If you don’t want to propagate more mass murders…
Don’t start the story with sirens blaring.
Don’t have photographs of the killer.
Don’t make this 24/7 coverage.
Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.
Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.
Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.
Chances are, a lot of compelling video will be shot on mobile phones and uploaded on sharing sites on the internet within minutes.
Chances are, the first report of a result out of a stadium won’t be Reuters, AP, or Afp. Chances are the first report of a result will be one of 1,572 (to pick a number at random) Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging the result out in a Tweet from their mobile phone.
And since tweets can aggregated and can be searched by keyword – who is the journalist? What is the media organisation? Who has control?
I’m willing to bet that 90% of the athletes participating all have Facebook pages and blogs and Twitter accounts and video-enabled mobiles themselves.
While I know you’ve tried to put some rules and structure around what athletes can and can’t do, frankly I think you’re whistling in the wind.
To say they can blog as long as it isn’t journalistic, misses the point.
David Schlesinger, chairman of Thomson Reuters China, former Editor-in-Chief of Reuters on the draconian rules of the Olympic committee
This was written back in 2009, today we are still under very strange rules. One of them tries to control how you link to the Olympics. (see 5. Linking Policy)
Isn’t LittleMonsters.com just a fan site or is it a Trojan Horse for The Backplane in the form of Lady Gaga to take on Facebook?
I’m skeptical about the prospects of this, what do you think?
AMC Networks will provide Dish Network customers access to the Season 5 premiere of Breaking Bad on Sunday, July 15, on its website, after the satellite operator dropped the programmer’s networks last month.
You’d think they had no idea, from reading the financial press. For instance, the WSJ’s Pui-Wing Tam started an article today by talking about “little-known social coding start-up GitHub”. Or consider this, from the FT’s Barney Jopson:
Most consumers still view Amazon as an online book retailer. Some are surprised to find it sells much more than the single product with which Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive, started in 1994.
I’m unclear on the purpose this kind of thing serves. For tech-savvy readers, it certainly makes these papers seem incredibly out-of-touch and irrelevant. Is it a way of reassuring the Old People that they’re not completely out of the loop? If so, it’s a pretty ham-fisted way of doing it. My guess is that it’s ultimately coming from crusty old editors who still view smartphones with suspicion. And that it’s going to be a serious impediment to these titles going effectively digital.
“There’s an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” - Cory Booker launches news startup #waywire
Using a combination of in-studio anchors and citizens piped in from Skype reporting directly from the ground, Syria al-Shaab manages to broadcast 12 hours of live programming a day from a country that won’t allow foreign reporters in.
“They hacked into our Skype account about a week ago and sent a virus to all the contacts in it. Every time they do something like that, we know we are doing our jobs” said Summer Ajlouni, founder of Syria al-Shaab in a report by Dan Rather of HDNet.
READ MORE: Syria al-Shaab manages to broadcast under fire
Television networks are suing Aereo for rebroadcasting their programs without paying retransmission fees. Is Aereo simply providing people with hi-tech rabbit ears? Watch and learn more.