Tag Archives: reporter

British Press Awards – the winners

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Guardian.co.uk was named website of the year at last night’s British Press Awards, as the paper picked up three awards.

Guardian journalist Sean Smith was named digital reporter of the year and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad foreign reporter of the year.

The Financial Times also scooped three awards winning the newspaper of the year title and prizes for two of its journalists.

The Sun walked away with most prizes on the night with four: scoop of the year and reporter of the year for Tom Newton Dunn; and its ‘Help for Heroes campaign’ named campaign of the year and winning the Cudlipp award.

Press Gazette has the full list of award winners.

Innovations in Journalism – Fromdistance

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Fromdistance logo

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

Fromdistance is a software company which makes products for mobile applications. Our main product is the Fromdistance MDM (Mobile Device Manager) – a tool for managing mobile devices. Based on this , we have built the Fromdistance Mobile Professional Reporter (MPR) and the Mobile Citizen Reporter (MCR).

The first is used by several media companies for their own content production; the latter is a service for publishers to get content from end users.

Both services transmit images and videos in their original quality without sacrificing resolution – making a sharp contrast with using MMS.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Using the MPR service professional journalists can create instant reports for their publishers extremely easily. We can automate the whole process to a point where only the recording button on a mobile device is used – everything else is 100 per cent automatic.

In professional reporting it’s vital to have tools that work. As the MPR is based on our mobile device management product, we can take care of the devices and of the user like never before. For instance, remote desktop access can be established to devices to help reporters in trouble.

Citizen journalists can take advantage of the reporter service, as it can be used to send images, videos and text to a publisher of their choice. The user is asked to accept the terms set by the publisher during the submission process, which eliminates rights-related questions.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

Live streaming is in the works.

4) Why are you doing this?

We believe that mobile devices and mobile networks facilitate new ways of content production, both in terms of processes and in terms of concepts. However, it’s important to ensure the technical quality of the material sent out – normally publishers don’t want scores of low-quality content.

We also want to help publishers in receiving material from end customers in order to get their stories heard. While traditional blogging is good, we would want to combine user generated content with professional publishing.

5) What does it cost to use it?

The MPR is a premium service – the cost depends on the number of devices, supported
video formats and level of integration needed.

Fromdistance MCR is free for end users. They only need to pay for the generated data traffic.

6) How will you make it pay?

Publishers/media companies are our customers and pay monthly fees for using either service.

Online Journalism India: Moblogging is citizen journalism in India

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indian flag

This week’s guest is Pramit Singh, blogger on the Indian new media scene and founder of Bighow.com. Continue reading →

Local Newspaper Week to be covered by journalist bloggers

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Local newspaper journalists are to blog on the progress of current campaigns in their newspapers for Local Newspaper Week – an event organised by the Newspaper Society to raise awareness of local media.

It is hoped the blogs, which form part of the event’s official website, will appeal to consumers, a press release from the society said, while allowing local titles to promote themselves and their campaigns.

Contributors so far include Mark Bowen, deputy news editor of the Hereford Times, and Donna Pryce, reporter with the Derry Journal.

This year’s Local Newspaper Week will take place between May 5-11.

Innovations in Journalism – Seesmic.com

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Image of seesmic

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

I’m Cathy Brooks, Seesmic executive producer.

Seesmic is a platform for global conversation. We take all the best of blogging, IM, Twitter and social networks and bring them together, creating a rich environment for debate and discourse using video as the medium.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Think of it as having access to a global pool of expert sources.

With 4,000 people from 25 countries currently in the system Seesmic provides journalists with eyes and ears in virtually every major part of the world.

When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, the Seesmic community almost exploded with discussion, revealing a deep, rich pool of commentators whose backgrounds and geography would have made them invaluable to a reporter.

Seesmic also can serve as a sounding board for story ideas and topics, often resulting in finding experts whose knowledge can support a journalist’s efforts.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

This is just the beginning. Seesmic opened its doors in September 2007. We have been in a closed, alpha stage with invite only access to the platform since late 2007 and will be opening more widely to the public in 2008.

We will be building out our community substantially as we open to a more widespread audience. We also will develop and produce both original and sponsored programming as well as create an array of channels for conversations.

4) Why are you doing this?

Because in the massive echo-chamber that is the world of social media there are myriad ways to broadcast thoughts and messages to either one, a few or many people, and there are even some ways to have group discussions, but there is a distinct lack of resources allowing people to truly communicate and converse in a meaningful, rich way.

By leveraging video as the conduit, Seesmic provides a truly personal and human connection.

5) What does it cost to use it?

There is presently no cost to the user and we will always provide a free service. There may, in the future, be subscription level “professional” versions with additional features and functionality but that is still in the future. Find out argos opening times and events

6) How will you make it pay?

Presently we are building our community and our technology. We have several potential options for revenue – from contextual advertising and sponsored channels/programming to subscription level services that provide additional features and no advertising.

Image of seesmic website

Innovations in Journalism – Newstin

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Newstin image

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

I’m Jeremy Lopez, director of business development at Newstin.

Newstin is a unique, semantic and cross-language information retrieval engine with metadata tagging and data visualization capabilities.

Newstin pulls content from more than 150,000 global sources in ten different language publications; organising this content into over 650,000 topical categories.

Major features include ‘across language navigation with integrated translation’, ‘text mining,’ and ‘semantic contextual searching’.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Our new feature ‘Across language commenting’ – coming soon. If a reporter puts out a story in English and someone from Russia translates and reads this story and then decides to comment on it in Russian, the reporter will have the tools on the page to be able to have the Russian comment translated back into English.

With our news retrieval system we have collected and organised news in such a way that you do not have to speak Russian in order to find, say, Russian news on computer and software supplies.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

There is a whole lot more to come.  We are currently in the process of re-designing the site for easier use and enhanced features.

A few of the major features that will be functioning by the beginning of Q2 are:

1. Social Newstin – personal accounts, editable categories
2. Commenting outside of publishing, ability to create discussion groups for editors, cross language commenting
3. Sentiment analysis – tone of the story and category will be displayed

4) Why are you doing this?

News is one of the highest growth categories on the internet but the world is stuck in cultural and linguistic silos, the reason is because there is no one source that organises it all.

If the world’s web newsreaders were to cross language and cultural borders with ease so that there were no need for these linguistic barriers then we would suddenly be all on the same page.

We have usage from 193 countries already and we are trying to put up local domains to bring more access from each of them so they don’t have to first navigate with an English site.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Newstin is a free service!  We will be implementing an upgraded version in the future with additional tools and access.  This will be a more professionally focused service with a cost.

6) How will you make it pay?

Advertising, sponsorships, premium service in the future…to name a few.

Wall Street Journal launches environmental business blog

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WSJ.com has created a new blog focusing on the impact of environmental change on the energy industry.

The Environmental Capital blog, which can be accessed for free, will feature regular podcasts and contributions from industry experts, guest bloggers and columnists.

Keith Johnson, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, will be the blog’s lead writer, while the Journal’s environmental news editor Jeffrey Ball is editor and contributor.

Facebook useful to local news? If it opened up the networks

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The Guardian may be adopting strategies to make itself more Facebook-friendly but the lack of truly local geographical networks on the social networking site makes it more difficult for smaller papers to make great use of it.

The UK currently has 17 regional networks that users can become part of, here they are:

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The regional networks, which unsurprisingly centre on larger towns and cities, offer reporters a great ‘in’ to the online community on their patch. A reporter working for the Manchester Evening News, for instance, or one of its smaller titles in the Greater Manchester area is at a distinct advantage over a reporter working on a paper in a smaller town:

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Just a brief, cursory glance at the Manchester group throws up leads for several potential stories amongst its 500,000 plus members. The ‘See what’s popular’ feature and the discussion board make it a simple place to seed stories as well as one in which to ask for information and pick up leads. But where would you go if you lived in Burton on Trent?

Burton is a town in Staffordshire that – if you’ve defining it in terms of Facebook regions – is slap bang between Nottingham and West Midlands. Not much use then if you’re a reporter on the Burton Mail.

Burton has 103 groups related to it on Facebook – a lot of ground to cover for any hack – but like many other towns across the UK it has no network and Facebook doesn’t allow users to establish there own networks. Users have to make that request to the site:

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If Facebook gave it’s users the ability to create these networks themselves it would solve a lot of headaches, but don’t expect that to happen in a hurry. So come on reporters on papers in Burton, Derby, Reading, Cardiff, Norwich and the like. Get a campaign going to get your town recognised as a network on Facebook. It can make the day job a hell of a lot simpler.

AFP launches global news diary

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Agence France-Presse (AFP) has launched a service called Global News Agenda – an editorial resource, essentially a searchable diary list, of newsworthy events in 2008.

AFP claims it’s a world’s first, compiled by its 2,400 reporter across the planet

The claims:

  • Over 5,000 future events providing a wealth of story-leads and features ideas.
  • More than 200 countries covered.
  • Researched by over 2,400 AFP journalists in 160 bureaux worldwide.
  • Five “at a glance” categories indexed by date, country and region.

But it’s only available in English and costs £145 for a password to the online edition.

You can also – and I can’t understand this really – get a printed edition. How would you keep it updated? Write in the margin? Do they send you extra pages through the year?

New look for Birmingham Post website

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Trinity Mirror are to revamp the Birmingham Post’s website, according to reporter on the paper Joanna Geary – who is part of the development team for the new site.

Geary opened up the floor to readers of her blog to suggest features for the redeveloped website, taking their ideas to a meeting yesterday with management staff working on the project.

In an updated blog post, Geary wrote the following on some initial thoughts on the relaunch: “We’ve got a nice head start in that we will be using a similar template to other papers in the group such as the Liverpool Post, Liverpool Echo, Daily Post (Wales) and Daily Record (Scotland). Ours, however, will have a very distinct Birmingham Post feel.”