News

Olympique de Marseille falls foul of the French press

Executives at the French football club Olympique de Marseille (OM) have been accused of “making a mockery of the freedom of the press” by the Association of Sports Journalists in France (Union des journalistes de sport en France, UJSF) after publishing a 12-page document outlining new restrictions on press access to official team information.

PolitiFact founder Bill Adair: fact-checking is necessary evolution in journalism

PolitiFact Australia, the first international licensee of U.S-based PolitiFact, Election FactCheck and the soon-to-be-launched fact-checking service at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are gearing up for Australia’s federal elections later this year. Each service states that its mission is to hold political powers to account by establishing the veracity of declarations made by political figures. It’s the kind of objective you might think would endear such sites to any journalist keen to verify reports from the electoral trail. However, the apparent need for these sites has provoked questions about the state of journalism as a whole. Indeed, in an article for The Guardian journalist Bronwen Clune asks: are fact-checking sites indicative of the media’s failure to fulfil its primary function?

Corriere della Sera joins forces with Vatican to launch World Youth Day site

To mark the 28th World Youth Day gathering (23-28th July) in Rio de Janeiro, Italian national daily Corriere della Sera will team up with the Vatican to produce pope2you-Corriere.it as part of the pontiff’s wider plans for unprecedented new and social media coverage of the event.

Ten top UK dailies publish airline-sponsored interviews

In an unusual twist on sponsored content, on Monday 10 top British newspapers, including the Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph, published Justin Rose interviews, apparently sponsored by British Airways.

Android dominates smartphone market, but publishers haven’t monetised it

Google’s Android is now the undisputed champion of the smartphone market, beating Apple’s iOS across the globe. Yet publishers consistently prioritise iPhone development over that of Android, often launching iOS apps before Android counterparts (a recent example: NPR). Apple’s purchasing ecosystem and wealthy clientele have proved more lucrative, but several developments, including the rumored launch of Google Play News, could shift this dynamic and help publishers monetise on the operating system.

New-look paywalls could charge less to earn more

If media executives had a £1/$1 (insert currency here) for every time they thought about how to monetise online content, they would never again need to worry about financing their publications. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, and for the past 10 years many media organisations have not stopped in their search to develop new payment models to replace falling print revenue. Just this week two innovative models in the paid-content field have come to the fore, and both seek to increase revenue at the same time as charging readers less.

Newspaper websites overwhelm readers, should declutter

Picking up a newspaper, a reader expects to see an editor’s judgement of the most important stories that day. But this hope is false-placed on the web, with many newspapers so overindulging in cheap online space that homepages become cluttered to the point of ruining the user experience.

French press to pay higher postal tariffs due to government funding cuts

The French government has announced that it will eliminate its 32.5 million euros of annual funding to the national postal services in response to increasing pressure to reduce public spending, hereby forcing the press industry to pay higher postal tariffs, reported Les Echos.

Japan’s biggest mafia group launches magazine for its members

If reports in several Japanese newspapers are correct, the printed press may have found an unlikely advocate in the form of one of Japan’s most notorious mafia organisations, the Yamaguchi-gumi. The criminal group is said to have created an 8-page magazine named Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo (The Yamaguchi Clan Gazette) that is distributed exclusively amongst its approximately 28,000 members.

Press+ takes its meter subscription model global

RR Donnelley’s Press+, which provides a digital subscription metering solution for publishers, recently announced it is expanding globally and has added London-based John Michael Hull as business development director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Hull was previously the business development manager for Piano Media.