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Britain’s Guardian newspaper is holding an international journalism competition for amateur or freelance journalists.
Journalists entering the competition, known as The Guardian International Development Journalism Competition, must pick one of the issues given and send in a 650-1000 word feature before the deadline of May 6. The overarching theme throughout the competition is the way any of these issues relate to the achievement of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Among the prizes is the chance to be published in the newspaper, which is read by up to 450,000 people every day.
To learn more, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/developmentcompetition/page/0,,2260233,00.html. For more information, e-mail Diana Thomas at diana.thomas@mariestopes.org.uk
By DAVID BAUDER
NEW YORK (AP) — The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago, a study on the industry released Sunday found.
It was believed at one point that the Net would democratize the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives. Yet the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many Web sites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report.
Two stories — the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign — represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.
Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said.
The news side of the business is dynamic, but the growing ability of news consumers to find what they want without being distracted by advertising is what’s making the industry go through some tough times.
“Although the audience for traditional news is maintaining itself, the staff for many of these news organizations tend to be shrinking,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director.
NBC News’ recent decision to name make David Gregory host of a nightly program on MSNBC, while keep his job as White House correspondent is an example of how people are being asked to do much more, he said.
News is less a product, like the day’s newspaper or a nightly newscast, than a service that is constantly being updated, he said. Last week, for instance, The New York Times posted its first report linking New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to a prostitution ring in the early afternoon, and it quickly became the day’s dominant story.
Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day’s newspaper, Rosenstield said.
“The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online,” he said.
A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they’re asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found.
Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he’s even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times’ Web site.
In another unexpected finding, citizen-created Web sites and blogs are actually far less welcoming to outside commentary than the so-called mainstream media, the report said.
The last paragraph actually might be interesting than the rest of the story. I’ll have to find out more.
Ben Colmery, a student of international media development at Columbia University, writes in the Morningside Post, a blog by students of the School for International and Public Affairs:
In places where the hopes of democracy, rights, freedom, and change have long been crushed by dictators, tyrants, and murderers, you often have to crack the existing foundation before you can build a new one. Otherwise, anything you build is not likely to stand for very long. In my experience, media development is a great way to crack the foundation and plant some seeds.
Read the rest here.
I’ve been an off-and-on member of the Society of Professional Journalists for years. Just a membership and nothing more. But the recent and ongoing troubles in journalism have been a cause for great personal concern: declining numbers of newspapers, layoff of staff, eroding trust in the media. So I renewed my membership, even though as a freelancer I don’t think I receive as much benefit from SPJ as a staff reporter. (Thankfully, the organization recently began paying more attention to folks like me).
This time, however, I’ve gone beyond merely joining. I’ve made the first foray into being active. I volunteered to work on the membership committee, and was asked to contribute to a blog about growing members. My first “tithe” can be found here:
http://spj.org/blog/blogs/membership/archive/2008/02/24/18619.aspx
If you’re a journalist, or you’re merely thinking about becoming one, you should join SPJ. Not only will you stay abreast of the latest changes in the industry and law, you’ll be saying that you are serious about what you do. If you were an attorney, you’d join the bar association wouldn’t you? And don’t forget to get involved with the local chapter in your area. If there isn’t one, start one – just like the two young women are doing in my blog piece.
With health care continuing to grow in importance to most Americans, a reporter needs to know the most effective way of covering this beat. The USC Annenberg School for Communication is offering an all-expenses-paid fellowship to attend a week-long training focused on community health and health policy. The training includes a $2,000 stipend. The seminar, from April 13-18 in Los Angeles, is open to print, broadcast and multimedia journalists in all markets and general circulation and ethnic media. If you’re a freelance writer like me, check to see if a local news organization you work with now might sponsor you. (There’s no charge to the company). Annenberg pays the cost of meals, travel and lodging. Deadline for application is March 3. The number of fellowships offered is limited. To find out more, go here.
The website “PopMatters” seeks essays (1,200 to 3,000 words, usually) about any aspect of popular culture, present or past. (If you are interested in pitching a review of some specific current work or performance, please contact the appropriate reviews editor.) We prefer careful analysis of the chosen subject matter with the intention of supporting an original thesis; we aren’t particularly interested in articles that merely want to promote their subject. An assessment of what ideological work a given pop culture phenomenon performs (i.e. what has allowed something to become popular, what’s at stake in its popularity besides money, how it is situated in a historical or geographical context, etc.) is especially welcome. Ideally essays will draw on sophisticated interpretive strategies derived from a theoretically informed point of view but will be presented for a general reader in lively, accessible language.
For details, click here.
“Internet punk” Rob Curley has some most instructive commentary about how local newspapers can and should operate, in the Internet age, to cover breaking local news.
He does a moment-by-moment recount of how reporters for the Las Vegas Sun covered the fire at the Monte Carlo casino in what was virtually non-stop coverage. This PRINT publication used its blog and website to post updates, videos, photos and even background stories – as the fire was still being fought.
It’s not news that newspapers are facing tough times. Technology has created new challenges for print news gatherers, and change has come so fast that publishers’ heads must be about to twist off from the constant spinning around to check out the latest thing.
This may be Curley’s most cogent statement:
Now more than ever, newspapers have to show our communities that we are as relevant now — if not more — than we have ever been. Yet, as an industry, does it feel like we are doing that? Or does it seem that many in our ranks are just yearning for things to be like they used to be before that damned Internet?
The news business is no longer just about what will be on the front page tomorrow morning. Readers (I hate to use this term, but news consumers) now set the terms for how, when and what kind of news they receive. With a newsroom full of news gatherers and data researchers to draw on, there’s no reason why newspapers can’t be the news source of first choice.
(While you’re reading Curley’s blog, check out his additional comments about “hyper-local strategies” for increasing readership. It amounts to focusing on news in and of the community in which the paper circulates. This shouldn’t be news, but for some reason it is).
The rise of the Internet will put newspapers and television out of business. Everybody knows that, right? “Don’t write the obituary yet” might be the more accurate prediction, according to a story published by MediaWeek. Media research firm Borrell Associates studied where candidates for political office are spending their advertising dollars:
More than 80 percent of all political dollars, nearly $4 billion, will be spent locally, with 60 percent or $2.9 billion going to broadcast TV. Newspapers are forecast to capture 17 percent of dollars, followed by radio at 10 percent and cable TV at 5 percent.
The story adds that success on the Internet hasn’t translated into success at the polls:
…But as Ron Paul has discovered, heavy traffic on the Web site isn’t enough. Paul’s site garnered 37.9 percent of political traffic, but his candidacy has been unable to break through in the polls or in the primary races….
You’ve probably read the wire reports about the study by media groups that found the Bush administration put out more than 900 lies that led our country into the war in Iraq. Here’s the opening paragraphs of the actual report by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.
Read the full report here.
From “Editor and Publisher” magazine:
NEW YORK Already the media have found at least two dozen angles to approach the sudden death of actor Heath Ledger in New York City today. The Los Angeles Times entertainment blog, Web Scout, used the occasion to look at the way the news emerged, almost in “real time.”
The Times now reports on its site, pointing to the danger, “that preliminary reports that pills were found scattered around Ledger’s body” were “inaccurate.”
Here is part of the posting at www.latimes. com :
If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
Chief among the media’s switchbacks was the early non-fact that Ledger’s death had taken place at the New York apartment of Mary-Kate Olsen. Celebrity news site TMZ.com and even the New York Times’ City Room blog reported this piece of misinformation before they unreported it.
Importantly, however, neither the New York Times nor TMZ got it wrong. It was the NYPD spokesman who had the story mixed up — the media were simply parroting incorrect information.
When the spokesman later corrected himself, the sites rushed to update the story, but readers were critical of the changes.
“TMZ is in such a rush to break the news,” one commenter wrote, echoing dozens of others, “that they are usually wrong first.”
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
Here’s a slightly different perspective from Columbia Journalism Review.
