Nuevos formatos para las noticias

Interesante y exhaustivo análisis de Tristan Ferne en este artículo publicado ayer en el sitio del News Labs de la BBC: Beyond 800 words: new digital story formats for news. Léalo, véalo.

Aquí las doce categorías de nuevos formatos para las noticias que presenta Ferne:

1. Short & vertical video; often with captions, pioneered by AJ+ and NowThis
2. Horizontal *Stories; swipeable cards like Snapchat Stories and its clones
3. Longform scrollytelling; evolved from the original NY Times Snowfall
4. Structured news; like the original Circa or the reusable cards at Vox.com
5. Live blogs; frequently used for big events
6. Listicles; like Buzzfeed
7. Newsletters and briefings; which seem to be on trend right now
8. Timelines; which I expected to be more common
9. Bots and chat; from the chat-styled Qz app to the many attempts to deliver news within chat apps
10. Personalised; which typically is used to filter the choice of stories, rather than the story itself
11. Data visualisation; from graphs to interactives
12. VR and AR

y el cuadro que las explica:

Las fotos blureadas no son fotos

¿Publicaría usted una foto en la que están fuera de foco las caras de los protagonistas? 

Menos habría que publicar una en la que el defecto lo hemos causado nosotros para que no se vea lo que justamente interesa. Si no se puede publicar, no tenemos foto. Es así de simple el dilema de las fotos blureadas como esta de Dagens Nyheter (Estocolmo) de hoy.

Qui bono?

Coinciden los dibujantes y los editores de La Nación (Eulogia Merle), Clarín (Hermenegildo Sábat) y Noticias (Pablo Temes) en el retrato de Santiago Maldonado, el mochilero tatuador desaparecido en un hecho confuso en el sur de la Argentina. Es Doppleganger y es endogamia y es editorial de los dibujantes, todo junto, pero sobre todo es una comprobación de la cara que sirve. Me manda los recortes JA*, junto con la recomendación de esta nota de James Neilson en Noticias. La pregunta –elemental en criminalística– para dilucidar la desaparición de Maldonado está en latín Cui bono? ¿A quién le sirve? Buena pregunta para hacerse en las reuniones de inteligencia colectiva de las fábricas de contenidos.

Periodistas de huracanes

Genial nota de Sopan Deb en The New York Times sobre los reporteros de TV que cubren huracanes. Todos sabemos que antes y después estaban tomando copetines en hoteles cinco estrellas.

As Winds Rise, So Does Debate Over Derring-Do of TV Storm Reporters

Mike Seidel, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, fighting fierce winds and flooded streets in Miami on Sunday. Credit Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency 

Early Sunday morning, Bill Weir, a veteran CNN correspondent, was talking to the anchor Chris Cuomo in the middle of a live shot in Key Largo, Fla. He could barely stand up straight in the lashing winds of Hurricane Irma. At one point, he was nearly blown over by a gust.

As video of the incident spread on social media, criticism mounted. “Why do these news networks feel the need to put these reporters out there?” read one tweet. Another said: “This is not safe. Lead by example.”

Others pointed out that reporters were standing in conditions that they were advising residents to stay out of. Even Mr. Cuomo acknowledged the criticism: “There is a strong argument to be made that standing in a storm is not a smart thing to do.”

Mr. Weir was one of many television journalists facing potentially unsafe conditions in covering the hurricane. Hours later, over at MSNBC, the correspondent Mariana Atencio stood on a boulevard in Miami and pointed to a large tree that had fallen across the street, as other trees bowed in the wind alongside her, raising the question of whether her team was in danger. And around noon, Kyung Lah, a reporter for CNN, said on the air from Miami Beach, “If I didn’t have this steel railing, I’d be flying.”

The tradition of television crews standing in the middle of a dangerous storm goes back decades, reflecting the hunger to be on the scene for a nationally significant event. But the news value of dangerous stand-ups — in which a correspondent is seen in the field talking to the camera — is increasingly being questioned, particularly with the rise of social media. Some critics wondered whether they are unnecessary and overly sensational spectacles, especially in cases where correspondents are struggling to deliver information.

But those same field reporters insist that the visuals from the storms are essential in persuading people to take hurricane threats seriously and getting them to leave the area. At the same time, veteran reporters say they take every precaution to stay out of life-threatening situations. On CNN, John Berman, in Miami, described flying debris nearby and took pains to say that he didn’t believe he was in serious danger.

“It’s blowing in the other direction, just so you know,” he said.

One MSNBC studio anchor, Ali Velshi, addressed the issue directly, saying before 10 a.m. that he wanted to pause the coverage: “I want to take a quick break. I want to reset. I want to find out that our reporters are safe.”

The custom of reporters broadcasting live from hurricanes began with Dan Rather, the former CBS News anchor, in 1961. Working for KHOU in Houston, he broadcast the first live radar image of a hurricane — Hurricane Carla — on television and took to the streets to show the conditions firsthand. CBS took the broadcast live, giving viewers around the country their first look at the threat posed by such a storm. Pictures of Mr. Rather wading through waist-high water propelled his rise to network anchor.

Today, this kind of reporting seems routine. And as it has become more common, reporters have become more aware of the criticism and have tried to justify this approach, as Sam Champion, a weather contributor for MSNBC, did on the air on Sunday.

“Everyone says, ‘Well, look, if you’re standing out in the storm, Sam, then how come I can’t stand out in the storm?’” Mr. Champion said. “And what I’m going to tell you is we do this so you can see what it’s like outside.”

Reporters, at both the national and local level, echoed that reasoning.

“I think it’s a fair question: Why would you have reporters standing potentially in harm’s way who are telling people to do exactly the opposite?” Mark Strassmann, a CBS News correspondent who has covered hurricanes for 25 years, said in an interview shortly after taking part in a live special from Miami.

“Part of that is that television is all about visual proof,” he said. “You want to persuade people that what they’re seeing is real and matters to them. And if they can see me standing out there getting knocked around, it’ll convince them that they should not do the same thing.”

Local reporters have fewer resources than network correspondents and this could lead them to brave some particularly unsafe conditions. In a Facebook post on Aug. 25, Jacque Masse, a reporter for 12News in Beaumont, Tex., said she covered Hurricane Harvey by herself, acting as an “M.M.J.” — industry jargon for “multimedia journalist,” or a solo television news reporter. She was her own camerawoman, producer and editor. The station came under withering criticism from industry watchers.

“Sending a single M.M.J. to cover a hurricane is not only one of the cheapest moves we’ve ever seen, it was dangerous,” said an article on FTV Live, a website that covers television news. In those cases, reporters said, they have to know when to say no to their bosses.

“Somewhere it’s been ingrained in our minds that there’s a million people that would love to have your job, so if you won’t do it, someone else will,” said Hayley Minogue, a reporter for WKRG, a CBS affiliate in Mobile, Ala., who was covering her first major hurricane from Jacksonville, Fla. “So you get pressured into doing stuff for that, but that’s not really my attitude.” Ms. Minogue added that her own station had never pressured her in that way.

Whitney Burbank, a reporter for WPBF, the ABC affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla., said that she had not been pressured, either.

“I’m looking at a tree that’s fallen through a concrete wall that’s covering half of a major road,” Ms. Burbank said after her 10th live appearance of the day. She described harrowing conditions that at times forced her crew to huddle inside their satellite truck. But, she said, her bosses place a premium on her team’s safety.

“My employers are pretty careful if something is unsafe,” Ms. Burbank said. “They don’t want you to do it. They don’t want you to do a crazy live shot in the middle of a tornado. If it’s too windy to go out, they’re going to say, ‘Don’t do it.’”

Buenos Aires Times

Salió a la calle el sábado pasado, como semanario con formato de diario y propiedad de Editorial Perfil. Aquí la historia, en el blog de José Crettaz.

La venta del Daily News

Así cuenta el Daily News de Nueva York su propia venta al grupo Tronc (Tribune Online Content, ex Tribune Publishing, ahora de Michael Ferro).

The New York Daily News is sold to tronc, Inc.

The New York Daily News, America's Pulitzer Prize-winning tabloid and the city's journalistic heart, has joined a leading national chain of flagship newspapers.

Ending a quarter century as owner of the Daily News, publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman on Monday sold the print and digital media organization to tronc, a Chicago-based company with ambitions of reengineering the struggling newspaper industry for an electronic future.

Tronc adds The News to a stable of nine daily publications, including, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. Its corporate lineage traces to the Tribune Company, The News' longtime owner before Zuckerman.

Buying The News thrusts tronc and its chairman, investor and internet entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro, to prominence in the nation's hyper-competitive media capital. He also gains a pugnacious populist voice that strives both to entertain with flair and to inform with deeply researched facts.

The transaction shifts The News from ownership by a single, deep-pocketed patron to the organizational chart of a publicly traded corporation whose roster of newspapers is filled out by the Orlando Sentinel and Sun-Sentinel in Florida, the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., the Hartford Courant, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Boosted by the 24 million unique visitors drawn monthly to The News' online operation, nydailynews.com, tronc properties now count a total of 80 million such visitors monthly.

"We are excited to welcome the New York Daily News team to the tronc family, and we look forward to working with them to serve new audiences and marketers while delivering value for our shareholders," tronc CEO Justin Dearborn said in a press release.

"As part of the tronc portfolio, the New York Daily News will provide us with another strategic platform for growing our digital business, expanding our reach and broadening our services for advertisers and marketers."

A billionaire real estate developer who had previously ventured into publishing, Zuckerman rescued The News from the rubble of bankruptcy in 1993. The paper's longtime owner, the Tribune Company, had provoked a near-fatal strike by trying to break its unions and then sold the weakened title to British press lord Robert Maxwell. Subsequently, Maxwell fell off a yacht and drowned – and was soon revealed to have been a swindler.

Spanning almost a quarter century, Zuckerman's tenure encompassed fully 25% of the News' 98-year existence, generated five Pulitzer Prizes – almost half of the paper's total of 11 – and propelled the organization into the digital age.

"Over the past near-century, the Daily News has served New York City and its surrounding areas with its award-winning journalism and helped shape the dynamics of the city," Zuckerman said.

Former Co-Publisher Eric Gertler, who spearheaded the transaction for The News, lauded New York’s Hometown Newspaper as a city staple with a bright future.

“The Daily News is a venerable New York City institution,” Gertler said. "We believe that under tronc's leadership, the Daily News will maintain its tradition of excellence in journalism and continue to be a critical voice for millions of print and online readers."

A native of Merrick, L.I., Ferro came of age in the Chicago area. After a fast-moving career that featured founding or taking interest in several tech-related companies, launching a private equity firm, and participating in a failed bid to buy the Chicago Cubs, he entered the media world in 2011 by leading a rescue-takeover of the Chicago Sun-Times, a paper that has since secured new ownership.

In 2016, Ferro's investment firm took a controlling interest in Tribune Publishing, a spinoff of the protracted bankruptcy of The News' original owner, the Tribune Company whose assets included a portfolio of newspapers.

Tribune Publishing was rebranded as "tronc" a name meant to signify Tribune Online Content. Citing a "pixels to Pulitzers" strategy, the company website describes tronc as "a media company rooted in award-winning journalism, which harnesses propriety technology to present personalized, premium content to a global audience in real time."

With the addition of the News' 11 Pulitzers, tronc gains bragging rights to 105 such honors.

"Instead of playing golf and doing stuff, this is my project: journalism," Ferro told the Chicago Tribune in March 2016. "We all want to do something great in life. Just because you made money, is that what your kids are going to remember you for? Journalism is important to save right now."

Según El País Tronc pagó un dólar por el Daily News. En realidad pagó la deuda de USD 30 millones

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