“Furlough House Swap? Sounds like a new reality show. But it’s the brainchild of two Gannett employees who are among thousands in the company facing two furloughs so far this year,” reports the Editor & Publisher.
Furloughhouseswap.com has been launched by two Gannett employees. The idea is that employees on enforced unpaid holidays, or furloghs (or ‘furcation’) can swap houses for the week.
The Twitter tag is #furloughhouseswap.
Silicon Valley Insider editor, Nicholas Carlson, comments on the possibility of cuts at the New York Times [Thursday April 2].
“The New York Times says it will lay off 70 people from its newsroom if employees who belong to the Newspaper Guild don’t agree to take pay cuts.
“We expect the Guild, which met with Times management yesterday [Wednesday], to make all the necessary concessions.”
The Frontline Club’s livestream of tonight’s talk with Stephen Grey on ‘Helmand – Investigative Journalism at the sharp end’ is available below (from 7pm (BST)).
Former editor on the Sunday Times’ Insight team Grey will discuss his work in Afghanistan, which looked behind the frontline reporting of the conflict.
“general knowledge, whether under the brand name of a giant like Britannica or Microsoft, can’t withstand an effort that was developed specifically for the Internet and that harnesses gifted amateurs,” writes John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, one week into web-only production.
Time Inc and Getty Images yesterday launched Life.com, which offers free access to more than 7 million photos that depict the news.
What was once a deceased US publication, Life has now been revived and is online.
The site features photos from as far back as the 1850 up to the present day. Around 3,000 photos are added each day.
Users can view, rate, share and link to the photos, which will be categorised into news, celebrity, sports, travel and animals.
Celebrities will also have the chance to create galleries of their favourite subjects or themes, with Ellen DeGeneres will be the first to do so.
Life.com editor, Bill Shapiro said in an article for Brand Republic, the tagline for the site is ‘See your world’, which he believes shows the sheer amount of photos that users can view that have shaped their lives.
Jeff Williams, former city editor of the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, has been monitoring the number of pages, local story bylines and number of sections in the title over the last four Februaries.
His results suggest ‘a dramatic drop’ in content.
According to figures from the Newspaper Audience Databank, almost 75 per cent of Canadian adults read a newspaper in print each week compared with less than 20 per cent, who read an online edition during the week.
Yesterday Journalism.co.uk spoke with Audioboo founder Mark Rock about the potential for the iPhone audio app to be used for local news reporting:
“[E]veryone knows what’s happening to traditional media and local newspapers are dying by the moment. But is there a very simple and easy way [for others] to start collecting audio data and using it?”
As the tool is developed – both by Audioboo’s team and third-parties once the API is released – there’s even more scope for using geotagged audio news reports.
You can see the possibilities from how it’s already being used by some Audioboo-ers:
Pie & Bovril
The Scottish Premier League site ran a trial of the app last weekend. The aim? To get ‘sound byte updates’ from fans in and around stadia, the site’s David MacDonald told Journalism.co.uk.
“Although the big clubs are well catered for of an afternoon with live commentary we felt that the smaller clubs weren’t really in a position to service the information requirements of their fans who can’t make it along for whatever reason or those ex-pats who are keen to find out what’s happening from afar on a Saturday afternoon,” explains MacDonald.
“We pick up the information via feeds from Boo which automatically populate the appropriate section of our site.”
P&B has tried updating web pages using email to text gateways and experimented with SMS updates, but these were time consuming and failed to convey the mood of fans at the game, he adds.
“It’s early days but we feel this could be a really neat, low cost way, of getting information back from around the grounds to those unable to attend. We’ll continue to grow the trial and get a few users on it and see how it goes from there,” says MacDonald.
London SE1 Community Website
James Hatts, editor of community website London SE1, published by Banksidepress said the site is also experimenting with Audioboo and has uploaded newsworthy clips, such as updates on a local fire.
“I think AudioBoo has great potential for local reporting – it’s just so easy. No waiting to get back to the office, no transcribing endless recordings, no editing, no waiting for YouTube (for example) to process your video,” says Hatts.
According to Hatts, the ‘idiot-proof brilliance’ of the app is comparable to using a Flip camera and could make it an important part of a modern reporter’s kit.
However, using it in a way that makes economic sense is a key consideration for Bankside:
“It’s early days for Audioboo but at the moment there’s no way to drive traffic to our own site from a boo page, for instance,” explains Hatts.
“There are interesting future possibilities for using voice recognition software to display contextual adverts around the audio player (or even to insert relevant audio adverts).
“At the moment it’s great for novelty value and building an audience and building a brand, but even an operation like ours which is run on a shoestring needs to be able to derive some revenue from our content.”
Our Man Inside
Rock said Audioboo should be used to augment other reporting and that audio was an emotive medium – both ideas that seem to have been taken on board by ‘social media mongrel’ Christian Payne in his use of the app.
“[W]hile i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds,” he writes in a blog post.
“Combined with a photo attached to act as a catalyst for the imagination, the listener is not being force fed the story. They have to take a moment to let their imagination get involved in the media.”
In a letter to the editor, Zimbabwean Nyarai Chidemo urges the country’s media regulators to crack down on ill-informed news reporting and propaganda in the industry.
“Our people deserve better informed presenters who can articulate issues and dissect problems intelligently. Such recycling of ignorance is detrimental to the the health of our society,” writes Chidemo.
At the Frontline Club tonight: a discussion of press standards, self-regulation and public trust on the question: Is the press accountable enough?
The debate features:
“According to a report published by the Media Standards Trust, the current system of press self-regulation is not successfully protecting either the press or the public. The current system is not, the report claims, effective enough, accountable enough, or transparent enough, and does not reflect the transformed media environment. So should Britain’s system of press self-regulation be over-hauled and if it is, will it do anything to restore public faith in the press?”
