Friday, February 15, 2008

Global News

New web only international news publication, yes, Global News, is scheduled to launch next year based in the U.S., Boston, but promised to have correspondents in about 70 countries. In addition, the venture has succeeded to collect more than $ 7 million, so far. It is run by veteran journalist Phillip S. Balboni. In times of diminishing original foreign reporting, new international news sources are really needed. Especially, in the U.S.

Boston Globe: NECN founder starting news site

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Foreign Reporting

E & P (AP): 87 Journalists Killed on the Job in 2007, China Leads in Jailing Them

Iraqi journalists have made great sacrifices during last years in their work in order to cover news for foreign media.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Citizen News Video

Finally, Reuters has told that CNN will enter YouTube territory with its citizen journalism site iReport.com.

Video clips are among the main drivers in the Internet´s multimedia world just now, and the trend seems to continue. The main actor is Google with its YouTube. According to MediaPost and new comScore data, just recently, Google sites saw substantial growth and extended their video market share gains. All together, U.S. Web users watched more than 10 billion videos online in December. As predicted, the Writers Guild of America three-month-long strike appears to be contributing to a surge in online video viewing activity. The loosing side - broadcast and cable-tv.

This kind of "strike-effect on media consumption" has happened several times before in the history of the media. For example, during 1960´s, when newspaper journalist went on strike in the U.S. and elsewhere
for several months, network TV-news ratings were boosted. Actually, for the very first time TV-news became more important source for the people than newspapers. Something similar can happen now with video sharing sites.

That´s why CNN
launched its counter-strike, and most likely, later, all other major media news producers as well has to follow its model.

However, another solution for the MSM to survive with the disruptive Internet-effects, is to ship quality content to existing popular video sharing sites. British news behemoth BBC News and its commercial rival ITN News has done this already some time ago with YouTube.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Business of News

When the price of the news has dropped almost into zero because of the Internet, how is it possible to sustain any news business anymore. This is exceptionally vital question for foreign news, which is the most expensive sports of the news business. Here is one of the first academic scholars, who has explored the question. His name is James T. Hamilton, and he is Charles S. Sydnor Professor of Public Policy, Economics, and Political Science at Duke University.

Here is a good opportunity to hear and watch the man himself:

UC Berkeley/Graduate School of Journalism: "The Economics of News" with James T. Hamilton. (approx. 1hour)

And here is a link to his book: All the News That's Fit to Sell:How the Market Transforms Information into News (2004)