PBS’s FRONTLINE airs the first in a series entitled “News War.” What will be the future business model for the news industry? How will we get news? Where is the line between legitimate national security concerns and the public’s right to know? Should reporters have the right to protect anonymous sources?
Looks like a must-see for anyone in the news business. You can watch it on-air and online beginning February 13th. Set those Tivos.
Podcasting News reports:“The Associated Press and NowPublic.com announced Friday that they have agreed to an initiative designed to bring citizen content into AP newsgathering, and to explore ways to involve NowPublic’s on-the-ground network of news contributors in AP’s breaking news coverage.
NowPublic.com, based in Vancouver, is the world’s largest participatory news network with more than 60,000 contributors from 140 countries. The AP is the world’s largest newsgathering organization with a staff of more than 4,000 employees located in more than 240 bureaus in 97 countries.
The goal of the effort is to expand the world’s access to news as it happens, the companies said.”
A couple of years ago I suggested adding comments to the stories we post on our news websites. The reporter to whom I offered the suggestion said he really didn’t care what readers thought about his story. No shit.
We have just relaunched our news sites and have a comments feature we have yet to enable. Should we? It won’t be my call but, stay tuned.
Radio Iowa reporter Stella Shaffer produces “Radio Iowa: Week In Review” and it’s a nice toe-in-the-podcast-water for the network. She pulls together the top stories of the previous week:
“The old governor’s got a gig teaching law at Drake, the new governor wants a dollar-a-pack increase in the cigarette tax, and an economist tells us what that might cost. The new improved state minimum wage may also have unanticipated consequences, according to HeadStart heads. Bitter cold played a part in the apprehension of an auto-theft suspect, OSHA offered a helping hand to migrant workers while one mayor wants a fulltime cop to bust them, and we mourn two more Iowa soldiers lost.”
Another of our networks began repurposing feature programs as podcasts last year. But RIWIR is our first true podcast (by my definition).
We have some really good reporters working in our newsrooms. Historically, if they came up with a good idea for a new program, it could only fly if we could convince enough affiliate stations to “clear” it.
In the world of podcasts, they are only limited by their imaginations and the hours in the day. I’m hoping to hear some good stuff in the coming year.
LostRemote points to a survey of over 1,000 teachers that found that 57 percent use national or international news websites as a source of news for teaching purposes, compared to 28 percent for daily newspapers and just 13 percent for local TV news.
“Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records,” one teacher said in the study. Local papers “haven’t recognized how quickly this transition is taking place,” said the study’s author, Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. What about local TV sites? They weren’t even mentioned.
Uh, any mention of radio news?
The Hardest Working Blogger in Show Business, Chuck Zimmerman, is in Berlin, covering the annual meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists. IFAJ is “a non-political, professional association for agricultural journalists in 29 countries.” As far as I can determine (and Chuck is aware), he is the only person blogging this event.
You gotta figure that at least some of the attendees have laptops and digital cameras with them. Not one blogger in the bunch? Maybe there’s coverage of the event at the official IFAJ website…nope.
Old Media types can’t understand why I’m even asking? Bloggers can’t imagine attending something like this and not putting up a couple of posts.