Could Manchester topple London's crown?

So apparently London is the social media capital of the world.

That is according to Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent of the Telegraph who argues that

1.Nearly 10 per cent of traffic to news recommendation site Digg comes from London alone,

2.London is the Facebook geographical network with the largest number of members and

3.London is the top Twitter-using city.”

Robin Hamman thinks the reason is

“London has a comparatively young, affluent and office based workforce with high levels of internet connectivity. That, combined with its status as a global communications, business and social hub, means that its population is more likely than those of similar sized cities to participate in social networking activities.”

But maybe Manchester combining its creativity backlground with its social networking scene should be mounting a challenge

Did the Sun have any alternative?

The blogosphere and twittersphere has been alive with the news of the Sun's switch to the Tories this morning.

Danny Finkelstein puts an interesting take on it over at Comment Central

A popular newspaper stays popular by listening to its readers and articulating their views with panache.
So what alternatives to its course of action did the Sun have?
First, tell its readers that, contrary to their opinion, it is not time for a change.
Second, tell its readers that the Sun isn't sure that it is time for a change.
Or third, that although it is time for a change, the Sun isn't going to make much of it in order not to be unfair.
When you examine these alternatives, you realise that none of them makes much sense. The Sun had to go with "time for a change" and had to do it in in a brash, bold way. The fact that the timing was "in your face" was really part of the point.

How Magcloud put together a magazine in less than two days

Great story via Nieman Lab of the magazine that came to fruition in 31.5 hours.

The magazine called Strange Light came at of last week's events in Sydney when the populus was subjected to a dust storm.

It was put together using Magcloud

From the idea to the final product — which featured 54 photos of the storm, each use with the permission of its photographer — took less than two days.

The potential for this is great with events being able to be turned around and published quickly and it will be an interesting exercise in seeing whether this concept takes off

Local newspapers "producing a torrent of worthless badly written drivel"-Discuss?

A damning indicement of local media?

Well the mabiblogion sets the cat amongst the pigeons with this piece in the Independent yesterday where he looks at the state of local newspapers in Wales

The failure of the Welsh government has been mirrored by the inability of the print media outlets to change and refine their output. They too have not responded to the problem. This inability to change and respond to the problems they face looks a lot like falling on one’s sword. If there is still a place for the local newspaper (and I am not sure there is) they need to make changes quickly. The ability to view local, regional, national and international news at the click of a button has made them largely obsolete. The remaining strength of the local newspaper lies in reporting things that don’t make it out of the area. The trouble is that in becoming ever more reliant on press releases and producing a torrent of worthless, badly written drivel, they have lost their market.

Will the Sun now win it for Cameron in 2010?

One of the main arguments for newspapers continuing to have a profound effect and influence on our lives is their ability to set the agenda and influence political opinion.

Famously the Sun told its readers that it prevented Neil Kinnock getting into power in 1992 and it backing and continued support for Labour has kept the party in power for 12 years.

Well it seems as though that will be put to the test next summer as the paper courted for so long by both government and opposition has come out this morning by telling its leaders that Labour has lost its support.

In what must be a body blow to a revitalised party conference it exclaims that

TWELVE years ago, Britain was crying out for change from a divided, exhausted Government. Today we are there again.

adding that

Blair took office with bulging coffers, an invincible majority and weak opposition, and he and Gordon Brown could have worked miracles.

It has now firmly planted its flag in the court of David Cameron,so we shall see whether the paper still has a profound influence on the voting intentions of the British public

First the paywall now the pay app for the Spectator

The Spectator magazine is announcing plans to put its website behind a paywall and yesterday it further engrained itself into the content is not free model by launching a paid-for iPhone app which is also based on a subscription.

Paid Content reports that

The app, made by digital-edition magazine vendor Exact Editions (EE), costs £0.59. That price includes one week’s access to the current edition of the magazine in a miniaturised, page-turning, iPhone version of the real thing. But that’s not one-off payment - the payment must be renewed again and again for £0.59 a week. A month’s subscription is £2.39 and both options include access to five years of Spectator back issues.

Where physical is the new scarcity

Artists who depend on selling recorded material in order to make a living are doomed.

That was the conclusion of Andrew Keen speaking at the end of the Art of Digital event in Liverpool last week.

Keen,the controversial author of the Cult of the Amateur,told an audience made up of mainly artistic people that the only ones that would survive were those that were funded by public money.

According to Keen,the old business model, which saw culture sold by record,book and film ie all recorded and founded on the model of mass production and distribution was finished.

The digitisation of culture had made it virtually unprotectable as in our post Napster world it is no longer practical to protect intellectual property on the web.

However two years on from writing his book,Keen is more optimistic about the future as our digital culture has created new scarcities which have an added value.

One is the physical in the live performance which will mean ironically that live music and cinema will continue to expand.The second is the scarcity of attention.Writers for example now earn more money from public speaking rather than publishing.

The digital generation in conflict with the Telecoms

Young people’s behaviour is no longer technology-driven, but reflects how this technology has been internalised and now drives a new participatory culture which impacts across all generations and demographics online.

That is the findings of a new report Serving the Digital Generation Innovation for a new breed of customers

Whereas the digital generation wants,Communication to be free,to be able to express identity and content and move seamlessly between media,this conflicts with Telecom operators whowant to connect calls and lines,to control as much as possible,to minimize capital investment and take a long time in developing new products and services

via Norman Lewis

Email is complementary to rather than being replaced by social media

Maybe email is not a dying art after all?

The predictions that social media may replace it as the tool for creating and targeting a message may be premature.

Indeed according at least to Adam Toren

While it is true to say that the social media “infant” is barely out of the maternity ward, trends seem to point to its relegation to a soft marketing approach and it is very unlikely to replace e-mail or other marketing techniques as primary methods of communication. Social media can, however, be used to spread the word about the information that you are communicating via your e-mail newsletters.

The inverse advertising scenario

Fascinating survey by Tivo which finds that the most popular television programs had the least-watched commercials.

The New York Times reports that

The company said that nearly all of the television shows that won 2009 Emmys showed higher levels of ad-skipping than the averages for their respective genres

Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president for audience research and measurement, suggested that people watching hit shows were likelier to skip ads because they were more wrapped up in the show than other viewer

Presumably then the worst programmes have th most watched?

Hannibals predictions come true

Not that Hannibal but Andreas Kluth who recalls the article that he wrote for the Economist back in 2006 where he tried to envision the future of the media.

As he recalls

As part of my Special Report, I did our (The Economist’s) very first podcasts,I heard the word “YouTube” for the first time and I had never heard of Facebook (not to mention Twitter).

But it is his media habits that are most interesting in the three years since the report.Once having many subscriptions to newspapers and magazines

Today I have no paper subscription at all! I have precisely two electronic subscriptions on my Kindle, one newspaper (The New York Times) and one magazine (The Atlantic).

Now his newspaper subscriber is the RSS feeds,and lives the life that he predicted being

simultaneously the audience for other “amateur” producers of content and an amateur producer myself.

Ht-Adrian Monck

Launching your own independent journalism site

Mashable's How to launch your own indie journalism site is getting a fair amount of tweeting and sharing since its publication on Thursday.

Maria Schneider left mainstream publishing behind last year to start Editor Unleashed, a site covering writing, publishing and social media and shares some top tips from journalists who have been forced into going along.

This is on getting an audience

for hyper-local journalists, face-to-face community building is also crucial to the mission. “When you’re ready to launch, make contact with community members you trust and respect as well as the local leaders who you’ll be covering to introduce your site,” says Larson. “Community support for your effort is critical, and having the respect and response from your sources will help you lead the pack.”

Permanently alienating potential crushes

Imagine you have a crush on a girl at the bank.Every time you talk, it's only business.
But one day she says, “Here's my cellphone number. Call anytime.”

Derek Sivers is writing about corporate social media policy and the story continues

You call her and ask her out. She says OK.
You meet up for dinner and after talking for 15 minutes she says, “Could I interest you in a home equity loan?”
Arrgh! That's worse than if she had never given you her number in the first place!

The giving of the cell phone number is the equivilent of the taking on of social media but

They're acting like they want to connect directly with you, get to know you, or hang out where you hang out.
But unless they learn how to stop selling, listen, and be real - they're just permanently alienating potential crushes.

Ht-Joanna Geary

Benji Lanyado's vision of journalism's transition

Rather an apocalyptic nightmare awaits journalism during its transformation from the old to the new according to Benji Lanyado writing on journalism.co.uk.

1.The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

2.The non-paywall sites are damned because they didn’t

3.The fall of ‘quality’ news

4.The rise of ‘all blogosphere’, and the government subsidy solution and then

In the face of widespread industrial pressure, and public pressure born of a desire to see journalism saved from the realms of populism and boobs, governments begin to bail out the bigger news organisations. In Britain, the BBC subsidy is chopped up and dished out to a handful of stripped-down organisations in return for a stake and light-handed influence.

Vietnam's open diplomacy has not translated into media freedoms

Haning been to Vietnam a couple of times, most recently in 2004,I always keep an eye on news coming out of the country about media freedoms.

The committee to Protect Journalists has written an open letter to the President Nguyen Minh Triet following his participation in this week’s United Nations General Assembly.

Unfortunately, Vietnam’s more open diplomacy has not translated into substantive democratic reforms at home, including in the areas of press and Internet freedom. The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonprofit organization that defends press freedom worldwide, was alarmed by your government’s recent crackdown on online journalists and political bloggers, many of whom were detained and interrogated for their reporting.

Praise indeed for Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera may have its critics especially across the Atlantic but Robert Kaplan isn't one of them.

Writing in the October edition of Atlantic magazine he describes it as

a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it.adding that

if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

On a watershed of creativity for Manchester and Media City

This post first appeared on the Innovation Manchester Blog


Napoleon had a saying that morale is to the physical as three is to one.

What he meant was that an army will win for its creativity and innovation and not on their strength.

For Alex Connock, chief executive of Ten Alps talking at today’s Insider Business Media summit at the Lowry,this is the lesson for Media City.

Overlooking the building work at the complex, Connock said that the physical part has been done,the bricks and mortar have been laid.Now the project stands on a watershed.The creativity needs to come to the fore.

He gave the example of Hollywood,which started its life as a ranch with real cowboys being the actors.It didn’t take a building to initiate the creativity,the studios came after.

Paul Newman head of communications at Media City gave a tour of the complex from the vantage point of the balcony of the Compass Room before Michael Nulty editor in chief of New Media Age gave the assembled audience a synopsis of the challenges to the sector.

Despite the gloom of last year,he found that the digital sector was very optimistic and had come out of the best year that many seen

A year on, what had actually happened was that it was impossible to predict a trend because the business had become so granular.

Whilst online display had according to Nulty “taken a hammering” there had been an acceleration to new cutting edge approaches.

The paradox of this recession is that risk taking is becoming the norm.The digital sector has realised that to carry the audience it must take risk and a strategy of safety was no longer perversely a safe strategy.

The digital sector, he continued, are starting to look not only at marketing but also setting the agenda through strategy.Digital businesses are by their very nature agile but to stay ahead of the game they did to be collaborative.

Eruptions at Politics Home

I sincerely hope that Politics Home does not become another mouthpiece for the Conservative Party after today's announcement that

It will form a distinct unit within a new media company, owned jointly by Stephan Shakespeare and Lord Ashcroft, who will take a 57.5% stake in the holding company. ConservativeHome and ConservativeIntelligence will continue to be part of the same group of companies but as before they operate in completely different spheres and there will be no editorial crossover whatsoever.

That unfortunately was not enough to stop Andrew Rawnsley resigning as its editor in chief

I became Editor-in-Chief on the basis that PoliticsHome was dedicated to being a non-partisan site clearly independent of any party both editorially and financially. It was essential for users of the site that they could feel absolute confidence in the political independence of PoliticsHome. I do not believe that can be compatible with being under the ownership of the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.

I,like many, have been impressed with the site since its inception last year and am struggling,like Rawnsley,to see how it can remain bi-partisan following the takeover.

Rushbridger quantifies the Guardian's losses

Astounding figures coming from Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger on how the paper has lost £20m since 2002.

The revelation came after a comment left on Roy Greenslade's blog said of the paper

It's ploughed so much into its internet operation that it is now having to lay off journalists

Rushbridger replied that

That's not actually right. Since 2002/3 our spending on guardian.co.uk (operational and capex) has exceeded revenue by just £20m. There's a crisis in the industry, and the Guardian is no more immune than anyone else, but it's a myth that we've plouged lunatic sums into digital.

Ht-Paid Content

Social media policy or does common sense prevail?

The issue crossed my path yesterday yet again.Do organisations need a social media policy?

General guidelines should be in place but I firmly believe that the moment an organisation starts bringing in rigid structures,the very essence of social media ,its vibrant coomunication and instant reaction starts to dissipate.

I was therefore quite interested in what Scott Hepburn has to say in this post especially his call for getting rid of a can't do that policy

Social media is a new-ish approach to business. It enables new forms of collaboration, new approaches to problem-solving, and new ways to increase efficiency. “You can’t do that!” is our default response, a knee-jerk posture we instinctively deploy as a defense against discomfort. Hear it, recognize it, accept it, and set it aside

Maybe though his final point is the most important

Since the dawn of commerce, more companies have failed for lack of innovation than because of legal liabilities. Yes, be compliant with the law. Yes, know your risks. But there’s a difference between knowing your risks and deferring to them. Err to flexibility, toward encouraging new ideas and new models, and your people will astound you with their talents.

Too polite to be hyperlocal?

Could this be a reason why Hyperlocal may not work as a concept in the UK.

Russell Davies writes that

We live in an interesting area, there'd be stuff to write about. And every time I think, yes, I'll get on with it, I realise that writing about my neighbourhood worries me deeply. Because the people and shops and cafes are going to notice that you're writing about them, and if you're in any way critical they'll know and glare at you, and you're going to feel really bad. I would anyway. And doing it anonymously would be even worse and hugely destabilising to any real community.

Ht-Dom Rodwell

Reader's Digest to undergo a makeover

Reader's Digest has been struggling recently with its American enterprise being forced into bankruptcy earlier this year.

On the back of that,it is undergoing an overhaul with the FT reporting that it is going to

attract a younger audience to a brand suffering from its associations with doctors’ waiting rooms and elderly readers.

Its website is leading the way reports the paper

Starting with the Netherlands and China, where a redesigned website goes live this week, the group is planning to replace a patchwork of international sites, each designed separately by local teams and carrying a different selection of content, with a single, coherent platform.

Online readers turn their backs on paywalls

An interesting report commissioned by Paid Content which reveals that there is little enthusiasm for charging for content amongst the general public.

The figures from Harris Interactive show that

1.If their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source, people who read a free news site at least once a month told us.

2.Just five percent of those readers would choose to pay to continue reading the site.

3.Eight percent would continue reading the site’s free headlines only.

4.And 12 percent of respondents are not sure what they would do.

Some green shoots in the European Digital Journalism survey

Maybe one of the surprising things to have come out of the European Journalism survey is the feeling that journalism has improved in the internet age.

350 journalists across Europe were interviewed to determine what impact the advent of the Internet and widely-available broadband had had on the world of journalism.

The same poll was taken a year ago and whilst the survey not unexpectedly shows a worry about the general economic climate,there are some indicators of a positive future.

A third of respondents thought that the traditional media channel in which they worked could well be taken off the market whilst this had already happened to a fifth of the respondents.However digital media was seen as being a way of keeping the channel alive in some form.

The survey also showed the dramatic impact of twitter on the market with many organisations seeing its potential as an appetiser for information,especially those based in the UK.

More and more original content seems to be ending up on the web,although the web has created in a lot of people's minds more work with the same resources.40 per cent of respondents thought that the internet had increased their workload.

Surprisingly with the industry in deep recession,job satisfaction is higher with nearly half of the respondents reporting that the quality of journalism had improved in the last couple of years and over 80 per cent are happier or as happy with their jobs.

The main differences from 12 months ago is most certainly the recession and the falls in advertising streams which has intensified the pressure on journalists to perform and becoming more reliant on outputs from third sources such as PR agencies for content

Are our polititians too comfortable with social media

If the politicians like social media so much, then we must be doing something wrong.

That's the conclusion of Polis' Charlie Beckett after the latest Polis/Channel 4 debate on the future of the Internet.

After seeing a number of community initiatives the politicians on the panel

accepted that independent social media is now part of the political communications landscape. They realise it will be rude, irregular and unpredictable. They even agreed that they should make sure that they and their parties, councils and government should be open to what social media can do for their electors.

but and a big but

I didn’t get the sense that they thought it would really change anything. The ballot box and party politics are safe. The system sees social media as a tool for making the machine work more smoothly, not for a change of gear, let alone direction.

The question then is what needs to change for social media to have an effect on the process of democracy?

Charlie suspects that political social media is too marginalised at the moment and doubts that next election will indeed be the social media election that some people think it will be

there is not the critical mass behind social political media either locally or nationally for it to make much of a real-world difference

Optimise your time in social media

Far too many to list here but check out Adam Singer's 21,yes 21 tips for utilising your time interfacing with social media.

But these,I particularly like.

1.Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.

2.Unfollow those who don’t add value or aren’t important to your network. This tip isn’t for a brand or company seeking to make themselves accessible to the world at large, but for you as a marketer personally.

3. Audit your time. Calculate how much time you spend daily in different areas of the social web. It adds up, and no one is immune to losing time. Carefully audit just where your time is going and realign efforts to the areas that make a different in achieving objectives.

Tools and tips to build an online community

JD Lasica gives a good presentation here at an ethnic media publishers at San Francisco State University the other week.

His strategy?

1. Be first with breaking news
2. Leverage Twitter
3. Enable conversations
4. Community video
5. Online petitions & causes
6. Geocoding & citizen photography
7. Google map mashups
8. Facebook communities

Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

View more documents from JD Lasica.

Things to ask before you redesign your website

How often do businesses and for that matter individuals go down the path of "we have to redesign our website whilst not really knowing why?

Seth Godwin in an excellent post poses some of the questions that you should ask yourself first

# What is the goal of the site?
# In other words, when it's working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
# Who are we trying to please? If it's the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
# How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
# Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
# What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
# Are we trying to close sales?
# Are we telling a story?
# Are we earning permission to follow up?
# Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
# Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
# Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
# Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
# Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
# Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
# Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
# Do we want people to call us?
# How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
# Who needs to update this site? How often?
# How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
# Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
# Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?

Beeb developing public resource on citizen journalism

The BBC's Matthew Eltringham is searching for the answers to some of the questions posed by citizen journalism.

Writing on the Editor's blog he announces that

there's precious little authoritative advice around on good practice for citizen journalists, so to try to help find the appropriate answers to these and many other questions, we're developing a publicly available resource.

where

But we will be setting out how we - the BBC - see some of these issues and what we think is good practice, even if others disagree.

So I suggest that you get in touch

The search for the first blogger in the world

Scott Rosenberg,who says that,in the end each candidate is a pointer to one before. And the search is as futile as searching for the first poet, first playwright, first novelist,

When was the last time you read a newspaper in the loo

Ht-Adam Tinworth

Tweet it or sleep on it?

We have all been guilty of it,perhaps me more than many but is it right to live blog or live tweet at events.

The advantageous are all there in giving an audience instantaneous access to what is going on

But here is the downside

Suddenly there is no concept of news values. Only just how many tools can we use to spread the thin story just about as thinly as possible? There is never any thought of "what is this worth?" or "is this a story?"Just keep on spreading.

I would add to that the context and the time out aspect where it is often good as a journalist to reflect on what has been heard or viewed.

It is a battle that journalism has to contend with in this 24 glare that we live under.Getting the balance right is important and maybe it is up to journalists to set the parameters.

Ziltch-that's the value of newspaper's digital content

So according to Steve Outer,the digital content of a newspaper is worth.....nothing.

Writing at Editor and Publisher

he says that whilst there is some value for advertisers

who will pay to get in front of the audience assembled to consume the content.

for the ordinary person

consumers paying for news stories online, or on mobile phones, via micro-payments or subscriptions? Not likely

Steve explains further on his blog

my main point is that whether online or on mobile devices, news publishers need to figure out how to offer something that’s tangible, not ephemeral. Selling fleeting digital news stories is a non-starter. The mobile platform offers some alternative opportunities.

Is the Atlantic a digital chasm?

Adam Westbrook wanders if there is a digital divide across the Atlantic ocean.

He notes that in his opinion,there is a lot more digital innovation coming out of America than in Britain when it comes to the media.

So come on, UK newsrooms, where are you? he asks

Of course it’s all about money, or the lack of it. It is not as if UK media don’t have the talent. But can money really be an excuse? American papers afterall have been hit harder than British ones with more big city closures and layoffs: almost all UK papers that were in print a year ago are still in print today. And of course there are many talented freelancers and independent producers making great stuff, but even that is hard to find.
So what else is it? A lack of ambition? We just don’t get multimedia? Or are we just not interested

Get well soon Jeff Jarvis

Jeff announced earlier in the summer that he was suffering from Prostrate Cancer.

He went under the knife yesterday and reports from his blog that

My prostate surgery went fine. I’ve been tweeting it. Will blog more when I get a full keyboard at home, later today, I hope.

Future of news or future of Fast Flip or "tormenting ants with a magnifying glass"

I have to admit that yesterday's RSS and twitter feeds seemed to be all about Fast flip and I hadn't a clue what they were on about.

Anyway I discover that it is Google's latest device to give users a new way to browse newspaper sites and blogs on their desktops and mobile devices.

And the verdict doesn't seem that good.

This from Read Write Web

Google Fast Flip simply isn't a very good product and that it feels more like a step backwards than the future of news.

and concluding that it is

a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots.

Paul Bradshaw describes it as a cruel joke on the industry asking

why are the web-native minds of Google wasting time on such an analogue-mindset concept?

and adding that

it is proof that Google are prepared to cash in on the blind panic of the news industry in the midst of a crisis. Add in their recently mooted micropayments system and it’s almost as if Google are having a bit of fun tormenting ants with a magnifying glass.

How the future of newspapers could be Tweetdeck

Zachary M. Seward over at Nieman Lab says that Microsoft's vision of the next generation newspaper has an uncanny resemblance to TweetDeck.




And the similarities are striking.It is he says,

taking TweetDeck to its logical conclusion, pulling in RSS feeds, photos, and video from news providers and placing all that content alongside your friends’ status updates on Facebook and Twitter. Think of it as a surging river of news spilling over its banks.

On Duncan's imminent departure

There is much coverage of the latest problems at Channel 4 this morning with reference to the departure of Andy Duncan.

Ian Burrell in the Independent says that Duncan

was a fervent champion of public service media. Endlessly enthusiastic, he eschewed the hierarchical message of suits and ties and sat at an open plan desk as he encouraged colleagues to help realise his vision for Channel 4's multimedia feature.

Whilst at first things were going well his

wider dreams for Channel 4 began to unravel as plans for Channel 4 Radio and an adventure into magazine publishing had to be shelved. There were also numerous programming scandals which, although the channel claimed they fulfilled its remit for making challenging shows, also prompted questions over the suitability of the broadcaster's leadership.

Ben Fenton in the FT describes a

difficult year, with Channel 4's fut-ure the focus of constant debate as part of the Digital Britain process. It was thought the advertising-funded, state-owned broadcaster would solve its financial shortfall, self-confessed as likely to hit £150m a year by 2012, by forming a joint venture with the BBC's commercial arm.

No doubt that attention will turn to his successor with Peter Fincham and Kevin Lygo being touted as possibles as there will again be much speculation about the channels very future

Michael Moore-newspapers only themselves to blame

The film producer argues in this You Tube clip that American newspapers have no one but themselves to blame for their declining financial health

Moore said that newspapers, bought up by corporations in the last generation, have pursued profits at the expense of news gathering. By basing their businesses on advertising over circulation, newspaper owners have neglected their true economic base and core constituency

via Huffington Post

CPR targets Russia's record

The Committee for the Protection of journalists has been compiling a report to

highlight the alarming and ongoing problem of deadly violence against critical journalists in Russia and the government’s consistent inability to bring justice in these cases.

It points out that since 2000, Seventeen journalists have been killed in retaliation for their work and in only one case have the killers been convicted,which stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s stated record in solving murders among the general population.

The report adds that

The Kremlin has set the political tone by marginalizing critical journalists, effectively barring them from state-controlled national television, and obstructing their work through politicized regulations and bureaucratic harassment. Probing journalists—often shunted to media with limited audiences—are isolated, undervalued, and vulnerable to attack.

So what is a good return for social media?

According to a report in Brand Republic this morning,Business Week has sunk more than $16m into a social network service that after two years has realised around $600k.

The social networking site, which users can link to their LinkedIn account, allows users to blog, post news and comments, and debate issues in a variety of forums.

adding that

In 2008 alone BusinessWeek is said to have racked up $7.6m in expenses with another $4.7m expected this year for which it is drawing only around 1.5m page views a month in the US according to ComScore.

The company is of course up for sale,having been put on the market in July having been hit by the recent falls in advertising revenue

Latest Pew-less than a third of Americans think news organisations get the facts straight

The latest Pew report is out and it makes grim reading for the American media.

It has found that the public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades.

According to the report

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate

Also the report finds that only about a quarter say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased.

And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.

Companies get on with it and sell your message

I couldn't agree more with what Dave Sparks says

Given the endless tools for cheap to free production and distribution of content, there’s absolutely no reason a business must rely on others to tell their story. Yet for some demented reason, it’s still unbelievably difficult trying to convince corporations to do just that. Tell your own story. Businesses ingrained with the culture of “corporate communications” feel far more comfortable going through the traditional channels of PR firms, journalists, and bloggers.

Yes there are problems in allowing a story to go uncut,notably the need for professionalism in writing the content.That can be overcome as can the issue that PR can target more effectively.

But what the hell,companies get on with it and sell your message

Get readers gradually used to paying for content

Barry Ritholtz ruminates on how to save journalism and newspapers over at the big picture.

I agree totally with what he says

The problem facing journalism and newspapers is not one of technology — it is one of behavior. People are used to free, they don’t think they need to pay for content. A solution that ignores this simple fact is destined to fail, regardless of technology, software or widgets.

His strategy?

1.All newspaper sites should require registration

2.that six month after bringing in registration sites should introduce micro-payments (pennies) for select content. This would consist of a few pennies an article.

3.that a year on all new article would require a micro payment

Ht-Adrian Monck

Spectator to hide behind a paywall

Interesting snippet of information from Guido Fawkes yesterday evening.

According to the political blogger, the Spectator magazine

will within weeks be stealing a march on Murdoch and putting up a paywall around the magazine’s online content. The web-only stuff on CoffeeHouse will still be free, but the magazine content will be sold so as not to cannibalise the print edition.

Nobody has the answers

Mark Luckie over at 10,000 words looks at 10 ugly truths about journalism and decides that amongst other things

1.The stories that are published are the stories that sell.

2.Many stories are not copy edited and

3.Many stories come from wire services

But maybe his last one is the most pertinent

Everyone is looking for the savior of journalism and the solution to the industry's problems. Social networking, paywalls, restructuring and micropayments have all been suggested as the key to saving journalism, but anyone who says they have a definite answer is delusional or misinformed. Together we will try to do everything to ensure journalism's future, but what exactly that magic solution is remains to be seen.

New study shows shows social media rising up the priority of agencies

A new report on the media buying plans of advertisers and agencies indicates that having a "presence on social networks" is one of the top priorities of their media plans for next year.

2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study,found that 57.7% of respondents "ideally" plan, and 56.3% "realistically" plan to include social media in their media plans next year.

The study covers more than 25 industries, including advertising, automotive, business service, pharmaceutical, restaurant, technology, healthcare, entertainment, education, travel, nonprofit, financial, home improvement, luxury, telecom, media and electronics,

Amongst its other findings,were that those who plan, buy, approve media would ideally buy presence on a social network.
Almost two times more would ideally buy mobile video than will realistically buy it
and agencies and brands both would ideally buy more national TV than they will realistically buy

Via Online media daily

How journalism has become an exercise in pie throwing

An interesting piece in Atlantic Monthly from Mark Bowden who looks at a case study of what he considers to be the way that journalism is going.

It concerns the events surrounding the day back in May that President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

According to Bowden the journalistic events surrounding the announcement show that

With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition

He describes how

First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project

.but

then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target.

Ht-Richard Sambrook

Months away from a paid model

According to the New York Times,

Journalism Online, says that within months it will have a system operating and in use by hundreds of Web sites.

Its founder Steve Brill has said that he had

nonbinding letters of intent from companies that own more than 1,000 news and information Web sites — large and small, domestic and foreign — but would not name any of them. Mr. Brill said he expected a beta version of a payment system to go into use in November or December, and be in use within months on hundreds of sites.

The model appears to be that journalism online will retain 20 per cent of the income from the publisher.

Its rational is that

Serious journalism has always required payments by consumers, a lesson now being remembered as it becomes clear that online advertising revenue alone will not sustain robust, independent news departments, whether for newspapers or online-only publishers. Everyone, from readers to reporters, is facing the consequences as news organizations of all kinds are forced to cut back.

We await with baited breath

Newspapers and twitter in the US

The news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.

That's the conclusion of Marcus Messner who has presented a paper, co-authored with Asriel Eford at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff this morning.

Alfred Hermida reports on the paper saying that

Most tweets were news related and only just over 5% were personal. Messner said most of the tweets were pitching the news content of the organisation. Overwhelming, news outlets provided links to their own material, rather than to external sources.

Farrell files his account of his kidnapping

The news of his kidnapping may have been subject to a blackout but Stephen Farrell is quickly using technology to post an account of his ordeal at the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan

You can read it in full at the New York Times,here is an excerpt as he is rescued and his interpreter is killed

Vague sounds coalesced into northern British vowels. One voice was urging someone to get a ladder up over the wall and into the compound we had just left. Pressing my face down as low as I could I screamed, “British hostage, British hostage,” and flashed the light once, very briefly to tell them the direction. I heard a voice saying something like: “British hostage approach me with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground.”
I complied, dropping the camera bag and all its contents. While I wanted to keep my equipment, emerging suddenly from the dark carrying a bag seemed an insane risk.
I lay on the ground, gave my name and newspaper and pointed to where Sultan was lying behind me, telling them I thought he had been shot.

“Would Walter have cut through the noise of “the blogs, tweets and soundbites” to get the facts? I think the answer is yes.”

Yesterday's memorial to the American broadcaster Walter Cronkite featured a medium that I am sure would have been alien to the veteran

As CJR reports

TVNewser kept us up to date this morning by live-tweeting the Walter Cronkite memorial service at Lincoln Center. Besides breathlessly reporting on the veritable “who’s who” of broadcast journalism in attendance, TVNewser noted President Barack Obama’s remarks before Obama jetted off to Washington D.C. to give his healthcare address tonight at 8 p.m.

Welcome to Twitterville

No surprise that a new book about twitter and business is out and no doubt there will be a gushing of others in the next few months and business embrace social media.

This one by Shel Israel is called Twitterville and the FT's David Gelles does a good review in today's paper

Twitterville manages to be an engaging read, full of meaningful anecdotes and useful analysis. It makes a convincing case that Twitter's worth is not just the ability to broadcast short messages, but the ongoing and transformative conversations that these tweets ignite.

he writes

The book comes with a warning though as twitter is

quickly transforming from a quaint community into an unruly megalopolis. "As it grows it suffers from an ongoing assault of a steadily increasing flock of spammers, scammers, stalkers, phishers and plain old-fashioned flimflam artists,

Storyvault-capturing the memories of social history

Former ITV executive Stuart Prebble has launched a social history and genealogy networking website.

storyvault.com. is promoted as a chance to preserve the remarkable memories of friends and families so that future generations can enjoy them and learn from them.

This from the site

StoryVault encourages users to interview a friend or family member, usually on video, and to upload the content into the site. You can then mark some content as "private", accessible only for chosen friends or family, or you can make them available for the wider world. Over years StoryVault will develop into an invaluable record of your own family's history, and also as a resource for anyone interested in any historical event.

Amongst the stories on there

1.A very emotional John Mitchell talks about how, a year after he had flown home from the Suez Canal zone, he heard the news that two good friends has tragically lost their lives - on a flight home havi

2.James WHO was a Major in Berlin and among his responsibilities was taking care of Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess. He met Hess frequently, and tells of the extraordinary relationship between

Source Paid Content

Stop that navel gazing and look around. You are outmatched.

Newspaper executive are telling themselves 10 lies according to Julie Sims (via Martin Stabe)

The biggest is

I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.

No they can't she says

Until you have a blog, a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and until you are reading most of your news online and commenting on what you read, until you are all over Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, iGoogle, Netvibes and the like, until you can actually explain to me how online CPM-based advertising works, until you can explain how SEO and SEM work, until you know what “pwnd” means, until you know the significance of the 3 Wolf Moon or 3 Cat Keyboard t-shirt, you don’t know what you don’t know.
You are competing with the very people who created the Internet. Increasingly, you are competing with the generation who grew up online. How can you possibly be so arrogant that you think you can compete in that world without becoming a part of it?

Beeb to review its size and its resources

So the BBC is going to address the concerns of the James Murdoch's in looking at their size and role.

Sir Michael Lyons has released aa open letter to the license payer saying that

Recent debate has focused on two particular arguments. The first is that the BBC should be much smaller and should scale back its involvement in areas such as providing news for free on the internet. The second, as proposed by the Government, is that the licence fee should be shared and that an element should pass to a range of commercial media companies - initially regional news providers - breaking the historic funding link between the BBC and its audiences. Both arguments are rooted in the problems faced by the broadcasting and wider communications industries as the internet challenges the traditional role of both broadcasters and newspapers and the recession cuts into advertising revenue.

Mark Thompson is now to oversee a review on whether the BBC is indeed the right size what areas it should concentrate its resources on in future.

Economist magazine will introduce a paywall model

Much touted,the Economist has announced that it is looking at plans for its new paid for model.

Media week reports that

Yvonne Ossman, publisher of The Economist in the UK, revealed to Media Week that the brand would move to a paid-for content model, following the completion of a review.

adding that it

marks something of a reversal for the brand, which, in 2007, moved to a predominantly free model.
It had previously provided a mix of paid-for and free content, before deciding to make its content free on its homepage in September 2006.

Ht-Journalism.co.uk

Bloggers and journalists most respected by MP's

Via Iain Dale and ComRes

Check out Herdict for the news on who is blocking the Internet

If you want to check out which countries are blocking access to the internet,check out this site HerdictWeb.

It aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem by crowdsourcing data from around the world.

Its herdometer keeps up to date with news of sites that are being blocked.

Not surprisingly at the moment,Iran and China stand out in the reported number of blockages of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube as well as Mexico.

The site is the brainchild of Jonathan Zittrain,



via Huffington Post

Court reporting service is saved

Court reporting is one of the facets of good hard local reporting and this story from Hold the Front Page caught my eye

It tells of how

James Brewster from Strand News, which covers the Royal Courts of Justice in London, wrote to local newspaper newsdesks across the UK appealing for unpaid bills to be actioned straightaway.

His company has covered the Royal Courts of Justice for the past 20 years and is the only agency dedicated to reporting from the High Court and Court of Appeal.

So it was good to know that James' letter has done the trick as least for the time being by staving off the immediate threat of closure

left to itself, the market would throw up a vibrant and pluralist broadcasting industry

There is an interesting aftermath to James Murdoch's controversial MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival according to Philip Stevens writing in the FT this morning who says that the younger Murdoch was

at least half-right in his recent broadside against the overmighty BBC. He was just as wrong in his analysis that, left to itself, the market would throw up a vibrant and pluralist broadcasting industry.

adding that

Murdoch's prescription for the media landscape - sacrificing public service broadcasting to a Hobbesian struggle for market supremacy that he supposes he would ultimately win - may have the opposite effect. Slimming down the BBC is one thing; dismantling it in the cause of liberal market fundamentalism is another.

An Image problem not a PR problem for google?

I tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis' comments on Google.

Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.

Catholic church continues to embrace the internet generation

It may have misgivings about the seedy side of cyberspace, but faced with falling attendances, the Catholic Church is seeking to harness the wonders of the digital age.

reports the Independent this morning.

After the launch of its You Tube channel earlier in the year comes the news that a priest is allowing worshippers to light a candle with a click of a mouse

To make the dedication, the faithful of the church of Santa Maria Regina Pacis di Ostia, just 20 miles from the Vatican, need only find the correct section on the church's homepage (www.reginapacisostia.it), and click to "light" a candle and leave a message for a loved one.
Among hundreds of messages left so far are those to a missing person and another dedicated to victims of the year's Abruzzo earthquake.

Vietnam detains another blogger

Another blogger has been arrested in Vietnam for writing about China

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh,was arrested at around midnight on 1 September on charges of violating national security laws and “interfering in state interests.”

writes RSF which adds that

Quynh, who blogs under the name of “Me Nam,” made several criticisms of the ruling Communist party in entries posted in her blog (http://menam0.multiply.com/) on 26 August. She criticised a bauxite mine project that is being managed in large part by a Chinese company and she referred to Vietnam’s dispute with China over the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea

She is the fifth blogger to be detained following Bui Thanh Hieu , Pham Doan Trang , Nguyen Tien Trung and Dien Cay

Open source camera software

An interesting development in the world of Photography (via Robin Hamman)

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

The result is that

camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere

Martha Lane Fox's blogging experience

Paul Bradshaw's MA Social media course is starting up and they are blogging regularly

John Hickman has been doing some investigation of the Government's digital inclusion champion Martha Lane Fox and

happened to take a look at her website today, and was a little surprised by what I found. It’s a slick looking site, but it seems to lack some understanding of the digital world which Lane Fox is selling to the public. I find this a little worrying. There are two issues which I’d like to pick up on: technical problems and voice.

The technical being that the site lacks an RSS feed,surely an appropriate tool for people keeping track of postings but also that it is difficult to decide who is actually speaking on the blog

As he concludes

You too can be a champion of the digital world, all you need is the budget to buy a web designer’s time. And an executive assistant.

Social media-lifechanging for the young generation

Is Social media changing childhood?

Before you read on it's not a story from the Daily Mail but comes from a study carried out in San Franscisco by Common Sense Media.

Ht-Martin Belam

They concluded that

“Communication and socialization in our kids’ world is increasingly moving from face-to-face to face-to-cyberspace, and parents vastly underestimate the amount of time that kids spend on their networks. That makes it more challenging for parents to actually parent in the crucial areas of social interaction and development, and, in a digital world, parents need to play a more important role than ever in ensuring that our kids get the best of these technologies and are using them safely.”

But warned that

when teens communicate either anonymously or through a disguised identity, the doors are left wide open for them to not be held accountable. That kind of communication also leads to a disconnect between actions and their consequences, which is how irresponsible behaviors like cyberbullying become a reality.

This is what they found

- 22% of teens check social networking sites more than 10 times a day, while only 4% of parents believe kids are checking that much
- 51% of teens check social networking sites more than once a day, while only 23% of parents say their kids check more than once a day
- 28% have shared personal information that they normally wouldn't have shared in public
- 25% have shared a profile with a false identity
- 39% have posted something they regretted
- 26% have pretended to be someone else online
- 54% have joined an online community or Facebook/MySpace group in support of a cause
- 34% have volunteered for a campaign, nonprofit, or charity

Is there some truth in this?

IN OUR BUSINESS, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some expert waxing on about what ails journalism and how to fix it. Gratingly, many of those who tout prescriptions are the same people who let the patient get critical. And the new-media pundits whose analysis was fresh five years ago now feel like a Greek chorus that won't shut up after the curtain's down and the seats are empty. (Or, to retweet @theatavist, a.k.a. writer Evan Ratliff: "Maybe the future of journalism is just an endless vacillating din of banal bluster and whinging about the future of journalism.")

Mother Jones

Knights news challenge launches for 2010 awards

This year's Knight's News Challenge has launched on the 1st September with a total bursary fund of $5m to the projects selected.

They are looking for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations and information distribution and visualization.

There are three rules to the competition,that the project uses digital, open-source technology that it distributes news in the public interest,and the project can be tested in the local community.

On change to this year is that the project doesn't have to be live and can be judged on closed basis with only the judges seeing the results.

All applications must be made online before the 15th October.

Newspaper twitter followers up 17%

Malcolm Coles has come up with some twitter stats which say that National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 .

You can check out all the figures Here

The top 20 are dominated by the Guardian,the FT and the Times with technology,news,finanacial,travel and media prolific.

The heights of Madness

A man after my own heart.

Jonny Muir, from Aberdeen daily the Press and Journal, spent three months cycling to and climbing to the highest points of all 92 historic counties in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. reports Press Gazette

He has produced a book of his travels entitled Heights of Madness,in which he chronicles his marathon which was

a continuous cycling and walking adventure between the summits of the UK’s 92 counties. Starting in Cornwall and finishing in Inverness-shire 92 days later, I cycled 4,400 miles and walked another 600 miles, scaling the equivalent of 14 Mount Everests.

Donkeys used for Press Freedom

I just love this story from the BBC

Apparently two bloggers from Azerbaijan are facing up to five years in jail after posting a video of a donkey giving a news conference on YouTube.

The video was meant to be a satire on Press Freedom but as the Beeb reports

Shortly after the video was released, Andnan Hajizade and Emin Milli were held on hooliganism charges following a scuffle in a restaurant.
Their lawyer says the arrests were politically motivated.

Express returns to a familiar theme

Need I say anymore

Why do I think that this company's webinar promotion will gain a great deal of hits

Web conferencing service Dimdim's recently released new webinar product


Via Mashable

Factor involved in the paywall decision

Paid Content have done a quick analysis of factors involved in newspapers putting up a paywall in the US and have come to some conclusions

The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75% of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5%); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions.

That last point is the crucial one in the business model suggesting that it is making the print version a more scarce and differentiated product.

This from one of the papers

“It will allow greater value to our many loyal print-edition subscribers by not giving away the news to non-subscribers,”

Orwell diaries spring to life

I had given up on the Orwell diaries failing to be riveted by the prospect of one or two eggs.

It now though appears that they may have come to life with the commencement of the second world war having been reached.

Invasion of Poland began this morning. Warsaw bombed. General mobilization proclaimed in England, ditto in France plus martial law. [Radio]
Foreign & General
1. Hitler’s terms to Poland boil down to return of Danzig & plebiscite in the corridor, to be held 1 year hence & based on 1918 census. There is some hanky panky about time the terms were presented, & as they were to be answered by night of 30.8.39,[1] H.[2] claims that they are already refused. Daily Telegraph [a]
2. Naval reservists and rest of army and R.A.F. reservists called up. Evacuation of children etc. begins today, involving 3m. people & expected to take 3 days. [Radio; undated]
3. Russo-German pact ratified. Russian armed forces to be further increased. Voroshilov’s speech taken as meaning that Russo-German alliance is not contemplated. Daily Express [b]
4. Berlin report states Russian military mission is expected to arrive there shortly. Daily Telegraph [a]

Maybe now I will resume the RSS feed

Second largest shareholder says sell or close the Indy

So the shareholders of Independent News & Media have spoken.

This morning,its its second-largest shareholder Denis O'Brien, who owns 26 per cent of the group, called for an immediate sale or the closure of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

He has called for an extraordinary general meeting to tackle the issue which will bring a clash with Tony O'Reilly who with 28 pr cent of the shares in the largest shareholder in the group.

His son and chief executive Gavin said only on Friday that the London broadsheet titles were not up for sale and should be at least breaking even by the end of next year.

Small steps in the net and civic engagement

Pew have just published a report on the internet and civic engagement in America.

What has it found? You may or may not be surprised

the internet is not changing the fundamental socio-economic character of civic engagement in America. When it comes to online activities such as contributing money, contacting a government official or signing an online petition, the wealthy and well-educated continue to lead the way.

There are hints that the net may be developing new forms of civic engagement.

The report found that

Some 19% of internet users have posted material online about political or social issues or used a social networking site for some form of civic or political engagement. And this group of activists is disproportionately young.

No doubt social media will play a greater role in this but the barriers are changing oh too slowly

Surprise tactics by the newspaper industry?

Often, when an industry faces decline, management and ownership will opt to take door number three; rather than reinvesting profits in new businesses or redistributing them to shareholders, they'll direct them to legislators and lobbyists in an effort to buy themselves protection from competition.

Writes the Economist this week.

They are putting it in the context of the decline of newspapers and as they continue

This has been the strategy used by agricultural and manufacturing interests, often, though not always, with success. I'm actually a little surprised that journalism has not been more aggressive or successful with appeals for government help. I don't imagine that a technology as revolutionary as the internet could have been quashed by government interventions (though its development could have been checked in important ways).

Via Adrian Monck

War reporter calls it a day with embedding in Helmand

An independent war reporter has had enough of the military's embedding policy in Afghanistan.

Frontline'sDaniel Bennett reports that Michael Yon

claims that the Ministry of Defence has been trying to have him removed from the area of Regional Command (South) and from Thursday he will be reporting unilaterally from Helmand province.

adding that

Yon was annoyed that his embed with 2 Rifles in Helmand was ended by the Ministry of Defence last week, and says his "days of covering British operations are over."

He recently wrote on the topic that

"The Pentagon and British MoD spin lies (though I have found Secretary Gates talks straight), but veins of pure truth can be found right here with these soldiers. The Pentagon and MoD as a whole cannot be trusted because they are the average of their parts. There are individual officers and NCOs among the U.S. and U.K. who have always been blunt and honest with me. Among the higher ranking, Petraeus and Mellinger come to mind, but for day-to-day realities this is where it’s at. Out here. Nothing coming from Kabul, London, or Washington should be trusted."

Follow all the public sector bloggers

Paul Canning has put togEther an aggregator of the public sector bloggers currently in the UK at the moment over at The Wardman Wire.

I ma sure that there will be some interesting reads

Is this the next big thing-Augmented reality

According to Neville Hobson

it’s a great illustration of how augmented reality could be of distinct use in a pragmatic way: you’re in a new city, you can interactively find out information about your surroundings with your mobile device, in real time – tourist spots, historical sites, museums and parks, photo galleries and videos at the points of interest.

No mobile web

Is their such a thing as the mobile web and should we make the distinction between it and the static version?

Steve Yelvington thinks not and give seven reasons why not.

His main argument is that

Mobility is about interests and utility, not technology. Feeding your crappy old shovelware website is not a mobile strategy. Easy mobile access to the entire Web opens a broad field of opportunity. Pursue it.

and that

We are mobile people. There is no Mobile Web, but in our mobility we will expect simple, direct, easy tools that meet our mobile needs. Those who provide them will win.

Newspaper success story.

Newspapers are not dying the world over but it appears that you have to look to the Indian Sub continent for success.

The FT reports that

Dainik Jagran, a Hindi language daily, has a circulation of more than 17m and a readership of 54.5m in India, according to the latest Indian Readership Survey. This comes on the back of the growing dominance in the country of Hindi language newspapers – four of the five most widely read newspapers in the country are in Hindi, a language that is spoken by 41 per cent of the country’s 1.2bn people

According to Robin Jeffrey, an academic and author of India’s Newspaper Revolution its success can be put down to politics and consumer capitalism.

“Politicised people seek information. Politically mobilised classes have expanded – [such as] the Bahujan Samaj Party [which represents lower caste groups],Proprietors and advertisers at the same time have sought more eyes across their products so they have localised content and pushed newspapers into the countryside.”