Editor's desk: Week of October 9, 2006

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Friday October 13

The stats are in

and here are the most-read stories this week on nzherald:

1.

'Untold sadness' as NZ V8 driver dies

2.

Girls take compensation for wrongful imprisonment

3.

Radio breakfast host charged with road-rage attack

4.

Keisha very young to be pregnant, says grandmother

5.

Dead woman found propped upright in car seat

- - - posted 12.25pm by Neil Sanderson

Thursday October 12

Reader comment:

This may be a minor point, but it is glaring in both the New Zealand Herald and Television News commentators that they always refer to 'the car' or 'a motorcycle' failed to stop, or plowed into a crowd of people, etc. Doesn't the driver carry any responsibility as to what the car or motorcycle does, or do these objects have a mind and life of their own? I'm just asking.

- - - posted 09.10am by Jim

Response:

I'm with you completely on this one Jim. I'm not sure whether it's sloppiness or an over-sensitivity on the part of some journalists regarding the issue of responsibility. Although we need to avoid ascribing blame for a crash until the facts emerge (e.g. in court), we may go too far the other way and shift suspicion from the driver to the vehicle itself (i.e. a mechanical problem caused the crash).

My advice to anyone covering such a story is:

1) Keep the language neutral and factual. "Witnesses say the car didn't stop" seems fine to me, whereas "witnesses say the car failed to stop" implies there was something wrong with the car.

2) Say that vehicles "collided" rather than one vehicle struck another (which implies that the first driver is at fault).

3) Use the word "accident" carefully. In initial coverage of a crash we generally have no way of knowing whether it was indeed an accident (it could have been deliberate, or a result of sabotage, for example). So just call it a crash or a collision.

- - - posted 12.10pm by Neil Sanderson

Also at the ONA conference,

Iraqi blogger

Zayed

said Americans are probably getting only half the story about what he regards as the continuing civil war in Iraq.

He said he found much of the news for his blog by reading local online sites. Although there was a lot of propaganda to sift through, if the same information appeared on sites with opposing perspectives, then he knew he should look into the claims.

Zayed is perhaps unique in having a blog

[Healing Iraq]

that is itself the subject of another blog

[Hearing Zayed]

, set up by

USA Today's

Mark Memmott to help readers understand and find their way around Zayed's site because, as Zayed comments, "my blog is such a pain to navigate". [I don't think it's hard to navigate at all, but Memmott's blog does give a useful orientation.]

- - - posted 11.00am by Neil Sanderson

Online Journalism Awards: msnbc.com

was recognised for general excellence in online journalism (for sites with over 1 million visitors per month) at the annual convention of the

Online News Association

, held last weekend in Washington DC.

>> Other winners

- - - posted 10.55am by Neil Sanderson

Did Google get a bargain?

On Tuesday, just after news arrived that

Google had bought YouTube

, I heard an interesting comment from Ben Ataya, our senior web developer here at nzherald.

He reckoned that US1.65 billion wasn't such a high price - if we used as a reference point

the sale earlier this year

of New Zealand auction site Trade Me to publisher Fairfax.

Here are the figures:

• Fairfax bought Trade Me for NZ$700 million
  (plus $50m if targets are met over two years)
• Google bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion, roughly NZ$2.5 billion

In other words, YouTube - a global phenomenon - only cost 3.6 times as much as Trade Me (without considering the conditional bonus payment for Trade Me).

Is this a reasonable comparison?

The combined Google/YouTube has been announcing content distribution deals with major studios, networks and music labels.

Rupert Murdoch has joined the queue

, looking to expand the existing co-operation between Google and his MySpace.com.

Related...

Jeff Jarvis suggests

that the algorithm jockeys at Google gain something extremely valuable in their purchase of YouTube - the human factor. Appropriately, Jeff has placed a video version of his comments

on YouTube

.

- - - posted 10.00am by Neil Sanderson

Wednesday October 11

Today is catch-up day on some things that I've been meaning to mention to you, but just didn't get around to...

British media commentator Roy Greenslade

will be keynote speaker at the annual

Journalism Education Association conference

in Auckland Dec 4-7.

Greenslade, former editor of the

Daily Mirror

, is a professor of journalism at City University, London, and writes a

blog on the Media Guardian website

.

The conference will be held at AUT University, and the theme is "the future of media in the digital age".

- - - posted 1.55pm by Neil Sanderson

The BBC site now publishes live traffic stats

in a very impressive interface that's worth getting familiar with. Traffic to the website can be observed minute by minute and even broken out by region (although the BBC keeps actual page impression numbers confidential and just shows volume relative to "normal").

The most-read stories and the most-emailed stories are listed and can be broken out

by site section

(e.g. health, technology, entertainment) and

by hour

(for the past seven days).

- - - posted 1.35pm by Neil Sanderson

The New York Times put its entire archive online

a couple of weeks ago, giving easy access to stories all the way back to 1851. The historical content is covered by the site's paid subscription system,

Times Select

, which has a

14-day free trial offer

.

After the trial it will cost US$4.95 per article to read Tom Wicker's account of

the Kennedy assasination

, a report on

the Beatles's 1964 arrival in America

, or any of the hundreds of thousands of stories in the archive. Monthly and annual rates are available too, including access to up to 100 archived stories/month.

- - - posted 1.00pm by Neil Sanderson

Tuesday October 10

Reader comment:

As you prepared for Tuesday's edition, dozens of Kiwis were winging their way towards the UK to encourage us to live and work in NZ (Immigration Expos in London and Manchester). Reading the stories you release online over the past year or two, you would wonder why we should want to do this with carnage on the roads a regular feature, tasers a recent addition, deaths in various other situations the feature of many reports, etc.

Perhaps it is that we are so numerous in the UK that such stories unless exceptional, are no longer a feature of our national papers but relegated to regional press & TV?

But when you release all these stories online, just remember that they are going around the world and perhaps the occasional scan down your headline stories may be worthwhile in calculating what you are trying to say about present day NZ. Is it really so grim? I didn't find it so on my visits. Parks were generally clean and tidy and graffiti free, as were the towns and cities (until Waitomo!).

Agreed, you drive like lunatics once released from the confines of the cities, but I would be far happier walking around the streets of Auckland or Christchurch than Manchester or Birmingham or Liverpool or Glasgow or London, etc.

Accepted there are some stories you can't ignore but try to appreciate what you do have and don't run it down too much - balance the good with the bad.

- - - posted 12.05pm by Robert Leivers, Church Stretton, Shropshire, UK

Response:

Thanks for the message Robert. While I agree we must be alert to positive news stories, the reality is that people are dying on our roads and that crime - including horrible violent crime - is an issue of enormous public concern. For most of us, life remains pretty good. Even so, tragedies do affect our friends, our families and our communities. To ignore them and the wider issues they raise would be irresponsible, in my view.

- - - posted 12.05pm by Neil Sanderson

Vodafone's purchase of ihug

not only threatens Telecom's dominance of the dialup and broadband internet markets but could completely change the way New Zealanders think about their telephone services.

The $41 million acquisition gives

Vodafone

an array of services that will complement its well-established and competitive mobile phone business.

On National Radio this morning,

ihug

CEO Mark Rushworth said ihug's internet service products and toll calling plans will be sold through Vodafone's retail network.

And just two weeks ago ihug unveiled its

home phone plus local calling scheme

, telling consumers they could "leave Telecom for good".

Expect that sort of rhetoric to increase, and the package offers to start coming thick and fast as Vodafone extends its marketing skills beyond the mobile market.

Telecom

recently announced new broadband pricing, and will no doubt respond aggressively to deals offered by Vodafone/ihug.

- -- posted 11.15am by Neil Sanderson

US$1.65 billion is the price of YouTube

but sorry, you're too late to buy it.

Google has done that

this morning, and will pay with Google shares which shot up in value on the news before easing slightly to a still-breathtaking US$427.

As for all the talk that YouTube didn't have a business model? And that it would eventually fall victim to copyright violation claims from the film, TV and music industries?

Seems YouTube and Google have been working on that too, with a number of deals with major networks and studios announced today that would see them distribute their material willingly via YouTube.

- - - posted 10.30 by Neil Sanderson

Monday October 9

NewAssignment.net

, Jay Rosen's effort to bring citizen journalists and professional editors together to produce user-requested news coverage, will use a US$100,000 grant from Reuters to hire the site's first editor. But getting the new project off the ground is taking some time, with the editor not due to start until next year, and the latest posting on the NewAssignment site being more than two weeks old.

But

Rosen

, a NY University professsor and blogger, has been busy talking about the project in an online Q&A (with the citizens, of course) at

slashdot.org

.

The whole exchange is interesting, but here are a few quotable excerpts:

• Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors.

That's an idea developed further in Rosen's response to the 3rd question, where he tosses around ideas on how a citizen journalism site can (and must, he says) be rigorous on fact-checking. Ironically, one of his suggestions is that editors are unlikely to be overwhelmed by eager citizen journos.

• Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one per cent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

And he cautions would-be entrepreneurs on the dangers of trying to build a business on user-generated content:

• Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

Among the projects being proposed for NewAssignment.net is a follow-up to concerns about

electronic voting machines

in the 2004 US election. Citizen journalists would compile a

national database of polling stations

as a platform for investigating voting issues. Unfortunately this project will not be undertaken until after next month's mid-term elections.

- - - posted 11.20am by Neil Sanderson [hat tip

Russell Brown

]

After more than six years as editor of nzherald.co.nz,

I will be moving on at the end of this month. Being involved with such a successul online publication has been a wonderful experience, and I'll truly miss "the team" who made it such a pleasure to come to work each day. I've also appreciated hearing from so many of our readers over the years. The feedback, encouragement and occasional criticism have helped us build the site you're reading today. Thank you.

- - - posted 11.15am by Neil Sanderson