Tag Archives: director

Live streaming from Norwegian journalism event

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There’s a live video from the Free Media conference at the Norwegian Institute of Journalism in Fredrikstad today, courtesy of Journalisten.no.

You can’t rewind the video but you could opt in at the points you want to (Norwegian time is one hour ahead UK time).

Here’s the programme:

Thursday November 6

10.00
Welcome: Trine Østlyngen, director, The Norwegian Institute of Journalism
Opening remarks: Håkon Gulbrandsen, State Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

10.15
Strengthening media in the developing world – what does it take to ensure access for people living in poverty? Stephen King, director, BBC World Service Trust

11.15
The Muhammad Cartoons – an imagined clash of civilizations?
Opening remarks: Why I published – and how do I reflect upon my decision today? Flemming Rose, cultural editor, Jyllands-Posten
Panel discussion The caricatures as seen by the press around the world. Presentation of the new anthology summarizing the Muhammad cartoons controversy in several countries with Rose, Elisabeth Eide, researcher at Culcom, University of Oslo, and Risto Kunelius, professor and director of the journalism program at the University of Tampere, Finland
Moderator: Journalist and author Solveig Steien

14.00
Caucasus burning: The need for a free and independent media – and how to develop it? Danish SCOOP with support from International Media Support has started a program to help train journalists and develop media infrastructure in the Caucasus. The first national seminars were held last month in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. With Antti Kuusi, country coordinator, International Media Support; editor Boris Navasardian, Yerevan Press Club; and former Russia-correspondent Arne Egil Tønset, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, who recently returned from a journey in the region. Moderator: Aage Borchgrevink , writer and advisor at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee

16.00
A Cameroonian journalist in exile: Philip Njaru and Jan Gunnar Furuly, SKUP/GIJC

Friday November 7

09.00
A thousand words – the camera as a tool. Well-known Iranian photographer Reza presents his “100 photos for press freedom”

09.45
Safety for journalists. A global overview. Sarah de Jong, Deputy Director and Project Manager  INSI (International News Safety Institute).

10.30
Conflict-ridden Colombia: The role of the media
A journalist’s perspective: From death threats to a life in exile – reflections from Maria Cristina Caballero
Followed by a panel discussion where Jan Egeland, former UN Under-secretary general and the secretary general’s special adviser on Colombia, and NRK-journalist Sigrun Slapgard, will join. Moderator: Journalist and former Latin-America- correspondentHaakon Børde

11.30
Closing speech: Former presidential candidate and FARC-hostage Ingrid Betancourt

Hunt at Polis: on Brand, Ross and the BBC

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The Shadow Culture Secretary, Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, today made a keynote policy speech on the subject of public service broadcasting, at a Polis event. He talked about opposing BBC local plans, in a wide-ranging speech. You can download Hunt’s full speech here.

@bowbrick on Twitter reported that: “Nothing radical in Hunt’s analysis. Presumably a great relief to the BBC”.

Of most interest seems to be Hunt’s take on the story du jour (economic downturn returning to our screens next week): Brand, Ross and the BBC.

Over at Polis Director, Charlie Beckett’s blog, we read:

“Hunt was careful not to call for anyone to be sacked. He believes that politicians shouldn’t go around trying to get private individuals fired. But he was scathing about the BBC response to the incident and the outrage it has provoked.

Hunt said this was not risky comedy, it was ‘offensive, juvenile behavour’. But what worried him was that the BBC’s slow and limited public response indicates that “the BBC doesn’t understand the huge influence the stars they employ have on the public”.”

FT.com recruits Bono and Jeffrey Sachs as bloggers

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U2 frontman Bono and development economist Jeffrey Sachs are teaming up with FT.com in a bid to form the world’s ultimate rock group to blog their way through the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals summit, which starts in New York on Thursday.

Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Bono will post ‘development diaries’ throughout the event, a release from the paper explains.

Coverage was kicked off with a Q&A with Bono, who, it seems, is taking his duties pretty seriously:

AB [Andrew Beattie, FT trade editor]:What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?

Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.

Or then again…

AB: What exactly happens in the meetings you have with these world leaders?

Bono: Judo in a suit.

Online Journalism Review finds new home at Knight Center

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The Online Journalism Review, run by the University of Annenburg’s journalism school, has been resurrected by the Knight Foundation’s Digital Media Center, Geneva Overholser, the university’s new director of the school of journalism, announced yesterday.

The site closed in its previous incarnation in June after 10 years of reporting on the ‘transition from other media to online reporting and production’ for mid-career journalists.

Major OJR contributor and media academic Robert Niles will continue to write for the new-look site, which will focus on the following:

  • Reporting and writing in a conversational environment
  • Investigative reporting in the internet era
  • Entrepreneurial journalism
  • ‘Guerilla-marketing’ the news

New articles will be added to the site twice-weekly on Mondays and Fridays.

Global News Enterprises makes editorial appointments

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Global News Enterprises has expanded its editorial and executive teams ahead of its official launch in January 2009.

The web-based news organisation has made a host of appointments to further its aim of providing daily international news coverage from internationally-based correspondents:

  • Thomas Mucha has been named managing editor and will oversee Global News’ body of correspondents and its multimedia operations. He will also contribute to special features and reporting projects, and pen a weekly column on global business.
  • Former deputy managing editor of Politico Barbara Martinez becomes managing editor for the web.
  • Andrew Meldrum has been hired as senior editor and regional editor for Africa.
  • Amy Jeffries takes on the role of webmaster and will be responsible for technical aspects of the website and the implementation of multimedia content. Jeffries was previously a reporter and producer for WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio and a freelance reporter for Frontline World Online.

The organisation has also named James Wooster as business manager and Richard Byrne as its new director of communications and marketing, it said in a press release.

SIIA conference: Copyright needs standard tagging system, says Dow Jones director

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Speaking in a session on copyright on the web at yesterday’s SIIA Global Information Industry Summit, Greg Merkle, vice president and creative director of Dow Jones‘ enterprise division, said a standard system for tagging the copyright of material online is needed – in particular, because of the growing use of social media tools to distribute content.

Dow Jones relies on ‘trust’ and ’emerging standards’ to prevent news and information, which it releases through social media tools such as RSS feeds, from leaving that network, said Merkle.

“There’s no standard for marking up the copyright of information. We are looking at microformats which is a way to say this is copyrighted,” he said.

“We know users collaborate on information, but there are no provisions and no guidelines. We instill trust and we are banking on emerging standards.”

BBC’s online Olympics coverage draws 4.4m

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The BBC Sport website had its ‘best ever day’ in terms of traffic on Monday 11 August with 4.4 million individual users, a blog post from Roger Mosey, director of BBC Sport, has said.

The traffic surge from the site’s Olympics coverage also saw more than 1 million users view live video streams on Friday 15.

The BBC’s iPlayer received 700,000 requests for Olympic programmes in the first week of the Games, Mosey said.

The competition – combined with the beginning of the Premiership – has also created record figures for mobile with more than 400,000 users accessing the BBC’s mobile services on Saturday – breaking the previous record of 270,000.

To report the Beijing Olympics online and on mobile the corporation has introduced six live video streams to its BBC Olympics website, an interactive map of the city and its sporting venues, an Olympics blog and expanded its mobile site to carry more video.

The coverage has also benefited from the decision to embed BBC video within pages rather than in a separate player.

Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google

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The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.

By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.

The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.

“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.

[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.

“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.

“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”

The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.

“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”

The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t’, he said.

The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ‘stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.

“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.

“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”

BBC appoints Roly Keating as first archive director

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The BBC has named BBC Two controller Roly Keating as its first director of archive content.

Keating, who will take up his new role in October, will be responsible for the corporation’s tv, radio and multimedia archive. He will be tasked with increasing public access to this content, a press release from the BBC said.

He will work with the newly appointed director of the BBC’s Future Media & Technology department Erik Huggers on the digitisation of the archive and take charge of BBC archived content on on-demand services such as the iPlayer.

“Unlocking the value of broadcast archives is one of the great opportunities opened up by digital media – and the BBC has the greatest archive of them all, with untold potential public value,” he said.

The BBC Two controller position will be advertised in the autumn.