Monthly Archives: May 2010

#followjourn: @lizhollis/freelance

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#followjourn: Liz Hollis

Who? Freelance journalist.

Where? Hollis has worked for major national newspapers and received a journalism award for her work in the Guardian. She has her own website here, as well as a blog on which she writes about the media and finance among other things.

Contact? @lizhollis.

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.

AP to launch copyright tracking system on 14 July

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The Associated Press will launch its news registry on 14 July, opening it up to all members and publishers who want to sign up before the end of 2010, the agency has announced.

The new system will automatically notify the agency and members about how their content is used beyond their own websites. It also stores information identifying each piece of AP content distributed and its terms of use.

The registry will make use of the new microformat for metadata introduced by the AP earlier this month, which has been added to all its news stories online to encourage an industry standard for tagging.

“Beyond analytics, the registry also will set the stage for a new way of doing business as a cooperative,” says Tom Curley, AP president and CEO, in a release.

“Every content creator who uses the registry will be able to set the rights for the use of that content, so that it can be copied legally or used in new products that the industry or others create with proper permission and compensation.”

More than 200 AP member newspapers have signed up as beta testers of the system and the agency expects this number to reach 600 by the July launch date.

Independent journalist attacked while investigating voting fraud

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A journalist investigating voting fraud in the UK was attacked yesterday while on a reporting job.

Jerome Taylor was repeatedly punched and kick by the group of attackers, who approached him in Bow, east London, where Taylor was looking to speak to a local election candidate about allegations of postal vote fraud.

He describes the ordeal in an article on Independent.co.uk today:

I don’t know how long it lasted – it was probably only a minute – but it was a long minute. I don’t remember them saying anything as they did it. The first noise I was aware of was the beeping of a car horn and a woman screaming.

The noise brought a man out of a nearby block of flats. With little regard for his own safety he waded in and defended me until my attackers ran away.

Full story at this link…

‘No reporters/no dogs allowed’: Dan Rather on reporting Civil Rights

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From Advancing the Story, US broadcasting veteran Dan Rather on his experiences of reporting the Civil Rights movement in the US.

Rather was delivering his speech at the University of Mississippi, where French journalist Paul Guihard was killed in 1962 when riots broke out following the enrolment of the university’s first black student.




Armando Iannucci: #bigotgate turned UK media into ‘pack of shrieking gibbons’

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Creator of TV political satire The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci on bigotgate and what it says about the UK’s media:

The journalist from Sky News was in some kind of hysterical state of tumescence as he cackled “Gordon Brown’s done a gaffe and we wondered if you’d come on to respond. You’ve got to see it!” on my answering service, and I’m sorry I deleted it rather than release it in to the public domain. The BBC was no less sensationalist in its pokey recording of Brown sitting listening to his own surreptitiously recorded voice played back to him.

It’s at these moments that you stand back and see, not a nation debating its future, but a pack of shrieking gibbons.

Thankfully, though, Bigotgate seems to have had no impact on the polls. This has restored my faith in this election as a sober, sincere and considered affair, though it’s shed a light on what the media machine can do when it’s taken too much Red Bull.

Full article at this link…

Google News Blog: Google’s Living Stories come to WordPress

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Google launched its “living stories” project in December with collaborations with the New York Times and Washington Post:

The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment (…) Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritised on one URL.

Having made the format open source in February, Google has now created a plugin for blogging platform WordPress to help publishers create their own “living stories” more easily.

Full post at this link…

(Hat tip to Andy Dickinson, who posted about the WordPress plugin at this link.)

Beet.tv: WaPo plans live video programmes for hundreds of reporters

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The Washington Post is planning to launch hundreds of live video shows hosted by reporters using webcams from their desks and a new version of the title’s existing video player.

The programmes will be developed to include live chats with story sources and commentators, and feature questions from readers about the topic being discussed, posted as a webchat around the video.

“We’re looking at this as an opportunity to conduct journalism in real-time,” Hal Straus, interactives and community editor for the Post, tells Beet.tv.

Full story at this link…

TheRecord.com: Blind journalism student takes on photography class

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From last month, but worth a read – the story of Ashley Welford-Costelloe, a blind journalism student at Conestoga College in Ontario, US, and her determination to complete the photography module of her course.

“It’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” says Welford-Costelloe, 23. “All I need help with is how to hold the camera. I just need someone to show me where to point the camera.”

She has an aide for that, provided by the college. The aide acts as Welford-Costelloe’s eyes, by telling her where the subject is in the frame. Then Welford-Costelloe pushes the button to shoot the picture.

Full story at this link…

Advertising Age: Calls for Facebook privacy regulation could hit publishers

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A US senator has written to the country’s Federal Trade Commission asking for the development of guidelines for how individual’s information on Facebook can be used.

The letter from Senator Charles Schumer follows Facebook’s launch of its Open Social Graph Platform – a series of new tools and functionality for the social network, including deeper links with third-party sites. The network’s new “like” feature, for example, has already been put into use by numerous news sites, including the Washington Post.

The flap couldn’t come at a worse time for online advertising, facing the very real prospect that it will be regulated in the form of privacy legislation that would require publishers, networks or marketers to receive specific consent to use consumer data for a variety of purposes on the web.

(…) Of course, Facebook needs to default to openness because that’s where the service derives its viral nature. The more that is shared, the faster the Facebook web grows.

Full story at this link…