Media News - Monday, August 18, 2008

Television is still the top U.S. news source

Fewer Americans are reading newspapers and instead are getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country, according to a survey released Sunday. Not surprisingly, younger people tend to get more of their news on the Internet, while older people use traditional media such as TV and newspapers, the Pew Research Center said in its biannual survey on news consumption habits. Pew said that the results show an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but that there is now a sizable group of more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that uses both traditional and online sources to get its news. The Pew researchers referred to these people as 'integrators' and said they account for 23 percent of those surveyed, spending the most time with the news on a typical day. Pew found that the largest group of news consumers - 46 percent of those polled - has a 'heavy reliance' on TV for its news. This group is the oldest, with a median age of 52, and least affluent, with 43 percent unemployed. They are unlikely to own a computer. The group that relies most on the Internet for news is the youngest, at a median age of 35. It is also the smallest, at 13 percent of those polled. (AP via KansasCity.com)

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US: Media coverage of the economy lags, study finds

Media coverage of the economic downturn in the U.S. has lagged behind both economic activity and public interest, according to a study being released Monday by a Washington, D.C.-based research group. The Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed more than 5,000 economic stories in 2007 and the first half of 2008. The stories, by 48 different news outlets, were delivered by cable news channels, network television, radio, newspapers and the Internet. The study found that reliance on government data to track the economy is leading to scattershot coverage that, at times, lags months behind actual economic conditions. Meanwhile, various media have focused on different aspects of the economy at different times. Television coverage has tended to focus on gas prices, while newspapers have leaned toward banking and housing stories. As a result, it is difficult for the casual news consumer to understand the story of the economy, the study said. The study also found that Americans' concern about the economy has far surpassed the media's focus on the topic. The economy has been the number 2 story of 2008 so far - ahead of the war in Iraq. But media coverage of the presidential race has outstripped economic coverage by a five-to-one margin, although the economy has ranked as Americans' top concern. (AP)

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Africa: Seacom’s fibre optic under way

Seacom's 15 000 km fibre optic undersea cable, linking Southern and East Africa, Europe and South Asia, is scheduled to go live in June 2009. President of Seacom, Brain Herlihy said they are very happy with the progress made over the last five months. Manufacturing and deployment schedule is on target. Brain adds that Seacom are able to meet the African market's urgent requirements for cheap and available bandwidth. The cables will start working before the 2010 Fifa World Cup starts in South Africa and Seacom has already been working closely with broadcasters to meet broadband requirements. Seacom is said to assist communication carriers in South and East Africa through the sale of international capacity to global networks. The Undersea Fibre connection will provide African carriers with open access to cheap bandwidth, removing infrastructure bottleneck and support east and southern African economic growth. The first cable will provide broadband to countries in east Africa which at the moment rely on expensive satellite connections. (IT News Africa)

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BBC trials embedded links in news articles

BBC News is trialling links within the body of its online news stories. When clicked, the 'in-page links' direct users to background information from across the BBC News site related to the highlighted word or phrase. Links to social media sites, including YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr, and external news and organisations' sites are also included in the trial, which can currently be switched on and off on the featured articles. External links are identified by different symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page. 'We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources,' said Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor, in a post to the BBC Editors' blog. The trial will last for four weeks and is currently only available on the UK site, Herrmann added. The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which has implemented a similar feature on the news pages of WashingtonPost.com. (Journalism.co.uk)

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Anti-spam tool used to translate old books

A tool designed to deter fraudsters from registering fake e-mail accounts has been recruited to help digitise books and newspapers dating back hundreds of years. Captchas are little boxes on web pages which show a squiggly set of letters and numbers that the user is required to transcribe correctly in order to register or enter the site. They were devised eight years ago as a way of preventing computers from setting up e-mail accounts automatically which could then be used to send out spam, but a clever tweak means they are now being used to transcribe newspapers dating from the nineteenth century and earlier. Instead of displaying a random collection of letters and numbers, the newly designed Captchas present the user with a word from an old manuscript that a computer, somewhere, is having trouble deciphering. When three people type in the same word, the system deduces that this must be the one displayed on the manuscript, and relays this to the computer which has been stumped by the mystery word. At present the system, which was devised by a 29-year-old assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is partnered with the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit organisation which is overseeing the digitisation of books at 70 public universities and libraries in the US - but it could conceivably be employed by any such project. Luis von Ahn, who also created the original Captcha system, says that the new version - which is free to anyone who signs up and will be rolled out early next month - will be able to help digitise about 160 books a day. (Times Online)

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Member states drag feet on European digital library

The European Commission has urged member states to step up efforts to make Europe's cultural heritage available to citizens at a mouse click. Plans for a European digital library containing books, paintings, music, film and photographs are already underway but progress on making works digitally available has been slow with funding problems and lack of technical know-how dragging the ambitious project down. According to commission figures, European libraries contain over 2.5 billion books but only around 1 percent of archival material has been made available online. On Monday (11 August), the commission said more funding needs to be allocated to digitalisation by the bloc's 27 member states calling efforts so far 'small scale' and 'fragmented.' For its part, Brussels promised EUR 69m of EU money for 2009-10 for digitalisation of works and EUR 50m for improving access to cultural content, although it pointed out that around EUR 225m has been needed just to digitise 5 million books. There are also big discrepancies between member states progress towards the goal. While countries such as Slovenia are making 'exemplary' headway on the project, only one in four German museums that have digitised material offer online access to it. In Poland, just one percent of digitised material is online. Another more general problem that remains to be solved is the issue of copyright, particularly for orphan works where the artist cannot be found to give consent to digitisation. Despite the foot-dragging by member states, the commission said it is determined to push ahead with plans for a European Digital Library by the end of 2008. (EU Observer)

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