Barack Obama’s election victory named top news story of 2008 in Associated Press’ annual poll, voted for by US editors and news directors.
Oil prices, the Beijing Olympics and Mumbai terror attacks all feature in the list.
Tags: Associated Press, Barack Obama, Beijing, China, India, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Oil prices, Olympics, the Beijing Olympics, United States
Well, we could have brought you ‘Flocking Around the Twitmas Tree’, ‘We Three Nings’ or just a straightforward end of the year list (if only to add to our list of lists), but instead we chose this: your sing-along treat to round-up 2008 is the ‘Twelve Days of Online Media Christmas’ (hyperlinked to relevant stories, but bear in mind it’s a selection of picks and not comprehensive…).
On the first day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … An editor in a law court
Colin Myler, News of the World
On the second day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Two arrested hacks
Milton Keynes Citizen’s Sally Murrer / ITV’s John Ray (video below)
… And an editor in a law court.
On the third day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Three web gaffes
Steve Jobs and CNN / United Airlines stock collapse / AFP photo ‘altering’
… Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the fourth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Four journo forums
Wired Journalists / Journalism Research / Visual Editors / Journalism.co.uk forum
… Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the fifth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends
Stephen Fry / Paul Carr / John Cleese / Mark Mayhew (Hurricane Gustav) / the Mad Men
… Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the sixth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Six news sites out-linking
WashingtonPost.com, BBC, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, Drudge Report, Not the AP (they didn’t even want to be linked to)
… Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the seventh day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Seven feeds a-mashing
Publish2.com, Daylife, Delicious, Digg, Technorati, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes
… Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the eighth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Eight maps a’plotting
Hurricane Gustav tracker, BBC Beijing Olympics map, PaperCuts newspaper job losses map, Economist pre-election map, NYTimes.com post-election map, Managingnews.com’s newstracker during Chinese earthquake, Interactive maps of Canadian tornado damage, Journalism.co.uk new timeline-maps.
… Seven pipes a-mashing, Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the ninth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Nine strikers strikin’
Le Monde, Writers’ Guild of America, Australian Fairfax newspapers, Express Newspapers, Sheffield Star.
(or at least thinking about it…) Trinity Mirror Midlands, Telegraph Media Group, ITV regional, BBC Scotland.
… Eight maps a-plotting, Seven pipes a-mashing, Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the tenth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Ten blogs a-blooming
10,000words.net, Adrianmonck.com, Jay Rosen’s PressThink, OnlineJournalismBlog, BBCJournalismLabs, BusinessMediaBlog, RegretTheError.com, Publishing2.com, Spokesman Review’s Daily Briefing, Tomorrow’s News Tomorrow’s Journalists
… Nine strikers strikin’, Eight maps a-plotting, Seven pipes a-mashing, Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the eleventh day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Eleven papers packing
(up for new offices) The Guardian, the Birmingham Mail, the Independent.
(away their desks forever) NY Sun, Belfast’s La Nua, Kazakhstan’s Law and Justice, Moscow’s The Exile, US Post newspapers, Trinity Mirror weekly titles, Switzerland’s Mittelland, three editions of Spanish Metro.
… Ten blogs a-blooming, Nine strikers strikin’, Eight maps a-plotting, Seven pipes a-mashing, Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks, And an editor in a law court!
On the twelfth day of Christmas my feed read’r brought to me … Twelve sites a-starting
Trinity Mirror mobile sites, outside.in UK, Spot.Us, Hubdub.com, Coventry Telegraph, FT’s Alphaville Long Room, Magicalia, DailyPostCymraeg.co.uk, Time Out Kuala Lumpur, the BusinessDesk Northwest, the Daily Beast.
(and re-focusing) CSMonitor.com.
… Eleven papers packing, Ten blogs a-blooming, Nine strikers strikin’, Eight maps a-plotting, Seven pipes a-mashing, Six sites out-linking, Five Tweeeeeetin’ friends, Four journo forums, Three web gaffes, Two arrested hacks and an editor in a law court!
Tags: Australian Fairfax, BBC, BBC Scotland, Beijing, Beijing Olympics, Belfast, Birmingham Mail, China, Christmas, CNN, cnn.com, Colin Myler, CSMonitor.com., DailyPostCymraeg.co.uk, Economist, editor, fairfax, Fairfax Media Limited, FriendFeed, Hurricane Gustav, ITV, Jay Rosen, John Cleese, John Ray, Journalism.co.uk, Kazachstan's Justice and Order, kazakhstan, Kuala Lumpur, law court, Le Monde, Le Monde SA, list, location, Mark Mayhew, Milton Keynes Citizen, Moscow's The Exile, News of the World, Olympics, Online Media Christmas, paul carr, Review, Sally Murrer, second day of Christmas, Sheffield Star, spokesman, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Switzerland, The Birmingham Mail, The Exile, The Guardian, Trinity Mirror, twelve days of online media christmas, United Airlines, United Kingdom, US Post, web gaffes, Writers' Guild of America, Yahoo
A new forecast from eMarketer UK predicts internet ad spend growth will be cut by more than 50 per cent next year and that the digital media sector will not fully recover from the economic downturn, until the London Olympics in 2012, reports MediaGuardian.
Tags: advertising spend, digital media sector, internet ad, London, Olympics, the London Olympics, web ad
The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the World Editors Forum have written to the Chinese government about international standards of press freedom in the country.
Laws in China restricting foreign journalists were temporarily relaxed during the Olympic Games in Beijing and have recently been extended by authorities.
In a letter dated October 21, WAN wrote to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in an attempt to change the laws permanently:
Your Excellency,
We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 102 countries, to welcome the extension of the relaxation in media regulations, but also to call on you to take further steps to uphold international standards of press freedom.
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, your government introduced new rules that allowed foreign journalists greater freedom to travel in the country without prior government permission and to talk to anyone who was willing to be interviewed. Those regulations were set to expire on 17 October, however, shortly before they expired new regulations were introduced that recognise these rights.
While welcoming the extension of the more relaxed regulations for foreign journalists, we are concerned that they do not extend to domestic journalists and that many fundamental rights necessary for the proper functioning of a free press are not observed. For example, there is no protection of news sources, it is not possible to report freely on Tibet and hotels are obliged to report the arrival of a foreign journalist to police. Furthermore, with more than 30 journalists and at least 50 cyber reporters imprisoned, China jails more journalists than any other.
We respectfully call on you to extend the relaxed regulations to domestic journalists, to introduce further reforms so that your country might fully respect international standards of press freedom, and to ensure that all
those detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression are immediately released from prison.We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely,
Gavin O’Reilly
President
World Association of NewspapersXavier Vidal-Folch
President
World Editors Forum
Tags: Beijing, China, Chinese government, foreign journalist, Gavin O'Reilly, Gavin O'Reilly President, media regulations, Olympic Games, Olympics, Premier, the Beijing Olympics, the Olympic Games, Tibet, WAN, Wen Jiabao, World Association of Newspapers, Xavier Vidal-Folch, Xavier Vidal-Folch President
The software engineering company behind Sky News’ recent online revamp, Daylife, has launched a new product aimed at online news publishers.
Sky used Daylife’s products to create topic pages of related multimedia content called ‘in depth’ pages.
The new Daylife Enterprise API will similarly let publishers re-purpose blog posts, text, data and audio-visual content in new ways online.
How does it do this? The service will collect this content and then create feeds which the publisher can put to use a variety of ways – as per their request.
For example – the Enterprise API was trialled by the Washington Post to create picture galleries from the Beijing Olympics – searchable by sport and country – and to accompany its US presidential campaign coverage.
Daylife took all the incoming photos from Post photographers around these subjects and made them available to the paper as an API, ready for use to create new pages on its website.
Utilising existing content in this way can be a success in terms of web traffic – making sites a more attractive prospect for advertisers, says Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand.
As part of the product, publishers can make these content feeds open to the public and third-party developers – a feature which Shardanand hopes will lead to more collaboration on news content between publishers and users.
“In terms of e-commerce and advertising there’s been so much innovation in the last 10 years online, in comparison there’s not been so much in news,” he told Journalism.co.uk.
“How do you innovate if you don’t do software? I don’t know what the next best concept is but a service like ours can be shared.”
Publishers should not dismiss outsourcing this work, says Shardanand, after all it’s not their job and with the amount of content they have available would be extremely time consuming – the company has over 200 machines running to process the content. It’s not for free, but licences are decided on a customer-by-customer basis.
Instead, he told us, the aim is to get the most value out of the content that publishers are already producing for both online and other editions – such as the photos taken by WaPo staff – by doing the backend work for them.
Crucial to the success of the project will be the say that publishers have over what is done with their content – something which Shardanand is keenly aware of.
“These have to be content portals that are still customised and match your brand and voice,” he says.
“It wouldn’t work if the editors couldn’t do exactly what they want. Advertisers wouldn’t value it either.”
Tags: API, CEO, Daylife, e - commerce, Journalism.co.uk, Olympics, online and other editions, online news publishers, online publishers, Sky News, software engineering, the Beijing Olympics, The Washington Post, United States, Upendra Shardanand, Washington Post, web traffic
So Boris might give out Blackberries (well, ‘blackberry-type gizmos’) to Olympics spectators in 2012, but over in the States Wall Street Journal journalists are finding that their technology allowance is being cut back.
Or so this ‘internal memo’ on Gawker.com would have us believe. Is it for real? Apparently, all WSJ news staff have been told that a new money-saving measure is in place: ‘at its core is the concept of “one person/one machine.’
“If you are an office-based editor, you’ll get a new desktop. If you are a reporter or editor who travels on assignment, you’ll get a new laptop with a docking station, keyboard and monitor for office use.”
That’s what the alleged internal memo reads. Comments below the Gawker article are sceptical: surely the typos in the memo are a bigger story than the computer cuts, writes ‘drunkexpatworker’.
Hmmm. Authentic or not? It seems an odd kind of prank if not: it wasn’t that funny.
Tags: blogs, editor, Gawker, office-based editor, Olympics, reporter, technology allowance, the States Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, WSJ, WSJ.com
China is to end its relaxation of reporting restrictions in the country for foreign journalists, which were introduced in 2007 ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
It is not yet known what rules will replace the current guidelines, which will cease on October 17.
Tags: Beijing, China, Olympics, the Beijing Olympics
A new video player – courtesy of Perform and Virgin Media – is just the start for Sport magazine’s ‘nascent’ website, Greg Miall, managing director, told Journalism.co.uk.
Traditionally television’s domain, online sports video from other media sites is a growing trend. By working with a third party, however, rights to the content are handled by Virgin, which supplies Premier League football highlights, and Perform, which handles video of cricket, tennis, golf and rugby fixtures.
“It’s a different way to supply a latent audience demand for this kind of content,” said Miall, adding that the BBC’s recent online coverage of the Beijing Olympics was a benchmark for online sports video.
“What it did [the BBC's Olympics site] was provide another way of viewing all this content and a lot more people ended up looking at content, which they might not look at usually.”
Improvements are lined up for the player and embedding it across the site’s other channels is also in the pipeline.
In addition, an online channel manager is set to join the magazine in the next few weeks and will bring in a series of changes to the site, Miall added.
The key thinking behind the video offering, he said, is to appeal to a generation of readers and viewers who aren’t watching television for prolonged periods or through a set anymore.
So is short-form, online sports video the freesheet equivalent of television?
Tags: BBC, Greg Miall, Journalism.co.uk, managing director, media sites, Olympics, online channel manager, player, Premier League, recent online coverage, sport, Sport magazine, the Beijing Olympics, Video, video player, Virgin Media
The BBC Sport website had its ‘best ever day’ in terms of traffic on Monday 11 August with 4.4 million individual users, a blog post from Roger Mosey, director of BBC Sport, has said.
The traffic surge from the site’s Olympics coverage also saw more than 1 million users view live video streams on Friday 15.
The BBC’s iPlayer received 700,000 requests for Olympic programmes in the first week of the Games, Mosey said.
The competition – combined with the beginning of the Premiership – has also created record figures for mobile with more than 400,000 users accessing the BBC’s mobile services on Saturday – breaking the previous record of 270,000.
To report the Beijing Olympics online and on mobile the corporation has introduced six live video streams to its BBC Olympics website, an interactive map of the city and its sporting venues, an Olympics blog and expanded its mobile site to carry more video.
The coverage has also benefited from the decision to embed BBC video within pages rather than in a separate player.
Tags: BBC, BBC Sport, Beijing, director, Olympic, Olympics, Roger Mosey, separate player, the Beijing Olympics
The International Olympic Committee has withdrawn a takedown noticed issued to YouTube under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which ordered the removal of a video footage posted by a pro-Tibetan group.
Tags: International Olympic Committee, Olympics, video takedown request, YouTube
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