Media News - Tuesday, June 30, 2009

YouTube offers reporting tips from top journalists

YouTube opened an online journalism training hub on Monday featuring tips from some of the top names in the business including Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. The YouTube Reporters' Center, located at youtube.com/reporterscenter, hosts a series of short video tutorials on subjects such as investigative journalism, citizen journalism, journalism ethics and how to conduct an interview. The five-minute video on investigative journalism is presented by Woodward, who along with a fellow Washington Post reporter uncovered the Watergate scandal which led to president Richard Nixon's resignation. CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric offers tips on 'how to conduct a good interview' while Ariana Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post website, talks about 'citizen journalism.' New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof provides instruction on reporting from a conflict zone 'without getting shot.' Other tutorials include 'How to Capture Breaking News on Your Cell Phone' and 'How to Build Your Audience on YouTube.' YouTube described the venture as a bid to help 'citizen reporters' learn more about how to report the news. The Google-owned video-sharing site also invited users with reporting experience to upload 'how-to' videos to YouTube to 'share your knowledge with citizen journalists around the world.' (AFP via Yahoo News)

Netherlands: Media Minister imposes soft ceiling on broadcasting salaries

Media Minister Ronald Plasterk is not imposing a rock solid salary ceiling for staff of the public broadcasters. In principle, they will be allowed to earn a maximum of EUR 181,000 a year, but this ceiling will not apply to individual TV stars. The Labour (PvdA) minister sent a proposal to the Lower House Friday, which specifies that presenters at the public broadcasters may not earn more than EUR 181,000 a year - the Balkenende norm. But he wants to make an exception for 'unique talents' which could otherwise switch to the commercial broadcasters. The broadcasters themselves are allowed to decide who these celebrities are. The public broadcasters themselves wanted the salary ceiling put at EUR 240,000. Plasterk finds this too high. His proposed EUR 181,000 norm is exclusive of expenses and employers contribution to pensions however. Additionally, severance packages are not allowed to be higher than one year's salary. Plasterk wants the regulation to come in on 1 September. It will not apply to existing presenters but only to newcomers. (NIS News)

Al Jazeera gets breakthrough in U.S. TV market

Al Jazeera English will be seen in the U.S. from July 1st. The Qatar-based TV network is well known throughout the Arab world but has been shunned by U.S. TV and cable networks due to its graphic coverage of events in the Middle East. The network has come under fire from the U.S. government, in particularly the military, but more so under the previous Bush administration. The network has now inked a deal with a cable TV company in Washington DC area, according to a report by Arabian Business on Friday. 'On July 1 we are going to launch the first operation in cable distribution in the United States,' Al Jazeera's director general, Wadah Khanfar, told the publication in an interview. 'I can tell you that on July 1 we are going to launch an agreement with a Washington DC based company that has around 2.3 million subscribers.' The English language version of the Qatari news channel is available in 140 million homes in forty countries, including Israel, but has been unable to enter America, the world's most important English-language market. Local operators in Burlington, Vermont and Toledo, Ohio have been the only two exceptions to date. Al Jazeera English began broadcasting in November 2006, after hiring a number of well known international journalists, including veteran UK broadcaster Sir David Frost. (Barcelona News)

China to broadcast in English in European supermarkets

China will unveil its latest attempt to present western audiences with its take on world events this week as the state-run news agency, Xinhua, launches an English-language television news programme to be broadcast in supermarkets and outside Chinese embassies across Europe. The programmes, which will be produced by Xinhua's Beijing bureau, are part of a large investment programme by Chinese authorities intent on wielding 'soft power' alongside an increasingly muscular position on the diplomatic stage. Supermarkets in Brussels are reported to be among those that will be airing the broadcasts, along with screens outside Chinese embassies in other European capitals. Few details have yet to be disclosed, but the launch on Wednesday will involve about a dozen European broadcast partners showing mostly 10-to-15-minute news programmes, along with short features and lifestyle items, officials said. Xinhua has not divulged which organisations have signed up to broadcast its programmes or expand on the nature of the deals with its partners. However, it has ambitious plans. According to earlier reports in the Chinese media, the country's government has set aside as much as GBP 4bn to fund international expansion of various state-owned media organisations in the hope that they could one day rival the scope of coverage of networks such as CNN and the BBC. (The Guardian)

Pirate Bay launches video streaming service to rival YouTube

The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing web site that flung Europe into a heated debate over online copyright, has launched a new video sharing service that could rival YouTube. The men behind The Pirate Bay are facing jail and have to pay GBP 2.4m in damages after being found guilty of promoting copyright infringement. But they still plan to launch the new site, called The Video Bay, which could also put them in violation of copyright law. At the moment, the Pirate Bay has called the service a 'Beta Extreme'. 'Don't expect anything to work at all,' says a note on The Video Bay site. 'This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.' The launch follows the Pirate Bay application for a retrial being rejected by the Swedish courts. The men had hoped to overturn the guilty verdicts after hearing that Judge Tomas Norstrom belonged to the Swedish Copyright Association. A spokesman for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said he could not comment on the launch of The Video Bay unless the organisation was going to take legal action. (VNU Net UK)

Could changes in copyright law be newspapers’ savior?

With individual newspapers and professional associations chasing after all manner of notions of how to build a business model that successfully bridges the transition from print to digital, a seemingly simple idea is taking hold among some legal thinkers - rewriting copyright law. The idea received a major push over the weekend from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Schultz reviewed the ideas of David Marburger, a First Amendment attorney at the firm Baker and Hostetler, and his brother Daniel, an economics professor at Arkansas State University. Their idea focuses on how to protect the originators of news such as newspapers from aggregators who link or rewrite that content, and may sell advertising against it. The Marburgers propose changing federal copyright law to give the original newsgatherer a period - they'd like it to be 24 hours - in which the news item would be available only on the originator's Web site. 'If the copyright law doesn't open the way for originators of news to stop the free-riding, newspapers will die,' David Marburger told columnist Schultz. 'No exceptions.' (Editor and Publisher)

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