The Czech Lead

There has been quite a debate recently about the announcement by the Associated Press that they will protect their news by a code that will enable them to show who is using their content without paying for it. I am not sure everyone in the debate discussed the same thing, but in any case it [...]

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“Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards,” states DigiDave in his recent post. Just as he does I try to avoid the “professionals good - amateurs wrong” (or vice versa, which is far more frequent) debate about journalism, since I think it mostly exaggerates and misses the point. My view is that these two branches [...]

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Starting from scratch is what not many people do. It is not natural, sometimes not quite useful (my fellow fans of Zdenek Jirotka´s book Saturnin will know exactly what I mean) but in other instances it can be very innovative and revealing. I think one such project was recently announced by Elsevier and is called [...]

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When asked by the Czech TV what is the worst feature of the new “gagging law” directed at the Czech media, I said that it is the fact that it makes journalists much more vulnerable due to uncertainty of how this law is going to be applied. And that proved to be the case.
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I feel I should add a bit more about our Twitter feeds, an issue I mentioned briefly in my last post.
We started experimenting with Twitter very recently, after a complete redesign of Ceske Noviny and its sister publications (http://www.ceskenoviny.cz, http://www.financninoviny.cz, http://www.sportovninoviny.cz and for those still speaking only English at http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/news) which took place over the [...]

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“Anytime judgment is involved, unbiased opinion is not possible,” is the opening sentence of a blog entry on journalism published at Under the Same Sun here. This fed into an article at Politico.com about new and highly controversial ways the AP (Associated Press) now promotes, mostly in writing analysis but increasingly in writing stories.
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As a News Agency you generally do not want to become news. You are there to bring the news, not to be a subject. Especially not if this is for the wrong reasons, like the doctored photo from an Iranian rocket launch Iranian News Agency (IRNA) published and then had to retract. See here the [...]

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 Jeff Jarvis made interesting comments here regarding new division of “labour” in the internet age, in this case among newspapers and Google (or somebody - Google is a metaphor). His point is that everybody should be doing what they are best at, and he considers that:
Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer [...]

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