Luckhurst stands behind Johnston Press' paywall

I see that Tim Luckhurst's article on Comment is Free has collected a fair amount of comment

Johnston Press alone cannot restore sanity. But the experiment it is launching should remind us that information required to hold power to account cannot be produced free of charge. Good journalism supplies the raw material without which freedom of conscience becomes meaningless. Ensuring its supply is essential.

he writes adding that

The internet is a valuable tool. It can bring inspiring, diligent and creative reporting into every home. But it will not do so by obliging consumers to accept the shoddy, propagandist ranting some categorise as citizen journalism and less credulous critics recognise as a deplorable reversion to the days when news was always deployed as a political weapon and only occasionally reported.

The model is well and truly bust

The fall of Borders may be underway in the UK but as the New York Times says today

Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing.

I was reading the Economist at the weekend and their synopsis was that

media is diverging into blockbusters and niches—with everything else struggling.

Technology was expected to assist the small publisher/artist/writer reach his audience cheaply and efficiently but instead

The loser in a world of almost limitless entertainment choice is not the hit, but the near-miss.

Now it seems that unless you have a blockbuster or celebrity,you are unlikely to reach the mass audience as the message becomes more and more crowded.Instead niche is the way forward,low but targeted audiences.

Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information.

But back to the New York Times,

The most popular books of the holiday season have become cat toys in a price war between online and offline retailers. Newspapers still hang onto a portion of seasonal ads, but the retail chains that place them have consolidated into a much smaller cohort, and much of their spending is bifurcated between old and new media marketing. Magazines intended to help the reader primp for Christmas parties are, in many cases, half as big as they were just a few short years ago.

Churnalism and lack of council reporting in Lancashire

35 pages were devoted to news and of these 6.25 pages were given over to ‘council reporting’.

That's the verdict of Ed Walker who has been keeping an eye on coverage in the Lancashire Evening Post over the last few days.

As Ed says

Like others I’ve been finding there is little reporting of council meetings, more stories are created from council press releases and then a few quotes from councillors. It’s also not clear when these councillors were saying these quotes, although the councillors title and ward are always attached.

Blogger claims he was paid by the FBI

A story to watch from across the Atlantic

A New Jersey blogger about to stand trial on charges that he made death threats against federal judges was apparently paid by the F.B.I. in its battle against domestic terrorism, reports the New York Times

Hal Turner, received thousands of dollars from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to report on neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups and was sent undercover to Brazil,

says the paper adding that he also claims

the F.B.I. coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements on his Internet radio show, but the newspaper also found that many federal officials were concerned that his audience might follow up on his violent speech.

Northcliffe trials semantics

Fascinating story from Hold the Front page which reports on a new initaitive from Northcliffe.

The compnay has begun the roll-out of a new system of linking to related stories in its online articles. Called "topic pages," the initiative has been launched thisisbristol.co.uk and will be rolled out across the rest of the thisis network of newspaper companion sites over the next few weeks.

The pages will will automatically generate internal links in stories from key words and phrases after the pages are reviewed semantically.

The system is beiong trialled in Bristol

Does citizen journalism represent a return to journalism's roots/

Is journalism coming full circle?

The question is asked by Gautam Lamba who argues that far from being the disruptive thechnology that many think they are,the likes of blogs and citizen journalism concepts are merely journalism returning to its roots ie that of crowdsourcing.

Only as it grew did it

transform from the crowd and into a specialized, organized collaborative group of people that banded together to report on vagaries of government and the elite.

Ht-Sarah Hartley

The engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist.

An interesting take on the problem of news (Ht-Martin Belam)

News consumers are mainly interested in news coverage, not content. Coverage is a service that promises to keep its users "in the loop" about what is relevant to them and their peer groups. It is delivered by selecting content on readers' behalf – i.e. through aggregation and curation – and while it relies on content it is more than that. Because it is an ongoing, day-to-day service, coverage is all about loyalty: once consumers find a provider they like, they come back to it. And because of hyperlinks, in the web coverage providers need not be content providers (and vice-versa). This means that media brands' power – including their pricing power – will increasingly be a matter of how well they aggregate content – whatever its source – and not just how good their content is.

Nico Flores writes on his blog On Demand media

His description of the example of the technology and the car is a great read and for journalism

the engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist

and adds that

Tim Berners Lee's invention of the hyperlink created the perfect frictionless interface between two formerly integrated industries: publishing and aggregation. It does not matter that this did not come about in the gradual way that Christensen describes (i.e. through a slow process of industry evolution) but as a quantum leap, before the industry was ready

Now here is a way to keep up newspaper circulations-enforced subscriptions

One area of the world where newspapers are not under attack is apparently Japan

The single biggest reason is Japan’s direct distribution system. Subscribers who attempt to cancel meet with repeated and agonised house visits from a familiar local employee of the newspaper company.reports the FT

But maybe the most important is the system of yomawari, or “evening round” where reporters wait until the small hours and then try to put questions to the grandee, who with luck will be slightly drunk, as they arrive home.

One thing this does is that many stories in Japan’s morning newspapers are fresh, and were not on the internet the previous day.

“Japan is still a very closed society. There are close relationships between information sources and news reporters and they are emotional not rational relationships,” says Yutaka Oishi, director of the Institute for Media and Communications Research at Keio University.

Is X box the new platform?

More than two million people have logged onto their Facebook accounts via Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console in the last week.

reports the Independent.

Rather staggering figures and maybe questioning which platforms will take precendence in the future.

Certainly this is a coup for Microsoft who earlier this month

enabled Xbox LIVE Community subscribers to use their Xbox 360 connect to social networking sites Twitter and Facebook as well as live radio streaming site, Last.fm, directly through their gaming console.

America prepares for a social media barrage

Social media will be at the forefront of a barrage of post Thanksgiving retail promotions in the United States.

The FT reports that

Retailers including discounters Target and Walmart, and department store groups Macy’s, Kohl’s and JC Penney have used Facebook pages to publish the “doorbuster” and “early bird” deals traditionally announced in newspaper advertising inserts on Thanksgiving, the day before “Black Friday” – so called because it was once the day on which retailers’ ledgers for the year moved out of the red and into the black.

A new digital direction for the Telegraph

Yesterday it was anounced that the Telegraph's editor Will Lewis will be moving upstairs so to speak.

He will be managing a new digital division at the paper which will be tasked with creating cutting-edge ideas and new revenue streams.

He explains to New Media Age what the role entails

“Over the last three to five years we’ve established an integrated way of working. Because of that we’ve stepped on the gas and asked how we can do even better at creating digital products and services and new digital revenue streams. We spent quite a while thinking about it. It’s about setting up a new base camp and being able to draw on the resource here in Victoria and to use the brand if we choose and to use the content if we choose as well. While innovation continues in Victoria, we will take a different path to hunt down digital revenues in the new operation in Euston.

UGC can promote greater media democracy

The term User Generated conflict may have fallen by the wayside apart from in journalism schools but the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA)has produced a set of guidelines for broadcasters wishing to work with the medium.

They can be downloaded as a PDF

One issue that it brings to the fore is that of its use in promoting media democracy

While encouraging ‘better quality’ UGC (however that may be defined) might appear a worthwhile aim, pursuing this goal alone could serve only to further amplify the voices of the better resourced members of the audience and further marginalise the poor and disempowered. The aim of these guidelines, therefore, is to provide guidance on how to encourage a greater diversity of material from a wider range of voices: material that serves both the public and commercial needs of broadcasters and the viewing and democratic needs of the widest possible audience.

Ht-Laura Oliver

Conventional ideas of balance are all but redundant in modern conflict

Charlie Beckett gives a good synopsis of Polis' debate this week on Managing the News in Conflict: Covering Gaza under the Media Ban.

Reporting war is getting more dangerous, difficult and complicated but working with citizen journalists is one way of getting around the censorship, lack of resources and danger.

The debate featured Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East Editor, Alan Fisher and Sherrine Tadros, both Al Jazeera English, and Louise Turner, Unseen Gaza Dispatches Director/Producer.

What was interesting says Beckett

was the consensus that conventional ideas of balance are all but redundant in modern conflict where so often the sides are disproportionate.

and

There was also a thoughtful debate around whether TV channels serving western audiences should show as much gore as Arab broadcasters routinely do. Bowen thought that the BBC could show more but as soon as you go too far it loses its impact. And both Fisher and Tadros agreed that to get the most impact, you don’t have to resort to explicit horror. Louise Turner watched hours of rushes of stomach-churning imagery in the making of her documentary about Gaza and she said that the effect was to numb not to inform.

Peter Mandelson and the Digital economy Bill-the musical

Ht-Comment is Central

Murdoch is flawed -there is no such thing as scarcity in the 21st century media

While we are into predictions,Harvaad business school's Umair Haque has paid short shrift to the Murdoch Microsoft attacks on Google

The simplest flaw in the MicroFox's strategic logic? MicroFox is trying to create artificial scarcity instead of value. That might have worked in the 20th century, but in a hyperconnected world, creating artificial scarcity kills orthodox businesses dead. That's because though MicroFox can block Google, there's no way to block people from using Google to find stuff that doesn't suck. Artificial scarcity is usually a one-way ticket to oblivion, as people simply defect to better alternatives.

Ht-Martin Stabe

Those predictions for 2010

Its that time of year when everyone starts making predictions and blogtrepenuer's Adam Toren is no exception

Amongst his predictions

1.an increasing number of applications will prompt us to reveal our exact location to our friends and followers.

2.Applications will come to the rescue and re-position Twitter for a business model and

3.Flash-based websites will soon be able to deliver a great user experience and be viewed as meaningful, searchable, deep, indexable and rich.

Borders teeters

Tragic news for the UK book industry as Borders looks set to dive into administration.

Its 45 stores employing 1100 people are at risk after it seems about to appoint BDO Stoy Hayward as administrator today.

As with many other book stores the company has been hit by the internet and competition from the supermarkets.

Its current owners Valco have tried to do a deal with WH Smith but that has reportedly faltered and HMV, the owner of Waterstone’s, is also believed to have been involved in discussions.

Guardian holds onto its online lead

The latest ABCE's are out and Guardian.co.uk is still out in front when it comes to unique users of its site.

31.7m to be exact in October,a fall of around 4 per cent and just slightly in front of the Mail no doubt helped by that Jan Moir article.

Large increases in the month for the Times up nearly 13 per cent to 20.87m and the Independent over 10 per cent at 9.7m.

First local news consortia invited to submit tenders

"The huge increase in viewers and readers seeking information about the terrible floods in Cumbria over the last week is a clear demonstration of that. Its importance to local democracy, coupled with the acute challenge being faced by commercial news companies, means there is a need for Government support.""The huge increase in viewers and readers seeking information about the terrible floods in Cumbria over the last week is a clear demonstration of that. Its importance to local democracy, coupled with the acute challenge being faced by commercial news companies, means there is a need for Government support."

The words of the culture secretary Ben Bradshaw who has announced today that Border and Tyne Tees are to be the first region to conduct the pilot experiment for local news.

The panel will then select bidders wanting to form independently funded news consortiums to provide regional ITV1 news bulletins and other content for the area to go forward to the second stage after Christmas with the submission of final tenders by the end of February 2010.

Uclan places digital at the heart of strategy

Good to see that my former place of learning is championing the digital community.

How Do reports that

The University of Central Lancashire has created the new role of 'project champion for digital industries' as it looks to build strategic links between itself and the sector on a regional, national and international level.

adding that

Lisa Harding has been recruited to take up the post and direct UCLan's 'University Knowledge Transfer agenda for digital and creative industries'

Has Wikileaks made a big mistake?

There is going to be a great deal of debate about the lastest information to come out of Wikileaks.

The topic?

An archive containing the contents of more than half a million pager messages sent on 11 September 2001 and as the Independent says

It provided an uncensored and sometimes deeply moving first-hand account of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Times claims broadband costs could treble

This morning's Times reports that it has seen a leaked memo which suggests that two million homes will pay more than three times the broadband levy initially proposed.

The plans, drawn up by Revenue & Customs, show that ministers will tax households with more than one phone line — of which there are more than 1.7 million — for each line they rent, and will also levy VAT on the charge.

says the report adding that

Families with one telephone connection, a separate line for broadband and another for a fax would end up paying £21.15 a year, instead of the originally announced £6. The Finance Bill, to be published early next year, will contain the plans for the 50p a month tax, which ministers hope will raise up to £175 million a year to fund superfast broadband connections for rural areas.

Is this what is going to happen to information in the future

The lessons of the likes of Google becoming too powerful?




Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

Last throws of the dice for Johnston Press

I think that paid content's Patrick Smith sums it op quite well

If readers will only pay for content that’s unique and unavailable elsewhere, perhaps local sites have a distinct advantage in their patch and, in theory, a clear path to monetisation.
—But what if a rival publisher in the same town keeps their content free? Unless there’s a huge gulf in quality between local rivals, readers will have a very easy choice. Our paid content research showed that 95 percent of people would rather go elsewhere than pay for news online.

He is talking about Johnston Press deciding to roll out a paid content model.

A leaked memo via Hold the front page says that

Managers have told staff that JP intends to roll-out the paid-for model across the company in line with what they are calling "industry moves in this area to find a sustainable business model going forward."

Whether this is a suitable business model or the last throws of the dice of a beleaguered media group,we wait to say.

The page you may never want to see

The Guardian has redesigned a page that it hopes you will never see.

Martin Belam explains

In an ideal world, you'd never see one of the things that our front-end developers have recently been working on. It is a new version of the page that appears when there is an error on the site - most usually a 404 error.

He adds that

Our old 404 page had a list of links to various areas on The Guardian and Observer sites, but the new version more closely mimics the standard navigation that should be familiar from nearly every other page on the site.

All change at BBC online

The BBC has made some changes to its online front page.

Steve Herrmann,editor of the BBC News website explains the changes on the editor's blog.

We have increased the number of headlines under each of the section headings in the bottom half of the page, made the popular Business and Technology sections more prominent by adding pictures, and we have increased the number of featured items in the video area.Internationally, advertisements appear on the right hand side of the page alongside editorial content and this has resulted, some of the time, in that side of the page becoming much longer than the rest of it. The modified layout should allow us to balance the two sides of the page better, and provide more headlines at the same time.

BBC4 comes out fighting with Gracie

This blog has always been a supporter of BBC4 and it was therefore heartning to see its biopic drama Gracie hit good viewing figures on Monday night.

The channel pulled in a record 1.4m viewers to watch Jane Horrocks portray Rochdale's famous daughter and will no doubt bask in the delight of putting one across Jeremy Hunt who has argued that the corporation should devolve itself of its niche channels.

It is not just a flash in the pan either for the previous weeks expose on the private life of Enid Blyton pulled in 1.2m.

An I-Tunes for magazines

According to the New York Times,

A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast are plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

which adds that

In the face of slumping print circulations for many magazines, the publishing houses are eager to exert some control over digital readership, said people at the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the plans. Some newspaper owners have also expressed interest in the joint venture.

Follow the Iraq inquiry with 4's anonymous blogger

An interesting move by Channel 4.

Journalism.co.uk reports that it has

launched a new blog to offer blow-by-blow coverage of the inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war – with a focus on deeper analysis of the proceedings which have started this week.
The blog will be written anonymously by ‘a Channel 4 News reporter with a deep interest and thorough knowledge of intelligence and security matters’

You can also follow the blogger on Twitter @iraqinquiryblog.

BBC Worldwide to float?

This morning's FT leads with the story that BBC Worldwide is looking at the possibility of floating on the stock market in response to pressure from the government and commercial rivals to dilute its media market power.

According to the paper

Two people close to the early-stage discussions told the Financial Times that Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse were part of the advisory process. The banks declined to comment. Two other people close to the BBC confirmed that any flotation was unlikely before the end of 2010 at the earliest.

Its value is placed at around £2b and as the report adds

Worldwide, which operates 23 television channels in more than 100 countries and sells BBC branded magazines, Lonely Planet travel guides, merchandise and programme formats, had revenues of £1bn in 2008-09 and an operating profit of £112m before exceptional costs.

Why crowdsourcing may be doomed to failure

One of the problems identified with this cconcept that we call crowdsourcing is the very fact that people get rather fed up with doing something for nothing over time and a rapid enthusiasm will eventually turn to apathy.

Maybe Wikipedia is going to be a prime example of this as this graph show



As Matt Buckanan says

The decay of time, bitter infighting, and the increasing scope and strength of regulations slowly strangle the life out of Wikipedia, with editors—its braintrust—fleeing in droves, even as traffic at the world's fifth most-popular website keeps growing

Journalist who broke the story of the Dalai Lama's flight passes away

His name probably won't go down as one of the famous journalists of our time but

Veteran journalist Naresh Chandra Rajkhowa, who broke the news about the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet through Tawang in March 1959 and his seeking asylum in India, passed away at his Chandmari residence here on Monday. He was 87.

via The Hindu

Mr. Rajkhowa was also the first Indian journalist to have interviewed the Tibetan religious leader. The Dalai Lama’s request letter for asylum had reached Mr. Rajkhowa by mistake in Shillong, where he was based as the correspondent of the The Assam Tribune, a local English daily published from Guwahati.
The messenger, who carried the Dalai Lama’s request letter written in English, reached Mr. Rajkhowa instead of a government official to whom the letter was addressed and who was residing near the journalist’s residence.

Ht-Sans Serif

The death of the traditional web

Thanks to Paul Bradshaw who altered me to this fascinating study of what may turn out to be the death of Web 1.0.

This according to Nicholas Moerman occured in September 2008 when blogs,entertainment and shopping portals,media sites and even sex sites began to show falls in traffic.

The only sites that continue to rise?

No prizes that it is twitter,facebook and linkedin.

The Internet Is Dying

View more presentations from NicolasMoerman.

Maybe Murdoch has figured out the internet

There was a lot of commemt and bravado circulating yesterday over Rupert Murdoch's latest foray into the online world.

It is worth reading John Gapper's interpretation in the FT

Mr Murdoch appears to be willing to sacrifice a lot of traffic to the websites of papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times in return for a payment from Microsoft. In effect, he would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing.

adding

that suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible.

12 journalists killed in the Philippines

Quite appalling news coming out of the Philipines yesterday.

Reporters without borders reporting that

At least 12 journalists were killed today in Maguindanao province (on the southern island of Mindanao) by armed men, including two policemen, linked to the province’s governor, a supporter of President Gloria Arroyo. More than 30 other people were murdered. Some of the victims were beheaded.

They describe it as

“Never in the history of journalism have the news media suffered such a heavy loss of life in one day,”

as

The convoy of Mangudadatu supporters, accompanied by journalists, had been on its way to an electoral bureau to file documents related to his candidacy, which the gunmen wanted to prevent. The fatalities included Mangudadatu’s wife, sister and other relatives. The governor’s son is also alleged to have been involved in the massacre.

A fascinating study of online distribution and collaboration in Kigali

Publishing Kigali Wire

View more documents from Graham Holliday.

Facebook-a portal for product branding

A new survey on peoples use of facebook in the United States has found that they have more conversations about brands than the typical US consumer.

The survey by the Keller Fay Group assessed over 350,000 pieces of marketing-related "buzz" each year, with its data covering everything from personal to online interactions.

It found that people

had an average of 36% more brand-focused conversations a week than the typical US consumer.

and it applied to

a broad range of categories, and included an uptick of 47% for children's products, 46% for retail and apparel, and 43% for technology brands.

Ht-Joanna Geary

Oprah-the media savvy star

The biggest media story of the weekend at least across the Atlantic was the news that Oprah Winfrey is ending her popular daytime talk show in 2011.

The show will not be finishing instead it will move to cable network OWN, or Oprah Winfrey Network, a Los Angeles-based joint venture that she formed with Discovery Communications Inc.

OWN will be available in more than 70 million homes and shows that the talk TV star is far and away one of the most business savvy of her generation.

According to the New York Times though her

her longevity and success probably has more to do with what she did not do.

1.She never took her company public, which meant that she remained in control of both her operation and her destiny

2.She never stuck her name, a very powerful brand, on any merchandise

3.She did not license her name to a magazine, she built one in her own image and tweaked it until it became a big publishing success

4.She never engaged in behavior that tarnished the luster of her name.

5.She also never made big deals just for the sake of synergy never got addicted to doing deals never made dubious investments that put a strain on her core business

News Corp and Microsoft ganging up on Google

The latest attempts to destablise Google over the weekend have come from a comination of Microsoft and News International.

The former has

had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company's being paid to "de-index" its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

According to the FT

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers, ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who cautioned that talks were at an early stage.

Is information killing the boss-employee relationship?

That's what Carol Bartz, the new head of Yahoo, in The Economist's "The World in 2010".

Traditional management is over. The internet has killed command and control. Now that everyone can analyse and ridicule their chief executive's every move almost before they've made it, it has become impossible to order people about.

Although Lucy Kellaway in the FT doesn't agree

Command and control is not over and won't ever be. Bosses are still bosses. If mine tells me to do something, I'm inclined to get up off my bottom and do it. If Bartz's employees don't get off their bottoms when she tells them to, there is a problem - and it has nothing to do with the internet

How would you describe the mobile phone?

A great story from the New York Times.

Moments after he walked out of Sing Sing prison on Friday after serving 18 years for a crime that a judge ruled he did not commit, Fernando Bermudez Jr. was handed a cellphone so he could speak with one of his lawyers. It was the first time he had held one.

“It almost seemed like a little baby,” Mr. Bermudez said. “It was so delicate. I didn’t want to break it. I have to become more technologically advanced. I’m an anachronism, almost.”

Watch out as the Chinese move into the world's media

The Chinese are on the offensive,that's the media offensive before we get too worried.

Check out this article from the English version of Spiegal Online which profiles Yang Rui,who wants to "enhance China's prestige in the world.".

China is fighting the battle of the world's media on three fronts

1.The Internet, brutally monitored domestically but also used to broadcast CCTV-9 worldwide;

2.new English-language editions of party newspapers, intended to enhance China's reputation in the rest of the world;

3.The global development and acquisition of television networks.

According to the article

Yang embodies China's new ambitions. As Asia's leading power, China wants to become a global media player -- one focused above all on maintaining its own image. After the rebellion in Tibet last year and the public relations disaster surrounding the Olympic torch, Beijing recognized that it was no longer possible to retain control over its enormous empire only with police-state tactics directed at its own population.

The top 100 political journalists

Total Politics has for the second year in a row produced its top 100 political journalists of the year

Here are the first 20 with last years places with PM's Eddie Mair,Channel 4's Jon Snow and Radio 4's James Naughtie and Edward Stourton jumping up the charts.

1. (+3) Nick Robinson
2. (-1) Evan Davis
3. (-1) Jeremy Paxman
4. (+9) Adam Boulton
5. (+18) Eddie Mair
6. (+1) Andrew Marr
7. (+22) Jon Snow
8. (+3) Quentin Letts
9. (+22) James Naughtie
10. (-4) Martha Kearney
11. (-1) Peter Riddell
12. (-9) Matthew Parris
13. (+1) Simon Hoggart
14. (-9) John Humphrys
15. (-7) Andrew Rawnsley
16. (+16) Carolyn Quinn
17. (+1) Simon Walters
18. (+36) Edward Stourton
19. (+18) John Pienaar
20. (+7) Ann Treneman

You can view the full 100 HERE

Local people getting angry in local papers

Thanks to the Indy's John Rentoul who found this website which he says continues to provide a top-quality running commentary on the state of rage against modern life.

It is called Angry people in local newspapers and takes the news from the local papers from people who are literally angry with the way things are happening in their community.

Today's anger comes from the Norwich Evening news where

Almost 200 people have added their names to a petition calling for refurbishment work to be carried out on a pub which would enable a keen couple to re-open it.

Or this from the Bournmouth Echo where

Christmas lights have been banned from sale at Bournemouth’s Christmas market after council contractors branded them “not relevant.”
Now businessman Daryl Self, who bought in £200,000 worth of Blachere fairy lights in the hope of selling half his stock at the Christmas market, has been left with stacks of unopened boxes in a Christchurch warehouse.

Needless to say I have subscribed to the site on by RSS reader.

You can also follow them on twitter

The UK needs to look at lessons in broadband adapation

Lesson for the UK?

Across the Atlantic,The Federal Commission has listed seven obstacles in the road towards universal use of broadband.

In the United States almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but of course that's a long way from the country's ultimate goal.

The biggest problem according to the commission,

The Universal Service Fund. The USF was created to directly subsidize phone service for low income people and to support service providers in rural areas. It does all that, but at an exorbitant cost and with increasingly irrelevant results. The United States now spends about $7 billion every year to support this pooch, a result of lousy auditing methods, goofy standards for measuring provider costs, and an intercarrier compensation system that was designed for a pre-IP-telephony world.

However it also identifies

2. The broadband adoption gap.

3. The consumer information gap.

4. The spectrum gap.

5. The deployment gap.

6. The television set-top box innovation gap.

7. The personal data gap.

Take a look at the full article here

Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

Gripes and moans about the Digital Bill

The internet was alive with the Digital Britain bill yesterday.

The main conclusion it seems was that most in the digital and media professions are not happy with it.

There is a good synopsis by KPMG’s director of intellectual property Mark Harding over at Paid Content.

His main gripe being that

there appears to be too much focus on policing the net rather than promoting digital enterprise and access. Ultimately, piracy measures alone will not solve the underlying issue of revenue models for content owners.

For Mark the key area which remains undefined is how to measure the target of reducing file sharing by 70 percent.

In recent months, file sharing activity has seen a reduction, which could well be due in part to the growing popularity of music streaming sites, particularly among young people, enabling those who simply want to access content rather than own it, to do just that.

Journalists under attack in Ukraine

According to the CPJ

Officials first barred reporters from entering their offices in the Odessa Television and Radio Center and then cut the power supply to their newsrooms and transmitter, silencing 12 independent broadcasters, Natalya Perevalova, chief editor of the Odessa-based independent television channel ATV, told CPJ.

A move that Perevalova says follows

critical reporting on corruption in the city administration and its poor financial policies have prompted official retaliation ahead of the 2010 mayoral and presidential elections.

Journalism and Maths-oil and water?

Should journalists be good at Maths?

Well certainly according to Scott Maier, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, (via CJR) which reports that every year he asks

his students to raise their hands if they went into journalism because they love writing. Unsurprisingly, most of them put their hands in the air.

adding that

“Then I ask how many of them got into journalism because they love math and numbers, and the hands that stay up are pretty few,” he said. “In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from maths.”

It is an interesting point for as they point out

Almost every story contains a number, be it a statistic, an address, or someone’s age. Journalists deal with numbers every single day, and yet so many of us willingly profess ignorance or fear when faced with simple arithmetic.

Mail accuses the Beeb of producing seven tons of carbon dioxide as it covers Copenhagen.

More BBC bashing this morning courtesy of the Daily Mail which reports that the corportation

is sending 35 people to next month's climate change talks in Copenhagen - creating as much carbon dioxide as an African village does in a whole year.
its delegation of 12 presenters, along with a backup team of researchers, producers and camera crews, will spend up to two weeks in the Danish capital on expenses to cover the global summit.

The Beeb recognises SEO in its headlines

The BBC has decided to make its headlines more serach engine friendly.

Steve Herrmann explains all on the Editors Blog

our developers have done a bit of work to allow journalists the scope to create two headlines for a story if they want to - a short one which appears on the front page and our other website indexes, and a longer one which will appear on the story page itself and in search engine results.
The front page headlines will remain limited to between 31 and 33 characters and will continue to appear on Ceefax and Digital Text, as they do now, along with the top four paragraphs of each story.

Murdoch identifies the high income values of WSJ's readers

It is hardly surprising that a lot of Rupert Murdoch's time and effort is going into the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has the wealthiest readership among print readers according to a new survey from Mediamark Research & Intelligence,

reports the Silicon Valley Insider

Its readership has an average income of $135,740 putting it above the following

Barron's ($126,710); The Economist ($124,701); United Hemispheres ($120,809); Washington Post Sunday ($120,400); The New York Times Sunday ($118,471); The New York Times daily ($115,816); American Way ($108,522); Condé Nast Traveler ($106,407); The Atlantic ($104,786); Southwest Spirit ($102,505); Architectural Digest ($101,159); and Yachting ($100,740).

via Adrian Monck

Accountability in the changing news model

If the future model of news is doing more with less then the non profit sector will play a greater role in the provision of news.

It is worth reading Pablo Eisenberg essay on this very subject (via Niemans)

The crisis in accountability in recent years has become all the more acute as the number of operating nonprofits has grown enormously and the sector has assumed even greater responsibility for society’s well being. Public expectations are greater than ever. Public confidence in their performance and integrity is, of course, the key to nonprofits’ ability to raise money. While most nonprofits are honest and transparent, the small number that are not can stain the reputation of the entire field. That is why there must be oversight mechanisms to ensure that both nonprofit organizations and philanthropic foundations operate ethically and effectively. The loss of daily newspapers and the investigative journalism they have traditionally provided will make this task much more difficult.

Twitter looking to businesses to monetise the model

For me the most interesting part of yesterday's NESTA sponsored discussion on twitter was the news that the company is looking at launching corporate accounts that would help the site begin to generate revenues.

Biz Stone dropped this into the conversation adding that they hoped to roll out some of these tools by the end of the year

“This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we’ve seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores,” he said, “We want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.”

The discussion features Stephen Fry, Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn who discussed the future impact of social media.

You can watch the whole thing here

Rumpuy Pumpy is EU's numpty

A rather predictable newspaper welcome for the new EU President this morning.

The prime minister of Belgium, a virtual nonentity on the world stage, was confirmed in the hugely powerful new job in a unanimous stitch-up by 27 national leaders over dinner in Brussels,

says the Express adding

Herman Van Rompuy's massive pay package, revealed yesterday in leaked EU documents, will make him the highest paid leader in the Western world, earning more than US President Barack Obama.

The EU stitch-up: Low-profile Labour crony made foreign minister so fanatical Belgian federalist can be President says the Mail

The Sun has a classic headline Rumpuy Pumpy is EU's numpty

EUROPE'S obscure new President Herman Van Rompuy was celebrating his £320,000-a-year job last night - together with Baroness Ashton, the equally little-known British peer named as EU foreign minister.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2738610/Herman-Van-Rompuy-is-first-President-of-EU.html#ixzz0XNYFnqKL

But even the more European leaning newspapers are not happy.The Gaurdian shares a headline with the Mail calling it a stich up

and the Independent is cool to the idea

Following a trade-off that managed to juggle the competing demands from Europe's left and right political blocs, from the region's big and small states and from those calling for a gender-balanced ticket, the victorious couple were formally anointed at a dinner of the European Union's 27 leaders.

The Times quite simply begins by saying

A Belgian federalist and a former chairwoman of Hertfordshire Health Authority were ushered into Europe’s two grandest jobs last night as it stumbled on to the world stage.

Beeb announces the Radioplayer

The BBC has announced that it will be releasing a new online radio player that aims to offer the output of every licensed UK radio station.

Its press release says that

The UK Radioplayer, due for launch early next year, is a pop-up console which will be open to stream more than 400 licensed national, local, community and student radio stations, offering a unique, constantly updated live and on-demand audio service.

So unlike the I-player which the corporation was prevented from sharing with other broadcasters,however as Paid Content reports

the BBC isn’t yet submitting UK Radioplayer to formal trust approval, believing it’s not a new service but a marrying of existing technology backends. That would avoid scrutiny for public value and market impact.

How the news audience has changed

New News Audience

View more presentations from Pew Internet & American Life Project, Pew Research Center.

The web-the last chance for luxury branding

THE luxury goods industry, struggling through a recession that has threatened some well-known names with extinction, is trying to use technology to its advantage.

The New York Times reports that the move to capitalize on the Web has become a financial imperative for many brands as

executives say that attitudes are softening as brands realize that the Web provides one of the last untapped sources of potential growth.

but

Some executives also remain reluctant to invest heavily in digital initiatives because of costly failures in the past.

It reports on the example of Net-a-porter

One of the most successful ventures on the Web has been Net-à-Porter, a site based in London that sells high-end fashion and accessories, delivering them to homes or offices in black boxes. Though sales in the United States slowed during the depth of the recession, they have since recovered and have continued to rise at double-digit rates in other markets, the company said. It expects sales this year to top £100 million ($168 million), up from £82 million last year.
“It just made a lot of sense to allow women to shop when they wanted to shop, how they wanted to shop — at work, at home, in bedroom,” said Natalie Massenet, the company’s founder.

Salve-Thursday's Guardian Tech

One of the casualties of the Guardian media groups cost cutting will be the stand alone Technology section on a Thursday.

It ceases publication on the 17th December as Charles Arthur explains in today's edition it won't signal the end of the paper's championing of the subject.

The final issue will mark just over 26 continuous years since Futures Micro Guardian had its first edition, on 20 October 1983. From then, you will continue to find our writing online, or through our Twitter feed, and also throughout the paper incarnations of the Guardian in the news, business, features and other sections, where we will have a renewed focus on bringing you our take on the technology issues that truly matter and which you should know about.

and as Arthur continues to say

In part it has been the internet that has hastened the end of the physical version of this section, as more classified job adverts have migrated to online job sites such as Guardian Jobs (jobs.guardian.co.uk, in case you're looking); there have also been the arctic winds of the recession, which seems to be hitting the UK harder than many other countries around the world.

Newspapers should stop thinking as fixed products and start acting valuable, branded interfaces to on

CJR carries an interesting interview with Rob Durst, a Boston-based business and technology consultant who believes that newspapers can remain viable.

How? Well according to Durst,if they move quickly and use innovations such as “mobile codes.then have a cahnce of surviving.

Magazines and newspapers should stop treating their publications as fixed products and start thinking about them as valuable, branded interfaces to online content and services. They can do this using mobile codes, which are essentially printed barcodes that readers “click on” using a camera phone—kind of like clicking on a Web link with a mouse. QR (quick response) codes are a good example. They are in widespread use throughout Asia. QR codes contain a Web address, and your phone’s browser automatically connects to that Web site when you take a picture of the code with your camera phone.

Unlike some countries,getting news here will never cost a life

Join Reporters without frontiers campaign of awareness for the United States

Is Vietnam blocking Facebook?

Vietnam's growing legions of Facebook users fear that the country's communist government might be blocking the popular social networking website, which has become difficult to access over the past few weeks.

reports the Independent

Although there has been no official government comment

A technician at Vietnam Data said government officials had ordered his firm to block access to Facebook and that VDC instituted a block on the site 11 November. He declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak to the media

Over to you Manchester creatives says the BBC

The BBC's Peter Salmon has announced a new initiative for multimedia content makers in the North of England.

Writing on his blog,he says that there is a plan to make £500,000 available to commission up to four new pilots of interactive content for CBeebies and CBBC.

The initiative is called @north

We have allocated the money. We have published the guidelines. We have given everyone a blank sheet of paper. And now it's up to the creative teams from Newcastle to Crewe to blow us away with some fantastic ideas. The BBC can be the platform that shares the brilliant work already being done across the North with audiences throughout the UK.

Tories lose a goat-ITV gets a new poisoned chalice keeper

The appointment of Archie Norman as ITV Chairman is a coup for the channel - and bad news for Conservatives.

That's according to Danny Finkelstein at the Times' Comment is Central.

He reminds us that apart from being former chief of ASDA,he was also a former Tory MP who was

a critical Conservative figure. During his period at Central Office he guided all the leading figures towards a new analysis of the party's problems.
Without Archie's prodding and his leadership, it really is quite possible that the modernisers and their analysis would not have emerged.

So the loss?

the party will need change managers to help transform public services. And there is no better change manager in Britain - as ITV will discover - than Archie Norman.

And the chalice?

The business model for ITV is effectively buggered.The only way it is really going to survive is to downsize,specialise and concentrate on broadcasting for a niche.Maybe that means that it must go downmarket even more than it already has,forget quality drama,news and documentary.

Five don't for multi media journalists

1.) Don’t think of your video as an afterthought. Good video might save a story, but poorly shot wallpaper video will certainly ruin one.

2.) Don’t complain about carrying gear. There are hundreds of darn good reporters out there who are carrying resumes right now who would kill to be carrying gear.

3.) Don’t forget what it’s like to be a viewer. See each day’s story as if you were watching it from home. Did you get the take home message across? Did you like video? Did it all make sense? Would you want to watch it again? Would you need too?

4.) Don’t rush the writing. That’s where real mistakes are made.

5.) Don’t use being a one man band as a crutch or an excuse. It’s the wave of the future and a great skill to have.

via Deb Wenger

The future of social media monitoring

The Future Of Social Media Monitoring Marshallsponder

View more presentations from webmeticsguru.

Ht-Robin Hamman

Ofcom frees up the local picture

So Ofcom is set to recommending to the government that rules covering local media ownership should be relaxed, allowing one group to own newspapers and radio stations in the same area.

According to Guardian media

The recommendations will be welcomed by newspaper, TV and radio companies, which have been urging the government to liberalise local cross-media ownership rules as they struggle with plunging advertising revenues in the recession.

A solid case of commercial pressures dictating the way forwards?

Tweeting in 1889

Well they certainly look like tweets.This was the Boston Daily Journal. December 5, 1889.

the longer I stare at these old newspapers, the more I am bewitched by the cumulative insanity and variety and intellectual free-fall of these deep stacks of randomly interesting nonsense.

Ht-The Hope chest

Technology is failing disabled web servers.

Speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh,Cynthia Waddel of the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability said that

One of the fundamental problems has been not consulting persons with disabilities when designing technologies,"

The Independent reports that the organisation

presented the forum a paper calling for more "education and training on accessibility and the consultation of persons with disabilities throughout all stages of design."

Which countries have the most wi fi spots.

It won't surprise you to know that it is America.

This from the Economist

WIRELESS internet is spreading extremely fast. Today business travellers have over 286,000 hotspots around the world at their disposal, compared with 53,700 five years ago, according to JiWire, a mobile audience media company. Reflecting its early adoption of WiFi, America has most hotspots, although China is adding networks particularly rapidly. Rich countries with the most tech-friendly cultures (such as South Korea) figure prominently. Measured per person, Sweden and Britain offer the best hotspot penetration rates.

It's people's attention and not information that is scarce

There has been a great deal of reaction to Times Editor James Harding's comments about his paper's paywall strategy.

Straight on the case is the Guardian's Kevin Anderson who says that

referring to the media economics of the 18th century to build or justify a strategy for the 21st is clearly ludicrous. Paper in the 18th century was an expensive thing and steam presses hadn’t been invented. Information was scarce and could fetch a premium.

Kevin adds that

In the age of the internet, information is not scarce. Opinion isn’t scarce. People’s attention is scarce.

The changes in blogging since 2007

Total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows.

That's the conclusion of at PostRank, who have been monitoring and recording all the off-site engagement since mid-2007.

Their survey found that there has been a 30% year over year growth in engagement,a sign that more people are participating in the social web and the driver behind this is the share and like this bookmarking on many article and posts.

Most interesting though is the increased lifespan of a typical story.

in 2007, we observed that over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article......down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009. While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency, the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. What we’re observing are the effects of strengthening the weak ties.

The Mega Turtles

Disappointing numbers at the session this morning but some interesting questions were posed.

1."How can the UK government best support its creative entrepreneurs and innovators"

2."How can we encourage more collaboration across disciplines to the benefit of the UK economy"

3.How do we ensure the UK can nurture and develop the necessary skills for individuals to participate in the creative digital economy.

Three very interlinked questions.

All the groups that I was involved in came to the conclusion that all three problems lie in the educational sector.That the innovative and entrepreneurial instincts need to be nurtured in the education system and at an early age so that the risk adverse society that we live in can be swept away.

The need for collaboration is paramount but we have forgotten how to network.As more have become virtual,the element of establishing trust has gone and this we need to return to a social arena in which we can comfortably do business and are at ease in sharing data.

As for government support,well yes there were the usual calls for the tax breaks and funding but really the issue is should it or should the initiative be with the private sector?

New social media editor at the Beeb but is he on twitter?

The BBC has announced that it has appointed its first social media editor

Alex Gubbay, who is currently news editor for BBC Sport Interactive will take on this new role in January, co-ordinating the work of correspondents and reporters using social media tools, and ensuring best practice is developed and shared within the BBC.
He will manage the existing user generated content hub within BBC Newswire, making the most of news stories suggested by users, as well as their case studies, photographs, videos and comments, across our website, and on TV and radio. The new role is being funded by redistributing money within BBC Newsroom.
Alex will have a particular focus on developing new ways for audiences to have their say on stories being covered by BBC News, and he will be blogging here frequently in the New Year.

writes Sam Taylor, the editor of Newswire.

Strangely though cannot find him on twitter-if yiu know better let me know?

The Spectator seems happy with its paywall

This morning has seen a couple of interesting items regarding the paywall.

Chris Tryhorn of Paid Content reports on James Harding, the editor of the Times' comments yesterday.

Pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers”, Harding said the Times would charge for 24-hour access to that day’s edition of the paper alongside a subscription model, but dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.
Harding said the newspaper business had to avoid the mistakes of the music industry – and call time on free distribution.

Meanwhile the Spectator has announced that it hasn’t been hit that bad after raising the wall in September. It has lost around 2 per cemnt of its traffic following the switch but actually sales of the magazine have increased in the six weeks since its introduction.

Next on the agends=a is its luanch of the I-phone app which it will charge 59p a week for.

That will be a very interesting development to watch.

Journalism models and Rick Waghorn's Evslin's law

Whilst we were discussing the future of journalism at Open 09 yesterday,I picked up a tweet from Rick Waghorn,who I would describe as the godfather of hyper local.

Decided that big is bust; that the future of news will be 'small, but perfectly formed'. Now just got to write a blog post to match...

Spot on Rick I replied and he kindly tweeted a blog post that he had written earlier this year "A new business model for journalism? Well, you start with Evslin’s Law and work from the bottom up…"

I remembered reading it at the time but it was good to refresh and remind

For those who don't know Evslin's Law,Rick kindly explains all

‘An ad network that extracts the minimum commission it can afford out of ad sales for member sites will grow larger because more sites will join this network than its greedier competitors.
‘Ad networks need a critical mass of audience before they can sell to top-tier advertisers, which pay higher rates. So charging less commission to grow larger can yield more ad sales at better prices…

But the crux of the argument is this

Evslin’s Law in its editorial form would take us; to that hyper-local community that meets and mingles at the school gates every afternoon. In nigh on each and every postcode in this country.

and he adds

That’s where you draw your line; build your network from… You work from the very bottom up; not hope to find an answer that is imposed from the top down.
You start at the very bottom; with a basic molecule of editorial life and then build our new, journalistic platforms from there.

A busy day of turtling at Open 09

So a busy first day at Open 09 yesterday discussing the future of the web and the future of journalism.

For the later we were asked three questions.

1.What skills will journalists need to equip themselves for in 2020.

2.How do we find independent quality journalism and

3.How should the media react to the ever increasing change of pace.

I don't pretend that for one moment we have solved any of these three points but some very interesting discussion which will feed into today's mega turtle.

For the first,it seems that journalists will have to think of themselves more as a brand,that they will have to operate more as a business and be equipped with greater freelancing skills.

There was also some discussion on the power of cooperation and possible journalists forming themselves into groups with which they can market a range of skills.

On the funding aspect,quite surprisingly the subject of micro payments was rarely mentioned.Instead the power of hyper local where small concerns unsaddled with the high costs of corporate media conglomerates could compete in a more level playing field.

As for how the media competes in the curent climate,well it was think strategic.Media has to act like any other business in a rapidly changing world.It's difficult when you are under pressure but decisons need to be taken at a higher level of plane.The rush to digitalise without thinking of the business model was held up as a classic example.

As for the future of the web,connectivity,democratisation and the ability to filter the ever increasing information were concerns that our group came up with.

Today all the group's conclusions will go into the "mega turtle" and from them a manifesto and a plan of action

Today I am turtling

At least I think that is the verb.

What's a turtle you may ask?

Well it is quite simply a discussion box and they are being run by the people organising Open 09 at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston over the next couple of days.

I shall be taking part in two turtles.The future of the web in whcih some of the questions posed are

1. Will the future of the web be led by education or industry?

2. What are the implications of open source on the future of the web?

3. The future of the web depends upon…?

and the future of media

But it is not just about media and the net.There are a number of turtles running including the future of music,the future of animation.textiles and fashion as well as product design futures.

You can hollow on the blogs and also on twitter following the hashtag #OPEN09.

It should be a good couple of days

Cyber Attacks

Military officers describe cyberspace as the fifth domain of war, after land, sea, air, and space. But cyberspace is unique in one important respect -- it's the only battlefield created by humans

.


A fascinating piece from National Journal magazine on how the US planned and carried out a cyber attack during 2007 in Iraq.

At the request of his national intelligence director, Bush ordered an NSA cyberattack on the cellular phones and computers that insurgents in Iraq were using to plan roadside bombings. The devices allowed the fighters to coordinate their strikes and, later, post videos of the attacks on the Internet to recruit followers. According to a former senior administration official who was present at an Oval Office meeting when the president authorized the attack, the operation helped U.S. forces to commandeer the Iraqi fighters'communications system. With this capability, the Americans could deceive their adversaries with false information, including messages to lead unwitting insurgents into the fire of waiting U.S. soldiers.

Ht-Spectator Live

Future vision for the BBC under a Tory government

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is interviewed by the Sunday Times this morning and gives a fair indication of what a future Tory government may do to the BBC.

He told the paper that
the public broadcaster could be dramatically slimmed down under a Tory government and

warned that the BBC’s bureaucratic waste had become an “absolute nightmare”.

Hunt said that it had been “obscene” of the BBC to demand an inflation-busting licence fee increase despite the squeeze on family incomes. “The BBC should have waived its increase this year,” said Hunt. “Why did it have a £68m inflationary rise when there is no inflation?”

He was very sceptical of the corporation's niche channels with BBC Three and BBC Four, as well as digital radio stations such as 1Xtra, 6 Music and Radio 7 coming under particualr scrutiny.

The BBC needs to make a better case for investment in some of its new digital channels which have very low audiences but do cost a lot of money.

Semenya tricked into Guardian interview

Yesterday's sports section of the Guardian carried an interview with South African runner Caster Semenya but according to the Huffington Post her lawyers say she was tricked into the interview.

Greg Nott, the managing partner for Dewey & LeBoeuf, issued a statement Saturday saying the quotes were obtained "under false pretenses and in a wrongful and unlawful manner."

However the Guardian

rejected the claim in a statement Saturday, saying its reporter Don McRae was invited to speak to Semenya by her coach, Michael Seme."(Seme) was fully aware that he was writing a feature for the Guardian and suggested that he talk to Ms. Semenya," the newspaper said.

Icons of the 1st decade

It's that time.Quite remarkably we are approaching the end of the first decade of the 21st century and cue long rambling reflections on the ten years.

Could it reallt be 10 years since we all worried about the millenium bug?

Intelligent Life has asked what the icons of the first decade will be and amongst its selections,the hoodie,Apple. Instant landmarks,Price tags,Mega pixels,and the iPod.

I am sure that there will be many more but as a first list,not bad.

Banks not keen on paywalls or for that matter bloggers

Do read Josh Halliday's review of former Mirror editor David Banks' views on paywalls,aggregation and bloggers.

This on Rupert Murdoch's plans

"I just don't see how he's going to make it work. I think there are possible ways to make it work. The other day, I needed a new virus scanner, and I wanted a free one so I went online. So I went to their site and it said free download, so I clicked it, and you had Love Film, something else, you had ink supplies - you had to buy something from one of their advertisers and that's all you had to do, and as soon as you did, within about half-an-hour you were told you'd got the free virus scanner and I also bought a couple of cartons of ink for the computer.

and this on bloggers

"I could be a blogger, and I could offer this stuff for free on my site, you know, I'll read the papers for you - it's called being a journalist. Except, what do they call it? They don't call it plagiarism anymore, they call it aggregation - that's the word. Aggregation is the word of the nation. Roy Greenslade, the great Professor, he's an aggregator, or an aggregationist, and he aggregates, but really he's sucking stuff from anywhere else and you don't have to read media stuff in the world's press now you just go to Roy's site and read that. He's breaking the embargo really and it's wonderful, it's wonderful that bloggers can do that."

Sporting boards not happen with the new A list

It seems that the government's review of the sporting crown jewels has not gone down very well in many quarters.

Yesterday a report was submitted to the culture secretary Ben Bradshaw which added home Ashes Tests, competitive football internationals for all home countries, home and away, and Wales's home Six Nations rugby matches to the covereted A list which means that they have to be shown on free terrestrial television

Leading the attack was the England and Wales cricket board whose chief executive David Collier decribed it as turning Gordon Brown's much heralded "golden decade of sport" into a "decade of decay".

He wasn't alone though.Rugby league, rugby union, football, horse-racing, tennis and Olympics bodies unanimously rejected the findings as well.

The proposed list of protected events is as follows

Summer Olympics,Footballs World Cup finals,European Championship finals,Home and away qualification matches in the World Cup and European Championships,FA Cup final,Scottish FA Cup,Grand National,Wimbledon Championships,Open Championship golf,Cricket Home Ashes Test matches,Rugby Union World Cup tournament and,Rugby Union Welsh matches in the 6 Nations (in Wales only).

Off the list came the Winter Olympics,The Derby and the Rugby league Challenge Cup final.

According to the ECB

The "vast majority" of thousands of coaches recruited since it first signed an exclusive deal with Sky, now worth £75m a year, would have to be sacked if home Ashes series were listed. Its chief executive, David Collier, said its income could be halved if the Ashes were listed and the chairman, Giles Clarke, claimed half of all England players' central contracts could be cancelled.

whilst

The Welsh Rugby Union has argued the sport could be "decimated" by the decision, the Welsh FA said it would be "catastrophic" and the Scottish FA has claimed it will cost £12m a year. The impact on the International Rugby Board could be particularly acute.

Why people follow brands on twitter

An interesting survey from the The digital agency Razorfish in the States via (Joanna Geary)

It found that discounts and special offers are the main reasons why "connected consumers" in the US choose to "follow" brands on social networks like Facebook and Twitter

The digital agency, part of Publicis Groupe, surveyed 1,000 Americans in an effort to identify the characteristics of "connected consumers", the audience which it argued "our clients are most interested in both understanding and reaching."

and

Among participants tracking brands on Twitter, 44% said access to exclusive deals was the main reason for doing so, a total that fell to 23.5% opting to link to these feeds because they were an existing customer of the brand, and 22.7% in order to view "interesting or entertaining content."

Who knows who

Do check out the latest website from Channel 4.

Entitled Who knows who,it shows who is connected to who in public life perhaps rather like a public linkedin site.

Top of the list and following on from their docy drama about Boris and Dave are those two charactors.

David Cameron has 66 connections so far on the site for example.

Channel 4 says that

We hope that it will reveal the surprising and often hidden stories behind the headlines. This is the first iteration of an ongoing process to develop this tool to be rich in content and functionality and over time build the biggest network of connections in the UK.

FA Cup live streaming a success

It seems that the FA's experiemnt of live streaming first round FA Cup action has been a success.

Forced down the alternative route after the demise of Setanta,the FA's webiste reports that

The FA Cup First Round tie between Oldham Athletic and Leeds United, streamed exclusively live on TheFA.com, achieved over 176,000 plays on Saturday evening. This is believed to be a UK record for a free-to-view competitive football match on the internet.

Ht-Martin Belam

Pakistan faces up to its media horrors

With the contining battle against terrorism in Pakistan,this guest post on the Dawn blog looks at how the sensativities of the population have been numbed by the media

It seems being the frontline ally in the war against terror has numbed our sensitivities. And the ongoing quest for the highest ratings among the broadcast media is adding wind to the sails of insensitivity.

adding that

you realise how worthless the loss of human life is and how easily people get away with murder. Now that sense of worthlessness is being compounded in the name of free media.

It's a question that the media worldwide has to grapple with balancing the often gruesome facts of reporting with the need to self regulate tbroadcasting of the horrors.

When decision makers at channels are asked if it’s appropriate to sully the airwaves in this manner, they shrug and offer the evergreen reply that it is their responsibility to report what is happening.

Their solution?

Broadcasters need to carefully consider – on a case-by-case basis, no less – what constitutes good reporting, and what is mere exhibitionism. And in an ideal situation, viewers need to be given a choice about what kinds of images they consume, rather than being forced to scamper for the remote and change the channel every time blood or a body part flash across the screen.

Ht-Adrian Monck

New documentary honours journalist who exposed the truth of Stalin's famines

The journalist who exposed the manmade famines of 1930's Soviet Ukraine is to have a new documentary made about his life.

Media Guardian reports that

Gareth Jones's accounts of what was happening in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 were different from other western accounts. Not only did he reveal the true extent of starvation, he reported on the Stalin regime's failure to deliver aid while exporting grain to the west. The tragedy is now known as the Holodomar and regarded by Ukrainians as genocide.
Two years after the articles Jones was killed by Chinese bandits in Inner Mongolia – murdered, according to his family, in a Moscow plot as punishment.

It is estimated that over 6m people died in the Ukraine as a result of Stalin's policy of forced collectivisation

What would you ask the Chinese President?

If you had 10 questions to ask Chinese President Hu Jintao about freedom of expression what would you ask.

Well with Barack Obama about to meet him RSF pose their 10 and here they are

1.Why are the websites of the US companies Twitter and Facebook blocked by the Chinese authorities?

2.Why do the Chinese authorities jam the programmes that are broadcast in Mandarin, Tibetan and Uyghur by the US-funded stations Radio Free Asia and Voice of America?

3.Is he going to pardon the hundreds of imprisoned journalists, intellectuals and bloggers, including Liu Xiaobo, Hu Jia, Shi Tao and Qi Chonghuai, who did nothing but express their opinions peacefully?

4.Why are foreign journalists, including American journalists, unable to visit Tibet without a permit?

5.Why is the Tibetan filmmaker Dhondhup Wangchen being tried on a charge of subversion when all he did was film interviews with Tibetans?

6.Why are international news agencies, including US news agencies, unable to sell their services directly to Chinese news media?

7.Why does the Propaganda Department routinely censor international news reports, including some aspects of the growing dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme?

8.Why do the Chinese security forces prevent journalists from freely doing investigative reporting in the area along the border with North Korea?

9.Why have the communication services (including Internet and telephone services) of the inhabitants of Xinjiang been blocked or kept under close surveillance for nearly four months?

10.Why are investigative journalists, especially those trying to cover business and corruption cases, still being harassed by the police and Propaganda department, a problem that led to the recent joint resignation of many of the editors and reporters employed by the leading magazine Caijing?