Military battles are not the only Taleban victories

There was a very good article in the Times this morning investigating how the Taleban was winning the propoganda war in Afghanistan.

since 2006, the Taleban have been harnessing that same despised technology in an escalating campaign of propaganda against which Nato appears to have no effective answer.

As well as the obvious methods of the internet

the Taleban produce magazines, dozens of DVDs of attacks and hundreds of different Taleban song cassettes — mournful chants promoting Taleban heroes and martyrs. There are even downloadable Taleban mobile phone ringtones. On the ground in southern Afghanistan, Taleban fighters leave “night letters” in villages and wandering preachers propagate the Taleban message.

London in colour in 1927

Claude Friese-Greene shot this film in 1927, with a process developed by his father called Biocolour.



via Comment Central

Just 5% of readers will pay for online content

Yet more research on why consumers don't like paying for news.

New Media age reports that just 5% of consumers would be willing to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription to a newspaper or magazine to access online content.

The research carried out by Continental showed that of

500 regular newspaper and magazine readers in the UK, 35% would pay 2p per article, 22% would pay 5p per article, 13% would pay 10p and 7% would pay 20p.

adding that

A micropayment model was also disliked by the majority (63%) but compared with the small amount that would pay for a subscription, 21% said they would be willing to pay for individual articles and 11% would pay a larger one-off sum to get access to the whole publication.

News International accused of intrigue with the Tories

The Independent's lead story this morning suggests that David Cameron has done a deal with News International.

After this week's attacks on Gordon Brown in the Sun,Peter Mandelson went on the Today programme yesterday to accuse the Tories of such a move.

They suspect that the Conservative Party has been tailoring its policies on media regulation and the BBC to suit the commercial interests of News International, which owns The Sun, and that the paper's aggressive support for the Tories is a pay-off that could spread to other parts of the mass media.

and as if to further the cause

Yesterday, The Times, another Murdoch newspaper, announced that its veteran political editor, Phil Webster, is leaving the Commons, where he has been based for decades. Mr Webster is very well thought of by New Labour. His replacement, Roland Watson, was a friend of David Cameron's at Eton

Media and technology are struggling to adapt in the new economy

New research from Deloitte has found that, while many industries suffer from intense pricing pressures and falling return on assets, the media industry is doing worst of all. In fact, the industry now has a negative return on assets of 4.4 per cent, compared with a positive 7 per cent 40 years ago.

writes John Gapper in the FT this morning and interestingly he adds that

although one might think instinctively that profitability is transferring from media companies to technology companies, the latter are themselves struggling to adapt.

Indeed it appears that increasing competition in the sector is leading to falling returns for assets in these businesses.

Centotaph wars break out between the Sun and the Mirror

It seems this morning that the Mirror has decided to retaliate against the Sun over its attacks on Gordon Brown's performances around war memorials.

Its front page this morning attacks the Tory leader over his photo shoot at the Garden of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey.

The paper reports how

The Tory leader slipped in by a side gate at 10.15am, 30 minutes before dignitaries including the Queen arrived for a First World War commemoration service.

adding that

Mr Cameron had clearly been instructed on how to behave and moved briskly from pose to pose, often bending down to read the names on crosses as he was snapped.

It follows the Sun's attacks on the Prime Minister's behavior at the Cenotaph when it accused the Prime Minister of forgetting how to bow.

Get ready for the next installment

Why ecosystems and not conglomerates are the future

The future of news lies in ecosystems according to Jeff Jarvis.

In his latest blog post,he argues that in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit,they find efficiency and growth,by working collaboratively.

This will be achieved through

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

Bazalgette calls for more investment in Tv

Britain's investment in original television content is plummeting writes Peter Bazalgette in the FT today.

Does this matter?

New figures from analysts Oliver & Ohlbaum show the total spend on content (at 2008 prices) has fallen from £3.4bn in 2004 to £2.8bn this year. The decline this year alone has been 10 per cent. The trend is that this will hit £2.5bn by 2012

and the answer is yes

Britain used to spend more per capita on television content than any country in the world. News and current affairs are an essential part of our democracy. Drama and documentaries contribute to the nation's cultural conversation. And the programmes' producers are a cornerstone of the creative economy. As exporters of intellectual property, they have captured more than half of the world's sales of formats.

Video the way for online ads to go?

Online ads are booming but only if they are attached to video.

According to this report in the New York Times,

CNN.com and ESPN.com are featuring video much more prominently on their home pages, often prompting visitors to press play before they begin to read. Even The Wall Street Journal has moved its video player front and center with a twice-a-day live newscast on WSJ.com.

The reason quite simply is that video is benefiting from the higher cost-per-thousands, or C.P.M.’s, that ads on those videos command.

The attention to video mirrors changes in how consumers are experiencing news. Major events — be it the presidential election or the death of Michael Jackson — bring a surge in video stream viewings by new users, and each time some of them stick around.

Indys bond holders come to a deal

At least some of the uncertainty surrounding the Independent may have gone away as the paper reports that last night

Independent News & Media, the publisher of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, last night struck a deal with bondholders that will see creditors swap €123m (£110m) worth of debt for a 46 per cent equity stake in the company.

It is the first stage of a restructuring plan which says the paper

comes after months of negotiations and several so-called standstill agreements, which deferred debt repayments.

The plan should be completed by the end of the year

Questions surrounding the Fort Hood shootings

There seems to be many lessons coming out of the reporting of the Fort Hood shootings last week and one may well be how do you balance confirmation of facts with the race to get the story out first.

The pressures to break news on the web can often outweigh the journalistic checks and balances and it is worth reading this feature from Greg Marx over at CJR.

He looks in detail at a report that appeared on Sunday in the Fort Worth Star Telegram in which the article stated that

In 2001, Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center was led by Anwar Al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born scholar now living in Yemen. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, according to new disclosures by a Fort Hood acquaintance, was an admirer of Al-Awlaki who has been described as a radical Islamist.

Unfortunately the article had failed to track down this source and as Marx writes

the Star-Telegram hadn’t actually tracked down a close friend of Hasan’s—rather, it had found a novelist who said he had spoken to this unidentified friend, and had decided that, at least in this case, a bit of journalistic telephone passed muster.

Are you ready to sell news on the web?

How to sell news on the web.

That's what we would all like to know and Insider have come up with a checklist to see if you are ready

1.You cannot charge for such commoditized content as world, national, business, sports and entertainment news.

2. You might be able to charge for local coverage, if it is sufficiently intensive, comprehensive and exclusive to make to make it required reading for residents of the targeted community.

3 In the business-to-business realm, you probably can charge users for exclusive information that helps them make money, avoid losing money or, ideally, both at the same time.

4.You probably can charge consumers for two things: (a) exclusive entertainment content and (b) authoritative information that helps them hang on to more of their money.


Ht-Joanna Geary

The American military wants happy stories

Frontline reports that after six years of blogging,a soldier's perspective has closed its doors

With this message posted up

Blogging is no longer worth the trouble. Everything is fine as long as the stories are happy and positive. The military wants happy stories, not honest stories. Everything must be 100% in concert with the Army spin. If it's not, you're considered an "embarrassment" to the Army, the installation, and/or the NCO Corps. Integrity is no longer an accepted method of leadership. If I can't be honest and open, I won't write at all. I refuse to allow my private blog's message to be dictated with threats and intimidation. It's been a fun six years!

10 ways to kill an online community

Some very good points made here



Ht-Adam Tinworth

The Observer wil be slimmed down

So the Observer is slimming.

Its much heralded announcement came as expected today.The Sunday will consist of four sections and three of the magazines are being axed with only the food monthly surviving.

The four supplements are news, sport, an expanded Review section and the Observer magazine with business and finance moving into the news section and travel moving to the magazine.

According to Guardian media

A core editorial staff will continue to work solely for the Observer. Other Observer journalists will be integrated into the editorial teams that work across the Sunday paper, GNM's other title, the Guardian, and its website network, guardian.co.uk, which includes MediaGuardian.co.uk.
GNM has reopened its voluntary redundancy scheme and the precise number of departures from different editorial departments has not yet been finalised, although the company has said there will be fewer staff at the end of the process.

A tactic too far for the Sun

Every since the Sun announced that it was switching allegiances at the next election,the paper has been running a simmering campaign against Gordon Brown.

Now there is nothing wrong with that,any publisher is entitled to its opinion but the tone of the attacks has changed across the weekend combining the attacks with criticisms of the war in Afghanistan,the memorial services and personal grief.

Yesterday the paper launched into the fact that the Prime Minister had forgotten to bow at the cenotaph.

Today though sees a new low as it publishes the transcript of a phone call that the Prime Minister made to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

I can understand the grief that the mother is going through and no doubt part of that anger manifested itself in the decision to tape the phone call and offer it to the Sun.

The paper though,should have had nothing to do with events after that.By publishing its contents,it has used a mother's grief to broaden its own message to the country.

It is a tactic that will ultimately fail,I am sure.Regardless of what we think about the government's conduct of the war,this is not the way to highlight it.

Enough said

Spot.us funds NYTs story

Yesterday's New York Times carried a story about the every expanding pollution in the Pacific ocean.

It's a great story and you can read it here.

One is really interesting is that it was part funded by Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.

The story was written by Lindsey Hoshaw and Spot.Us, helped Hoshaw raise $10,000 from more than 100 people so she could report the story.

It's a Google day

Yesterday was certainly a google day across the world.

The organisation announced that it had agreed to acquire AdMob, the fast-growing mobile advertising start-up, for $750 million.

Ad Mob,it may not surprise you is one of the leading developers of mobile apps in the US and its acquisition could help establish Google as an early leader in the small but rapidly expanding mobile phone advertising business.

Meanwhile the compnay was on the end of a tirade from Rupert Murdoch who threatened to remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

According to Guardian media,Murdoch said that

newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

However as Charle Arthur points out

The threat to exclude Google from News International websites won't have caused much lost sleep over in the search engine's headquarters in Mountain View in California.

adding that his threat

is akin to a runner at a sports event threatening to shoot himself in the foot: the ticket-seller, noting that all the other entrants aren't making the same threat, isn't going to be worried.

Economist set to launch mobile app

More news of the media concentrating more on the mobile platform.

Paid Content reports that

Economist.com is about to launch a paid-for iPhone app to accompany its global business-school league-table data and its annual spin-off print magazine Which MBA?.

and adds that

MBA data is free but a search feature that creates personalised rankings is for subscribers only—the iPhone app, developed by Zone Content, also has the search feature but will be available to non-subscribers for a one-off fee. It’s the Economist’s first mobile app and a clear sign of the company’s approach to monetising online data.

An American example of non profit news

Over at the Editors Weblog,Jennifer Lush looks at an example of non profit news.

The Texas Tribune launched early last week as a non-profit venture in an attempt to fill a gap in quality local journalism in Texas.

It aims to achieve something along the lines of ProPublica but on a smaller and more political scale.

Its editor,Evan Smith,says that it will survive because it has a good business plan,is staying online only to keep costs down and asked whether non profit is the way to go says

Yes and no. It is unlikely to become a general solution for newspapers simply because of the huge sums of money involved, but for niche reporting and more time/fund consuming journalism such as investigative reporting, it could definitely be a viable option.

Traditional marketing is now irrelevent

I think that Steve Farnsworth has got it spot on in this post

Communications is in a time of tremendous change. Traditional marketing communications models that allowed a company to have a significant level of control over the message and conversation (one-to-many communications) have become irrelevant.

agreed and he adds

We are now in a time where the consumers are empowered, and 95% of the conversation about your product is taking place outside of your Web page (many-to-many communications). The old tools and strategies have to be re-imagined, and new ones invented. This is a whole new game for today’s communications professional.

Video on demand and advertising on demand for Sky

It appears that Sky are rolling out targeted advertising on its online video platform, Sky Player.

According to New Media age,

Sky AdSmart will target subscribers with pre- and mid-roll ads around on-demand content based on their postcode, TV package and information from third parties

,adding that

In an email to subscribers sent today, Sky read, “In future, the advertising you see on Sky Player may be better tailored to your interests. The new system, which is called Sky AdSmart, uses customer information to replace some general adverts with ones which we believe to be more relevant to viewers’ potential preferences and interests.”

That JFK moment

The Fry affair was Twitter's first JFK moment,well at least according to Matthew Norman in the Independent this morning

Or what we were doing when news of his subsequent un-resignation gave those of us too young to remember the flavour of the joyous relief when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper? Pray God Stephen's return doesn't prove another false dawn, but regardless of that fear the episode constitutes Twitter's first JFK moment.

writes Norman

PCC under fire over NOTW phone tapping

The PCC's ruling over the News of the World phone tapping scandal has according to the Guardian this morning been attacked by MP's

Its report was described as a "whitewash" and there was a promise that another inquiry, from the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, would be more rigorous.
In a report published, the PCC also said it was not "materially misled" by executives at Rupert Murdoch's tabloid and that it did not believe senior managers at the paper knew reporters had illegally intercepted phone message left on mobile phones.

The new ruling centred around the Guardian's revelation that the paper had paid out £1m in confidential damages and legal fees to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and two others, over hacking claims.

However

While acknowledging the Guardian had "produced one new significant fact" in its revelations of the Gordon Taylor settlement, and had performed a "perfectly legitimate function" in further scrutinising activity at the Sunday paper, it added that in presenting its story, the Guardian had obligations requiring it to "take care not to publish distorted or misleading information".

Daily Mail gets the Downfall treatment

From where I’m sitting their business model and plans are all over the shop

There is a very interesting comment on Paid Content about the decision of New Media Age to go behind a paywall,

It comes from Ashley Friedlein,CEO,Econsultancy

Well… good luck to them. Brandrepublic (Haymarket’s mad.co.uk equivalent) will go the same way soon.
But I don’t rate their chances if they think news, however “big-hitting”, will sell. I can’t complain because it will only benefit the likes of us (niche) on the one hand and bigger free media players (in particular the BBC) on the other.
If you take a look at the traffic stats for our site (http://econsultancy.com) versus nma.co.uk verusus brandrepublic.com (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/econsultancy.com+nma.co.uk+brandrepublic.com/ for rough idea) then the outlook looks even more bleak. This is the state *before* they put up the paywall…?!
Meanwhile, Centaur are launching separate sites like http://reputationonline.co.uk/ - a hot area maybe but just further dilutes the brand and SEO equity overall.
The last edition of NMA I had contained 3 ads excluding their own and excluding recruitment ads.
I really rate NMA’s content but from where I’m sitting their business model and plans are all over the shop…?

Ht-Adam Tinworth

D Day for the Observer

According to this from the Sunday Times

Staff at The Observer will learn their fate on Tuesday, when executives are expected to brief them on the future of the newspaper. The Scott Trust, the charity that owns The Observer’s publisher, Guardian Media Group, has decided to keep the title but in a drastically slimmed down form. Staff are expected to find out which sections of the paper will be dropped and how many dedicated editorial staff will be retained. Some of its monthly magazines are facing the chop.

We await further news

Internet access-a human right?

Is there a fundemental right to being online?

The Times asked a number of people that question and here are some of the replies

Being cut off from your broadband isn’t the same as being whisked to Guantánamo; I see it more as a consumer right and a citizen’s right. Nobody says you have to shop online at Tesco, but it is convenient.

says David Rowan,Editor, Wired magazine

easy access to technology and information is a growing human right

.says Sam Barratt who is Head of Media for Oxfam .

and this from Padraig Reidy,Index on Censorship

As the internet becomes a prime conduit for information, it would seem that yes, access is a right. Increasingly it is merely another public space in which we interact and learn; a public space in which we are still learning how to conduct ourselves. The idea of barring people from that public space is detrimental to liberty and equality.

Clay Shirky on the social media revolution

Thanks to Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on the Online Journalism Blog

Want to be a happiness Ambassador?

Well it had to happen.

Coca Cola has taken to the social media bandwagon like a duck to water.

Mashable reports that

they are on a mission to find happiness in the 206 different countries that sell Coca-Cola products across the world.
With the Expedition 206 campaign, Coca-Cola is tapping regular people to be their “Happiness Ambassadors” and travel the world for the whole of 2010 and document their quest via blog posts, tweets, YouTube (YouTube) videos, TwitPics, and other social media mentions.

How the right has responded to Fort Hood

Maybe not surprisingly the right wing media in America have come out all guns blazing following the Fort Hood shootings.

Media matters reports that

Right-wing media figures have used the shooting at Fort Hood as an excuse to attack Islam and American Muslims in particular, with Debbie Schlussel, for example, urging readers to think of the alleged shooter "whenever you hear about how Muslims serve their country in the U.S. military." Additionally, commentators have blamed the shooting on "political correctness," with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggesting the implementation of "special debriefings" for Muslim American soldiers to prevent future attacks.

via Huffington Post

Tips for that exclusive online community

There is a great analysis of the FT's Long Room by Roland Legrand, over at Media Shift.

Entitled the Velvet Rope Approach to an Online Community,perhaps it makes sense to cut down on quantity, and create an exclusive members-only structure.

That is what the Long room has done and New York-based Alphaville editor Paul Murphy explains some of the thinking behind it:

It is "an exclusive comment and analysis arena, where finance professionals are invited to share their research and offer thoughts on the work of others." It is free to join, if you can get through the vetting process to be accepted.

"We are a blog and we acknowledge that people are promiscuous,So we tell them what to read elsewhere if they have half an hour of spare time, and we tell them what they should read in the FT. Being financial professionals, it's a navigational service. We allow them to sample."

and as to why it works?

"It's a very light structure, especially compared to a newspaper, which typically requires a massive industrial process,The Long Room also enables the Financial Times to gather important insight about its readers. This information helps the paper sell itself -

Iain Dale complaint about the Daily Mail is not upheld by the PCC

The news that Iain Dale's complaint against the Daily Mail under clause 12 of the PCC guidelines was not upheld came as a surprise to some

In summary

The piece reported that the complainant was on the shortlist of people applying to be the Conservative candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Bracknell. It described him as ‘overtly gay', and referred to an interview he had given to Pink News in which he encouraged its readers to attend the open primary, saying it was ‘charming how homosexuals rally like-minded chaps to their cause'.
The complainant said that the article was pejorative and snide, and that his sexual orientation was irrelevant to his decision to stand as a parliamentary candidate. The implication of the word ‘overtly' was that he flaunted his sexuality, which was not the case. Read in conjunction with the comment about homosexuals sticking together, the article was homophobic.

According to the PCC

the fact that he had taken offence did not in itself mean that Clause 12 of the Code had been breached. The particular terms used, and the context of the item itself, were important here

According to Roy Greenslade,the

adjudication that illustrates the fine line that must be drawn between a newspaper's freedom to be offensive and whether that offensiveness constitutes discrimination.

He concludes that

We have to allow freedom of expression. We have to avoid censorship. And we did not set up the PCC, nor construct a code of practice, in order to deal with subjective matters of taste and discretion.

Agree?

Things to ask befor you go for a journalism start up

Such a great post from Adam Westbrook who give seventeen question you should be asking yourself if you are thinking of starting up a journalism project.

News start-up checklist

1.Is it a new idea?
2.Does it have a defined target audience?
3.Does it provide niche (i.e. hyperlocal) content?
4.Does it satisfy a desire that is not being fulfilled by someone else?
5.Or does it do something better (faster, cheaper, more effectively) than someone else?
6.Does it actually have income potential, or will it rely on funding?
7.Does it use the power of crowd-sourcing/community?
8.Would it be fulfilling for journalists to work for?
9.Does it publish/exist on more than one platform?
10.If it has content, is it sharable?
11.Does it require a lot of money to run?
12.Does it have boot-strapping potential?
13.Does it scale?
14.Does it fulfill a public service?
15.Is it a legally sound idea? What about copyright?
16.Would it appeal to venture capitalists, angel investors?
17.And…does it have a cool name?

Is digital increasing our networks and decreasing isolation

The latest report from Pew sheds some new light on the problems of social isolation and the digital age.

The original report in 2006 showed that Americans were

more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased.

and that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend.

Wind forward three years and the situation is rather different

Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Check out the Berlin Project

Pushing the boundaries of new media and broadcast journalism.

That's the claim of the Berlin Project

By covering a modern day Germany 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, this five–member team – whose work has been published and broadcast on various high profile media outlets including the BBC, CNN, Sky News, Reuters, CBC and CanWest Media Works – will use multiple platforms to represent a new generation of interactive journalism.

The project is backed by Reuters and is a follow up to G20 London Live.

The secret of a newspaper's success

One newspaper that is doing well is Portugal's newest daily newspaper, i, and the Editorsweblog tries to find out the reasons for its success.

According to its editor-in-chief Martim Avillez Figueiredo the paper innovates by

1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion.

2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page.

3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. "We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams," Figueiredo said.

4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people's private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited. More encompasses the fifth need that the paper wanted to address: sports, about 80% of which is focused on football - "

This gives me some confidence in the current shake up of the media business model

Kevin Kelly quotes from Stuart Brand

the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

Most important is a drive for journalism

I am in total agreement with Adam Westbrook who writes about what he thinks are the priorities for journalism students.

He joined a panel at Kingston University and his starred priorities are

1.Entrepreneurial skills

2.Social-network skills

3.New technical skills

4.Old journo skills but perhaps most importantly

5.The drive

As Adam says

You can’t teach this to kids, but you can try to instill some enthusiasm. It is no longer good enough (in any walk of life, save I dunno, chemistry, engineering etc) to walk into a degree and hope to walk into a job. That attitude will earn you a McDonald’s badge and not much else. Students themselves must crave success, and as Hannah Waldram puts it: “get-up-and-go to take them through the difficulties and pressures of doing something on their own…”

Still concerns about the press in Zimbabwe

Reporters without frontiers has voiced concern once again about the situtaion in Zimbabwe.

It has written to Tomás Salomão, the executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community, on the eve of a SADC meeting in Maputo on the situation in Zimbabwe.

Voicing concern about the impact of the Zimbabwean government’s internal crisis on the ability of journalists to work freely and the reemergence of an independent press, Reporters Without Borders urges the SADC and the leaders of Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia to spare no effort to help the government emerge from the current deadlock.

The social hub

A god example of how companies are putting social media at the heart of their strategy.

This from New Media age which reports that LG IS using social media as the backbone of its brand strategy to promote its online sponsorships of LG Arena and F1.

The consumer giant currently uses social media for product launches only, but wants to extend this to include its sponsorship of events and extend its Life’s Good brand message beyond products such as TVs and mobiles, creating a social media hub.

adding that

It’s kicking off its new marketing strategy by relaunching the LG blog in the first quarter of 2010. It plans to use its sponsorships to provide sports and entertainment content on the blog, such as exclusive footage, backstage reports and gossip. LG hopes this kind of extra content will encourage consumers to share it.

Internet rights v Pirate ones

Plans to make internet access a “fundamental right” are to be dropped, a move that paves the way for European law enforcement agencies to cut off web users who have been caught downloading pirated films and music.reports the FT this morning

The European parliament has agreed to drop an amendment that was aimed at countering so-called “three strikes” laws, legislation that allows law enforcement agencies to shut down internet connections that have been allegedly used for illegal file-sharing .

A glitch for Murdoch's paywalls

The path to paywalls does not run smoothly with even the Murdoch empire being beset by problems

According to the Guardian this morning,the media baron

is finding it harder than expected to introduce charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites and may miss a target of next June for the introduction of so-called "pay walls".

He declined to comment on the reasons for any delay except to say that he was talking to rival publishers including the Telegraph group in Britain. "It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on," Murdoch said.

Loving the right wing press' front pages this morning

According to the Express

BRITAIN was last night frogmarched into a miserable new era of meddling Brussels rule after the final remaining resistance to the hated Lisbon Treaty collapsed.

Whilst the Sun says that

THE last hope of blocking a new European constitution was snuffed out last night - the final kick in the teeth after Labour's betrayal of Britain

Read more:

The future of reading

Ever wanted to know why people want to read?

Tom Peters tries to answer that question in this post as he looks at the future of reading as we stand on the cusp of the ebook revolution

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading.

ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

China to launch its own CNN

The Chinese competitor to CNN is to launcj at the end of this week.

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency has been putting together its own 24-hour satellite news channel for the past year and will begin broadcasting reports from a Chinese perspective next month to viewers around the world in conjunction with CCTV's existing English-language channel.

reports the Chosum Ilbo

Broadcasting from the Chinese capital an official said

"Just as Al Jazeera has an Arab point of view, CITV intends to report global news from a Chinese, rather than a Western, perspective,"

Ht-Adrian Monck

BBC brings the democratic process to your PC

The BBC has launched its latest initiative in returning democracy to the people.

Called Democracy Live the BBC says that

it will offer live and on demand video coverage of the UK's national political institutions and the European Parliament. Alongside the video, we have guides to how the different institutions work and who sits in them. Our search engine is a BBC "first" - it uses speech-to-text to take you straight to your points of interest in the video.

The site will cover the main chambers of the House of Commons, House of Lords, Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly, Welsh Assembly and full sittings of the European Parliamentas well as Westminster Hall and Select Committees at Westminster.

The site will enable the user to embed video into their blog or website although discussions over copyright are still taking place with officials in Westminster.

Barrymore is once again outed by the tabloids.

Both the Sun and the Mail have tracked down the former Strike It Lucky stat who fell from Prime Television after the death of Stuart Lubbock who was found in the swimming pool at the star's home in Roydon, Essex.

The Sun calls him Michael Barrowmore as it finds him

is reduced to mucking out a pal's garage.
Barrymore, once host of ITV's prime-time show Strike It Lucky, now spends his weekends polishing cars, clearing junk and sweeping the forecourt.

The Mail reports that

The 57-year-old toils throughout the day as he piles barrowloads of rubbish into a skip with a shovel, washes cars and throws away cardboard boxes at Shiltons Bodyworks in Epping, Essex.
Barrymore, who has battled drink and drugs, has spent the past nine months working hard to stay clean and sober.

Cobain wins the Foot award

Congratulation to Iain Cobain who last night won the Paul Foot award for investigative journalism.

The Guardian journalist won the award for his investigation into Britain's involvement in the torture of terror suspects detained overseas.

Ht-Laura Oliver

A definition of journalism

(A) means a person who—
(i) with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports or publishes on such matters by—
(I) conducting interviews;
(II) making direct observation of events; or
(III) collecting, reviewing, or analyzing original writings, statements, communications, reports, memoranda, records, transcripts, documents, photographs, recordings, tapes, materials, data, or other information whether in paper, electronic, or other form;
(ii) has such intent at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought; and
(iii) obtains the news or information sought in order to disseminate it by means of print (including, but not limited to, newspapers, books, wire services, news agencies, or magazines), broadcasting (including, but not limited to, dissemination through networks, cable, satellite carriers, broadcast stations, or a channel or programming service for any such media), mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means.

This latest attempt comes from the American Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ht-Nieman Lab

A novel use for You Tube

HM customs and excise plan to use the video sharing site to fight illegal overseas bank deposits.

According to New Age media,it will produce a video

to urge savers to declare their offshore accounts or face prosecution.In a two-minute video titled New Disclosure Opportunity which launches todaym Dave Hartnett, the government body’s Permanent Secretary for Tax, calls for full disclosure of offshore accounts and an end to “fiddling your tax”.

Now ITV's Friends sale could be scuppered

ITV's plans to sell Friends Reunited has hit more problems.

The company was planning to sell to Brightsolid, a division of DC Thomson & Co, for around £25m.It planned to combine Friends reunited's family history site, Genes Reunited, with its own genealogy properties, 1911census.co.uk and FindMyPast.com.

Unfortunately the regulator has stepped in and the FT reports that

after investigating the UK genealogy market, the Office of Fair Trading decided that the “current competition in this market or the potential for future entry is sufficiently strong to prevent the merged firm from reducing the quality or range of its services, or possibly raising prices”.

ITV bought Friends Reunited for £170m back in its heyday of 2005.

Fry blogger critic revealed

So it appears that the blogger who nearly sent Stephen Fry into twitter oblivion runs a an adult site in Birmingham.

The Birmingham Mail has tracked him down and reports that

The 47-year-old translator from Handsworth, who uses the false name Richard Plum, has become the subject of a hate campaign since making the comments against the television presenter

Rather than levying taxes for the sake of old media give tax breaks to new media says Jeff Jarvis

Journalism is not in crisis – its fate lies in the hands of new and old media entrepreneurs, not institution

That's according to Jeff Jarvis writing in Media Guardian this morning responds to Columbia Journalism's president, Lee Bollinger, who declared

"a crisis of massive proportion" for news and argued that the market will not support quality journalism. "The economic foundation of the nation's newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing

and

sought government funding as being the answer.

According to Jarvis though,when government involves itself with media, trouble often follows.Instead the solution should be the entrepreneur

Rather than levying taxes for the sake of old media, we may want to give tax breaks to invention in new media and technology (by companies old and new). Rather than safeguarding the owners of presses, we should bring the entire nation online via broadband to create a new market and, with it, new development.

How innovation in thinking can increase your circulation

A great story on how newspaper's innovation can lead to increases in circulation comes from Lithuania whose.

free Lithuanian paper 15min went from a daily to a three-days-a-week schedule. The decline in the local advertising market (45-50%) caused publisher Schibsted to take drastic measures. The paper now distributes 93,000 copies on the days it is published.

adding that

The paper is also more active online. The 15min website attracts now 60,000 daily, 205,000 weekly and 600,000 monthly unique users. The citizen journalism site IKRAUK is doing well, getting around 10,000 daily visitors and many news feeds from the users as well. 15min also launched a Facebook page, getting 7500 fans in the last three months.

But the biggest innovation?

the underwater laminated 15min paper, which is being used in Vichy aquapark in Vilnius, people can read news while laying in Jacuzzi.

Emap puts up the paywalls

Staying with the paywall issue,Paid Content is reporting that B2B magazine publisher Emap will convert all its websites from free to pay-for, starting in the next few weeks.

CEO David Gilbertson told us in an interview that all websites in the Inform division (19 business magazines including Construction News, Retail Week and Drapers) will stop giving away free news and instead start bundling web access in with subscription packages. There’s no exact timeframe, though the process has been one year in the making

reports Patrick Smith.adding that

“We’re shifting the balance of the marketing message from, ‘this is a magazine and it has a website’ to ‘this is an information brand that delivers content across a range of media”, says Gilbertson, adding that alerting services, emails, data services and mobile apps will also come with the paid strategy

.

The first magazine to go behind the wall will be retail week in two weeks time

NYT set for decision on paywalls

Will they or won't they?

Yes it seems that the New York Times is seriously considering the paywall issue.

In his column the public editor,the paper's Clark Hoyt writes that

Though The Times retains the largest newsroom of any American paper — 1,250 reporters, photographers, editors, columnists, graphic artists, Web producers, videographers and more — it is about to cut 100 people through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, layoffs that would happen in the weeks before Christmas. Editors say they are determined to minimize the impact on readers, but some of those readers are worried

and tells that Scott Heekin-Canedy, the newspaper’s president and general manager, said in June that a decision about charging online readers would be made by late summer. But he said last week that executives were still studying the issue.

Its editor Bill Kelner said that

“It’s a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go.” At stake are millions of dollars from online advertisers who want the largest possible number of readers. Putting up any kind of pay wall has the potential to drive away readers and some of those dollars.

So we wait with baited breath

Unlocking China

Polis' Charlie Beckett is currently out in Shanghai and writes an interesting post on whether the new media business is changing the politics of China?

The media industry here appears to be booming but scratch under the surface and you realise that even the political authorities fear that there are too many obstacles to innovation. This is both a source of concern and hope

.he writes and continues

the journalism school students and staff talk about how they are being paid for by the state to create journalists who will go out to serve the state. They describe it as accepting 10% censorship in return for doing the rest of their jobs.

Can this work with new media? Well, the answer I am getting is that it doesn’t and that the state itself recognises that.

From social relations to consumer power

There is a great piece on the future of the social web by Brian Solis Ht-Neville Hobson.

It is his response to the Forrester report which I have talked about before on this site which came out eralier this year.

That report told of five stages in the devoplment of social media

1. The era of social relations – Starting with AOL and others in the mid-1990s, this era witnessed the connection of people through simple profiles and friending features that served as the foundation for online conversations through connections.

2. The era of social functionality – Evolving from friending to platforms that supported social interaction through applications and infrastructure, facilitating communities through relationships locked within the confines of a particular network.


3. The era of social colonization – Deemed as the next stage of social evolution, which will emerge as soon as this year, tools such as OpenID and Facebook connect will enable individuals to freely journey from network to network.


4. The era of social context – Starting in 2010, social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior.


5. The era of social commerce – In 2011 – 2012, social networks will eclipse corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Communities will become a driving force for innovation and as such, companies will be forced to formally cater to communities, signifying the trading of power towards connected customers.

According to Solis

While Forrester predicts the era of Social Commerce, the future of the social Web as I see it, starts to embrace a corporate philosophy and supporting infrastructure that migrates away from CRM and even sCRM to one of Social Relationship Management or SRM.

VRM is the opposite of CRM, capsizing the concept of talking at or marketing to customers and shifting the balance of power in relationships from vendors to consumers. As such, systems are created to empower consumer participation and sentiment and improve products and services with every engagement.

Why the East German's didn't need twitter

We might think that twitter and modern technology is the tool of spreading revolution but as the Globe and Mail reports

In 1989, there was no text messaging or Twitter. But that didn't stop resistance members from quickly spreading the word

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, and the communist government in neighbouring Czechoslovakia joined its neighbours in giving up power six weeks later, the activists involved are struck by the fact they were able to communicate with a speed and efficiency that would be difficult today - even though they lacked the cellphones, e-mail networks, Twitter accounts and websites used nowadays by anti-government movements in places such as Iran.

Media freedoms being curtailed in Pakistan

Bob Dietz Asia Program Coordinator for CPJ reports on some worrying incursions into media freedoms in Pakistan who got an email message from Mazhar Abbas in Islamabad this morning.

He is worried about proposed legislation that passed Thursday through the National Assembly's Standing Committee on Information—which is headed by the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party. The committee has recommended that a new law be passed that would set restrictions on media, including a ban on live coverage of events the government doesn't want to see on the air. Mazhar says the legislation would allow for sentences of up to three years in jail and 10 million rupee fines (about US$120,000). He worries that “it is almost the revival” of an ordinance amended by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulations Authority that was imposed by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf on November 3, 2007. That's the day Musharraf declared a state of emergency amid mounting political criticism that eventually drove him from office.

Pakistan is of course at the forefront of the fight against the Taliban.its armies are currently on the offensive in the border territories with Afghanistan and the Taliban have responded by carrying out suicide attacks on its cities including a devastating one in Peshawar earlier this week

What is it like to be a modern journalist

What price does the modern journalist pay for living in this 24 hour digital age?

This journalist reveals the pace of modern life in a 24 hour period

I had a speedy day myself yesterday. It's one which might be worth recording if only to offer a cautionary tale to media studies students or the bright young things on City university's fashionable postgraduate journalism course: our trade is changing fast, the future is uncertain.

It started on the day of the Christopher Kelly leaks

the only new detail was the "60-minute train test": no second home allowance for anyone who can get home in an hour.
Both Sky and Radio 4 had rung before midnight. Would I come in next morning to comment?

before he arrived at his newsdesk

Some of my colleagues have been in for hours. No late, leisurely starts any more; in the age of the internet newspapers are close to being a 24/7 operation now: think speed, relentless speed.

Then

I normally watch from the press gallery in the Commons, as I have done for years. You can read the collective mood better, as you can't from the TV. But TV is how most people see it, so that's good too. Nowadays, I don't actually watch as much as I did because I have to cover the event on Twitter. Mostly I listen.

And on it goes-What price indeed

Keep emailing your boss

Certain e-mail connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production.

That's the conclusion of a joint survey by IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Business Week reports that

Workers who have strong communication ties with their managers tend to bring in more money than those who steer clear of the boss, according to this new analysis of social networks in the workplace

So the message is -Keep messaging the boss

Ht-Robin Hamman

How to fix the model-Digital Editor's Network

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results," according to that well known quote from Albert Enstein.

Maybe that is where we are with the current discussions on how to repair the broken media business model.

That was the conclusion drawn from yesterday's events in Preston at the Digital Editor's Network and the Journalism leaders Forum that followed it

At the former,Francois Nel summarised his research into how the media are adapting to the digital business model and his conclusion was not very well.

His main concern was that that there has been little innovation on the business side as opposed to the content side.Whilst there had been a rush to increase the range and medium on the digital side,video,interactivity,podcasts etc,the perennial problems of how to make them pay had not been addressed.

The old model of selling advertising around content to a mass audience has long since been banished yet the business side has yet to comprehend this shift.advertising and we still believe that this is how it must operate.

As Francois concluded,

Making more content and assuming that more inventory meant more sales was simply not the case.

Whether the future is hyperlocal is yet to be concluded.We are after all at the early stages of this experiment.The Guardian's Sarah Hartley,the person behind the launch of the papers beat blogging exercise told the audience of a rise of the hyperlocal

New tools are giving more opportunity to the population to publish and this combined with the problems in the local press are creating opportunities for the passionate to explore what is going on in their neck of the woods.

The future she sees will no longer see control by a single newspaper but instead by an eco system made up of many players with varying motives.

It is inevitable that the big players will attempt to jump on the hyper local trend and Tom Johnson head of training at the Press Association unveiled a model for Public Service reporting that the organisation is looking to trial next year.

They are looking to set up three pilot schemes to report and make accountable public sector organisations,such as councils,education and health authorities.

Research has shown that over a 10 year period,for mainly resource reasons editors of local newspapers feel that they no longer scrutinise the goings on of local politics.

The gap has been filled by the local council propaganda sheet which whilst produces a lot of information will never be able to act as the fourth estate.

A two week trial has already been carried out in an area in Essex which concluded that a range of stories were simply not being covered whilst others covered should have been higher up the news pyramid.

Johnson estimates that to implement this model nationwide would mean employing between 500-800 people with a cost of £15-18m.As he pointed out that is three Jonathan Rosses.

However in the current economic climate it is difficult to see how funding will be obtained.

One way of obtaining funding is for established successful businesses to step in and one successful business is Microsoft.Alastair Bruce from the organisation told the assembled audience how Microsoft Local is trying to fill the gap.

Their model of aggregating content and information to establish what was important to the local community was interesting but will be criticized as technology driving journalism rather than the other way round.

It was interesting that property prices and schools were the topics were the topics they felt were of most interest to the population.

It was an interesting day with lots of ideas but whether we have solved the broken business model problem,that,I very much doubt