Zite will be free to pursue partnerships with other news organisations.

The interview starts by asking “why Zite?”.

Estenson: We saw in Zite a best-in-class product. It’s deeply loved by the people who have it, and we thought it would be a nice addition to our digital portfolio. Secondly, there’s great technology behind it. We’re seeing a lot of interest in this space now, but these guys have been working on this for six years.

Johnson: The iPad is really well suited to reading. I think what’s interesting about Zite is that it brings you really interesting information you might not have otherwise read. It’s not just repackaging information.

We’re seeing Flipboard move into TV and film, while Pulse is getting into bookmarklets and extensions. Where is Zite going next?

Johnson: We still see a huge market in giving you the information most relevant to you. We’re focusing on content right now, news-type content. We really want to focus on giving people a great personalised iPad magazine.

The interview goes on to ask:

Can we expect CNN’s content to feature more prominently on Zite in the future?

Johnson: Absolutely not. Our personalisation algorithms look for most interesting content on the web, whether that comes from CNN or elsewhere. Our algorithms are completely agnostic.

The full Q&A is at this link

• App of the week for journalists: Zite
• PDA: ‘Algorithms will replace journalists’
• App of the week for journalists – Flipboard
• Innovations in Journalism – Tiinker
• Wired gets ‘wired’ with Adobe for iPad edition

A new study has looked at how six news sites’ Twitter followers engage and react to tweets. Twitter content publishing platform SocialFlow has assessed the Twitter audiences of Al-Jazeera English, BBC News, CNN, the Economist, Fox News and the New York Times.

The study is based on bit.ly and Twitter data from more than 20 million tweets posted by the seven million users who follow these accounts on Twitter.

It has revealed some interesting facts:

• Engagement can be read in clicks. The Economist has a highly active and engaged audience in terms of both clicks per tweet and retweets per tweet, suggesting a high level of alignment between content posted and attention users are willing to provide.
• Audiences differ in their willingness to consume and share information on Twitter. Al-Jazeera’s audience is the most active in terms of publishing and retweeting content on Twitter, while the Fox News audience generates substantially more clicks from its audience.
• A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into action. Despite being the largest account, the New York Times garners the fewest clicks per tweet when audience size is normalised and earns many fewer retweets when compared to accounts that are much smaller.
• Timing and topical interest matter when seeking attention. By arranging audience tweets into topic maps, we were able to visualise the flow of attention between topics of interest, across the different audiences.

It is worth being aware that this is what SocialFlow does: it offers solutions to businesses wanting to maximise the effectiveness of their tweets by timing them to get the most reaction.

Click throughs

One of the points the study draws out is that where the Economist’s highly engaged Twitter audience clicks on links to the associated news article, Al Jazeera’s audience behaves differently. The study finds Al Jazeera English has the most retweets per tweet but followers are not necessarily clicking links – an all important goal for web publishers.

The takeaway for publishers is one of topics, network and timing, as the report states.

Knowing when an addressable audience is available and what topics they’d like to engage in is key to earning their attention.

The study also points out that a Twitter audience is measurable and this should be analysed and used “to inform content development strategies and marketing planning”.

While clicks bring immediate returns, retweets and other forms of audience participation raise trust and brand awareness, both imperatives for maintaining sustained growth. A high number of followers is not indicative of an engaged audience; a high click-through rate doesn’t necessarily yield other engagement metrics such as retweets and new followers.

By paying attention to long established demographics, collective audience behavior and the mercurial and fickle moment-to-moment signals, we step away from conjectures, generalisations, and assumptions, and leverage the audience itself in determining how best to interact.

SocialFlow has also created a Twitter visualisation looking at engagement with @AJEnglish. Topics have been mapped using over the period of an hour. The larger the topic node, the more it was discussed on Twitter during that hour. Click on the visualisation to download SocialFlow’s diagram as a PDF and explore it.

The full report is at this link…

• Twitter to send users emails about RTs and favourites
• Mashable: Monday is the worst time to post and tweet
• Tool of the week for journalists – WhenToTweet
• Mainstream media drives Twitter trends, claims study
• How the five journalists with the greatest online influence use social media

CNN today announced it was launching its first ever iReport Awards, to celebrate the contributions of its citizen journalist iReporters and recognise the “most extraordinary iReport stories of 2010″.

There are six award categories in total – breaking news, compelling imagery, commentary, interviewing, original reporting and personal stories.

Our producers looked at hundreds of iReports to find the most amazing stories, and then we worked with our friends at CNN, CNN International and CNN.com to choose the five nominees in each category. It was a tough job, with hours spent agonizing over the lists. Picking the winners will be even tougher, so we’ve recruited a talented group of judges to make the final call.

Visitors to the site can also vote for the winner of a separate Community Choice Award until 7 March. The winners will be announced in March.

• Webby success for FT.com and BBC News
• Awards round-up: Index on Censorship winners; Mind Journalism Awards; Paul Foot nominations call
• Fifth International Photography Award open for entries
• First annual Vimeo Awards offer $25,000 grant to overall winner
• Hubdub’s news pundit winners: who got it most right and most wrong?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended his decision to walk out on an interview with CNN last week in a one-on-one with Al Jazeera’s the Listening Post today.

According to Assange, the CNN interview, specially arranged with journalist Atika Shubert, had broken agreed ground rules stating it would only cover the stories revealed in the Iraq war logs release about Iraqi citizens. Assange claimed that the journalist later called him to apologise and said she had been instructed to go off script by her bosses.

Assange once more questioned mainstream media’s relationship with WikiLeaks. He spoke about the changing situation between the New York Times, which was involved in the Afghan war logs publication but has recently criticised Assange in its pages, and the whistleblowing site:

My impression is that the Times feels that its forced in that position, that simply is the real politic. In order for the Times to keep its influence as a newspaper… It has to act in a defensive manner and one of the ways to defend yourself is to distance yourself from people… My very strong suspicion is that you discover what happens when you don’t do that, when it appears that you’re criticising the US military… your proprietor suffers as a result, your access to military sources suffers as a results.

Assange said that since the site’s foundation getting people to submit information and mounting a legal defence – the things he thought would be most challenging – had proved relatively easy. Getting coverage of the material that’s leaked away from reports on the organisation itself has been more difficult, he said.

Details of the show can be found at this link…

• Swedish prosecutor seeks arrest of WikiLeaks founder in rape case
• WikiLeaks announces new release of nearly three million documents
• Assange: The US cannot take down WikiLeaks
• OWNI.eu publishes WikiLeaks ebook
• WikiLeaks to be subject of New York Times’ first e-book

Who “owns” a Twitter account when a presenter gets fired? ReadWriteWeb asks the questions following CNN and presenter Rick Sanchez’s parting of ways over comments he made about Jon Stewart and Jewish control of the media.

His Twitter account @RickSanchezCNN has more than 146,000 followers at time of writing. Asks RWW:

Did CNN lose out on the social media investment they put into Sanchez’s personal account over the years? Ought they have driven all followers to an official company account instead, in case something like this happened? Presumably some people would see it that way, but social media is so personality-driven that wouldn’t likely have worked as well.

Full post at this link…

• #jpod: Who owns your followers? Three journalists discuss Twitter strategy
• @ITVLauraK: My Twitter followers don’t belong to the BBC, ITV, or me
• City Pages: When a reporter leaves – who owns the Twitter account?
• Twitter round-up: Twitter for sale and twittering for freedom
• Financial Post apologises for reporter’s Twitter outburst

“Mobile is as different to online as television is to radio,” CNN’s vice-president of mobile Louis Gump told an audience at the Frontline Club, in an event supported by Journalism.co.uk.

You can now watch video of the event below, including discussion of the role of mobile journalism in the newsroom and the opportunities offered to journalists by mobile technologies:

Related coverage on Journalism.co.uk:

Podcast from the CNN Mobile event

Blog round-up of mobile journalism discussion

CNN launches free international news app for iPhone and iPod Touch

• AFP launches paid-for iPhone app
• #media140: Full coverage from media140 2011
• Twitter starts to roll out new site for mobile browsers
• #media140 #jpod – Day two round-up with interviews
• ITN launches iPhone news app

Writing on the Upshot, John Cook has an interesting investigation into “reverse embedding”, a practice “which permits active-duty service personnel to serve as interns in major media companies – sometimes in an editorial capacity”.

The practice is part of the military’s Training With Industry (TWI) programme, which allows military officers to leave the service for up to a year to work for private companies in a wide variety of sectors. But Cook’s article draws attention to the problem with placing officers in media positions, alleging that they may be “gleaning insights and intelligence into how media organisations operate, and perhaps helping to shape the way they cover the military”.

The TWI operation achieved some notoriety in 2000, when Dutch and French media reported that CNN had invited US Army psychological operations soldiers into its newsroom to serve as interns. Embarrassed at having hosted military disinformation specialists,  the network acknowledged that it was a mistake and said in a statement that “the intern program was terminated as soon as the leadership of CNN learned of it.”

Now, however, the program appears to have been reactivated – at CNN and elsewhere.

Full post at this link…

(via Fishbowl NY)

• AP: US military backs down on photography ban on soldier casualties
• Daily Finance: Atlantic Media announces it will pay all interns
• Parliamentary committee calls for police training in role of protest journalists
• Blood and Dust: Vaughan Smith on the rescue teams saving lives in Afghanistan
• FT study exposes problems in finding media information on corporate websites

Journalists came together at the Frontline Club last week to discuss mobile journalism today and in the future.

The panel debate covered most of the ongoing issues surrounding mobile journalism, from the role a device plays in the image of a journalist to the debate over how such content should be used by ‘professional’ video journalists. Journalism.co.uk caught up with the panel (Louis Gump, CNN; Andy Dickinson University of Central Lancashire; Alex Wood, Not on the Wires; and Jonathan Hewett, City University) at the end of the debate to talk more.

Note: Due to technical problems during recording some audio is reduced quality.

• ‘There’s a killer app on your phone. It’s called a phone’: Journalists talk mobile at CNN event
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• #Followjourn @alexwoodcreates /journalist
• Calling all video journalists…
• Tomorrow: 12th Journalism Leaders’ Forum in Preston

Journalists from across all media platforms came together at the Frontline Club last night to discuss the impact of mobile on the newsroom and the wider media world.

“Mobile is as different to online as television is to radio,” CNN’s vice-president of mobile Louis Gump told the Frontline audience.

In the beginning people took someone who was sitting in the radio studio and put a camera on it. Then realised they didn’t have to do it that way. I think that’s what happening now.

He told Journalism.co.uk that the near future of mobile content needs to look at original content, rather than just using it as a new platform for existing material.

The biggest change I think will happen at CNN over the next two years is we are going to start creating content just for mobile devices. Right now most of what you see on a mobile from CNN you can also find on other platforms, but we will have more original programming.

The panel debate covered most of the ongoing issues surrounding mobile journalism, from the role a device plays in the image of a journalist to the debate over how such content should be used by ‘professional’ video journalists. Andy Dickinson, course leader of BA Digital Journalism Production at University of Central Lancashire, said it was a “mistake” to expect large news organisations to adopt the same production processes as smaller outlets.

I think it is a mistake to always be talking about what’s happening outside mainstream media, it won’t work for us. We can’t do it because of our agenda and personal and professional things get in the way of that. Now and then our big spotlight will land on it. But citizen journalism is not there to replace, it’s there to amplify.

Gump agreed, saying that the rise of citizen journalism “increases the value” of professional journalists, by “filling in the gaps”, but would not be a replacement: “We are still telling the hard news, [citizen journalism] enriches the overall offering”. Alex Wood, freelance mobile journalist and co-founder of Not on the Wires, added that mobiles were simply another platform to leverage the story. But he said in his own work, such as when he organised mass coverage of the G20 summit by mobile phones, the journalistic talent still had to shine through.

I always try to keep the integrity of the story and still worked very hard to make it journalistic. People tend to obsess about technology being one thing after another. Why not use your mobile phone to do your vox pops. There’s nothing wrong with you then putting that into a more traditional package. It’s another tool in the ever expanding toolkit that journalists have now. We can still take things from broadcast, for example framing a good shot and having good audio. Let’s go back to the basics but use them in the new technology.

He added that as a journalist using user generated content, old rules of fact-checking must still apply.

People can manipulate technology very easily and its still a worry. Journalists still need to pick up the phone and speak to the person if they have submitted media. We should always keep to those standards.

Jonathan Hewett, director of the newspaper journalism course at City University, agreed: “We are not going to chuck out the old stuff and forget the valuable lessons”. Prompting Dickinson to respond: “There’s a killer app on your phone that will allow you to check if something is right. It’s called your phone.”

Hewett said mobile has created opportunities for newspapers who do not have the visual reputation of a broadcaster, but more needs to be done.

Newspapers have been slower to catch up with more innovative stuff, but they are getting to realise mobile reporting is one way where a newspaper website can be different. It isn’t too fussed about quality of footage (…) We are still at early stage with mobiles full stop. We need to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Wood commented near the end of the panel debate that he wanted to see more innovation from iPad apps, which he claimed had so far been “disappointing”, telling Journalism.co.uk to expect to see some exciting stuff from him in the near future.

CNN also announced the launch of a new international iPhone app featuring their iReport platform at the event. See our report here, and catch up with tweets from the event with the #cnnfrontline hashtag.

• Podcast: CNN mobile journalism event at the Frontline Club
• Innovations in Journalism – Fromdistance
• Media Release: IPC Media unveils 24 mobile-optimised sites
• WAN 2008: ‘Newspaper phone’ launch to build audience awareness of mobile services + barriers to development of newspaper’s mobile platforms
• Social Media Journalist: “BBC journalists are increasingly using Del.icio.us to collaborate and turn research into content” Robin Hamman, BBC Senior Broadcast Journalist

The Twitter career graveyard has begun slowly filling up. News today that CNN’s senior editor for middle east affairs has been sacked after 20 years with the company for voicing what was deemed to be an inappropriate sentiment via Twitter. Octavia Nasr publicly mourned the death of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.

Parisa Khosravi, CNN’s vice-president international newsgathering, said in a statement that Nasr’s credibility had been compromised.

Full story at this link…

Back in May, comedian and columnist for Australian newspaper the Age Catherine Deveny lost her slot on the paper following tweets she sent during the Logies awards ceremony.

Deveny defended herself, claiming that Twitter was like “passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context. Twitter is online graffiti, not a news source.”

“Wrong,” said the Age technology editor, “posts to Twitter are not private messages”.

Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan lost his job during this year’s general election campaign after what the Times called a “spectacular ‘Twitter suicide’”. MacLennan reportedly called the elderly “coffin dodgers,” before moving on to some more colourful language:

He had also labelled the Commons Speaker John Bercow a “t**”, David Cameron a “t***” and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, “a b******”.

• The Age: Columnist sacked for inappropriate tweets
• NYT: Saddam Hussein ordered killing of Observer journalist, records show
• Never miss a note with a Simon Heffer RSS feed
• FT Alphaville: ‘Twitter, the new Reuters witness’
• DNA09: Twitter – a few more questions for the panel

CNN has announced that it will no longer use content (stories, video and photographs) from the Associated Press (AP), “ending a business relationship that had been in place since the cable network’s inception”.

Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, said in a memo to employees that the decision to discontinue the network’s use of the wire service was part of a strategy to “more fully leverage CNN’s global newsgathering investments.”

“We will no longer use AP materials or services,” Walton wrote. “The content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.”

It is to use Reuters to supplement its breaking news coverage. While cutting the deal with AP will save CNN money, Walton claimed it was only “partly a business decision”.

Full announcement at this link…

• Breaking news from mobile to Twitter/Seesmic – perfect example of how it works
• Nieman Journalism Lab: News content is ‘a stream’
• Thomson Reuters creates site for deal makers
• Revamped Reuters business section on IHT.com goes live
• CNET launches industries site BNET

A telling screen grab is doing the rounds – showing the discrepancy between CNN’s news coverage and Al Jazeera English’s.

It shows the two channel’s front online pages, captured on the day Wikileaks released its video showing previously unreleased footage of a US army attack in Iraq.

It looks like the two channels have quite different priorities. CNN goes for Tiger Woods and the iPad, while Al Jazeera puts the Wikileaks story top of its page.

Screengrabs at this link…

• Wired: Army intelligence analyst arrested over leaked video of Iraq helicopter attack
• Committee to Protect Journalists: Bahrain government freezes Al Jazeera operations ‘indefinitely’
• Citizenside: Al Jazeera Talk blogger responsible for Facebook page that took down Mubarak
• Al Jazeera Arabic joins Livestation
• New York Times considers creating own in-house WikiLeaks