links for 2006-12-11

The University of California, Berkeley, journalism school will be webcasting its Winter New Media Lecture Series from today through Wednesday.

Many of Presstime magazine’s “20 Under 40″ list of talented journalists “are smack dab in the middle of innovative efforts to grow audience and revenue at their papers or companies.”

IHT’s Michael Oreskes says this is breaking down: “For more than 100 years journalism has been sustained by this virtuous circle in which the audience paid for their news, and the advertiser paid to reach that audience, and the publisher made a profit and

Arsenal Ladies FC have reached the UEFA Cup final, and ahve challenged a team of football journalists to a match. Now the hacks are backpeddling.

“[Sousveillance, or “watching from below.” It refers to … the monitoring of authorities … by informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant against the excesses

Paul Harris: “The Huffington Post … gets 3m unique visitors a month and more than 30m page views. … The cost of setting up the Post was just $2m (a magazine might have cost 20 times that, and would reach a mere fraction of the audience).”

Wagner James Au: “[T]he Chinese government … fears that the QQ is deflating the official yuan. “QQ” is the virtual currency created by Tencent, China’s largest instant messaging platform based in Shenzen.”

Gannett is set to review its British newspaper unit Newsquest, a move that could lead to its disposal for up to £1.5b, the Sunday Express reported.
Later: Gannett has unequivocally denied the report, and Roy Greenslade looks at how this story spread.

Trinity Mirror will announce a round of head office job cuts this week, according to an unsourced article in the Mail on Sunday.

“It is often the players that maybe did not reach superstar status, e.g. Alan Hansen or mark Lawrenson (sorry to both), that make the best pundits. There is less ego getting in the way.”

Nature’s Google Earth avian flu tool has been unpdated.

William Rees-Mogg: “privacy is being extended in British law, at the very time that the internet is making it impossible to protect. Any blogger who wants to put CC’s name on the internet could do so with virtual impunity.”

Jessica Coen on Gawker: “It’s not journalism, it’s blogging … It’s putting rumour out there and seeing what sticks.” “Writers … are paid sales target-style bonuses for the volume of traffic … their stories generate.”

Martin Rosenbaum: “Perhaps those who are concerned about the cost of freedom of information should examine how much money could be saved by public authorities responding properly to FOI requests in the first place.”

The ICC wants to prevent newspaper web sites from providing over-by-over coverage of international cricket matches. Kim Fletcher says “The information is out there. We cannot allow or accept limitations on our right to report it.”