To encourage innovative solutions to community problems, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is investing $3.2 million in Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. Ashoka will select 15 promising social entrepreneurs in the U.S. communities where Knight serves as a funder and elect them to the global Ashoka fellowship.

Each Fellow will receive a three-year stipend, allowing them to focus full-time on their effort to provide systemic change to a problem affecting each Knight community. They also become life-long members of the Ashoka community, sharing and learning with the more than 1,800 Ashoka Fellows in the United States and around the world, and having access to consultative help from leading social entrepreneur experts.

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Dr. John Horgan has been announced (14.AUG.2007) as Ireland’s first Press Ombudsman.

The Press Council’s press release statement can be viewed here.

“The key function of the new Press Ombudsman will be to investigate and adjudicate complaints made by members of the public against newspapers and magazines. A new Code of Practice has been agreed by the press industry,and this code will be the framework against which all complaints are considered.”

The Irish Times reference the appointment here (subscription rqd).
Breaking News.ie have a note here as does the Irish Independent, the Belfast Telegraph and RTÉ.ie.

John is a co-editor of a newly published book Mapping Irish Media: Critical Explorations. He has also authored Broadcasting and Public Life:RTE News and Current Affairs, 1926-1997(2004) and Irish Media: A Critical History Since 1922 (2001).

John’s other publishing career can be viewed on wikipedia.org.

John’s academic biographical profile from DCU can still be viewed here (John has retired from DCU since 2006).

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Sunday Business Post’s John Burke gives a refreshing inside angle on the attacks and defences of press freedom.

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Culturing Audiences | Tomas Ó’Siochain

Tomás Ó’Siocháin, a programme editor for TG4 and RTÉ Nuacht, gave the fourth presentation of six at Media Moves examining the work and responsibilities of news editors.

Editors simultaneously guess what the audience desires, and nurture their appetites for media content. How do they balance these seemingly opposing responsibilities? And where do they source their stories.

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‘How the media got it wrong’

There’s a lot of commentary out there about the media’s (specifically journalistic reportage, comment and analysis) ‘got it wrong’ about the Election 2007. Probably, this debate will continue, and no doubt is continuing on since the revelations about Berti-gate.

It would appear that the issue at core is not about the merits or otherwise of the media coverage, moreover it is about the relationship between media producers and consumers, between the fourth estate watchdog and the public.

When everything is spun through the media, whether it comes from First, Second or even the Third Sector, the challenge for the media consumer is to appraise the sources and content of journalism and to use that to inform his/her voting choices. Ultimately the primary motivator for the public’s ballot choices are their political concerns, ideologies and allegiances. Does the media shape and influence these, or does it reflect them?
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Some of the documents you’d need to access about the Defamation Bill 2006

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Last night (Monday 29th January) RTE Radio 1’s flux programme presented a show produced by Ronan Kelly looking at the intrusiveness of media attention associated with major news stories.

The programme took a look at the case study of a tragic and traumatic event in a local community in Firhouse (2006) which recieved huge media interest. Interviewing editors, journlists and photo journalists from broadcasting and press, tabloid and boradsheet, the show revealed some interesting insights into the workings of contemporary journalism.

“We’ve got your picture; now what’s your name?”
What happens in a community when a tragedy there brings the national media to their doorsteps.

The audio is not yet available online (programme 38), but should be soon from the Flux page on rte.ie.

**Update;
audio now available.
Interviewees included; Fergal Keane (RTE), Jimmy Cunningham (Daily Mirror), Steven Cregg (RTE), Laura Ryan (TV3) Warren Swords (Tallaght Echo) and Paul Drury (Irish Mail editor).

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The number of planned job cuts in the U.S. media soared 88% last year, according to a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, up to 17809 layoffs, from the 9,453 that were announced in 2005. The trend is to continue, and ‘old media’ must effectively renew themselves.

Importantly, the study focuses on planned layoffs, not actual number of job cuts.

“Already this year we have seen job cuts announced by Time Inc and the New York Times Company,” said John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “These organizations will continue to make adjustments as their focus shifts from print to electronic.”

As readers spend more time online than reading print, advertisers are readjusting their own focus, thus providing less revenue for print, thus pushing newspapers to focus even more on online, and so on.

Newspapers are in tough competition with other media and news organizations, but also with the increased number of alternative news sources and information platforms (blogs, gossip sites, consultants and analysts), according to Challenger.

“This dilutes their audience and dilutes the amount of money they can charge advertisers, which currently is the primary source of revenue for online news sites, since most are not charging subscriber fees to access their content,” Challenger said.

There is only one solution for traditional media including newspapers: transition quickly and smoothly to online and multimedia. For those who can’t embrace the change, or who don’t have the resources to sustain print while transitioning, they will continue to be forced to cut jobs.

“Until they can figure out a way to make as much money from their online services as they are losing from the print side, it is going to be an uphill battle,” said Challenger of planned cuts across the media sector.

Source: CNN, via EditorsWeblog.org

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David Barstow, Investigation Unit, The New York Times, 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Public Service.

I think we are at a defining generational moment in journalism: a moment when we must earn again the freedoms that give us the vital space to work.

I think we, as a profession, are at a point where we must step up and pay the butcher’s price. We must step up and earn the right to report the news, without fear or favour. We must earn the right to tell the difficult stories that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We must earn the right — in the immortal words of “Deep Throat” — to follow the money, especially when it leads to the highest of high. And we must earn the right to question authority, challenge concentrated power and reveal uncomfortable, unpopular, even unwanted truths about the world we live in.

Past generations of journalists have paid this price in spades. In my country, I’m thinking about reporters in the 1950s who suffered brutal beatings by racist mobs to cover the Civil Rights movement. I’m thinking of reporters who gave their lives to describe our long national nightmare, Vietnam. I’m thinking about Myron Farber, another New York Times reporter who went to jail to protect a source in the 1970s. Their sacrifice and their example cleared the way for us.

It created that vital space in our culture and in our politics for tough, honest investigating reporting. Now it is our turn.
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Letter to the Editors

Since it is part of the human condition that power corrupts it makes for a healthy democracy to have an alternative government to the one in power available at each election.

The ongoing and relentless campaign of the majority of political correspondents to undermine the possibility of any alternative government to the present being offered in the next election is, therefore, pathetic. This is a fairly widespread campaign. It includes the Independent Group of papers, the so called public service broadcaster RTE, much of commercial radio and TV and some of our former imperial master’s organs of propaganda in this country such as the Daily Mail and the Sun.

This orchestrated campaign is being conducted over many years in order to limit the choice of the electorate of this democratic republic. Its net results are nearly continuous government by one party. Its modus operandi is that the coverage of political affairs is confined to obsequious interviews with the politicians in power. There is a total lack of critical analysis towards the sayings and doings of the powers that be and the fact that they use taxpayer’s money to project their image and make celebrities of themselves. The cultivation of the image of the Taoiseach is all pervading. This includes many flattering photographs, soft interviews on his doings and his family’s connection with the celebrity circuit and nearly limitless access to public service radio and TV. Most importantly this campaign is totally dedicated to the destruction of the credibility of the leadership of the main opposition parties.

It is a prostitution of the role of the media in a democracy. They are supposed to act as watchdogs by holding those in power to account on behalf of ordinary people. Instead they are deliberately attempting to undermine the democratic right of the electorate to have an alternative government available at election time.

A. Leavy
Sutton
Dublin 13

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