The Chicago Tribune and Tribune Co.’s other US newspaper titles will run a week-long experiment starting from next Monday by using as little Associated Press (AP) content as possible.
The trial is part of review into costs and follows the Tribune’s warning to the agency last year that it might drop the service.
Last year a group of newspapers in Ohio forged an alliance (the Ohio News Organisation or OHNO) to share their top stories in a move against AP copy.
[Update from the AP: The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, has now waived the flogging sentence, ‘the second such pardoning of such a high profile case by the monarch in recent years’. Full article at this link…]
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has released a statement condemning the sentence of 60 lashes passed by a judge in Jeddah, on journalist Rozanna al-Yami, ‘because she worked for the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation (LBC), a satellite TV station that shocked conservative Saudis last July by broadcasting an interview with a Saudi man talking openly about his sex life’.
It is understood that the judge dropped the charges that she had directly worked on the programme, but imposed a sentence nonetheless.
A new ‘microformat’ for metadata in news stories is fast nearing a stage of ‘widespread adoption’. The ‘hNews’ system will attach information about the author of the story, where it was published and where it was written, to every news story.
Media Standards Trust director Martin Moore updates on the latest hNews developments today: AOL and TownNews should be coming on board soon, to join the Associated Press which signed up in July.
“Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the internet. Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org. This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption.”
More to follow from Journalism.co.uk next week.
Ah, Nieman Journalism Lab, how we love your full transcripts and audio.
Publishers must take back control of their content from search engines, aggregators and bloggers, which have become the ‘preferred customer destinations for breaking news’, the Associated Press (AP) president and chief executive Tom Curley told an industry summit in Beijing last week.
But as Nieman Journalism Lab reported on Friday, Curley was ‘far more revealing’ when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
NJL is kindly sharing the audio and transcript.
Publishers must take back control of their content from search engines, aggregators and bloggers, which have become the ‘preferred customer destinations for breaking news’, the Associated Press’ (AP) Tom Curley has said at an industry summit in Beijing.
“We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost – to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it,” Curley said (though slightly strangely citing Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook as key examples of threats).
Speaking separately at the event, News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said ‘the aggregators and plagiarists’ would soon have to pay the price for using publishers’ content for free.
If publishers and news organisations don’t regain control they will pay ‘the ultimate price’ and it will be ‘the kleptomaniacs who triumph’, he added.
Earlier this week the Associated Press (AP) said it is considering whether it could sell news items to online clients for a short, exclusive period.
The agency is also developing a new system for tracking its content online and monitoring copyright infringements.
The Associated Press (AP) is considering whether it could sell news items to online clients for a short, exclusive period.
Stories could be sold to web outlets half-an-hour ahead of other customers, Tom Curley, AP chief executive, suggested at an industry event.
‘Premium priced information on certain topics’ and associated metadata and multimedia could be sold ahead of more general release, he explained.
Curley’s comments came in reaction to publishers’ ongoing concerns about the use of the content by search engines and aggregators.
The agency is also developing a new system for tracking its content online and monitoring copyright infringements.
At the time of writing, this is still live – a published Associated Press story that looks rather more like an internal memo. ‘OK, can you do some more probing?’ is quite an unusual intro.
It can be seen on Google hosted news (published 19 hours ago) and Forbes.com. Twitter users have spotted but the AP hasn’t removed it yet – maybe it’s playing it cool. NB: Google’s SideWiki can be put to good use here, if you feel inclined to point out the error…
An update on Journalism Online, the venture started by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery with the aim of helping news organisations charge for content.
Stephen Farrell, a British-Irish journalist working for the New York Times, was rescued from Taliban captivity on Wednesday morning, according to global news reports.
His Afghan interpreter, Sultan Munadi, was killed during the operation, the Telegraph reports.
According to as yet unconfirmed reports by the Associated Press, a British commando was also killed during the raid.
“Military officials in Kabul told the Associated Press a British soldier was killed in the raid. The Ministry of Defence was unable to confirm the reports this morning.”
Rivals currently claim to both be on track for victory in the Afghan elections, in a race watched closely by the world’s media – mainstream, citizen and social.
The Guardian, for example, reports that ‘President Karzai’s staff said he has taken a majority of votes, making a second round run-off unnecessary,’ while Abdullah’s spokesman, Sayyid Agha Hussain Fazel Sancharaki, said the former foreign minister ‘was ahead with 62 per cent of the vote,’ even though preliminary results are not yet expected.
But publicity hasn’t always been courted by the government: critics the world over were shocked by the Afghan foreign ministry’s demand for a media blackout. On Wednesday, the government ordered all journalists not to report acts of violence during its elections, as a last minute attempt to boost voter turn out.
Both the foreign and domestic media said they intended to ignore the ban. Rahimullah Samander, head of the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan said that they would ‘not obey this order’. “We are going to continue with our normal reporting and broadcasting of news,” he told the Associated Press.
Both domestic and foreign reporters turned out in force to cover yesterday’s election. Although the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that there have been reports of at least three foreign journalists and several local journalists detained and other acts of aggression towards the media, it is believed that no one was seriously injured.
As with the Iranian election protests, yesterday highlighted the pivotal role social media and citizen journalists now play within mainstream news. Here are a few examples: