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ये संपादक इस युग में भी कलम लेकर कापी एडिट करते हैं

क्या टाइम्स आफ इंडिया, हिंदुस्तान टाइम्स, हिंदू, टेलीग्राफ, डेक्कन, भास्कर, हिंदुस्तान, अमर उजाला, पत्रिका, जागरण, प्रभात खबर आदि अखबारों के कार्यकारी या स्थानीय संपादक कंप्यूटर-इंटरनेट के युग में खबर की हार्ड कापी लेकर कलम से उसे एडिट करते होंगे? मैं सबके बारे में दावे के साथ तो नहीं कह सकता, फिर भी सालों से यह परंपरा बंद ही नजर आ रही है। आप सोच रहे होंगे कि यकायक मुझे यह बात कहां से याद आ गई जो इसका जिक्र कर रहा हूं। दरअसल मैं प्वाइंटर के पुराने न्यूजलेटर देख रहा था और वहां अप्रैल के महीने का एक आलेख मुझे मिला जिसमें अमेरिका के उन संपादकों की बात बताई गई थी, जो आज भी हाथ में कलम लेकर कागज पर रिपोर्टर की कापी एडिट करते हैं। यहां वाशिंगटन पोस्ट के नियमित लेखक हैंक स्टूवर के ब्लाग का जिक्र हैं। मैं उस ब्लाग पर गया और प्रेसीडेंट ओबामा की स्पीच की कलम से एडिटेड कापी देखी। मैं इसे भी यहां पोस्ट कर रहा हूं-

और तलाश शुरू की तो पाया कि अमेरिका में एक नहीं कई संपादक आज भी कलम से कापी एडिट करते हैं। 

वायस आफ सैनडियागो के संपादक एंड्रू डोनाह्यू कहते हैं कि I still edit by hand w/ a red pen and a clipboard। एंड्रू कलम से एडिटिंग को ट्रेनिंग और कोचिंग का अच्छा टूल मानते हैं। उनका मानना है कि इससे रिपोर्टर्स को अच्छी कापी लिखने में मदद मिलती है।

आग्रह

• आपके संपादक यदि ऐसे हों तो उनके बारे में यहां शेयर करें।
• यदि आप खुद संपादक हैं और रिपोर्टर्स की कोचिंग के लिए कोई खास तरीका इस्तेमाल करते हैं तो यहां शेयर करें।
• यदि आप रिपोर्टर हैं और अपने संपादक के तरीके आपको अपनी स्किल्स विकसित करने में मदद मिली है तो विस्तार से सबको बताएं।

FTC is trying to protect journalism’s past

पत्रकारिता की मदद करेगी अमेरिकी सरकार-3

 अमेरिकी फेडरल ट्रेड कमीशन की पत्रकारिता के पुर्नाविष्कार के प्रोजेक्ट पर अमेरिका में लगातार बहस चल रही है। हमारे पत्रकार भी इस बहस को समझें,  इसलिए हम लगातार वहां उठ रही बातों को इस ब्लाग पर देने की कोशिश कर रहे हैं। इसके तहत पढ़िए tampabay.com  पर प्रकाशित एरिक डेगांस के आलेख को....

 

A bailout for news?

By Eric Deggans, Times TV/Media Critic

For most old-school journalists, the equation is simple.
Public disdain for reporters - ranked slightly above used car salesmen in one public poll - combined with a need to stay independent from the government as watchdogs, equals a situation where we can't take money from the government to survive.
But there are some other numbers to consider: 5,900 full-time newspaper journalism jobs disappeared last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, with one-third of newspaper newsroom jobs gone since 2001. Newspaper advertising revenue dropped 22 percent in 2009, according to the PEJ.
The historic way of funding great journalism in America - bankrolling newsrooms through the sales of real estate, auto, retail and employment ads - is disintegrating. Which means journalists must once again confront an uncomfortable issue: Do the news media need a bailout from the government to save journalism?
"If these institutions go away, will it be impossible to build back some alternative?" asked Tom Rosenstiel, director of the PEJ, which is part of the Pew Research Center. "If something precious is irretrievably lost, you may have to move in sooner."
On Tuesday, I'll explore this issue in Washington, D.C., at the national convention of the American Society of News Editors - moderating a panel featuring a journalist, newspaper publisher, government officials and lawyer in a discussion titled: "Can government save us? And do we even want to try?"
John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the liberal magazine Nation and co-author of a book advocating government subsidies called The Death and Life of American Journalism, thinks so. Noting a media universe increasingly crowded with information but decreasing in journalism, Nichols fears a future where reporting on local and state government vanishes.
He and co-author Robert McChesney have suggested a few government-funded antidotes: boosting subsidies to public broadcasting outlets such as National Public Radio and PBS; a tax credit for the first $200 citizens spend on a daily newspaper; or tax incentives for owners of debt-laden media chains who sell their newspapers to local owners.
"The Founding Fathers strongly supported postal subsidies and printing subsidies," Nichols said. "If Rush Limbaugh wants to say this is a typical liberal running to government … I'm like those liberals who founded the American system and thought the government was so powerful it had to have journalism to keep it in check."
A study released in January by the University of Southern California found that in 1970, the U.S. Postal Service covered 75 percent of the mailing costs for news periodicals, totaling $2 billion. In 2006, that subsidy fell to 11 percent, or $288 million. Federal and state tax breaks for newspapers and magazines total more than $900 million.
"If the government has supported the news industry for all of American history, shouldn't it consider new forms of support now, when the survival of news businesses is in doubt?" wrote the study's co-author David Westphal, a former McClatchy Newspapers editor and senior fellow at the school's Center on Communications Leadership and Policy.
But Paul Tash, editor, chairman and CEO of the St. Petersburg Times, opposes direct subsidy of newspapers while noting that government might help indirectly - by allowing the public to make tax-deductible donations to newspapers, for instance.
He criticized the industry for being too fatalistic - incorrectly connecting the problems of big newspaper chains struggling to pay off massive debts in the worst economy since the Great Depression to the death of local journalism.
"This can still be a very vibrant business," he said. "We're here to make government's life miserable. ... To be subsidized by government seems to only invite compromise."
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin echoed that view back in 2008, writing: "A press beholden to the ruling class - a press that cannot stand on its own two feet and the strength of its product - is a press better off dead."
The nation's current political polarization makes substantial or direct aid for journalism seem a long shot. But given how long it may take to see if media rebounds after the general recessions ends - one expert said up to 18 months - it may be time to start drastic discussions now.
"I'm maybe a minority opinion, but I don't think getting government into (supporting) the content creation business is a disaster," said Rick Edmonds, a media analyst for the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times. "But the details are important."
Eric Deggans can be reached at (727) 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com. See The Feed blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.

News Corp. Buys Skiff, Stake in Journalism Online

Acquisitions Fuel Its Campaign for Paid Digital Content

In a pair of deals intended to fuel its campaign to expand paid digital content, News Corp. has bought the Skiff e-reading platform developed by Hearst and a stake in Journalism Online, a company founded to help publishers charge for content on the web.
News Corp. did not, however, acquire the Skiff Reader, a planned e-reader device. It's not clear whether Hearst will still bring the device to market, seek a separate buyer for it or let the planned device die.
Terms of the deals were not disclosed and are not likely to prove material enough to show up in News Corp. financial reports.
News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch have been arguing for some time now that newspapers need to start charging for their content on the web, but the new acquisitions put the company in position to sell them the services to do so. News Corp. has also suggested that it might offer a consumer pass that provides access to multiple gated websites, which again would benefit from the acquisitions. "Soon we'll deliver an innovative subscription model that will deliver content to consumers whenever, wherever they want it," News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said during a quarterly earnings call last month.

News Corp. already had pay technology in its arsenal, of course, starting with the longstanding pay wall at The Wall Street Journal Online and followed by the pay walls at the London Times and Sunday Times. But Journalism Online's outreach to many publishers during the past year may help News Corp. round up partners for its plan more quickly.

And the Skiff e-reading platform gives News Corp. new capabilities and potential services to offer publishers and consumers as e-readers continue to grow. Magazine and newspaper publishers are excited about the potential to sell their content on e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and tablet computers such as Apple's iPad.
News Corp. also said Monday that it had named Jon Housman to the newly created post of president for its digital journalism initiatives; Mr. Housman had been serving as a strategic advisor to News Corp. for the past several years.


Related Story...
Why You'll Pay More to See Popular Science on IPad :Bonnier Thumbs Nose at Theory That Print Should Cost More Than Digital

COURTESY :  AdAge.com

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -3

CONTINUED....

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Where Journalism Fits 

This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists,  as I describe in my book “What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism.” We have been trained for many good reasons to shy away from it in the presentation of news. But we see our audience drawn to it. And we do not even have a way of discussing which uses of emotion are misleading or manipulative and which actually can help people understand their world. 

The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them. They explain, for example, why the immediate crowds out the important. Why bad news attracts attention more than good news does. They can show us how emotion interacts with the human brain’s inherent mental shortcuts to lead us systematically to erroneous conclusions. They can point us to the ways in which search algorithms interact with emotions and these mental shortcuts to mislead people about the relative importance of various pieces of information. They can even help us understand the way our ability and impulse to read other people’s minds draws us to a story and light up other secrets of how and why narrative works. 

It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment. The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience. 

To conclude where I began, the audience will determine the future of news. Serious journalists must understand to the very essence the minds that make up this audience in order to know how to persuade people to assimilate the significant and demand the accurate. Anything less is the neglect of our most important social responsibility. 
THE END

वुवुज़ेला पर बहस

PRAMOD JOSHI
विश्व कप में कौन जीतेगा या हारेगा पर कयासबाज़ी पहले से चल रही थी। अब इस बात पर बहस है कि वुवुज़ेला बजाना ठीक है या नहीं।एएफपी  की रपट के मुताबिक ऑनलाइन कम्युनिटी के लिए यह जबर्दस्त मुद्दा है। मज़ा यह है कि इस दौरान वुवुस्टॉप नाम के ईयर प्लग्स की बिक्री भी जोरों पर है। इस रपट में एक ईयर प्लग विक्रेता का ज़िक्र है जिसका कहना है कि उसने 200 ईयर प्लग बेचे। पर अगर उसके पास 300 होते तो वे भी बिक जाते।


शुक्रवार को दक्षिण अफ्रीका और मैक्सिको के बीच मैच के दौरान कुछ देर के लिए अचानक वुवुज़ेला खामोश हो गए थे। ऐसा तब हुआ जब मैक्सको के मार्केज़ ने दक्षिण अफ्रीका पर बराबरी का गोल दागा।


फेसबुक और यूट्यूब पर वुवुज़ेला प्रेमी और उसके आलोचक आपस में भिड़ गए हैं। बहस इतनी जोरदार है कि एक वैबसाइट खुल गई है। ईएसपीएन के कमेंटेटर इस पींपी से खासे नाराज़ हैं। आप चाहें तो इस बहस में कूद पड़ें। हो सकता है आप टीवी न देख पाए हों और चाहते हों कि आखिर कैसी आवाज़ है जिसपर हंगामा बरपा है तो यहाँ क्लिक करें और सुनें।और अगर आपके पास वुवुज़ेला है और उसे बजाना सीखना चाहते हैं तो इधर चले आएं। 

वुवुझेला है क्या ?

दक्षिण अफ्रीका में हो रहे विश्व कप का टीवी प्रसारण देखने पर एक खास तरह का शोर सुनाई पड़ता है। लगता है मधुमक्खियाँ भिनभिना रहीं हैं। यह वुवुज़ेला बज रहा है। वुवुज़ेला करीब आधे से एक मीटर तक लम्बा भोंपू है, जिसे दर्शक मौज-मस्ती में बजा रहे हैं। एक वुवुज़ेला पूरी शिद्दत से बजाया जाए तो 131 डैसिबल की आवाज़ करता है। और हजारों एक साथ बजें तो? प्रतियोगिता के पहले रोज़ 90,000 दर्शकों में से 10 प्रतिशत ने भी इसे बजाया होगा तो करीब 10,000 वुवुजेलाओं को तो आपने झेला ही होगा।


विकिपीडिया से पता लगा वुवुजेला की ईज़ाद मैक्सिको में हुई। वहीं जहाँ मैक्सिकन वेव की ईज़ाद हुई। वहाँ यह टीन का बनता था। इसे ब्राज़ील में भी बजाया जाता है। बाद में यह अल्युमिनियम का बनने लगा। दक्षिण अफ्रीका में इन दिनों प्लास्टिक के वुवुज़ेला बज रहे हैं। वुवुज़ेला से कान को नुकसान होता है। इसकी आवाज़ दरअसल हाथी के चिंघाड़ने जैसी होती है। इससे बहरापन पैदा हो सकता है। कारोबारियों के पास इसका भी इलाज़ है। जितने लोग वुवुज़ेला खरीद रहे हैं, उतने ही ईयर प्लग भी खरीद रहे हैं। बेचने वालों को दक्षिण अफ्रीकी दर्शकों के शौक का पता था, सो उन्होंने पहले से इंतज़ाम करके रखा है। 25 रैंड में एक जोड़ी। तुम्हीं ने दर्द दिया.....

साभार - http://pramathesh.blogspot.com

FTC is trying to protect journalism’s past

पत्रकारिता की मदद करेगी अमेरिकी सरकार-2

 अमेरिकी फेडरल ट्रेड कमीशन की पत्रकारिता के पुर्नाविष्कार के प्रोजेक्ट पर अमेरिका में लगातार बहस चल रही है। हमारे पत्रकार भी इस बहस को समझें,  इसलिए हम लगातार वहां उठ रही बातों को इस ब्लाग पर देने की कोशिश कर रहे हैं। इसके तहत पढ़िए buzzmachine.com पर आए इस आलेख को.... 

Get off our lawn

The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.
If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.
The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them are as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I’ll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn’t endorse them.
Still, it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That’s something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC’s mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent.
“This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers’ survival. There’s the problem.
Among the ideas the FTC presents:
* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we’ll soon see how Murdoch’s properties do without it). The FTC doesn’t broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don’t) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears).
The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn’t begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip ‘n’ read, it’s called.
What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous.
* Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn’t that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn’t the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents’ price advantages? Not here.
* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.
* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It’snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).
* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs.
* Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that.
I’m quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”
But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn’t — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I’d argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer.
The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side.
The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It’s this:Get off our lawn.

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -2

JUNE 15 POST CONTINUED....

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Emotional Heat 

My struggle with this question led me to the science of how the brain processes information, especially the way emotion directs attention. Of course, it did not take the rise of modern neuroscience to prove that emotion holds an audience. Sophocles knew that when he wrote his drama of incest and violence, “Oedipus Rex.” So do the editors of supermarket tabloids. Count on fear and sex to attract the eye.

Evolution provides the reason: Our ancestors became our ancestors by being able to spot danger and the opportunity to mate. So it was inevitable that as competition for attention exploded with the revolutionary information technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, message senders raised the emotional volume. Serious journalists tended to decry this as infotainment or worse. Perhaps they never themselves quite lived up to the professional ideal of utter disinterest and detachment, but they did learn to draw back from raw emotional appeals.

The audience did not. This baffled many of us. How could people be taken in by screaming commentators (on everything from health care to basketball), by celebrity gossip, by reports characterized at best by truthiness rather than the rigors of verification? 

Here is where the implications of the rapidly developing science of the mind help. It turns out that certain kinds of cognitive challenges (challenges to our thinking) produce emotional arousal. And an emotionally aroused brain is drawn to things that are emotionally charged. 

Give normal humans a tricky anagram or a long division problem involving two numbers out to six decimal points, and they will begin to show emotional arousal—think of it as stress. Give them a strict time limit, and their level of arousal will rise. Throw new information at them (some of it useful, some irrelevant, some just wrong) while they are working on the problem, and their emotional temperature will go up even more. Then distract them (say by calling their names or having their smartphones signal that somebody is trying to reach them), and their arousal level will soar. 

If that sounds familiar, it is. All too familiar. Information overload, time pressure, and distraction characterize our era. The very nature of the information environment in which we all live creates emotional arousal. We are available every moment to everyone we know, and an enormous number of people we do not know. We continuously receive messages: messages of a particular sort—the kind that are directed specifically to us. They come from people who know us personally or from people or institutions that have learned something about what interests us. 

In effect, these ubiquitous messages call out our names. Consequently we live in a continuous state of interruption and distraction. Time pressure is enormous. Even after leaving the Tribune Company to write books, I discovered that people expected me to respond to e-mails within a couple of hours, if not a couple of minutes, and were offended if I did not. 

So not only has the explosion of competition among suppliers of information—news, advertising and entertainment—caused producers to increase the emotional temperature, the recipients of information have become more attracted to emotional heat. This helps explain why heavy news seekers turn to the intensity of Fox News or MSNBC and away from CNN. (It also explains why the once rather restrained National Geographic channel has so many shows about predator species that prey on humans—species that include Homo sapiens themselves.) 


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New New York Times TV Ad

न्यूयार्क टाइम्स बना रहा है नए रास्ते

By RAMU
कहीं ऐसा न हो कि द न्यूयार्क टाइम्स को द न्यूयार्क टाइम्स एंड फ्रेंड्स के नाम से जाना जाने लगे। इस अखबार ने पिछले माह सैन फ्रांसिस्को के  प्राफिट जर्नलिज्म ग्रुप द बे सिटीजन के साथ न्यूज गैटदरिंग पार्टनरशिप की है। बे सिटीजन के 15 कर्मचारी हैं और इनका नेतृत्व जोनाथन वेबर कर रहे हैं। जोनाथन वेबर अपनी गति को प्राप्त हो चुकी बिजनेस मैगजीन द इंडस्ट्री स्टैंडर्ड के एडीटर इन चीफ रहे हैं। अब वह न्यूयार्क टाइम्स के आठ माह पुराने सैन फ्रांसिस्को पुलआउट के लिए कंटेंट उपलब्ध कराएंगे। यह पुलआउट हफ्ते में दो दिन दिया जाता है। यहां यह बता देना उचित होगा कि न्यूयार्क टाइम्स और वाल स्ट्रीट जर्नल में आजकल लोकल कवरेज बढ़ाने की प्रतिस्पर्धा चल रही है। अखबार का यह पहला प्रयोग नहीं है बल्कि उसने इस साल की शुरुआत में न्यूयार्क यूनिवर्सिटी के पत्रकारिता छात्रों को मैनहटन के ईस्ट विलेज पर केंद्रित अपनी अति लोकल वेबसाइट के लिए कंटेंट उपलब्ध कराने के लिए रखा था। गौरतलब है कि न्यूयार्क टाइम्स अपने अति विश्वसनीय कंटेंट के लिए जाना जाता रहा है और इसकी वजह यह रही कि उसने पहले कभी फ्रीलांसरों का सहारा नहीं लिया था।
अगर हम अपने देश की बात करें तो यहां फ्रीलांसरों की परंपरा बहुत पुरानी है। अपने फ्रीलांसरों को प्रतिनिधि कहा जाता रहा है क्योंकि इनके साथ अखबार का एक्सक्लूसिव अनुबंध होता है। हिंदी हो या अंगरेजी, सभी अखबार क्षेत्रीय (अपकंट्री) खबरों के लिए इन्हीं पर आज भी निर्भर करते हैं। लेकिन मैनहटन की अपनी अति लोकल वेबसाइट के लिए जो प्रयोग न्यूयार्क टाइम्स ने अब किया है, वह प्रयोग भास्कर ने 2005-2009 तक सफलता पूर्वक चलाया। दरअसल भास्कर का लोकल पुलआउट सिटी भास्कर का अधिकतर कंटेंट कालेज से निकले नए छात्र ही उपलब्ध कराते थे। इन्हें फ्रीलांसर का दर्जा दिया जाता था और इनको छपी खबरों के लिहाज से भुगतान कर दिया जाता था। जिन फ्रीलांसरों में प्रतिभा दिखती थी, उन्हें साल-डेढ़ में स्टाफर बना दिया जाता था और नए फ्रीलांसर भरती कर लिए जाते थे। बाद में डीबी स्टार में भी यह प्रयोग किया गया। अब वहां शायद यह प्रयोग ढीला पड़ गया है।

Times Online switched off yesterday, now it's back to TheTimes.co.uk and TheSundayTimes.co.uk

Steve Jobs, iTunes app and The Sun!!!!

स्टीव जाब्स अपने आईट्यून्स एप स्टोर को पोर्न कंटेंट से बचाना चाहते हैं लेकिन थोड़ी मुश्किल आ रही है। पूरी तरह पोर्न मुक्त होना कठिन  हैं यदि आप अर्धनग्न माडल्स के फोटो को पोर्न की किसी भी श्रेणी में रखते हैं तो.

दरअसल मर्डोक के स्वामित्व वाले ब्रिटिश टेबुलायड सन  की प्रिंट व आनलाइन संस्करण मुस्कराती-इठलाती टापलेस पेज 3 गर्ल्स के लिए जानी जाती है और according to huffington post they’re in the $7.99 iPad app, too, according to this numbingly in-depth review/slideshow from paidContent. Here’s the relevant screenshot, which paidContent has made safe for work but that would otherwise feature a half-nekkid lady’s boobies: 

How’s that work? According to paidContent, The Sun gets away with itbecause Apple (AAPL) requires the app’s users to confirm they’re at least 17 years old.

But if that’s the case, wouldn’t every vaguely porny app be embracing this workaround? And if so, wouldn’t that make iTunes as steamy as Google’s (GOOG) Android offering?

I’m hoping that Apple’s PR staff can sort this out for us. But I’m not hopeful.

Inside Facebook Headquarters

Inside Facebook Headquarters

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -1

हार्वर्ड यूनिवर्सिटी नीमैन रिपोर्ट का समर 2010 इश्यू जारी हो चुका है। यह इश्यू केंद्रित है कि न्यूज में आगे क्या पर...इसमें तमाम तरह के लोगों ने कंट्रीब्यूट किया है। हालांकि यह रिपोर्ट मुख्य तौर पर अमेरिकन पत्रकारिता के परिप्रेक्ष्य में ही है लेकिन इससे हम अपने यहां की पत्रकारिता और उसमें टेक्नोलाजी व इकोनोमिक्स की वजह से चल रहे ट्रांजिशन को समझने और दृष्टि विकसित करने में मदद ले सकते हैं। मैंने अभी इस रिपोर्ट को सरसरी निगाह से देखा है और यहां पर इसका वह आलेख अंग्रेजी मूल में ही दे रहा हूं जो मूल बात को उठा रहा है। मैं जल्द ही इस रिपोर्ट का सार हिंदी में यहां पोस्ट करूंगा - रामू

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

‘This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists … . The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them.’

By Jack Fuller, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, was editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing Company. His book, “What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism,” is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Here is the deepest and, to many serious journalists, most disturbing truth about the future of news: The audience will control it. They will get the kind of news they choose to get. Not the kind they say they want, but the kind they actually choose. 

To the extent that news needs to produce profits, the demand ultimately will shape the supply. But even if unlimited nonprofit funding for serious journalism were suddenly to appear, demand would still control. That is because, no matter what its business model might be, journalism will fail to deliver to the broad public the civic education our society requires unless it can persuade large numbers of people to pay attention to it. So the choice is not between giving people what they want or what they need. The challenge is to induce people to want what they need. 

How to do that with everything in constant motion? New technologies, new services, new competitors seem to arise every day. All this activity can mask a more important trend—the audience itself is changing rapidly. As a consequence, the disciplined, professional presentation of news perfected over the 20th century no longer commands the widespread respect it once did. The influence of undisciplined news voices grows. 

Journalists know all about responding to the next new thing. We leap like dalmatians at the sound of the fire bell. But to understand what is happening to the news audience today we need to get beyond the clang of the alarm. We have to get past the immediacy of each hot new idea and begin with something deeper and more durable. We need to understand what the transformation of our information environment has done at the most fundamental level to the way people take in news. (cont...)

It may change the economic dynamics of media

By RAMU

UK’s The Times is getting ready to make its online content paid. It is Rupert Murdoch’s move. He has been advocating for it since long time. He is dead against free for all.

Of course it is going to be a bold decision which may change the economic dynamics of media.

I don’t know whether he is taking a right decision but he is very passionate about newspaper business and very fond of taking big risks…

Rupert Murdoch on iPad and Steve Jobs

पत्रकारिता की मदद करेगी अमेरिकी सरकार!

अमेरिकी सरकार अपने अखबारों (या कहें मीडिया) को मुश्किल से उबारने की योजना लाने पर विचार कर रही है। अमेरिकी फेडरल ट्रेड कमीशन तमाम प्लेटफार्म्स का इस्तेमाल कर पत्रकारिता बिजनेस को ज्यादा लाभदायी बनाने के सुझाव एकत्र कर उनका विश्लेषण कर रहा है। पत्रकारिता के पुनार्विष्कार के तहत यह कार्यक्रम चलाया जा रहा है। अब तक आए कुछ सुझाव इस प्रकार हैं-

• ·        आईपैड पर अतिरिक्त टैक्स लगाना
• ·        न्यूज कंपनियों के लिए आनलाइन कंटेंट पेड बनाने की राह आसान करना
• ·        युवा पत्रकारों के लिए अमेरिकार्प्स की तर्ज पर फंड स्थापित करना

इस साल के अंत तक कमीशन की विस्तृत रिपोर्ट आ जाने की उम्मीद है। न्यूयार्क टाइम्स में प्रकाशित एक खबर के मुताबिक, कमीशन निदेशक सुसान एस डिसैंटि ( इनके नेतृत्व में यह अध्ययन हो रहा है) का कहना है कि अमेरिका में खबरों का बिजनेस गंभीर संक्रमण काल से गुजर रहा है। कोई नहीं जानता कि कब यह दौर खत्म होगा और न ही कोई यह बता पाने की स्थिति में कि कब और कैसे यह संक्रमण की स्थिति खत्म होगी।

 

लेकिन अमेरिकी अखबार इसका पुरजोर विरोध ही नहीं कर रहे बल्कि सरकार के इस प्रयास का उपहास भी बना रहे हैं। वाशिंगटन टाइम्स ने अपने संपादकीय में लिखा कि यदि सरकार पुराने बिजनेस माडल को बचाने के नाम पर इन्नोवेशंस को दबाने की साजिश रचेगी तो उपभोक्ता ही घाटे में रहने वाला है। एक मीडिया वाचडाग प्रकाशन चलाने वाले स्टीवेन ब्रिल कहते हैं कि पत्रकारों को इसका पुरजोर विरोध करना चाहिए। सिटी यूनिवर्सिटी आफ न्यूयार्क के प्रो. जेफ जारविस कहते हैं कि पत्रकारिता का भविष्य सुरक्षित रखने के नाम पर सरकारी हस्तक्षेप कतई ठीक नहीं है। भविष्य इंस्टीट्यूशनल नहीं बल्कि उद्यमशीलता में है और उद्यमियों को इस तरह की सरकारी मदद की जरूरत नहीं हैं। 

Teenage trips: that first parent-free holiday

I read this article in guardian....Seven writers recount the adventures – and mishaps – of their first holiday without mum and dad
(It is good story idea for hindi newspapers, which often serves garbage in the name of travel and leisure ...)

Emma Kennedy, right, as a teenager

Hilary Bradt: Staying with a German pen pal

When I was 15 I went to stay with my pen friend in north Germany. It was my first trip abroad and the first without my parents and I hated every minute of it. From the moment we met, Christina and I disliked each other and, in hindsight, I can only feel sorry for this normal teenager who liked boys and pop music. I only liked horses and was shamefully retarded on the emotional front.

It's hard to pick out the low point from a trough of tearful gloom but it was probably when I was alone in the house and there was a persistent ringing at the bell which I ignored. Then, to my alarm, I could see the visitor walking around the house looking through the windows. I hid under the dining room table. That afternoon Dr Schmidt, Christina's very frightening mother, came home from work and told me she'd left her key behind and had needed to pick up some papers from the house. "But you didn't hear me," she said. "Oh, I must have been in my room. Sorry!" I said, blushing crimson, with the awful knowledge that she'd seen me.
Hilary Bradt is the co-founder of Bradt Travel Guides

Read full story here....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/jun/12/teenage-holidays-without-parents-comic?page=all

वॉरेन एंडरसन की रिहाई

प्रमोद जोशी

पिछले कुछ दिनों के भारतीय अखबार पढ़ने से लगता था कि एंडरसन की केन्द्रीय सरकार के इशारे पर हुई रिहाई कोई बड़ा रहस्य थी, जिसका भंडाफोड़ अब हुआ है। यह बात तो उन दिनों के भारतीय अखबारों में भी छपी थी और अमेरिका के पिट्सबर्ग पोस्ट गज़ट और फ्रीलांस स्टार के पेज गूगल सर्च के बाद आसानी से मिल जाते हैं, जिनके अनुसार एंडरसन की रिहाई भारत सरकार के सहयोग से हुई। सीआईए के डिक्लासिफाइड डॉक्यूमेंट भी यही कहते हैं, जो सीआईए की साइट पर देखे जा सकते हैं। ये अखबार दिसम्बर 1984 के हैं।

 

पिट्सबर्ग पोस्ट गज़ट का लिंक
सीआईए दस्तावेज़ का लिंक
इस किताब का पेज 148 पढ़ें

साभार - जिज्ञासा

Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content

by Paul Carr 
“Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?” –Blog headline

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” – Macbeth

There’s something about the idea of “New York Internet Week” that I’ve always found inherently funny; like “Saudi Arabia Bring Your Daughter To Work Day”, or Greenland being called Greenland.

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

read complete post http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/new-york-internet-weak/