#FollowJourn: Matt Garrahan
Who? An Englishman in Los Angeles/Los Angeles correspondent.
Where? His work goes up regularly on FT.com.
Contact? Follow @mattgarrahan.
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.
Spot.us, the crowd-funded journalism venture that launched 10 months ago in San Francisco with funding from the Knight Foundation, has expanded to Southern California as its second market, the LA Times reported yesterday.
According to LAObserved.com, Mark Sudock, senior features editor at Fox 11 has written an open letter to Rupert Murdoch, pleading that he halts lay-offs at the Los Angeles-based station.
‘Please, please do everything possible to keep what the media has accurately described as the Fox 11 bloodbath from being realised’ Sudock begs.
Around 117 workers are to due to be made redundant at KTTV Fox 11, a LA news station part of the Fox News network and owned by News Corporation. Sudock writes to Murdoch:
“The cuts are so severe that virtually no one remains on-site to technically maintain the facility. The cuts are so deep that our ability to cover the news as we did this past week (with pursuits, brush fires and the Michael Jackson funeral happening simultaneously) is in absolute jeopardy.
“Sir, if we believe the rumors, this station or the station group needs to save ten million dollars. These layoffs appear to be the solution. Please, Mr. Murdoch, see a bigger picture.”
A new online newspaper venture, Tewspaper, has been launched with automatic aggregation replacing the need for journalists. The sites use an algorithm to search and aggregate news from social media sites to create websites relevant to five US cities (though the site itself claims to cover 10), according to a press release.
The service uses publicly available APIs to find text updates and match images to stories for Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York City.
“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper, in the release.
The sites currently look pretty basic, but add an RSS feed and this could be a handy tool for journalists in these areas wanting to track news in real-time.
There’s also an attempt at a Digg-style user-rating system, perhaps similar to plans for the blogpaper, though this isn’t yet explained on the site.
The ‘video-in-print’ (VIP) ads in the September 18 issue of Entertainment Weekly will feature samples from upcoming shows broadcast by CBS, the North American television network.
The VIP ads will be limited to copies distributed in New York and Los Angeles.
Video from Wired’s YouTube channel below:
Last night, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who had been sentenced to 12 years hard labour in North Korea, were said to be heading home on Bill Clinton’s private jet, reports the Independent. Full story at this link.
New America Media (NAM) reports on the LA Watts Times, a newspaper in Los Angeles, focusing on the black community. It is part of NAM’s LA Beez network, a collective of hyperlocal ethnic media.
“We try to look at positive stories that don’t portray blacks in a negative light, as we see in mainstream media,” managing editor Sam Richard says in the piece. “L.A. Watts Times has just been better in reporting deep down in the trenches.”
Tony Elliott, the proprietor of listings magazine Time Out, is considering selling control of the title to help fund online expansion.
“We want to develop in Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester; in Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And we’d certainly not look to launch magazines in places like Paris or Los Angeles without a developed website in place first,” he told the Times.
“Digital is becoming a bigger chunk of our revenue than print. Print is still very strong for us. Digital, it’s not much more than half, but it’s more than half,” Onlon President-CEO, Steve Hannah, told Ad Age, in the last question of a Q&A this week.
Hannah also denied rumours that the Onion’s weekly print edition is to be shut down, although Ad Age reports that the Onlon’s San Francisco and Los Angeles print editions have been closed.
The LA Times and Chicago Tribune are pooling their foreign reporting operations to serve all Tribune newspapers. The operation will be run from Los Angeles.