Blathnaid Healy’s Blog

Someone has put a bid of $13,000 for a two-three month unpaid internship with the Huffington Post!

Read more about it here and here

The Guardian has launched a new commercial venture, which will enable ‘partners’ to reuse guardian.co.uk content for free while carrying its advertising.

Guardian News & Media Director of Digital Content Emily Bell says the move will help to weave its content into the ‘fabric of the web’.

The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson writes:

A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.

More from the Guardian about Open Platform here.

What others are saying:

Wired says this is not a new move citing that it comes ‘on the heals of a similar move by the New York Times and seems to point toward a new kind of approach to online news — give away your content and send the advertising with it.’

Tom Watson calls it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘leap into the future’.

My initial thoughts:

It will further consolidate content.

Open Platform like the NYT’s Developer Network could push the wires into doing something similar.

The data store element of this initiative is very interesting and is worth keeping an eye on.

Publishing its new pricing structure this week, the Associated Press has been criticised by some of its newspaper members, David Kaplan writes over on paidContent.org.

Having concluded a drawn-out battle between the AP and member papers over next year’s change in fee structure, a handful of newspapers are expressing betrayal at the AP’s increased interest in cultivating Yahoo and Google —for an entity that was started 162 years ago by a band of New York newspapers—some members are acting like they’ve suddenly been disowned by the family patriarch.

Newspapers used to make up half of the AP’s members, but now they’re at 27% and by next year will drop 2% to a quarter.

The question is how do they keep the old guard happy while pushing ahead with online, which they need to do to survive?

I’ll have to ponder that one over the weekend!

Damien Mulley shares some of thoughts on the current state of play and what’s ahead here

There are some good graphs, which provide a quick snapshot even if it is a bit of a rough guide to where things are at.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press sent a letter to the Drudge Retort blog asking them to remove quotations. Specifically it asked the blog to remove seven sections which contained quotations ranging from 39 to 79 words in length. The news agency is now considering its position on blogs.

NYT’s article

paidContent.org’s update

Jeff Jarvis’ take on what the future holds for the AP here 

Have a look at Alexander Wolfe’s take on it also

Michael Arrington has been out and about on this over at TechCrunch

The stories over the weekend were bad enough – the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions. Drudge Retort is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor.

Some of this is fair enough, but saying that the AP should consider being linked to by blogs a favour…he can’t actually be serious!

The Guardian has reported that news website The Huffington Post  is to move into local news.

Founder Arianna Huffington made the announcement last night at Guardian News & Media’s Future of Journalism conference.

The Huffington Post will initially target Chicago with an edited news aggregation website and will function with one (presumably very busy) editor.

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in “dozens of US cities”.

The second city already has a good local news website and blog, the Chi Town Daily News. It is of course a different online offering, but it covers local Chicago news very comprehensively.

Full story from Guardian.co.uk here

Audio of Arianna Huffington speaking at the conference here

Jeff Jarvis gives some insight into the BBC newsroom reshuffle today in the Guardian and over at his blog BuzzMachine.

Jarvis gets an overview of the changes from head of the BBC’s newsroom Peter Horrocks.

This is particularly interesting and I completely agree:

Then there is Horrocks’ new-media on-demand production unit, which will create, not just repackage, content for the internet. We agreed that creating new forms of news narrative – making appropriate use of all media within a story, rather than creating separate media versions of each story – is one of the most innovative frontiers for journalists today.

What I have been up to today.

Irish journalist, professor and Pulitzer-prize winning author Samantha Power has stepped down as an adviser to Barack Obama over comments she made about his rival Hillary Clinton.

A full-length version of the story can be read here.

I just heard her speak in University College Dublin last night, she is such a talented woman and this is a big loss for the campaign. As a journalist I have huge respect for Ms Power, she has written several fine articles from countries around the world.

Her article about Darfur published in the New Yorker back in 2004 is still one of the finest pieces of journalism I have ever read. (If you haven’t read it already I strongly recommend that you do) Before I read it I was wavering back and forth between Journalism and Music as a career, but after reading if my mind was made up.

All of that aside, there is something else to discuss.

Ms Power apparently made her remarks about Ms Clinton off the record to the Scotsman newspaper. It perhaps wasn’t the smartest move in the world, but nonetheless since when did off the record stop meaning exactly that to reporters? To me off the record is still off the record.

It may be frustrating as hell when a source says something great and you know you can’t do anything with it, but that’s the way the game works. If as journalists we burn sources and print off the record comments people will get scared, hush up and we will never get to the bottom of stories.

The Scotsman may have gotten themselves a story and a whole lot of publicity, but they may well have damaged journalism in the long run.

Steve Yelvington has bravely waded into the whole John Lavine anonymous source debacle, you can read his post here.

He may well have one thing right, there are probably other agendas at play here and they all centre around what direction Lavine wants to take Medill.

However I feel Steve Yelvington is being too harsh on Medill’s students and faculty.

I think the angry faculty who are fighting change need to step out of their comfort zones and take a really hard look at their assumptions, their motives, and their own skill sets. In the future we need great editors who can act as — gasp — the chief marketing officers, content strategists, and product leaders of their journalistic organizations. This will require a mastery of tools and techniques not taught in a 1970-style reporting and editing course.

I certainly believe we must change and adapt as journalist, but lets not forget what it is fundamentally about: reporting and investigating, producing accurate stories, being aware of the audience you are writing for.

The tools and techniques that were right for the 1970s are right for the current day and most likely for 2025 too. But what will change is distribution and delivery method and range of roles we will be taking on.

As I commented on his blog:

I do question whether the shift (when we reach 2025) will be that big. Of course we need to be more conscious of our audience, but many of the basic principles of journalism will remain the same. Reporting and editing will still be the backbone of that, but the packaging and approach will most certainly change. We will have to become a lot more flexible and be able to do much more: write copy, edit it, take photos, shoot video, record audio, update websites, write headlines, write blurbs, design graphics and much more. In the short year I spent in Medill (Lavine took over about six months into that time) I learned how to do many of these things and in my current job I am learning to do several more.

Lets all not get carried away with the obvious changes that digital platforms offer us. They are powerful tools, but the basics of journalism are constant.