One of the podcasts I enjoyed the most, thank you Thomas Crampton and Michael Oreskes for this International Herald Tribune in Paris visit. See how the IHT is made ("how the sausage is made" as they say) and also very interesting conversations I think around user generated content, blogs and journalism.
Technorati Tags: IHT, thomas crampton
Want to date this beautiful model or dream to look like her ? Too bad, she does not exist, not exactly like this. Follow step by step the modifications on the pictures before it got to the magazine cover, check the "breasts" button...
It's like advertising, mainstream media keep creating a false version of reality that does not exist, a beautiful fake version of life. The result is that the trust keeps going down. I was recently talking to a friend who works at a TV station who told me that most of the "questions of the audience" you see in TV broadcasts are totally inventend, such as the SMS of some of our French stars...
Before / After: see by yourself
Via Marc Perrin.
Nick Robinson just launched his new blog.
France is in the middle of Germany, Paris not at the right place, Lyon in the middle of France and worst of all Toulouse is actually in the South West and is here in the North East !!! I can't believe it and sometimes wonder if the people who announce the death of mainstream media are not right... Via Veuve Tarquine [FR]
Senior Planet is a well known French Senior media on the web and they just launched their blogs. We are proud to be the technology behind 17 partners around Europe (they offer blogs in "white label" on TypePad), Neuf Telecom (FR), Turboblog (FR), Le Monde (FR), VNUNet (FR), T-Online (DE), 01 Net (FR), Europe 2 (FR), Cadres OnLine (FR), Psychologies (FR), Club-Internet (FR), Noos (FR), VTX (Switzerland), Kataweb (IT), VNUNet U.K., Sport (FR), Senior Planet (FR) and Radio Deejay (IT)
Radio Deejay is #1 radio on the Youth audience in Italy and just launched their blogs. We are proud to be the technology behind 16 partners around Europe (they offer blogs in "white label" on TypePad), Neuf Telecom (FR), Turboblog (FR), Le Monde (FR), VNUNet (FR), T-Online (DE), 01 Net (FR), Europe 2 (FR), Cadres OnLine (FR), Psychologies (FR), Club-Internet (FR), Noos (FR), VTX (Switzerland), Kataweb (IT), VNUNet U.K., Sport (FR), Senior Planet (FR) and Radio Deejay (IT)
The weekly free title on sports, Sport, just launched their blogs. We are proud to be the technology behind 15 partners around Europe (they offer blogs in "white label" on TypePad), Neuf Telecom (FR), Turboblog (FR), Le Monde (FR), VNUNet (FR), T-Online (DE), 01 Net (FR), Europe 2 (FR), Cadres OnLine (FR), Psychologies (FR), Club-Internet (FR), Noos (FR), VTX (Switzerland), Kataweb (IT), VNUNet U.K. and Sport.
Niall Kennedy (Technorati):
"Is receiving a press release from a PR agency just more spam? What about product discounts or free goods? Are there better ways for traditional marketers and bloggers to interact? What is the implicit contract created when marketers and bloggers communicate? What are the ethical questions? What are companies not listening to that they should be listening to?"
Take the survey. Disclosure: I invested in Technorati. Update: Jackie answered the survey and shares her thoughts.
I am impressed by the growth of Pascal Riché and Laurent Mauriac's blog audience, à l'heure américaine (a blog in French about the US). They are journalists at one of the best known French daily Liberation and this is an obvious proof for me that the debate bloggers against journalists and journalists against bloggers is flawed. Great content finds its audience immediately and transparency with comments attracts even more readers.
Congratulations Pascal and Laurent ! I am glad to see a French blog with such an audience, even more so as it's coming from what we call "traditional media"... Let's wish all media companies get it the way you do.
Disclosure: Liberation is one of our clients.
VNUNet just launched its blog service, after having launched its french one a few months ago. We are proud to be the technology behind 14 partners around Europe (they offer blogs in "white label" on TypePad), Neuf Telecom (FR), Turboblog (FR), Le Monde (FR), VNUNet (FR), T-Online (DE), 01 Net (FR), Europe 2 (FR), Cadres OnLine (FR), Psychologies (FR), Club-Internet (FR), Noos (FR), VTX (Switzerland), Kataweb (IT) and VNUNet U.K.
ABC News blogs. Thanks for choosing TypePad. via Heiko.
A great interview of Roland Piquepaille by Robin Good.
I randomly came across this NY Times article: Flooding Stops Presses and Broadcasts, So Journalists Turn to the Web Interesting analysis on how amateurs played a major role during the New Orleans disaster.
Jeff Jarvis has another excellent post, quotes:
Content
"Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content"
Distribution
"You thought you “owned the customer.” But all you owned was the bill they didn’t want to pay — that and assets that cost you money"
Value
"So where is the value now? Is there value now? Of course, there is. The value is — thank you, Cluetrain — in the conversation, in the relationship. The value is in trust."
"In the end, isn’t the only asset worth owning trust? Content is not king. Distribution is not king. Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation. "
It is via Jeff and the editorsweblog that I learn about this report. John Burke at the Editors Weblog says:
"A report just released by a French government think tank that analyzes present situations and predicts the future of various public and private organizations paints a bleak picture for the future of the French printed press. The threat from the Internet and foreign news sources will, according to the think tank, transform all French news organizations into multimedia companies, of which only 2 or 3 will be left standing by 2011. Result: " a majority of newspapers will disappear by 2011... if nothing is done".
The report cites the need of French government aid to journals that undergo innovative reforms and that improve their public service. To further involve young readers, French government subsidies should be used to provide free temporary subscriptions for 18 year-olds. For the French media in general, the report calls for improved training for journalists, a radical reform of Agence France Presse, and a reform of news distribution."
I wonder what is this "French government think tank". Cyril has more in French.
la brujula verde pings me on the fact that Merodeando had blogged a very similar cartoon to this one, done by Cox & Forkum.
I really like this cartoon that I added to my presentation about blogs and I wonder as well as mdamt what is the original source. Anybody has an idea ?
Jason notices that CNET talks about the French "bloc" word for "blog" when many blogs already talked about it and uses it as an example on why they should quote their sources if they are blogs. Obviously provided they got this one from blogs but it really looks like.
An article by Christine Pouget, that talks about many european experiences by traditional media around blogs: The Guardian, Libération, Skyblog, Le Monde... (AFP)
Inspired by Ohmynews and Dan Gillmor's We the Media, Carlo Revelli and his team have just launched AgoraVox, a European citizen media initiative, starting first in French.
Anyone can become a reporter and already many bloggers and citizens have joined forces to contribute. Congratulations.
OK you all know about it, I just want to congratulate Dan for Bayosphere and his new blog.
Jason (WeblogsInc/Engadget) and Gaby (Gawker/Gizmodo) at the speakers dinner at les blogs, that was one of the most interesting offpanel conversation.
Jason writes an Open letter to Molly Wood of Cnet who claims that Engadget has no ethics.
Jason: " We follow the same exact ethical standards as the WSJ, NYT, PBS, and NPR. We do not keep review units and we don’t get paid to blog about products. The fact that you’re insinuating we do is absolutely false.
Had you taken the time, as a “journalist,” to call me or do two minutes of research you would have found this out.
The fact that you’re losing scoops has nothing to do with ethics, it has to do with hustle—something you clearly don’t have since you couldn’t even be bothered to get your facts straight in this editorial.
Blogs are out-hustling you plain and simple. The audience is voting with their eyeballs as are the big companies who appreciate the transparency and passion of blogs."
Via Neville.
It looks like an OhmyNews of TV. Interesting, I did not know about it when apparently thousands of people gathered in San Francisco last month for its launch. Current.tv do you know more about this ? What I can say is that unfortunately it is terribly slow from Europe.
Here are some quotes from a paid only (be linkable, Economist, or die) Economist.com article:
"I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers," Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world's largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today's teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings "don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what's important," Mr Murdoch said, "and they certainly don't want news presented as gospel." And yet, he went on, "as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent."
"Mr Murdoch said that news "providers" such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, "become places for conversation" and "destinations" where bloggers" and "podcasters" congregate to "engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions." He also criticised editors and reporters who often "think their readers are stupid".
"In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Newspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan. In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; today only half do so. Philip Meyer, author of "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age" (University of Missouri Press), says that if the trend continues, the last newspaper reader will recycle his final paper copy in April 2040."
Announcing the end of the press as we know it is not really new, what's new is that it is Rupert Murdoch himseld announcing it...
What a week ! 01net, one of the largest publishing company on Internet and computers in France has just launched its blogs on TypePad today. I am very proud to see that France gets the weblogs phenomenon that fast. I believe that like OhMyNews in Korea, that has 33 000 citizen journalists writing the media, the traditional media start to understand the value of having thousands of people sharing their passion with us.
Thank you 01net for having chosen TypePad, I wish you a big success and tens of thousands of bloggers creating great content.
The Weblog portals running on TypePad in Europe are now 6, Neufblog, Turboblog, Le Monde, VNUNet et T-Online, 01net in addition to Friendster in the U.S., NTT, Nifty and Hitachi in Japan.
Thank you so much Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz for having podcasted me via Skype on "For Immediate Release".
I am very impressed by the quality of the show and much less by my accent and the number of "euh" I pronounce every ten seconds but he, that's my accent...
The show is available at For Immediate Release and on Neville's blog. I think you are really doing an amazing job in new PR, congratulations.
Bill Gates answering an interview with Gizmodo. If that is not a recognition that weblogs are an important communication tool...
Dan considers the Tsunami events mark the beginning of a true recognition of citizen journalism by traditional media.
See this article of Steve Outing who interviewed Dan
See this section in the Guardian devoted to the best citizen reporting during the tsunami
I can't resist to blog again about the Secours Populaire Français moblog, live from Thaïland.
In 2014, The New York Times disappears. and the press as we know it does not exist anymore.
This prediction (flash, 8 minutes) is worth giving some time but I disagree. Large press organisations have already started to adapt themselves. Le Monde in France provides blogs to journalists and puts its brand on Le Monde reader content. It enlarges the online reach of its brand by hosting citizen originated content, not only professional.
Concerning the Google leadership on information, I can only agree.
(via Manu, via Olivier Rafal, journalist at Le Monde Informatique, in French.)
The BigBlogCompany, fully dedicated to blogging organizes training sessions in London. Great idea.
Following a comment on this note (In French - merci Marc !) I discover a very interesting interview by Ohmynews founder, Yeon Ho, (that I had already talked about: "the end of 20th Century journalism").
An interesting discussion about who will own the rights about the blog-written Scoble book The Red Couch.
OK this is old stuff already, but I wanted to wish good luck to Dan for his new citizen journalism project as he announced he leaves his current job.
Sometimes it is "do what I say not what I do", for Dan it is "do what I say and now also what I do"...
Wonder why I have been blogging so many quotes from Dan's book in my previous posts ? That's easy, I am preparing a panel Six Apart has organized in Paris tomorrow.
All launched from my French blog, close to 100 journalists and media people are gathering tomorrow in Paris to discuss blogging and journalism and study the cases of
Le Monde blogs
Liberation blogs
VNU
L'express, Pierre Yves Lautrou
Bertrand Pecquerie (of WAN)
Chryde (blogger journalist)
Cyril Fievet (blogger journalist)
Soon, France will not only be known for its wine and cheese, it will also be known in the World for its blogging, I promise !
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Journalists are beginning to get it." [...] "However, I'm still not convinced that Big Media is doing the most important thing: listening. We are still in a top-down mode and don't realize that the conversation is more important than our pronouncements. I see progress, but not enough".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Hollywood tried to kill off the home video recorder. Only by the narrowest margin in the Supreme Court, in a crucial 1984 decision, did Americans preserve the right to tape a TV show and play it back later"
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, explained Dan: "The only way you can write something that survive is that someone who's your diametrical opposite can agree with it".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Rich Gordon, of Northwestern Univiersity's Medill School of Journalism, told Dan:
..."In all those classes I talk about the unique capabilities of new media. And clearly one of the most powerful is the way in which it changes the relationship between the journalist and what we've historically called the audience. I point them to interesting examples of this kind of journalism, including Weblogs, discussion forums, ohmynews, photo blogs, etc. And I raise the question of why more traditional journalists and media companies are not seizing the opportunity to change their relationships with the audience".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Some of the most important photos and videos in recent news history were the product of amateurs; we can scarcely imagine the second half of the 20th century without the grue-some Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination. More recently, as video cameras have become popular, we have seen what happens when average people captured important events such as police beatings of suspects and approaching tornados. And it was amateurs who caught the most horrific images of the United Airlines 767 fireball as it crashed into the second World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"The most web-like activity is linking: pointing to other people's content. Newspapers and other journalism organizations have been learning to do a better job of this on their sites, offering pointers to articles and data that reside outside their sites. We need to do more than that"
"On my blog, I frequently point at other news organizations' stories, including a local competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle. If I have the choice of pointing to an equally good story on my newspaper's own site, I'll naturally do so. But when the competition had done a better job than we have on a topic I care about, I'd be shortchanging my readers if I didn't take them to the best coverage"
Check out the CyberJournalist list if you don't know it, an excellent list of journalists blogging, or blogs about journalists. Via We, the media.
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"That's one reason why my blog has been so helpful. It's sparked deeper conversations with my sources and my readers, who are always telling me things I don't know. This is interactive journalism."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"Readers (or viewers or listeners) collectively know more than media professionals do. This is true by definition: they are many, and we are often just one."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
About the coverage of politics in the US: "Big Media, and the candidates, also started to realize that some of the best political journalism was coming outside their ranks. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Moulitsas' Daily Kos, among many others, offered better context than just about anything the wire services were delivering."
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
Joe Trippi: "Broadcast politics tells people they don't count".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
About Ben Chandler, an American Democrat. Chandlers "took out advertisements on the Daily Kos and 10 other popular political blogs, most of which had a left-leaning stance. A $2,000 investment, using the then nascent Blogads online ad agency, had turned into some $80,000 in contributions, mostly in small (around $20) amounts, from around the nation."
Another quote from Dan's book.
Azeem Azhar: "blogging is the eBay-ization of media - everyone can be a buyer and a seller".
Another quote from Dan's book.
About Companies who need to follow blogs to understand what their customers have to say, Dan is quoting Buzz Bruggeman, a lawyer.
"I immediately scan it, read it and figure out what to do, i.e. respond, comment, thank, forward to our team, etc. When I respond to a blogger, he/she is thrilled, and typically writes more about us, and tells his/her readers that we are great people, responding to users and customers and the net leverages all the time. It there are user problems, we solve them quickly; on balance it is brilliant stuff.""
"If you assume that bloggers really are "intelligent human agents", then this model is sensational as you don't have to go look for anyone or anything; it comes to you".
Dan again: "At one time, this kind of service cost a bundle. Now anyone can get it at almost no cost.
Another quote from Dan's book.
"We are not accustomed to being scrutinized the way we scrutinize others, however healthy it is that we are"
Dan quoting Jay Rosen's Press Think:
"I like the idea that people are watching what I say and correcting me if I get things wrong -or challenging my conclusions, based on the same facts (or facts I hadn't known about when I wrote the piece)".
Another quote of Dan's We the media.
"It's worth reflecting how events of the past would have looked had tomorrow's technology been available at the time. Let's apply that to the terrific events of September 11, 2001. Our memories of that awful day stem largely from television: videos of airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the fireballs that erupted, people falling and jumping from the towers, the crumbling to earth of the structures. Individuals with video cameras captured parts of this story, and their work ended up on network TV as well. The big networks stopped showing most graphic videos fairly quickly. But those pictures are still on the Net for anyone who wants to see them."
I have been reading again Dan's book and I wrote some quotes I really liked, I thought I could share them here.
Talking about Justin Hall launching one of the first weblogs:
"What had happened? Communications had completed a transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one-to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many."
There as been so much blogging about this that I hesitate to blog about it myself, so I'll be very short. Just in case you missed it, Sony threatens a blogger, Jason Kottke.
Read:
A good summary of the story by Ellis Conroy
Ken Jennings explaining his financial problems to face the issue
Dan Gillmor's note about boycotting Sony
A Washington Post article (not sued by Sony)
Jason Calacanis comments
I am blogging a lot about it these days but I keep being surprised by the launch of the Le Monde blogs
Le Monde is one of the first newspaper in the World to offer blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand. They have also published a ranking of the 10 top blogs, mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations.
After only two days after launch, 4 reader blogs make it in the top ten, that is lead by journalists, the blog of the language correction team of Le Monde (1st) that everybody talks about here (five people at Le Monde do nothing but correcting the French language of the journalists to be perfect French and they blog in a very humoristic way) and that of Francis Pisani (2nd) who reports on technologies from California.
Here are the blogs of the readers that made it in the top 10:
6 - Y a des questions que...
7 - Bostella
8 - James Blog
10 - Vous avez aimé le Liban
Looks like a competition between professional journalists blogs and amateurs blogs... This has been on for a long time on Technorati, but here it is under the Le Monde brand...
The daily Le Monde has just launched blogs for their readers, after having launched many journalists blogs. The last updated blogs of both readers and journalists (mixed !) is on this Le Monde blogs page.
Wired article. Via Chryde.
"Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines."
"John Athayde, also 27, a web designer who works in Washington, D.C., buys a newspaper once every "two to three months," usually "because someone I know has a picture in the events section or something." Instead, he views news as "packets of distributed information," and uses NetNewsWire to aggregate about 70 news sources, including several blogs. "I typically will read entire stories within the news aggregator, bypassing all design (and) advertising" to get "to the content."
moblogged from the panel
Last Friday in Lisbon, at the World Association of Newspapers Conference, Stéphane Mazzorato (LeMonde.fr) and myself have presented our thoughts on blogs and journalism and the Le Monde case study
LeMonde.fr has not only launched blogs for many journalists, but also blogs for their readers.
Here are the journalists blogs online today:
Big Picture, par Corine Lesnes
La république des Livres, par Pierre Assouline
Do not fold, par Virginie Luc
Technochroniques, par Tariq Krim
Transnets, par Francis Pisani
Langue sauce piquante
Copier - Décoller
Europe : pour ou contre la Constitution ?
A few blogs of Le Monde readers started even before the official launch next week:
James
Skildy
Pierre Bachy
trblt (ressources pédagogiques)
I will post a real case study when I have time but in the meantime should you be interested I have podcasted our presentation and uploaded the slides.
Slide on differences between journalists and bloggers
Our presentation in pdf (7704.1K)
Sound file of presentations in mp3 (21651.8K) (mine is in english, Le Monde is in French)
the sound file of the Q&A in mp3 (11479.5K) (in english)
Thanks again Bertrand Pecquerie and Yann Mauchamp of the World Association of Newspapers for having invited us and thanks Monde.fr for having presented the case study even before the official launch. I strongly advise you to also read their blog written for the Editors community, the Editorsweblog. Of course, at the end of the presentation I also encouraged everybody to read Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media".
Just arrived in Lisbon, finishing my rant at the World Association of Newspapers conference that gathers 500 managers of World Newspapers. Our partner Le Monde and myself are presenting the first results of our work: blogs for journalists and to my knowledge a European premiere, blogs for readers of Le Monde.
Classic discussions about blogs with or against newspapers already started tonight.
Anyway, great evening in Lisbon, lots to say, great fun and amazing food. More tomorrow.
Dan Rather announced today that he will leave The CBS Evening News in March. I guess the scandal around the false information on Bush's military services revealed by bloggers played a role. Dan Rather had many comments on the quality of his journalism on blogs, even some dedicated blogs such as Ratherbiaised.
For CBS, blogging is typing, not journalism. Of course their journalism is always perfect. Thanks, Marie !
The well known French daily Le Monde has just launched the blog of two well known journalists, Pierre Assouline, and Corine Lesnes, Big Picture, who writes about the US Campaign.
Thank you, Le Monde, for your trust in TypePad.
I have no clue about the legal issues, but clearly, this is ridiculous.