Tag Archives: editor-in-chief

WAN 08: Disparities between pay of web and print journalists – a problem all over the world for integrating newsrooms

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Integrating newsrooms isn’t just a matter of putting all you desks in a spoke and fulcrum formation and projecting the web traffic figures on the wall.

The small matter of how you remunerate journalists expected to work both for print and web is an issue for newspapers across the globe.

It’s an issue that the Guardian and Telegraph, to name just two in the UK, have been wrestling with as they bring their divergent print and online editions closer together.

International editors sitting on a panel looking at whether integrated newsrooms are really working at the World Editors Forum, today in Goteborg, Sweden, admitted to a similar set of problems.

Jim Roberts, editor of digital news at the New York Times, told delegates that the Times’ own integration plans were hampered by the different contracts and lower pay web journalists were receiving compared to their print colleagues.

Roberts is overseeing the introduction of a ‘horizontal’ news production system where each separate news department has web producers embedded with them to encourage multimedia content production, oversee publication.

The Times is trying to spread multimedia, video, podcasts and interactive features across all its news verticals – even to the point where the Times is reverse publishing blog content as columns into the printed edition of the newspaper.

This drive for web content has also brought a renewed thirst to keep the newspaper print edition fresh, as Roberts said ‘to redirect this energy back into print’.

But as staff are now expected to work for both web and print, the different contracts they work under has led to union wrangles. WSJ.com managing editor Almar Latour and Javier Moreno, editor-in-chief of El Pais, Spain, agreed that they faced similar contractual problems on their integration projects.

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.

Haymarket merges editorial team for medical titles

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Haymarket has merged the editorial teams for its medical titles GP and Independent Nurse.

As part of the changes the publisher has appointed Emma Bower, who launched Independent Nurse four years ago, as editor of GP.

Bower will now take on the editorship of both titles and responsibility for the newly merged team, which will be responsible for producing content across the magazines and the group’s Healthcare Republic website.

“So far, much of the crossover between our print and digital operations has developed on an ad hoc basis. Now we can tailor the structure of the editorial team to properly fit the needs of both platforms, and allow for further growth,” said Colin Cooper, editor-in-chief of Haymarket Medical Media, in a press release.

The integration will take effect from June 16.

Reuters: Robert Thomson named managing editor of Wall Street Journal

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Former Times editor Robert Thomson has been appointed editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, succeeding Marcus Brauchli.

An op-ed to be published in today’s Journal, will see Thomson admit he made mistakes in his involvement with Brauchli’s departure.

Guardian: Times website seeks Sky News link-up

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The Times website wants to carry more video content from Sky News.

Times Online editor-in-chief, Anne Spackman, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that negotiations to make this happen were at an early stage on the newspaper website carrying breaking news videos from Sky.

Any deal is likely to improve the online video offering from the Times.

Despite being one of the first national newspapers to adopt a TV service the Times offering has fallen behind other nationals – in terms of quality – and seems to be due an overhaul.

PPA Magazines 2008: TimesOnline could reward commenters

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Ongoing discussions at TimesOnline could see a reward system for regular contributors to the site’s comments.

Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of the site, said it was early days but a way to reward or highlight regular and valuable commenters on the site was being considered.

Spackman, who was speaking at the PPA’s annual conference for the magazine industry, said the focus of any such system would be on making the reader feel their involvement with the site was worthwhile.

“We are not likely to have users writing the news. I think what we will start to do is to pull in those people who have wider value and are of our better commenters,” she said.

She added that comments left by users were increasingly being fed back into reporting, which in turn generates a reader response creating ‘a vital circle’.

PPA Magazines 2008: Timesonline readers ‘obsessed with house prices’

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Readers of TimesOnline are obsessed with house prices and road tax, according to Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of the title.

Readers of the site’s business section also go home early on Fridays, Spackman told delegates at the PPA’s annual conference.

The information gleaned from the site’s search queries is vital to understanding Timesonline readers and shaping content on the site, she said.

However, while search data helped journalists to understand ‘the hook that pulls the reader in’, she stressed that just writing to maximise search rankings is not what journalists are for.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the demand for celebrity bloggers in Sweden.

Swedish lifestyle sites are using celebrity bloggers to drive traffic and to help lure attractive advertisers to their sites.

Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman (below) recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, in search of a pay per click deal.

Schulman is big news in the Swedish blogosphere. She is married to one of the nation’s most successful bloggers (neither known for mincing their words, hence the name of her blog), her husband is also part of a family that is old, aristocratic and influential in its own right.

image of Katrin Schulman

She told the Swedish media: “I only work on commission. Four pence per unique visitor per month,” and promised to deliver nothing short of 120,000 visitors to any potential site wanting to host her blog.

It’s a far cry from the digital era sweatshop described by The New York Times.

She was eventually hired by Sthlmsfinest.com, a website and online community focused on celebrities and a direct competitor of Stureplan, which is a general lifestyle magazine and site born out of Stockholm’s club scene.

“We have seen a 15,000 increase in visitors just in the couple of days Katrin has been blogging here. She has a lot of readers,” Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of Sthlmsfinest, told Journalism.co.uk.

All the bloggers the site hired by Sthlmsfinest.com to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends have to bring in their own audiences, Erwik added.

He also said that he hoped that in just two weeks hiring Schulman would have brought a substantially traffic increase from 70,000 users to around 100,00 readers to the site.

Reuters cameraman killed in Gaza

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Fadel Shana, Reuters cameraman, who was killed yesterday by an explosion in Gaza

Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, 23, was killed yesterday in Gaza by an explosion, the media group has announced.

Shana, who is the first Reuters journalist to be killed in Gaza, was on his way to cover an incident when his vehicle stopped. On getting out of the vehicle an explosion killed Shana and two bystanders.

A soundman travelling with Shana escaped serious injury.

David Schlesinger, Reuters editor-in-chief, has called for an investigation into the incident.

“This tragic incident shows the risks journalists take every day to report the news. All governments and organisations have a responsibility to take the utmost care to protect professionals trying to do their jobs,” he said in a statement.

“Our thoughts are with his family. We request an immediate investigation into the incident by the Israeli defence forces.”

Shana had worked for Reuters in Gaza for over three years and was one of 15 journalists from the news organisation in the region.

UPDATE – Reuters says Shana was killed by an Israeli tank shell. A medical examination has suggested that metal darts from the shell, which explodes in the air, caused the cameraman’s death. A Reuters video shows the incident.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: lessons in UGC, follow the crowd

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the (weird and wonderful) challenges of soliciting readers’ contributions.

Local newspaper readers more keen to submit photos of their own kids than of world champions, that’s what one online newspaper in Norway found out last month.

Mecom-owned Drammens Tidende (DT) invited its readers to help them cover this year’s World Cup Ski Sprint in Drammen, but found their readers were more interested in the Children’s Ski Cup that took place a day prior to the international event.

image of reader submitted photo from ski race

(Reader-submitted picture (above) and the pro snap (below) – both courtesy of DT)

image of world cup ski racing

“In retrospective, we might have done better to put more of our resources into soliciting pictures from the Children’s Cup,” said Geir Arne Bore, editor-in-chief of DT, a Norwegian regional newspapers headquartered in Drammen.

“The traffic to our news site doubled on the day of the World Cup, and the shots submitted by readers garnered quite some interest, but people were particularly interested in viewing and submitting pictures from the Children’s Cup.

“Our experiences confirm the general impression which is taking root in Norwegian media: user generated content does not come unsolicited, and if it does come it is on issues people are very passionate about, or as a result of substantial marketing.

“I guess you could say this in line with the trend described in ‘The state of the news media 2008’,” Bore added.

DT is one of the early testers of ‘The Readers Newspaper’, an online portal where readers can upload text, pictures and video. It’s developed by Edda Media, Mecom’s Norwegian arm, and is still in Beta.

So far, DT’s readers have mostly uploaded text and pictures about entertainment events, while Budstikka.no, another early tester, has attracted more content about local sports events.

The portal is expected to be rolled out to all of Edda Media’s regional and local papers over the coming months.