MediaGuardian reports:
“ITV is to suspend carrying news supplied by ITN on its website from next month after ending its contract, resulting in the loss of five journalists from the content supplier.
“ITN On, the division of the TV news producer that supplies video and text to websites and mobile internet services, will stop supplying content to the ITV website on 22 July.”
Yesterday it arrived: the final version of the Digital Britain report. Landline users among us will have to sacrifice around three lattes a year to meet the 50p a month levy for the Next Generation Fund.
Director of digital content for Guardian News & Media, Emily Bell, asked, via Twitter, for two words to sum it up other than ‘colossal disappointment’. An advanced Twitter search showed these responses from her followers: ‘as expected,’ ‘damp squib,’ ‘disappointingly colossal,’ ‘wasted chance’ and ‘too cautious’. However, Bell is now worried she might have been ‘too negative’ in her reaction – but that could just be her going soft, she says.
Ten good links*:
*with an extra two, for luck.
Here are the winners from last night’s Amnesty International Media Awards; nominees and judges were reported here. The awards, designed to recognise ‘excellence in human rights reporting’, feature ten categories spread across print, broadcast and online journalism.
Gaby Rado Memorial Award
Aleem Maqbool, BBC News
International Television & Radio
World’s Untold Stories: The Forgotten People, CNN, Dan Rivers and Mary Rogers
Nations & Regions
The Fight for Justice, The Herald Magazine by Lucy Adams
National newspapers
MI5 and the Torture Chambers of Pakistan, The Guardian by Ian Cobain
New media
Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, Wikileaks, Julian Assange
Periodicals – consumer magazines
The ‘No Place for Children’ campaign, New Statesman, Sir Al Aynsley Green, and Gillian Slovo
Periodicals – newspaper supplements
Why do the Italians Hate Us? The Observer Magazine, Dan McDougall and Robin Hammond
Photojournalism
No One Much Cares, Newsweek, Eugene Richards
Radio
Forgotten: The Central African Republic, BBC Radio 4 – Today Programme, Edward Main, Ceri Thomas, Mike Thomson
Television documentary and docu-drama
Dispatches: Saving Africa’s Witch Children, Channel 4 / Red Rebel Films / Southern Star Factual, Mags Gavan, Joost Van der Valk, Alice Keens-Soper, Paul Woolwich
Television news
Kiwanja Massacre: Congo, Channel 4 News / ITN, Ben De Pear, Jonathan Miller, Stuart Webb and Robert Chamwami
Special award
This year’s Special Award for Journalism Under Threat was awarded to Eynulla Fәtullayev, from Azerbaijan.
ITN has launched a free news application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It is the first, video-focused news application created for the Apple products and its special offline function allows users to access UK, world and sports news when they are out of wifi range, according to a press release from ITN.
“News is one of the biggest services on handsets and ITN has built a great reputation as a provider of high quality videojournalism on mobile,” said Nicholas Wheeler, managing director of multimedia division ITN On, in the release.
The application is available to download at the iTunes’ store – and at time of writing is the seventh most downloaded free news app from iTunes.
FT.com is also looking to tap into the iPhone market with plans to introduce a new site for the handset.
If the Wordle and other coverage isn’t enough, here’s the Hugh Cudlipp speech by the editor of the Sun, Rebekah Wade, in full [note: may have differed very slightly in actual delivery]:
The challenging future of national and regional newspapers is now the staple diet of media commentators.
If you have been reading the press writing about the press you’d all be forgiven for questioning your choice of career.
I’m not denying we’re in a tough place – we are.
But I don’t want to use this speech to make grand statements on the future of our industry.
I want to talk to you about journalism.
The BBC has been on the receiving end this weekend of some fairly heavy criticism for not broadcasting an appeal from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) for donations to help people in the Gaza region.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, a group of 50 MPs launching an Early Day Motion, 11,000 viewers and protestors outside Broadcasting House have urged the corporation to reconsider its stance.
“What we’re not going to do is run a free-standing appeal on our airwaves. We do want to cover the humanitarian story, we want to cover it in our news programmes where we can put it in context and we can do it in a careful, balanced objective way,” said director-general Mark Thompson on BBC Breakfast.
Thompson also explained the decision via the BBC Editors Blog.
Sky News joined the broadcaster today in saying it will not show the DEC message – following up the announcement with an online debate with foreign news head Adrian Wells.
But elsewhere Al Jazeera will run public service announcements relating to the campaign from today and the 10 Downing St website is carrying a news release and link to the DEC site.
Meanwhile Tony Benn used an appearance on the Today programme to mention the appeal despite the BBC’s stance.
As such, there’s an argument that the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the charity’s appeal is generating even more coverage for it.
Blogger Martin Belam points out that an info box on DEC is carried on several pages of bbc.co.uk.
“Depending on where you stand, the BBC decision over the DEC appeal is either a fig-leaf to cover a previous lack of impartiality, evidence that the BBC will do absolutely anything to appease their Israeli masters, or a cunning ruse to to gain even more publicity for the appeal than merely broadcasting it ever would have done,” writes Belam.
As such, what is inarguable is the heated response that any coverage of the Gaza situation by the BBC will receive and the disagreement it will cause, says Belam.
A lose-lose situation for the Beeb?
UPDATE: The video has now been aired on ITN and you can view it here.
Confirming the Telegraph’s plans to outsource some of its sub-editing operation to Australia in comments on Jeff Jarvis’ blog, Ed Roussel, digital editor of Telegraph Media Group, made the following statement:
“Reducing the cost of manufacturing and distribution is an imperative for any newspaper group that is determined to remain profitable, as we are (…) The principle holds true on the digital side. ITN creates our video content, providing quality and value that we would struggle to generate internally; Brightcove handles our video distribution; Google powers our search; Escenic provides our web publishing tool; we use software developers in Bulgaria and India.
“Newspaper-web companies should focus internal resource on what they do best: creating premium editorial content.”
Similar to Jarvis’ own mantra of ‘do what you do best and link to the rest’, Roussel’s ‘outsource the rest’ makes sense in a journalism industry where partnerships and collaboration, especially online, seem to be the way forward.
So, outsourcing – not all bad?
British news company ITN has started to develop Google Maps to its advantage: a new mashed-up map of its news stories uses Google Gears Geolocation API to determine the user’s location and provide them with geographically relevant news.
The site provides a map with pinpoint flags highlighting the location that a particular news item is related to. All the user has to do is click on the individual flag and read on for the full story.
The reader can change the destination to view worldwide stories, while also being able to access archive stories stretching back to the previous month.
Website mibly.com has also used Google Maps, on this instance, working in conjunction with BBC iPlayer, tagging where a certain programme was located, allowing UK residents to view the selected show by clicking on a flag.
Independent Radio News (IRN), supplier of news to commercial radio stations, has ended its partnership with ITN after 16 years and signed up Sky News.