Al Jazeera International gets US carrier

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 April 2006 at 15:40
Tags: Al Jazeera, Journalism, United States

One stumbling block for Al Jazeera International’s global launch may have been overcome: the Qatar-based network has finally signed up a satellite operator to carry its new English-language rolling news channel in the United States, according to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

AJI had been struggling to find a US carrier, allegedly because of the companies’ concerns about Al Jazeera’s image in the United States.

Speaking to the Observer this weekend, however, AJI’s British managing director, Nigel Parsons, said: “America has been one of our most difficult markets, but the problems haven’t been political, they’ve been hard-nosed business negotiations with cable operators who have limited space and may not want to carry another news channel.”

Everything must go

Posted by Lou Thomas on 24 April 2006 at 10:49
Tags: Journalism, Regionals, United States

US regionals have felt the heat as much as their UK counterparts when it comes to declining ad revenue but on the other side of the pond they it look’s like the St Paul Pioneer Press doesn’t demand the 30 per cent profit margin expected by some British regional groups.

And hats off to the PP for being so up-front about the sale:

time is running out to submit a bid for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, if there’s still a chance at all.

What a line!

The cat and the correspondents’ caterer

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 19 April 2006 at 11:04
Tags: Journalism, United States

The media frenzy garnered by Molly, an 11-month old moggie that was trapped for two weeks in a hole in the wall of a food store in New York’s Greenwich Village, may in part be attributed to the fact that the owner of both the cat and the store is an Englishman from Keswick who for years has been a friend of many news people in New York.

Since his arrival in the US almost 20 years ago, Peter Myers has been providing British ex-pats with many of the delicacies they miss: veal and ham pies, Cornish pasties, Scotch eggs and Cumberland sausages.

He was a regular patron, from the start, of such newspaper hangouts as Costello’s, many of which served his home-made specialities. He also hand-delivered to journalists hankering after a taste of home.

The efforts to free Molly from her hole in the basement wall of Myers’ food shop attracted scores of journalists and resulted in stories, according to the New York Times, in papers all around the world including the Sun, plus papers in France, South Africa and Australia.
In some papers, Molly got as much space as Iraq. After her release from her hole in the wall, unharmed by her ordeal it seemed, Molly was treated to a meal of lean pork and sardines in olive oil. No black pudding for her.

Former Times correspondent will edit Marie Claire

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 19 April 2006 at 09:38
Tags: Journalism, Marie Claire, Times, United States

A former New York bureau chief for The Times has been appointed editor-in chief-of Marie Claire, the Hearst-owned American version of the French beauty and fashion magazine.

Joanna Coles replaces Lesley Jane Seymour, who has been editor for almost five years.

Coles, after leaving The Times in 2001, worked for New York Magazine, first as articles editor and then features editor. Eighteen months ago she joined More, the Meredith magazine for women over 50, as executive editor. She was a popular and respected editor.

Coles will take up her new job in May. Hearst has made no official comment except to announce Seymour is leaving the company.

One of the oddities of the unexpected change is that Marie Claire was recently nominated for an award at next month’s National Magazine Awards, its first nomination for at least five years. Also Marie Claire’s circulation, under Seymour, grew thre per cent in the second half of last year to a total of just under 1 million, plus another half million newsstand sales.

Hurricane-battered papers collect Pulitzer Prizes

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 18 April 2006 at 16:51
Tags: Journalism, United States

Two newspapers that virtually drowned in last year’s Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honours in American journalism.

The papers, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the smaller Sun-Herald in neighbouring Biloxi, Mississippi, received the awards, which were announced yesterday, for public service.

The Times-Picayune also won an award for its coverage of the disaster. When the hurricane hit, the paper had to evacuate its offices as the floodwaters rose. Although the paper was forced to suspend publication of its print edition for three days, it continued to publish online, drawing millions of readers from around the world to its web site, nola.com.

At the same time, the Sun-Herald managed to continue publication by switching its printing to a sister paper many miles away in Columbus, Georgia, and shipping the papers to Mississippi. It never missed an issue.

In respect to the dead still being mourned in New Orleans, the staff of the Times-Picayune (the name comes from the Spanish for “small coin�?) celebrated their gold medal without the normal champagne.

Other awards went to the Washington Post (four prizes) the New York Times (three) and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver (two). The New York Times receives one of its awards for its reports on national eavesdropping, the second for reports on China’s rough justice system and the third for its reports on genocide in Darfur.

The Washington Post got one of its awards for its probe into the alleged corrupt activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, another for its revelations about America’s secret anti-terrorist “black site” prisons and a third for dispatches from Yemen. The fourth, by contrast, was for its fashion reporting.

Reuters teams up with blogger network

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 April 2006 at 11:44
Tags: Blogs, International, Journalism, Reuters

Reuters has made a donation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University which will allow Global Voices Online, the international network of bloggers based at the university, to hire a full-time editor.

A statement from the newsagency said that the move was part of “efforts to invite a wider set of voices and viewpoints into the news discussion”.

Reuters says it will make material from Global Voices available on its websites.

Rebecca MacKinnon, the former CNN correspondent in Asia who is one of the co-Founder of Global Voices, said she hopes the partnership with Reuters will enable interaction between perspectives coming from citizen and professional journalists.

“We believe that bloggers and journalists share a common goal of informing an engaged global citizenry,” she said in a statement distributed by Reuters.

Carroll kidnappers demanded $8m

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 April 2006 at 10:13
Tags: ABC, Iraq, Journalism, United States, War reporting

The man who negotiated the release of American journalist Jill Carroll has said that her kidnappers were demanding a ransom of $8 million.

Speaking to the American television network ABC,  Sheikh Sattam al-Gaood, a former business associate of Saddam Hussein and supporter of the Iraqi insurgency, described the kidnapping of the freelance working for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor as “a mistake”.

Al-Gaood, who was one of the people thanked by Carroll’s family following her release, denied that he had paid the ransom demanded by her kidnappers, but had instead arranged to pay for widows and orphans of Iraqi insurgents.

Tailoring journalism for Google users

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2006 at 12:24
Tags: Associated Press, BBC, Google, Journalism, Online, United States, Yahoo

Subeditors are increasingly tailoring headlines to attract visitors from search engines to their web sites, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Because search engines deliver a huge amount of traffic — and thus advertising reveune — to their web sites, news organisations are experimenting with search engine optimisation, or SEO.

The result is that heads online are often terse, literal versions of the headlines that appear on the printed page. Forget about puns or witty allusions to high or pop culture: Attracting the bots that feed content to search engines places a premium on using key words and basic facts explaining what the story is about. And brevity: The Associated Press now limits its headlines to 40 characters.

“There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing,” notes Steve Lohr in the New York Times story.

This is not just an American phenomenon. Lohr quotes BBC News Online’s Nic Newman to illustrate how the Beeb’s web site uses two seperate headlines — one to attract search engines and one to be more appealing to human readers.
But pandering to Google could go far beyond just headlines, Lohr’s report says:

Journalists, [search experts] say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. “That’s not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”

Before journalists begin wringing their hands about the technologically-determined death of style, the New York Times story makes an important point: Many of the current conventions of news writing originate with the cost of transmitting stories by telegraph.

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Chinese ban on new foreign magazines

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 10 April 2006 at 11:31
Tags: China, Journalism, Magazines, United States

Rolling Stone has really hit the Great Wall. The government in Beijing has decided that the magazine cannot publish a second issue of its Chinese edition – because it failed to get proper approval for its front cover and title.

In fact Beijing has imposed a moratorium on all new foreign magazines on topics other than science and technology. That – says the Wall Street Journal – is a big blow to media companies that were seeking to cash in on China’s booming ad market.

It’s a particular set-back to life-style magazines. Titles that have already got approval have been assured they can continue publishing This should include the Chinese edition of Vogue, which was launched last September.

Sports Illustrated, which announced last month it hoped to launch a sports magazine in China sometime soon and says it has concluded a partnership with a Chinese company is optimistic it will get the go-ahead.

As for Rolling Stone, an official in Shanghai said curtly “It doesn’t exist anymore.�

Scandal of the New York gossip page

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 10 April 2006 at 11:22
Tags: Ethics, Newspapers, United States

It has all the makings of a Hollywood thriller. Two men meet secretly in a New York loft; a secret camera in the ceiling tapes their meeting as FBI agents stake out the scene from a room upstairs. The protagonists are a California billionaire and a New York tabloid journalist.

That meeting over a glass-topped kitchen table is now rocking the American journalism world, making big headlines and creating turmoil at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

The two men were California industrialist Ron Burkle, who made his fortune from supermarkets and is somewhat notorious for his amorous affairs and freelance gossip writer Jared Paul Stern, a contributor to the Post’s “Page Six”, America’s best-known and probably most widely-read gossip column.

It’s alleged that the journalist was trying to shake down the billionaire with the promise of keeping his name out of the column. His price: $100,000 plus regular monthly payments of $10,000.

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