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A growing challenge to legitimate local news sources is aggregators that parade as local news providers. There are now a few of these that publish “Swiss” news.

Mostly we don’t say much about them and hope you spot the difference.

Sometimes they help us to help you figure it out, see left.

Update, Thursday 19:50:  Fox just ran a story about a Swiss news report on bees and cell phones, sounds remarkably familiar, but the source mentioned four times isn’t GenevaLunch.com.

I haven’t included Apidologie here, the scientific journal, but the lineup of the three articles below offers an example of some of the issues involved in correctly sourcing news articles.

Click on images of articles to view larger

Version published by Fox News in the US, 23 June

Version published by thelocal.ch, managed out of Sweden and Germany, published 23 June

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I’m giving a presentation this morning on the impact of new media on news gathering and production. I’ll post it after the presentation but as background, here are some comparisons, the news media world as we know it today and as we’ve known it for the past 150 or so years. Feel free to add to the list!

Compared to 2000

We have technical tools that media use: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Analytics for circulation + 3 skills – writing, photography, audio and video

We have to consider multi-layered news “reception” – radio, TV,  newspaper + now web site (CMS), blogs (separate technology), FB, Twitter, mobile

Workload of journalists has tripled, so we attend far fewer press conferences and we do as little as possible by phone: covering a beat is no longer physical work except for sports reporters; the number of journalists has been sharply reduced

Citizen journalism, bloggers, comments: journalist no longer has the final word or is viewed (even skeptically or wrongly!) as the expert and often doesn’t even have the best access to sources

Accreditation, recognition as “legitimate” journalists is in a state of chaos, causing problems for PR people (who to work with), but also causing problems for local media because Internet size/traffic are used to measure impact, and these are easily manipulated – local, smaller media suffer as a result

The scoop has lost its value and ownership, copyright, the original source of reporting is fast disappearing: too difficult and costly to chase abusers, but also lines are blurred between broadcast and print, both of them online, which means old rules are not being applied and there are no new ones except market rules.

Compared to 1990

We have the Internet, with a massive shift in distribution, but it’s also changed how people read, physically (sentence structure), where they are when they are getting their news, frequency of news reception and immediacy – the latter is the most important.

We have online libraries compared to physical ones, for research

We no longer have to know HTML and focus on the technology behind our tools thanks to Windows, etc.

Newsrooms, with groups sharing facilities, have lost their importance except for broadcast and wire services, and more journalists work alone – the salles de presse at the UN Palais in Geneva are now empty compared to 1990

Compared to 1980

We have computers; my first was 1982, Radio Shack Toshiba 2-line screen and before that IBM typewriters, so the noise level has died down in group work areas. Journalists have a new responsibility, to put their reporting work into the system themselves, compared to days when teletext or typesetting people, an extinct species, did it.

We have email: information, news alerts, etc. comes in this way rather than via tickertapes, teletext and fax

We can upload stories when we are on the go, by mobile phones or much smaller computers, compared to phoning in stories and dictating them to sub-editors

Compared to 1960

Telephone and TV are now widespread and affordable: they are regular journalists’ tools for reaching sources, getting information

Large presses have made print cheap, very fast but it doesn’t appear to be enough to have saved them

Compared to 1930

News companies are large – first on a national scale rather than local, then international, starting with the growth of US and British radio in the 30s, the roots of the major TV channels that grew in the 60s and with this a whole world of advertising (we used to have highway billboards before the Interstate in the US)

Today, a swing back to local and very local (Huffington Post babies) because electronic media make this possible, even easy, but we’re moving into a new era where news is again being dominated by the big guys.

Compared to 1900

Our idea of news, particularly in non-urban areas, is no longer limited to what’s happened locally

Literacy rate has risen and broadcast plus Internet visuals plus mobile have made news far more widely accessible.

Zurich is a financial capital, but definitely not the seat of government for Switzerland!

At long last, someone put together a picture for us of the Qaddafi family, all of whom are on lists for frozen assets in Switzerland: thanks go to Ria Novosti, Russian news agency. Aunts, uncles and the rest of the clan are not here, but the children are all here, with photos and their birthdates.

Bern, centrally located and on the language divide, is the capital of Switzerland

A news story mistake became the story this week, giving us a reminder of why local news providers (that’s us!) are often more credible. Associated Press in the US ran a story about Google Street View and mentioned Zurich, with the editors at a safe distance, in New York. The story noted that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. Oops. A correction was sent out, and since the first story was picked up by several US media, word for word, a lot of corrections then appeared. Google News for Zurich suddenly had a stream of stories that started with the intriguing one-liner “Zurich is not the capital of Switzerland.”

The problem wasn’t the reporter, I hasten to add: Frank Jordans, who reported the story, has been in Geneva for several years and he’s covered enough political stories from Bern to know it’s the capital. I can only assume an inexperienced sub-editor in the US thought the world might not know the capital of Switzerland, so thought to add it.

Years from now, though, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will still be insisting that Zurich is indeed the capital of that little Alpine nation because after all, they once saw it on the news.

The mistake also underscores the growing problem of aggregated and massaged (rewritten) news stories from sites that do not themselves produce news or have journalists behind them: the story in its original form is still out there, no corrections made.

Pssst: Bern is the capital.

The BBC gives us a fun little travel story

Ice roads: here’s one of those great little feature articles we used to see regularly in mainstream media, but since editors can’t afford to pay for them anymore, they’ve become the domain of bloggers and travel groups, which is too bad. This is one of the BBC’s “from our own correspondent” series, and I fear that with BBC cutbacks in several countries we might see fewer of these, too.

L’Hebdo has just published a story about the demise of Lausanne-based Swisster, which closed its doors in December 2010. GenevaLunch and other English language sites are mentioned as one of the likely causes. It’s true that there is probably some splintering of traffic due to the number of sites around, but these mostly serve different purposes and meet different needs. This is why GenevaLunch has always supported groups like glocals.com, Englishforum.ch, worldradio.ch, angloinfo.ch, lemanevents.ch, and more, believing that as a news provider, we are complementary and here to help the international community thrive.

Our traffic more than doubled in 2009 and again in 2010, and we’re well on the road to doing the same this year. We’ve done this on a tiny budget, with nothing like the backing of a large company like Edipresse. This is not meant as a criticism of Swisster, whose staff were good and the team made an effort. I believe, as editor of GenevaLunch, that there is a real need for online news in English that is tailored to a local/regional population, and that the key to success is getting the mix right.

As for the business model, we don’t have a magic wand, nor does anyone else in the media business right now, but we think it’s time to look further than the classic income source provided by advertising and find new and creative solutions that are the right size for each media.

Here’s my response to the Hebdo story:

(Chinese video) Well, we aren’t sure. Spiegel in Germany says “Overcome” by American band Creed, but Ria Novosti in Russia says it was “thrash band Megadeth”. Whatever the music, that plus flailing arms and loud shouts scared off four wolves that a 13-year-old Norwegian boy came across on his way home from school 20 January. His mother had drilled it into her children that if you come across a wolf, face it, don’t run away, and try to scare it off. He turned up volume on the heavy metal music he’d been listening to on his mobile phone. Spiegel says he later told a local TV station that “the worst thing you can do is run away because doing so just invites the wolves to chase you down,” Walter told TV2. “But I was so afraid that I couldn’t even run away if I’d wanted to.”

I wonder if Walter Eklund, the boy in question, has seen the Chinese rendering of his adventure:

Two world leaders get together and hold what are presumably key talks. China, the US. Two world powers, two potential adversaries or, if not partners, at least friends, depending on your perspective.

Presidents Hu and Obama, ready to share with the world the fruits of their discussions.

So the rest of us, sitting at home and watching TV, thought they might say something about what they discussed, during a post-meeting press conference.

We don’t expect earthshaking question-and-answer sessions, since at this level press conferences are somewhat orchestrated (note the tidy black suits, not the daily attire of most journalists).

What we got was so far less than this that I fear it doesn’t bode well for future trade or political discussions. It’s hard to tell if the press conference was badly planned, or if the problems were technical or human, but most of those wonderfully expensive TV minutes were spent watching the two men waiting for translators to repeat what the other had just said.

We heard and saw Obama several times, but Hu was left virtually speechless, not always by choice. The reporters who were there (see NPR blog from the conference, below) seemed blissfully unaware it was mostly incoherent to the watching world.

The NPR blog doesn’t include a Chinese reporter from Xinhua demanding that his question be translated correctly, which brought laughs, so maybe we missed something there, too, watching it on a little screen.

The BBC has a headline about Hu’s response to a human right’s question, which certainly shifts the emphasis away from economic issues, which appeared to me to be the bulk of what the press conference dealt with, not human rights. CNN and China’s CCTV both emphasized that the talks were about positive ties, somewhat empty as headline news goes.

Duh . . . Maybe the two nations’ communications gap isn’t cultural after all, but just plain bureaucratic? Surely the technology they both sell is up to the job.

I watched the BBC, switched to CNN, checked out China’s CCTV, which not surprisingly was not carrying the live press conference.

Summaries of their talks, from broadcast media: BBC Britain, CNN US, FR1 France carried no story on this, NPR US, CCTV China

Cannabis captured by police in Lausanne

This is a cannabis day, news-wise, but the best is the ducks and worms story making the media rounds.

To start:

• First, in Switzerland, we have the endless media fascination with Bernard Rappaz, whose main claim to fame is that he sold marijuana, became an unofficial spokesperson for making it legal, and he’s spent years fighting authorities over it. He’s been on a hunger strike since August, but the latest word is that he’ll stop if they reduce his current sentence.
• And then there’s the man in Lausanne who grew 330 marijuana plants near the police station, and was found out (plants were destroyed).
• In nearby France a man named Michel Rouyer wasfined for giving his ducks cannabis to get rid of their worms. It’s a great silly story, so has been picked up by media around the world, but the best version remains the original, in French, published by Sudouest.

The real winner for cannabis stories today is Ganja.com, or maybe Google Translator or Babble, for the truly weird version they’ve published in English of Rouyer’s little run-in with the French police. Guys, were you maybe smoking something? Here’s a little teaser: “A police spokesman said the case of marijuana for this is the first duck ever dealt with local police.”

Telecom TV’s Martyn Warwick reports on a disturbing proposal from the UK, to create a two-tiered system for content that could profoundly change Internet news if implemented. Warwick writes 18 November that “Communications Minister Ed Vaizey in a speech yesterday signaled the Government’s intention to allow service providers to make even more money by allowing them to discriminate between traffic streams and charging extra for ‘prioritizing’ some of them.”

In brief, the big guys would get their information up faster than the little guys, potentially reversing one of the most significant changes the web has created in the world of news media. Warwick is wrong on one point, however, but I suspect it’s an oversight, when he refers to this as “the end of traffic impartiality”. Even today, Google’s news alerts give more weight to the big media players, posting their stories faster than smaller media’s stories, even if the latter are posted first.

That imbalance means that local media, such as GenevaLunch, are not seen to be breaking stories even when they are. Their more knowledgeable local reporting, as opposed to distance reporting from the likes of the New York Times or the BBC, does not receive as much recognition because the stories are  perceived as having been published later. There is a widespread perception that they may therefore have been copied from larger media.

This is really a question of credible and reliable news sources.

But Warwick is right when he says the UK proposal is “dangerous” and that “those who believe that a network that prioritizes traffic presages the end of digital democracy.”

Swissinfo has a good series of videos, including news features about aspects of Swiss life. One that I think works particularly well was posted 8 November and covers an exhibition about Lake Geneva’s old Latin sailboats, which is on in Morges. Reading about the old boats exhibit which runs until 6 December, by the Bolle Foundation, it hadn’t attracted me. The video did the trick.

swissinfo video

Translators never have an easy task, but Orange’s new tagline translators surely must have argued with the phone company’s powers-that-be over the final UK version of the French line, “”La vie change avec Orange”. Telecom TV has a delightful time rubbing Orange’s nose in the dirt over this one, and I’m with Telecom TV. How about “Orange: time for a change”? Of course, someone might get the wrong message. That’s the trouble with translations.