Tag Archives: reuters

DNA 2008: CNN says no ‘mojos’ for five years

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Laurel Chamberlain, director of digital media for news at Turner Media, told delegates at DNA 2008 that CNN would not be adapting its journalists or content for mobile phones in the near future.

Chamberlain, who was speaking in a panel discussion on the business of mobile news, said there was currently no need to use specially trained mobile journalists or alter content for mobile.

“There are always ways of looking at how we can condense what we put onto mobile, but at this stage I don’t think it’s necessary,” Chamberlain said.

“If people only want to read the first paragraph of a story that’s fine by me, but so far we’ve found they’re reading five or six pages of one story.”

In the UK the Manchester Evening News has been experimenting with mobile journalism, giving reporters Vodafone handsets to file news copy and pictures on the fly.

Reuters has also been conducting its own ‘mojo’ trials since last summer with reporters equipped with lightweight Nokia kits producing multimedia coverage from the US Presidential primaries and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

But Chamberlain said such experiments were not being carried out at CNN: “I don’t think special mobile journalists are coming soon for CNN, maybe in another five years when we are only thinking about the mobile space.”

Bloggers to stand in Malaysian election

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Three bloggers are hoping to convert their online popularity into political votes by standing in Malaysia’s national elections next month, Reuters reports.

Jeff Ooi, a 52-year-old advertising copywriter and political blogger, Tony Pua, a technology firm worker, and Badrul Hisham Shaharin have found success with their blogs, which are widely read as an antedote to the country’s pro-government mainstream media, according to the report.

Each will run as a candidate for opposition parties in the elections on March 8.

European Commission approves Reuters/Thomson merger

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The European Commission has approved the acquisition of Reuters by Thomson – subject to certain conditions being fulfilled.

The Commission was concerned that range of information services – rather than the news side of the respective businesses – supplied by the companies would be reduced and that the creation of a sole provider of analytical market information would be detrimental to customers.

The companies therefore agreed to a range of measures to limit this impact.

“The merging parties have offered a remedies package that provides strong safeguards that users of financial data will not be harmed by this major consolidation,” Neelie Kroes, competition commissioner, said in a statement.

The Commission originally raised concern that markets for the distribution of certain reports and financial data would be ill served by the merger as it may reduce choice, encourage the ‘likelihood of price increases’ and a ‘severe risk of discontinuation of overlapping products.’

The statement from the Commission stated: “To remove the Commission’s competition concerns, the parties committed to divest the databases containing the content sets of such financial information products, together with relevant assets, personnel and customer base as appropriate to allow purchasers of the databases and assets to quickly establish themselves as a credible competitive force in the marketplace in competition with the merged entity, re-establishing the pre-merger rivalry in the respective fields.

“Therefore, customers of such financial information products would continue to have sufficient alternatives post-merger.”

The statement added that the US Department of Justice would propose a settlement agreement consistent with the remedies accepted by the Commission.

Guardian removes suicide bomb video after 550 complaints

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The Guardian has removed a video from its website showing a suicide bomb attack in Israel after more than 550 complaints were made about the footage.

The piece, which was selected from a package of footage and text supplied to the paper by Reuters, showed the wounded being taken to hospital, as well as statements from the Palestinian agriculture minister and a Hamas spokesman. It was removed four days after being posted to the site.

Writing about the decision to remove the video from the site, Siobhain Butterworth, readers’ editor, says most traffic to the video came from the site Honest Reporting, which criticised the lack of an Israeli spokesperson in the footage.

In response Butterworth points out that at the time no Israeli sources featured in the Reuters package.

She also directs complainants, readers and Honest Reporting to the paper’s other online coverage of the event:

“Honest Reporting linked only to the video; it ignored the rest of the Guardian’s coverage. It didn’t mention that the story published on the day of the bombing (and which the video accompanied) began with comments from the Israeli prime minister and included statements from an eyewitness, a doctor at the scene and a police spokesman. Stories about the event in the following days also included statements from Israeli sources.”

However, with regards to the video in question, Butterworth admits there was ‘an editing error’, which may have lead to a perceived Palestinian bias. While this was the reason the piece was removed, this was not ‘a deliberate attempt to give a one-sided response to the event’, she adds.

BBC moblog reports from international mobile conference

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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.

Jeff Jarvis on mobile journalism

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Beet.TV has an interesting video interview with Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York journalism professor, on the advantages of mobile journalism.

In particular Jarvis has been testing out Reuters’ Nokia handsets at the recent World Economics Forum, where found practical advantages to the size of the device and the speed with which copy can be filed.

Nokia mobiles gets a multimedia blog publishing application

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Telewaving is today launching Wavelog, an application that allows users to post multimedia content directly from Nokia mobile phones to blogs.

The Wavelog system works with s60, the software run on smart Nokia multimedia phones like the N95.

According to the developers the software, which was developed and tested on Nokia N95 mobile phones posting to the WordPress, can run on any blogging platform.

The system sounds similar to the software developed by Nokia and Reuters for their mobile journalism project.

That system allowed journalists to upload multimedia reports from their N95 phones to a back-end WordPress blog that desk editors would then have access to.

The Telewaving system is also able to upload text, images, audio, and video and is able to upload over any network connection (this may just be US networks, though).

NBC provides code to embed news shows

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From Wednesday news show clips from US broadcaster NBC will be offered as embeddable codes, according to a report from beet.tv.

As the beet.tv article points out, while such codes are offered for Reuters videos and videos on the Wall Street Journal website, this is the first time a major US network news operation has opted for this method of sharing content.

Revamped Reuters business section on IHT.com goes live

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Last month we reported that Reuters and the International Herald Tribune were partnering to revamp the IHT’s financial news offering online and launch a daily co-branded world business report in the newspaper.

The new section of the IHT.com site – renamed Business with Reuters – has gone live today and features news analysis and comment from IHT, Reuters and New York Times business writers and columnists.