Tag Archives: Globe and Mail

Journalism Daily: Trinity Mirror’s Midlands consultation, Wikipedia’s editorial changes and the industry chicken and egg conundrum

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

Ed’s picks:

Tip of the day:

#FollowJourn:

On the Editors’ Blog:

Globe and Mail: ‘The model, the blogger and the web giant’

The Globe and Mail looks at the blogger anonymity case in the US sparking debate across the world.

The blogger unmasked by Google – as the result of a New York court order last week – is now threatening legal action against the company. The Globe and Mail’s Josh Wingrove writes:

“Is calling someone a ‘ho’ on a blog worthy of the anonymity afforded to the writings of the American Founding Fathers 200 years ago?

“That’s the basis of a landmark internet privacy debate sparked this week in connection with a looming civil suit against web giant Google Inc. The company is facing a potential $15-million (U.S.) lawsuit by a once-anonymous blogger, Rosemary Port, after it complied with a New York court order last week and released her name.”

Full story at this link…

  • Related: BBC Radio 4 Today programme featured a discussion this morning with Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, and Dr Vince Miller, a lecturer in sociology at Kent University. Listen again at this link.

#FollowJourn: @mathewi/communities editor

#FollowJourn: Mathew Ingram

Who? Communities editor.

What? Works for the Globe and Mail, a prolific Twitterer on all things journalism and technology blogger.

Where? @matthewi

Contact? Take a look at his blog or email mathew [at] mathewingram.com.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Beatblogging.org: Globe and Mail/Reuters using Twitter photos of China riots

According to Beatblogging.org, the Globe and Mail featured five photos that all originally appeared on Twitter as part of its main story yesterday on riots in China.

The images were posted by Chinese citizens using the service and picked up by Reuters – the Globe and Mail took them from the agency’s service and attributed both Twitter and Reuters.

An example of, writes Beatblogging.org, news worthiness overriding photographic quality (the pictures are taken on mobile phones); and the importance of curation as a skill for journalists and editors (Reuters will have had to go through many photos before finding these images).

What’s more it shows the ability of social media and online communities to break through the great Chinese firewall:

“Rather than fear social media and other emerging Web technologies, news organizations should embrace these new technologies. In this case, the Globe and Mail was able to print five incredible photos that illustrate the upheaval and deadly violence in China. These photos would not be possible without social media, and the world would be poorer without these photos.”

Full post at this link…

Tips and thoughts for journalists from Bloomberg’s former multimedia editor

Last week (Thursday May 28) Bloomberg’s former multimedia editor, Abhik Sen, spoke to journalism students at City University on a range of topics:

MPs’ expenses:
Revelations about MPs’ expenses would not have had as much impact if the story had been broken online, the former editor of multimedia at Bloomberg told students. “There are still some stories which work much better in traditional formats,” he said. “The MPs’ expenses story could have been broken in any format but it would not have had the same impact if it hadn’t been print.”

“The resulting chaos in Westminster probably would not have happened if it had broken on a blog or website. That medium just doesn’t have the same impact as the front page of a newspaper does.”

Sen added that the gradual ‘drip feed’ of information in the daily papers and sustained ‘wall-to-wall coverage’ in the Daily Telegraph allowed the story to build a momentum that would not have been possible in the rolling news environment of the web.

Where multimedia works best
He emphasised that online journalism continued to surpass traditional formats in  providing ‘more detailed, more thoughtful’ coverage and a ‘360 degree view’ of any story.

“For the swine flu story, for example, you get the headlines in the newspapers and the footage on the television channels, but for a comprehensive view you have to go online and look at videos, stories, first person pieces, interactive graphics, maps,” he said. “That rule holds true for pretty much every big story, from Obama to climate change.”

“TV and newspapers are the entry point for the news cycle,” he added. “Only people who are particularly interested in a story will then go digging for more stuff online. But that’s when they will expect comprehensive, meaty content.

“Then, multimedia journalists have to take the game to the next level: beyond the headline, beyond the immediate soundbite.”

Sen’s tips for journalists
“In tomorrow’s world, which is pretty much today’s world, there is no media organisation which is not thinking multiplatform,” the former multimedia editor at Bloomberg. “Everyone will have to be a multimedia journalist of some sort. The earlier you get familiar with the grammar of multimedia, the easier and better it will be.”

  • Planning is important. “Most bad multimedia pieces flounder because not enough thought has been put into what you are trying to communicate,” he warned. “Think about how your story could best be told and what sort of interactivity you want to offer.”
  • Get creative. The challenge for multimedia journalists covering diary stories, such as the G20 protests, is to find a way of reporting that is “original, refreshing, different from the newspapers and television, and yet complimentary,” said Sen. “You must build on what others have done, but also do what others cannot do.”
  • Think flavour, not just facts. “In a multimedia piece, you need to convey not just who was there and what happened, but what was it really like?” he said. “You need to capture things that make the piece alive. They might look small at production stage, but become really interesting and useful at the editing table.”
  • Less is more. “Five minutes is an eternity in news time,” he warned. “Most multimedia pieces won’t ever run for more than a few minutes.”
  • Always shoot action and emotion. “It doesn’t need to be someone fighting a war, but you need mobility or some dynamic element,” he advised. “It might be someone’s eyes floating from left to right, clinking glasses, natural sunlight.”
  • Develop skills beyond conventional journalism, or work with somebody who has. “A graphic designer is critical to a multimedia project,” said Sen. “It’s up to them to bring all the elements together and present them in a way that can either make or break a multimedia piece.”
  • Keep the big picture in mind. Remember that neither audio or visual will ever work alone in a final multimedia production. “They will be next to text, or on top of a picture, so always have an idea of the final product in mind,” said Sen. “Then you don’t always have to face the dilemma of dropping or cutting to fit.”
  • But if in doubt: “Shoot first, make up your mind later,” he advised.

Sen, who spent more than a decade as a television and newspaper journalist before joining Bloomberg, added that these skills should be developed in addition to, not at the expense of, the traditional journalist’s toolkit. “The nuts and bolts remain the same. Good journalism, solid reporting, news judgement and good writing skills are as important online as off,” he said.

Sen’s favourite multimedia packages:

  • Economy Tracker by CNN: “Somebody has done the hard work of crunching numbers and then somebody has made it into a really visual, interesting piece of work,” said Sen. “It’s a good example of telling a big story simply but effectively”.

Related link:

Alison Battisby’s report on her blog: ‘Everyone will be a multimedia journalist,’ says ex-Bloomberg editor.

Lara King is a freelance journalist and blogs on the media at www.lara-king.co.uk.

Globe and Mail: Secret Service personnel remove writer Brenda Lee from near Air Force One

A picture on the Globe and Mail blog site, of Brenda Lee, who, as the AP reported is ‘a writer for a small Georgia newspaper who wanted to give President Barack Obama a letter’, being removed from near Air Force One on Thursday. Full post at this link…

Twitter workshop for journalists shared – courtesy of Globe & Mail’s Matthew Ingram

That’s the spirit! The slides from a Twitter workshop for journalists are shared online at this link, and also embedded below.

Matthew Ingram, communities editor at the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper, ran a training session for his colleagues recently on how to get the most out of Twitter. He writes on his blog:

“I tried to make a number of points in the workshop, among them that Twitter is extremely simple to use (so why not give it a shot); that yes, it has a silly name, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful or valuable (Google had a silly name at one point too); that it is a great way of a) reaching out to and connecting with users, b) promoting our stories and c) finding sources for stories (otherwise known as ‘real people’); and that there are a number of tools that can make it even more useful (Tweetdeck, etc.).”

Globeandmail.com: Future of newspapers debate at 1pm ET on Tuesday

The Globe and Mail’s ‘Future of Media: Is democracy written in disappearing ink?’ article has provoked a fair amount of comment (226 beneath the article alone, at the time of writing)

So, this should be fun, a debate on the Globe and Mail’s site, tomorrow:

“…reporter Grant Robertson and deputy editor Sylvia Stead will join us on Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET to debate these topics and take your questions on the future of the newspaper industry.”

“Can journalism truly be saved if newspapers are not? Can citizen journalists in the blogosphere fill the void? What are the social costs of the industry’s decline? How has the Globe and Mail dealt with the fundamental shift in the way people want to consume information?”

That’s 5pm GMT.

Full story at this link…

Nieman Journalism Lab: Globe and Mail on setting up a news wiki

Matthew Ingram, communities editor at the Globe and Mail in Canada, discusses the highs and lows of setting up a Public Policy Wiki on the paper’s website.

Full story at this link…

Globeandmail.com: ‘Tempest in a book review’: Black and Wolff’s online run-in

“As literary feuds go, this one is Grade A,” writes Patricia Best in the Globe and Mail.

She takes a look at the controversial review of Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch – by Conrad Black.

Wolff, in response via a blog post, isn’t impressed by ‘this new sort of web journalism’. He sees it as ‘dramatically discredited people reinvented as web opinionists’.