SFN’s World Digital Media Trends 2007 has reported that local TV news is rated ‘as the most important news source,’ followed by the internet. The report uses information from the Carnegie Corporation’s ‘Abandoning the News’ survey.
Having set up a timeline dedicated to reporting on the sweeping job cuts affecting both senior and junior journalists alike, a trend is emerging for laid-off staff to use blogs, Twitter and other online sites and tools to capture their redundancy.
Reports such as Martin Gee’s set of Flickr images from his last day at the San Jose Mercury give a highly individual picture of how these cuts are being felt on a personal level beyond the redundancy figures and prediction stats.
In the summer, the Columbia Journalism Review started its ‘Parting Thoughts’ series, posting responses from journalists leaving the industry or facing redundancy.
At the Gannett Blog, former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins crowdsourced a blogpost of lay-offs by the publisher, listed by newspaper area – at time of writing redundancies at 72 of Gannett’s 85 US titles affected by the company’s latest round of job cuts were accounted for in Hopkins’ post.
In an open blog post last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of web application design and events agency Carsonified, used the company’s blog to share his thoughts about staff cuts and give the reasons for making them.
Carson went on to give tips for companies looking to recession-proof their business (points that some commenters on the post argue are common sense no matter what the economic situation).
The Spokesman-Review has used its Daily Briefing blog to cover staff leaving in an equally personal and open way. News of senior staff exiting the paper, such as editor Steve Smith and assistant managing editor Carla Savalli, was broken on the blog and posts have also been penned by outgoing journalists, including Thuy Dzuong:
“Folks, it’s been fun but The layoff list for non-managers has been finalized, and I’m on it.”
Last week Silicon Alley Insider built a ‘real time’-style page to cover lay-offs at parent company Yahoo, updating it as new info came in.
(UPDATE – The Rocky Mountain News has launched iwantmyrocky.com to canvas support for the newspaper)
Despite the sad circumstances, the way in which journalists and media workers are facing redundancy in these examples shows a real engagement with online tools. A personal picture of what is happening to the industry is being documented for future reference by these staff members expressing themselves so openly (and perhaps significantly being ‘allowed’ to express themselves by their past/present employers).
What is more, while they may not hold the answers to the problems currently faced by the media industry, they shed light on how these issues are perceived and felt on the frontline. Something which employers should read and learn from.
As noted last week, the Pulitzer prizes will now allow entries from online-only publications. But, as online writers were quick to comment, not all bloggers are welcome.
As Robert Niles notes, “the awards are not throwing open their doors to every blogger on the planet. Entries are restricted to U.S.-based publications which ‘regularly engage’ in original reporting.”
He gives a full guide to entering, with some additional comments from Sig Gissler, administrator of the Prizes. “The Pulitzer Board is not creating new categories for online-only work at this point, but he [Gissler] noted that the Pulitzers ‘have changed a lot in recent years’ in expanding eligibility for online work,” Niles writes.
Extensive staff cuts in US newsrooms will affect the diversity of the organisations and their reporting, according to this report.
As the US’ first black president comes to power, journalists who understand diversity will be more in demand, argues Dori Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Following its decision to become an online-only outfit from spring next year, the Christian Science Monitor has opted for an open source content management system (CMS) produced by Norway’s eZ Systems.
The eZ Publish CMS will support multimedia content and allow the monitor to publish to multiple platforms if needed, a release from eZ said.
The deal marks the CMS provider’s plans to expand into the US.
CJR rounds up its take on US/UK translation confusion. What’s the origin of ‘gob-smacked’ exactly? And apparently another common Britishism has a slightly different and cleaner meaning in the US sense…
PolitiFact has scooped the National Press Foundation’s 2008 online journalism award, according to a release from the foundation.
The site, which was developed by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly used its Truth-O-Meter to rank candidates’ statements during the US presidential campaigns.
It was previously recognised by the Knight Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism and though it’s been on a break since the elections, a statement on the site says it will return in January.
Yesterday I picked up a discussion on Facebook, via a friend, about media coverage of the Ghanaian elections (voters went to the polls yesterday, and votes are being counted now, if you missed it, by the way) why had there been so little election coverage on the Western networks? Very little on CNN; very little on BBC.
“I was hoping, only hoping that for just a fraction of a moment the media cameras and the pens will slip from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe onto Ghana. Just a bit of positive reportage on Africa! That’s all I was hoping for. But I guess that’s not sensational enough for the Western media. ‘Ghana peacefully elects a new President’… that’s not headline stuff! It simply does not sell,” wrote Maclean Arthur.
Meanwhile, rounds up the poor global news coverage here, on his blog. ‘Does Ghana exist’ he asks? He finds it ‘interesting that many of the leading Western media outlets have not made a mention of Ghana 2008 Elections.’
“Perhaps, Ghana does not exist on their radar screen. Ghana, like the rest of black Africa will only pop-up on their monitoring screens when over 1,000 people have butchered themselves or over 300,000 people are dying of starvation, or over 500,000 people are displaced by a civil war,” Ajao writes.
Over on Facebook, others were quick to join in the criticism and call for more African specific coverage, in the form of an African television network.
That’s exactly what Salim Amin wants to set-up, in a bid to counter existing coverage (or lack thereof) with a proposed all-African television network, A24, as I have written about on Journalism.co.uk before. Amin told me in September:
“Everything we get is negative out of Africa. 99 per cent of the news is genocides, wars, famine, HIV.
“We’re not saying those things don’t occur or we’re going to brush them under the carpet, but what we’re saying is there are other things people want to know about. About business, about sport, about music, environment, health…
“Even the negative stuff needs to be done from an African perspective. African journalists are not telling those stories – it’s still foreign correspondents being parachuted into the continent to tell those stories. We want to give that opportunity to Africans to come up with their own solutions and tell their own stories.”
However, Amin is still searching for suitable investors that won’t compromise the ideals and aims of the channel. In the meantime, A24 exists as an online video agency.
The pitiful global coverage of the Ghanaian election reinforces the need for better and wider spread African news coverage, that isn’t just the stereotypical coverage we’re so used to, as Maclean Arthur referred to on Faceboook as ‘the usual images of dying children with flies gallivanting all over their chapped lips.’
Yes, some websites are bridging some gaps (for example, New America Media for the ethnic media in the US, and Global Voices Online – who wrote about Twittering the Ghanaian elections here), but there’s still a heck of a way to go. BBC World Service may have a Ghana Election page, but it’s not quite on the same scale as you might see for a European election is it?
The Kyrgyz state television and radio company KNTR said on Friday that BBC’s local radio service and U.S-funded Radio Liberty have been taken off-air, for ‘violating’ obligations, Reuters reports.
For those that haven’t seen it, here’s Bloomberg’s interview with ContentNext/paidContent founder Rafat Ali, in which he forecasts more job cuts in January and February for the media industry and major product closures by publishers and broadcasters. Ali also predicts the end of one UK or US national newspaper in the next few months.