Tag Archives: United States

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Should public broadcaster seek competitive advantage online by offering users content for free?

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks if public broadcasters should be more restrained in the content they offer for free online.

The head of the online division of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) has admitted that it intends to use its public mandate of supplying content for free as a competitive advantage on the web through increasing activity with file-sharing and social networks.

“I believe all public broadcasters more and more think along the lines that it is a competitive advantage that they can deliver content without charging it for it,” said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, head of the online division of NRK.

He added that the organisation is actively working to use its public mandate as a competitive advantage to strengthen its position online.

Not only are they working to make NRK’s content more easily available to download and share on social sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, but are also experimenting with file-sharing services such as BitTorrent and Joost.

NRK recently made its first programme series available to download in Bit Torrent, they liked it so much, they are thinking of doing more. (You can read about their experiences so far here.)

The broadcaster has also been working to get its own channel up and running on Joost, a project that has been delayed somewhat by the challenge of obtaining permissions from all the copyright holders involved.

In addition, it has recently made some of its footage available to use under a creative commons license on Flickr. Something Germany’s public broadcaster has also dabbled with.

So is this the way forward? A good way to give value back to all its license fee payers, or just a way of completely skewing the competition in the broadcasting market?

What if the BBC, in a time of intensified competition, started extending its own free delivery of content across Facebook and bit-torrent sites? It’s probably only a matter of time, but is it an unfair advantage over commercial broadcasters, news and otherwise?

Is it a way of better fulfilling its public mandate, or just an outright example of the rampant commercialism of public broadcasters using public funding as an advantage against others that find it more difficult to distribute content for free?

Online Journalism Scandinavia: More news sites using Twingly to link to blog reactions

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia looks again at news sites linking to blogs.

Dagbladet.no, the online operation of Norway’s second biggest tabloid, has become the latest Scandinavian news site to use Twingly to show blog links to articles on the site.

Dagladet.no has been experimenting with Twingly since October last year, but last week announced that Twingly would now become the standard across the site.

However, the online newspaper said that articles dealing with very sensitive issues – those concerning murder, suicide and death – would not not have the technology applied to them.

“Our experiences with Twingly so far are very positive. There are so many interesting things happening in the blogosphere, and we think it is important that our readers can converse in their own rooms and extend the debate about our articles there,” Mina Hauge Naerland, a journalist involved with the implementation, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s also very interesting for us to be able to follow those conversations, it helps us improve our journalism.”

Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, started using Twingly a month ago, and the online operations of two of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, have used Twingly for about a year.

San Antonio news site blogs tips for blogging staff

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MySanAntonio.com – the companion site of US newspaper the Express News and broadcast channel KENS5 – has taken a novel approach to improving staff blogs on the site.

The site has set up a blog offering ‘tips and ideas for blogging more successfully at MySanAntonio.com’ – thanks to Journalism Iconoclast for the link.

The blog ranges from technical advice on posting to more general posts about writing style. It’s also a way for housekeeping notices about the blogs to be delivered and for journalist bloggers to air their queries and concerns.

A great resource supporting the idea that if you ask staff to take on a new project like a blog, the training shouldn’t end with setting it up, but should continue throughout the process.

Blog post = one line (13 words) gets 5 comments

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I have my suspicions that the love of commenting on blogs is more ardently felt on the US side of the Atlantic than here in the UK.

I’m offering this little example up as evidence. A one line – 13 words – post on Lostremote that has so far led to five comments.

It’s not extraordinary, I happily admit that. But it is interesting that the few words: CNN’s Jeffery Toobin did a live shot from a Maui hotel via Skype have generated such interest.

I’m sure it’s probably not even the best example of brevity generating a response (if anyone can offer links to sharper examples, I’d be extremely grateful) what is interesting though is whether more of a story can be built from the comments to the one line post.

Cory Bergman, who posted the one line, seems to hope so. The fifth comment is from him in response to the other four asking for more information.

NY Gov. Spitzer prostitution ring story crashes NYT website

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A huge traffic surge in response to a story broken by the NYTimes.com alleging New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a client of a high-end prostitution ring, caused the newspaper website to crash yesterday.

According to Huffingtonpost.com, the website went offline for a period yesterday afternoon as readers raced to read allegations about the governor.

NYT spokesperson Diane McNulty told Huff Post that between 2-4 pm (Eastern US time) traffic was 60 per cent higher than at the same time last Monday. NYT mobile almost doubled its traffic for the same period.

Considering the amount of traffic that would have been generated by last week’s primaries for the Democratic candidate, yesterday must have been a pretty heavy day.

Times uses interactive poll for front-page splash

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The Times has used the result of an interactive survey run on its website to create a front-page story about peoples spending habits, ahead of tomorrow’s budget.

Nearly 2500 people contributed to the survey, 400 of whom added comments about what most worried them most about their finances to an interactive map on the Times website.

image of times use of google maps

The map, a first use of Google Maps by the Times, was created with the assistance of UCLAN journalism course leader Andy Dickinson, using Google Forms and Yahoo Pipes.

“The Times has a long history of commissioning opinion polls,” wrote Tom Whitwell, Communities Editor, Times Online, about the origin of the survey.

“These are scientifically rigorous, using a carefully selected panel of maybe 1,000 people. At Times Online, we can do things very differently. We can throw out questions to our readers and capture their mood quickly, cheaply and easily.

“It doesn’t have the statistical rigour of an opinion poll, but it’s a snapshot of unfiltered opinion and anecdotal. In the United States, many newspaper have taken the process further, using “crowd-sourcing” to research and write major news stories.”

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. Continue reading →

Innovations in Journalism – EditGrid

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Each week we give technology developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week it’s data as journalism with online spreadsheets from EditGrid.

image of editgrid logo

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m David Lee, from EditGrid.

EditGrid is an online spreadsheet service that does for numbers what blogs and wikis do for text.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
It can be useful for journalist in multiple ways: managing simple lists and mini-databases so that the data can be shared, collaborated and accessed anywhere (including iPhone and Facebook) and publishing of tables and charts.

The Daily Kos has used us to publish quick and easy charts of US primary election results.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We keep enhancing the sharing and publishing capabilities to make EditGrid more powerful.

In the future it will be the platform to access live data (financial and much more). Users already created live financial spreadsheets attracting tens of thousands of users and million of views.

4) Why are you doing this?
Spreadsheet is a technology area in which the fundamentals haven’t been changed for more than 20 years.

Now we can make online spreadsheet running in a web browser which multiple people can edit at the same time with changes synchronising in real-time.

We see much potential in it and believe it will revolutionise the ways people use spreadsheets.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Free of charge for personal users, US$5 per user for organisations.

6) How will you make it pay?
We offer most of the features for free but we charge organisations $5/user/month and provide more administration and security features.

Currently, we’re more interested in growing our base to hundreds-of-thousands of users, we may charge for future value-added features and/or premium data access but what our users can enjoy for free now will remain free forever. 🙂

Current TV’s Vanguard video journalism programme to launch in the UK

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Image of Current TV website

Current TV, the peer-to-peer online news and information site, will later this month launch its investigative journalism program, Vanguard, on its cable TV channel in the UK.

(watch the trailer here…)

Vanguard is a youth-orientated weekly show focusing on behind-the-headlines stories from across the globe.

The show, which already runs on Current’s US cable TV channel and online, will feature reports from China on the trade in e-waste, the rise in organised attacks on migrants in Russia and the lawlessness of the oil-rich Niger Delta, when it launches.

“Lots of news organisations are scaling back their productions of international reports that go beyond the immediate headlines,” Laura Ling, vice president of Vanguard told Journalism.co.uk.

“I think that’s unfortunate. We are trying to look beyond the headlines, trying to be out in front of events so that we can have a better understanding of what’s going on [in the world].”

This latest move is an extension of the journalism already carried on the integrated web and TV platform. Last month, Guardian reporters began submitting vlog for broadcast on its TV channel.

The Vanguard launch precedes Current TV rolling out a bilingual version of the service in Italy, in May.

Wikileaks site restored by court ruling

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Wikileaks – the whistle-blowing website forced offline two weeks ago – has been restored by a US federal court judge, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Overuling the closure, Judge Jeffrey White said he was concerned about issues of freedom of speech and the ‘effectiveness of disabling the wikileaks.org domain name’.