And here's looking into someones crystal ball:http://www.niemanlab.org/category/themes/predictions-2011/
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
To close out 2010, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2011 will bring for the future of journalism.
Dec. 13: What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
Dec. 13: The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
Dec. 13: Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
Dec. 14: Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 14: Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
Dec. 15: In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
Dec. 15: Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
Dec. 15: Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
Dec. 16: Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
Dec. 16: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
By Clay Shirky / Dec. 13 / 10 a.m. / 19 comments
Editor’s Note: To mark the end of the year, we at the Lab decided to ask some of the smartest people we know what they thought 2011 would bring for journalism. We’re very pleased that so many of them agreed to share their predictions with us.
Over the next few days, you’ll hear from Steve Brill, Vivian Schiller, Michael Schudson, Markos Moulitsas, Kevin Kelly, Geneva Overholser, Adrian Holovaty, Jakob Nielsen, Evan Smith, Megan McCarthy, David Fanning, Matt Thompson, Bob Garfield, Matt Haughey, and more.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
To start off our package of predictions, here’s Clay Shirky. Happy holidays.
The old news business model has had a series of shocks in the 15 or so years we’ve had a broadly adopted public web. The first was the loss of geographic limits to competition (every outlet could reach any reader, listener or viewer). Next was the loss of progressive layers of advertising revenue (the rise of Monster and craigslist et alia, as well as the “analog dollars to digital dimes” problem). Then there is the inability to charge readers easily without eviscerating the advertising rate-base (the failure of micropayments and paywalls as general-purpose solutions).
Next up for widespread disruption, I think, is syndication, a key part of the economic structure of the news business since the founding of Havas in the early 19th century. As with so many parts of a news system based on industrial economics, that model is now under pressure.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Jonathan Stray, linking, Nicholas Carr, syndication
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 13 / noon / 16 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Many of their predictions centered on what may be the most anticipated business-model shift of 2011: The New York Times’ shift to charging for full access to NYTimes.com next month. We found voices on both sides of the “will it work” debate. Here are Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, C.W. Anderson, Paddy Hirsch, Jason Fry, Nikki Usher, and Barry Sussman on how they see the metered model shaking out.
Megan McCarthy, editor, Mediagazer
Prediction for 2011: The building up — and subsequent tearing down — of online paywalls for general news sites. The New York Times are planning to implement their paywall in January and I predict it will be modified enough — either by the Times themselves or outside developers — to be rendered irrelevant by March.
C.W. Anderson, assistant professor of media culture, CUNY
Faced with a massive migration of regular readers to the Guardian and the BBC, The New York Times will abandon its recently enacted paywall.
Keep reading »
Tags: Barry Sussman, C. W. Anderson, charging, Jason Fry, Journalism Online, Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, New York Times, Paddy Hirsch, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
By Steven Brill / Dec. 13 / 3 p.m. / 4 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Here, Journalism Online cofounder and long-time journalism entrepreneur Steven Brill lays out three predictions for 2011.
1. E-books will continue to soar — and authors will get into major fights with publishers over who gets what percentage of the take, with more top authors withholding their e-book rights and selling them independently or through specialty distributors.
2. Someone — via Press+, I hope — will go into the business of commissioning long-form magazine articles from top writers and providing the first two or three paragraphs online for free and then selling the rest for, say, 75 cents or a dollar. That trailblazing publisher might call these “mini-e-books” and use a business model of simply splitting the revenues with the author, 50-50. My favorite candidates would be website publishers who already have great brand names, such as the Huffington Post or Daily Beast, but that want to revive long-form journalism and make money doing it (and limit risk by making some top writers their 50-50 business partners, rather than pay high flat fees for their work.)
Keep reading »
Tags: business model, charging, ebooks, long-form journalism, paid content, paywall, Press+, Steve Brill
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / 10 a.m. / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Bob Giles, Alan Murray, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Alan D. Mutter, Melissa Ludtke, Brooke Kroeger, Jan Schaffer, and Ory Okolloh.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Bob Giles, curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Newspaper companies will regret the deep cutting of newsgathering resources as the economy recovers and advertisers conclude that local newspapers are no longer vital sources of community coverage. Moreover, newspapers will follow their historical pattern of being slow to adapt to what’s new — in this case, opportunities offered by the iPad and other tablets.
Geneva Overholser, director, USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism
This will be the year when collaboration finally, truly, really takes hold. Smart legacy media leaders will determine what they and they alone can do best, then ally themselves with others who can supply the rest. Radio, TV, web-based publications, print publications, bloggers, international and national news providers, journalism schools, nonprofits, and commercial media — the smart ones will figure out their niche and how to partner (strategically) with others to be sure their work is seen. The public will be the biggest beneficiary.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Brooke, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Jan Schaffer, Melissa Ludtke, Ory Okolloh
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / noon / 1 comment
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
One of the common threads through many of their predictions was mobile — the impact smartphones and tablets and apps will have on how news is reported, produced, distributed, and consumed. (Not to mention how it’s paid for.) Here are Vivian Schiller, Keith Hopper, Jakob Nielsen, Alexis Madrigal, Michael Andersen, Richard Lee Colvin, Megan McCarthy, David Cohn, and David Fanning on what 2011 will bring for the mobile space.
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
After two decades of saying that “this is the year of mobile,” 2011 really will be the year of mobile.
Michael Andersen, editor, Portland Afoot
My wild prediction: 2011 will be the year of media initiatives that serve poor and middle-income people.
For 20 years, almost all native Internet content has been made for the niche interests — often the professional interests — of people who make more than the median household income of $50,000 or so. But one of the best things about the mobile Internet is that it’s finally killing (or even reversing) the digital divide.
Poor folks may not have broadband, but they’ve got cell phones. African Americans and Latinos are more likely than white people to use phones for the web, pictures, texts, emails, games, videos, and social networking. As hardware prices keep falling, we’ll see more and more demand for information that is useful to the lower-income half of the population — and thanks to low marginal costs, people will be creating products that fill that need. It’s about damn time, wouldn’t you say?
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, apps, David Cohn, David Fanning, iPad, iPhone, Jakob Nielsen, Keith Hopper, Megan McCarthy, Michael Andersen, mobile, news apps, Richard Colvin, Vivian Schiller
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 15 / noon / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Paul Bass, John Paton, Philip Balboni, Martin Moore, Mark Luckie, Adrian Monck, Ken Doctor, Keith Hopper, and Vivian Schiller.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Paul Bass, founder, New Haven Independent
Every city of 100,000 or more in America will have its own online-only daily local news site.
Local governments will create their own “news” sources online to try to control the message and compete with new media and compensate for the decline of old media channels.
Newspapers, TV and radio stations, and online news outlets will collaborate on a bigger scale on local coverage and events
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
“Local” takes center stage in online news, as newspaper sites, Patch, Yahoo, NPR member stations and new start ups (not for profit and for profit) form alliances, grow, and compete for audience and revenue online.
Twitter and Facebook become established as journalism platforms for newsgathering, distribution and engagement.
In-car Internet radio becomes a hot media topic, though penetration of enabled cars will lag by a few years.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Monck, John Paton, Keith Hopper, Ken Doctor, Mark Luckie, Martin Moore, Paul Bass, Philip Balboni, predictions, Vivian Schiller, Xinhua
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
By Matt Thompson / Dec. 15 / 1 p.m. / 9 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
We also want to hear your predictions: Take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Here’s Matt Thompson, he of Newsless, Snarkmarket, and NPR fame.
At some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent. And this moment — let’s call it the Speakularity — will be a watershed moment for journalism.
So much of the raw material of journalism consists of verbal exchanges — phone conversations, press conferences, meetings. One of journalism’s most significant production challenges, even for those who don’t work at a radio company, is translating these verbal exchanges into text to weave scripts and stories out of them.
After the Speakularity, much more of this raw material would become available. It would render audio recordings accessible to the blind and aid in translation of audio recordings into different languages. Obscure city meetings could be recorded and auto-transcribed; interviews could be published nearly instantly as Q&As; journalists covering events could focus their attention on analyzing rather than capturing the proceedings.
Keep reading »
Tags: data, search, transcription, video, YouTube
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
By Dave Winer / Dec. 15 / 2 p.m. / 6 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, it’s web pioneer Dave Winer, a man key to the evolution of many of the publishing technologies we use online today, currently a visiting scholar in journalism at NYU, and half the team behind the Rebooting the News podcast.
When people in the news business try to figure out how to make news pay after the Internet, it seems analogous to the French, after being invaded by Germany in World War II, trying to figure out where to put the new Maginot Line.
The Maginot Line would have been a perfect defense in World War I. It didn’t help much in the second war.
Analogously, there was a perfect paywall in the pre-Internet news business, the physical product of a newspaper. There is no equivalent in the new distribution system.
Keep reading »
Tags: charging, commerce, CraigsList, deal brokering, Groupon, Maginot Line, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
By Jonathan Stray / Dec. 16 / 11 a.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, our predictor is Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor for the Associated Press and a familiar byline here at the Lab. His subject: the building of new multi-source information products, and whether it’ll be news organizations that do the building.
2011 will be the year that news organizations finally start talking about integrated products designed to serve the complete information needs of consumers, but it won’t be the year that they ship them.
News used to be more or less whatever news organizations published and broadcast. With so many other ways to find out about the world, this is no longer the case. Professional journalism has sometimes displayed an antagonistic streak towards blogs, Wikipedia, and social media of all types, but it’s no longer possible to deny that non-journalism sources of news are exciting and useful to people.
Unencumbered by such tribalism — and lacking content creation behemoths of their own — the information technology industry has long understood the value of curating multiple sources, including traditional news content. Google web search was the first truly widespread digital public information system. RSS allowed readers to assemble their own news feeds. Mid-decade, Wikipedia exploded into the one of the top ten sites on the web, used as much for news as for reference. The business practices of news aggregators angered publishers, but there’s no getting around the fact that they are tremendously useful tools. The most recent change in information distribution is social. Twitter has become an entirely new form of news network, while Facebook wants media organizations to use their social infrastructure to reach users.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, curation, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, information needs, service, Wikipedia
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 16 / 1 p.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Susan Orlean, Joe Grimm, Matt Haughey, Adrian Holovaty, Megan McCarthy, Mark Potts, Jake Shapiro, and Cody Brown.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Susan Orlean, Twitter artist, and staff writer, The New Yorker
We’ll be reading more on our phones, our iPads, and our Super Scout Decoder rings by the end of next year.
Several magazines — maybe Time or Newsweek or both — will go monthly and/or digital only. But there will be new magazine startups in print that will be luxurious and expensive and book-like. 2011 will be the year of those two forms making themselves distinct; things on line will become more webby, and print publications will become more “collectible” and classic.
Journalism schools will offer a “web producer” major.
The last typewriter living in the wild will be captured, its DNA sequenced; and then it will be humanely destroyed.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Holovaty, Cody Brown, Jake Shapiro, Joe Grimm, Mark Potts, Matt Haughey, Megan McCarthy, Susan Orlean
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 17 / 11 a.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Michael Schudson, Alexis Madrigal, Markos Moulitsas, Joy Mayer, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Steve Buttry, Paddy Hirsch, John Davidow, Ethan Zuckerman, Richard Lee Colvin, and Kevin Kelly.
We also want to hear your predictions: Today’s the last day we’ll be accepting entries in our Lab reader poll, where you tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Michael Schudson, historian and sociologist, Columbia Journalism School
Prognosticating about the news media in these times is a risky business, but I’ll try one nonetheless: In 2011, none of the 250 largest U.S. cities will stop publishing (on paper) its last remaining daily newspaper. Cities with more than one daily newspaper may be reduced to one survivor.
Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic and co-founder, Longshot Magazine
One of the truly important big city papers will go digital-only.
Kevin Kelly, author and founder, Wired Magazine
Twitter will go down for 36 hours. The ensuing media attention will prompt a 10 percent increase in signups in the months following.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, Ethan Zuckerman, John Davidow, Joy Mayer, Kevin Kelly, Markos Moulitsas, Michael Schudson, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Paddy Hirsch, Richard Colvin, Steve Buttry
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
By Jason Fry / Dec. 17 / 1 p.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Today, our predictor is Jason Fry, a familiar byline at the Lab. Jason also prognosticated earlier this week about the potential success of the NYT paywall.
Hyperlocal will remain stubbornly small scale. Large-scale efforts at cracking hyperlocal will seed more news organizations with content, but that content will remain mostly aggregation and data and still feel robotic and cold. Meanwhile, small-scale hyperlocal efforts will continue to win reader loyalty, but struggle to monetize those audiences. By the end of 2011, the most promising developments in hyperlocal will come from social media. Promising efforts to identify and leverage localized news and conversation in social media will be the buzz of late 2011, and we’ll be excited to think that social media is proving an excellent stepping stone to greater involvement in our physical communities.
Google will deal the content farms a big blow by tweaking its algorithms to drive down their search rankings. But the company will be opaque to the point of catatonia about exactly what it did and why it did it, reflecting its reluctance to be drawn into qualitative judgments about content. There will be talk of lawsuits by the spurned content farms and no small amount of jawing about Google’s power, lack of transparency, and whether or not it’s being evil. But even those worried about Google’s actions will admit that search is a much better experience now that results are less cluttered with horribly written crap.
Keep reading »
Tags: content farms, Facebook, Google, hyperlocal, search engine optimization, social media, tablets
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Making the business case for long stories at Slate
The Internet is supposed to wreck attention spans. So why is Slate seeing great numbers for its longest pieces?
Surviving in an age of brand fragmentation
How will paid-content models adjust to a world where publications are no longer the atomic unit of news?
The Wikipedia of news translation
How a Chinese website assembled a volunteer army to translate English stories — despite Beijing interference
Is an English major the best way to become a journonerd? | A study of the NYT’s interactive news team finds a liberal-arts heart beating in the code
Apple’s impact | What Steve Jobs’ latest announcements mean for the news industry’s mobile strategy
Could a name-your-own-price model work for news?
Panera is experimenting with a new model. Can you build a business on good will?
Who owns the news? Could sharing a hot story be illegal?
The right to link is up for debate in a critical court case, pitting news orgs against Google and Twitter
Apps vs. browsers | Why the biggest competitor to iPad news apps may be a familiar but forgotten icon in the dock
The changing value of copyediting in an online age
How can copy desks stay relevant in a time of content farms, Captcha, and crowdsourced errors?
Why Twitter looks like a social network but feels like news media | The promise of many-to-many communication ends up looking more like broadcast
This chart is not encouraging | Ignore the spin: The latest circ numbers aren’t cheery
When the public’s right to know meets copyright
States are using the copyright code to keep otherwise public data private. What rights do journalists — and citizens — have?
* No, seriously: What Old Spice can teach us about news
* What makes a nonprofit news org legit? Six clues
* Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers on print
* An involuntary Facebook for reporters and their work
* The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Back to the pre-print world?
* The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words
* Why Apple banned a Pulitzer winner from the iPhone
From Twitter
* Predicted: In 2011, Google will tweak its algorithms to drive down content farms' search rankings http://nie.mn/gYd0yQ 49 mins ago
* Better curation on Twitter, more news start-ups, and reconsidering anonymity: More 2011 predictions for media http://nie.mn/h3YqBk 2 hrs ago
* DDoS attacks on the media. A more searchable Twitter. An important paper goes digital-only. More predictions for 2011 http://nie.mn/g0bk1q 4 hrs ago
* 2011 predictions continue: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots--and a new golden age for blogging http://nie.mn/fMxnWh 6 hrs ago
* Dealing with equal and opposite forces in news start-ups: How to speed up and slow down http://nie.mn/ecmX9e 8 hrs ago
* More updates...
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
I know,I never though that I would ever say this but here is another (that's two) great Australian ;>}:
10 December 2010
Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information?
It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a few days these men were all proven wrong.
Now we know Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib sends confidential information to the Americans. He’s not alone.
Crucially, however, our media class aren’t asking the next obvious questions.
The Australian’s Paul Maley argues that communication between politicians, journalists and diplomats is part of the daily job.
“It is no surprise the Americans were talking to Arbib,” he writes, “They talk to everyone.”
And yet the senior Murdoch journalist doesn’t understand that the general public are rarely told about such meetings. What is discussed? What are the agendas? Is there transparency in such dealings? And who is telling what information to whom? Who benefits and what stories are not being told to avoid embarrassing somebody?
The cosiness between these players is exactly what WikiLeaks is aiming to challenge. Why shouldn’t the voting public be privy to whims and wishes of the American government and their relationships with key government ministers, individuals voted in by all of us? If Arbib was warning the Americans he thought Rudd may fall, why wasn’t he telling his constituents, the ones who put him in office?
The fact that the US had followed the rise of Julia Gillard and approved her views on the American alliance, Afghanistan and Israeli aggression is worrying though unsurprising.
It’s extremely rare that a leader rises who hasn’t received American approval or extensive years of obedience grooming. Former Labor leader Mark Latham was loathed by the US because he publicly expressed scepticism about the US alliance, the war in Iraq and then-president George W Bush.
It’s worth recalling that Latham called former prime minister John Howard an “arselicker” of the Bush administration and described a delegation of Liberal party politicians going to Washington as "a conga line of suckholes".
Latham would undoubtedly use equally colourful language to describe Arbib and Kevin Rudd. So why did ABC TV’s 7.30 Report feel the need to mitigate the damage to Rudd and Australia with the latest release of cables this week by featuring a soft-ball interview with assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell?
Host Kerry O’Brien didn’t even blush when he acknowledged that, “he [Campbell] asked to come on the program to counter the damage from today's exposure in Fairfax newspapers of the US embassy cables”. Since when is the ABC designed to offer air-time to a senior US official with a clear agenda to kiss and make up with Canberra? Moreover, viewers were expected to believe that Rudd was one of Barack Obama’s “best mates”?
The interview was symptomatic of the greater media malaise in this massive story; journalistic jealousy and closeness to state power.
The latest leaks that show profound Australian Government doubts over the Afghan mission are damning. Ministers are complicit but what about the journalists who visit Afghanistan, embed with our troops and paint an overly rose picture of brave men and women in a winnable war? Scepticism is often in short supply when reporting from the front lines.
When Hillary Clinton recently visited Australia, she was treated to a light interview with ABC’s Leigh Sales (who even Tweeted a grinning photo of the two). There were no challenging questions, just friendly banter and space for the Secretary of State to spin lines about loving Australia and its hospitality.
To learn a few weeks later, via WikiLeaks, that Clinton directed US officials across the world to spy on unsuspecting governments and UN officials should elicit outrage from a media fraternity that recently offered little more than obsequiousness before American power. There’s been not a peep.
Such obedience doesn’t come naturally; it takes years of practice. Annual events such as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue - a secret gathering of politicians, journalists and opinion-makers - consolidate the unhealthy, uncritical relationship between Australia and America. Many corporate journalists have attended, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher and former Labor MP and ABC reporter Maxine McKew. It aims to consolidate American hegemony rather than challenging it.
It’s largely a one-way street. Australians display loyalty to an agenda and the Americans are allegedly thankful. As US participant Steve Clemons wrote in 2007:
“Phil Scanlan, founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, is proud of the fact that in 15 years, no-one has leaked any of the internal conversations of the conference. I won't either... unless I get permission from one of the speakers or commentators to do so which is allowed by the rules.”
The Australia-Israel Leadership Dialogue, inspired by the American one, is once again about to head to Israel for a short burst of Zionist propaganda. Journalists and politicians invariably return with the required Israeli talking points (let me guess this year; Iran is the greatest threat to the Middle East and the world?).
The Age’s Michelle Grattan tweeted this week of the post-WikiLeaks reality of the tour:
“All those pollies travelling to the Aust-Israel dialogue might be a bit more inclined to zip their lips in private.”
But why are such gatherings so secret? Why do journalists allow themselves to be romanced without revealing the kinds of agendas they’re pushing? It’s obvious why; being close to top officials and politicians makes them feel connected and important. Being an insider is many reporters’ ideal position. Independence is secondary to receiving sanctioned links and elevated status in a globalised world.
The WikiLeaks documents challenge the entire corrupted relationship between media and political elites. Founder Julian Assange is an outsider and doesn’t attend exclusive and secret meetings where the furthering of US foreign policy goals are on the cards. He aims to disrupt that dynamic. Many in the media resent not being leaked the information themselves and are jealous. Others simply dislike a lone-wolf citizen with remarkable tech-savvy to challenge their viability.
One can dismiss The Australian’s bragging of knowing virtually everything in the WikiLeaks cables before they were released - if only they more deeply scrutinised the effect of war policies they backed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond - because the key point here isn’t merely covering disillusionment over Rudd or Gillard or anyone else. It’s something far bigger; a fundamental re-writing of the relationship between journalists and governments.
The WikiLeaks cable dumps have revealed a chasm between establishment attitudes towards truth-telling and furious attempts to protect the embarrassed. The sign of any healthy democracy is the ways in which it deals with the most sensitive of information. Senior media figures and government authorities are often remarkably consistent in their messaging. They move in similar worlds and they often rely on each other for sourcing.
It’s this kind of dangerous, mutual sycophancy that WikiLeaks could break.
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist, author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution and currently working on a book about disaster capitalism
10 December 2010
Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information?
It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a few days these men were all proven wrong.
Now we know Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib sends confidential information to the Americans. He’s not alone.
Crucially, however, our media class aren’t asking the next obvious questions.
The Australian’s Paul Maley argues that communication between politicians, journalists and diplomats is part of the daily job.
“It is no surprise the Americans were talking to Arbib,” he writes, “They talk to everyone.”
And yet the senior Murdoch journalist doesn’t understand that the general public are rarely told about such meetings. What is discussed? What are the agendas? Is there transparency in such dealings? And who is telling what information to whom? Who benefits and what stories are not being told to avoid embarrassing somebody?
The cosiness between these players is exactly what WikiLeaks is aiming to challenge. Why shouldn’t the voting public be privy to whims and wishes of the American government and their relationships with key government ministers, individuals voted in by all of us? If Arbib was warning the Americans he thought Rudd may fall, why wasn’t he telling his constituents, the ones who put him in office?
The fact that the US had followed the rise of Julia Gillard and approved her views on the American alliance, Afghanistan and Israeli aggression is worrying though unsurprising.
It’s extremely rare that a leader rises who hasn’t received American approval or extensive years of obedience grooming. Former Labor leader Mark Latham was loathed by the US because he publicly expressed scepticism about the US alliance, the war in Iraq and then-president George W Bush.
It’s worth recalling that Latham called former prime minister John Howard an “arselicker” of the Bush administration and described a delegation of Liberal party politicians going to Washington as "a conga line of suckholes".
Latham would undoubtedly use equally colourful language to describe Arbib and Kevin Rudd. So why did ABC TV’s 7.30 Report feel the need to mitigate the damage to Rudd and Australia with the latest release of cables this week by featuring a soft-ball interview with assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell?
Host Kerry O’Brien didn’t even blush when he acknowledged that, “he [Campbell] asked to come on the program to counter the damage from today's exposure in Fairfax newspapers of the US embassy cables”. Since when is the ABC designed to offer air-time to a senior US official with a clear agenda to kiss and make up with Canberra? Moreover, viewers were expected to believe that Rudd was one of Barack Obama’s “best mates”?
The interview was symptomatic of the greater media malaise in this massive story; journalistic jealousy and closeness to state power.
The latest leaks that show profound Australian Government doubts over the Afghan mission are damning. Ministers are complicit but what about the journalists who visit Afghanistan, embed with our troops and paint an overly rose picture of brave men and women in a winnable war? Scepticism is often in short supply when reporting from the front lines.
When Hillary Clinton recently visited Australia, she was treated to a light interview with ABC’s Leigh Sales (who even Tweeted a grinning photo of the two). There were no challenging questions, just friendly banter and space for the Secretary of State to spin lines about loving Australia and its hospitality.
To learn a few weeks later, via WikiLeaks, that Clinton directed US officials across the world to spy on unsuspecting governments and UN officials should elicit outrage from a media fraternity that recently offered little more than obsequiousness before American power. There’s been not a peep.
Such obedience doesn’t come naturally; it takes years of practice. Annual events such as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue - a secret gathering of politicians, journalists and opinion-makers - consolidate the unhealthy, uncritical relationship between Australia and America. Many corporate journalists have attended, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher and former Labor MP and ABC reporter Maxine McKew. It aims to consolidate American hegemony rather than challenging it.
It’s largely a one-way street. Australians display loyalty to an agenda and the Americans are allegedly thankful. As US participant Steve Clemons wrote in 2007:
“Phil Scanlan, founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, is proud of the fact that in 15 years, no-one has leaked any of the internal conversations of the conference. I won't either... unless I get permission from one of the speakers or commentators to do so which is allowed by the rules.”
The Australia-Israel Leadership Dialogue, inspired by the American one, is once again about to head to Israel for a short burst of Zionist propaganda. Journalists and politicians invariably return with the required Israeli talking points (let me guess this year; Iran is the greatest threat to the Middle East and the world?).
The Age’s Michelle Grattan tweeted this week of the post-WikiLeaks reality of the tour:
“All those pollies travelling to the Aust-Israel dialogue might be a bit more inclined to zip their lips in private.”
But why are such gatherings so secret? Why do journalists allow themselves to be romanced without revealing the kinds of agendas they’re pushing? It’s obvious why; being close to top officials and politicians makes them feel connected and important. Being an insider is many reporters’ ideal position. Independence is secondary to receiving sanctioned links and elevated status in a globalised world.
The WikiLeaks documents challenge the entire corrupted relationship between media and political elites. Founder Julian Assange is an outsider and doesn’t attend exclusive and secret meetings where the furthering of US foreign policy goals are on the cards. He aims to disrupt that dynamic. Many in the media resent not being leaked the information themselves and are jealous. Others simply dislike a lone-wolf citizen with remarkable tech-savvy to challenge their viability.
One can dismiss The Australian’s bragging of knowing virtually everything in the WikiLeaks cables before they were released - if only they more deeply scrutinised the effect of war policies they backed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond - because the key point here isn’t merely covering disillusionment over Rudd or Gillard or anyone else. It’s something far bigger; a fundamental re-writing of the relationship between journalists and governments.
The WikiLeaks cable dumps have revealed a chasm between establishment attitudes towards truth-telling and furious attempts to protect the embarrassed. The sign of any healthy democracy is the ways in which it deals with the most sensitive of information. Senior media figures and government authorities are often remarkably consistent in their messaging. They move in similar worlds and they often rely on each other for sourcing.
It’s this kind of dangerous, mutual sycophancy that WikiLeaks could break.
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist, author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution and currently working on a book about disaster capitalism
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
WOW this one is for real:Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors
| from the tree-of-attribution dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday November 26, @22:33 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/0117252/Googles-New-Meta-Tags-For-News-Story-Authors?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EreIamJH writes "Google News is [0]experimenting with meta-tags in an
effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an
article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that
breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the
story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article
that sources information from other articles would include an
original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article.
While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger
fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as
an original source."
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/27/0117252&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html
| from the tree-of-attribution dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday November 26, @22:33 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/0117252/Googles-New-Meta-Tags-For-News-Story-Authors?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EreIamJH writes "Google News is [0]experimenting with meta-tags in an
effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an
article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that
breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the
story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article
that sources information from other articles would include an
original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article.
While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger
fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as
an original source."
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/27/0117252&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html
How do you like this for the future of Journalism??:Digital Domain
When the Software Is the Sportswriter
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 27, 2010
ONLY human writers can distill a heap of sports statistics into a compelling story. Or so we human writers like to think.
The StatSheet site for Ohio State men's basketball. One recent story on the site had 10 sentences and 156 words — written entirely by software.
StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, thinks otherwise. The company, with nine employees, is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games.
Established in 2007, StatSheet.com provides statistical analysis of college football and basketball, Nascar and other sports. It dices data in more ways than any fan could possibly absorb. But charts, graphs and rankings alone cannot replace words that tell a story. We humans love stories; a craving for narrative seems part of our nature.
This month, StatSheet unveiled StatSheet Network, made up of separate Web sites for each of the 345 N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball teams. Beyond statistics galore, each site has what the company calls “automated content,” stories written entirely by software, including write-ups of the team’s games, past and future. With a joking wink, StatSheet’s founder, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as the “Robot Army.”
Each team’s StatSheet Web site is located at a freestanding Web address, conveying the sense that it is wholly invested in the interests of that school’s fans. (To find a domain name, a fan first visits http://statsheet.com/#websites.)
The software is imbued with the smarts to flatter each particular team. The same statistics, documenting the same game, produce an entirely different write-up and headline at the opposing team’s page.
A team like No. 1-ranked Duke — whose StatSheet Network Web site is at BlueDevilDaily.com — does not lack for attention from human sports writers. But StatSheet expects that the sports programs of smaller schools will appreciate the advent of robot journalism.
“There are at least 200 Division I schools that the large sports media companies give no attention to,” says Mr. Allen at StatSheet. “Once we have the algorithm in place, there’s no cost to adding the Lamars and Elons to the Dukes and U.N.C.’s.”
Small schools are less likely to have large alumni bases and to draw significant traffic, Mr. Allen said, so he is knocking on their doors to explore licensing partnerships.
Mr. Allen explains that his story-writing software does not perform linguistic analysis; it just uses template sentences and a database of phrases that numbers about 5,000 for now.
“My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human,” he says, “and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”
In the battle between human writers and robots, I’m not a dispassionate observer: I own up to rooting for the home team. So I asked Michael W. White, an assistant professor of linguistics at Ohio State and a specialist in the field of natural language generation, for his professional opinion of the quality of the robot army’s writing.
We visited the StatSheet site for Ohio State’s team —BuckeyesBeat.com — and looked at the write-up of its Nov. 12 season opener, written expressly for Buckeyes fans: ”Ohio State Gets 102-61 Monster Win Over North Carolina A&T.” “Ohio State has already started living up to monumental expectations with a good first game,” it began. “On November 12th on their home court, the Buckeyes waxed the Aggies, 102-61.”
The story had 10 sentences and 156 words. Over all, Professor White said, it read “pretty well.” He praised the first sentence as very good and said the use of “waxed” in the second was a nice touch.
Then he pointed out some glitches. In one passage, the software lost track of who had beaten whom and forgot to use “the” when referring to Ohio State’s supposed victory “over Buckeyes.” A note that followed the write-up was a bit overeager to show that Ohio State was undefeated so far this season, when its record was still just 1-0.
The Statsheet Network’s Web sites are plainly labeled “beta,” and these minor bugs can easily be eliminated with tweaks. The bigger problem, the professor said, is that StatSheet’s software lacks the awareness of linguistic structures that would let it generate more complex sentences: “Getting from remarkably good to human level is very hard. The more you cram into a sentence, the more difficult it is to do it well.”
The StatSheet software avoids those difficulties by using simple sentences and swapping in particular details. “This makes it perfectly readable, but it also can make it seem stilted,” he said.
Mr. Allen of StatSheet says he believes that what some readers regard as “stilted” will be appreciated by others who say “‘ I don’t like personality — I just want the straight facts.’”
He sees opportunities to extend robo-journalism not only to other sports but also to other subject areas — like financial news — in which there is an abundance of readily available data.
Will StatSheet’s robo journalists replace business columnists? Not a chance: we humans are undefeated.
Only problem is, just like the Buckeyes two weeks ago, we’re just 1-0.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
When the Software Is the Sportswriter
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 27, 2010
ONLY human writers can distill a heap of sports statistics into a compelling story. Or so we human writers like to think.
The StatSheet site for Ohio State men's basketball. One recent story on the site had 10 sentences and 156 words — written entirely by software.
StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, thinks otherwise. The company, with nine employees, is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games.
Established in 2007, StatSheet.com provides statistical analysis of college football and basketball, Nascar and other sports. It dices data in more ways than any fan could possibly absorb. But charts, graphs and rankings alone cannot replace words that tell a story. We humans love stories; a craving for narrative seems part of our nature.
This month, StatSheet unveiled StatSheet Network, made up of separate Web sites for each of the 345 N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball teams. Beyond statistics galore, each site has what the company calls “automated content,” stories written entirely by software, including write-ups of the team’s games, past and future. With a joking wink, StatSheet’s founder, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as the “Robot Army.”
Each team’s StatSheet Web site is located at a freestanding Web address, conveying the sense that it is wholly invested in the interests of that school’s fans. (To find a domain name, a fan first visits http://statsheet.com/#websites.)
The software is imbued with the smarts to flatter each particular team. The same statistics, documenting the same game, produce an entirely different write-up and headline at the opposing team’s page.
A team like No. 1-ranked Duke — whose StatSheet Network Web site is at BlueDevilDaily.com — does not lack for attention from human sports writers. But StatSheet expects that the sports programs of smaller schools will appreciate the advent of robot journalism.
“There are at least 200 Division I schools that the large sports media companies give no attention to,” says Mr. Allen at StatSheet. “Once we have the algorithm in place, there’s no cost to adding the Lamars and Elons to the Dukes and U.N.C.’s.”
Small schools are less likely to have large alumni bases and to draw significant traffic, Mr. Allen said, so he is knocking on their doors to explore licensing partnerships.
Mr. Allen explains that his story-writing software does not perform linguistic analysis; it just uses template sentences and a database of phrases that numbers about 5,000 for now.
“My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human,” he says, “and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”
In the battle between human writers and robots, I’m not a dispassionate observer: I own up to rooting for the home team. So I asked Michael W. White, an assistant professor of linguistics at Ohio State and a specialist in the field of natural language generation, for his professional opinion of the quality of the robot army’s writing.
We visited the StatSheet site for Ohio State’s team —BuckeyesBeat.com — and looked at the write-up of its Nov. 12 season opener, written expressly for Buckeyes fans: ”Ohio State Gets 102-61 Monster Win Over North Carolina A&T.” “Ohio State has already started living up to monumental expectations with a good first game,” it began. “On November 12th on their home court, the Buckeyes waxed the Aggies, 102-61.”
The story had 10 sentences and 156 words. Over all, Professor White said, it read “pretty well.” He praised the first sentence as very good and said the use of “waxed” in the second was a nice touch.
Then he pointed out some glitches. In one passage, the software lost track of who had beaten whom and forgot to use “the” when referring to Ohio State’s supposed victory “over Buckeyes.” A note that followed the write-up was a bit overeager to show that Ohio State was undefeated so far this season, when its record was still just 1-0.
The Statsheet Network’s Web sites are plainly labeled “beta,” and these minor bugs can easily be eliminated with tweaks. The bigger problem, the professor said, is that StatSheet’s software lacks the awareness of linguistic structures that would let it generate more complex sentences: “Getting from remarkably good to human level is very hard. The more you cram into a sentence, the more difficult it is to do it well.”
The StatSheet software avoids those difficulties by using simple sentences and swapping in particular details. “This makes it perfectly readable, but it also can make it seem stilted,” he said.
Mr. Allen of StatSheet says he believes that what some readers regard as “stilted” will be appreciated by others who say “‘ I don’t like personality — I just want the straight facts.’”
He sees opportunities to extend robo-journalism not only to other sports but also to other subject areas — like financial news — in which there is an abundance of readily available data.
Will StatSheet’s robo journalists replace business columnists? Not a chance: we humans are undefeated.
Only problem is, just like the Buckeyes two weeks ago, we’re just 1-0.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Good Editor Journalist here: RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Trouble
| from the who's-to-blame dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 24, @22:24 (Music)
| https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/2336248/RIAA-Now-Blames-Journalists-For-Its-Piracy-Trouble?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
adeelarshad82 writes "RIAA executives have [0]written a letter to PCMag
expressing 'deep disappointment' for publishing an article on [1]Limewire
Alternatives. While the article includes a disclaimer from PCMag that it
does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material, RIAA
executives believe that 'PCMag is slyly encouraging people to steal more
music.' The letter goes on to ask PCMag to retract the article from their
website. PCMag's [2]Editor in Chief has responded to the letter by
stating that music industry's charges remain groundless and that it reeks
of desperation. He points out that PCMag covers all aspects of
technology, which includes the products, services and activities that
some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. He defends
publishing the article by saying 'We covered these Limewire alternatives
because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand
that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot
encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the
existence of these services does neither.' PCMag has also refused to
retract the article."
Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/24/2336248&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f9f4fb80d8c7ba149
1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371590,00.asp
2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp
| from the who's-to-blame dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 24, @22:24 (Music)
| https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/2336248/RIAA-Now-Blames-Journalists-For-Its-Piracy-Trouble?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
adeelarshad82 writes "RIAA executives have [0]written a letter to PCMag
expressing 'deep disappointment' for publishing an article on [1]Limewire
Alternatives. While the article includes a disclaimer from PCMag that it
does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material, RIAA
executives believe that 'PCMag is slyly encouraging people to steal more
music.' The letter goes on to ask PCMag to retract the article from their
website. PCMag's [2]Editor in Chief has responded to the letter by
stating that music industry's charges remain groundless and that it reeks
of desperation. He points out that PCMag covers all aspects of
technology, which includes the products, services and activities that
some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. He defends
publishing the article by saying 'We covered these Limewire alternatives
because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand
that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot
encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the
existence of these services does neither.' PCMag has also refused to
retract the article."
Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/24/2336248&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f9f4fb80d8c7ba149
1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371590,00.asp
2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Some of you might be interested in this:
Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration
■ Friday, January 21 – Tuesday, March 15
Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo
Some fifty years ago, the small community of Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking. James Houston, then a government employee, introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in 1957. To learn more about printmaking himself, Houston travelled the next year to Japan to study for three months with Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the world's leading masters of the art. Houston went back to the Arctic in 1959 to share his knowledge and his collection of Japanese prints with the fledgling printmakers of Cape Dorset.
"Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration" will feature exquisite and historically significant works of art from Japan and the world-renowned Cape Dorset print studio. By juxtaposing the works, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which the Cape Dorset artists creatively "localized" Japanese influences.
Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration
■ Friday, January 21 – Tuesday, March 15
Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo
Some fifty years ago, the small community of Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking. James Houston, then a government employee, introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in 1957. To learn more about printmaking himself, Houston travelled the next year to Japan to study for three months with Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the world's leading masters of the art. Houston went back to the Arctic in 1959 to share his knowledge and his collection of Japanese prints with the fledgling printmakers of Cape Dorset.
"Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration" will feature exquisite and historically significant works of art from Japan and the world-renowned Cape Dorset print studio. By juxtaposing the works, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which the Cape Dorset artists creatively "localized" Japanese influences.
We have talked about flash crowds and here is something else that might be useful for Journalists Crowd sourcings:http://gigaom.com/2010/11/17/can-you-crowdsource-fact-checking-truthsquad-says-yes/
Can You Crowdsource Fact-Checking? Truthsquad Says Yes
By Mathew Ingram Nov. 17, 2010, 9:36am PDT 2 Comments
*
*
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success, and NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year. Among the things NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:
* Game mechanics work. NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave 10 times more answers per quote than reviews per story; over half the participants read linked stories; and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
* Pros and amateurs can work together. Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
* Crowdsourcing takes effort. Florin said despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.
Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking; MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking-oriented site. MediaBugs is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.
Like most blog-focused sites, GigaOM gets plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it’s a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we aren’t perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.
NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it’s hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.
Can You Crowdsource Fact-Checking? Truthsquad Says Yes
By Mathew Ingram Nov. 17, 2010, 9:36am PDT 2 Comments
*
*
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success, and NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year. Among the things NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:
* Game mechanics work. NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave 10 times more answers per quote than reviews per story; over half the participants read linked stories; and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
* Pros and amateurs can work together. Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
* Crowdsourcing takes effort. Florin said despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.
Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking; MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking-oriented site. MediaBugs is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.
Like most blog-focused sites, GigaOM gets plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it’s a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we aren’t perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.
NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it’s hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HAPPENING IN JOURNALISM TODAY:
WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing
The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
The structure of Wikileaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPA
By Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010
Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.
However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.
Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.
Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs
Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.
He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.
Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.
After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities.
WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing
The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
The structure of Wikileaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPA
By Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010
Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.
However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.
Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.
Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs
Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.
He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.
Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.
After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Wow, here is something else to talk about:
Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010
CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.
Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010
CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
This book review from Mantex is maybe a little long for you, however important enough for me to post and you to read.
Here Comes Everybody
how change happens when people come together
Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.
Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.
A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.
There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.
The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.
The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.
Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.
There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.
The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.
The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’
Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.
He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.
His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.
Here Comes Everybody
how change happens when people come together
Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.
Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.
A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.
There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.
The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.
The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.
Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.
There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.
The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.
The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’
Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.
He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.
His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Some people take living on this planet seriously and they put them selves on the line always. Take a look at these posters from wiki leaks:>http://picasaweb.google.com/AoC4WL/WikiLeaksPosters?ref=nf#
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Here is another try at making newspapers viable again:
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010
The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
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The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.
The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.
“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.
The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.
The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.
But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.
The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.
The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.
When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.
Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.
But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.
Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.
“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.
Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.
Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010
The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
Add to Portfolio
* Amazon.com Inc
* News Corporation
Go to your Portfolio »
The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.
The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.
“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.
The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.
The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.
But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.
The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.
The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.
When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.
Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.
But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.
Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.
“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.
Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.
Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.
Friday, October 29, 2010
I would like to analyze the following very good, long story running in the New York Times:
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010
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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.
There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.
All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”
Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.
Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
A bit.
For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.
Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)
Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.
“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”
“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.
Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.
Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.
“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”
Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.
“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).
Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.
Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.
“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”
But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.
“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010
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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.
There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.
All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”
Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.
Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
A bit.
For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.
Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)
Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.
“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”
“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.
Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.
Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.
“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”
Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.
“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).
Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.
Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.
“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”
But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.
“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Don't believe it until you see it is down the tube, again: Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time
| from the no-more-wires-visible dept.
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 13, @08:09 (Graphics)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/13/0525245/Erasing-Objects-From-Video-In-Real-Time?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smoothly [0]interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive
enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from
Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of [1]on-the-fly erasure of
selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image
synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then
increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40
milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."
Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/13/0525245&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/25/1835256/Content-Aware-Image-Resizing
1. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/video-voodoo-software-removes-objects-live-video
| from the no-more-wires-visible dept.
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 13, @08:09 (Graphics)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/13/0525245/Erasing-Objects-From-Video-In-Real-Time?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smoothly [0]interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive
enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from
Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of [1]on-the-fly erasure of
selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image
synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then
increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40
milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."
Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/13/0525245&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/25/1835256/Content-Aware-Image-Resizing
1. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/video-voodoo-software-removes-objects-live-video
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