Journalism faculty blogs

Pakistani journalist abducted and killed

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

The body of Pakistani journalist Razzaq Gul, a reporter with the Express News in southern Balochistan, was found the day after he was abducted. He had 15 bullet wounds and there were signs of torture. The president of Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), Pervaiz Shaukat, said: "We demand t...

Posted on 22 May 2012 | 9:08 am

Mexican journalist tortured and murdered

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

The International Press Institute (IPI) has condemned the murder of kidnapped Mexican journalist Marco Antonio Ávila García, whose tortured body was found last Friday (18 May).His body was found, wrapped in a black plastic bag, beside a highway in the northern state of Sonora near the port city of...

Posted on 22 May 2012 | 8:00 am

Local newspapers' crisis: what hyperlocal means, and why it works

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Today's extract from What do we mean by local?* is by Ross Hawkes, the founder of the hyperlocal news website Lichfield Live. He is also a senior journalism lecturer at Staffordshire university.He argues that journalists working for traditional "big media", through a culture of centralisation, have...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 9:27 pm

US magazines take risks to attract new readers - and it works

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

America's two rival news magazines appear to be locked into a battle over which can publish the most provocative cover.Time magazine turned heads with a picture of a woman breastfeeding her three-year-old son, asking "Are you mom enough?"Then Newsweek ran a cover line under a picture of Barack Obama...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 5:45 pm

New Statesman and HuffPo get new political editors

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Two press releases. Same story. But with a different emphasis. So which should be the intro? Rafael Behr becomes the new political editor of the New Statesman? Or Mehdi Hasan joins the Huffington Post?Sure, cynics may well say neither is worth reporting anyway. But I'm doing so regardless...For the...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 3:41 pm

Sun libel victor faces £300,000 legal bill

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Social worker Sylvia Henry won a libel action against The Sun, which made false allegations about her over the Baby P case, but she now faces the possibility of being almost £300,000 out of pocket. That's the amount of shortfall in the legal costs she is able to claim from the paper's publisher, Ne...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 3:11 pm

Journalists are 'battery hens sipping water and eating half-frozen sandwiches'

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Former national newspaper editor Brian Hitchen has lashed out over the state of modern journalism. He is quoted by Press Gazette as saying too many journalists "are the product of half-baked courses"... "haven't a clue what a good story is"... and are "battery hens sipping Evian water and eating...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 1:19 pm

Inter-Council Payments and the Google Fusion Tables Network Graph

Posted by Online Journalism Blog

One of the great things about aggregating local spending data from different councils in the same place – such as on OpenlyLocal – is that you can start to explore structural relations in the way different public bodies of a similar type spend money with each other. On the local spend wi...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 10:25 am

The real reasons for Warren Buffett's newspaper deals

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Warren Buffett, often billed as the world's most famous investor, last week bought 63 local US newspapers for $142m (£90m).This acquisition, by Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway group, has been trumpeted as illustrating some kind of counter-intuitive faith in the future of newsprint.But one of America's...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 10:21 am

Johnston Press turns frees into paid-fors

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Publishers are desperately trying a battery of tricks to breathe life into dying newsprint. So dailies are becoming weeklies. Some weeklies are being merged, while others are being de-merged in hyperlocal experiments. Paid-for titles are becoming frees. And, contradictorily, some frees are becoming...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 8:57 am

Message to advertisers - farewell newspapers, hello newsbrands

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

The Newspaper Marketing Agency, the body that seeks to raise awareness of the value of newspapers to advertisers and agencies, is being reborn as Newsworks. The new name, removing the word "newspaper" from the title, is indicative of the changed landscape of the news industry. It is part of the re-...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 8:00 am

The economic history of newspapers according to the Sage of Omaha

Posted by George Brock

Tweet For many years, Slate has been one of the best sites for commentary in America. One of the stupidest things that intelligent team ever did was to sack their media columnist Jack Shafer, who now writes at Reuters. His trenchant style hasn’t yet quite recovered from the transfer...

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 7:43 am

Mary Beith, the journalist who broke the 'smoking beagles' story

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Mary Beith, who died last weekend aged 73, was responsible for one of the most memorable newspaper front pages in the history of popular journalism.She was the undercover reporter who took pictures of dogs being forced to inhale cigarette smoke, resulting in an iconic 1975 People splash: "The smokin...

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 11:52 am

How the papers reported Chelsea's football victory

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Chelsea's European Champions League victory kept Sunday paper editors later at the office than usual because it was delayed by extra time and a penalty shoot-out.But they did the unfavoured British team proud with pages of pictures, reportage and analysis. Every national title ran front page coverag...

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 10:42 am

Local newspapers' crisis: a story of hyperlocal success

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Today's extract from What do we mean by local?* is by Richard Coulter, a former assistant editor at the Bristol Evening Post.He left the Northcliffe Media title in July 2011 to launch a magazine, filtonvoice, which is an attempt to publish community journalism - in print...When I left the Post I was...

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 4:49 pm

Don't read it, sniff it - the daily newspaper that smells like bread

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Journalists are supposed to sniff out stories. But today's issue of the Grimsby Telegraph is asking readers to sniff its pages.If they do, they will discover that the paper smells of bread... supposedly. In what the paper is claiming as a first for a regional newspaper, it is using new developments...

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 11:48 am

Local newspapers' crisis: is hyperlocal journalism the answer?

Posted by Media: Greenslade | guardian.co.uk

Many apologies for the hiatus in my serialisation of What do we mean by local?* I am pleased to return with an extract from a chapter by David Baines, a lecturer at Newcastle university.Hyperlocal journalism is the rage, with all manner of experiments having been tried both by individuals and tradit...

Posted on 17 May 2012 | 11:34 am

Event: Sydney Writers Festival 2012

Posted by Heather Brooke

I’m speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival this week. Here are the debates I’m participating in: Journalism 2.0 – Is journalism different in the digital age? MYOB – Does it matter that we have surrendered our privacy to Google and social media sites? You Must Have Somethin...

Posted on 16 May 2012 | 9:32 pm

Journalism Reloaded – What journalists need for the future

Posted by Online Journalism Blog

In a guest post Alexandra Stark, Swiss journalist and Head of Studies at MAZ - the Swiss School of Journalism, argues that it's time for journalists to take action on business models for supporting journalism. Stark proposes a broadened set of skills and a new structure to enable greater involvem...

Posted on 16 May 2012 | 2:51 pm

German social TV project “Rundshow”: merging internet and television

Posted by Online Journalism Blog

In a guest post for OJB, cross-posted from her blog, Franzi Baehrle reviews a new German TV show which operates across broadcast, web and mobile. There’s a big experiment going on in German television. And I have to admit that I was slightly surprised that the rather conservative “Bayer...

Posted on 16 May 2012 | 9:49 am