The FJP

May 16

Google’s Richard Gingras: We are at the beginning of a journalism renaissance -

via Nieman Journalism Lab:

Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his8 questions that will define the future of journalism.

On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues.

Click-through to watch the video.

Infographic: How is the Newspaper Industry Trying to Save Itself?

via GOOD & Column Five Media

“

The past two decades have witnessed a disconcerting decline in the quality of coverage, particularly by TV networks obsessed with presentation rather than content. This became more pronounced during the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The ‘dictatorship’ of live-time coverage has proved especially subversive. ‘Parachuted’ journalists are obliged to broadcast within minutes, even if they have no idea what’s going on.

This means less legwork. As veteran producers lament, their networks have abandoned real journalism, while Fox News is nothing more than propaganda. Wars are now presented as reality shows with computer game graphics and screaming captions.

” —

“Lessons from Afghanistan: Let’s Get Back to Real Foreign Reporting,” a perspective on foreign reporting from Edward Girardet, former foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.

via Nicholas Kristof

May 15

The New Renaissance Journalism Website

If you’re not already familiar, Renaissance Journalism, a program of San Francisco State University’s Department of Journalism, is a great resource on the future of news (especially for those in the Bay Area). Also see their new media toolkit for curated tools and tutorials. Some new features include:

What’s New?

A new blog called “Media Matters” by Jon Funabiki, Renaissance Journalism’s executive director, who weaves together insights from a career that spans journalism, philanthropy and academia.

Bay Area Ethnic & Community Media Map: Based on a 2011 Renaissance Journalism survey, we’ve charted the more than 140 ethnic and community media organizations in the Bay Area. You can narrow down your search by primary language or search by a news outlet’s name.

Resources page, where we’ll be posting studies, research and writings on media innovations—from Renaissance Journalism and other journalism and media organizations—as well as links to many of our partners’ and collaborators’ websites.

“

If things that are not journalism entertain, inform and facilitate agency better than things that are, don’t bet on journalism to thrive.

I work for a newspaper and I think about how to reinvent newspapers and reassert their relevance all the time. And people are consuming more news than ever, so we must be doing something right. My guess, though? Most innovation in media and most of the revenue and most of the value will come not from the incumbents and not even from news startups, but from people who unwittingly stumble into producing media as the solution to another problem.

” —

Stijn Debrouwere in his recent blog post on the state of the news industry and opportunities ahead.

He argues that journalism’s disrupters are companies that don’t actually produce journalism, but fulfill the same underlying consumer needs that traditional journalism has sought to fulfill.

I will repeat this because it’s important: YouTube nor Facebook or any of these other companies aim to be an alternative to journalism and much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all. A good chunk of it contains written or spoken words, but sometimes not even that. It’s not journalism. But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news. It’s the same kind of functionality in a different package, after all, and that new package happens to be rather attractive a lot of the time.

Thus, the shift in journalism is radical—“from narrative and stories and reporting to entirely different and entirely unrelated ways of sharing knowledge.”

News organizations and publications may be able to survive in the digital era, but that’s about it:

I’m confident that strong digital players like The Guardian and the New York Times and Digital First Media will survive. I’m less confident that they’ll ever thrive. I mean, we’re congratulating The Guardian for losing money online, NYTbecause its paywall isn’t the crash-and-burn we expected it to be, and because the Journal Register Company is in the black. If you don’t go out of business, you’re a hero.

Through this same lens, he comments on effective changes being made in the news industry, and what more can be done.

If people tell you, as they did assistant professor Amy Zerba’s research assistants, that they hate not being able to multitask when reading a newspaper, does that mean we should try to find ways to make it easier for readers to multitask, or is it simply a symptom of people not caring all that much about the news? And does that in turn mean they just don’t care about stuff in general anymore and have become jaded and uninterested in politics and world news (for which there is some evidence), or is there more to it and are people perhaps getting their information needs met in other, more convenient or more exciting ways? Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore? Perhaps we should take the best traditions of journalism and do something entirely new with it.

Read on. The comments on the post are most interesting, as are the reactions storified by Burt Herman.

The First Accredited Foreign Correspondent to be Expelled from China in 14 Years -

Chan, who was the sole Al Jazeera English correspondent in China, said she knew she was on shaky ground for most of this year.

She had been working on month-by-month credentials since January, when the government refused a routine visa-renewal request. Ordinarily, journalists are granted year-long credentials, but Chan is believed to be the first foreign correspondent to be given temporary papers.

In March, she wrote about a distraught mother seeking a daughter who had been forcibly sterilized and put in an illegal “black jail” for violating China’s one-child policy.

“A lot of journalists have done black jail stories,” she said, but hers “was probably the first” to get coverage on TV. “It’s also the first time that we got a government official to respond to a question about the existence of black jails.” The official denied the black jails existed, “but it was on the record, Chan said, “so that was useful for human rights groups. And that could be one reason why there’s the perception that I’m a go-getter.”

Click through to keep reading.

FJP Has a New Mascot

Jihii just returned from two weeks in India and brought this guy back with her. Naming rights are open since he (at least she says he’s a he) doesn’t yet have one.

Hit us up with your recommendations or suggest something if you reblog.

theatlantic:

Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man

At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia University Human Rights Review published and posted its Spring 2012 issue — devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the “gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision.” […]

The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don’t have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.

Read more. [Image: Corpus Christi Police Department]

UK newspapers reveal Saturday-only sales for first time -

New figures have revealed the extent to which UK national newspaper Saturday circulations far exceed sales on Monday to Friday.

The shift in reporting the circulation figures for particular days, instead of lumping them together may seem like a small change to reporting figures but it also signals the beginning of a seismic shift in the business model of UK newspapers. If Saturday is the best day to publish a newspaper, maybe it’ll become the only day?

As the shift to online reporting via iPad, apps and the web itself continues, we could see newspapers using their websites during the week and the Saturday edition become bumper packages with more long form journalism, features and lifestyle stories.

This could be a long-drawn out affair or a quick one - after all, The Economist has seen steady increases in readership and initiatives like Matter show that there is an appetite for less noise in users consumption of news. Intriguing times.

May 11

Things You Can Do That You Never Used To

Via Archive.org:

For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.

So if you can’t get enough of whatever it is they’re trying to do in the Situation Room, a one gig tarball of text is waiting for your download.

H/T: Flowing Data

New York Times Give Red Sox the Boo -

Via the New York Times:

The New York Times has sold its remaining stake in the Fenway Sports Group, the company that owns the Boston Red Sox, the latest in a continuing effort to shed assets unrelated to the company’s flagship newspaper…

…In 2002, The Times paid $75 million for a 17.75 percent stake in Fenway. But the 2008 recession and the steady decline of print advertising revenue at newspapers like The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, has prompted the company to shed its nonessential assets.

As a Boston fan who knows the Red Sox suck, nonessential? Harsh.

Google-NSA: A Relationship That Dares Not Speak Its Name -

Via Wired:

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.

That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google to consider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.

EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail.

In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.

On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security. (.pdf)