FT.com has started embedding video footage in its news story pages (example here).
Prior to today’s launch of the smaller embedded player users were directed to a specific page for video content.
FT.com follows the BBC in embedding video in its news pieces and more widely across the site.It stared in March and soon after claimed the move had led to a doubling of views.
The Chicago Tribune is to follow the LA Times by culling newsroom jobs and reducing the number of pages in its printed editions.
Around 80 of its 578 newsroom posts are expected to be culled with further cuts appearing in non-journalistic positions.
The printed edition of the Tribune is expected to reduce the number of pages it publishes by 13 or 14 per cent each week.
Management began informing staff of the changes late on Tuesady, the Tribune itself reported.
This is the fourth round of staff cuts since 2005, when the paper had nearly 700 newsroom staff on its books. In real terms the paper expects to lose around 55 people as positions made vacant in recent months have remained unfilled.
Last week, The Los Angeles Times, another Tribune Company newspaper, announced that it would reduce the number of pages it published each week by 15 per cent anddo away with 250 staff roles, 150 of them from the newsroom.
Last week LA Times, one of the biggest employers of journalists in the US, announced that it would be dispensing with the services of 150 of them as part of a total 250 job losses at the paper.
Yesterday afternoon it emerged that two more journalists would likely be leaving the LA Times, but not as a direct result of the editorial cuts.
According to LA Observed, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber will be leaving the paper later in the summer to join the not-for-profit investigative start up ProPublica.
“It’s another big morale blow in the newsroom, which used to be a place where journalists aspired to reach and stay to do their best work. With new deep cutbacks coming and [LA Times owner] Sam Zell’s outbursts making many of the best journalists feel the Times’ commitment to serious news is precarious, it’s no longer surprising to see stars like Ornstein and Weber flee,” wrote Kevin Roderick.
Last week’s editorial staff cuts, which amounts to roughly 17 per cent of the employees, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ web operations.
Those cuts led to this fascinating quote from Times editor Russ Stanton:
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” he wrote said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
One hundred and fifty losses job losses against two hires doesn’t really make a great case for the internet as a growth medium for the employment of journalists, but nonetheless the growth of ProPublica and its journalistic modus operandi online marks a neat stab at Stanton’s paradox.
The ProPublica site will be fully operational later this year and plans to have almost 30 investigative reporters working on in-depth stories (it helps that self-made billionaire Herb Sandler has set up the site with a donation of $10m a year from his foundation and that it’s under the watchful eye of former WSJ editor Paul Steiger).
ProPublica will conduct investigations, largely online, in areas of significant public interest. It will also use TV documentaries to reveal on that large canvas issues that will be followed up extensively online.
It’s first major project, an investigation into US-backed Arabic language TV network Alhurra, ran on 60 Minutes two weeks ago.
Zell say that newspapers have to slim down and become more economically viable. Newspaper’s are about money, not news, that’s fairly self-evident. Little wonder then that Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber decided to walk and pursue their investigations elsewhere.
What awaits them at ProPublica?
A philanthropic backer claiming no editorial interference. No desire for profits. No ads on the site. Where almost all resources will be poured into journalism (what no free CD give away?).
The journalistic equivalent to Willy Wonka’s ‘golden ticket’, it seems.
For his latest Vanity Fair article, Believe me, it’s torture, Christopher Hitchens underwent a session of waterboarding to test whether it amounts to torture (hat tip Greenslade)
Here’s the video:
Here also is the video of a investigative reporter from Current TV’s vanguard journalism strand beating him to the punch by undergoing the procedure for a piece that ran on the peer-to-peer news network about eight months ago:
Gawker has cut the rate at which staff members get paid for the second quarter running.
Writers working for the blog get their salary paid according to traffic on the site.
According to Radar, at the start of the year those bloggers were getting $7.50 per 1000 page views that then went down to $6.50 for the next quarter and it is now $5.
Channel 4 is mulling over the a possible move into the gap in regional news broadcasting left by the retreat of ITV services.
The broadcaster is in discussion with Ofcom and ITV about investing funds in regional news services and infrastructure – a move which could strengthen its public service broadcasting hand.
Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:
Things we have already covered:
The shock of the new: