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Global View
Best Online Resources for Following the 2012 London Summer #Olympics
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London have largely been anticipated as the first social media Olympics. Athletes, fans, and the media shared their voices online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, but this time in London, even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to adopt a full-fledged social media strategy. Starting with the Athletes' Hub - fully...
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EducationShift
Student Journalists Go Global, Think Locally in #Olympics Coverage from London
Amid the thousands of professional journalists gathered in London for the start of the Summer Olympics will be a handful of journalism students with the unusual opportunity to work in school-sponsored teams to cover the high-profile games. Several U.S. universities have launched new programs to bring journalists-in-training directly to the scene of the giant international sporting event, where they have...
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Business
Starting a Daily Paper Uniting a Struggling Europe: Crazy or Genuis?
Imagine a Tuesday morning in Rome. A woman dressed in business attire drinks her espresso while browsing the European Daily in a noisy cafeteria. At the same time, imagine in Stockholm, an Erasmus student from Bulgaria is absorbed in a report from the same paper about his country being finally accepted into the Schengen area. Although just a scenario right...
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PoliticalShift
The Pirate Party Gains Steam Overseas; Will It Catch in the U.S.?
Meet Jan Hemme: mild-mannered public relations executive by day, Pirate by night -- specifically, a strategist for Berlin's Pirate Party. This new political movement, with roots in the tech culture, is shaking up politics across Europe and hopes to make some noise in the coming U.S. elections. Given the exponential influence of digital media in the life of political parties,...
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World View
The Digital Age and the Changing Face of International Media Development
Search for the term "international media development" and you won't find many university departments or publications. Nonetheless, the field is over 50 years old and has exerted a major influence on many regions of the world, accounting for a budget of half a billion dollars a year. The Center for International Media Assistance, a Congressionally-funded think tank, defines media development...
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Europe
Spain's iPad Mag, Vis à Vis, Shows Growth, Points to New Path
In a small office in Alcala Street, in the center of Madrid, a team of seven young entrepreneurial journalists are working overtime to produce the next issue of digital magazine Vis à Vis. Conceived exclusively for the iPad and launched in January, Vis à Vis is an interactive, visual and modern publication that wants to reinvent journalism. The first...
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Social Networking
How Social Media Is Changing Protest Reporting in the U.K.
In March 1984, tens of thousands of British miners went on strike over expected coal mine closures. During the next year, unions faced off with police and Margaret Thatcher's conservative government in what became Britain's most turbulent industrial protest of recent decades.
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MobileShift
How One Reporter Ditched His Laptop and Covered a Conference with an iPhone, iPad
For the first time in my career last week, I went to work naked. I had the requisite snazzy shirt and tie, but I showed up at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, without my laptop computer and without my camera. I had decided to go all mobile. I'm one of those reporters who usually overdoes it with technology....
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EducationShift
Technology Journalism: The Jobs Are There; the Journalists Are Not
BARCELONA -- If journalism is a profession in trouble, you would never know it from the newsroom at the Mobile World Congress. It's hard to find one of the 500 seats in the newsroom empty as journalists from around the world file stories for specialty newspapers, websites and blogs. Unfortunately, few journalism schools can boast about placing their alums here....
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Ethics
3 Laws for Journalists in a Data-Saturated World
At the Cyberspace Conference in London in November, Igor Shchegolev, the Russian minister of communications and mass media, referred to sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #31: BBC World Invades U.S.; ReadWriteWeb Sold to Say Media
Welcome to the 31st episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we turn across the pond to the U.K., where the BBC is pushing its BBC World cable news channel to an American audience. The BBC recently made a deal with Comcast to increase its...
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Business
Truth and Contradictions: The Global News Industry Looks to the Future
In recent years, the global news industry has been battered by the double tsunami of the economic downturn and technological disruption, as managers of newspapers and magazines struggle to integrate digital media into their business models. Now, over the past two years, the tablet and the smartphone have appeared, promising to again rewrite the relationship between digital distribution and content...
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Social Networking
Dutch Artist Explores Privacy, Social Media With 'Showroom Girls'
This past summer, Amsterdam's Foam museum exhibited a controversial project by Dutch visual artist Willem Popelier -- a project that has raised a debate about the intersection of the Internet, in particular social media, and privacy.Popelier's Showroom Girls centers on the story of two 14-year-old girls the artist tracked through social media.The two girls visited a shop where customers can...
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Europe
In Spain, 'Little Black Book' of Journalism Shows Profession in Crisis
Pressure from the publishing industry has weakened the watchdog role of journalists, turning them into lapdogs at the service of corporations and politicians and unable to serve their readers. That's one of the conclusions of Bernardo Diaz Nosty, journalism professor at the University of Malaga. Diaz Nosty, also a journalist, is the author of "Libro Negro del Periodismo en...
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Business
Financial Times Enjoys Life Beyond the App Store
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when app makers were fighting to get featured in Apple's App Store, and crying out in protest if their app didn't make the cut. So it's quite a turnabout to talk to folks at the Financial Times, who have not only removed their apps from the App Store but have thrived with an HTML5 web app that lives outside of the App Store completely.
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Europe
Infographic Explains Hackgate, News of the World Scandal
Maybe you're still confused about the whole "hackgate" scandal in the United Kingdom, where the News of the World tabloid hacked cell phone voicemail messages to get inside information. Perhaps our guide to the scandal was just too dense. Well, here's an even simpler proposition: one simple infographic to explain the whole thing. The infographic was created by security firm...
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Social Networking
What the England Riots Tell Us About Social Media
When England instituted the Riot Act of 1714, it did so to prevent "tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters." That statute came off the books in 1973, but now British Prime Minister David Cameron is targeting the "riotous assemblies" of the online and social media worlds in the wake of deadly and...
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Guides
Your Guide to the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal (or 'Hackgate')
From time to time, we provide an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. We've previously covered Twitter, local watchdog news sites, and Net neutrality, among other topics. This week MediaShift U.K. correspondent Tristan Stewart-Robertson looks at the...
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Your Take
What's Your Current Interest in the Phone-Hacking Scandal?
The phone-hacking scandal seems to have everything: tabloids chasing celebrities, celebrities suing news organizations, police getting bribes, politicians cozying up to media moguls, media moguls questioned at Parliamentary hearings, and a media mogul's wife showing off her mean left hook vs. a pie-throwing, tweeting comedian. It has certainly set social media, cable TV (except for Fox News) and mass media...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #14: This Week in Rupert; NY Times' Pay Wall Pays Off
Welcome to the 14th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. There's a lot of news to cover in this podcast, including Apple's earnings, Yahoo's earnings, the possible sale of Hulu, and more. But the big deal this week is of course another heaping...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #13: Smartphone Ownership Booms; This Week in Rupert
Welcome to the 13th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at a recent survey by Pew Internet that found that 35 percent of Americans now have smartphones, and that ownership is even higher among people of color. Guest...
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Your Take
Who Is Ultimately Responsible for the U.K. Phone-Hacking Scandal?
The revelations coming out by the hour in the U.K. phone-hacking scandal are breathtaking. What began as supposedly a rogue operation by a gossip reporter and a private investigator have now allegedly widened to include many more editors, reporters, investigators, bribes to police and the shutdown of the best-selling newspaper in the English language -- the News of the World....
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Europe
UK Phone-Hacking Scandal Shows Clash of Privacy with Need to Know
British journalism has just undergone one of the most radical weeks in several decades. "Rocked," "chaos," "shocking" -- use whatever adjectives you like, but news this week that the News of the World (NOTW) tabloid hacked into the phones of child murder victims, families of London's July 7, 2005 terror attacks, and parents of soldiers killed in action has turned...
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Social Networking
How the Egyptian Revolution Inspired Protests in Spain
Shortly after I moved to Madrid after visiting Cairo, an Egyptian friend tweeted solidarity with the hashtag #SpanishRevolution. A revolution? In Spain? Was this his attempt to make my new home seem more exciting? The link he posted led to video of a packed Puerta del Sol -- a square in the center of Madrid. And so, someone 2,000 miles...
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Europe
In Lithuania, an Overdue Crackdown on Online Hate Speech
Online hate speech is becoming more and more widespread in Lithuania and until recently, comments like, "The world needs Hitler again to do the cleansing job," which was posted on a website called Delfi, or "Expel dirty Roma people out of Lithuania" would have gone unheeded by criminal justice. "Although the Lithuanian Criminal Codex includes sufficient law provisions to prosecute...
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Social Media
BBC Social Media Summit: Crowdsourcing a Research Agenda
The BBC College of Journalism is staging a Social Media Summit (hashtag #BBCSMS) in London this week, which will bring together industry leaders, practitioners and academics from around the world, with a view to collaboratively mapping the future of social journalism. Social media is having a transformative impact on professional journalism. And the speed of the real-time revolution raises significant...
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PoliticalShift
How Social Media is Being Used in the Scottish Elections
Since Barack Obama successfully tapped into social media during his run to the White House in 2008, every political group has tried to use the digital world to bring in revenue and votes. This year's Scottish Parliament elections, which take place on May 5, will be the first in that country since Facebook and Twitter came to dominate the social...
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Europe
Romanian Magazine Uses Facebook for 'Crowd-Publishing' Success
It all started over a beer. One evening in April 2009, Cristian Lupşa and four other young journalists were chatting in a pub in Bucharest, Romania about the low quality of the country's print media. They should start their own magazine, someone joked. They could call it Decât o Revistă, which in slightly broken Romanian means "just a magazine." It...
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Technology
How French Site OWNI Profits by Giving Away Its Content
Most content sites in the U.S. have two ways of making money: charging for subscriptions or running advertising (or both). But a French site, OWNI.fr, has found an unusual business model for a site with no ads and no subscriptions -- that's also profitable. How do they do it? Their main business is doing web development and apps for media companies and institutions.
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Social Networking
How Tuenti Held Off Facebook in Spain with Better Privacy
JEREZ DE LOS CABALLEROS, SPAIN -- When I first got to Spain, my Spanish students immediately asked me if I was on Tuenti. Like most Americans, I had never heard of it. Once I learned that it was another social network, I figured I didn't need it. First of all, I had a Facebook page, and secondly, I was wary...
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Europe
Brussels Leaks Tries to Build on WikiLeaks Idea in EU
A new site, Brussels Leaks, modeled after WikiLeaks, launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and the Twittersphere. This follows the announcement of OpenLeaks, a spin-off from WikiLeaks from former workers there. But Brussels Leaks doesn't plan to run the documents that are leaked to it, but rather rely on the media to...
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