News of the World Paper Will Close

Share

Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World will close after a very public phone hacking scandal.

From the latest Reuters article:

The demise of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper is likely to weaken media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s grip on British politics, at least in the short-term, after a phone hacking scandal that has tarnished Prime Minister David Cameron.

Allegations that the News of the World Sunday newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International , hacked into phones of people including a murdered schoolgirl and dead soldiers have rocked British politics and disgusted the public.

The allegations triggered the dramatic announcement on Thursday of the closure of the 168-year-old paper, after a rare emergency session of parliament on the scandal on Wednesday and Internet campaigns to boycott the publication. Many firms had already pulled their advertising.

Read the full article

2011 TV and Radio News Staffing and Profitability Survey

Share

The latest staffing survey released by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University shows that local news jobs increased last year and made up for job losses in 2009. The survey found that “anticipated hiring in 2011 could bring the industry back to its precrash peak by the start of 2012.”

You can read the first part of the survey here or visit the the RTDNA website.

 

 

 

Rural Newspapers Doing Surprisingly Well

Share

By Jim Romenesko on Poynter.org, July 7 – The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University has just published an analysis of ruralnewspapers that tracks the growth of that media category, from Boston’s Publick Occurrences in 1690 to the over 10,000 publications in print today. “The community newspaper business is healthier than metro newspapers, because it hasn’t been invaded by Internet competition,” Al Cross, a rural journalism analyst at the University of Kentucky, told the researchers. “Craigslist doesn’t serve these kinds of communities. They have no effective competition for local news. Rural papers own the franchise locally of the most credible information.”  Read the full article

Algorithms Are Good But Don’t Fire Your Editor Yet

Share

By  Eli Pariser on Harvard Business Review, May 26 –  A recommendation from the recommendation frontier: You may not want to fire your human editor just yet.

For the last year, I’ve been investigating the weird, wild, mostly hidden world of personalization for my book, The Filter Bubble. The “if you like this, you’ll like that” mentality is sweeping the web — not just on sites like Amazon and Netflix that deal with products, but also on sites that deal with news and content like Google search (users are increasingly likely to get different results depending on who they are) and Yahoo News. Even the New York Times and the Washington Post are getting in on the act, investing in startups that provide a “Daily Me” approach to the newspaper. Read full article