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Israeli troops may have targeted Gaza newsman: watchdog - Middle East Times
2008-04-20 22:23:00
"The Reuters truck was clearly marked 'TV' and 'Press' and drove by the tank twice, so it's hard to believe the Israeli tank crew didn't see the pickup contained only journalists"
More About: Middle East , Gaza , East , Middle , Times

Xpress: News | Sky News sets sights on Dubai [del.icio.us]
2008-04-20 21:47:00
Sky News , the big daddy of rolling news, seeks to join other international TV news channels that established bureaus in Dubai , senior officials said.
More About: Sights , Sets , Xpress

Message force multipliers: Third-party advocates and the Iraq war [del.icio
2008-04-20 19:36:00
Trying to recruit the support of third-party advocates is an accepted public relationstactic. When third-party advocates can't be recruited, simulating them, such as by the creation of "advocacy groups" that are often thinly disguised industry organizatio
More About: Iraq , Party , Iraq War , Force , Message

Zen Traveler: Applause Of A Nation [del.icio.us]
2008-04-20 19:33:00
Down the escalator emerged a snaking line of tired looking uniformed soldiers and Marines...The applause started as a ripple and grew to a sustained, heavy crescendo as the hundreds of passengers in the terminal, US Customs agents, flight crews, and airpo
More About: Nation , Applause

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times [de
2008-04-20 19:28:00
"Analysts...often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they w
More About: Military , New York , York , New York Times , Times

The decline of newspapers - nothing to do with journalism 3
2008-04-20 01:05:00
More grist to the mill from one of my favourite reads, John Robinson. Here is Robinson, (who edits the News-Record in Greensboro, North Carolina) explaining why he missed a retired editor speaking about the good old days and proposing another old-fashioned remedy for the news industry’s ills: Doubling the size of reporting staffs would certainly serve the community. The more journalists reporting the good, the bad and the ugly, the better.But those are the effects of problems facing newspapers not the cause. While good journalism has not changed markedly since the 1990s, technology has.So has the audience. So have people’s habits.Not addressing those changes in discussions about journalism and newspapers is like talking about television as if there were still only three channels.Those changes: the economic distress faced by traditional newspaper advertisers such as department storesthe loss of classified revenuesthe splintering of the attentions and interests of the audiencethe...
More About: Journalism , Newspapers

Our lonely planet, 3: ambient emotions [del.icio.us]
2008-04-19 21:51:00
"You can fill your life with vicarious pleasures, watching the actions of other people through a filter. It has the potential to unfurl our horizons, but also the potential to limit it massively."
More About: Planet , Emotions , Ambient , Lonely , Lonely Planet

The Other McCain: Blue-collar TV news? [del.icio.us]
2008-04-19 21:02:00
"when Peter Smith (who is, in point of fact, an advertising executive) writes about "all those tax brackets between" journalists and the working class, he's propagating a dangerous myth."
More About: News , Blue , Collar

ITV News: now edited by everyone
2008-04-19 19:51:00
I understand that today is the day ITV News moves to a system where reporters edit their own TV packages.How can you tell someone new to video editing? Well, it’s always the sound that gives it away. That, and the going to black and flash frames.Having pioneered multi-skilling in TV newsrooms what would my thoughts be? Well, for one video editing has become a lot simpler. We’re not quite at the point where it’s no more complicated than word processing, but it’s getting there.For a well-resourced news programmes - on one level - it makes sense. But working to deadline, the ability of a number of people performing synchronously to outperform one individual is pretty much given. And, if you have a news channel, the economies of scale are pretty simple. Peter Horrocks is unlikely to view this move as giving ITV a competitive advantage in news.Still it is going ahead, and the real measure of any multi-skilling effort is the number of hold-outs. Which high profile correspondents m...

Why a Journalism Museum Makes Sense | Newsweek News | Newsweek.com [del.ici
2008-04-18 21:13:00
"the News eum was able to net $122 million in seed money from major media outlets that are simultaneously slashing personnel and shuttering bureaus."
More About: Sense , Journalism , Museum , Newsweek

Channel 4 - News - Why Flat Earth News falls flat [del.icio.us]
2008-04-18 21:09:00
Flat Earth News is an engrossing book, especially for navel-gazing journalists and PRs, which makes a coruscating attack on both professions. But it's also flawed.
More About: Channel , Channel 4 , Falls

The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook [del.icio.us]
2008-04-18 14:50:00
why is Facebook worth $15bn and Wordpress is worth $200mm? Well for one, Facebook controls the advertising inventory on the pages it serves and Wordpress does not.
More About: Difference

Tribune Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha [del.icio.us]
2008-04-18 11:37:00
"classified advertising makes up about a third of our total publishing ad revenue but it contributed to nearly three-quarters of the decline in publishing ad revenue."
More About: Alpha , Earnings , Call , Seeking , Tribune

The New York Times strategy...
2008-04-18 01:32:00
Strategy at the New York Times ? Goes a little something like this...according to their earnings call: There are four key elements to our strategy - introducing new products and services, both in print and online; aggressively managing our costs;rebalancing our portfolio of businesses both by making acquisitions and by divesting properties that no longer meet their financial targets or fit strategically within the Times Company;and building our digital research and development capability.[BTW cf. McClatchy: We are focused on four major areas: driving new revenues, with a particular emphasis on online advertising;focusing on growing total audience;providing high quality public service journalism;and reducing our cost structure.]How else does it look for the Times?The national print categories where we saw the largest declines were telecommunications as wireless carriers reduced advertising; transportation, as international and domestic airlines cut back their spending due to a rise in...
More About: Strategy , New York Times

Fadel Shana and flechettes
2008-04-17 12:08:00
Reuters has released a video (see below) showing what appears to be the Israeli tank firing the round that - it’s claimed - killed cameraman Fadel Shana.The first thing to note is the distance that Shana is from the tank, probably a Merkava 4 with a 105mm gun firing flechette rounds. Flechettes?Flechettes are razor-sharp 3.75mm darts released from cannisters that explode in mid-air and spray thousands of them in an arc some 300 metres long and 90 metres wide.The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) generally fires them in 105mm tank shells. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the IDF is using a modified version of US-supplied M494 105mm APERS-T rounds, acquired in the 1970s.According to the Israeli Supreme Court: the use of the flechette is restricted to areas [Hebrew. gizra, is closer to “sector”, implying a more closed, delineated area] in which the danger to innocent civilians is not actual, and only against those suspected of activity that endangers IDF soldiers or Israeli citize...

Magazine covers...
2008-04-15 22:56:00
[The peerless Onion - HT: Jeremy Leslie]
More About: Magazine , Magazine Covers , Covers

Public service broadcasting - don't text in your votes
2008-04-15 21:10:00
Funny really. The only time television has ever really cared about voting was when it offered an opportunity to drain money from audiences.When it comes to public policy, broadcasting follows the long British tradition of deferring decisions to appointed boards of scrupulously selected, upstanding gentlefolk. God forbid those board members be politicised, or lured into some broader political process.It is hardly the fault of Ofcom that when it comes to options for dishing out public money the preferred solutions of boss Ed Richards are expressed like this: "Ofcom's content board could do it, although I would not necessarily recommend that. The BBC Trust could become a broader funding agency, or you could set up something new called the Public Service Trust or Agency," he said.Political, democratic or voting based solutions are not on the table to decide on subsidy allocations aimed at producing television to encourage and support what exactly?Er, precisely the kind of civic activit...
More About: Text , Broadcasting

Public service broadcasting 101 (Give us the cash or Gordon Ramsay replaces
2008-04-14 22:15:00
I haven’t put pen to paper on the Ofcom PSB review. The review is thorough but transparent, the best take on it is from Ofcomwatch - I’ve added a link to a pdf of Stigler’s seminal article. Nobel winner George Stigler famously observed [pdf] that firms often acquire policy or regulation so as to serve their interest, not the public interest.Ofcom’s Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) review looks like it could be headed directly down this path.The regulator paints a dire picture of the future of quality television broadcasting and strongly suggests a state subsidy should be offered. The likely beneficiary? Channel 4.Ofcom say Channel 4 ‘will need greater certainty in its funding model.’‘Greater certainty’ in this context = money. And the likely source? The BBC licence fee.
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Invitation to a book launch
2008-04-13 19:05:00
The launch debate for Can You Trust The Media? will be at City’s Cass Business School, on Wednesday, April 30 (6 for 6.30pm). Sarah Montague of Today will be taking the chair. Andrew Gilligan, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Charlie Beckett and myself will be panelling. Q&A to follow.You are - of course - cordially invited.Can You Trust The Media?6 for 6.30pm, Wednesday, April 30The Hub, Cass Business School106 Bunhill Row, LondonEC1Y 8TZ
More About: Book , Launch , Invitation

Can You Trust The Media? - Mistakes and corrections
2008-04-10 20:10:00
The plan to set up a blog to record all the mistakes in CYTTM has - alas - been on the backburner (too busy).So here’s one mistake from line 16, p58 [HT: Jack Shafer].The newscaster – who doubled up as host of What’s My Line – was obliged to present the day’s stories while holding a lit cigarette.The newscaster who hosted Camel News Caravan, John Cameron Swayze, was a also a panellist on NBC’s quiz show “Who Said That?” and NOT host of CBS’s “What’s My Line?” - that was John Charles Daly Jr. who doubled as a newscaster and executive at ABC.BTW, on the day UK regulator Ofcom announced its review of public service broadcasting it’s worth recalling what Daly told Time when he got the boot from ABC in 1960: “By the old standards by which I was brought up, most of what passes for public-service programming today is nothing of the sort; I don’t know how they get away with it.”
More About: Media , The Media , Trust , Corrections

Snap judgment
2008-04-09 17:21:00
In case you wondered exactly how low in the public’s estimation are the people who feed their habit for celebrity photographs, an inquest jury has provided the answer.They rank alongside drink-drivers who kill their passengers.More than 10 years after the event, the British public finally gets to hand out the blame for the death of the most famous woman in the world. The pursuing paparazzi and the driver are guilty. The passengers who should have worn their seatbelts are innocent.So will this verdict bring an end to hyper-aggressive photography? Hardly. The interval between Diana’s death and the multi-million pound inquest has not seen a falling off in the market for paparazzi pictures.The past 10 years has seen the US market finally waking up to the fact that these pictures sell. The one sector of the print media bucking the downward trend in advertising revenue is the celebrity magazine. While traditional news magazines like Time and Newsweek are losing ad revenue, the celebri...
More About: Snap , Judgment

How newspaper managements see the future...
2008-04-08 09:29:00
If you want to see where the business end of the newspaper crisis is being played out, read the transcripts of the earnings calls.This is from the conference call with the CEO of US newspaper group McClatchy, Gary Pruitt [via Seeking Alpha*]. And these calls are where management gets down to what without an MBA is called the nitty gritty, and with one is called granularity.McClatchy’s goals?We are focused on four major areas: driving new revenues, with a particular emphasis on online advertising; focusing on growing total audience; providing high quality public service journalism; and reducing our cost structure.But here’s where it gets into detail: Classified advertising revenues declined 20%, and here is a review by category.[Jobs] First, employment, in the fourth quarter employment advertising declined 24%. Print employment revenues were down 28.3%, while online revenues were down 15%, reflecting the close tie between print and online up-sell advertising in the employment cat...
More About: Future , The Future , Newspaper

Restructuring newsrooms: the reading list
2008-04-08 08:31:00
Want to know which blog posts can help save the newspaper industry? According to LA Times editor Russ Stanton, these are required reading for senior execs.The People Formerly Known as the Audience by Jay RosenThe Times Better Change from Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachineEnd of the Daily Deadline by Murray Armstrong, on Comment is FreeMaybe it is Time to Panic from the American Journalism ReviewAnd the book? No, not The Vanishing Newspaper, but Good to Great. Great to Good might be the more appropriate version.
More About: Reading , List

Pulitzer pictures...
2008-04-08 01:41:00
This extraordinary and awful picture of dying photographer Kenji Nagai from Burma remains memorable months on. It won Adrees Latif of Reuters a Pulitzer prize.
More About: Pictures

Off topic: What universities should teach
2008-04-08 01:05:00
Tonight I’ll be taking the stage at the Agora debate in the Guardian newsroom. Here’s my contribution (as Adrian Monk) to Education Guardian in support of the motion: Renaissance Man is dead. Education should be about training in subjects that will boost the economy.What do we know about the world since the Renaissance? Almost every single forward movement in advancing the position of humankind has come from science, technology and business.James Watt developed the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution in a workshop at Glasgow University. His partnership with Matthew Boulton made it a commercial success.Where will the advances that take us forward in this century come from? Will they emerge from study of the nineteenth century novel, or being able to translate the Hesiod, or from theology (I’m open to taking bets)?You know the answer, and yet we continue to subsidise 30% of our undergraduates to study these subjects in universities. Are we nuts?We’re producing ...
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Quick tip: Blogs of note
2008-04-07 11:20:00
Just a quick heads up on a blog I’ve started subscribing too. It’s by Al Jazeera Head of New Media Mohamed Nababhay. Mohamed has posted some nice presentations and other goodies.
More About: Blogs , Note , Quick

Correcting the British media on Israel
2008-04-06 19:26:00
There is a new watchdog on the prowl. Just Journalism is funded by those very public defenders of free speech - “private individuals.”Just Journalism aims to promote accurate and responsible reporting about Israel in the British media.Why start with Israel, you might ask? Before asking exactly what promoting accurate and responsible reporting means.In case you want to see the quality of their work, it appears to consist of a rather lame Fisking.Personally, as one private individual to another, I don’t think much of it.Perhaps British expats in Israel might want to set one up to promote accurate and responsible reporting about the UK in the Israeli media? Silly idea, of course...Anyone like it?
More About: Media

Stretching credulity across platforms...
2008-04-06 06:13:00
More Can You Trust The Media? trust fodder from the Online Journalism Symposium.A paper titled “A Mediated, Interactive Call to Action: Audience Perceptions of Credibility and Authority for a Times Journalist in Print vs. Online” picked on the NYT’s Nick Kristof and asked people to rate his credibility as a columnist and video reporter.Guess what? He’s a more credible columnist than he is a TV reporter.People watching the video described Kristof as someone who is “annoying,” “sensational,” and “arrogant,” and who “talks in a monotone voice.” People believed the story more because Kristof’s video provided proof. On the other hand, ... [s]eeing and hearing Kristof made some people recoil, instead of boosting his credibility.According to the author: people who read Kristof consider him to be an omniscient being telling the story as a principled activist...In contrast, people who watch Kristof interviewing his sources and witness him running all over the Sudan ...
More About: Stretching , Platforms

Off topic: Crews control
2008-04-06 03:34:00
Currently reading Frederick Crews’ Follies of the Wise. If I needed a new motto for this blog it might come from him: “we do not have things to say. We acquire them in the process of working on definite problems that catch our attention.”This is from his intro to Follies: My aim in telling this story is not to scoff at apologetics for otherworldly belief, though I do regard them as uniformly feeble, but to call attention to a clash between two intellectual currents.One is scientific empiricism, which, for better or worse, has yielded all of the mechanical novelties that continue to reshape our world and consciousness.We know, of course, that science can be twisted to greedy and warlike ends. At any given moment, moreover, it may be pursuing a phantom, such as phlogiston or the ether or, conceivably, an eleven-dimensional superstring, that is every bit as fugitive as the Holy Ghost.But science possesses a key advantage. It is, at its core, not a body of correct or incorrect ide...
More About: Topic , Control

Al Jazeera, the Marash analysis
2008-04-05 09:20:00
So Dave Marash admits he quit Al Jazeera English after being bumped out of the anchor chair and on to the road. Not exactly how he first explained it. Still, we all have our amour propre, what is interesting in the CJR piece is his analysis of the shifting politics of Qatar (my links in the copy below): I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran.And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories.This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus...
More About: Analysis , Al-Jazeera