Journalist quits his newspaper, buys plane ticket, and starts blog

Here’s a nice yarn for you: a print journalist named Adam Jadhav quit his job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to begin a new life travelling and blogging.

Since I entered J-School, I’ve been dreaming of being a foreign correspondent. Unfortunately, the journalism industry doesn’t have the scratch to afford many of those these days.

finally pulled the trigger this summer, told the bosses I’d be quitting and bought plane tickets. I am bound for the developing world, with a stop in Kenya and before an eventual long-term stay in India. There will be sidetrips elsewhere (Thailand for at start, but who knows where the winds will blow).

His blog is adamjadhav.com. He has also made a rap video to celebrate his transition, which feels rather hackeneyed considering the number of rap parody songs out there, but it is midly entertaining:

We must wish Adam the best of luck on his new journey and hope that he gets plenty of freelance work to support his travels. Dare we say Adam Jadhav, “‘international journalist 2.0″, could exemplify the opportunties that are open to intrepid word-smiths in the so-called new era of journalism?

Either way, this is an inspiring story to any journo student yearning to become a foreign correspondent but worried about being restricted by a miserly newspaper company.

I know a few people who will be heartened by Adam’s tale…

Google says you can’t charge for news, silly goose.

Google CEO and internet tyrant Eric Schmidt was recently asked what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge visitors for online news.

His response echoes the words of most cynical commentators in the online news debate: people may pay for niche media like the Wall Street Journal but fat chance getting anyone to pay for general news.

“In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity.”

“So my guess is for niche and specialist markets … it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”

While the perspective isn’t a new one, Schmidt’s comments are interesting for two reasons:

1) This is from Google, and if Google know anything its how people use the web.

2) As Editor’s Web Blog points out, his comments seem to contradict a proposal the company put forth this month to the Newspaper Association of America which laid out a micropayment system for online news. Here’s their summary of the proposal:

Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers.  However, “open” need not mean free.  We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models — including content available only via subscription. While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue.  In addition, a successful paid content model can enhance advertising opportunities, rather than replace them.

Do these words feel a tad hollow given Schmidt’s recent remarks?

Obama calls Kanye a jackass – twitter, ethics, and the newsroom

ABC has discovered it may need to set rules around Twitter and its newsroom.

ABC reporters overheard Obama call rapper Kanye West a jackass during an off-the-record chat Obama was having with CNBC. Obama was criticising  an outburst Kanye had at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to say he thought Beyonce deserved the award.

Obama made the comment not strictly off-the-record, but during the pre-chatter before an interview on CNBC – which is considered kind of off-the-record. Chumps from ABC overheard the comments through a fibre optic line the network shares with CNBC, one of the chumps tweeted:

“Pres Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”

Nuttiness ensued. The Whitehouse had no comment.

The question this beckons is what kind of guidelines journalists may need in the newsroom around social media like twitter.

Twitter, a technology that’s a natural tool for reporters who love to tell people what they know whenever they know it, has raced ahead in usage before many news organisations have developed policies to govern its use, said Richard Wald, a former ABC News executive and professor at Columbia University.

“You need to reinforce the sense that you have to verify before you publish,” Wald said. “The policies may be very comprehensive, but they may not be adequate to the technology that news organisations have.”

Lets be sceptical for a moment and not buy into new media paranoia: is this a typical scenario that could pop up with any story that is poorly fact checked? Or, as Wald suggests is Twitter, with its speed, rapid dissemination, and easy digestibility,  opening up a whole new can of worms?

New York Times website hacked!

Well, kind of. A rogue ad has surfaced on The New York Times website that commandeers your browser and directs you to a fraudulent anti-virus website.

This is a note left on their media and advertising section:

“Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.”

It will be interesting to see the full story as more details come to light.

Source: CNET

Behind the news Vol. 1

You can’t trust the news. You know this and I know this. We are smart people.

So that’s why once every blue moon, when the media fat cats have their backs turned, I dish up what they don’t want you to see. As a media insider I have this access. I know the people, I have the connections, and I have an outlet that doesn’t deal in so-called ‘fact checking’.

You may have heard earlier this week that Radio New Zealand’s political reporter, Julian Robins, stumbled upon a notebook left on the street by a Treasury official outside of parliament. The notebook detailed a potential merger between New Zealand’s spy agencies. There was fallout, the government blushed, and something that should have been secret was no longer so secret.

Juicy scoop? Yes. Convenient? Suspiciously, yes. Unfounded reports from my hearsay division give me rock solid details this was a set up.

The SIS, concerned it may have to cede power to the Government Communications Security Bureau if a merger went ahead,  acquired the civil servant’s notebook and conveniently planted it in Robins’s path.

The story surfaced (Julian Robins, you predictable bastard) and the merger is less likely than it ever was. After all, whats the fun in making secret closed-door rearrangements of your spy agencies if the rest of the country knows about it?

It is a tribute to that typical New Zealand humbleness we find it so difficult to accept that our own intelligence agencies could be this devious.

Until next time.

You can’t trust a press photo

A month hiatus from blogging? What hiatus. Lets stop living in the past.

The Lovejoy Journalism and News Literacy series of blogs has thrown up an interesting piece by New York Times photo editor Becky Hanger about how much we can trust newspaper photos.

He notes a number of altered photos that in recent years were splattered over front pages the world over.

“In the summer of 2006, the Reuters news agency moved a freelance photographer’s photo showing smoke rising from a Beirut suburb after an Israeli airstrike. Later it was revealed that the photo had been manipulated in Photoshop to increase and darken the smoke. Reuters cut ties to the photographer and removed all of his photos from its archive.”

So how can we tell a fraud? We can’t. Hanger says an editor has to trust his photographers and readers have to trust the outlet they’re reading. You know, that old chestnut.