Tag Archives: United States

Guardian mobile; Daily Mail targets US audience on Kindle

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Guardian.co.uk will be available as a new mobile site from March, a release from the publisher has confirmed.

Specific versions of m.guardian.co.uk will be available for iPhone and Blackberry handsets will be released. The decision to launch a dedicated mobile site follows growing mobile traffic to the Guardian, Adam Freeman, commercial director, said in the statement.

Distribution deals for mobile content have been signed with 3 and Vodafone. The site itself will be ad-supported.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail is planning to make its content available on the US version of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, according to a report from NMA – part of a push to capitalise on the Mail’s growing US audience. The site previously told Journalism.co.uk that its commercial focus remains on the UK, but perhaps this marks the beginnings of an overseas push.

CollegeJourn.com: Professors join in the Twitter conversation

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We’ll link again to a round-up post, but in the meantime here’s the CollegeJourn.com ‘Bring A Professor chat’ from yesterday evening, displayed via CoverItLive. Journalism educators shared their thoughts on ‘how journalism education can be improved’: “what they’re doing right and how, together, we can help redefine the future of journalism and journalism education,” the host, Suzanne Yada, asked the range of US college students and professors.

Update: And here’s the round-up: http://www.collegejourn.com/2009/02/bring-a-professor-chat-wrapup.html

Berkeley Daily Planet launches ‘Fund for Local Reporting’

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In a frank article about the paper’s future, the owners of US independent newspaper the Berkeley Daily Planet admit they don’t have a solution for plugging the revenue gap in their ailing ad-supported business model.

Enter the Fund for Local Reporting, which is asking for donations large and small to keep the Planet running.

“As we explained in a recent editorial, paying salaries and benefits just for the reporters and editors who cover local news adds up to at least $250,000 a year. That doesn’t include production, rent, printing, distribution, sales etc,” reads the online payment form.

The O’Malleys, the paper’s owners, are also exploring developing the fund into a tax-exempt, not-for-profit organisation. Indeed, they’ve been toying with lots of ideas – part of a ‘reality check’, the editor says – including voluntary subscriptions and migrating to the web [All ideas mooted in today’s #cfund debate]. They might not know what the solution is, and this might be a last roll of the dice, but they’re certainly going for it with all they’ve got.

MediaShift: Five challenges for small college media in US

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Bryan Murley takes a look at five challenges for US college media. He outlines:

1. Small staffs and high churn rate; 2. Instructors who don’t get it; 3. Old mindsets from the students; 4. Not enough payoff for students; 5. Sparse resources.

Full story at this link…

Editor&Publisher: Star-Ledger to outsource local news to new service

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The US paper will partner an as yet unestablished news service, being created by former Star-Ledger managing editor Rick Everett, for local news coverage.

The new organisation is expected to hire around 30 reporters, including college students. The collaboration will boost the paper’s coverage after it lost 151 newsroom staff last year.

Full story at this link…

Dallasnews.com: Court calls on news aggregator to reveal anonymous commenters

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A US county court judge has called on news aggregation site Topix.com to reveal identifying information about 178 anonymous commenters, who left comments on a story relating to sexual abuse allegations.

The site has until March 6 to comply.

Full story at this link…

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.

CPJ releases ‘Attacks on the Press in 2008’ report

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The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released its ‘Attacks on the Press in 2008’ report yesterday and speaking in the preface, Carl Bernstein made two comments that neatly highlight the duplicitious nature of the web when it comes to press freedom:

“[T]he tension between technology and outright repression – the availability of satellite television, the use of the internet as impetus for growth and economic modernization – has rendered obsolete the old methods of press control and suppression of information such as media nationalization and overt censorship.

vs

“In China, which now has more than a quarter billion online users, self-censorship is enforced through government rules and regulations that guide Internet service providers about what news can be posted and who can post it (…) In every country following the Chinese model, internet access has been severely restricted or the plug pulled entirely during periods of potential social unrest.”

Last year CPJ’s imprisonment index noted that more online journalists were in jail than those working in any other media.

While the US’ ranking in terms of imprisoned journalists is low, the country’s actions have ‘a disproportionate impact’ on the rest of the world. With a new administration comes new hope for global press freedom, Bernstein adds.

“President Barack Obama must recognise that whenever the United States fails to uphold press freedom at home or on the battlefield, its actions ripple across the world. By scrupulously upholding press freedom at home, by ending the practice of open-ended detentions of journalists, and by investigating and learning from each instance in which the US military is responsible for the death of a journalist, Obama can send an unequivocal message about the country’s commitment to protecting press freedom. These policies might accelerate declines in the numbers of journalists killed and imprisoned. They will certainly make it much harder for governments worldwide to justify repressive policies by citing the actions of the United States.”