Category Archives: Editors’ pick

Ariel: BBC launches 2012 local reporter scheme

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The BBC this week launched its 2012 Community Reporters scheme, according to an article by in-house magazine Ariel, which will see the trainees ultimately get the chance to pitch an idea to BBC London.

According to the report the 18 trainees include “a minicab driver from Brick Lane, an artist from Hackney and a Marylebone youth worker”.

The new recruits, who are actively involved in their communities and have no paid broadcasting experience or qualifications, will get six days of advice from experts across the BBC, including the College of Production, CoJo and journalists at BBC London.

They will then pitch their ideas to the BBC London editorial team, who will choose which ones to develop for broadcast in a week of production in December.

BBC: Powerful audio slideshow shows photographer’s ‘baptism of fire’

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The BBC has produced a powerful audio slideshow which documents the experience of Press Association photographer Lewis Whyld when he reported on the riots in Tottenham on 6 August.

The slide show, displayed on the magazine section of the BBC News site, uses Whyld’s own images and audio accountof his “baptism of fire” in covering the riots.

He describes the scenes he witnessed and how he dealt with covering such a hostile environment, often using just his mobile phone to capture images.

Later this afternoon BBC Radio 4 will broadcast “Picture Power: Portraits of five leading photographers”, the second of five programmes looking at photographers who captured images of “the most dramatic events of the past year”.

Nieman: Zeega, ‘like Storify for multimedia’

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The Nieman Journalism Lab has a post on Zeega, a storytelling web app that it describes as “like Storify for multimedia”. The people behind Zeega, which is not yet public, describe it as a whole different medium rather than simply new software.

Nieman describes the concept:

The still-in-alpha software feels like Storify for multimedia: As you travel across the web, use a simple bookmarklet to collect media fragments — a Flickr image, a YouTube video, a track from the Free Music Archive — and dump it into a project bin. You can share your project bin and invite others to collaborate on the story. The editor interface is simple: Select a few seconds from a video, cut it with a few seconds of another video, drop in a music track, and suddenly you have a little story. You can even prompt the user to call a number or send a text message, delivering a surprising bit of audio in return. The output is pure HTML5, no Flash.

The post also has details on the team behind Zeega and how this summer there were awarded a $420,000 Knight News Challenge grant.

Co-founder Jesse Shapins tells Nieman how he feels hacks should seek to collaborate with hackers and how journalists should develop a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of specific technologies.

“I do think you should have a culture within journalism of creativity around interaction, around the ways in which code works, and what the code makes possible. That doesn’t mean making a journalist learn to write every single programming language that exists. If they’re able to have a rich understanding of the creative possibilities, they can creatively approach the projects that they create.”

There is more on how Zeega makes interactive storytelling simple here.

Reporters Without Borders urges Iraq authorities to reopen radio station

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Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders has urged authorities in Iraq to reconsider the closure of radio station Al-Sada, reportedly the only independent broadcaster in the Al-Qadisiya province.

At the weekend RSF reported that the station was closed down because of music “contrary to local morality”, but that the local branch of the Iraqi journalists’ union had warned that the decision “violated freedom of the press as guaranteed by the constitution”.

Its representative stressed that such a move was unprecedented in Iraqi justice and warned of the dangers that it might present for the media industry.

New York Times: Arab Spring reshapes market for TV news

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The New York Times published an interesting article yesterday (30 October) on potential changes facing the Arab television news market, looking at the impact of both the Arab Spring and the impending influx of new providers, national and local.

As author Eric Pfanner writes, the area is “poised for a shot of new competition” with two 24-hour news channels in the pipeline: Alarab from media company Rotana, to be run in partnership with Bloomberg and Sky Arabia, to be launched by BSkyB in spring next year.

As well as this, following the uprisings across the Arab world, the industry may start to see more local media and new channels opening up, he adds.

One reason that news providers like Al Jazeera attracted such a large following was that they were beyond the control of authoritarian regimes in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where governments kept the local media on a tight leash.

Now that those regimes have fallen, the local news media are moving toward greater openness, and new channels providing news and commentary on current events have sprung up.

This could eventually undermine the audience for so-called pan-Arab channels beamed in from outside via satellite, analysts say.

Read more on how the Arab Spring is reshaping the market for TV news.

 

Mashable: Five tools to better time your tweets

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If you are trying to work out the best time to tweet about a news story and get maximum attention, it is worth making a note of the free applications listed in this Mashable post on five tools to help you work out the best time to send out tweets.

The post has been written by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, an application which enables you to schedule tweets.

The five tools are:

1. WhenToTweet

2. TweetStats

3. Tweriod

4. TweetReports

5. TweetWhen

Add your Twitter handle to the various websites and the five tools will provide an interesting insight and help in your planning of social media optimisation (SMO) – (although we are not convinced 8am GMT on a Saturday is really the best time for @journalismnews to tweet).

 

PolitiFact and Poynter team up to create the PolitiFact Lab

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At the end of last week PolitiFact announced it had launched a partnership with the Poynter Institute to create the PolitiFact Lab: “an initiative that will oversee joint projects and educational programmes on fact-checking”.

According to a statement from PolitiFact the lab will promote best practice and carry out fact-checking research.

The partnership will be modelled after the success of joint programs that Poynter and PolitiFact created in 2010 for PolitiFact Florida, a unique partnership of the Times, the Miami Herald and other Florida newspapers. It was underwritten by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Collins Center for Public Policy and the Craigslist Charitable Fund.

Read more on how PolitiFact and the Poynter Institute have launched a partnership to create the PolitiFact Lab.

 

Guardian on using Gaddafi corpse images: ‘Complaints arrived within the hour’

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The use of the image of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse in coverage of his death caused much controversy earlier this month, as newsrooms across the country made decisions about which images to use and with what prominence. At the time newspapers and broadcasters swiftly sought to explain the reasoning for their decisions to their audience, with the BBC’s Steve Herrmann issuing a statement to say the BBC News site would be “working on ways to ensure that we can give appropriate warnings on our website when we think images from the news are especially disturbing”.

And the debate continues, with the Guardian’s readers’ editor Chris Elliot yesterday questioning the way in which the newspaper had used the images of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse after it emerged he had been killed.

In a column published yesterday Elliot revealed that almost 60 readers wrote to him or the letters page to complain about the use of the images “as gratuitous, exploitative or triumphalist” while others posted criticisms online.

Elliot concludes that while he agreed with the decision to publish at the time, he is now “less convinced” about the manner in which they were used.

The scale of the photo on the newspaper front page of 21 October and prominent picture use on the website took us too close to appearing to revel in the killing rather than reporting it. And that is something that should feature in our deliberations the next time – and there will be a next time – such a situation arises.

Interestingly he added that in 2006, when the Guardian published images of Saddam Hussein after being hanged, it received more than 200 complaints.

However the Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade does not agree with Elliot, arguing that “it was a valid journalistic response to this most extraordinary of news stories to publish the picture and to publish it big on the front page”.

It was news – gruesome, grisly, ghastly (choose your own shock adjective) news – and the images told a story of brutality and mob chaos that could not be explained in words alone.

Lost Remote: Q&A on Bloomberg TV’s new iPad app

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Lost Remote has an interview with global head of mobile at Bloomberg Oke Okaro on the TV channel’s new iPad app, which was released yesterday.

The free app allows any iPad user to stream Bloomberg TV’s full 24-hour broadcast over WiFi or 3G.

The post states:

Bloomberg’s decision to make their TV content available to any iPad user sets an extremely innovative precedent in a TV world dominated by [US cable television] network-MSO relationships.

Lost Remote goes on to explain:

While the app’s main focus is video, users can also get live market data and related news for companies mentioned in videos. You can customize Bloomberg’s familiar scrolling ticker.

Other added features include the ability to watch in landscape or portrait, download videos for offline viewing, search the content library, schedule reminders for upcoming shows, and share via social networks.

 

HoldtheFrontPage: Southern Daily Echo wins regional Newspaper of the Year award

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Southampton paper the Southern Daily Echo took home the Daily Newspaper of the Year award from last night’s 2011 EDF Energy London and South of England Media Awards, HoldtheFrontPage reports.

The Newsquest-owned Echo took home three awards, but Johnston Press daily the News, based in Portsmouth, took away the most prizes, scooping four on the night.

HoldtheFrontPage has the full list of winners named at the ceremony at Lord’s Cricket Ground, as listed below:

Newcomer of the Year: Nikki Jarvis, Croydon Advertiser

Environmental Journalist of the Year: Charlotte Wilkins, ITV Meridian

Business Journalist of the Year: Emma Judd, The News, Portsmouth

News Photographer of the Year: Terry Applin, The Argus

Sports Journalist of the Year: Jordan Cross, The News, Portsmouth

Feature Writer of the Year: Sarah Foster, The News, Portsmouth

Columnist of the Year: Louise Ford, Kent and Sussex Courier

Designer of the Year: Graeme Windell, The News, Portsmouth

Radio Journalist of the Year: Julia George, BBC Radio Kent

Television Journalist of the Year: Andrew Pate, ITV Meridian

Weekly Print Journalist of the Year: Gareth Davies, Croydon Advertiser

Daily Print Journalist of the Year: Jenny Makin, Southern Daily Echo

Website of the Year: Getreading.co.uk

Community Campaign of the Year: Southern Daily Echo – Have a Heart

Front Page of the Year: Faversham News – Murdered teenager discovered by side of road

Radio news or current affairs programme of the year: Breakfast Show, BBC Radio Kent

Television news or current affairs programme of the year: ITV Meridian – Turner Contemporary Opens.

Free Weekly Newspaper of the Year: The Wokingham Times

Paid for Weekly Newspaper of the Year: Kent and Sussex Courier

Daily Newspaper of the Year: Southern Daily Echo