This week’s Job of the Week on Journalism.co.uk is Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd’s vacancy for an assistant producer.

Closing date: 08/11/09
Salary: Up to £26K
Location: London, Covent Garden
Hours Per Week: 40

Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd is the European subsidiary of Travelzoo Inc. (NASDAQ: TZOO), a global Internet company. With more than 17 million subscribers in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, Travelzoo® publishes offers from more than 1,000 advertisers. Travelzoo’s deal experts review offers to find the best travel deals and confirm their true value.

2.4 million travel enthusiasts visit our European websites each month, and in November 2008, Travelzoo.co.uk was voted the third best travel website by readers of The Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

The assistant producer will be part of the production team and have following responsibilities:
* Research, develop and source outstanding travel deals
* Writing news-focused, compelling travel deal content explaining the details for each outstanding deal
* Assisting in the management of client campaigns, including monitoring campaign performance, providing campaign reports, negotiating offers
* Developing and fostering client relationships
* Working with colleagues from offices in Paris, Munich, Hamburg and Barcelona

Candidate profile:
* First professional experience as editorial assistant or online content manager or online marketing assistant, ideally acquired in an online media company or in a similar fast paced work environment
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* Strong project management, problem solving and organizational skills
* Ability to multi-tasking, working with deadlines
* Passion for travel, knowledge about travel media content would be a plus
* Proactive and self-starter attitude
* Bachelor’s degree minimum
* Knowledge of other languages (French, German, Spanish) would be a plus

What we offer:
* Competitive salary
* Excellent global career opportunities in a high growth company
* Ask about our travel perk!

For more information and to apply, please visit the vacancy listing at http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/articles/535731.php

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Tony Elliott, the proprietor of listings magazine Time Out, is considering selling control of the title to help fund online expansion.

“We want to develop in Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester; in Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And we’d certainly not look to launch magazines in places like Paris or Los Angeles without a developed website in place first,” he told the Times.

Full story at this link…

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From The Economist: ‘A freedom-promoting media centre is accused of going too far too fast’. The organisation’s head, founder and former secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Robert Ménard, is involved in rows with Qatari officials and critics.

“When the Qataris asked Robert Ménard to run what they heralded as the world’s first press freedom centre, in Doha, their capital, they were probably asking for trouble. An intrepid Frenchman who had previously run a Paris-based lobby, Reporters Without Borders, Mr Ménard is famous for courting controversy. Last year he disrupted a torch-lighting ceremony in Greece that was meant to be a dignified prelude to the Olympic games in China. Later he scaled Notre Dame Cathedral and unfurled a protest banner as the torch was carried through Paris. Now, only months after becoming head of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, he is entangled in a row that may well be more bitter than anything he has experienced.”

Full story at this link…

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• Government launches ‘virtual media centre’ for 2012 London Olympics
• IOC blogging guidelines – ‘Blogging form of personal expression, not journalism’

The Guardian’s Benji Lanyado on his ‘TwiTrip’: a trip to Paris, where he ‘would be at the mercy of Twitter’  The plan was that he ‘would sling questions into the ether’, and Twitter users would send him recommendations. Did it work…? Some ‘Tweething problems’ as Lanyado puts it, but it seems that yes it did. Full story at this link…

Plus: Lanyado’s TwiTrip to Paris will be featured on The One Show, BBC1, tonight (Wednesday) at 7pm.

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Today saw the start of the ‘Building a Europe of Asylum’ ministerial conference in Paris, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have used the opportunity to ask the 27 ministers responsible for asylum policy to do more to protect the dozens of journalists and free speech activists who are forced into exile each year.

“The current situation is dramatic and most journalists seeking asylum – who mainly come from Eritrea, Iran, Iraq or Sri Lanka – have difficulty finding refuge,” the letter says. “The long waits in the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the almost systematic refusal of western embassies to grant them visas force the great majority to risk their lives by resorting to illegal immigration methods.

“For this reason, there is an urgent need not only to recognise the refugee status of journalists in your country seeking asylum but also to facilitate procedures for protected entry and emergency resettlement.”

The two-day conference begins today.

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Hurricane Gustav, which according to Breaking News Twitter reached the coast of Louisiana at 11.19am (BST) today, is being avidly blogged, twittered and mapped by US news organisations online.

The Houston Chronicle has set up a special section of its site – Hurricane Central – to cover the storm, featuring live radar maps of its progress, forecasts of the storm’s path and related news stories.

The Chronicle has also created a guide for readers on how to prepare for the hurricane when it hits.

Kansas City’s KCTV5.com is mapping Gustav with its interactive Hurricane Tracker, which allows users to compare and contrast past storms in the US.

KCTV5 is also streaming live footage from cameras located on the US coast.

Elsewhere intern with the Knox News Sentinel, Willow Nero, is blogging from New Orleans’ airport as she tries to catch a flight to Paris (thanks to Jack Lail for the tip);

A quick search for New Orleans on Twitter Local shows a wealth of residents using the microblogging service to update on their evacuation or as they sit out the storm.

Mark Mayhew, twittering from 932 Bourbon St, New Orleans, is using the service to update followers from the ground:

Weberence has created a round-up of twitterers affected by the hurricane giving a highly personalised account of the storm; while a Twitter account set up as the American Red Cross is giving followers up-to-the-minute details of evacuation procedures and safety information.

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Global page views of Times Online’s blogs rose past the 2.5 million mark in May this year, according to figures from the publisher – an increase of 500 per cent compared to May 2007.

The graph below shows the overall growth of its top performing blogs. Daniel Finkenstein’s Comment Central and Paris correspondent Charles Bremner’s Le Blogue are shown to perform consistently well, while The Game blog and Money Central (no doubt spurred by the recent economic downturn) have increased in popularity:

The site’s top 10 blogs in terms of global page views in May this year were:

The Game Blog 562,835
Money Central 552,941
Comment Central 541,598
Alpha Mummy 170,862
Fanzine Fanzone 136,760
Charles Bremner 114,884
Formula 1 103,607
Snakes and Ladders 94,202
Mousetrap Technology 88,496
Red Box 85,96

As you can see the top three account for the majority of the blogs’ traffic. Figures for TimesOnline’s page views from May’s Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) report suggest the site recorded 117,826,926 page impressions. These stats therefore suggest blogs accounted for roughly 2.12 per cent of the site’s total page views.

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• UK ad spend dropped 4% in 2008, says AdAssoc
• Shropshire Star posts 59% rise in page impressions

Yesterday’s news that Topix will now handle the forums and article commenting system for MediaNews Group raises some questions for the future of user-generated content on news sites.

Does the future of so-called citizen journalism and user-generated content on news sites lie in opinion/comment rather than reporting?

MediaNews’ decision seems to suggest so, investing in areas of their sites where users react or debate content rather than submitting their own.

Writing for the Future of News blog, Steve Boriss takes this one step further saying: ‘Citizen journalism is dead. Expert journalism is the future‘. To summarise, Boriss argues that citizens (and to some extent professinal journalists) should not be reporters or newsgatherers for online but act as ‘topic experts’:

The model that will work — that will make news better, not worse — is one that combines the talents of topic experts throughout the web with those who have a knack for aggregating and editing their material to satisfy an audience.

Quality content, whether it’s from citizens or journalists, properly targeted by editors with the ability to ‘energize their audience’. To be avoided: allowing a free-for-all in terms of the quality of user-generated content in a bid to show users that their contributions are desired.

Allowing citizen journalists and users to submit news reports can be invaluable – the first pictures of a fire, a natural disaster, riots in Paris. But, as Steve Outing suggests in his article analysing the failure of his own grassroots citizen journalism project, the way in which news sites publish this content needs changing.

Too often, says Outing, these images and films are segregated in a separate area of the site away from professional coverage of the event. A better idea, says Outing, is to use editors to select the best submissions and mix these with the professional coverage – again supporting Boriss’ model of experts and expert editors.

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