Tag Archives: Obama

Channel 4 News: Obama picture by Welsh photographer goes viral

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A photo taken by award-winning cameraman Dai Baker to highlight the ‘For Luca’ campaign has gone viral on Twitter.

As Channel 4 News reports here, Baker snapped a photo of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office while visiting the White House to accept the new photographer’s association award, having smuggled his mobile past security.

The ITN photographer from South Wales was raising awareness for the ‘For Luca’ campaign, which aims to raise £1.5m to buy prosthetic legs for a three-year-old with meningococcal septicaemia.

After an interview with Baker’s local paper, the South Wales Argus, his stunt attracted the attention of news outlets around the world, as Baker told Channel 4 News. Do you want to become a master of gambling entertainment? http://bonscasino.com/ is your partner on this journey. Our games require strategy, intelligence and luck. Apply your skills, participate in tournaments and show everyone that you are a true master of gambling. Make your game even more exciting with our regular events.

It’s quite surreal appearing in the Huffington Post, the Mumbai Mirror, and some foreign newspapers I can’t even read.

Baker has been a winner at the White House press awards for six years running, this year claiming prizes for best day feature, best magazine feature, best news features, and best special report/series.

Journalisted Weekly: Obama, Ryan Giggs, G8, & ash

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Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about.

It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

For the week ending Sunday 29 May

  • Obama’s European tour captures the headlines
  • Debate over privacy injunctions spreads across tabloids and broadsheets
  • Alleged sexual harassment by French government minister covered little

Covered lots

  • President Obama’s UK and Ireland visits ahead of the G8, including Guinness sampling, a Buckingham Palace banquet, and historic addresses to Parliament and Westminster Hall, 340 articles
  • Footballer Ryan Giggs is named by MP John Hemming for having taken out an injunction, igniting further debate over privacy law and the internet, 176 articles
  • The G8 Summit in Paris, including talks over Middle East aid, Russia as mediator in the Libya conflict, and internet regulation, 154 articles
  • Iceland’s most active volcano erupts, causing more than 500 flights over Scotland to be cancelled in fear of another ash cloud, 129 articles
  • Serbian fugitive Ratko Mladic, arrested and awaiting trial at the Hague for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, 126 articles

Covered little

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

Celebrity vs serious

Arab spring

Who wrote a lot about…’The G8 Summit’

Patrick Wintour – 12 articles (The Guardian), Tim Bradshaw – 11 articles (Financial Times), Kim Willsher – 7 articles (The Guardian), Sam Coates – 6 articles (The Times), Andrew Porter – 5 articles (The Telegraph), Tom Chivers – 4 articles (The Telegraph)

Long form journalism

More from the Media Standards Trust

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s new site Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

Churnalism.com ‘explore’ page is available for browsing press release sources alongside news outlets

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

ProPublica launches ChangeTracker with help of journalist-programmer

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Not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica is already making the most of new journalist-programmer intern Brian Boyer, who joined the site last month.

Boyer, who graduated from a specialist programming-journalism course at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, has created ChangeTracker – a tool to monitor changes made to WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and the upcoming FinancialStability.gov websites.

“ChangeTracker lets users see exactly what was removed, edited or updated on those sites by showing side-by-side comparisons of sites before and after changes made to them,” says a release from ProPublica.

What’s more you can get updates of the changes via RSS, Twitter, email or via the ChangeTracker webpage.

“ChangeTracker will help us keep an eye on the administration’s transparency pledges, and will help reporters, bloggers, government watchdogs and everyday citizens keep watch over the websites of their elected officials,” said Scott Klein, director of online development.

In true Boyer style, the programming behind the tool will be open source, much like his News Mixer application, for use by third-parties.

The organisation recently launched Shovelwatch – a site analysing President Obama’s stimulus package.

ProPublica’s ‘Shovelwatch’: reviewing Obama’s stimulus package

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Not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica has crated a site dedicated to analysis of President Obama’s stimulus package for the US economy.

Working with news program The Takeaway and public radio station WNYC, ShovelWatch is big on data and data visualisation.

For starters:

A searchable, visual representation of the senate and state’s spending plans for the stimulus bill – created using IBM’s Many Eyes (also used by the New York Times):

Screenshot of Shovelwatch visualisation

A fully searchable database of ‘How Much Your School District Stands to Lose in Stimulus Bill Construction Funds’.

The site will continue to develop – perhaps deploying the skills of new intern programmer-journalist Brian Boyer – and, in a press release, said it will later look to citizen’s help track how the plan is working/not working.

Photo Attorney: Who is right in the Fairey vs AP Obama photo case?

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As reported by various sources (including the AP) the AP has made a claim against artist Shepard Fairey for use of its photograph: the AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey’s defence claims that the use is permitted through ‘fair use.’

“Who is right?” asks Carolyn E. Wright on the Photo Attorney blog. “Unfortunately, only a court can truly tell us. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to figure it out!”

Wright’s comprehensive post looks at issues surrounding fair use and photograph copyright.

Full post at this link…

Obama inauguration coverage sets new live streaming record for AP

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It seems that more and more people are eschewing television in favour of online content, when it comes to obtaining and providing coverage of important events.

According to the Associated Press, eight million users watched the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States in Washington D.C on Tuesday, via AP’s Online Video Network (OVN).

At its peak, AP claim that as many as 374,000 streams were accessed concurrently.

This is a significant increase from the 80,000 live streams AP recorded during its coverage of the presidential election night in November.

In addition, 160 media outlets subscribed to their premium service, which provided a video widget allowing for multiple viewing angles of the event.

Static media also enjoyed a healthy rise, with AP Images and AP Exchange together recording an 80 per cent peak over regular traffic to their sites during the event.

In total, over 1,400 inaugural images passed through their services from around the globe.

AP were not alone in their online triumph. CNN shattered its own record four-fold, by attracting 136 million views of its website and 21.3 million viewers to its live streaming coverage.

Web users were so busy watching President Obama sworn into office that Google noticed a distinct drop in the number of searches performed during the inaugural address.