Adrian Monck

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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

News editors - read the comments...
2008-04-04 11:18:00
I try not to do this (being far from perfect), but have a read of the following story which asks, by way of reporting, Baby joy for Kaplinsky – but are Five chiefs happy? Natasha Kaplinsky, who six weeks ago became the face of Five News on an annual salary of £1 million, making her the richest news presenter in Britain, is three months pregnant, the station confirmed yesterday.While Ms Kaplinsky, 35, was said by friends to be “ecstatic” about her latest good news, it is not known how senior management feel at the prospect of losing their high-profile signing to maternity leave.Yesterday, the station insisted it shared in its new employee’s good fortune. Chris Shaw, senior controller, said, through teeth that may or may not have been gritted: “Natasha has had a tremendous impact and we’re delighted to hear the fantastic news about her pregnancy.”As one commenter writes: So, let me get this story right. Natasha is pregnant, she is ecstatic and her employers have said th...
More About: Editors , Comments , Read

The benefits of less journalism
2008-04-03 20:50:00
There is an upside to the downturn in newsgathering budgets if you believe some people. Take the US presidential campaign:What we need less of, as any consumer will tell you if you ask, is slavish coverage of poll numbers and obsession with campaign gaffes and missteps, and that’s what I hope we’ll get less of as news organizations pull back. (Yes, there are political junkies who thrive on this stuff, but there are also more comprehensive sources for it than most local newspapers.)The truth is you have to hang out with politicians during campaigns to report. The problem is that 99% of what you get is of zero value to news consumers. You can put it online, but it really doesn’t get a whole lot better.
More About: Journalism , Benefits

Britain’s public diplomacy: BBC Arabic
2008-03-07 10:35:00
The BBC is about to launch its new Foreign Office funded, 12-hour Arabic channel. This exchange between Asharq al-Awsat’s Faisal Abbas and the BBC’s Nigel Chapman sums up my feelings exactly. Reporting the status quo is not reporting.Q: You stated that you always strive to be impartial, but don’t you think that what many people are expecting is not impartiality at all but rather the exposure of corruption and conflicts in Arab states and to discuss issues that other channels avoid? Do you agree that in the absence of democracy in many of the states that what is required is a “campaigning broadcaster” not impartial media as such?A: That is a very interesting question. The BBC is not a campaigning broadcaster; it does not have a view about issues in the Middle East or anywhere else. BBC’s job is to report them fairly and accurately and to reflect the relevant points of view in relation to them.
More About: Public , Diplomacy

The visual display of information: bus tickets [del.icio.us]
2008-03-07 10:12:00
Edward Tufte eat your heart out...
More About: Information , Visual , Display , Tickets

Journalism not to blame for newspapers’ decline 2
2008-03-07 01:01:00
Reading this piece from the Chicago Daily Observer, I just wanted to pick out a couple of points to reinforce my claim that journalism is not to blame for the decline of newspapers. (Yes, I know poorly resourced newspapers tend to produce lousy journalism, but you’re missing the point.)The Daily News ... couldn’t survive the triple whammy of social, economic and demographic change. The sales of afternoon dailies declined with the rise of television and the movement of its readers to the suburbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people commuting to night-shift jobs, long the main readers of afternoon newspapers.With the continued exodus of the Daily News’ readership to the suburbs, distribution efforts were increasingly dependent on long ribbons of concrete that grew more and more congested, making it ever more difficult to deliver newspaper in a timely manner.Former News staffer Alan Mutter was quoted: I would have to say there is nothin...
More About: Journalism , Blame

Chicago Daily Observer | On the Daily News’ Demise [del.icio.us]
2008-03-06 23:26:00
The sales of afternoon dailies declined with the rise of television and the movement of its readers to the suburbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people commuting to night-shift jobs, long the main readers of aft
More About: Daily , Chicago , Observer

Q & A with BBC World Service Director, Nigel Chapman (Asharq Alawsat Ne
2008-03-06 22:51:00
Do you agree that in the absence of democracy in many of the states that what is required is a "campaigning broadcaster" not impartial media as such?
More About: World , Service , Chapman , Director , Nigel

Al Jazeera English: management shake-up
2008-03-06 18:10:00
I try not to pass on every rumour I hear, but on at least two separate occasions recently strong hints have been dropped to me that suggest a management shake up is coming soon at Al Jazeera English . This is code for someone replacing CEO Nigel Parsons.Parsons has survived much longer than I would have predicted - given the delays launching the channel - but now that it has been running for a while it needs to move on, and Parsons might well feel the same.If there’s a problem with AJE for me, it’s that it doesn’t have an editorial voice, and it doesn’t get talked about (except when David Frost forgot to ask Benazir Bhutto if OBL really was dead). Ultimately, that editorial voice needs to emanate from the Middle East, rather than from the mineral depths of a glass of Chablis.Someone Middle Eastern, with a serious editorial background and who understands Washington might be a good choice. Who might that be?
More About: Management , Al-Jazeera

Showbusiness survivor Grade is getting it right - Telegraph [del.icio.us]
2008-03-05 18:01:00
The proof? He lured unemployed execs Fincham and Airey to ITV. Tough job...
More About: Survivor