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.

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.

(more…)

Walking with dinosaurs

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 10 April 2006 at 10:09
Tags: Newspapers, United States

Perhaps someone should have taken a look in advance, but the opening event at this years conference of the Newspaper Association of America — which represents close to 1,500 daily papers — took place in Chicago’s Field Museum in a large hall flanked by two dinosaur skeletons.

There were a few jokes, but nobody was crass enough to suggest the animals might be a metaphor for what’s happening in the industry these days.

Condé Nast paying editors’ mortages

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 10 April 2006 at 10:00
Tags: Journalism, Magazines, United States

One of the best-kept secrets in American publishing is how Condé Nast keeps its editors, top executives and even some of its writers happy. The answer: In addition to paying top salaries and good expenses, the senior staff enjoy one other big perk: help with their home mortages.

Tina Brown and her husband Sir Harry Evans are among at least 20 beneficiaries of the housing perk which was seen the publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Glamour, Gourmet, Details, Condé Nast Traveler and numerous other magazines shell out millions over the years.

It helps explain why Condé Nast editors, in the main live in expensive apartments and homes, and are renowned for their parties. That, it’s said, is what company chairman Si Newhouse likes to see. He likes his top executives to be part of the New York social scene. (more…)

Magazine gets funeral following its demise

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 4 April 2006 at 14:31
Tags: Magazines, United States

When magazines die they don’t usually get a funeral. But that was what happened following the closure of Budget Living, a magazine that everyone thought had a great future.

Its target was the ultra-thrifty. At a memorial service in New York, attended by many former employees, most wearing black, there was even a casket – filled not with copies of the magazine, but bottles of cold beer. It was flanked by a blow-up of the magazine’s last cover draped in black lace and flanked by a funeral wreath.

Despite its promise, and several awards, including the coveted General Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, plus a circulation of more than 500,000, the magazine lasted a mere four years.

What went wrong? Budget Living – according to its publisher Don Welch – faced too much competition from bigger glossier magazines and without help from advertisers who were not interested, he claimed, in people who are trying to live on a shoestring.

Rather they are after the big-spenders. Welch, a veteran publishing executive who at one time worked at Rolling Stone and Outside magazines, “We were fighting Goliaths with big circulations and big budgets.�

Incidentally that coffin, in keeping with the magazine’s aim was bought on the Internet – for a very thrifty $10.

Manila press targeted for official intimidation

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 4 April 2006 at 13:59
Tags: Journalism, Phillipines, United States

For the first time since President Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown more than 20 years ago, the news media in the Philippines is suffering, it claims, from Government pressure.

Normally the most free-wheeling in Asia, the press in Manila – according to a dispatch published in the New York Times – is the target of official intimidation.

The pressure includes harassment lawsuits, surveillance of journalists and threats of arrests on charges of sedition. Although no journalists have up to now been arrested and no newspapers or news organizations have been shut down, local journalists are unnerved.

Recently troops set up cordons around several television stations for more than a week. Also lately in the wake of what was claimed to be an attempted coup against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo several gatherings said to be critical of the Government have been banned. At the same time the Government is said to be targeting the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism, which has a reputation as a watchdog and has been in the forefront lately in exposing what its claims has been Government corruption.

The centre is credited with bringing down Mrs Arroyo’s predecessor, Joseph Estrada. It was also in the forefront in the battle 20 years ago that overthrew the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Rolling Stone hits the Great Wall

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 4 April 2006 at 13:50
Tags: Journalism, United States

Has Rolling Stone run full tilt into the Great Wall? It seems like it.

Plans to launch a Chinese edition of the popular American magazine have run into problems. It involves what’s been described as a bureaucratic bungle over the licensing of the title. The first Chinese language edition – with the usual scrawling Rolling Stone logo across the top, but the name Audio Visual World in Chinese and smaller type underneath – hit the news-stands in China in late March.

According to Advertising Age, it was a big hit and sold out within days. It featured a mix of local stories and translated features and pictures from the US edition.

The cover featured Cui Jian, one of the first Chinese musicians to incorporate Western rock into his songs. His best-known song, “Nothing to My Name�, was often sung by students during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.

However it wasn’t the contents that apparently upset the Chinese authorities. Chinese regulations stipulate that a foreign title of a magazine must be “significantly smaller� than the local title. Although the magazine has not been officially banned - at least not yet – changes will have to be made, it’s said, before the next issue can be published.

Officially Rolling Stone hasn’t commented on the problem, but in American publishing circles, it’s seen as one of the difficulties of putting out a publication in China without making sure it has the official blessing – and approval – of the government. And conforms to all the rules.