Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Damien Van Achter

#FollowJourn: @davanac/editor and developer

Laura Oliver — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:48:39 +0000

#FollowJourn: Damien Van Achter

Who? Editor, developer and social media manager.

What? Works for Belgian broadcaster RTBF.be with a penchant for multimedia experimentation – see Rory Cellan-Jones’ recent article on Van Achter.

Where? Writes French-language blog ‘Blogging the News’.

Contact? On Twitter he’s @davanac.

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.Similar Posts:

BBC dot.life: ‘Hi-tech hacks’ in action

Laura Oliver — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:45:40 +0000

Rory Cellan-Jones reports back on some multimedia initiatives and journalists pioneering new technologies for newsgathering and reporting, in particular Damien Van Achter, who works for Belgian TV station RTBF.

“[H]is card describes him as community manager, editor developer and journalist. But his role seems to be to act as a kind of new media agent provocateur inside quite a traditional organisation, encouraging older broadcasters to try all the new tools that are now available.

“(…)His blog, ‘Blogging the News’, is where he brings a lot of his journalist experiments together but it seems most of it is his own rather than RTBF’s material – he’s really a backroom boy at the station rather than a mainstream correspondent. All the more interesting then that the US State Department, which had spotted his blog, contacted him before Hillary Clinton’s visit to Brussels and offered him exclusive access to the secretary of state during her tour.”

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

French publishers vs Google: ‘You are becoming our worst enemy’

Laura Oliver — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:25:51 +0000

The headline quote comes from a round-up up by Eric Scherer of a meeting involving French newspaper and magazine publishers and Google. The meeting suggests some heavy anti-Google feeling on the publishers’ part.

According to one executive at the event, magazine and newspaper publisher Lagadère is on the brink of reporting Google to the EU Commission for ‘predatory practices’.

Watch the video below (courtesy of Adrian Vanachter Damien Van Achter of Scherer’s tweeted coverage of the meeting and make your own mind up as to which party you agree with.

One quote that grabbed my attention, however, was newspapers reported remark: “You are accepting the end of news as we know it.”

Google, secrecy about its algorithms and dominance of the online ad market aside, is looking forward; newspapers are trying to protect and control what they perceive as news and the news business. The problems they are facing, some related to Google and others not, should show them that this self-interested attitude can’t be maintained and their perception of ‘news as we know it’ is out-dated.

Jeff Jarvis sums this up in a blog post reacting to Scherer’s report:

“This anti-Google attitude comes from an apparent sense of entitlement that we see clearly in France but also elsewhere: Google owes us (…) They – like other publishers and journalists – think a market should be built around what they need and that there is a fair share that belongs to them even though they did not innovate and change so those who did should rescue them. But as Scott Karp has said, no one guarantees them a business model.”

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