The Kindle – only a threat to books, not newspapers?

That certainly seems to be the view of BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. Trying out Amazon’s new Kindle ‘moving global, but still only available from the USA’, he found it very easy to use: “Plug it in, charge it, download your first book and you’re away. Then subscribe to a digital edition of a newspaper and it is wired to you in the morning, via the Kindle’s “whispernet” 3g connection.”

He believes that its strong point is its integration with the Amazon store and suggests they are looking to Apple’s iTunes as an example of what can be done using download technology.

He was impressed with the experience of it all: “When I started reading, it felt pretty close to the paper experience. There’s no glare on the Kindle’s screen, so you get simple black text on a cream background, with just enough added bells and whistles. You can make digital notes, search the text, and, if you fall asleep with the book on your face as is my wont, it will remember which page you were on when you turn it on again.”

Having said this, he doesn’t believe that newspapers should feel under threat, the way way book sellers eventually might. This is because reading a book is an ‘analogue’ experience (he probably meant ‘linear’), starting at page one and continuing till the finish. “A newspaper, on the other hand, is more random, more interactive. I scan the sections and leap from one article to another, much as I do on the web. That’s what is already available to me – for free – on newspaper websites, so why would I pay for a less satisfactory digital newspaper?”

Google is no newspaper vampire

Or at least that’s according to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO in a long interview with Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com. In a week when Rupert Murdoch seems to have slightly eased his attacks on  ‘Internet News Thieves’ Schmidt claims that Google actually helps newspapers by pointing its visitors to ‘sources of quality content’. He further claims that only existing mainstream news institutions have the resources and established trust to do deep journalism. Surprisingly although he acknowledges that new online publications have emerged and that there are journalists working independently of large companies, his faith, according to Sullivan is ‘still with the old school, so to speak’.

Schmidt also claims in the interiew that critics often target Google, when their real target is the internet:

“I think in this case Google is a proxy for the internet as a whole. So the people would make the same statements about the Internet as they do about Google. Substitute the internet for Google and you get that idea. And because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything. In some cases people don’t understand that we’re a conduit to other people doing things. They think Google did it when in fact somebody else did it and made it available.”

In terms of solutions, one that he suggests is Google Fast Flip. Readers can try it here.

BBC Trust to journalists: ‘Don’t Blog what you wouldn’t say’

One of the lesser known aspects of the new BBC draft editorial guidelines appears to take their definition of impartiality even further than previously understood, in their new advice that “Nothing should be written by [BBC] journalists and presenters that would not be said on-air.”

According to the guidance: “Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists and presenters on such matters.” .

“This applies as much to online content as it does to news bulletins”.

This is an issue that is sure to result in comment during the consultation on the guidelines as while this point of view will be what some viewers will want others may  question  whether this is taking the guidelines too far in that the audience are able to tell the difference between personal opinion – when it is served up as personal opinion – and ‘impartial’ news reports broadcast on behalf of the BBC by these individual journalists in their capacity as newsreaders or reporters.

Meanwhile the Government continues to support it’s own guidelines on departmental use of Twitter – guidelines which  at a word count of almost 5,500, would be equivalent to more than 250 tweets. Suggesting that departmental users should tweet no less than two times per day, with a maximum of ten daily tweets, it suggests that departments should steer clear of ‘self-promotion’.  In supporting Departments to follow usual Twitter etiquette that ‘followers’ should be ‘followed back’ it cautions that at all costs however, it is necessary to avoid the image of ‘big brother’ following people for the wrong reasons. And we know what the Daily Mail would say about that.

Rupert to the Internet: It’s War

Rupert Murdoch has started a war on the internet that he cannot win according to his own biographer Michael Wolff. Writing in the latest copy of Vanity Fair Wolff suggests that Murdoch’s problem is partly due to the fact ‘he really doesn’t understand the internet’.

“You get a dreadful harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even simple linking to other sites. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t want it. Every conversation I’ve had with him about the new news, about the fundamental change in how people get their news—that users go through Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper—earned me a walleyed stare”

Taking the example of Murdoch’s greatest on-line asset – Jeremy Clarkson, who reputedly is responsible for 25 percent of Times on-line traffic – Wolff points out that event if there are enough ‘fanatical Clarkson readers’ who will pay enough to make a ‘paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one’, Murdoch’s gain is Clarkson’s loss – which will be most of his readers and their ‘constant and addictive feedback’.

Meanwhile the latest to support Murdoch’s War on free content is Financial Times managing director Rob Grimshaw. Talking to the Association of Online Publisher’s conference in London he claimed that  most publishers will have no option but to charge for online content. In this he was echoing the sentiment of Financial Times chief executive, John Ridding, who last week advocated paid-for as the only way to safeguard quality journalism.

Ridding had claimed: “I simply can’t see how its possible to make a pure advertising-funded model work unless you have enormous scale and really I’m talking about a billion page views plus per month.

According to the Press Gazette, which reported this story a survey of AOP members last week had suggested that almost 70 per cent were looking at charging online. However, a Harris Poll last month found that just five per cent of readers would be willing to pay to access news websites.

Strictly come Social Networking

According to Anthony Rose, the BBC’s controller of Vision and on-line, speaking at the launch of the Media Guardian’s Innovation awards, this weekend will see the addition of unspecified ‘social media’ applications to Strictly Come Dancing as part of a radical re-launch of all their on-line services. This radical re-launch is planned for March, and will be based on ‘what the next generation in social media will be’. Amongst the innovations will be the development of an open version of iPlayer which will allow third-party platforms to embed BBC content while it remains on the BBC site. This is seen as one element in BBC management’s attempts to prevent top-slicing the licence fee – by working in collaboration with commercial organisations they argue there is value going to the commercial sector – without the need for a funding cut to BBC resourcing.

There are also

Not drowning but Waving

Google Wave – a browser based tool combining email, instant messaging and real time interaction – launched for beta testing 1 hour 24 minutes ago. If you’re one of the lucky testers – and you can apply here then you can be in at the beginning of what they claim can be a way of working which can transform journalism. According to the story in the Media Guardian here, “Google Wave could speed up the collaborative journalistic process from research to writing, including quotes, enriching articles with pictures and videos. Stories could be corrected by subeditors using Google Wave, while readers could suggest changes and use the tool to discuss the article”

Some drawbacks may be that till present it runs on most browsers except Internet Explorer – users of IE will have to download a plug-in called Chrome Frame to use the application.

I’ve applied to be a beta tester – so will let you know if I’m one of the lucky ones to be enrolled to try it out.

Here’s a 10 minute video which tries to explain its benefits:

Shift happens……..

Two useful new You Tube videos out make varying claims for the impact of social networking on our lives. The first Did you Know 4.0 is an update from their previous Shift Happens video of July 2007 – comparing both shows how quickly things have moved on. Meanwhile AllMediaScotland have done us all a favour of drawing our attention to this latest video from the socialnomics website – essentially advertising their latest book on socialnomics. This makes a number of interesting claims as to the growing importance of social media – at a time of decline for traditional news outlets like the press.

Very professionally produced, the videos hit us with a relentless stream of facts (in the case of Did You Know, sometimes too fast to really grasp), and show some of the changes multimedia journalists have to grapple with. Like any presentation of this type however, little time is given to context, and although it is essentially making large claims for Web 2.0 – the type of web we can interact with, the format of this You Tube presentation is of course one which makes us, the viewer, very much a passive receiver of claims, unable to question or interact at all. Here’s the socionomics video which will give you some flavour of the claims being made:

By 2010, Gen Y (born between the mid 1970s and late 1990s) will outnumber Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and 96 per cent of them have joined a social network.Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
One in eight married couples in the U.S. last year met via social media.
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet four years and the iPod three years.
Facebook (www.facebook.com) added 100 million users in less than nine months. iPod Application downloads hit one billion in nine months. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, behind China, India and the USA, but ahead of Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. Yet, China’s QZone (www.qzone.qq.com) is larger, with over 300 million users.
The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) are shared on Facebook, daily.
The US Department of Education has found that, on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. And the same study had found that one in six higher education students had enrolled in online education.
80 per cent of companies are using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) as their primary tool to find employees.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter (www.twitter.com) followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. 80 per cent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.
Generation Y and Z (born since the mid 1990s) consider email passé; in 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
YouTube (www.youtube.com) is the second-largest  search engine in the world: 100 million videos.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has over 13 million articles; 78 per cent of these articles are non-English. 156 articles are posted every hour.
There are over 200 million blogs; 54 per cent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
25 per cent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34 per cent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google (www.google.co.uk) ranks them.
78 per cent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 per cent trust advertisements. Only 18 per cent of traditional TV campaigns receive a positive ROI (return on investment). 90 per cent who are able to skip TV ads, on their digital video recorders, do.
US-based TV catch-up website, hulu (www.hulu.com), has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
70 per cent 18-to-34 year-olds have watched TV on the web. Only 33 per cent have ever viewed a show on digital video recorders, such as TiVo. 25 per cent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
35 per cent of book sales on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) are for the wireless reading device, Kindle (here).

Are all these stats accurate? Again journalists should not take slick videos just at face value, but follow up the basis of their claims. You can see how the stats are put together (some in a more robust manner than others) on the socialnomics site.

Thanks to AllmediaScotland for doing the work to extract these stats. You can subscribe to AllMediaScotlands RSS feed here

Journalist Executed by Drug Cartel

According to a report in the radical French newspaper Humanité Norberto Miranda Madrid, a journalist in a North Mexican paper became the latest Journalist to pay with his life in defence of the truth. According to Humanité , Madrid was executed last week by a death squad on behalf of one of the powerful Mexican drug cartels. Having written a series of stories on the increasing public insecurity in the North West of the country, Norberto was gunned down himself by 5 killers in his newspaper office in the small Mexican town of Casas Grandes. Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) and the Committee to Protect Journalists have increasingly warned of the dangers to journalists from those involved in the growing drug trade.

Security Council Vote may help Postgraduate Journalism

The United Nations Security Council yesterday unanimously approved a resolution to rid the world of nuclear weapons, a move seen by some as a prerequisite for preventing a future nuclear holocaust in which the majority of humanity – including postgraduate students would perish. In what was seen as a historic vote, Russia, China, the UK, France and the developing nations supported the US sponsored motion, something which may give some impetus to the process of nuclear disarmament – an idea which has seen very little real progress since the end of the cold war. Britain had earlier in the week announced that its Trident submarine fleet would be reduced from four to three – a move which government spin doctors heralded as a major change in approach, although critics from the Peace Movement while generally being positive in their response, pointed out that this was not a major change, given that the fourth submarine was always seen more as ‘insurance’ and not a key part of the UKs nuclear arsenal.  At the same time Brian Quail the secretary of Scottish CND called for some honest reporting by journalists of this issue, claiming that the phrase ‘nuclear deterrent’ was in effect an example of ‘weasel words’ and that the phrase ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was a more ethically correct phrase. Quoting Confucius he said that the way to ‘restore honour and virtue to the state’ was by ‘giving things their proper name’ and that there should be a veto on ‘this most vile of euphemisms’