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19 June 2012 | UPI

Canada’s news media near sole-source

The downsizing of news media in Canada has led to a situation in which newspaper publishers are indirectly paying their competition for news. Now, all but one of the national news outlets is being sourced by the Canadian Press agency. The Canadian Press is now the prime national news source for almost every major Canadian media outlet, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., CTV News, Global TV and Postmedia News, as well as national publications such as the National Post, the Globe & Mail and the Toronto Star. The CP was founded in 1917 as a not-for-profit news-sharing collective, along the lines of the Associated Press, which was formed in New York in 1845. The CP and AP still maintain an exclusive news, radio, television and photo sharing agreement for their respective clients. In November 2010, three news organizations bought the Canadian Press: The Torstar Corp., parent of the Toronto Star and associated media, the Globe and Mail newspaper and the Square Victoria Communications Group, which publishes numerous French-language newspapers in Quebec. That's created a curious situation in which almost all of the national and local competition is feeding from the same trough as newsrooms are downsized amid shrinking advertising revenues.

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19 June 2012 | ABC ction News

Facebook to show you ads based on your Web browsing

Facebook will soon be using your Web browsing to help decide which advertisements you see. A new Facebook system will use your activity on other websites to send you what Facebook thinks are ads about your current interests. Advertisers will, in effect, be bidding to get their ads in front of you. The site announced the new system, called Facebook Exchange, to marketers last week. It's expected to begin rolling out in the next couple of weeks. Real-time bidding is already widely used across the Internet. In a blog post, Mike Stiles of Atlanta-based social marketing company Vitrue compared the feature to Google's Ad Words, which pushes an advertiser's ad in front of users when they search for a keyword that advertiser has chosen. Currently, Facebook ads are targeted based on users' profiles and the companies or other pages they "like." Stiles writes that model will still be available for advertisers, but the new one should be more specific. Facebook noted that users will be able to opt out of Exchange by going to the site's About Ads page, by clicking on an "X" that appears on the ads themselves or by blocking cookies on their Web browser. The company statement said Facebook won't share any user data with the advertisers and that no advertising controls that users currently have will go away.

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19 June 2012 | Reuters

Facebook to buy facial-recognition startup: sources

Facebook Inc is paying USD 55m to USD 60m to buy Face.com, according to people familiar with the matter, acquiring the company that provides the facial-recognition technology used by the world's largest social network to help users identify and tag photos. The deal bolsters one of Facebook's most popular features - the sharing and handling of photos - but the use of the startup's technology has spurred concerns about user privacy. The No. 1 social network will pay cash and stock for Face.com, potentially paying as much as USD 60m, two sources with knowledge of the deal said. Media reports in past weeks have pegged the transaction at USD 80m to USD 100m. Neither Facebook nor Face.com disclosed terms of the deal, which is expected to close in coming weeks. Face.com, which has raised nearly USD 5m from investors including Russian Web search site Yandex, launched its first product in 2009. The company makes standalone applications that consumers can use to help them identify photos of themselves and of their friends on Facebook, as well as providing the technology that Facebook has integrated into its service. Facebook uses the technology to scan a user's newly uploaded photos, compares faces in the snapshots with previous pictures, then tries to match faces and suggest name tags. When a match is found, Facebook alerts the person uploading the photos and invites them to "tag," or identify, the person in the photo.

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19 June 2012 | The Guardian

Romanian prime minister accused of plagiarism

A scientific journal has claimed that Romania's new prime minister has copied large swaths of his doctoral thesis without proper attribution. Nature said in a press release it had seen documents that indicated that more than half of Victor Ponta's 432-page thesis on the international criminal court was plagiarised from a work of two Romanian law scholars. The state news agency, Agerpres, said Ponta denies the allegation and is offering to submit his work to "any kind of test". Ponta accused the Romanian president, Traian Basescu, a bitter political rival, of orchestrating the attack. Ponta became prime minister on 7 May after the previous government was ousted after losing a confidence vote. Two of his appointments for education minister stepped down after they were accused of plagiarism.

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19 June 2012 | AFP

Japan press agency head steps down over dateline error

The head of Japanese news agency Jiji Press is to step down over an incident in which a report with a rival agency's dateline was sent to clients. Masahiro Nakata said he will leave the post of company president at the end of the month to "clarify my supervisory responsibility". The announcement came after a staff correspondent in the agency's Washington bureau last week copied and pasted a Japanese-language report by Kyodo News "for reference" when writing a dispatch for Jiji, the agency said Monday. "The reporter failed to change the dateline correctly, and the improper story passed through editing and copy checks," a report by the agency said. A similar incident occurred in January 2011, the dispatch said. "Copying and pasting a news story from another media company is an unforgivable act as a professional journalist," Nakata was quoted as saying. Nakata, 64, is to be replaced as president by 62-year-old director Yutaka Nishizawa, the agency announced. It gave no details about the reporter. Kyodo News and Jiji Press, a major client of AFP, are Japan's two main news agencies serving the country's large media landscape.

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19 June 2012 | PC Mag

BBC launches Internet startup incubator

The story of old media losing out to the Web is now a familiar narrative. But one very old media icon, the BBC, wants to aggressively put itself squarely in the middle of the next phase of digital media innovation with a new program called BBC Worldwide Labs. The initiative is a six-month program that will offer five digital media startups the opportunity to work directly with the BBC Worldwide team, including sales, marketing, and legal, as well as attend a number of mentoring sessions and exclusive networking events. An initial pool of 18 companies will be selected, ending with a final five that will work inside the BBC Worldwide Labs offices for the duration of the program. Although the program is looking for companies based in the U.K., its goal is to foster the growth of companies that are focused on global reach. Although BBC Worldwide Labs will provide a wide array of support for the selected startups, it will not take equity in the actual businesses. The deadline for applications is July 15, and finalists will be announced on August 15.

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