Young people enticed to become newspaper readers

By Virginia McMillan

Editors Weblog alerts us to the arrival of the promised French government-subsidised newspaper project for young people, Mon Journal Offert (My Free Paper).

The site invites readers to get involved using social media tools and offers four newspapers from which young people can choose, to subscribe to free for a year.

Meanwhile, check out this week’s loss of thousands of readers from New Zealand newspapers and magazines. The minus signs in the right hand column tell the story starkly.

The time-frame covered by this Roy Morgan research reflects the deepest part of a recession that appears to have eased somewhat. Many challenges for print remain.

Note that down-to-earth mags like New Zealand Gardener and Healthy Food Guide grew their readership strongly. Newspapers to escape the flight of readers were provincials such as the Gisborne Herald.

Hosting Isaac Mao: social media reframed

By Virginia McMillan

Whitireia Community Polytechnic journalism programme has welcomed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao into our classroom these past couple of days.

Photo: Carl Suurmond

Isaac (right) is a pre-eminent international expert on social media, having learned the power of these tools in a sharply more difficult political climate than the one we operate in, here in New Zealand. As well as knowledge in his head, Isaac has fire in his belly and courage in his heart. He is an inspiring speaker.

Isaac trains Chinese journalists to make the most of social media tools. He says using them, journos stay close to the community that’s screened out by the editorial hierarchy in mainstream media (or by state censorship, as in China).

Here’s how Julie Starr, of Wintec in Hamilton, summarises part of Isaac’s talk to her students.

Twitter and Trafigura – a big win for citizen journalism and social media

FURTHER UPDATE: Twitter played a pivotal role in The Guardian’s win against a ban on covering an important parliamentary question.

Tweeters tracked down the suppressed question – relating to restrictions on reporting about toxic sludge dumping by British company Trafigura – as well as legal argument to help the newspaper.

“Trafigura” quickly became one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers, writes Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian. Trafigura threw in the towel. Powerful stuff.

The Guardian is gagged – and can’t say why

UPDATE: Gag is lifted.

On a personal note, last year’s Whitireia Journalism guest tutor Dave Lee, now with the BBC, tweeted earlier today that he was following this saga.

The Guardian reports here that it’s being prevented from reporting facts about a parliamentary question. The paper can’t even explain why it’s being gagged except that a sue-happy law firm is involved. Read all about it!

Luke’s top ten tips for recording and editing audio

By Luke Appleby

WELCOME to another edition of Luke’s top ten tips – this time I’m focusing on recording audio for journalistic purposes, and the best tricks for editing and using the stuff.

If your chosen field is that of a TV reporter, radio reporter, filming enthusiast, citizen reporter or a just general all-round multimedia journo for web and what-have-you, you will quickly identify the need to collect good quality audio for broadcast. There are a few pitfalls for young players, so I’m going to give you a few tips on what to do, and what not to do.

What the Wha…

By Queenie Rikihana

WANT to really know how the Miceal (silent ‘h’) Laws’ letter to 12 year olds from  Otaki School’s total immersion class ended up in the media?

Yes. Me too. But here’s my imaginary scenario of what might have happened.  An upwardly mobile parent of  one of the pupils   (please note it is not a kura kaupapa)  is aghast to see the over the top response the Mayor of Wanganui, Micael Law (silent ‘h’) wrote to his shy daughter’s polite request. He/she shows it to a colleague at work [in Wellington] and starts an avalanche of emails.

Inspiration in the growing power of multi-media

By Virginia McMillan

Multi-media experts have chosen their winners in visual journalism for the web – and there are some stunning works.

The New York Times’ nytimes.com has killed the competition, mainly for its coverage of the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. But there is even recognition for the Wisconsin State Journal website’s take on a local government story – told via a game in which readers choose which budgets to cut.

What caught my eye in particular was a major project on the tropical Brunswick Islands, off the coast of North Carolina, by University of North Carolina students taking part in the 5th annual Carolina Photojournalism Workshop.

Their web page is busting full of photo stories to explore (you choose a picture “cue” from a row along the bottom of the page).

Most are in the “day in the life” style but make good use of techniques such as narrated slideshow, in which the reporter’s voice does not appear.

Those talking about their lives include families on food stamps and fishermen working in the luminescent calm of dawn. Fine portraits in words, and still and moving images, put together after a week-long visit by the students. Inspiring.

The winners, listed here, were chosen by the Society for News Design.

Book gives new perspective on NZ news media and its handling of Maori issues

PROFESSOR PAUL MOON: A new study of NZ’s news media and its relationships with Maori has been published by Professor Peter Cleave, Wolfson College, Oxford, and according to a leading NZ academic on diversity, Paul Moon, it’s a must read for all journalists.

Here are the views of Dr Moon, who is Professor of History at Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of Maori Development at AUT University:

The very nature of academic publishing is that it serves a niche market, and in a country as small as New Zealand, that niche can be so narrow that some books probably never see the light of day because they are simply uneconomic to produce.

So when a ten-volume set of books is released, written by Professor Peter Cleave – one of New Zealand’s respected academics – attention is bound to be aroused by the scale of the venture, and by the promise of a substantial body of content.

The work’s opening volume comprises a collection of articles, some of which are new, and some of which are revised versions of existing articles that Cleave has written or presented.

The relevancy of the work is underscored by the first paper, which contains suggested options for dealing with the vexed issue of the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004.

The Government has indicated that it will reach some conclusions on this matter within the next two months, but regardless of what is decided, it will be interesting to see the extent to which Cleave’s recommendations are reflected in Government policy, and for academics to debate some of the themes raised long after any settlement has been made at a political level.

This article stands out as being the most detailed in this volume, and certainly one of the most well-conceived discussions of the present state of the Act that exists in print anywhere.

For this piece alone, the first volume in this collection makes an extremely useful contribution not only to academic discourse, but to issues affecting the national life of the country.

Iwi Station: A Discussion of Print, Radio, Television, and the Internet in Aotearoa/ New Zealand also has a string media focus, as the title suggests.

However, in keeping with the general approach of the other volumes in this collection, Cleave has added elements of history, sociology, and anthropology into the mix.

And instead of merely being descriptive about the topics he has chosen, Cleave continually probes and questions to elicit deeper meanings behind them.

This is most certainly a text that should be compulsory reading for every journalist and person involved in the media in New Zealand.

In particular, it lifts the lid on the sorts of conceptual developments in thought that have led to the status the media currently has in New Zealand.

This collection, coming out as a single set, is unique in New Zealand academic writing.

But the format and quantity side, the lasting value of these works is in the ideas they express and the changes in perception that they will bring about for the reader. Cleave deserves full praise for the contribution he has made in these works to the intellectual conversation about New Zealandness.

There are ten books in the basic Campus Press set. All of these are 200 pages or more in length. The books are also available as a collection.

There is a playlist with videos about each book.

Another new way of working: reporters for hire

By Virginia McMillan

NEWS outlets that hire out reporters on investigative work for private clients could help their bottom line and that of their staff, according to media watchers.

“Special order research” has been the bread and butter of The Economist magazine’s intelligence unit for years, but the model is starting to take off, David Westphal reports here in The Online Journalism Review.

He cites subscriber online news services Global Post and Boston University’s New England Centre for Investigative Reporting, both embarking on contract research jobs for private clients.

As one of the comments to Westphal’s piece notes, these days “information ‘wants to be free’ as the cost of spreading it goes down, but it also wants to be valuable depending on a particular person, context, or point in time”.

Ethical questions inevitably arise. The media outlet would need to be sure it was not being used for, say, one political party against another. This model of working appears likely to take off, however these questions are resolved.

“What’s interesting here is the idea that news organisations might do this under their own corporate banner, using proceeds to fund the news,” writes Westphal.

Hat tip: Editors Weblog.

Financial markets’ turmoil a lesson for reporters

By Virginia McMillan

JOURNALISTS failed to warn of the impending recession because they took their eye off the big picture, according to a book previewed here on Journalist.co.uk.

Once banks established and developed the controversial practice of  ”securitisation” of loan-based assets, the media accepted it uncritically, says The Banker’s editor-in-chief Brian Caplen in a new book, Playing Footsie with the FTSE?

“Few of us spotted how markets were mushrooming and the financial sector as a whole was becoming wildly out of proportion to the real economy it was supposed to be serving,” says Caplen. Journalists mainly looked at individual banks rather than the system overall.

Caplen says, however, that it would have been too much to expect journos to put all the complex concepts together, name the day and form of the collapse, and run a campaign for regulatory change and oversight.

The book, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, is published by Aramis on September 28.