Media and Journalism – Page 4

Orange County Register outsources production to India

Outsource to India, says the deputy editor of the Orange County Register, California’s fifth-largest newspaper. On a one-month trial basis, Mindworks Global Media, an India-based company, will copy-edit some of the Register’s stories and lay out pages for a community newspaper at the same company that owns the Register.

Similar moved were made at the Irish Independent last year, except they outsourced production to an Irish firm RE&D and to some based in France I think. As best I can tell, that particular outsourcing project may have not been as successful as IN&M painted, or wanted, it to be. I would imagine this is to do with the disconnect between the production teams at a different premises, and the journalists who write the stories. They could bring some production back in-house later this year.

Still though, I guess there’s no harm in testing it out, as in the case of the Orange County Register.

Why Newspapers Must Embrace RSS

As an aside to my post on Jeff Jarvis, Felix Salmon has a good post over at Portfolio.com. Salmon is referring to a recent report from Forrester.

The main thing I’d try to communicate to the newspaper-industry readers of the Forrester report is that RSS and blogs are not unfortunate necessities, they’re one of your brightest hopes. Few US newspapers will ever be able to compete with the NYT in terms of attracting inbound links for the nation’s biggest stories. But when it comes to local content, the field is wide open: the NYT isn’t even the best newspaper for metro news in New York City, let alone anywhere else.

So embrace the bloggers in your area, encourage them, feed them, give them full RSS feeds sliced and diced to whatever specifications they desire, and let them bring you the new generation of readers which will replace the old print subscribers who are dying out. Don’t worry if you don’t make a lot of money serving ads to those bloggers directly: they’re much more useful as traffic drivers in any case.

Interesting too are the questions of why the NY Times should be bought by Google.

Jeff Jarvis at the Guardian and the future of journalism

Jeff links to two videos of him talking with staff at the Guardian about the future direction of the news organisation. As ever he is refreshing to watch, equally so as his writing, which I have been reading now for seven years.

Unfortunately many of my colleagues in the industry (in various firms) are slow to think about these changes, or the repercussions these changes will have for everyone working in the media in Ireland. I consider myself fortunate for not only having discovered Jeff’s writings early on (and indeed Dan Gillmor), but for the fact that I will myself shortly start my seventh year blogging. And I guess I am one of the relative few that made the transition from blogging to print media.

As for changing people’s habits in the old media world – I consider it a good day when I convert a colleague to Firefox 3 – nevermind Delicious, Magnolia, blogging, Twitter, RSS, Podcasts, or any of the other exciting things going on online.

Slowly but surely, I guess.

Jeff Part 1
Jeff Part 2

Gayle Killelea on journos

In an article about Irish print journalists not applauding Ahern’s speech to Congress, Gayle Killilea noted the following:

“Even worse, there is a growing tendency not to bother contacting the subject of the story at all, which goes against basic, rudimentary, journalistic ethics.”

Unfortunately, before writing her diatribe, it seems she did not bother to contact the journalists in question and ask them why they had not applauded.

She might have ended up with a more considered viewpoint had she done so.

Editing world news

I don’t blog much about work, mainly because there is no set conditions by which we blog. And also because text sub-editing doesn’t involve much in the way of newsiness.

Yesterday though I edited our two world pages for the first time. It was an interesting day, though Sunday can be slow I guess.

From the morning I had intended to lead with Berlusconi and the Italian elections on the first page and Zimbabwe on the second world page. Nothing much happened during the day to alter that.

Half way through the day news of a coalition in Kenya came through, so I decided to sit that beside the Zimbabwe story and use a lead picture of Kenyan President Kibaki. I think the BBC used a similar, or the same, picture – mainly because it was the best of a bad lot. Zimbabwe was still my lead, and the Obama ‘incident’ was my second lead. A leg of briefs, including the 8,000 year old trees story (made sure to keep that in, it was very interesting), H5N1 in South Korea and a couple of others. Downpage was a story on Tibetan monks being arrested, and some violence in Darfur on the fifth anniversary of the conflict.

On the first page nothing much changed from my morning plan, except some design alterations. I kept the Murat libel story, led with Italian election too with a main pic and colour piece below. A leg of briefs leading with Nepal elections and British tourists killed in Ecuador. The Italian woman killed in Turkey, the Paps selling drugs to Ledger story.. and that about summed it up.

I would have liked to have got in the BAE/corruption/banking story, but space dictated. I would also have liked to put in something about the Pope’s US visit, but again not enough space. Rawstory mentioned that he may snub a Whitehouse dinner.

Besides that I was happy enough, and I shall speak to the powers that be to get some feedback on my selections. I guess the other metric I have is the competition, and since I don’t have access to the Indo as yet I should look at what the IT picked.

They led with all the same stories. And about 70% of their offleads were the same. They gave more space to the old trees story than I did. They also got the Pope in which I would have liked, and a tee-up to Merkel’s visit to Ireland today (though it was a local journo writing colour really). Overall though pretty much the same selections, though they didn’t feature Darfur, Ledger, or the Italian lady killed in Turkey.

If I was writing in my capacity as an employee of de paper I would ask you for your opinions on future direction, or stories I missed that should have gone in.

But since this is purely a personal blog I cannot do so, though of course comments are always welcome.

Mahon Tribunal traffic

As a result of Ahern’s announcement, traffic to the Mahon Tribunal wiki has surged. I guess I should welcome colleagues from the BBC, Associated Newspapers, The Guardian, News International (Times), Sky News and the The Washington Post.

PS. I should ask Sadie Gray to perhaps contact me to clear up a number factual inaccuracies in her story.

Two questions…

On Friday’s Late Late show, Eamon Dunphy repeatedly pointed to an article by Gene Kerrigan in the Sunday Independent of March 23 . (It was, incidentally, a very good article).

1. Why can I not find this article on the Independent’s website?
2. Why did Eoghan Harris replace Gene Kerrigan on the back page of the Sindo today?

Answers in the comments section please.

For those interested, here is a copy of the article. Dunphy was right to reference it several times.

Update: Apparently Kerrigan was at a conference. It would have been nice of the Sindo to tell us that.

Google pulled in total revenues of £327m compared with an estimated £317m for all of ITV1’s output during the same period between July and September 2007.

The report said the new figures offered a significant milestone as it was the first time Google has overtaken ITV1 in pulling in UK advertising revenue.

Last year the ubiquitous internet firm surpassed Channel 4’s total advertising bounty, with Google generating £871m in revenue from sponsored links for 2006. For the first nine months of this year, Google’s advertising revenue increased to £925m.

Category: Media and Journalism