Eideard

A thin man rests his head on the shoulder of a burqa-clad woman, the pair collapsed together against a wall. The expression on her face can’t be seen. But her body language – right arm wrapped tightly around his neck, left hand clinging to his arm – conveys everything her expression cannot.

This is Samuel Aranda’s World Press Photo of the Year, which Mr. Aranda shot in Yemen while on assignment for The New York Times last fall.

The image, which has the mood of a Renaissance painting, was one of the first Mr. Aranda filed from Yemen, where he spent more than two months shooting for the paper. He found the pair at the entrance to a mosque that had been converted into a hospital.

“I got back to my place and I saw the photo in the screen and I was like, ‘Wow,’” Mr. Aranda said. “The woman is not just crying. It was something more. You can feel that the woman is really strong…”

Mr. Aranda, 32, was born in Spain and is based in Tunisia. When he arrived in Yemen in early October, no one knew he was there. It had taken him more than a month to safely sneak into the country.

He fell in love with the place.

Still, it was a couple of weeks before he felt comfortable walking around with a camera. While covering protests in Taiz, he and a freelance reporter for The Times came under fire from government soldiers. As the only Western photographer in Yemen at one point, Mr. Aranda was helped by friendly local wire photographers – like Mohamed al-Sayaghi of Reuters.

That made it difficult to leave, which he did just before Christmas. “I remember saying ‘bye’ to Mohamed and he was super serious, looking at me, and he was like, ‘We have a big problem,’” — “’You cannot leave the country now.’”

Koyo Kouoh, another juror, said Mr. Aranda’s photo speaks for the events that swept the region in 2011. “It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring,” Ms. Kouoh said.

It’s no surprise to see other photos from the uprisings on the list of winners, which can be seen on the World Press Photo Web site. Alex Majoli won first prize in the general news singles category for a photograph of protesters in Tahrir square reacting to a speech by the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February. Rémi Ochlik was awarded the prize for general news stories for “Battle for Libya.” And Yuri Kozyrev‘s photograph of Libyan rebels in Ras Lanuf won first prize in spot news singles.

Bravo to you all. For your skill, humanity and bravery.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

If Fox News viewers want to be informed about current events, they might as well turn off the TV.

A poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University on Monday found that people who get their news from Fox News know significantly less about news both in the U.S. and the world than people who watch no news at all.

In a survey of 612 New Jersey natives, Fox News fans flunked questions about Egypt and Syria when compared with people who don’t watch the news. Fox viewers were 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians toppled their government and 6 points less likely to be aware that Syrians have not yet overthrown theirs.

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson professor who served as an analyst for the poll, said in the report. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all…”

The most informative outlets were found to be the Sunday morning news shows as well as outlets like the New York Times, USA today and NPR.

Har.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dead” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure behind the article link) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the longer-form publishing abilities that blogs allow…

So what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

I guess Mathew is inspired to post his comments as a reaction to the ancient newspaper practice of having someone write headlines other than the journalist who wrote the article. The NY TIMES article contains a boatload of contradictions to the headline. Something that always trips my trigger.

Even the analysis of growing use of social networks is incorrect – since the fastest growth is among geezers my age. Damned if I know why, though.

New York Times Co., owner of the namesake newspaper, started Press Engine, a business designed to help other publishers deliver content to digital platforms such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.

Times Co. will collect license fees and maintenance fees from publishers and media organizations that use the technology and design solutions for digital distribution. Individual publishers will continue to control and own their advertising and subscriptions, the New York-based company.

The Telegraph Media Group, publisher of the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, and A.H. Belo Corp., the Dallas-based owner of the Dallas Morning News, will be among Press Engine’s customers when the product is introduced in the fourth quarter, Times Co. said.

“This is part of the multi-faceted move into new technology” at Times Co., said Ed Atorino, an analyst at Benchmark Co. in New York. “They’ve got the content, they’ve got the brainpower. We’ll see if people will pay for this stuff.”

Publishers are seeking ways to replace a drop in newspaper print advertising sales, which fell 11 percent in the U.S. in the first quarter, according to Newspaper Association of America data.

The New York Times newspaper is preparing to unveil in January a new online subscription model, which will make much of its Web content available only to visitors who pay fees for access. The company is also planning to sell an enhanced application for Apple’s iPad, which will be offered in addition to the free app currently available on the device.

The free app for the iPad rocks. Informative and useful. I admit I could be tempted to pop for a subscription – well, a little tempted.

They might be second in line after GigaOm Pro which I also haven’t subscribed to. Yet.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

ProPublica, in an historic first for online journalism, won a coveted Pulitzer Prize…for investigative reporting about controversial deaths at a New Orleans medical center following Hurricane Katrina.

The chronicle of decisions by doctors caring for patients stranded by the flood, written by Sheri Fink of ProPublica in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine, marked the first time an online service won a top journalism award given annually by the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University.

The nonprofit ProPublica is considered by some to be a new model for journalism as struggling for-profit outlets have fewer resources to put toward investigative reporting. The Times magazine published the Hurricane Katrina piece.

“This is something we’re going to see more of in the years ahead as there’s more and more collaboration of news entities when it comes to enterprise journalism,” Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, said in announcing the winners.

In another online first, www.sfgate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, won for editorial cartooning. The award for the animated cartoons by Mark Fiore marked the first time an Internet-based entry won in that category.

Overdue.

Though the standards for the Pulitzer are high enough, the time it has taken for online journalism to be considered is mostly legit. Even if geeks don’t think so.

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.

This is where tears are supposed to well up into your eyes.

According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest pot of transportation stimulus money. In many cases, they have lost a tug of war with state lawmakers that urban advocates say could hurt the nation’s economic engines.

Don’t state lawmakers represent the whole state? Will they be replaced en masse for not favoring cities?

RTFA and you’ll learn those interviewed for this article oppose the concept of spreading the money throughout each state. For whatever their reasons.

The Times analysis shows that a little more than half of the stimulus money will be spent on “pavement improvement” projects, mostly repaving rutted and potholed roads. Nearly one-tenth of it will be spent to fix or replace bridges. More than a quarter of the money will be spent to widen roads or build new roads or bridges.

Professor Gutfreund came up about the dumbest analysis I’ve ever seen when he criticized “formulas that give priority to state-owned roads, often found far outside of urban areas”. Does this guy drive anywhere? State roads connect cities, connect other roads. I guess you could whine about most of each road being outside of cities; but, then, isn’t that why they’re called “highways”?

Cripes! Most of all roads are built outside cities – excepting city streets.

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, escaped Friday night and made his way to freedom after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, was abducted outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 10 while he was researching a book. Mr. Rohde was part of The Times’s reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.

Mr. Rohde told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that Mr. Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They found a Pakistani Army scout, who led them to a nearby army base, and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan…

Until now, the kidnapping has been kept quiet by The Times and other media organizations out of concern for the men’s safety…

Both Mr. Keller and Mr. Rohde’s family declined to discuss details of the efforts to free the captives, except to say that no ransom money was paid and no Taliban or other prisoners were released.

“Kidnapping, tragically, is a flourishing industry in much of the world,” Mr. Keller said. “As other victims have told us, discussing your strategy just offers guidance for future kidnappers.”

RTFA. Long, detailed account – not only of this adventure; but, of David Rohde’s dedication to good, traditional journalism. He’s had no shortage of despots and murderers to cover whether it be in Bosnia or Afghanistan.

Fortunately, there remain a few media outlets in the world ready and willing to employ the services of those who gather news and information about what’s really happening in the world. People like David Rohde. All the rest is entertainment.

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.

Actually, the New York Times proper didn’t report the end of the Iraq war. But a spoof 14-page “special edition” of the newspaper, circulating free in Manhattan did carry those items. It was printed in a form that was so high quality that many New Yorkers were nonplussed, and was backed up by an entire website that equally faithfully mimicked the original.

Dated July 4 2009, and boasting the motto “All the news we hope to print” in a twist on the daily’s famous phrase “All the news that’s fit to print”, the fake paper looks forward to the day the war ends, and envisages a chain of events that would be manna from heaven for American liberals. In one story ExxonMobil is taken into public ownership, while in another evangelicals open the doors of their mega-churches to Iraqi refugees.

The organisers of the evidently expensive satire are connected at least to some degree to the Yes Men, a leftwing group that seeks to expose what it claims to be the “nastiness of powerful evildoers” through pranks. A spokesman for the New York Times spoof going by the name of Wilfred Sassoon said that the Yes Men had helped with distribution, but that the paper itself had been produced by a number of writers from various New York dailies, including a couple from the New York Times itself. The project had taken about six months and had been funded by a large number of small donors.

The New York Times is “in the process of finding out more” about its imitator.

Paul Krugman, the Princeton University scholar and New York Times columnist, won the Nobel economic prize Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.

The 55-year-old American economist was the lone winner of the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award and the latest in a string of American researchers to be honored. It was only the second time since 2000 that a single laureate won the prize, which is typically shared by two or three researchers…

Besides his work as an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he has been since 2000, Krugman also writes about politics and inequality in the U.S. and other topics for The New York Times. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review and Scientific American.

He has come out forcefully against John McCain during the economic meltdown, saying the Republican candidate is “more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago” and earlier that the GOP has become “the party of stupid.”

I wonder if he means “stupid” as an individual like McCain or Bush? Or does he mean an agglomeration, say, of the eedjit vote?