The Association of Online Publishers’ summit isn’t the only conference happening today: Cardiff University’s journalism school is hosting Tomorrow’s Journalists.
The line-up includes: Peter Barron, formerly of Newsnight now with Google; Sky News’ Simon Bucks; and Guardian Cardiff’s Hannah Waldram.
There’s some footage of the day’s event via the university’s website, but you can follow tweets from the day in the liveblog at this link.
Journalism.co.uk reporter Rachel McAthy is on the ground at the AOP’s annual summit. A full programme for the event can be found at this link, but you can follow all the tweeted action in the liveblog courtesy of the #aopsummit hashtag.
Tweets from Journalism.co.uk can be found on @journalism_live.
Speakers include: James Bromley from Mail Online; Matt Brittin from Google; Mark Wood from Future; and Tim Brooks from Guardian News & Media.
There’s just one week to go before media140’s event on data and how journalists and media can make better use of it. Featuring the Guardian’s news editor for data Simon Rogers and Information is Beautiful author David McCandless, the event will discuss the commercial, ethical and technological issues of making data work for you.
Rufus Pollock, director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Andrew Lyons, commercial director of UltraKnowledge will also be speaking. Full details are available at this link.
Journalism.co.uk is proud to be a media partner for media140 dataconomy. Readers of Journalism.co.uk can sign-up for tickets to the event at this link using the promotional code “journalist”. Tickets are currently available for £25, which includes drinks.
The event on Thursday 21 October will be held at the HUB, King’s Cross, from 6:30-9:30pm.
Former Guardian News & Media director of digital content, Emily Bell, is answering questions from the public on the future of the news industry in her new role as director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Questions can be submitted to Bell via the Columbia University Facebook page. The deadline for submissions is 12pm EST tomorrow (Tuesday 12) and her answers will be presented in a video interview to be posted a week later, on the day of the official Tow Center launch (19 October).
The tabloid press is adopting increasingly ‘murky newsgathering’ tactics according to a documentary maker who exposed UK tabloids for publishing false celebrity stories.
Speaking at a Media Society debate on Wednesday night, ‘Starsuckers’ director Chris Atkins called for better self-regulation among British newspapers and accused them of colluding to keep the public ignorant of media malpractice.
“When pharmaceuticals and the police are up to no good, everyone reports it. But when journalists are up to no good, no one reports it,” he said.
Atkins focused his criticism on the News of the World after it attempted to stop the release of his film, which showed one of the newspaper’s journalists taking details of a false story.
“They will fight privacy laws and restrictions, but when you criticise them, they will do everything to shut you down.”
In the course of making the Starsuckers documentary, Atkins’ team planted a fake story about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching fire.
“It’s the same journalists who write about Amy Winehouse’s hair [catching fire] who then write something about global warming,” he said.
He added that a tabloid tendency to promote showbiz reporters to senior editorial positions took the problem beyond celebrity gossip stories. “Why do [the Sun’s] Bizarre reporters get to be editors? They don’t check facts, and then you have the Sun saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” he said.
But former editor of the People Bill Hagerty defended tabloid behaviour:
“I disagree that people lie about news across all areas. I reject the thought that many journalists start out to falsify news. It’s a few bad apples, and it’s not huge.”
Hagerty also held the online ‘welter of media’ responsible for falling standards in print journalism, but maintained that false reporting was not a widespread practice:
“It’s true that reporters don’t go out any more, and news is often web driven. The press is in very bad shape, but it isn’t driven by people who want to make up stories.”
Related reading on Journalism.co.uk:
Documentary’s legal battles reveal ugly truth about UK media culture
Former News of the World journalist defends phone-hacking at lively debate
Google wouldn’t be drawn today on rumoured plans for Newspass – a reported micropayment system that could be used by publishers and news websites.
Answering questions at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, Madhav Chinnappa, Google’s recently appointed strategic partner development manager, would only say that the search company is continuing to talk to publishers about their strategies.
There’s a myth in the industry that having paid content means you’re out of Google. [But] there’s lots of stuff there that allows control at a publisher level to allow them to do what they want.
When asked by Journalism.co.uk what accessibility publishers behind a paywall would have to Google’s tools (Chinnappa had showcased Fast Flip, Living Stories and YouTube direct), he said that publishers had to realise the levels of information required by tools such as map and the “quid pro quo” arrangement that means they get to use them for free. Google technologies, such as FastFlip, are opt in, he stressed.
Related reading:
#WEFHamburg: Invest in a more human side, Zeit Online editor tells Google
More from Journalism.co.uk:
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An open and up-front session to close the 2010 World Editors Forum, with publishers discussing their hyperlocal web projects: the successes, the failures and the lessons.
And that’s just how Bart Brouwers, managing editor for hyperlocal online at Telegraaf Media Group, likes it. Browers, who is responsible for de Telegraaf’s four hyperlocal pilot sites in the Netherlands, urged editors and journalists to be open about their work, to discuss what they’re doing with their projects and ask for feedback without fear of sharing ideas with “competitors”: “The more I tell, the more I get back.”
De Telegraaf is trialling a range of sites: two aggregation websites, one a mix of editorial and commerical content and another community news site. The newspaper group isn’t just approaching hyperlocal as a something that fits into one definition and format: “What’s hyperlocal to me, might not be hyperlocal to my neighbour.”
Brouwers gave some practical advice for publishers planning to launch community sites and his full slides can be seen below. Perhaps most important, he said, is keeping things personal. If you want to reach a specific local audience, you need to be hyperpersonal and hypersocial too.
On the other side of the coin was fellow Brouwers’ fellow speaker Roman Gallo – five days out of his role as CEO of PPF Media, which launched the Nase Adresa hyperlocal project last year. Nase Adresa, after an initial pilot, had been given the green light for a combination 1,000 websites, 89 news cafes and 150 weekly newspapers.
But in August it was announced that Nase Adresa would shut, despite its promise. Gallo was given the order to close everything to do with project in four days. (More on this from Journalism.co.uk soon).
Gallo could however share some of the learnings from the short-lived, but seemingly successful hyperlocal venture:
RSS feed for all Journalism.co.uk WEF coverage
There has been plenty of discussion about moving digital journalism forward at the World Editors Forum this week, and the first panel debate today looked at the state of new media training and how editors can improve the teaching of their staff to enable full exploitation of the new media environment.
Announcing the results of a survey mainly of North American journalists by the Poynter Institute’s News University, Howard Finberg told the conference that while reporters felt more proficient in multimedia than five years ago they need to be motivated to learn.
The number one motivator for success is “I need to learn”. You need to tell staff there is a reason why you’re getting the training, it’s because we need to move the organisation from here to here. Give them the reasons to learn, give them the background.
He added that “training cannot stop”.
We do not have the luxury of declaring victory and moving on, this is not mission accomplished. What your staff are telling us is that they need direction, they need goals.
Up next was Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists. In her speech she gave four recommendations to editors in summary below:
She echoed Finberg in saying that media training is “a moving target”.
You can feel that you’ve learned the tools to get by today, but there are new tools coming out tomorrow. Journalism can be enhanced in this technological area and we can be better journalists if we embrace the new tools and new partnerships.
Finally the conference heard from Tarek Atia, media training manager for the Media Development Programme in Egypt which organises donor programs which have helped to train more than 4000 journalists in four years.
His lessons to trainers were:
RSS feed for full WEF coverage from Journalism.co.uk
Yesterday at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Washington Post, told Journalism.co.uk that the Post was not ruling out its own paid-content model.
The quality of the content we produce needs to be well funded, and one of the ways could be to make users pay for it, not all of it. I am not a big believer of putting everything behind a paywall. I am a big believer in saying we should monetise.
More power to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in figuring out and if they do we would be happy to look at that. We may find our own way.
You can read the full interview with Narisetti at this link and below are all the stories from the WEF meeting on Journalism.co.uk:
For a digested round-up of the conference subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes.
“Think of a number, quarter it, and you’re still not there.”
This was Annemarie Kirk’s answer when asked what her budget was for developing Danish newspaper Berlingske‘s first iPad app to be launched later this month, which she showcased yesterday at the World Editors Forum in Hamburg.
A shoestring budget and a small team were both necessities in developing the business news app and driving forces behind it. Find talented people in your newsroom, young people who will see things differently and get them to work on it, said Kirk. Don’t overlook existing skills though: much of the design for the new app was done by a newspaper designer from Berlingske’s print edition who had never even worked on design for the website. He was set to work on the iPad app though, alongside an external web designer brought in for the project.
The application, which is awaiting approval by Apple, will combine content from the print and online editions of the business section through a semi-automated process, said Kirk. Concept design and project management were carried out in Denmark and technological development in Kiev, Ukraine following a study into what applications and devices Berlingske should be launching onto, that began back in March.
It’s clear from the development that has taken place this has been a tightly managed project, but Kirk said there has been a real need to get onto the iPad, despite the device not being on sale in Denmark, as traffic stats show a significant growth in the number of users accessing the Berlingske website via an iPad.
Fellow panellist at the WEF event, Alfredo Triviño, who as director of creative projects at News International has overseen many of the publisher’s iPhone and iPad application developments, said the success of building apps for “liquid media” devices relies on understanding the technological boundaries.
“Tablets are not websites, they’re not newspapers, magazines or books. Not all of our content we produce is consumed. (…) probably we need tablet newspapers,” he said.
“Loading time is critical and progressive downloading is a must (…) Success also grows from envisioning what is next.”
When developing apps for tablet devices, news organisations must look out how these apps will scale and be iterated.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk after the debate, he said news organisations will have to reassess their plans when the next wave of technology comes to tablet devices, including built-in cameras and better integration with social media. Hear more of what he had to say in our WEF podcast at this link.
Speaking more generally, president of media for Thomson Reuters, Chris Ahearn, said that “whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone or a device we haven’t seen yet” news organisations have to embrace change. As an industry they must “lean into the wind together” and, to make these new apps part of a successful business model to support journalism, “collectively rise”.
When designing apps or tablet propositions, news organisations must look at what their readers and consumers want and need, and build a subscriber base, he said.
How can we add unique value to each subscriber? The answer for us is not always more content. It has to include more services. We have to embrace the technological advances to build compelling user experiences. We have to put that content into context and develop a loyal customer base.
