Monday, June 30, 2008

Possibly the best slideshow so far ...

Photographer Lucas Oleniuk and columnist Jennifer Wells reflect on the Conrad Black trial.

Know any other good ones?

Who needs those bloody subs anyway?!?!

About 40 editing jobs expected to go at Fairfax

NZPA

Fairfax Media, which owns The Dominion Post and The Press among other publications, today flagged lay-offs of about 40 sub-editors.

The company said it had 190 sub-editors across the group and although initial indications suggested about 40 redundancies, no firm numbers could be given until after a consultation period.

The move is another blow to the news media industry. This month the New Zealand Press Association announced it was cutting seven jobs and last year TVNZ cut nearly 60 news and current affairs jobs while The New Zealand Herald's publisher, APN New Zealand, cut 70 sub-editors in an out-sourcing move.

APN said at the time it w anted to centralise the sub-editing of all its print titles with Pagemasters, which hired up to 50 people.

Fairfax Media said today that the move was part of its plan to have "national centres of expertise" for world, features and business pages on its nine daily newspapers. More generic pages such as the weather and tv pages could follow.
MORE

So ... does this represent a slow and steady erosion of the standards of journalism???

Us v Them, or rather, new v old media

Yup, the "fight", if you want to call it that, is still going on strong, as seen in the furore over the Associated Press taking issue with The Drudge Report. Good or bad move? What does it represent?

Here's some takes on it:

Associated Press takedown notice sets the net abuzz

Bloggers to AP: I got your feed right here

I don't understand why it has to be an Us V Them type scenario to be honest. In the end, news wires like AP are still, I believe the lifeblood of the news industry. Without them, news would be one unregulated mess. Maybe that's how the bloggers like it, I don't know. But I can't see how sifting through millions of blogs to get just a decent bit of information would be feasible as a newsgathering activity. Or, I could be wrong ...

But yes, AP is cutting back, and so is Reuters. So maybe one day it'll just be blogs eh?

What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia

By Clay Shirky

Nick Carr is right. Now what?

As new capabilities go, effortless distribution of unlimited perfect copies is a lulu. (Throw in low cost, accessibility to amateurs, and global reach, just for good measure.) Defending businesses based on scarce production is simply special pleading in the face of a change this epochal.

That’s not to say that the beneficiaries of the old system are above a bit of special pleading; indeed, there is a whole literature of newspaper publishers equating their falling revenues with social calamity.

To hear publishers tell it, they are deeply concerned about losing their audience, but the facts don’t bear this out. They’ve been losing their audience since 1984, the year readership first began shrinking (and ten years before the launch of the commercial web.) When their audience was shrinking but their ad revenues were growing, they were mum about social value. Now that the web means their audience is growing again but their ad revenues are falling, they’ve suddenly discovered their civic function. (Next stop: publishers lobbying for federal support on national security grounds. This will happen within two years.)
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Monday, June 9, 2008

Shoot the messenger

I've been away travelling for a while, but I'm back, and will try and post as often as I can.

In this news this weekend was the death of two BBC journalists - one in Somalia and another in Afghanistan. Both were murdered.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the number of journalists killed rose 244 per cent in five years (ending 2007).

"At least 86 journalists were killed around the world in 2007. The figure has risen steadily since 2002 - from 25 to 86 (+ 244%) - and is the highest since 1994, when 103 journalists were killed, nearly half of them in the Rwanda genocide, about 20 in Algeria’s civil war and a dozen in the former Yugoslavia.

More than half those killed in 2007 died in Iraq."

Grim stats indeed...


Image from Reporters Without Borders