A few notes from the introduction of Pew's annual State of the News Media report. I've yet to delve into the report, but judging by the intro there's plenty to look at.
This slide show gives clear and very useful tips on how well-constructed Google searches can help you find people, groups, company representatives in social networks that are otherwise hard to search with any precision. It looks at Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace and more. A must-watch for journalists.
A week or so ago Frank Torley, the executive producer of Country Calendar, came to Hamilton to speak at Wintec's Media Bites function. Here's what he had to say on why the programme's so successful and how the team go about telling stories: "I don't know... I'd like to believe that the New Zealand public recognises quality. The beginning of that process is research. If anybody says 'Why is Country Calendar successful?' -- research, research, research. Keep doing it, find the story. What is the story, what are the people like, what else can we do?
Back on the investigative journalism theme, this Editors Weblog post (based on a stronger Wired story) looks at Wikileaks, the document-leaking website set up to "help journalists change the world" according to its founder Julian Assange. Wikileaks has been responsible for the leaking of several major news stories: the U.S. military's operating manuals for its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; lists of U.S. munitions in Iraq; reports of the looting of Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi.
I had a sneak peak at the NZ On Screen website-in-progress last week and it looks great. I didn't have much time on it and didn't see much in the way of content because the site's still being developed and the content edited and checked for copyright. But first impressions suggest a lot of thought has gone into making the site user-friendly, intuitive to navigate and packing all the tools you need to enjoy watching moving images on a computer screen.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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