Chilling reports from Russia this week about the defamation trial of Mikhail Beketov, a former chief editor of Khimkinskaya Pravda. Beketov is being sued by the mayor of Khimki. In 2008 he was beaten so badly by unidentified assailants following publication of reports challenging Khimki authorities that he must travel to court by ambulance, reports Radio Free Europe.
More details of Beketov’s case are reported by The Moscow News.
Kigali-based blogger Graham Holliday reacts to this week’s release of the 2010 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Rwanda fell 12 places from its ranking in 2009 to 169th out of 178 countries.
The reasons behind its position are not all warranted, he says:
There are problems with the Rwandan press. Media emanating from Rwanda is almost universally uncritical of power, while the blogs and commentators outside the country are almost universally critical of power. The reality is that things are not all bad and they’re not all good. In that respect, Rwanda is just like anywhere else.
Self-censorship is probably the biggest and most unquantifiable problem here, which relates directly to a key question, especially for foreign correspondents – how do you write about this country and manage to remain fair and balanced?
News Corp has abandoned its plan for a news aggregator, dubbed Project Alesia, which would have brought together content from News International titles and external publishers and broadcasters, Campaign reports.
It is believed that News Corp’s decision not to take the product to market is related to concerns over running costs. Speculation that third-parties were resisting invitations to jump aboard were unfounded, according to a source.
Full story on Campaign at this link…
The project has reportedly been in development for 12 months at an estimated cost of £20 million – Media Week’s Arif Durrani has the full story on why the aggregator has failed to launch.
Video publishing platform Ooyala is using PayPal to create a paywall option for clients. The Ooyala Paywall will make it easier for publishers to earn revenue from live and on-demand videos on their sites, says the firm.
Jay Rosen on how to start innovating with news and news journalism by thinking big:
Here’s a little idea for creating innovation in news coverage: the 100 per cent solution. It works like this: first, you set a goal to cover 100 percent of… well, of something. In trying to reach the goal you immediately run into problems. To solve those problems you often have to improvise or innovate. And that’s the payoff, even if you don’t meet your goal.
Got it? Good. For that’s the whole idea.
In the rest of this post I will explain what I mean and why I think it can work. And I will give you some examples. Because the 100 per cent solution is not an entirely new idea. It has been tried. My aim is to get some of you to try it in some form.
Former digital director at Guardian News and Media Emily Bell gives some great answers to questions from students at Columbia University, where she is now director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
The video is available at this link (no embed available unfortunately) and features answers on paying for news online (“Charging for news is incredibly expensive”) and journalists’ need for business savvy (“Every reporter should understand what the options are as to how you tell a story and how much do those options cost”).
Last night Bell helped to officially open the Tow Center with a speech that is well worth reading in full and is available on her blog.
Online journalism needs to be “of the web” not “for the web; journalism in the future must have a better understanding of the processes and business underwriting it and journalists must build relevancy and trust, she says.
In rebuilding – or rebooting – journalism, digital technologies are central to the solution, and not as many would have them, the source of the problem.As journalists, facing our own “Wapping moment”, we must examine some of the foundation stones of journalism and build better. We can acknowledge and perpetuate what is good about the best of our craft, but there is in truth so much opportunity to improve. We do not want to sustain parts of the business that need not a new model, but a sledgehammer. When we rebuild journalism we want it to be a more diverse and inclusive than the parts of the profession we have all at some point worked for. A rebuilt journalism has to hold power to account, but be accountable and transparent itself.
Rebuilt journalism has to be sustainable and not carry with it the extraordinary and untenable fixed costs of the past. It has to understand how to uphold free speech and tell stories in a world where protecting sources is evermore complicated. Rebuilt journalism has to use new ways to re-engage a generation alienated by old formats and for who screen-based portable devices bring the world to them. It has to live in a world of scarcer resource by understanding how to create production efficiencies, and measuring and understanding the impact of its output.
Reed Business Information (RBI) is hosting an event for journalists and programmers interested in working together on data visualisation. The one-day “hack day”, which will take place on 29 November, will be run with the help of data scraping project ScraperWiki.
Speaking on the ScraperWiki blog, Karl Schneider, editorial development director at RBI, explains the thinking behind the event:
Data journalism is an important area of development for our editorial teams in RBI
It’s a hot topic for all journalists, but it’s particularly relevant in the B2B sector. B2B journalism is focused on delivering information that it’s audience can act on, supporting important business decisions.
Often a well-thought-out visualisation of data can be the most effective way of delivering critical information and helping users to understand key trends.
We’re already having some successes with this kind of journalism, and we think we can do a lot more. So building up the skills of our editorial teams in this area is very important.
You can register for the event at this link.
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For the week ending Sunday 17 October:
Carl Markham – 13 articles (The Independent), Martin Fletcher – 11 articles (The Times), Fiona Govan – 10 articles (The Telegraph), Rory Carroll – 9 articles (The Guardian), Jude Webber – 9 articles (Financial Times), Guy Adams – 5 articles (The Independent)
A chilling tale of the murder of a journalist and the political silence that followed: the BBC carries a report on the unsolved killing of Sri Lankan journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan 10 years ago.
Nimalarajan, who was working for the BBC covering the Sri Lankan separatist war, was murdered by unidentified gunmen on 19 October 2000.
His father has expressed anger at silence over the case from the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP), a militant group that is now a political party.
Media watchdogs also accused the EPDP, headed by Minister Douglas Devananda, of being responsible for the killing to stop similar reports and to intimidate local journalists. He has always denied the allegations.
Newspaper Innovation looks at the Independent’s plans to launch a new 20p daily newspaper and considers its sources of inspiration, including Portuguese newspaper i (as mentioned by Journalism.co.uk on Monday).
This paper was launched in May 2009 with a print run of 100,000. Cover price was €1 – so more expensive than the Independent’s ‘i’ and also with more pages. The paper is published by Sojormedia Capital, owned by the Lena Group.
Since launch, however, the paper got in serious troubles, as the public demand for the paper was less than expected. Editor Martim Avillez Figuereido left the paper after disagreements with the management.
The post also considers the fortunes of similar “lite” newspapers, such as Welt Kompakt, Chicago’s RedEye and Red Streak – and suggests that the Independent’s plans might not be plain sailing.