Eideard

Two leading members of the lyin’ bastards club

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have been accused of telling TV viewers blatant untruths about Barack Obama.

The candidates deny their TV commercials are deceitful and dishonest but both ads selectively quote the president to make it appear he is saying one thing when he is saying another.

The advertisements have been widely scorned for crossing a line from a longstanding practice of political campaigns pushing the truth to its limits, over to misrepresentation. One ad appears to show Obama admitting he will lose next year’s election if he talks about the economy. The other has him calling American workers lazy.

Romney’s campaign ad is airing on TV stations in New Hampshire, which holds its primary in January. It shows the president saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” But Obama’s words were from his 2008 campaign, and he was quoting a statement by a strategist for his Republican opponent, John McCain, who was the one on the back foot over the economy.

Perry’s ad shows a short soundbite of Obama saying: “We’ve been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades.”

The ad switches to Perry saying: “Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America – that Americans are lazy. That’s pathetic.”

But a viewing of Obama’s full statement shows that he was saying the US government had been lazy in attracting foreign investment.

Darrell West, director of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Romney and Perry had gone further than previous campaigns in misrepresenting the truth.

“Those ads are blatant misrepresentations,” he said. “They are much more egregious than what we’ve seen in the past. Typically candidates have tried to be close to the truth because they know journalists are paying attention, but with all the problems of the news industry politicians have concluded they can get away with murder…”

But West acknowledged that politicians are less concerned about being exposed by reporters. “Politicians think that the news media have completely collapsed, based on the financial crisis, and so they are acting as if there’s no accountability and they can say whatever they want,” he said.

West makes a great point about American journalists having as little integrity as Republican candidates. Since their employers are either corporations controlled by Republicans or clown who consider news as entertainment – or both – there’s little encouragement for any of them to point out any of the lies or liars.

A number of European newspapers have reportedly been told by Apple that they can no longer offer paid print subscribers free access to an iPad edition through the App Store, as the subscription strategy leaves Apple out of its 30 percent cut.

According to a report issued Friday by deVolkskrant (via Google Translate), Apple has employed “stricter rules” for publishers, informing them that they cannot offer free iPad access to paid print subscribers. By offering free access to print subscribers, newspapers could avoid charging for access through the iPad, and can avoid paying Apple a 30 percent cut of all transactions on the App Store…Content providers are upset with the change, characterizing the move as one that makes Apple “too dominant.”

If I was Apple – a stretch I realize – I would do the same. Of course. A share is earned by providing the medium.

The alleged changes sent out to publishers by Apple come as the company is believed to be working on an update to iOS, its mobile operating system that powers the iPad, that will allow recurring subscriptions for software on the App Store. It is Apple’s preparation for the new subscription option that is believed to have allegedly delayed the release of The Daily, a new iPad-only newspaper from media giant News Corporation.

While a number of reports from overseas claim that Apple has contacted publications to inform them of the changes, no such reports have yet emerged from any newspapers in the U.S…

Subscription options can be whatever the parties choose them to be. Of course. Though, if Apple is offering access to methods built into the OS, more than a little consistency and conformity is required.

On paper, it’s just as easy for a newspaper to build in a share to Apple in their basic subscription price – with a sliding scale based on downloads measured in-app.

Sales of newspaper apps for devices like the Apple iPad are cannibalizing sales of physical newspapers, says James Murdoch, head of News Corp’s operations in Europe and Asia.

News Corp in June closed its free Times of London website. The Times, the Sunday Times and Britain’s best-selling Sunday tabloid the News of the World — also owned by News Corp — are now available online only to paying subscribers.

News Corp’s British newspaper arm News International said this month the titles had lost up to 90 percent of their online readership and now had 105,000 paying customers, including those who had bought the iPad and Amazon Kindle apps…

James Murdoch welcomed the opportunity to sell through Apple’s iTunes online store, despite the fact that Apple takes 30 percent of the publisher’s revenue.

“We go to the iTunes store because it’s frictionless. They charge a percentage but the guy on the newstand and the newsagent charge a percentage, and they don’t even merchandise it properly,” he told the Monaco Media Forum.

But he said apps for mobile devices, with which readers typically engage far more than they do with computer websites, were more dangerous to print sales.

“The problem with the apps is that they are much more directly cannibalistic of the print products than the website,” he said. “People interact with it much more like they do with the traditional product.

Reuters tries to be Mr. Nice Guy and tucks a blurb in at the end of their article mentioning other people “offering tablets.” Har! It is to laugh.

What I am interested in – is publishers planning on making the online edition their prime arena – and a print version [if they have one] as secondary. I truly wonder how that will play out.

It doesn’t take much to make yourself look like a fool, but in the case of The UK’s Sun and Daily Mail newspapers, they have to be feeling quite idiotic right about now. Perhaps not, as these tabloids have a history of running fabulous stories about celebrities, politicians, and the supernatural as a matter of daily business.

John Ware, a 47-year old builder, sent the newspapers a photo he had taken with his iPhone that allegedly showed a ghostly little boy dressed in turn-of-the-20th-century clothing, balefully looking at the photographer. You can see the little boy at the right side of the photo, standing in the foreground. The papers dutifully ran the story, with the Sun’s example shown at the top of this post.

There’s only one problem: as Macenstein pointed out, the same little boy haunts the US$0.99 iPhone app Ghost Capture. That’s right — it’s apparent that Mr. Ware snapped a shot of a demolition site with the app, and then submitted the photo. Our guess is that Ware was having a little fun with the papers, and that the “Got a story? We pay £££.” tag line you see at the top of the page might have provided some motivation.

Once again there’s an app for that.

Har!

Of course, you could have someone online to read you the newspapers

Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US, according to a survey. It is the third most popular form of news, behind local and national TV stations, the Pew Research Center said.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” it said…

The survey showed that news aggregators such as Google News and AOL were most commonly used, along with the websites of CNN and the BBC.

Which is misleading without noting that sites like Google News reference online sites run by newspapers probably 99% of the time.

Sixty-one per cent of readers surveyed said they got their news online on a typical day, compared with 78% from local news channels and 71% from a national TV network such as NBC or cable channels such as CNN or Fox News.

Fifty-four per cent said they listened to radio news programmes at home or in the car.

More than 90% use more than one method to get news, and 57% consult between two and five websites as part of their newsgathering, the survey found.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another bubble has burst. Instead of dot-com stocks or debt securities, this one involves a very different kind of paper, the free newspaper.

Starting in Stockholm in 1995 with a daily called Metro, free newspapers spread to cities around the world, providing the embattled print media business a rare growth story. By last year, daily circulation of free papers had climbed above 40 million worldwide, according to Piet Bakker, a professor in Amsterdam who tracks the business. In some countries, like Spain, more people were reading freebies than papers they had to pay for.

Since the economic crisis deepened last autumn, however, the free newspaper business has gone into free fall. Circulation in Europe, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the global total, has fallen by more than 10 percent, Mr. Bakker said, and dozens of titles have closed…

While paid-for newspapers are suffering, too, free newspapers have been hit even harder by the economic downturn because they rely entirely on advertising, which is more volatile than revenue from newsstand sales and subscriptions. Analysts say ad revenue at many free newspapers has fallen by more than a third in recent months, compared with a year earlier…

One thing that divides freesheet publishers is their approach to the Internet. Metro International, for instance, has invested little on the Web.

“Will you ever be able to make money on general-interest news on the Internet?” Mr. Kronborg said. “We think it will be very difficult.”

But Schibsted, an Oslo-based publisher of freesheets like 20 Minutes in France (in partnership with a local newspaper company, Ouest France) and 20 Minutos in Spain, sees things differently, saying there is a natural synergy between free papers in print and the predominant free model for news on the Web.

While these two papers’ Web operations lose money, the print editions of 20 Minutes and 20 Minutos were profitable until the economic crisis deepened this year, said Sverre Munck, head of international operations at Schibsted.

The business model may be promising – and I agree that it is – but, investors are so cranky and conservative they inevitably consider one round of failures to be struck in stone.

Two ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers have altered a photo of Israel’s new cabinet, removing two female ministers.

Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo.

But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

Publishing pictures of women is viewed by many ultra-orthodox Jews as a violation of female modesty.

Other Israeli papers reprinted the altered images next to the original photos, with one headlining it “Find the lady”.

I don’t know if these newspapers are run by opportunists or cowards. Probably the former. That seems to be what the breed has become.

They bend over for foolish, religious idiots. No thought whatsoever for the premise of journalism being a check on the truth of those in power. And these clowns doctor a PR photo because it would offend their readers?

As the death toll in the American newspaper industry mounted this month, the German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest annual profit in its 62-year history.

At Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, there has been no desperate talk of how to survive the recession and the digital revolution, the daily preoccupation of many U.S. publishers. Instead, Mathias Döpfner, Springer’s chief executive, said he was looking for opportunities to expand, scouting around for acquisition targets in Germany, Eastern Europe and maybe — in what would be a first for the company — the United States.

“I don’t believe in the end of the world; I don’t believe in the end of journalism,” Mr. Döpfner said. “On the contrary, I think the crisis can have a positive impact. The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”

Viewed from Europe, “there is a certain irony” in the plight of the U.S. newspaper industry, he said: America created the companies that dominate the Internet globally, yet its newspaper companies have struggled to adapt to the technology. Perhaps because there is no homegrown European equivalent to Google, Amazon or eBay, he added, “there has been more pressure on European publishers to change in a more progressive way.”

Around the world, American newspapers are often held up as the gold standard of quality journalism. But now that the business of American newspapers has tarnished, could those papers learn a thing or two from their European counterparts?

Perhaps so. In Europe, some publishers — not just financial newspapers like The Wall Street Journal — have figured out how to raise money from their readers, reducing their reliance on fickle advertisers. Others have created successful new Web sites from scratch, giving their Internet divisions the heft that many American newspaper publishers’ online units lack. And still others have taken maverick approaches to competing with the likes of Google, which in many countries mops up more online ad revenue than all newspapers combined.

Thoroughgoing article. Worth reading.

Though, I approached it with some trepidation. You’re seeing this article appearing in the Online Global Edition of the New York Times – instead of where I originally bookmarked it – the online edition of the International Herald Tribune.

I have read the IHT for as long as I have read the Times. I’ve always considered it a better paper – especially before it was purchased by the Times.

We’ll see what happens. It as, after all, part of the process discussed in this article.

The “boss” over at the Big Blog does this kind of post a couple times a month. Coming from a background in journalism, he’s incensed when news sources offer diametrically-opposed headlines about exactly the same story. Here’s todays example of what I’m talking about:

From the New York TIMES, a pretty straight up headline. That’s it up top:

Daylife/Getty Images

The volume of toxic chemicals that were released into the environment or sent for disposal in 2007 dropped 5 percent compared with 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday. But concealed within the overall numbers was good and bad news.

For example, the volume of released or disposed “persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals,” substances like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs, was up slightly, the agency said. Most of those releases were not to air or water, the agency said, meaning that the material was mostly buried in landfills, injected into deep wells or held in impoundments.

The number given for PCBs was up by 40 percent, but “it’s good news,” said Michael P. Flynn, acting deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Information.

The E.P.A. banned production of PCBs 30 years ago, so pounds counted now, Mr. Flynn said, represent electrical transformers or other equipment being taken out of service and PCBs disposed of in qualified facilities…

Mr. Flynn said that over the last few years, “the overall direction is a decreasing amount of releases.” Pollution prevention, reductions in chemical use, and some industrial companies’ going out of business all contributed, he said.

Now, the dorks at AP headline: EPA reports uptick in some toxic chemicals in 2007

You get the idea. My background is in insurgent politics – so, I expect these clowns to lie and cheat on behalf of the political interests of their publishers every chance they get. They’re owned by reactionary dragons. what do you expect?

A survey of more than 27,000 web users in 16 countries has shown that the Chinese – as a nation – spend the largest fraction of their leisure time online.

However, UK housewives spend even more than China’s average – 47%.

Germans are the most likely to meet someone in real life that they first met online; more than three quarters have done so.

The study also found that the UK is the least trusting of information in its newspapers among the 16 countries…

And as for online socialising? On average across all countries, respondents had 17 online friends.

However, when asked the question “Have you ever arranged to meet in person people who you’ve met through the internet?”, Germans came out on top with a whopping 76% saying yes.

A further part of the study comparing online and traditional media and information sources showed national differences.
In the UK, online news sites are second only to friends as the primary source of trusted information; two fifths said they considered online news a “highly trusted” medium.

The UK was markedly less trusting of print media, with only 23% counting newspapers as highly trusted – roughly the same fraction who considered the Wikipedia site as highly trusted. At the top were Finnish respondents, who were some three times more likely – 69% – to describe their newspapers as such.

I have a couple of friends I would describe as “close” who I met online. One of those is my partner in crime in this website – K B – who I’ve never met. We live over a thousand miles apart and while I don’t think he travels much or often, I’m a bloody hermit.

That settles that, I guess.