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Weiye Loh

The Medium Is Not The Message: 3 Handwritten Newspapers | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...handwritten-newspapers

Medium Message Newspaper Poverty Information

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • Handwritten newspapers.

  • Since 1927, The Musalman has been quietly churning out its evening edition of four pages, all of which hand-written by Indian calligraphers in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque in the city of Chennai. According to Wired, it might just be the last remaining hand-written newspaper in the world. It’s also India’s oldest daily newspaper in Urdu, the Hindustani language typically spoken by Muslims in South Asia. The Musalman: Preservation of a Dream is wonderful short film by Ishani K. Dutta, telling the story of the unusual publication and its writers’ dedication to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy.

  • I mentioned a fascinating reversal of the-medium-is-the-message as one Japanese newspaper reverted to hand-written editions once the earthquake-and-tsunami disaster destroyed all power in the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. For the next six days, the editors of the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun “printed” the daily newspaper’s disaster coverage the only way possible: By hand, in pen and paper. Using flashlights and marker pens, the reporters wrote the stories on poster-size paper and pinned the dailies to the entrance doors of relief centers around the city. Six staffers collected stories, which another three digested, spending an hour and a half per day composing the newspapers by hand.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 May 11
     
    Minuscule literacy rates and prevailing poverty may not be conditions particularly conducive to publishing entrepreneurship, but they were no hindrance for Monrovia's The Daily Talk, a clever concept by Alfred Sirleaf that reaches thousands of Liberians every day by printing just once copy. That copy just happens to reside on a large blackboard on the side of one of the capital's busiest roads. Sirleaf started the project in 2000, at the peak of Liberia's civil war, but its cultural resonance and open access sustained it long after the war was over. To this day, he runs this remarkable one-man show as the editor, reporter, production manager, designer, fact-checker and publicist of The Daily Talk. For an added layer of thoughtfulness and sophistication, Sirleaf uses symbols to indicate specific topics for those who struggle to read. The common man in society can't afford a newspaper, can't afford to buy a generator to get on the internet - you know, power shortage - and people are caught up in a city where they have no access to information. And all of these things motivated me to come up with a kind of free media system for people to get informed." ~ Alfred Sirleaf
Weiye Loh

Customised newspapers 'one way to engage readers' - 0 views

www.printsingapore.net/SingleNews.aspx

Newspaper Personalization Polarisation

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • A BRAVE new media world where personalised newspapers cater to readers' individual preferences was sketched out by a leading media expert yesterday. Professor Vin Crosbie from Syracuse University in the United States held out the prospect of newspapers landing on doorsteps - or on mobile devices like iPads - with editorial and advertising to suit the reader, in a talk yesterday at the Drama Centre.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Jul 10
     
    5 July 10  The Strait Times   by Fiona Chan, Assistant Money Editor Customised newspapers 'one way to engage readers'
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Straits Times Forum editor accuses Chee of unfounded attack o... - 0 views

journalism.sg/...attacking-newspapers-integrity

Newspaper media bias Singapore Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Straits Times Forum editor Yap Koon Hong has told opposition politician Chee Soon Juan that he would be denied space in the Forum pages until he withdrew his “serious and unfounded aspersions” on the integrity of the newspaper. He was responding to previous reports on the SDP website which implied that The Straits Times had unfairly edited certain portions of Chee’s letters before publishing them.
  • Chee took issue with the fact that the title of his second letter had been changed to "PAP just as confrontational, replies Chee", which implied that he was indeed confrontational. In fact, newspapers rarely use the headlines suggested by writers and most readers know that headlines, together with picture selection and captions, are the work of sub-editors and not writers.
  • The SDP website shows that almost half of Chee's letter was deleted before publication. The original text was 635 words long. Forum page letters are generally less than 400 words long. The published version of Chee's letter was 348 words long.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Chee also questioned Yap's claims that The Straits Times' integrity had been damaged by the SDP's articles, citing how the Singapore media was already ranked lowly in international press freedom rankings.
  • Yap wanted Chee to retract his statements about the integrity of The Straits Times, and that the newspaper would withhold publishing his letters in the forum pages until he did so.
Weiye Loh

Newspaper Uses Photoshop To Dramatise Violence In Syria | Gizmodo Australia - 0 views

www.gizmodo.com.au/...to-dramatise-violence-in-syria

Photoshop Journalism Representation War

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jul 12
     
    The Kronen Zeitung is Austria's largest newspaper, with a daily readership of around three million people. Yesterday, those readers were treated to the image on the left of war-torn Aleppo, bombed out and desperate - but that wasn't the scene at all. As one sharp-eyed Redditor points out, it was just another Photoshop job.
Weiye Loh

Print media - some things change, some things stay the same « Yawning Bread o... - 0 views

yawningbread.wordpress.com/...ange-some-things-stay-the-same

Newspaper Politics Bias Representation Singapore

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • n the present era with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, such as twittering and Facebook, the old editorial policy is no longer viable. Even Straits Times’ journalists have said as much. If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.
  • Here is the front page for Friday 29 April 2011:
  • Yes, you will notice that there is a wide-angle photo of the crowd at the Workers’ Party rally the previous night that was held at exactly the same location as the iconic rally in 2006.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • However, if you look at the placement of the three photos and the choice of headlines, it also tells you something else has not changed. The top photo is of a People’s Action Party (PAP) leader, in a pose resembling that of a victor acknowledging the people’s acclamation. Only sitting under it are pictures from the Singapore Democratic Party’s rally and the Workers’ Party’s.
  • Arguably, an objective measure of newsworthiness would suggest that the biggest news story from the evening before would be the size of the crowd at Hougang, the traffic jams leading up to it, and the way people were responding to the Workers’ Party’s “star candidate” Chen Show Mao, making his first rally appearance, and not what who-and-who said. After all, plenty of candidates were saying all sorts of things. Why was George Yeo’s the leading choice for front-page headlines?
  • On the rightside column is another story that gives a sum-up of (most) of the rallies the night before. You can see the text of it here. What I was more interested in was to analyse, using the internet version of the same article, the share of mentions devoted to the respective parties and their placements. I think my annotations on the left side of this graphic say it all.
  • In a nutshell, the editorial policy is this. While giving more space to opposition campaigns this time around (and perhaps fairer reporting angles as well) the pole position is still reserved for the PAP. You see this in the relative positions and sizes of the front page pictures and in the text share within the column above.
  • You also see this policy at work in terms of the allocation of the inside pages. Two whole pages (pages 4 and 6) are devoted to the PAP:
  • Deeper in, pages 8 and 9 are devoted to opposition parties:
  • The first thing you’ll notice is that there is a bigger version of the Hougang rally picture, for which I am estimating a crowd of about 100,000. This indeed confirms the view that wide-angle pictures can no longer be suppressed. Or can they? What we don’t see are comparative wide-angle pictures of other parties’ rallies, particularly those of the PAP’s. And this is not likely to happen until netizens also publish such pictures. The problem with that of course, is that netizens are in the main uninterested in attending PAP rallies, so having pictures out in cyberspace may not be a likely thing. But surely, until we see comparative pictures of other parties’ rallies, one cannot fully judge the significance of the Hougang pictures.
  • That said, having two pages devoted to the PAP and two to the opposition parties, seems relatively fair. It would be nice though if on some other days, the opposition’s pages came before the PAP’s.
Weiye Loh

True Enough : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...true_enough.php

Public Relations Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 May 11 - No Cached
  • The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda,” McChesney said. “We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country.”
  • Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, cjr contributor, and author of Discovering the News, said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister’s son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story. The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the “publicity agent” created deep concern among the nation’s leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.
  • But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “After the war, PR becomes a very big deal,” Schudson said. “It was partly stimulated by the war and the idea of journalists and others being employed by the government as propagandists.” Many who worked for the massive wartime propaganda apparatus found an easy transition into civilian life.
  • People “became more conscious that they were not getting direct access, that it was being screened for them by somebody else,” Schudson said. But there was no turning back. PR had become a fixture of public life. Concern about the invisible filter of public relations became a steady drumbeat in the press
  • When public relations began its ascent in the early twentieth century, journalism was rising alongside it. The period saw the ferocious work of the muckrakers, the development of the great newspaper chains, and the dawn of radio and, later, television. Journalism of the day was not perfect; sometimes it was not even good. But it was an era of expansion that eventually led to the powerful press of the mid to late century.
  • Now, during a second rise of public relations, we are in an era of massive contraction in traditional journalism. Bureaus have closed, thousands of reporters have been laid off, once-great newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News have died. The Pew Center took a look at the impact of these changes last year in a study of the Baltimore news market. The report, “How News Happens,” found that while new online outlets had increased the demand for news, the number of original stories spread out among those outlets had declined. In one example, Pew found that area newspapers wrote one-third the number of stories about state budget cuts as they did the last time the state made similar cuts in 1991. In 2009, Pew said, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999.
  • even original reporting often bore the fingerprints of government and private public relations. Mark Jurkowitz, associate director the Pew Center, said the Baltimore report concentrated on six major story lines: state budget cuts, shootings of police officers, the University of Maryland’s efforts to develop a vaccine, the auction of the Senator Theater, the installation of listening devices on public busses, and developments in juvenile justice. It found that 63 percent of the news about those subjects was generated by the government, 23 percent came from interest groups or public relations, and 14 percent started with reporters.
  • The Internet makes it easy for public relations people to reach out directly to the audience and bypass the press, via websites and blogs, social media and videos on YouTube, and targeted e-mail.
  • Some experts have argued that in the digital age, new forms of reporting will eventually fill the void left by traditional newsrooms. But few would argue that such a point has arrived, or is close to arriving. “There is the overwhelming sense that the void that is created by the collapse of traditional journalism is not being filled by new media, but by public relations,” said John Nichols, a Nation correspondent and McChesney’s co-author. Nichols said reporters usually make some calls and check facts. But the ability of government or private public relations to generate stories grows as reporters have less time to seek out stories on their own. That gives outside groups more power to set the agenda.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 May 11
     
    In their recent book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about .45 PR workers per one hundred thousand population compared with .36 journalists. In 2008, there were .90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to .25 journalists. That's a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.
Weiye Loh

Phone hacking: David Cameron is not out of the sewer yet - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-not-out-of-the-sewer-yet.html

Murdoch News Politics Power

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Murdoch himself was protected by his potent political contacts. Tony Blair, for example, would do anything to help out his close friend and ally. I can even disclose that, before the last election, Tony Blair rang Gordon Brown to try to persuade the Labour Prime Minister to stop the Labour MP Tom Watson raising the issue of phone hacking. And as recently as two weeks ago both Ed Miliband and David Cameron attended the News International (News Corp’s British newspaper publishing arm) summer party, despite the fact that the newspaper group was the subject of two separate criminal investigations.
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
    For more than three decades the most powerful man in Britain has not been a politician; it has been the brilliant but ruthless US-based media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who burst on to the scene with the purchase of the News of the World in an audacious takeover bid in 1968. Within barely a decade he had built up a controlling interest in British newspapers.But he did not just control our media. He dominated British public life. Politicians - including prime ministers - treated him with deference and fear. Time and again the Murdoch press - using techniques of which we have only just become aware - destroyed political careers. Murdoch also claims to determine the results of general elections.
Weiye Loh

On newspapers' online comments « Yawning Bread Sampler 2 - 0 views

yawningbread.wordpress.com/...on-newspapers-online-comments

Online Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Assistant Professor Mark Cenite of Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information said: ‘This approach allows users to moderate themselves, and the news site is seen as being sensitive to readers’ values.’
  • But Mr Alex Au, who runs socio-political blog Yawning Bread, cautioned that this could lead to astroturfing. The term, derived from a brand of fake grass, refers to a fake grassroots movement in which a group wishing to push its agenda sends out manipulated and replicated online messages in support of a certain policy or issue. His suggestion: user tiers, in which comments by users with verified identities are displayed visibly and anonymous comments less conspicuously. He said: ‘This approach does not bar people from speaking up, but weighs in by signalling the path towards responsible participation.’
  • what is astroturfing? It is when a few people do one or both of two things: create multiple identities for each of themselves and flood a forum or topic with similar opinions, or get their friends to post boilerplate letters (expressing similar opinions of course) even if they do not totally share them to the same degree. The intent is to create an impression that a certain opinion is more widely held than is actually the case.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • user-rating will have the tendency of giving prominence to widely-shared opinion. Comments expressing unpopular opinions will get fewer “stars” from other readers and sink in display priority. In theory, it doesn’t have to be so. People may very well give “stars” to well-thought-out comments that argue cogently for a view they don’t agree with, lauding the quality of expression rather than the conclusion, but let’s get real. Most people like to hear what they already believe. That being the case, the effect of such a scheme would be to crowd out unpopular opinion even if they have merit; it produces a majoritarian effect in newspapers’ comments sections.
  • it is open to abuse in that a small group of people wanting to push a particular opinion could repeatedly vote for a certain comment, thereby giving it increased ranking and more prominent display. Such action would be akin to astroturfing.
  • The value of discussion lies not in hearing what we already know or what we already believe in. It lies in hearing alternative arguments and learning new facts. Structuring a discussion forum by giving prominence to merely popular opinion just makes it an echo chamber. The greater public purpose is better served when contrary opinion is aired. That is why I disagree with a scheme whereby users apply ratings and prominence is given to highly-rated comments.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 10
       
      But the majority of users who participate in online activism/ slacktivism are very much the young, western educated folks. This in itself already make the online social sphere an echo chamber isn't it? 
  • nonymous comments have their uses. Most obviously, there will be times when whistle-blowing serves the public purpose, and so, even if displayed less prominently, they should still be allowed.
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 10
     
    A popular suggestion among media watchers interviewed is to let users rate the comments and display the highly ranked ones prominently.
Weiye Loh

Don't dumb me down | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...badscience.research

Science Journalism Communication Latour Statistics Humanities

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.
  • these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.
  • A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you (www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media's making (www.badscience.net/?p=23), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a "triple jab", presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria (www.badscience.net/?p=118).
  • people periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.
  • Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, but always using one single way of expressing risk, the "relative risk increase", that makes the danger appear disproportionately large (www.badscience.net/?p=8).
  • he media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data
  • Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases. Often, a front page science story will emerge from a press release alone, and the formal academic paper may never appear, or appear much later, and then not even show what the press reports claimed it would (www.badscience.net/?p=159).
  • there was an interesting essay in the journal PLoS Medicine, about how most brand new research findings will turn out to be false (www.tinyurl.com/ceq33). It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.
  • Scientists never said that tenuous small new findings were important headline news - journalists did.
  • there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.
  • Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.
  • Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science.
  • Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages.
  • Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.
  • science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times's health editor Nigel Hawkes recently covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. "This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study." That's what Hawkes said. Wrong! That's the "Hygiene Hypothesis", that's not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS: it didn't say, couldn't say, what the mechanism was, like whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. He confused evidence with hypothesis (www.badscience.net/?p=112), and he is a "science communicator".
  • how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it
  • The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield, Kevin Warwick and the rest can all get a whole lot further, in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence is rarely publicly examined.
  • it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".
  • This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science. And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.
  • had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?
  • Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.
Weiye Loh

Daily Mail threatens 'abusive' blogger with libel action | Media | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...dailymail-blogging

Libel Law Freedom of Speech Blog Newspaper

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The legal letters point this out in claiming that the material "is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre."
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 11
     
    A blogger has been threatened with a libel action by the Daily Mail, one of the papers that rails against the libel laws because of their chilling effect on press freedom. Kevin Arscott, author of the Angry Mob blog, reports that he and his webhosts have received letters from lawyers acting for the Mail's parent company, Associated Newspapers. It concerns an item posted on his former blog in November 2009 that attacked the Mail and its editor, Paul Dacre, over a story about the number of babies born in a London hospital to non-British mothers. (Needless to say, it was economical with the truth - see here).
Jody Poh

Bloggers bemoan Yahoo's role in writer's arrest - 3 views

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5852898-7.html Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist is being convicted of sending a government's 'top secret' message that was sent to the newspaper agency he was workin...

online democracy freedom rights

started by Jody Poh on 15 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...churnalism-pr-media-trust

Public Relations News Newspapers Media Bias Representation Objectivity

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.

  • Meanwhile, an independent film-maker, Chris Atkins, has revealed how he duped the BBC into running an entirely fictitious story about Downing Street's new cat to coincide with the site's launch.

    The director created a Facebook page in the name of a fictitious character, "Tim Sutcliffe", who claimed the cat – which came from Battersea Cats Home – had belonged to his aunt Margaret. The story appeared in the Daily Mail and Metro, before receiving a prominent slot on BBC Radio 5 Live.

    BBC Radio 5 Live's Gaby Logan talks about a fictitious cat story Link to this audio

    Atkins, who was not involved in creating churnalism.com, uses spoof stories to highlight the failure of journalists to corroborate stories. He was behind an infamous prank last year that led to the BBC running a news package on a hoax Youtube video purporting to show urban foxhunters.

  • The creation of churnalism.com is likely to unnerve overworked journalists and the press officers who feed them. "People don't realise how much churn they're being fed every day," said Martin Moore, director of the trust, which seeks to improve standards in news. "Hopefully this will be an eye-opener."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, all media outlets appear particularly susceptible to PR material disseminated by supermarkets: the Mail appears to have a particular appetite for publicity from Asda and Tesco, while the Guardian favours Waitrose releases.
  • Moore said one unexpected discovery has been that the BBC news website appears particularly prone to churning publicity material."Part of the reason is presumably because they feel a duty to put out so many government pronouncements," Moore said. "But the BBC also has a lot to produce in regions that the newspapers don't cover."
Weiye Loh

Effective media reporting of sea level rise projections: 1989-2009 - 0 views

iopscience.iop.org/...014004

Journalism Climate Science Sea Level

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11
     
    In the mass media, sea level rise is commonly associated with the impacts of climate change due to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. As this issue garners ongoing international policy attention, segments of the scientific community have expressed unease about how this has been covered by mass media. Therefore, this study examines how sea level rise projections-in IPCC Assessment Reports and a sample of the scientific literature-have been represented in seven prominent United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) newspapers over the past two decades. The research found that-with few exceptions-journalists have accurately portrayed scientific research on sea level rise projections to 2100. Moreover, while coverage has predictably increased in the past 20 years, journalists have paid particular attention to the issue in years when an IPCC report is released or when major international negotiations take place, rather than when direct research is completed and specific projections are published. We reason that the combination of these factors has contributed to a perceived problem in the sea level rise reporting by the scientific community, although systematic empirical research shows none. In this contemporary high-stakes, high-profile and highly politicized arena of climate science and policy interactions, such results mark a particular bright spot in media representations of climate change. These findings can also contribute to more measured considerations of climate impacts and policy action at a critical juncture of international negotiations and everyday decision-making associated with the causes and consequences of climate change.
Weiye Loh

Asia Times Online :: Southeast Asia news and business from Indonesia, Philippines, Thai... - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...MC25Ae02.html

Media Politics Singapore

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate
  • Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being contested online and over social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's opposition parties are using various new media to communicate with voters and express dissenting views. Alternative news websites, including The Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong followings by presenting more opposition views in their news mix.
  • Despite its democratic veneer, Singapore rates poorly in global press freedom rankings due to a deeply entrenched culture of self-censorship and a pro-state bias in the mainstream media. Reporters Without Borders, a France-based press freedom advocacy group, recently ranked Singapore 136th in its global press freedom rankings, scoring below repressive countries like Iraq and Zimbabwe. The country's main media publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, is owned by the state and its board of directors is made up largely of PAP members or other government-linked executives. Senior newspaper editors, including at the Straits Times, must be vetted and approved by the PAP-led government.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The local papers have a long record of publicly endorsing the PAP-led government's position, according to Tan Tarn How, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and himself a former journalist. In his research paper "Singapore's print media policy - a national success?" published last year he quoted Leslie Fong, a former editor of the Straits Times, saying that the press "should resist the temptation to arrogate itself the role of a watchdog, or permanent critic, of the government of the day".
  • With regularly briefed and supportive editors, there is no need for pre-publication censorship, according to Tan. When the editors are perceived to get things "wrong", the government frequently takes to task, either publicly or privately, the newspaper's editors or individual journalists, he said.
  • The country's main newspaper, the Straits Times, has consistently stood by its editorial decision-making. Editor Han Fook Kwang said last year: "Our circulation is 380,000 and we have a readership of 1.4 million - these are people who buy the paper every day. We're aware people say we're a government mouthpiece or that we are biased but the test is if our readers believe in the paper and continue to buy it."
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But It Will Be Tweeted - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...levised-but-it-will-be-tweeted

Information Revolution

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • information alone does not destabilize an oppressive regime. In fact, more information (and the control of that information) is a major source of political strength for any ruling party. The state controlled media of North Korea is a current example of the power of propaganda, much as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, where the state heavily subsidized the diffusion of radios during the 1930s to help spread Nazi propaganda.
  • changes in technology do not by themselves weaken the state. While Twitter played a role in the Iranian protests in 2009, the medium was used effectively by the Iranian regime to spread rumors and disinformation. But, if information becomes not just more widespread but more reliable, the regime’s chances of survival are significantly diminished. In this sense, though social media like Twitter and Facebook appear to be a scattered mess, they are more reliable than state controlled messages.
  • The model predicts that a given percentage increase in information reliability has exactly twice as large an effect on the regime’s chances as the same percentage increase in information quantity, so, overall, an information revolution that leads to roughly equal-sized percentage increases in both these characteristics will reduce a regime’s chances of surviving.-
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 11
     
    If the quantity of information available to citizens is sufficiently high, then the regime has a better chance of surviving. However, an increase in the reliability of information can reduce the regime's chances. These two effects are always in tension: a regime benefits from an increase in information quantity if and only if an increase in information reliability reduces its chances. The model allows for two kinds of information revolutions. In the first, associated with radio and mass newspapers under the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards media institutions more accommodative of the regime and, in this sense, a decrease in information reliability. In this case, both effects help the regime. In the second kind, associated with diffuse technologies like modern social media, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards sources of information less accommodative of the regime and an increase in information reliability. This makes the quantity and reliability effects work against each other.
Weiye Loh

TODAYonline | Commentary | For the info-rich and time-poor, digital curators to the res... - 0 views

www.todayonline.com/...digital-curators-to-the-rescue

Crowd-Sourcing Crowd Curation Curation Social Media Search Engine Optimization Newspapers

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • digital "curators" choose and present things related to a specific topic and context. They "curate", as opposed to "aggregate", which implies plain collecting with little or no value add. Viewed in this context, Google search does the latter, not the former. So, who curates? The Huffington Post, or HuffPo, is one high-profile example and, it appears, a highly-valued one too, going by AOL numbers-crunchers who forked out US$315 million (S$396.9 million) to acquire it. Accolades have also come in for Arianna Huffington's team of contributors and more than 3,000 bloggers - from politicians to celebrities to think-tankers. The website was named second among the 25 best blogs of 2009 by Time magazine, and most powerful blog in the world by The Observer.
  • By sifting, sorting and presenting news and views - yes, "curating" - HuffPo makes itself useful in an age of too much information and too many opinions. (Strictly speaking, HuffPo is both a creator and curator.) If what HuffPo is doing seems deja vu, it is hardly surprising. Remember the good old "curated" news of the pre-Internet days when newspapers decided what news was published and what we read? Then, the Editor was the Curator with the capital "C".
  • But with the arrival of the Internet and the uploading of news and views by organisations and netizens, the bits and bytes have turned into a tsunami. Aggregators like Google search threw us some life buoys, using text and popularity to filter the content. But with millions of new articles and videos added to the Internet daily, the "right" content has become that proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence the need for curation.
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Apr 11
     
    Inundated by the deluge of information, and with little time on our hands, some of us turn to social media networks. Sometimes, postings by friends are useful. But often, the typically self-indulgent musings are not. It's "curators" to the rescue.
Weiye Loh

Is Murdoch free to destroy tabloid’s records? | MediaFile - 0 views

blogs.reuters.com/...ee-to-destroy-tabloids-records

Data News of the World Tabloid Business Capitalism Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
    Here's some News of the World news to spin the heads of American lawyers. According to British media law star Mark Stephens of Finers Stephens Innocent (whom The Times of London has dubbed "Mr Media"), Rupert Murdoch's soon-to-be shuttered tabloid may not be obliged to retain documents that could be relevant to civil and criminal claims against the newspaper-even in cases that are already underway. That could mean that dozens of sports, media, and political celebrities who claim News of the World hacked into their telephone accounts won't be able to find out exactly what the tabloid knew and how it got the information. If News of the World is to be liquidated, Stephens told Reuters, it "is a stroke of genius-perhaps evil genius."
Weiye Loh

Stricter Marxist Training Signals Mass Re-Education for China's Reporters - China Real ... - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...education-for-chinas-reporters

China Journalism Propaganda Marxism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13
     
    "In a feature story published Tuesday, the English-language version of the state-run Global Times reports that 250,000 Chinese journalists are being made to attend weekly training sessions ahead of a certification exam scheduled for next year. All journalists are technically required to be certified in order to be able to legally conduct interviews or otherwise gather information. Such certification must be renewed every five years, the newspaper said, though such intensive and mandatory training sessions are new. The aim of such training is to reinforce the "Marxist view of journalism," the report said."
juliet huang

Google applying double standards? - 6 views

We all know that Google revealed the blogger who called model Liskula Cohen a skank, and everyone in the web community was up in arms because it seems that Google has breached its duty to protect i...

started by juliet huang on 09 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
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