Media News - Tuesday, August 12, 2008

CNN’s strategy: Bureaus out, flexible journalists in

CNN announced Tuesday that it would “double its domestic news-gathering presence” by assigning journalists to 10 additional cities across the United States. But the journalists will not work from news bureaus; instead, they will be stationed at local television affiliates and other office locations. Using inexpensive laptops and cameras, they will file stories for the Internet and report live on television. One “all-platform journalist” will be assigned to each city. The strategy reflects the increasingly portable and flexible nature of television production. Expensive bureaus with camera crews and satellite uplinks are increasingly being downsized by TV news divisions, in favor of so-called “one man bands”. CNN currently has 10 bureaus across the country, and will transfer employees from 4 bureaus - Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco - to staff the new operations. Michael Rosenblum, the president of Rosenblum Associates, a consulting firm that helps convert TV networks to the one-man-band model, called it a “much more cost-effective way” of reporting. (NYT)

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Google embroiled in Georgian conflict

In war, infrastructure is one of the first targets. And in the midst of the hostilities between Russia and Georgia, search engine giant Google has been trying to ensure its global computing infrastructure does not aid either side in the conflict. This week it emerged that the company had removed details of all roads, towns and cities in Georgia from its Google Maps online mapping service, as well as from the maps of neighbouring countries Azerbaijan and Armenia. According to the Azerbaijan Press Agency, the relevant maps went blank as soon as fighting broke out. However, satellite information was still available Tuesday. Several observers highlighted the fact that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is Moscow-born. Meanwhile, Google is involuntarily providing cyber-refuge to Georgian websites that have been disrupted by Russian hackers. Georgian news site Civil.ge relocated to a domain on Google's Blogger blogging infrastructure after a cyber-attack, reportedly originating in Russia, took the website down. Even Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is using Blogger infrastructure to disseminate information. (Media Channel)

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Free daily for refugees

Sometimes you hate to see a free daily being launched, the Newspaper Innovation blog reports. “Russian newspaper Rossyiskaya Gazeta will launch a special edition tomorrow for refugees from the South Ossetia region of the Russian Federation, reported Lenta.ru. Ten thousand copies will be published from Tuesday to Friday and freely distributed in areas where refugees live. The edition may include announcements about missing relatives, information about help from the state and important numbers. Since the start of the conflict, Russia has seen 30,000 refugees from the South Ossetia.” (Newspaper Innovation)

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Hi-tech thieves target Olympics

The start of the Olympics has proved irresistible to cyber criminals, security firms say. The volume of junk e-mail messages with an Olympic theme spiked prior to the opening ceremony, said Symantec. The malicious messages try to trick people into visiting fake sites or opening booby-trapped e-mail attachments, say other firms. Security firm Marshal said many of the malicious and junk messages emerging from the Rustock botnet were about the games. A botnet is made up of a collection of home computers that have been hijacked by a gang of hi-tech criminals who then put it to a variety of ends. Some gangs simply vacuum up the personal data they find on compromised machines, others use the botnets to pump out spam or to attack other sites. Phil Hay, lead threat analyst for Marshal, said e-mails sent out via Rustock to catch people out were getting more sophisticated. The latest batch appear to be about headline stories on CNN and many concern the Olympics. Security company MessageLabs said it was not just members of the public that were at risk. The company said it had seen a campaign that used e-mails crafted to look like they had been written by the International Olympic Committee. (BBC)

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ComScore: Social sites are going global

While Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, and Friendster were all founded in the US, social networking is a worldwide phenomenon. New statistics from ComScore show that these sites are growing rapidly across the globe, even as that growth slows down in their home country. On Tuesday, performance firm Pingdom released numbers pulled from Google Insights for Search, showing that different social networks have very different levels of “interest” across the world. ComScore's numbers, also released Tuesday, underscore the fact that social sites are increasingly global in nature--and sometimes unexpectedly. According to ComScore's numbers, social-networking sites may be nearing a peak in North America. The industry's foothold in the U.S. and Canada grew only 9 percent from June 2007, but in Asia it grew 23 percent, in Latin America 33 percent, and in Europe 35 percent. And social networks grew 66 percent in the Middle East and Africa. The 9 percent growth in North America meant that it was the only region of the world where the growth of social networks did not outpace the growth of the Internet-using populace as a whole, which ComScore pegged at 11 percent. The fastest-growing site is, not surprisingly, Facebook, with a 153 percent increase in unique visitors noted. Most of that growth is international - its domestic growth was estimated at 38 percent. (CNET)

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Former Chelsea boss José Mourinho signs for Telegraph titles

Telegraph Media Group has signed former Chelsea manager José Mourinho to write a column on British football across its daily and weekend titles starting this weekend. Mourinho, recently appointed manager of Italian side Inter Milan, will contribute columns for the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and telegraph.co.uk website. Mourinho, who left his post as Chelsea manager in September last year, is already the face of the newspaper's fantasy football competition. TMG also confirmed today that Paul Kelso, sports news correspondent at the Guardian, is to join the Daily Telegraph as chief sports reporter. The company has also made Duncan White, a sports writer at the Telegraph since 2003, football correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. Kevin Perry has been confirmed as racing editor of TMG. (Guardian Media)

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More recent Media News:

• 12/08/08 - Estonia, Google help ‘cyberlocked’ Georgia
• 12/08/08 - Senate speaker excludes press from meeting with Dalai Lama
• 12/08/08 - UK viewers watching more adverts
• 12/08/08 - Dutch journalist killed in Russian bombing of Gori
• 12/08/08 - Dutch broadcaster Veronica told to cover up
• 12/08/08 - Web firms acknowledge tracking behavior without consent

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