Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Here she looks at use of open-source software, Drupal, on Danish news sites. Continue reading
Matt Wells, head of audio at the Guardian, says the new morning news podcast will offer listeners an alternative to the BBC, which currently dominates the breakfast market.
Last month Wells criticised the BBC’s own podcasts for attracting ‘unimpressive’ audience figures.
The BBC has been experimenting with filing video reports from mobile phones as part of its coverage of Mobile World Congress 2008, in Barcelona this week.
Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones explained the approach in a video post the BBC’s dot.life technology blog before the event:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2SR-0WDQC0]Then while in Barcelona he moblogged several interviews, including one with Isabella Rossellini about making movies available for viewing on mobile phones, using the footage to augment a text story by embedding a flash player in the head of the story for a nice piece of additional story telling.
The MoJo approach is finding increasing favour with large news organisations. Reuters put mobiles in the hands of delegates at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos.
How long will it take to trickle down into the regional press though? My guess would be 18-24 months before we see the first serious use.
Dennis Publishing is to launch a new digital-only title, which will combine online, broadcast and print formats in an email sent to readers.
Gizmo, a free fortnightly publication scheduled for launch on March 11, will cover the consumer technology industry and focus on ‘immediacy, interactivity and innovation’, Bruce Sandell, head of new product development at Dennis, said in a release.
The new title will feature video and text-based editorial and product reviews using the same technology as sister title Monkey, which was launched in the same format in 2006.
Viewmagazine.tv, the online magazine of videojournalism, has staged what it describes as an international ‘vlog butterfly’ with Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC’s new multimedia newsroom.
To supplement an interview with Horrocks, videojournalist and editor of the magazine David Dunkley Gyimah asked for video questions to be contributed from interested parties across the world.
Questions were submitted from as far a field as Australia and South Africa, and can be viewed individually, followed by Horrocks’ responses.
Last night’s Radio Academy event on the future of podcasting proved a lively affair with criticism from Matt Wells, head of audio at Guardian Unlimited, of the BBC’s podcasting strategy and debate over podcasting’s relationship with radio.
The latter produced the following exchange between Trevor Dann, director of the Radio Academy and first speaker in the clip, and Wells.
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/mw.mp3]But as fellow panellist Nathalie Schwarz, director of radio at Channel 4, went on to point out: it doesn’t matter – the generation that are going be most in tune with podcasting won’t care what it’s called – adding weight to Wells’ suggestion that calling it radio is a hang-up of the traditional media.
Schwarz also levelled Wells’ views on the BBC’s podcast service: how you define success in podcasting, she suggested, should be related to what you are trying to achieve.
“The brave new world isn’t just about big numbers and mass reach – I think that’s the old style world of looking at RAJAR as a almost a trading currency to get commercial revenue.”
The entire evening’s discussion can be listened to courtesy of the Radio Academy’s website.
Mirror Group Newspapers digital head Paul Hood wants to add a ‘personalised and localised’ service to the revamp and development of the news Mirror.co.uk site.
Hood revealed details of his digital strategy to NMA. The plan to catch up with rival tabloid newspapers, like the Mail and the Sun, who have shot away in the race of online popularity, is to use the national newspaper site as “a starting point for web usage”.
Mindy McAdams has highlighted some interesting pieces of photojournalism documenting the tragic events of last week when Benazir Bhutto was murdered after speaking at an election rally in Rawalpindi.
Two pieces of work of the same event effectively sum up the citizen vs pro debate.
The BBC has footage that it claimed shows the assassin firing shots into the back of Bhutto’s head before blowing himself up (effectively debunking the Pakistani authorities’ line that she broke her neck while trying to take cover and evade the bullets).
As you’d expect it’s grainy, wobbly footage, but that’s not so important as it’s the event rather the quality of the craft that’s makes this compelling.
Compare that with the professional slideshow put together for the New York Times by the Getty photographer John Moore who was covering the event.
He gives a spoken first person account as his pictures show the rally, the brutal attack from further back in the crowd and the shocking fallout.
Look at the video images from the amateur and the powerful stills from the pro, then if you can think of a better more succinct example of how citizen journalism and the work of pro-snappers complement one another, I’d love to hear about it.
London-based twitterers have broken the news of a huge fire in East London.
Tweets describing the spread of a black cloud of smoke in the Stratford area of the city are the first reports of the incident – before any accounts online from the mainstream media.
The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.
Again according to Twitter The Press Association has now put up pictures of fire.
Sky News are now showing live coverage on the site and a quick search on Google News suggests Sky was the first mainstream media to file on the story at 12:34pm. Sky seem to have been the first news organisation on the scene and are now providing regular updates and a map pinpointing the location of the fire.
A ticker across the top of the BBC News site promises “more soon” reporting a “large plume of smoke” rising from a fire in East London”.
A brief report on Reuters also appeared at 12:39pm.
Tweets from Martin Stabe, new media correspondent with the Press Gazette, say the smoke cloud is now covering PG’s offices based in Underwood Street. (As Martin points out in a comment below, the cloud appeared to be covering the PG’s offices, but was actually further away. Still, he updated his Twitter accordingly and very quickly.)
Was anyone covering it earlier than the Twitter correspondents mentioned here?
UPDATE: reports are that the fire began in a disused bus depot – here’s a view of what the site looked like before it started.