Posts tagged media
Call for Entries: $1 Million African News Challenge
The African Media Initiative has opened a $1 million news challenge. The initiative will offer grants from $12,500 to $100,000 for African-based projects and is modeled after the Knight News Challenge in the United States.
This innovation challenge focuses on journalism and the news media.
We are looking for disruptive digital ideas for improving the way that news is collected and disseminated.
By digital ideas, we mean tools or strategies that use the Internet, mobile platforms, data driven journalism, computer assisted reporting, digitally augmented reality, or other electronic means to improve the relevance and impact of news media.
Your ideas should be focused on providing pragmatic solutions to realworld challenges facing Africa’s media.
Your innovation should fall into any of four broad categories: news gathering; story telling; audience engagement; or the business of news.
The competition opens today with the submission deadline on July 10.
More information is available here.
Times’ producer Ben Welsh created PastPages, an hourly archive of the homepages of major news media organizations.
I created this site because I think it ought to exist. The shifting homepages of major media sites should be saved so they can be studied. Done right, I believe PastPages could serve as a resource for scholars seeking to study coverage of news events, like the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
For Mainstream Media, Occupy and Economic Inequality are Yesterday’s News
Via Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:
Occupy Wall Street is rightly credited with helping to shift the economic debate in America from a fixation on deficits to issues of income inequality, corporate greed and the centralization of wealth among the richest 1 percent. The movement has chalked up other victories as well, from altering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax plan (New York Times, 12/5/11) to re-energizing activists and unions, but bringing some discussion of class into the mainstream dialogue has been one of its crowning achievements.
As Occupy slowed down for the winter, though, would corporate media continue to talk about our increasingly stratified society without a vibrant protest movement forcing their hand? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.
From June 2011 through March 2012, mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in the four papers first increased dramatically, then decreased slightly more slowly. The number of mentions per month ranged from 8 to 15 between June and September. Then in October, when OWS coverage peaked, “income inequality” mentions increased nearly fourfold to 44, and reached 52 mentions in November. January had a total of 64 mentions, though 13 of those stories focused on President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
By March, there were only 16 mentions of “income inequality,” half from the New York Times—which also far outpaced the other papers in coverage of OWS that month, at 45 mentions to the L.A. Times’ 12, the Post’s 10 and USA Today’s three, due in part to the scores arrested in New York City on the movement’s six-month anniversary on March 17.
Network broadcasts followed the same pattern, albeit with significantly lower numbers. From June to September, there was only one mention of income inequality (ABC, 8/10/11). Mentions across ABC, CBS and NBC jumped to seven in October and held fairly steady through January, but returned to zero by February.
Similarly, “income inequality” was barely mentioned on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News in the early months of the study. October saw a dramatic increase on MSNBC and CNN, with 10 and 14 mentions, respectively, while Fox News stayed low at only five mentions. The numbers peaked at 54 total in January—again, partially due to the SOTU—but by March, “income inequality” was mentioned only six times across all three cable news channels, four times on CNN and once each on MSNBC and Fox.
NPR followed the same pattern, with a peak of 18 mentions in October and only one mention each in February and March.
By 2017, there will be no printed metro newspapers, no local network TV stations, and few printed magazines. Weekly newspapers and video will be thriving. Tablets will be common and cheap. WiFi and WiMax will be everywhere. What do these and other predictions mean for the newspaper industry?
Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker, Ideas Magazine.
A bit dystopian, no?
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of access to information are vital whether you’re a credentialed journalist, a protester or a bystander with a camera. The First Amendment’s protections must extend to everyone.
Police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists simply for attempting to document political protests in public spaces. We are calling on the Justice Department to address this widespread abuse and protect everyone’s right to record.
Open letter in petition form via the Free Press to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
If interested, the petition can be signed here.
Primary Season Political Ads Bring New Low to Negativity
Can the soaring music, sunrises and deep gazes, the Wesleyan Media Group analyzed political advertising through the presidential campaign primary season and finds that negativity isn’t just on the rise, it’s the norm.
Above we see the difference between positive and negative advertising during the primaries in 2008 and 2012. We’re showing the difference by candidate and by special interest (eg., PAC and Super PAC).
Overall, in 2008 nine percent of ads were negative. In 2012, 70 percent are.
Read on at the Wesleyan Media Project for more analysis.
TLDR: Citizen United and the rise of Super PACs are behind the negativity.
TV Mentions for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: April 25 to May 1
Note the words most associated with them.
Via Bejan Siavoshy.
Select to embiggen.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The FJP wishes all a happy and safe World Press Freedom Day.
Press Freedom: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Via the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas:
Less than 15 percent of the world’s population lives in a country with a full free press — the lowest level in more than a decade, according to Freedom House’s new report, Freedom of the Press 2012, released Tuesday, May 1. The global press freedom rankings were released to coincide with the May 3 celebration of World Press Freedom Day.
In general, the report found that, for the first time in eight years, worldwide media freedom did not decline overall. Still, of the 197 countries and territories examined, only 33.5 percent (66) were rated as “free.” The number of “partly free” countries increased to 72 (36.5 percent), and 59 (30 percent) were rated “not free.” Most of the world’s population (45 percent) lives in a country with a “partly free” press, the report showed. The rankings are based on the level of freedom in three categories: legal, political, and economic.
While the rest of the world saw no real decline in press freedom — and even improved in the Arab world — in the Americas, press freedom deteriorated in 2011, the report said. Both Chile and Guyana moved from “free” to “partly free,” and Ecuador’s overall numeric score declined significantly. Press freedom remained restricted in Venezuela and Cuba, and extreme danger for journalists in Mexico also hurt that country’s press freedom scores — both Mexico and Honduras remained listed as “not free” (see these Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas maps on press attacks in Mexico and Central America) While the United States continues to have one of the freer presses in the region, it, too, saw a slight decline because of arrests and harassment of journalists covering the Occupy movement.
The ongoing death of newspapers is not about changes in journalism, or the need for them. It is about a business model that has ceased to be relevant in the face of present technology. It used to be a poorly kept secret, but amid a vast array of competing histories, it’s been forgotten like last year’s canceled NBC sitcoms: What made newspapers successful was never the news. Newspapers provided vital services in people’s lives: their connections with their hometown, the notices of local events, the daily topics of conversation, the latest thoughts hovering over Snoopy’s head as he snored atop his doghouse. Many of these services were syndicated, and those that were not - like the classified ads - were intensely well managed. The front page, and the headlines therein, were merely the container…
…The Internet commandeered the services that newspapers once championed and delivered each of these services on an a la carte basis. In an earlier era, it made sense to bundle these services in a single package - the newspaper - and deliver it fully assembled. Today, the Web itself is the package, and each of the services now competes against other similar services in separate, often healthy, markets. And this is as it should be - this is not somehow wrong…
…There is no rational business model that can be formed around solely the production of news, just as many artists will attest that there is no stable business model around just an artist producing art that does not involve dying first. News must be bundled with a service. And that’s a problem, because the Web model is to unbundle everything, reduce every service to its basic and fundamental form, and present it to you as a site or, more recently, as an app. If you ask southern California venture capitalists what types of investments they’re searching for, they’ll tell you they’re looking for that one thing - not six things bundled together, not three existing things that complement one another. One disruptive thing.
And that thing tends to omit the word “news.
Huffington Post Wins Pulitzer
The Huffington Post’s David Wood won a Pulitzer for national reporting for a 10-part series called Beyond the Battlefield that explores the challenges Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans face after a decade of war.
HuffPo is the first online daily to win a Pulitzer.
Via Mashable:
The award may be Wood’s, but Huffington Post cofounder Arianna Huffington is a clear beneficiary. Over the past few years, Huffington has made a point of hiring experienced, well-known and (no doubt) expensive reporters like Wood.
The hirings are part of an effort to position the Huffington Post as a serious news organization — not, as former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has described it, as an “overaggregator” of “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications… [with] a left-wing soundtrack.”
The complete list of winners is available at Pulitzer.org.
How to Be a Pundit, Stephen Colbert Edition
Important tips for your future career.
The Wall Street Journal looks at the best and worst jobs of 2012 with data collected by CareerCast from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ranking criteria are based on physical demands, work environment, income, stress and hiring outlook.
Journalism doesn’t do well. Software Engineer leads the pack. For future journalists, combine the two and you might be on to something.
Image: Twitter post by Jason Gay, sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
This is Going to Get Awkward: Fox News Finds Gawker Mole
Yesterday, Gawker published an article by their newest contributor, “The Fox Mole,” a long-time employee of the network.
In it, the mole outlines his or her long list of grievances and then gives a behind the scenes account (and video) of pre-interview chatter between Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity where they talk horseback riding, primping and Donald Trump.
Today, Fox confirms to Mediaite that they know who The Fox Mole is. In a terse statement they write, “We found the person and we’re exploring legal options at this time.”
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