Future of journalism
The Future Of News
The internet or information age is not keeping everyone informed, as once thought it would, in fact is dangerously contributing to information inequality, misinformation, polarisation and ultimately much noise. This has made audiences anxious and mistrusting, causing many to be confused and ultimately disengage. A future model needs to be built on fact checking and trust, with clear procedures to ensure news is not tampered with in any way. This new reporting method, will need be safeguarded by law to allow us to keep everyone informed in an age beyond the traditional broadcasting models. Join us as we discuss the ‘future of news’
The Future of Journalism: Will we be better informed? Part One
By Isabel Gonzalez-Prendergast On Wednesday 22 October, the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine launched at the Frontline Club. The magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, introduced the issue and handed over to author and columnist, David Aaronovitch, who chaired the accompanying debate on the future of journalism. Aaronovitch initiated the discussion by asking each panellist to speak individually on […]
Graham Greene: A Finger on the Pulse of the 20th Century
By Jim Treadway "He was there!" Director Thomas O’Connor said of English author and journalist Graham Greene (1904-1991), the subject of his documentary Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, which was viewed by a full house at the Frontline Club on 1 October. "There, you know, for 70 years, from one place to another, […]
Journalism doesn’t pay, so what?
I never thought about making money when I set up Kigali Wire. From the beginning it has always been an experiment and it remains so. I never thought about making money when I shot my first photojournalism essay – which is in dire need of an editor’s hand… forgive me, it is my first bash […]
End Times at The New York Times
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c End Times thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview The Daily Show take a tour of the offices of the New York Times. If you want to know what’s black and white and red all over… watch the […]
A world without foreign correspondents
Andrew Stroehlein, Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, wrote a great piece on his Covering Crisis blog on the Reuters AlertNet site. He has very kindly agreed to let us post it on the Frontline blog. He raises a lot of points about under-reported stories, things we regularly cover here and discuss at length […]
How not to read a newspaper
Writing on the Foreign Policy blog Thomas E. Ricks suggests we should start reading newspapers like reporters. His simple, but misguided, point is that we should simply follow the writers we like, look for the bylines we know and love, read those articles and pretty much ignore the rest of the paper. Here’s his take, […]
Fixing the foreign correspondent web
How does the Internet affect the work of a foreign correspondent? That’s the question Andrew Stroehlein, a journalist and Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, discusses on the Reuters AlertNet blog. Andrew draws together a lot of current thinking and makes the point that it’s often impractical for a foreign correspondent to work effectively […]
The Decline of the Foreign Correspondent
Princeton University recently held a panel discussion on the Decline of the Foreign Correspondent. They talk about the “dramatic shift of traditional media away from foreign reporting and the growth of web-based citizen journalists and the effect on coverage of international news and human rights issues” Taking part are, Loren Jenkins, Foreign Editor, National Public […]
Global Post looks to engage bloggers
Global Post, a new online news agency, is set to launch on Monday, January 12. The site claims it has 60+ foreign correspondents ready to report from 40+ countries in text, pictures and video. They plan to begin by trying to answer the question: “What does Obama mean to the World?” Charles Sennott, a Frontline […]
The future of news
This could make a good Christmas read. The Media Re:Public report on the future of media in the digital age is published just in time for the holidays and it’s free to download. As Ethan says, My friend Persephone Miel came to the Berkman Center more than a year ago to take on a challenging […]
50% of UK media jobs to go by 2013
[video:youtube:vpAdAG8ktAk] Robert Andrews has a thoroughly depressing (but realistic?) post up on the excellent media watch blog PaidContent about the number of job lay offs forecast for the UK media industry in the near future. “We calculated the total jobs in the media in the UK at about 400,000 … at the end of 2007. […]
“Basic Foreign correspondence is dead. I think that’s a damn good thing”
David Schlesinger, Reuters News editor-in-chief, gave the traditional foreign correspondent model both barrels at a debate on International news coverage at City University in London last week. “A lot of basic traditional foreign correspondence was lousy. It was reading the local papers, having some fixer translate it for you, stringing it together and sending it […]
Massive explosion in Kandahar
Frontline blogger Alex was in Kandahar when a “huge explosion near Kandahar stadium” went off. I caught up on this a bit late as I’ve been training all day, but Alex had the wherewithall to poke his head on to the balcony, snap some shots, send a series of messages to Twitter, upload a picture […]
Iraq embeds at all-time low
CNSNews reports that the number of embedded reporters working in Iraq is at an all-time low, There were just 39 embedded reporters covering Iraq in September 2008 compared to 219 in September 2007, a decline of 82 percent. link
Grim outlook for BBC says John Simpson
BBC World Affairs Editor and Frontline Club regular, John Simpson, was talking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival when he turned on his paymaster of the last 42 years, “The future? Well, I don’t think that it’s going to look very good for the BBC. I think the BBC we have known, for good or worse, […]
Foreign news needs real experts
Richard Sambrook, BBC Global News Director and Frontline Club regular, is interviewed in The Guardian this week. He argues for a change in the way international news is covered. He says there’s a need to greater utilize local journalists on the ground “The nature of international coverage is changing. The old model of a western […]
The tools have changed
Broadcast talks to four senior TV news journalists about how their working life has changed due to improvements in technology. Tim Marshall, Sky News’ foreign affairs editor, says most of the changes are for the good. And sometimes knocking on a door and asking if you can hop on a wifi connection is the best […]
How do you track Russian language news from South Ossetia without reading Russian?
Here’s one way to try and follow the South Ossetia story in Russian if you can’t read Russian. I touch on these methods when I teach the Track Breaking News Online courses each month in London. We’ll do all this by using a combination of online translation tools and RSS feeds. Firstly, find a number […]
More on the death of foreign news reporting
One of the least favourite (yet most common) topics of this blog since we started has been the decline in foreign news coverage and the various attempts to try and rescue it. The New York Times, quoting the latest Pew Research report today, suggests the grim tidings are only set to get grimmer, “It’s really […]
Web 2.0 for warzones… not there yet
Our man in Chad, David Axe, writes a great post summarizing the strengths and the weaknesses of using a Nokia N95 and live video broadcast software Qik to report from a war zone. It’s not rocket science, if the mobile phone networks are flakey and/or you can’t get to a decent wifi connection live reporting […]
Lara Logan and the death of foreign news coverage
It’s desperately ironic that one week Lara Logan bemoans the abysmal state of the US media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. While, one week later, she finds herself the target of more media coverage than both wars combined. But Why? She didn’t start another war, did she? No, well not really. She is […]
Frontline Club live – Making it pay
Live tonight from the Frontline Club, 7.30pm UK time. A debate about the economic model for online newspapers. Follow the livestream here. More information below, UPDATE: Here’s the recording of this event. And here are some images. As the internet fast becomes the dominant medium for news delivery, we look at the relationships between print […]
War reporting is too expensive
[video:youtube:CT-Hq117w8s] Following on from Lara Logan’s broadside on the American media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – the CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent said she would “blow her brains out” if she had to watch what passed for news in the US – The New York Times follows up with a round up of […]
What’s the economic model for news?
[video:youtube:a3n6qMGvpw8] We’re watching the Roman Empire fall apparently and we’re in the era of barbarian thieftans. Can’t argue with that. Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo blog, paints a paperless picture for the future of news at a conference last month at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Ziv Koren and the finger camera
Annaliza Savage, Wired.com’s multimedia editor, writes about how photographer Ziv Koren used a “finger camera” on top of his camera while photographing conflict zones. Film director Solo Avital later used a mix of stills and video to produce the More than 1000 Words documentary, In order to film Koren on the West Bank, Gaza and […]
Top 10 journalistic uses for Twitter
Here’s a brief guide to the top 10 journalistic uses of the microblogging tool Twitter. It’s not all useless banter about cats and cookery… Sources – Use Twitterlocal to find out if anyone is tweeting from where you want to report, see what they’re tweeting about, whether they might be useful/interesting and see if they […]
Twitter’s quicker
“Just heard a big blast near badi chowpak. Donno what it was.” Not much of a quote, but it was enough to get the story out. Sandil Srinivasan, or 2s as he is known on the micro-blogging service Twitter, was in Jaipur on 13 May when the first of a series of nine synchronized bombs […]
The new AP – no cost – high impact
following the jaipur blasts on twitter, originally uploaded by robinhamman. Robin Hamman follows how the microblogging tool Twitter was again so effectively used during the bomb blasts in Jaipur two days ago. Robin used Tweetscan, a tool that searches public Twitter messages for keywords, to see if anyone was twittering from the scene. It’s not […]
So, what is the future for news?
I have no idea… Well, I have some ideas, but I’m not blogging about them just yet. However, our very own Daniel Bennett puts together a useful future of news primer on his personal blog Mediating Conflict. One of the folks Daniel highlights is Adam Timworth, ‘If you were to ask a group of people […]