Good News

Continuing to follow another news media controversy that of news aggregators and local news companies competing here is the latest through Tech Review from MIT: Google News: Friend or Foe for Local News Services? Research suggests news aggregators like Google drive more traffic to local sites—but not their home pages. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011BY ERICA NAONE Audio » Google has long been a favorite scapegoat of the troubled news industry. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch famously accused the search titan of stealing from media outlets by drawing users to its aggregation service, Google News, and away from those sites' home pages. New sites often dismiss Google's claims that it helps them by driving traffic to their articles. Now, early results from Microsoft Research New England suggest that news aggregators like Google News increase visits to local news sites—providing they highlight local news stories. The issue is particularly important at a time when many newspapers are trying to end the practice of giving away news for free. Like it or not, aggregators play a significant role. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Google News is responsible for as much as 30 percent of the traffic that goes to the top 25 news sites. As such, it's a force that can't be ignored, and the Microsoft researchers wanted to assess how aggregators actually affect local news sites. Local news outlets have struggled, particularly online, an environment that's increasingly oriented toward a global audience. For every local news experiment, such as Steven Berlin Johnson's blog service Outside.in or AOL's Patch network, there seems to be another closed newspaper, such as the Honolulu Advertiser, or signs of trouble such as those that inspired the Christian Science Monitor to move to a mostly online format. Those local news experiments online haven't done very well to date. Johnson sold Outside.in to AOL for less than $10 million. Local news sites covered by Technology Review in the past, including YourStreet and Platial, have folded or suffered long-term financial difficulties. While many have theorized that the Internet ought to help local sites by making it easier to get their voices heard, in practice, sites have struggled to find a place—and business model—for themselves. But the Microsoft results suggest there is a hunger for local news online, according to senior researcher Markus Mobius, who was involved with the project. The researchers studied data going back to 2009, when Google gave French users the ability to enter geographic information to refine the results of searches done on Google News. The Microsoft researchers got their data from Microsoft's Bing toolbar, which asks users for permission to track data about online activity. The researchers used this information to study two groups—those who added location information and those who didn't. Besides this difference, the subjects lived in the same regions and had similar news habits before the change. For the group that added local results, the researchers found a huge initial spike in local news consumption, both in terms of page views and in time spent on local sites. Perhaps more interesting, once the spike stabilized, there was a lasting effect, Mobius notes. Eight weeks after the change, the researchers found there was a 16 percent increase in the number of unique local outlets that users visited. Their overall news consumption also went up, so the new interest in local news came as an addition to previous habits. 12 (AS YOU ALL SHOULD HAVE NOTED THIS BLOG IS MOSTLY A NEWS AGGREGATOR)

Set Up Journalism

Written stories, still photos and video all can be and are set up, often before hand, to fit a pre conceived idea of a news story:Behind the Scenes: How Conflict Photographs Come To Be | from the have-you-tried-throwing-left-handed? dept. | posted by timothy on Tuesday October 11, @11:43 (The Media) | with 141 comments | https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First time accepted submitter benro03 writes "Airing photojournalism's dirty secret, Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how [0]conflict photography is often staged by the photographers themselves. He spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem studying the role that photojournalists play in what the world sees. Ruben is about to graduate with dual majors for a BA in International Relations and Anthropology/Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel." Some commenters on the linked story defend much of what's shown as ordinary aesthetic and editorial decisions; doubtless a parallel documentary could have been shot from a few hundred yards away with an opposite slant. Discuss this story at: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://www.petapixel.com/2011/10/04/an-eye-opening-look-at-how-many-conflict-photos-are-staged/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+PetaPixel+(PetaPixel)