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Why is digital Arabic content key?
“Arguably, vernacular is one of the reasons that mobile phones have spread so fast: the main applications (voice and text messages) are offered in the language that is most relevant to their users. Over 60% of Arabic speakers prefer browsing internet content in Arabic according to Arab Media Outlook 2009-2013. More than half of them do not speak English. For the extreme poor and the bottom 40% of the population that the World Bank seeks to help, access to online knowledge and services in a native language is likely to matter even more.
The prospects for stronger digital Arabic content are exciting. Consider these last few numbers: only a quarter of women in the Arab world participate in the formal workforce. New forms of work such as online contracting and microwork could offer a chance to bypass physical barriers or social restrictions and empower women.”
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Digital Journalism: The Next Generation
“Overall, BuzzFeed’s practice of journalism seems nowhere near as pioneering as the sleek platform it has developed to deliver its product.
Could that change? BuzzFeed recently hired Hussein Kesvani, a reporter in London, to cover life among young Muslims in Britain. The site is also considering starting a beat on the status of women in India. If BuzzFeed were to head further in this direction, it could blaze a new path. So much of today’s reporting is given over to war, terrorism, geopolitical rivalry, and high-level diplomacy. BuzzFeed could pioneer a more grassroots approach, chronicling how ordinary people live, giving a voice to overlooked populations, capturing the daily struggle of citizens as they contend with poverty and prejudice, bureaucratic obstruction and government indifference. Coverage of this sort would, I think, resonate far more strongly with BuzzFeed’s young audience than its current reporting does. Undertaking it, though, would require a radical rethinking of how to use digital technology to cover the world. One way or another,BuzzFeed needs to become bolder and brasher. Otherwise, it will remain known mainly for its cat photos.”
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Digital storytelling is the next step
How are digital tools changing the way journalists tell their stories? An article in the Medium gives an overview of the next steps in digital transformation in journalism.
“Instead, journalists have to be open to constant change in storytelling and look for new ways to tell their stories at least as intensely as they look for new stories to tell.”
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John Hersey, The Art of Fiction No. 92
Early in his career—“before,” he says, “I was really even a writer”—John Hersey decided to restrict his public expression to the medium in which he was most comfortable; that is, to the written rather than the spoken word. He has kept to his decision. This is only the second interview he has ever granted; the first was with Publishers Weekly in 1984.
Read this interview with John Hersey in the Paris Review where he speaks about the writing process he follows, the relationship he sees between fictional writing and journalism, and delves into his life as a writer and journalist. Interview.
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Why Send My Novel Under a Male Name?
“Almost all publishers only accept submissions through agents, so they are essential gatekeepers for anyone trying to sell a book in the traditional market rather than self-publishing. There are various ways of attracting an agent’s attention, but sending query letters is the most accessible. The letter describes the novel, the author, and usually includes the first pages of the manuscript itself—the equivalent of what a reader might see picking up a book in a store. Agents can let silence speak for itself, write back with a rejection, or ask to see the novel.”
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Arab Youth Survey 2015
The 7th Annual ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2015 was conducted by international polling firm PSB to explore attitudes among Arab youth in 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The aim of this annual survey is to present evidence-based insights into the attitudes of Arab youth, providing public and private sector organisations with data and analysis to inform their decision-making and policy formation.
Take a look at the findings for the year 2015.
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Why NYTimes apps look different
“The battle will be won on the smartphone,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said at a tech conference last February.
The paper’s readers have increasingly been coming from mobile in recent years, and the Times has responded with a fleet of apps designed to draw in small, niche audiences to the paper. The NYT Cooking app, an opinion app, and NYT Now, which offers a single curated news feed, were designed mostly as evangelical products—to convert browsers into regular readers and eventually subscribers.
But these niche apps haven’t attracted the number of subscribers the Times was hoping for. The paper shuttered the opinion app in October, and last week it announced a retooling of its mobile apps. The NYT Now app, which had required a paid monthly subscription, will be free, while the paper’s comprehensive iPhone app is undergoing a transition to make it “more visual, more serendipitous, and to introduce a new mobile voice.” That new mobile voice will come from human editors, which the app is getting for the first time.
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Why Journalists Make Great Entrepreneurs
There is tremendous transition within the field of journalism. The number of full-time U.S. daily newspaper journalists now stands roughly at 36,700, according to the American Society of News Editors, down from 55,000 in 2008. I constantly receive calls from journalism colleagues who are in transition and grappling with how to move forward with their expertise. For any journalist who is in a state of transition, it is tremendously useful to know how to build on an idea and scale it into a business.
I am fortunate to teach entrepreneurship at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Each semester I break the class into three teams and ask thought leaders in journalism, technology, and communications to share a real-life challenge they see within our industry. These thought leaders have recently included Chris Crommett, founder of CNN en Español; Louis Libin, former CTO of NBC and president of Broad Comm; and Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas PR.
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The value of news
This essay is adapted from Tales from the Great Disruption: Insights and Lessons from Journalism’s Technological Transformation, by Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt. The book offers a look at how new and old journalistic institutions are dealing with the digital revolution, published by The Big Roundtable, a platform for nonfiction narrative stories. Shapiro, Hiatt, and Hoyt are, respectively, its founder, publisher, and editor.
In March of 2011, The New York Times announced that it would start charging readers for digital content. The announcement came from the publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who wrote that the shift away from offering all the Times’ online content at no cost was “an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times.”
The decision to erect a paywall had come after long and sometimes difficult debate, one that was taking place in news organizations around the world. There were, of course, the business considerations: Charging for access meant an inevitable drop in traffic. And with that drop would come a loss in interest by advertisers, who had become accustomed to being able to reach tens of millions of potential customers at a fraction of the cost of a print ad. But beyond the debate about the potentially catastrophic loss of digital ad dollars, something else was at play: an existential debate about journalism’s future.
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How To Fix American Journalism
It’s an age-old debate among journalists: which approach to covering the news is superior—the American, with its striving after objectivity and balance, or the European, with its frank embrace of slant and party? Should news organizations seek out all sides of an issue, or should they present the news with an unabashed tilt? By now, it seems clear that the Americans (at their best) have the edge. Newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, for all their shortcomings, offer a rich daily diet of news, from distant wars to local schools; analysis of events and trends; coverage of arts and culture; and opinion from both in-house columnists and outside contributors. Another top paper, the Financial Times, though based in London, follows an American-style approach. The European model has its own impressive exemplars, notably The Guardian, but overall the American way has, I think, shown its superiority.
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Stranger Still
I first heard about the writer Kamel Daoud a few years ago, when an Algerian friend of mine told me I should read him if I wanted to understand how her country had changed in recent years. “If Algeria can produce a Kamel Daoud,” she said, “I still have hope for Algeria.” Reading his columns in Le Quotidien d’Oran, a French-language newspaper, I saw what she meant. Daoud had an original, epigrammatic style: playful, lyrical, brash. I could also see why he’d been accused of racism, even “self-hatred.” After Sept. 11, for example, he wrote that the Arabs had been “crashing” for centuries and that they would continue crashing so long as they were better known for hijacking planes than for making them. But this struck me as the glib provocation of an otherwise intelligent writer carried away by his metaphors.
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Afghanistan’s Conflict History: War Rugs
Afghanistan has suffered through long decades of war; conflict with the Soviet Union, civil war and 13 years of a U.S.-led NATO combat mission. Among the political, economic and cultural impacts of this violence, there’s an artistic transformation: the history of violence is reflected in the country’s ancient art of rug making.
Kevin Sudeith, a collector, tells NPR’s Arun Rath that he has long been impressed by the craftsmanship of Afghan rugs.
“The thing that awed me about the war rugs … is the combination of a very ancient tradition and ancient designs and patterns that are tied to specific towns and regions of Afghanistan … coupled with the most contemporary subject matter,” Sudeith says. “And the war rugs document that unselfconsciously, succinctly and beautifully.”
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Infographic: Ideal Length of Posts Online
Brands generally understand the most engaging lengths for billboard headlines, print copy and TV spots. But what about tweets, Facebook posts and online videos?
The infographic below crunches some data to suggest the ideal length of everything online. Rules are made to be broken, of course, and this isn’t to say other lengths can’t work. A lot depends on the type of content, and audience.
But it’s a decent primer on how not drone on too long with your content.
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Interview: Edith Bouvier, Journalist
Douglas Herbert from France 24 meets Edith Bouvier, the French journalist who appealed for help on YouTube after being injured in a rocket attack on the besieged Syrian city of Homs, and who was later evacuated from Homs by Syrian activists.
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The Fight of Their Lives
On the evening of August 8th, Najat Ali Saleh, a former commander of the Kurdish army, was summoned to a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the President of the semiautonomous Kurdish region that occupies the northern part of Iraq. Barzani, a longtime guerrilla fighter, was alarmed. Twenty-four hours before, fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had made a huge incursion into the Kurds’ territory. They had overrun Kurdish forces in the western Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, and had surged as far as Gwer, fifteen miles from the capital city of Erbil. At the Mosul Dam, on the Tigris River, they had seized the controls, giving them the ability to inundate Baghdad with fifteen feet of water. The Kurdish army is known throughout the region for its ferocity—its fighters are called peshmerga, or “those who face death”—and the defeat had been a humiliation. “We were totally unprepared for what happened,” Saleh told me. Kurdish leaders were so incensed that they relieved five commanders of their posts and detained them for interrogation. “It would have been better for them if they had fought to the death,” he said.
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Editorial teams to enhance digital output
The Guardian is reorganising parts of its newsroom to better serve its digital audience.
Visual journalism, data journalism and audience development teams will all be restructured after new executive editor for digital, Aron Pilhofer, spent the summer visiting other media organisations for inspiration.
“I had a unique opportunity to spend time looking at different models and seeing how other newsrooms and native digital startups are doing this,” Pilhofer, who joined the Guardian’s UK office in September, told Journalism.co.uk.
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Find Your Beach
Across the way from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis.
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Tales of the Trash
Many things in Egypt don’t work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get cancelled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than seven hundred members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole, Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than seventeen million, zabaleen like Sayyid have managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.
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Publishing Startup at a Crossroads
The iOS app, pending improvements, still might catch on, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out how to try to keep those subscribers as we fold them back into the original distribution system. We’re also in talks with an established indie publishing house, trying to figure out whether doing a handful of print and e-book Emily Books originals in collaboration could make financial sense for both us and them; I’m hopeful, but when I look at the profit and loss statements they’ve given us for reference, I get less so. The idea that print availability is the only difference between selling a few hundred and a few thousand books seems like a stretch. Then again, we have a built-in base. “Two hundred people who love you are more important than 2 million people who like you,” some startup guy or other once said. Startup guys say a lot of stuff, though.
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Scenes from Daily Life in ISIS de Facto Capital
Editor’s note: In the year since Islamist factions took over Raqqa, Syria, very little unfiltered news has made it out of the area. In the meantime, ISIS has established its de facto capital in the city. Vanityfair.com received the below text from a Syrian who claims Raqqa as a hometown. To protect this individual’s security in an area where speaking candidly about ISIS is dangerous, we’re not revealing his or her name.
Artist Molly Crabapple has completed sketches based on the scenes presented in the source’s photos. “With the exception of Vice News, ISIS has permitted no foreign journalists to document life under their rule in Raqqa,” Crabapple wrote. “Instead, they rely on their own propaganda. To create these images, I drew from cell-phone photos a Syrian sent me of daily life in the city. Like the Internet, art evades censorship.”
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New Yorker Covers: Polite to Provocative
As scandals engulfed the National Football League, The New Yorker magazine’s cover that appeared on newsstands last week showed a player being chased down the field by police officers.
During the height of the demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, its cover depicted protesters with their hands raised, illuminated by the harsh glare of floodlights.
And early this year, as the Winter Olympics got underway in Sochi, Russia, the cover lampooned Vladimir V. Putin as a figure skater being assessed by five judges — all of them Mr. Putin.
Those three images, among others, signal a shift in The New Yorker’s cover art toward the topical and provocative.
For most of its existence, the magazine specialized in covers that its current editor, David Remnick, characterized, with some notable exceptions, as “a lot of abandoned beach houses, bowls of fruit and covers reflecting the change of seasons.”
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Arab states lag in extremists’ media war
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — As the Islamic State group battles across Syria and Iraq, pushing back larger armies and ruling over entire cities, it is also waging an increasingly sophisticated media campaign that has rallied disenfranchised youth and outpaced the sluggish efforts of Arab governments to stem its appeal.
Long gone are the days when militant leaders like Osama bin Laden smuggled grainy videos to Al-Jazeera. Nowadays Islamic State backers use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to entice recruits with professionally made videos showing fighters waging holy war and building an Islamic utopia.
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The Syria Campaign
We are The Syria Campaign.
We are a growing a movement for Syria built to capture the attention of the public and demand more from our global leaders in government, institutions and the media. We are focussed on campaigns that deliver real impact for Syrians in the country, and around the world. We’re demanding more money – billions more – from the world’s governments for those who need it. We’re pushing to make sure that displaced Syrians get access to the health, education and resources they need. We’re pushing to ban indiscriminate weapons that kill and injure civilians and calling for punishment for those who use them. We’re demanding that the rich countries of the world resettle a fair share of the 3 million Syrians displaced by the conflict. We’ll rally the world’s support behind Syrians solving the problems of the conflict by running hospitals under siege or rescuing non-combatants from the rubble. We’re ending the looting of Syrian artifacts by banning the trade in antiquities. We’re building a massive global constituency so when the time comes, we have the power to get all the parties to the negotiating table and find a way forward for a free and peaceful future for Syria.
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Michael Moore and Documentary Cinema
What Moore is responding to is a trend in documentary filmmaking – a certain strain that covers some, but not all, of the field – that turns documentaries into, essentially, visual works of journalism. Quite often, when watching a doc, one is struck with the sensation that some stock footage and a few talking heads are all that separate the experience from reading an article in the New Yorker – and if that’s the case, why not simply make the docs as journalism, since it’s so much easier to absorb written information you can take your time with? Well, I think documentary filmmakers are under the impression – entirely reasonable – that in order to create the greatest social impact with their work, they need to make films, not write non-fiction, since the readership in the United States is dramatically decreasing, whereas viewing content is dramatically increasing.
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Media reaping profits from Internet: study
The Internet is no longer draining profits from media and entertainment companies, which have learned to make online services pay, a new study shows.
The study by Ernst & Young released Monday found that media and entertainment companies “are continuing to increase their lead as one of the most profitable industries” with profit margins of around 28 percent.
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