Word of the "Kony 2012" video spread like lightning via social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, reaching "so many Americans in a relatively short period of time," it demonstrated the "critical role social media played, especially for adults under age 30," says a new study. The huge success of the video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony "provided striking evidence that young adults and their elders at times have different news agendas and learn about news in different ways," said the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in a research released Thursday. "Those ages 18-29 were much more likely than older adults to have heard a lot about the 'Kony 2012' video and to have learned about it through social media than traditional news sources. Indeed, a special analysis of posts in Twitter showed that it was by far the top story on the platform.” On Thursday, the 30-minute video, made by the group Invisible Children and released just 10 days ago, was closing in on 80 million YouTube views, and had been played more than 17 million times on Vimeo, "making it one of the most viewed videos of all time on those sites," Pew said. "The Internet was more than three times more important as a news-learning platform for young adults than traditional media such as television, newspapers, and radio." Only 10 percent of young adults first learned about "Kony 2012" via "traditional media platforms."

A national paywall operated by nine publishers in Slovenia and launched in January has generated more than EUR 26,000 revenue, with more than 25,000 readers having pre-registered according to Piano Media, which set up the subscription model. The paywall was the second model of its kind set up by Piano Media, the first being launched in Slovakia in April last year, where the company is based. When the second paywall launched the company outlined a subscription model where digital readers would pay EUR 1.99 per week, EUR 4.89 per month or EUR 48.90 per year, to access content behind the wall. Piano Media says that even though publishers involved in the Slovenia paywall "are only putting a small minority of their content in Piano's system", the latest figures show Piano "can be successful in markets beyond Slovakia". In a release chief executive Tomas Bella confirmed the company is seeing 37 per cent "more revenue per capita in Slovenia than Slovakia". "Slovene Piano publishers are earning more than EUR 1,500 per 100,000 users as compared to just over EUR 1,100 in Slovakia," Bella added. The company claims that publishers involved in the Slovenia paywall are "satisfied with the initial positive reader response" and Bella is confident "more and more Slovene readers will become Piano users as they become accustomed to the system". But there has been "an increased expectation for quality" from readers, the company adds.

Google has claimed it has halved the number of so-called "bad ads" being displayed across its services thanks to a combination of new technologies and improved detection methods to stop fraudulent services being offered. Writing on a blog post engineering chief Sridhar Ramaswamy said that improvements in monitoring for sensitive keywords, enhanced scanning methods and a faster response rate to flagged adverts had all helped lead to the significant increase in the bad ads it is removing. "In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems continue to improve – in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010," he said. "We're also catching the vast majority of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down approximately 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95 percent of these accounts were discovered through our own detection efforts and risk models." He added that Google was continuing to look for ways to improve its ability to stop fraudulent adverts from being displayed, given the importance of ensuring it systems is trustworthy to its future success.

A large majority of MEPs has adopted a resolution strongly condemning a Freedom Party website where visitors are encouraged to submit complaints about Eastern European workers. The website is condemned as a discriminatory and malicious initiative. The resolution urgently calls on Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his government to condemn the website and distance itself from it. The government should not close its eyes to the fact that the Freedom Party’s policies run counter to the European Union’s fundamental values. It is unusual for the European Parliament to draft a resolution which focuses exclusively on one country. The resolution is not binding and Mr Rutte can choose to ignore it. So far, the Dutch prime minister has refused to comment on the Freedom Party website, arguing that it is the initiative of a political party rather than his government. However, the prime minister’s refusal to condemn the website is generally seen as the result of his minority government’s dependence on Geert Wilders' Freedom Party for support in parliament.

With more than one million followers, the Mexican newspaper El Universal has more Twitter followers than any other newspaper in Latin America. Second behind Mexico’s El Universal is another newspaper named ElUniversal, this one from Venezuela, with more than 756,000 followers. In third place is the sports publication Meridiano, also of Venezuela, with more than 588,000 Twitter followers. The Twitter ranking, derived from the site 4International Media &Newspapers, includes newspapers in Latin America with more than 100,000 Twitter followers. According to the ranking, Mexico is the country that boasts the most newspapers – five - with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. The numbers of Mexican newspapers' Twitter followers are astonishing when compared with last year’s numbers: El Universal, Excelsior, Reforma, La Jornada and Milenio have more than doubled their popularity on Twitter since February 2011. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellency in Journalism, news organizations use Twitter mostly as a RSS feed and for self-promotion, rarely reaching out to their followers, reported the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The non-profit organization Invisible Children and its viral video Kony 2012, which has become an international sensation in the past couple of weeks, is continuing to stir controversy. Not only have critics raised questions surrounding Invisible Children and its methodologies, but numerous reports are now verifying that local Ugandans too are in fact angry about the campaign. The non-profit African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET), which calls itself an organization to help rehabilitate victims of war, organized a public screening in the town of Lira in northern Uganda on Tuesday night. Northern Uganda was one of the regions worst affected by Joseph Kony’s rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). While the Kony 2012 film has become the most viral video in history, this was the first time that most Ugandans in Uganda — the majority of whom have no access to the internet — saw the film firsthand. The reactions featured in this video report on the screening are a far cry from the outburst of support that pummeled through Western nations. These sentiments echo other crowd-sourced views surfacing from Uganda. According to reports, the reactions in Lira erupted into stone-throwing. As a result of this aggresion, AYINET has postponed further screenings of the video in Uganda indefinitely.

Deadline: 5/4/12 The Guardian

Amateur and professional journalists interested in international development can enter a competition.

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Date: 3/26/12 - 4/29/12 Deadline: 3/21/12 Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo (Abraji)

Professional journalists and students can enroll in an online, free course on investigative reporting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.

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Bad news for those in the news industry pinning their hopes on a tablet future: Nielsen looked at willingness to purchase media content among tablet owners in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Italy and found that Americans are the most likely to pay for all categories of media content – except...

"Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World" offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's "Comparing Media Systems", exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of "Comparing Media Systems" and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. The book covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.

Contents of the book

1. Introduction (Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini)

Part I. Cases.

2. The impact of national security on the development of media systems: the case of Israel (Yoram Peri)

3. Italianization (or Mediterranization) of the Polish media system? reality and perspective (Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska) 

4.  Culture as a Guide in Theoretical Explorations of Baltic Media (Auksė Balčytienė) 

5. On models and margins: comparative media models viewed from a Brazilian perspective (Afonso de Albuquerque)

6. Africanizing three models of media and politics: the South African experience (Adrian Hadland) 

7. The Russian media model in post-Soviet context (Elena Vartanova) 

8. Understanding China's media system in a world historical context (Yuezhi Zhao)

Part II. Methods and Approaches
.
9. The rise of transnational media systems: implications of pan-Arab media for comparative research (Marwan Kraidy)

10. Partisan polyvalence: characterizing the political role of Asian media (Duncan McCargo)

11. How far can media systems travel? Applying Hallin and Mancini's comparative framework outside the Western world (Katrin Voltmer)

12. Comparing processes: media, 'transitions', and historical change (Natalia Roudakova)

13. Conclusion (Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini)

Source: Cambridge University Press 

Deadline: 4/23/12

Journalists and filmmakers worldwide can submit films on indigenous and underrepresented minority cultures to a festival.

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Deadline: 3/31/12 Nico Colchester Foundation

Journalists or aspiring journalists in the European Union can apply for fellowships at the Financial Times and The Economist.

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A study of Dutch newsrooms conducted by communication scientist Yael de Haan reveals journalists are meek when receiving or dolling out criticism in the newsroom, which may contribute to low journalistic quality.

Haan conducted her study in the midst of an ongoing public dialogue in the Netherlands related to the role of media in society.  While previous debates focused on media structure and politics, new discussions on journalistic responsibility are taking center stage.

One of the catalysts for a more intensive discussion in the Netherlands was the rise of controversial politician Pim Fortuyn and his assassination in 2002, with critics pointing to the harsh political climate created by the Dutch media as the culprit.

In the years following Fortuyn’s assassination leading Dutch media outlets  – among them the daily newspaper de Volkskrant as well as the newscasts NOS Nieuws from public TV and RTL Nieuws from private TV – have introduced several innovative instruments for media accountability such as ombudsmen, editorial blogs, correction corners and dialogue with readers via social media.

But how relevant are these practices in their everyday editorial practice? Haan analyzed the three newsrooms mentioned above in a case study, spending three months in each newsroom as a participating observer.

The results were disillusioning. In all three newsrooms, Haan failed to find a culture of criticism, which prevented media accountability instruments from being implemented constructively.

While time constraints and management mistakes were often cited as reasons, Haan also uncovered other inconsistencies.  For example, the ombudswoman for NOS Nieuws kept in close contact with the editors-in-chief, but often avoided the newsroom altogether. In many cases the journalists themselves blocked the process of self-reflection, even though the editors-in-chief of de Volkskrant and NOS Nieuws have often championed increased media responsibility and media self-reflection.  Aside from introducing several innovative media accountability instruments into their newsrooms, many of the surveyed journalists anonymously admitted that they wouldn’t dare to express criticism in editorial conferences.

Yael de Haan (2011): “Between Professional Autonomy and Public Responsibility: Accountability and responsiveness in Dutch media and journalism.” Amsterdam.

 

Google is about to embark on its biggest renovation in history. In order to keep up with increased competition and new technology, the Web giant is working to keep ahead of the pack by completely revamping its search function, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google search executive Amit Singhal said that the new Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world." Changes are expected to roll out over the next few months, the Journal reports, but the full makeover to "next generation of search" will likely take years. The plan for the revamp isn't necessarily to swap out the current keyword-search system but rather to provide more relevant results. This process will work by using technology called "semantic search." With semantic searches, people's searches will be better matched with "entities" - or people, places and things - which the company has been building over the past two years, reports the Journal. For example, the Journal reports that people who search for "Lake Tahoe" today get links to the lake's visitor bureau website and a map; whereas with the makeover, they will see key "attributes" about the lake, including location, altitude, average temperature and salt content.

Leading UK animators are warning against an exodus of talent if the industry does not get tax breaks like those enjoyed by animators in other European countries like Ireland and France. The United Kingdom has a rich tradition of producing animated children's shows, like "Postman Pat," "Bob the Builder" and "Roary the Racing Car. But now the country's animators say they can no longer afford to make such high quality shows in Britain. “It's genuinely impossible for us to compete against the rest of the world with all the incentives they've got,” said Oli Hyatt from Animation UK, an industry lobby group. While the UK film industry enjoys state support, there is no such money available for producers of animated TV series. Many other European countries support their animation industry, providing at least 20 percent of production costs. Hyatt says that makes it impossible for UK animators to match their output. Animation production in the UK has fallen by more than 50 percent in the past seven years according to Animation UK, and it is already becoming harder for new animators to find jobs. The UK government is scheduled to present its budget on March 21. British animators will be watching to see whether the tax break they're hoping for will materialize. But faced with a record public deficit, the finance minister aims to save EUR 95bn by 2015. That means few are getting their hopes up that this support for the animation industry will come to pass.

Yahoo! UK has announced plans to create thousands of news editorial contributors to the website. The Yahoo! contributor network will see writers paid a small up front fee when they are commissioned to write an article, but there will also be performance-related payments based on the number of page views. Yahoo! said it would pay contributors around 70p per 1,000 clicks. The UK website claims to reach a monthly audience of 26m unique users. Potential writers begin by signing up to the network, and if approved they will be eligible for editorial commissions from the Yahoo! Team. The website is on the look out for writers on parenting, fashion, beauty, technology , movies and showbiz for its news, lifestyle and entertainment categories. Yahoo! said it was keen to “deepen the pool of quality content”. A spokesperson said that while up front payments are “relatively small”, if an article was featured on the front of the homepage it could get “millions on the clicks and the rewards would mount up”. A similar network was set up in the US last year and now has more than 700,000 registered contributors, including almost 50,000 active contributors in the past 90 days.

French news site Rue89 is giving up its monthly print magazine. As Les Echos reported, the site is returning to its original identity of a pure online player and ceasing the printed issue, which launched in June 2010. Pierre Haski, the site's co-founder, confirmed the news on Twitter, underlining that the return to an online-only reality is more coherent with the original identity of Rue89. Rue89 has followed an uncommon path: after being launched online-only in 2007, it started publishing a selection of the site's content in a print monthly edition with the aim of creating a new revenue stream both from sales and advertising in print. The idea was to find a new audience, trying to reach people who were not usually online readers by offering them a selection of the best online content of the previous month. At the same time, the magazine hoped to find also a second revenue source from advertising in print. Rue89 reached the point where the print circulation and subscriptions were breaking even, but no more, and the monthly product was taking up significant human resources. In the meantime, Haski said, the tablet started to become a key sector of development. In last June the paper began another experiment, launching the first magazine tablet app based on the print monthly. Haski also explained that although tablet circulation will initially be lower than the print, it has more strategic potential and it is more coherent with the original identity of the paper.

Brazilian and Mexican consumers in urban areas prefer spending time on the Internet to watching television, by a factor of four, according to new analysis from Forrester Research. Brazilian respondents to the survey of city-dwellers in both countries said that they spend 23.8 hours on the Web every week, but only 6.2 hours spent watching traditional TV. Mexican respondents spend a comparable 24.7 hours online, compared to seven watching TV. In terms of online video consumption, that appears to be a big factor in the consumption trends. A respective 86 percent and 83 percent of Brazilians and Mexicans reported watching online video on sites such as YouTube. Ironically, Internet penetration is still lower than in Europe and North America, but on the rise. By 2016, the number of broadband households in Brazil will increase to 57 percent and in Mexico to 48 percent, up from 47 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Mobile broadband continues to be a hugely important piece of the online public as well as smartphone penetration continues to grow. And, social TV marketers take note: Social networks are wildly popular in both countries, with 89 percent of Brazilians and 88 percent of Mexicans visiting one on a regular basis, with Facebook being the most popular platform.

Mobile-only Web users account for more than one third of China’s Internet population, according to a report from mobile research specialist On Device. The study found that the country’s rural population drove an annual 8 percent increase in mobile-only Web usage, which accounted for 38 percent of China’s Internet users in 2011. On Device found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, rural Chinese are most likely to be mobile-only Internet users, as they are less likely to own a computer than their urban-dwelling equivalents. Indeed, in rural areas as much as 45 percent of Internet access is mobile-only, that’s against 29 percent in urban areas. While mobile is the default for many outside of cities, a higher proportion of urban Chinese surf the mobile Web because they find it quicker and more convenient that the fixed-line alternative. Comparatively speaking, China’s ratio of mobile to fixed-line sits in the medium globally. While it is higher than Western markets like the UK, it is lower than less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia, the latter two of which recorded mobile Web rates of 56 percent and 42 percent respectively. Though the findings of the report are interesting, it is important to bear in mind that the survey sample is modest. On Device drew its conclusions from responses from more than 1,000 respondents but, as it used a representative sample profiled by mobile device manufacturers, the base of respondents is likely to be reasonably balanced, giving it greater credibility.

Date: 3/23/12

The BBC College of Journalism and the London School of Economics and Political Science will host Reporting the World, a free conference held March 23.

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