The National Post has introduced a barcode system, which readers can scan with a mobile to access updated digital content – the first newspaper to do so in North America, it claims.
The paper is looking into using the barcoding, which makes use of technology from Scanbuy, for advertising and competitions.
West Virginia University has been granted $85,000 to help train rural newspapers in multimedia production (via Editor&Publisher)
Money for the project – ‘West Virginia Uncovered: Multimedia Journalism from the Mountains’ – comes from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, which was set up to encourage human development in West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania by ‘helping people to help themselves’.
Will be interesting to see if this – and other collaborative, knowledge sharing partnerships, such as the citizen journalism training set up by the Oakland Press – benefit the local news industry.
“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.
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.
The Editor&Publisher’s editor Greg Mitchell was interviewed by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC ‘about current newspaper cutbacks and woes, new media, hopes for pay-for-play on the web, and his new book on the 2008 campaign, Why Obama Won’ …
From the Editor&Publisher: “The Poynter Institute has announced a new tuition scholarship program that is funded through proceeds from a new book of front pages about Barack Obama’s election and inauguration.
“The program will make available a limited number of tuition subsidies worth up to $500 for participants of select 2009 on-site seminars, a release stated.”
The US paper will partner an as yet unestablished news service, being created by former Star-Ledger managing editor Rick Everett, for local news coverage.
The new organisation is expected to hire around 30 reporters, including college students. The collaboration will boost the paper’s coverage after it lost 151 newsroom staff last year.
“The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been quietly sharing content for nearly two weeks, exchanging daily budgets and trading even the most high-profile stories,” Editor&Publisher reports.
It’s ‘the latest example of the ever-growing trend of newspapers with no common ownership or JOA trading news,’ according to E&P.
“The key ‘whistleblower’ in the Bernard Madoff fraud case, Harry Markopolos, testified today [Feb 4 2009] before Congress, alleging among other things that he approached the Wall Street Journal on the story more than three years ago, and the newspaper ultimately did nothing,” Editor&Publisher reports.
A group of US newspaper executives have formed the Newspaper Project – a campaign ‘to fight back against the misrepresentation of newspapers and their continuing importance to the public’, according to E&P.
The project will run a series of print and online ads for the campaign from today.