Tag Archives: Congress

NUJ release video showing police treatment of journalists

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As reported in Press Gazette, the NUJ’s General Secretary, Jeremy Dear, used his appearance on Monday at the the TUC Congress Conference 2008 to call for a motion against the erosion of journalists’ civil liberties and media freedom in Britain.

In a follow-up, the NUJ yesterday released this video, ‘Press Freedom: Collateral Damage’ by Jason N Parkinson : nine minutes of film documenting the treatment of journalists by police.

The film highlights a number of incidents in which the NUJ feel the police unnecessarily obstructed reporters and photographers.

The NUJ motion identified the cases of Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have both risked jail because of the legal requirement to reveal confidential information from sources. In his speech to the Congress, Dear also referred to Sally Murrer, a journalist who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source.

“Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance,” Jeremy Dear said in the NUJ’s statement.  “Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown,” he said.

Members of the TUC conference unanimously backed the NUJ’s motion on Monday. The NUJ statement, with more excerpts from Dear’s speech, can be read here.

WAN 2008: Sweden claims highest share of advertising spend online

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According to Tomas Brunegård, chairman of the Swedish Newspaper Publishers Association, Sweden is enjoying an online advertising market of 15 per cent of overall spend – the “highest percentage in the world” (do you know better?)

Despite its small population, Sweden has a healthy and innovative news publishing industry, online and in print. Hear more from Tomas in his speech during the opening ceremony of the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Gothenberg, Sweden today:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB0PX9zcSkU]

WAN 2008: The imminent demise of print is “sheer nonsense’

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Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, nailed his colours firmly to the print mast in his speech at the opening ceremony of the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden:

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=MevSx1EpRj0]

WAN 2008: Web TV Q&A with Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief Aftonbladet.se

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Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.

In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.

Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.

Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.

The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.

So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.

The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.

And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.

For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.

Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.

What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.

One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.

We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.

As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.

We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.

WAN 2008: ‘Newspaper phone’ launch to build audience awareness of mobile services + barriers to development of newspaper’s mobile platforms

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The launch of the world’s first ‘newspaper’ telephone by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) was part of a plan to establish it as a recognised platform for news, DN’s head of mobile told an industry forum today.

DN launched the phone in partnership with Nokia and Nordic mobile service provider Telnor in December to give users instant access to the paper’s online content, Johan Brandt told the digital media roundtable at the World Newspaper Congress.

“We did this because we had three challenges [with mobile]. We had to get people to realise we had a pretty good mobile site. Many people just didn’t know that they could find news from the mobile internet, not enough people were aware of it as a channel,” he said.

“Secondly, one of the big barriers was that it’s difficult to browse the internet with a mobile, there are too many clicks… and third was ‘what does it cost to serve?’. Mobile providers charge users by megabyte. But what is a megabyte? Is it an article or a mobile TV episode. People don’t know what it’s going to cost them.”

In order to promote the newspaper portal, he added, it was important that the phone allowed users to assess DN’s mobile service in a single click and surf those web pages without incurring charges for downloading data.

The service, he added, is now attracting 50,000 unique users per month – up more than 40 per cent from last year – but there remained significant factors hampering the development of the mobile phone as an established platform to deliver news and on which newspapers can make significant revenue.

He identified a lack of standardised technology and measurement across the mobile market as the primary drawback to significant growth.

“There are no standards on the mobile market, it’s unnecessarily difficult and hard for the developers to create model services. I want to see growth from the walled garden model to a more open environment,” he said.

“Secondly, there is a lack of standards when it comes to advertising and measurement. There are different ad formats for different mobile sites. The market is fragmented and this makes advertisers frustrated and it also dwarves the mobile market’s potential in the short term.

“As a result of this there is a lack of strategic integration of marketing across mobile and other platforms for advertisers.

“There are too many pricing models for our advertisers to learn and in Sweden there are no valid or integrated tools for measurement, there are just no standards.”

In addition to this, he said, it was difficult for consumers to establish the cost of accessing data on phones and that it could prove to be a deterrent to use.

“In Sweden there are several hundred mobile phone subscriptions, with different prices for surfing. How can the user really know which subscription to get and what it costs to surf when it’s paid for by megabyte?

“I think there should be flat fees for time spent, that would make cost more predictable [for users].”