Good News

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

Set Up Journalism

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

This question of who should decide what is news continues. That problem of what we want to hear and see and what we need to hear and see. The challenge for a journalist is to decide what truly is important and what just light entertainment. The second challenge is after deciding, making that important news interesting, compelling even, for the consumer of that news. And so here again from the New York Times:Bits - Business, Innovation, Technology, Society September 29, 2011, 9:17 am Should Google Tweak the News We Consume? By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news? That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media. The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel, as reporters cover the Casey Anthony trial instead of life-and-death issues in Africa. People are being fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money, he said. Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at The New Yorker, then asked Mr. Koppel if Google should tweak its algorithm to deliver people the news they need instead of entertainment-as-news. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Mr. Koppel said. To be clear, Google has said many times that its algorithm presents users with the most relevant search results and does not exercise editorial control, so the question is likely to remain no more than a matter of debate. It reiterated that this week, after Rick Santorum said he thought Google should remove a dirty joke that showed up in searches for his last name. Still, Mr. Page said that Google could do a better job of getting people to focus on certain issues, though he did not address Mr. Koppel’s statement directly. “I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.” “We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about,” he said. “And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.” Google has taken small steps toward editing search results for content. In February, for example, it changed its algorithm to weed out Web sites that it thinks have subpar articles and videos, like content farms, a move that affected 12 percent of search queries.

Here is some really good advice from the front lines. The New York Times gives suggestions to editors:October 4, 2011, 10:46 am The Reader’s Lament By PHILIP B. CORBETT Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.) AfterDeadline Times readers expect nothing but the best in our writing and editing. Too often, they’re disappointed. My colleague Patrick LaForge, who oversees our copy desks, described their dismay and offered some suggestions in this memo to editors: ••• Day after day, devoted Times readers are moved to complain. “As a 35-year subscriber to The Times, I continue to be disappointed in the number of typos that have become chronic and, sorry to say, expected on a daily basis,” one reader wrote recently. “Where are the proofreaders and editors? Where are the standards for punctuation and grammar? The Times used to be the gold standard.” Mistakes in copy have been a problem since Gutenberg, but it is hard to shake the impression that we have been slipping more than usual, especially in articles that are rushed onto the Web site, bypassing some of our traditional steps. Yes, speed is important in the modern news competition. But readers still have high expectations, especially now that they are paying for online news. We get letters, e-mails, phone calls and complaints on Twitter. Readers have even been known to buttonhole editors on elevators, at cocktail parties and in the local bodega. We often respond, apologizing for our lapses and promising to spread the word. But it is hard to ease the distress of readers like the one who wrote on Sept. 14 to complain about the phrase “committee that overseas foreign aid.” Readers expect a great degree of care in any copy published under our name, wherever it appears — on the front page or an inside page in print; on the home page or deep in a small blog; on a mobile app or in a summary on Facebook. They get annoyed at typos, usage errors and factual mistakes even when we are obviously breaking our backs to get the news to them first. Sure, they can figure it out when we refer to “John G. Borehner,” as we did recently, but they get irritated. “I’ve read The Times daily for more years than I can remember,” one wrote recently. “It goes without saying that it’s the best newspaper in the world. That said, is it irony or just coincidence that now that I’m ‘subscribing’ to the paper’s digital version, the number of glaring copy-editing errors is greater than ever?” This era of news publishing has put a greater emphasis on speed, across multiple formats and platforms. Thanks to blogging and continuous updates, more people in the newsroom find themselves in the role of publishing live material. The same forces have increased the workload and distractions faced by reporters, backfield editors, copy editors and producers. It can be tempting to cut corners. You might decide, unwisely, to save some time by bypassing the copy desk. There is rarely a justification for doing so. Our policy is for every article to get at least two reads, preferably one of them by an experienced copy editor, before publication. And then you should check your work again, or have someone else check it. ••• Here are some proofreading tips culled from years of journalism tip sheets: • Break your mind-set: Read the copy out loud. Read it silently, one word at a time. Read it backward and focus on the spelling of words. Print a copy. Preview it in a different application. Change the format or the screen resolution. Justify or unjustify the type. Take a break and return to it with fresh eyes. • Use spelling checkers but don’t trust them. In particular, be aware of homophone confusion: complement and compliment, accept and except, effect and affect, oversees and overseas. • Memorize frequently misspelled and misused words. Here’s a list: http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html. • Beware of contractions and apostrophes: their and they’re, its and it’s, your and you’re. • After reading for content and spelling, proofread separately for punctuation. • Beware of doubled words at the end and start of a line. A doubled “that” will often slip right by if you let it. • Double-check proper names and claims of distinction (first, best, oldest, tallest, etc.). • Double-check little words that are often interchanged: or, of; it, is. • Check all the numbers, especially any reference to millions, billions or trillions. Do the math. Do the math again. • Set aside a regular time to review stylebook and usage rules. This includes backfield editors and reporters. If you don’t want someone to change your story on style grounds (and perhaps introduce an error), learn the basics and follow them. • Be aware of dates and days of the week, especially in advance copy or copy that has been held. Be aware of references to next month/last month around the time the month is changing. • Make a personal checklist of the things you tend to miss. Use it on every story. • Have someone else, preferably a copy editor, read behind you. Last of all, think of our readers — and care what they think of us. In a Word This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers. ••• One upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip. Try proofreading one word at a time. ••• LOS ANGELES — DreamWorks Animation, the company behind successful movie franchises like “Madagascar” and “Shrek,” said it had completed a deal to pump its films and television specials through Netflix, replacing a less lucrative pact with HBO. A past-tense lead sentence like this should include a time element. ••• Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. This construction doesn’t work with “caution,” which as a verb is equivalent to “warn.” ••• Yet officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidences of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx. In precise usage, “incidence” means rate or prevalence: “Officials detected a high incidence of cheating.” Here, we wanted “incidents,” meaning specific occurrences. ••• He accepted a hearty handshake from Girardi, who often has received a snarl from Burnett along with the ball. Here’s what the stylebook says: adverb placement. In fluid writing, an adverb used with a compound verb should normally be placed between parts of the verb (the way normally is, a few words back in this sentence, and the way usually is, in the next example): He will usually take the opposing side. A similar rule applies when a verb like is links a noun to its modifier: Refundable fares are often expensive (not often are expensive). ••• Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Perry refused to back down, declaring that if someone opposes the policy, “I don’t think you have a heart.” And like they did to Mr. McCain, the audience quickly turned against Mr. Perry, loudly booing his position on the issue and his refusal to give an inch. “Like” is correctly used as a preposition in the first sentence, but incorrectly used as a conjunction in the second. Make it “And as they did …” ••• For the record, Octopoteuthis is the first among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females, Hendrik J.T. Hoving and two colleagues report in their paper, “A shot in the dark: same-sex squid behavior in a deep-sea squid,” published, lurid title and all, in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters. We capitalize the principal words in the title of an article. ••• The kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard filed a complaint for damages against the federal government on Thursday, charging that its parole agents did not adequately monitor Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender who was on federal parole when he abducted Ms. Dugard in 1991. The stylebook is clear on this point: Use kidnapping (never kidnap, even in headlines) for the noun and the modifier, to avoid a headlinese flavor. ••• In their third debate in as many weeks, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas engaged in a sometimes heated back and forth over immigration, health care and entitlements, their rivalry dominating a stage that included seven other candidates struggling to catch up in the race for Republican presidential nomination. Another point the stylebook is clear on: in as many. Avoid this journalese mannerism: This was the second case in as many weeks. As many as second? No. Make it the second case in two weeks. ••• His conviction came after testimony by some witnesses who later recanted and on the scantest of physical evidence, adding fuel to those who rely on the Internet to rally against executions and to question the validity of eyewitness identification and of the court system itself. We seemed to have our metaphors (or clichés) crossed here. You might add fuel to the fire (of a controversy), but you would not add fuel to the people rallying against executions. ••• As with a jigsaw puzzle, forensic anthropologists are putting together more pieces of this intense investigation, but a clear picture of the person, or people, responsible for the murders is still frustratingly unclear. Maybe this was a revision gone awry, or perhaps the writer just lost track of the sentence. But we didn’t want to say “a clear picture … is still frustratingly unclear.” ••• Whether the taxes on the rich in Europe raise enough money to close much of their budget shortfalls, they are being promoted as a step toward economic fairness at a time when governments are cutting spending on social programs like pensions, health care and education. As I’ve pointed out before, sometimes “whether” works alone, but sometimes it needs “or not.” A rule of thumb: “or not” is necessary if we mean “regardless of whether,” as we did here. ••• Mr. Cantor also recalled the conversation concerning the $50 million, and the prime minister’s support for it, and said that further monies from Congress would be “colored greatly by the Palestinians’ actions at the U.N.” No real need for the plural here, and in any case our preferred spelling is “moneys.” ••• Such rides are notoriously uncomfortable, but the Green Lantern, like its superhero namesake, comes with a little extra padding. As we’ve noted before, “namesake” (unlike “eponym”) generally refers to the receiver of the shared name, not to the giver. ••• After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.

This could become a very big problem in the future. As reported in the New York Times:September 29, 2011, 9:17 am
Should Google Tweak the News We Consume?
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news?

That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media.

The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel, as reporters cover the Casey Anthony trial instead of life-and-death issues in Africa. People are being fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money, he said.

Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at The New Yorker, then asked Mr. Koppel if Google should tweak its algorithm to deliver people the news they need instead of entertainment-as-news.

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Mr. Koppel said.

To be clear, Google has said many times that its algorithm presents users with the most relevant search results and does not exercise editorial control, so the question is likely to remain no more than a matter of debate. It reiterated that this week, after Rick Santorum said he thought Google should remove a dirty joke that showed up in searches for his last name.

Still, Mr. Page said that Google could do a better job of getting people to focus on certain issues, though he did not address Mr. Koppel’s statement directly.

“I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.”

“We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about,” he said. “And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.”

Google has taken small steps toward editing search results for content. In February, for example, it changed its algorithm to weed out Web sites that it thinks have subpar articles and videos, like content farms, a move that affected 12 percent of search queries.

Here is a story copied from Slashdot:Walmart Goes Solar In California
| from the price-drop-on-the-sun dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 21, @19:29 (Power)
| with 138 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/2246205/Walmart-Goes-Solar-In-California?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WHAT HAS THIS STORY NOT SAID?? THAT IS THE NEWS!

[0]tekgoblin writes "Walmart today has announced that it plans to
[1]install solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the
state. From the article: 'When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in
California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of
clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than
5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of
carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the
road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric
needs.'"
What is remarkable about this....? Well what should be said that isn't. The reporter has not carried through. Solar will provide 20-30% which at the 20% level leaves 80% not solar. So 4 times 4,100 cars is 16,400 and 4 times 21,700= 86,800 and finally 4 times 5,400 homes equals 21,600 homes. So you see that Walmart here has done a really wonderful job of reducing their eco footprint by 20 to 30 percent they have also told us just how much they will still be polluting.Don't get on them who out their is doing nothing and polluting more? That is the story to chase.

Well if any of you find yourself working in Journalism over the next few years here is your likely competition:September 10, 2011
In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
By STEVE LOHR

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost tool for publications to expand and enrich coverage when editorial budgets are under pressure. The company, founded last year, has 20 customers so far. Several are still experimenting with the technology, and Stuart Frankel, the chief executive of Narrative Science, wouldn’t name them. They include newspaper chains seeking to offer automated summary articles for more extensive coverage of local youth sports and to generate articles about the quarterly financial results of local public companies.

“Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,” Mr. Frankel says.

The Narrative Science customers that are willing to talk do fit that model. The Big Ten Network, a joint venture of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Networks, began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.)

As the spring sports season progressed, the computer-generated articles improved, helped by suggestions from editors on the network’s staff, says Michael Calderon, vice president for digital and interactive media at the Big Ten Network.

The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.”

“Composition is the key concept,” Mr. Hammond says. “This is not just taking data and spilling it over into text.”

Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.

Hanley Wood, a trade publisher for the construction industry, began using the program in August to provide monthly reports on more than 350 local housing markets, posted on its site, builderonline.com. The company had long collected the data, but hiring people to write trend articles would have been too costly, says Andrew Reid, president of Hanley Wood’s digital media and market intelligence unit.

Mr. Reid says Hanley Wood worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software for construction. A former executive at Thomson Reuters, he says he was struck by the high quality of the articles.

“They got over a big linguistic hurdle,” he observes. “The stories are not duplicates by any means.”

He was also impressed by the cost. Hanley Wood pays Narrative Science less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media.

NARRATIVE SCIENCE’S ambitions include moving further up the ladder of quality. Both Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Hammond are professors of journalism as well as computer science. The company itself is an outgrowth of collaboration between the two schools.

“This kind of technology can deepen journalism,” says John Lavine, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern.

Mr. Hammond says the combination of advances in its writing engine and data mining can open new horizons for computer journalism, exploring “correlations that you did not expect” — conceptually similar to “Freakonomics,” by two humans, the economist Steven D. Levitt and the author Stephen J. Dubner.

Mr. Hammond cited a media maven’s prediction that a computer program might win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 20 years — and he begged to differ.

“In five years,” he says, “a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology.”

Should it happen, the prize, of course, would not be awarded to abstract code, but to its human creators.

Science Journalism is specialized genre and reporters should have a good grounding in the sciences. They should also realize that scientists also make silly and stupid mistakes and watch for them. Here is a good example:Instant Cosmic Classic' Supernova Discovered
| from the transfixed-by-distant-lights dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Friday August 26, @08:52 (Space)
| with 138 comments
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/26/1236202/Instant-Cosmic-Classic-Supernova-Discovered?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

chill sends this quote from a news release by the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory: "A [0]supernova discovered yesterday is closer to
Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away—than any other of its
kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they [1]caught the supernova
within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a
specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools.
'We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting
brighter by the minute. It’s already 20 times brighter than it was
yesterday,' said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who
first spotted the supernova. ... the supernova is still getting brighter,
and might even be visible with good binoculars in ten days’ time,
appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30
years."

Discuss this story at:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/26/1236202/Instant-Cosmic-Classic-Supernova-Discovered?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/supernova/
1. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/25/astroalert-type-ia-supernova-in-m101/
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS REPORT? OUR SCIENCE DISCOVERER TELLS US THAT THEY DISCOVERED THE EXPLOSION WITHIN HOURS OF IT HAPPENING. DUH! HOW DID THEY GET 21 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY AND BACK AGAIN TO TELL US THIS IN LESS THEN A WEEK? THESE GUYS ARE SO WARPED THEY THINK THAT THEY HAVE A SPECIAL WARP DRIVE AND ARE NOT AFFECTED BY THE LIMITS OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT NOR TIME NOR ANYTHING. TRULY SOMEONE YOU SHOULD BE VERY CAREFUL CREDITING AND QUOTING.

Wow, can you believe it good news! And it's from the news broadcasting industry. This has been happening for some time with print papers in small local markets. I love the 4th paragraph were they state that the station is hiring broadcasters and in some cases employees. Ummm aren't broadcasters employees? Anyway here is the full story from the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/business/media/newly-flush-local-tv-newscasts-are-expanding.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25

Local TV Newscasts Expanding
Tim Parker for The New York Times

Leisa Zigman, an anchor at KSDK, which will begin newscasts as early as 4 a.m. next month.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: August 21, 2011

ST. LOUIS — Coming soon to this city’s television screens: more news at 4 in the morning, again at 10, and at 4 in the afternoon.
Enlarge This Image
Tim Parker for The New York Times

Casey Nolan of KSDK in St. Louis setting up a location shot.

KSDK, the local NBC affiliate, is adding newscasts to those time slots next month, giving it six and a half hours of local news each weekday, its highest count to date.

As in many other markets, the news is starting earlier than ever in the morning, and replacing “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the afternoon. To supply it in St. Louis, KSDK is hiring 10 people and buying new cameras and trucks.

This is what the rebound in local television looks like. Three years after the business buckled under the weight of the advertising recession, the more popular stations in markets like St. Louis are adding newscasts and in some cases employees — though not as many as were dismissed during the downturn.

Station economics affect the nation’s news diet because local TV news is consistently identified in surveys as the top news source for most Americans.

A study commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission concluded earlier this year that although there were pockets of excellence in local news, there was still a heavy reliance on thinly stretched staffs and predictable crime and weather coverage.

Three trends have benefited the local station business. First, advertisers have streamed back, especially in the automotive sector that is so important to local media.

Steve Ridge of Frank N. Magid Associates, which consults with local stations nationwide, said local TV ad revenues were up almost 25 percent in 2010 compared with 2009, buttressed by political ad spending. So far this year, even without political ads, the owners of several big groups of stations reported slight upticks in ad revenues versus 2010.

Second, cable and satellite companies have agreed in many cases to pay retransmission fees to stations, and bigger stations in local markets can command bigger fees. Even though stations are splitting those fees with their network partners, like NBC and ABC, they “really have been an infusion of stability,” Mr. Ridge said.

Third, the downturn became a rationale not only to cut costs but to innovate and experiment within news divisions, which have historically been profit centers for stations. The benefit of the industry’s bad times, executives say, is that it forced a hard look at news operations.

“Our view was that local broadcasting had gone on autopilot,” said Dave Lougee, the president of Gannett Broadcasting, which owns KSDK. Industrywide, he said, newscasts had “become sort of commoditized and formulaic — arguably in many cases irrelevant.”

Lynn Beall, the president and general manager of KSDK, said the turbulence “helped us put our focus more on the customer.” KSDK’s anchors and reporters now interact with some of those customers on Facebook and Twitter, making them more aware of community interests. Some of KSDK’s newscasts now include commentary segments. And perhaps most important, many employees have been trained to be what Gannett calls multimedia journalists, also known as one-man bands, able to record, produce and report pieces from start to finish.

“We have more people gathering content than we did a year ago, because more people are trained on more platforms,” Ms. Beall said.

Such arrangements have been a source of grumbling for TV journalists for years, but for those who have never experienced the old way — a reporter, a videographer and sometimes a producer and a sound technician — the new way is more acceptable, and sometimes even preferable.

Some of the changes, Ms. Beall acknowledged, were born out of necessity. During the recession, employees at KSDK were furloughed; at other stations across the country, longtime reporters and anchors were ushered out. Gannett consolidated the graphics and master control operations of its stations to a centralized location, eliminating more workers.

Now, Mr. Lougee said, with “the cost of technology coming down while the quality is going up,” stations have steered a greater percentage of their staffs toward producing content.

It is clear that investments are being made selectively. Because weather is consistently identified as the most important part of local newscasts, KSDK recently hired a fifth full-time member of its weather team and is adding dashboard cameras to its trucks to transmit live video via the Internet during severe weather.

The macroeconomic landscape for stations is still unsettled given the splintering television audience and the emerging Internet sources for news and entertainment that undermine the concept of a one-to-many broadcast. Uncertainty abounds about the reassignment of broadcast spectrum from television to new wireless uses.

But for now, some stations can still draw big audiences, both on TV and increasingly to their Web sites. A period of station buying and selling is anticipated by industry analysts this year, as shown by McGraw-Hill, which put its four full-power stations up for sale earlier this summer.

The rebound has not treated all stations equally. Mr. Ridge said he sensed that the downturn and the measured recovery since then “widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

“The stronger stations are now poised to really dominate in these markets, and the smaller stations are now less able to compete, because all around, the economics are not working for them,” he said.

That manifests itself in so-called shared-services agreements, in which one station in a market runs part or all of another station. The Communications Workers of America union said last year that it had identified at least 25 local markets where such outsourcing agreements were in place, and criticized them for reducing journalistic competition and “the diversity of local voices in a community.”

In St. Louis, KSDK is now paid to produce two newscasts a day for KDNL, the city’s ABC affiliate, which is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. KDNL had stopped producing its own newscasts nearly a decade ago; Ms. Beall characterized the work as a partnership.

Employees at local stations, for the most part, are not getting much breathing room. Bob Papper, a Hofstra University professor who surveys local television staffs, found a gain of 750 jobs in 2010, which made up for the 400 lost jobs in 2009, but made only a small dent in the 1,200 lost jobs in 2008.

At the same time, “the average amount of news went up 18 minutes per weekday in 2010,” he said via e-mail, adding, “I suspect we could see an even bigger jump in 2011.”

That is in part because of the shake-up in the syndication market. Without Ms. Winfrey’s show, KSDK is spending less on syndication, Mr. Lougee said; now it has more to spend on news.

Getting the news is what a reporters life is about, mostly. The hows and where fors are now front page news. If I read the following correctly we have here a conspiracy to to commit a crime and racketeering both crimes which have in the past resulted in very long prison sentences. What do you think?


Clive Goodman, suspended News of The World royal correspondent, arrives at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in central London in this August 16, 2006 file photo. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico/Files

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON | Fri Aug 19, 2011 1:49pm EDT

(Reuters) - Executives at Rupert Murdoch's UK-based News International are concerned that emails discussing questionable payments made to police by the News of the World may prove more problematic than those that discuss phone hacking, sources familiar with investigations into the shuttered tabloid's reporting practices said.

There are growing concerns inside the company that evidence of questionable payments to police -- or other British public officials -- could fuel investigations by U.S. authorities into possible breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), an American law that prohibits corrupt payments to foreign government officials. News International is owned by New York-based News Corp (NWSA.O).

"We're more frightened by the (U.S. Justice Department) than we are of Scotland Yard," a source close to News Corp who was briefed about the content of the emails told Reuters. "All Scotland Yard can go after is News International but the Justice Department can go after all of News Corporation."

Thousands of News of the World emails were assembled in 2007 when News International executives and lawyers at an outside firm were preparing responses to a litigation threat lodged by Clive Goodman, a former reporter for the News of the World, who was jailed for hacking into voicemail messages of aides to Britain's Royal family.

The emails sat ignored for years in the archives of London law firm Harbottle & Lewis. News International retrieved them earlier this year and showed them to Ken MacDonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales and a member of the House of Lords. MacDonald recently told Parliament that after he read the messages in May, it had taken him "about three minutes, maybe five minutes" to determine that they contained evidence of possible criminality.

The company subsequently turned over the e-mails to London's Metropolitan police, who shortly after receiving them set up a team to investigate payments to police officers. The company later authorized Harbottle & Lewis to cooperate with parliamentary and police investigators.

While much has been made of emails related to the phone hacking scandal, which since July has sparked a flurry of resignations within the company and Scotland Yard, some at News International are more worried by emails referring to payments to police.

The source close to News Corp said lawyers hired by News International were soon expected to question journalists at more than one of Murdoch's British publications about possible payments to both UK police officers and other British public officials.

Last month News Corp hired Mark Mendelsohn, who served as the deputy chief of the Fraud Section in the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). Mendelsohn is internationally acknowledged and respected as the architect and key enforcement official of the DOJ's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement program.

Reuters is a competitor of Dow Jones Newswires, the financial news agency that News International's New York-based parent company News Corp acquired along with the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

GREEN BOOK

The source close to News Corp said the email traffic indicates Goodman and the then-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, agreed that an unnamed police contact should receive a "four-figure sum" for leaking a confidential file known as the "green book" containing information about the movements, locations and phone numbers of members of the royal family.

The source said the dossier held by Harbottle & Lewis also included financial records showing the precise amount mentioned in the e-mail traffic was paid out in cash. The payment was made on or about the same day of the alleged e-mail exchange, to a recipient who used a pseudonym.

The source, and a second source briefed on the matter, said the evidence available to News International now indicates that neither the paper nor its outside lawyers sought to review the archived evidence relating to police corruption, or to further examine its content, between the time the material was sent to storage in 2008 and its retrieval earlier this year.

A spokeswoman for News International said she could not discuss the emails or how the company handled them due to a continuing investigation by British police.

Harbottle & Lewis says it has been asked by police to not make public the emails' contents "to preserve the integrity of their criminal investigation."

Thursday, parliamentary officials were expected to ask News International to authorize Burton Copeland, a second outside law firm retained by the publisher, to help the company look into questionable practices, the source close to News Corp told Reuters.

"LARGE NUMBER OF EMAILS"

In February, 2007, not long after Goodman pleaded guilty to phone hacking charges, Les Hinton, then News International's executive chairman, wrote to Goodman to fire him, according to documents made public Tuesday by a parliamentary committee.

A month later, Goodman sent a letter to News International's human resources director appealing his sacking. In it, Goodman claimed his activities were carried out with "full knowledge" of other executives at the paper. Goodman noted that even after he was jailed, the News of the World "continued to employ me for a substantial part of my custodial sentence."

As a result of Goodman's claims, the company launched both an internal review of relevant evidence -- by News International's human resources and legal affairs directors -- and a further review by Harbottle & Lewis.

In a submission to parliament, Jon Chapman, News International legal director in 2007, said he and personnel chief Daniel Cloke went through a "large number of emails" to try to determine whether a "limited and specified number of individuals" knew about Goodman's involvement in phone hacking. They found "no such evidence," Chapman said. He said Hinton subsequently asked that outside lawyers review the same emails looking for the same kind of evidence.

In its submission to Parliament, Harbottle & Lewis said News International asked the firm to look through five batches of News of the World emails for evidence that certain individuals knew of Goodman's involvement in phone hacking or that other journalists were involved in phone hacking.

The law firm emphasized it "was not retained to look for evidence of wider criminal activities and did not do so," and said it was only "being asked to assist News International in dealing with Mr. Goodman's internal appeal against his dismissal."

The law firm said the e-mails it collected were shipped to an outside storage company in November 2008 and were not retrieved until March 25 of this year, when the firm reached into its archives at the request of News International lawyers.

(Editing by Martin Howell, Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)

The evolution of Journalism quickens. Wikileaks dramatically revealed the weakness of our present day corporation owned and controlled media. Murdocs News group revealed the problems that occur when an established news organization tries to obtain news the same illegal way the the wiki boys did. Another thing to consider is what sort of news did these two different organizations reveal? With Wikileaks it seems we are given news we need to know but don't necessarily want to know. Were as in the latter case we get news (entertainment) we like to here but do not need to know. That is private, personal and sometimes tragic revelations revealed. So here from the New York Times:
July 28, 2011
In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship
By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — “After all the wind and storm, what’s going on with the high-speed train?” read the prophetic message posted last Saturday evening on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo. “It’s crawling slower than a snail. I hope nothing happens to it.”

They were a few short sentences, typed by a young girl with the online handle Smm Miao. But five days later, the torrent that followed them was still flooding this nation’s Internet, and lapping at the feet of government bureaucrats, censors and the state-controlled press.

The train the girl saw, on a track outside Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province, was rammed from behind minutes later, killing 39 people and injuring 192. Since then, China’s two major Twitter-like microblogs — called weibos here — have posted an astounding 26 million messages on the tragedy, including some that have forced embarrassed officials to reverse themselves. The messages are a potent amalgam of contempt for railway authorities, suspicion of government explanations and shoe-leather journalism by citizens and professionals alike.

The swift and comprehensive blogs on the train accident stood this week in stark contrast to the stonewalling of the Railways Ministry, already stained by a bribery scandal. And they are a humbling example for the Communist Party news outlets and state television, whose blinkered coverage of rescued babies only belatedly gave way to careful reports on the public’s discontent.

While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of weibos as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the Internet’s influence.

The government censors assigned to monitor public opinion have let most, though hardly all of the weibo posts stream onto the Web unimpeded. But many experts say they are riding a tiger. For the very nature of weibo posts, which spread faster than censors can react, makes weibos beyond easy control. And their mushrooming popularity makes controlling them a delicate matter.

Saturday’s train disaster is a telling example — an event that resonated with China’s growing middle class, computer-savvy, able to afford travel by high-speed rail, already deeply skeptical of official propaganda.

As state television devoted Saturday evening to reports of mass murder in Norway, Sina Weibo weighed in four minutes after the train accident with a post from the crash scene, by a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.” Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!” Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.

Then the reaction began to pour in. “Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official. “Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”

From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.

Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission. After weibos exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.

Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident. On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis. China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”

“I call it the microblogging revolution,” Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday. “In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”

The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibos for millions to see. So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.

Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. But the field is dominated by two players. Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo (pronounced SEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors. Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.

In some ways, the Chinese weibos replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said). Posts can be re-tweeted, too, although in China, tweeting is called knitting, because the word “weibo” sounds like the word for scarf.

There are also differences. Bloggers can comment on others’ posts, turning a message into a conversation. Users also can include photographs and other files with their posts, to telling effect: on Thursday, fact-checking bloggers posted photos of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent official activities to counter his assertion at a Wenzhou news conference that illness had kept him from visiting the disaster site earlier.

While Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked here, their Chinese counterparts thrive, largely because their owners consent to government monitoring and censorship — and perhaps because the government fears the reaction should it shut them down. The outpouring over the rail tragedy appears to have enjoyed at least some official approval; many analysts believe the government sees microblogs as a virtual steam valve through which citizens can safely vent complaints.

If needed, the weibos have literally dozens of electronic levers they can press to dilute, hide or delete offending posts, according to one Tencent Web editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of dismissal in disclosing that information. Yet the weibos also play cat and mouse with the censors.

“If we did not have any free speech then this company would not have any influence, so the company must act proactively to safeguard our space,” he said. “So that’s why they must go through this process of bargaining with the government departments.”

And even dedicated censors find the weibos hard to restrain. Government minders can electronically delete posts with offending keywords like “human rights” and “protest.” But like Twitter, the ability to instantly forward posts to dozens of fellow users means that messages can spread, well before censorship orders can be implemented.

And there are always screenshots to preserve posts that are deleted, such as this one by Ge You, one of China’s most distinguished actors:

“If a higher-level leader died,” he wrote, “there would be countless wreaths; however, when many ordinary people died, there was only endless harmony” — a euphemism for censorship. “If a higher-level leader died, there would be nationwide mourning; however, when many ordinary people died, there was not a single word of apology. If a higher-level leader died, there would be high-end funerals; however, when many ordinary people died, there were only cold numbers.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Adam Century, Li Mia, Li Bibo and Edy Lin contributed research.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
back to me
So in our "free and open society" we still have cover ups and in repressed dictatorships we still have freedom of expression despite censorship all through this wonderful internet and www. I wish George Orwell was here to see it. He would have loved (hated) the cameras in England as something he predicted for the USSR rather then his home country, although as a former civil servant he understood that the USSR was just a metaphor for here and there.

The concept of trust that has to be established with sources is incredible important for all journalists. It is the foundation on which they can collect information and it's betrayal is a failure of honour and a collapse of trust. This can result in a closing of sources which are so very important to finding the information which the public depends on journalists to provide.
Shame, shame, shame on Wired...Wired Releases Full Manning/Lamo Chat Logs
| from the crossed-fingers-legally-binding dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday July 15, @08:06 (The Media)
| with 282 comments
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]bill_mcgonigle writes "After more than a year, Wired has finally
released the (nearly) full [1]chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley
Manning. Glen Greenwald provides [2]analysis of what Wired previously
left out. Greenwald writes: 'Lamo lied to and manipulated Manning by
promising him the legal protections of a journalist-source and
priest-penitent relationship, and independently assured him that their
discussions were "never to be published" and were not "for print."
Knowing this, Wired hid from the public this part of their exchange,
published the chat in violation of Lamo's clear not-for-publication
pledges, allowed Lamo to be quoted repeatedly in the media over the next
year as some sort of credible and trustworthy source driving reporting on
the Manning case.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs
2. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/14/wired/index.html

Here, now in Japan there is a new awareness and sensitivity to energy consumption and the question has come up about which is the most energy efficient media for distributing the news? Print, T.V.,radio, internet, telephony ie, twit etc. What do you think?

The comic book of Journalism has arrived and you can take a look at the first chapter.The Influencing Machine
culturebox:
entries
12
The Goldilocks Number
By Brooke Gladstone
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:32 AM ET
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE

The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Read Gladstone's explanation of the book and a first excerpt about journalistic objectivity here. http://www.slate.com/id/2291942?wpisrc=newsletter_tis

This is something that we talked about a short time ago..the use of fictitious numbers were real one are hard to find or the reporter is just lazy.

The real danger of personalised news is that you don't get what you need to know only what you want to know.
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
| from the sound-of-your-own-voice dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 15, @23:21 (Censorship)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that
tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user,
restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly —
only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred
liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the
converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even
Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they
give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step
outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through
personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a
problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to
embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have
transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look
different than someone with opposing tastes." Hit the link below to watch
a video of Pariser's talk.

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
| from the gentlemen-start-your-computers dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 16, @01:55 (Australia)
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0259231/Tenth-Annual-AusCERT-Conference-Kicks-Off?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

What drives the news in the internet age? Here is one report:
Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
| from the nobody-cares-about-your-day dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 09, @11:15 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's
Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a
far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or
Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers
as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other [0]interesting
findings about news behavior."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/05/pew-the-drudge-report-drive-more-top-news-traffic-than-twitter-or-facebook.html

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2011



Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
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The classified section of KSL, a TV station in Salt Lake City, attracts 250 million page views a month. A study says part of its success comes from reflecting the community's moral values.
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That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

In a report released on Tuesday, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlines those recommendations and others, all intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.

“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”

And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.

The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”

That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”

It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”

The report is a product of several months of visits to news organizations. Mr. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report on Tuesday evening.

The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.

“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)

One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.

But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.

Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:

"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.

The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”

As an example, it cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season. “That gets you out of the pure ‘five dollars for every thousand page views’ model,” Mr. Grueskin said.

The report’s authors take a dim view of online subscriptions to news, cautioning that news sites “now should have very limited expectations for its success — at least on the Web.”

They are more bullish on the prospects of subscriptions for mobile access. They write, “If publishers really hope to expunge the ‘original sin’ of giving away content free online, they may be best positioned to do so not on the computers where they first gave away their wares, but on mobile devices that offer a more welcoming environment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists, A Call to Rethink Their Online Models.

Here are three separate articles, all from Slashdot, reporting on the rapid change in what we think of as Journalism:
First Ever Pulitzer For Non-Print Series
| from the take-a-lesson-rupert dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, @21:58 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]decora writes "[1]Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an
online news site. This year, they have been [2]awarded the first Pulitzer
for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and
Bernstein's 'The Wall Street Money Machine,' which described how hedge
funds and financiers profited from the collapse of the economy.
ProPublica publishes under a [3]Creative Commons license and hosts a
[4]Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and
publish [5]open source tools they have developed."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:decorat@mail.com
1. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/13/2020227/First-Pulitzer-Awarded-To-an-Online-News-Site
2. http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/
3. http://www.propublica.org/about/steal-our-stories
4. http://www.propublica.org/nerds
5. http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/timelinesetter-easy-timelines-from-spreadsheets-now-open-to-allThe Internet's New Alternate Reality
| from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-interweb dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 03, @05:11 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when
President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and —
to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House
briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many
leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very
recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined
a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes —
dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has
[1]drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0430-rutten-20110430,0,6735231.columnBin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
| from the almost-nothing-of-value dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 03, @08:49 (Twitter)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
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[0]gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its
inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate
last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the
[1]highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m.
ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."

Discuss this story at:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:g.perna@ibtimes.com
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140411/20110502/twitter-osama-bin-laden-twitter-record.htm

And again from the New York Times another very slanted Head Line:

- ON THIS DAY -
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
See This Front Page
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/April-30?th=&emc=tha213&nl=todaysheadlines
Buy This Front Page
http://www.nytstore.com/Front-Page-New-York-Times-Reprint_p_103.html
"Fell to Communist Forces"?? Well most people in the world at the time saw it from the other side of the line. Vietnamese capital of Saigon Liberated by Vietnamese forces.
The following are much funnier and thus slightly suspect as real headlines, however, you get the idea:

Proofreading is a dying art, wouldn't you say?
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day.
I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny...
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
No crap, really? Ya think?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers



Now that's taking things a bit far!
----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; VeterinarianTakes Over
What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!
------------------------------------------------------
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
See if that works any better than a fair trial!
----------------------------------------------------------
War Dims Hope for Peace
I can see where it might have that effect!
----------------------------------------------------------------
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Ya think?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Who would have thought!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Enfield (London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
They may be on to something!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?
----------------------------------------------------------
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
He probably IS the battery charge!
----------------------------------------------
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
That's what he gets for eating those beans!
---------------- ---------------------------------
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Do they taste like chicken?
******************************
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
*************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Boy, are they tall!
*******************************************
And the winner is....
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Did I read that right?
***************************************************

Here is a very good example of a bad headline. Headlines should catch your attention but also describe as best they can,accurately, what the story is about.
- TECHNOLOGY -
PC Sales Off, Games Buoy Microsoft
A slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft was
overshadowed by strong sales of its Kinect and Xbox video
game products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/technology/29microsoft.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
As you can see 'a slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft' leads. Microsoft does not sell computers, so a slow down of zero is how many sales?? Thinking should be involved in headline writing as well as writing the story itself.