Author Archives: Joel Gunter

About Joel Gunter

Joel Gunter is a senior reporter at Journalism.co.uk.

‘They provide the key for the map’: In defence of editors everywhere

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First, we heard about the death of the sub-editor. The sub-editor, they said, is expendable. Next, from Johnston Press, came the death of the editor. Don’t bother reading what you publish, JP told editors.

Apparently, editing has fallen so far out of favour that a piece on the Atlantic’s website by Alexis Madrigal is entitled “Why editing could make a comeback.”

But the piece, along with a recent essay by Paul Ford which it cites, speaks out for the value of editors everywhere, “those whose names do not appear underneath the headline”.

Here’s my analogy. We take good roads for granted in the US; our highway system just works, so you start to think of it almost as geology, almost immutable and close to eternal. But if you take a drive on the backroads of the Yucatan, the forest encroaches, large potholes appear out of nowhere, and the signage is indecipherable, regardless of your level of Spanish.

The Internet can feel like a jungle, and journalists are in the business of providing paths through the territory. Writers might blaze the trails, but editors maintain the roads. The vines are creeping and the potholes are growing. And maybe letting the road deteriorate is really the only way to make audiences and media companies realize the value of those whose names do not appear underneath the headline.

Full post at this link…

Canadian newspaper publisher reports print growth, digital shrinkage

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The New York Times yesterday reported that growth in digital advertising had offset a decline in print ad revenue. Which seems to make sense in 2010. But interestingly Canwest, publisher of the largest chain of English-language dailies in Canada, reported the same day that growth in print advertising had offset a decline in digital media revenue. So much so that the publisher grew overall revenue on the strength of the print ad money.

Parent company Postmedia Network Inc., which bought Canwest earlier this month, reported a one per cent increase in overall revenue despite a 16 per cent decrease in digital media.

Full story at this link…

#followjourn: @heidiblake – news reporter

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#followjourn: Heidi Blake

Who? News reporter for the Daily Telegraph

Where? Blake joined the Telegraph in 2009, before which she had stints with the Press Association and the Yorkshire Post. Her Telegraph articles are collected at this a link. In 2007 Blake was named Journalist of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards. Her contributions to University of York student website Nouse are collected at this link.

Contact? @heidiblake

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 laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Online journalism: A return to long-form?

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Nieman Journalism Lab’s Megan Garber has a good post up about Slate and its dedication to long-form journalism, a dying art in the world of blogs and aggregators and online news consumption analysis.

Slate editor David Plotz launched the Fresca Initiative last year, designed to give reporters the opportunity to produce long-form work on subjects of their choice. Under the scheme, staff can take four to six weeks off their normal jobs to produce more in-depth stuff.

The result? Not only a handful of very good (and, at as many as tens of thousands of words, very long) articles but serious traffic to the site too. For the tens of thousands of words there have been millions of page views.

For Plotz, the form is about “building the brand of Slate as a place you go for excellent journalism”. It is not about “building Slate into a magazine that has 100 million readers,” but making sure they have “two million or five million or eight million of the right readers”.

Anybody trying to monetise online content at the moment knows about the right readers, and about their value to advertisers.

So here’s to the idea that ten thousand word articles and are not anathema to online audiences, and to the idea that giving your staff six weeks off to write them isn’t anathema to making money from online content.

And, most of all, here’s to the idea that my boss thinks so too.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Full Nieman post at this link…

The Wire: Newsweek’s Tumblr editor is off to Tumblr

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Mark Coatney, an online editor at Newsweek largely responsible for building up and running the magazine’s Tumblr blog, announced recently on his own Tumblr blog that he would be leaving for Tumblr.

[I]t’s a big loss for Newsweek given that he’s sort of become the public editorial face of the magazine as it continues to navigate a closely-watched sale from the Washington Post Co. (And also given that he was supposed to be one of the 10 staffers that can help save it! Another from that bunch, entertainment reporter Ramin Setoodeh, left for People at the end of June.)

Full story at this link…

Should newspapers publish full interview transcripts online?

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Washington Post economic and domestic policy blogger Ezra Klein has called for newspapers to make full interview transcripts available online, where there are not the traditional space restrictions of a print edition.

Klein cites last week’s New York Times article on Paul Volcker, which is “clearly and proudly set around a wide-ranging, on-the-record interview with Volcker himself”:

But that interview, aside from a few isolated quotes, is nowhere to be found. This is a baffling waste of good information. Reporters are endlessly interviewing newsmakers and then using, at most, a handful of lines out of thousands of words. The paper, of course, may not have room for thousands of words of interview transcripts, but the web certainly does.

Klein’s comments echo those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who criticised the media on Friday for not making use of the huge amount of space available online to make primary source material more readily available.

The main issue for Klein, like Assange, seems to be one of transparency, especially for the interviewee:

It’s safer to have your full comments, and the questions that led to them, out in the open, rather than just the lines the author thought interesting enough to include in the article.

“And for the institution itself,” writes Klein, “it’s a no-brainer. You get a lot more inward links if you provide enough transcript that every niche media site can find something to point their readers toward.”

But news organisations considering such a move would have to weigh any potential increase in traffic – and any respect garnered by increased openness – with what is surely, for most, an unwelcome level of transparency. To say nothing of having to transcribe the hours and hours of interviews conducted by a newspaper such as the New York Times.

It is an interesting question for online journalism nonetheless. With programmes like the Open Government Data Initiative tipping more and more raw materials into the internet, will news organisations benefit overall from taking the same open approach?

Read Ezra Klein’s post here.

#followjourn: @marcreeves – editor

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#followjourn: @marcreeves

Who? Marc Reeves

Where? Marc is editor of theBusinessDesk.com West Midlands. He previously worked for a number of local newspaper companies including CN Group, Trinity Mirror, and BPM Media, and was editor of the Birmingham Post for more than three years. Marc is currently managing director of Reeves Associates. More information is available about his career on his LinkedIn page.

Contact? @marcreeves

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.

Journalism Online paid content system gets first user with obits paywall

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Paid content system Journalism Online has its first user, reports Poynter. Lancaster Online, website for the Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era titles in the US, will use the micropayments platform to paywall its obituaries from today.

Readers outside of Lancaster County will be free to view up to seven obits, after which they will have to pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

Journalism Online was set up by former US newspaper executives Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery in June last year and received investment from News Corp last month.

Lancaster Online’s obituary pay scheme would “not amount to enough to reverse the fortunes of our newsroom, in and of itself”, admits the site’s editor of content development Ernie Schreiber. “But it might be a model for the next steps in how we meter other content (…) And it might pay for a few reporters.”

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell criticises certain elements of the move, including the fact that Lancaster Online is simply moving established content behind a paywall and not offering anything new to incentivise would-be customers:

One area where Lancaster falls short: providing customers with significant new value to persuade them to spend money today for something they got yesterday for free. How many more obit subscriptions might LancasterOnline sell, in other words, if it were to bundle customized obit newsletters as part of its monthly or annual fee?

Research suggests however that there is a healthy market for obituaries within the Lancaster Online readership. According to Schreiber, more than five per cent of the 47.4 million pages viewed the previous year were obituaries, and 100,000 readers outside of the county accessed an obituary page over that year.

Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz said Lancaster’s launch of the Journalism Online system will be followed by “many other launches over the summer”.

He claimed that the most popular “will be metered access to a website as a whole rather than a focus on a particular area of content”.

Full story at this link…

‘A real free press for the first time in history’: WikiLeaks editor speaks out in London

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Julian Assange, editor of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has criticised mainstream media for not making proper use of “primary resources” and claimed that the site has created “a real free press (…) for the first time in history”.

Speaking at the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School at City University London on Friday, Assange accused the media of failing to consult important evidence in its reporting of a 2007 US Air Force strike that killed two Reuters news service employees and several Iraqi civilians.

The attack became infamous after a video of the event was leaked through WikiLeaks, entitled Collateral Murder. The footage was recorded by one of two Apache helicopters involved in the attack.

Showing an alleged copy of the US Military’s 2007 rules of engagement hosted on WikiLeaks, Assange said: “We had the raw ingredients you needed to decide right there. Why didn’t they use them?

“No one can be bothered to look up the term ‘positive identification’ to see what it actually is.”

Assange argues that it is clear from the document that the Apache pilot broke the rules of engagement. He said journalism needed to work towards making more primary source material such as this available online, arguing that this was the standard process for scientific investigations and that it should be the same for journalism.

You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results, that should be the standard in journalism.

You can’t do it in newspapers because there isn’t enough space, but now with the internet there is.

Last week, Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, who is accused of leaking the video along with tens of thousands of classified State Department cables, was charged by the U.S. Army with mishandling and transferring classified information. Assange will not attempt to enter the US for fear he might be subject to a subpoena concerning Manning’s leaks.

Citing another of the site’s leaks, concerning Carribean tax haven the Turks and Caicos islands, Assange praised the anti-corruption reporting of online-only, local news outlet the Turks and Caicos Journal, which he said was hounded out of several countries after law firms threatened its internet service providers (ISPs).

Warning of a new “privatised censorship”, he said that the Journal’s Googlemail account had been subpoened under US law and that Google agreed to surrender details of the news outlet’s account, at which point WikiLeaks stepped in to provide a defence attorney.

He heavily criticised the search engine company for its behaviour in the TCI Journal case, and challenged the actions of ISPs in India, Japan and the US for allegedly agreeing to cut the Journal’s internet access rather than risk incurring legal costs. According to Assange, Googlemail is a completely insecure way of storing information. He claimed that the Guardian had recently transferred all of its internal email over to the Google service.

Alongside the TCI Journal there was praise reserved for Time magazine for publishing an extensive investigation into the Church of Scientology and defending its investigation at a cost of millions dollars, but with potential costs so high, Assange asked, “what are the incentives for publishers?” WikiLeaks were themselves threatened with legal action by the Church after publishing secret documents relating to its “Operating Thetan Level” practices. We recommend the site of our partners – myworldescorts.com . A very useful resource. The whistleblowing site responded by saying “in response to the attempted suppression, WikiLeaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week.”

Asked about WikiLeaks’ funding, he said the site has so far raised $1 million dollars in donations but revealed it had had an application for a $650,000 grant rejected by the 2009 Knight News Foundation, despite being “the highest-rated applicant out of 3,000”, and heavily implied it was a politically-motivated decision.

Earlier this year, WikiLeaks put forward a proposal in conjunction with Icelandic MPs to create a safe-haven for publishers – and their servers – in the country. Last month the proposal, known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), was passed by parliament and will change Icelandic law, aiming to increase the protection afforded journalists, sources and leakers.

Image courtesy of Cirt on Wikimedia Commons

Texas newspaper posts video of photographer’s run-in with BP and police

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A short update to a post from earlier in the week about the case of Lance Rosenfield, a freelance photographer detained in Texas by police, a BP security officer and the city’s police department liaison to the Joint Terrorism Task force.

Rosenfield had been taking photographs of a sign outside BP refinery in Texas City for non-profit news organisation ProPublica and had remained on a public right of way.

Texas newspaper the Daily News has posted three dashboard-camera videos of the exchange between the police and Rosenfield. The News also details the laws under which Rosenfield was asked to reveal his images to police and give his name, phone number and social security number.

The audio in these videos is poor due to wind, but they show a relatively relaxed situation in which police try to determine that Rosenfield has no suspicious motive for photographing an oil refinery.

Full post at this link…