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31 August 2012 | Reuters

Google, Apple CEOs in secret patent talks

Google Inc Chief Executive Larry Page and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been conducting behind-the-scenes talks about a range of intellectual property matters, including the mobile patent disputes between the companies, people familiar with the matter said. The two executives had a phone conversation last week, the sources said. Discussions involving lower-level officials of the two companies are also ongoing. Page and Cook are expected to talk again in the coming weeks, though no firm date has been set, the sources said on Thursday. One of the sources told Reuters that a meeting had been scheduled for this Friday, but had been delayed for reasons that were unclear. The two companies are keeping lines of communication open at a high level against the backdrop of Apple's legal victory in a patent infringement case against Samsung, which uses Google's Android software. Last Friday, a jury awarded Apple USD 1.05bn in damages and set the stage for a possible ban on sales of some Samsung products in a case that has been widely viewed as a "proxy war" between Apple and Google.

Original source

31 August 2012 | CNET News

Facebook ad targeting to use e-mails, phone numbers

Facebook plans to roll out a new advertising tool that will let companies target their ads to existing customers based on their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The social network is launching the new tool next week and touts it as a way for businesses to reengage with customers who have already used their services, according to a Facebook spokesperson. For those who may have privacy concerns over this exchange of personal information, the social network said the process is secure. What this means is Facebook isn't giving any of your data away, it's taking existing numbers and addresses from businesses and letting those businesses use the information to target its ads. On the flip side, Facebook won't be gaining any new data from businesses. When advertisers give Facebook your data, it is hashed - a security technique that scrambles your data - before it is fed into the advertising machine. Once the ads are placed, Facebook dumps the hashed data, so that if an advertiser wants to do another ad, the process starts over again.

Original source

31 August 2012 | Techcrunch

Huffington Post now has its wwn “labs” site for online news experiments

News publishers are becoming tech companies, right down to the Google Labs style experimental sites: The New York Times Company Research & Development Lab, The Globe Lab, WapPo Labs… And now there’s HuffPost Labs, which will unveil its first project today: Highlights, a collection of the most popular sentences from articles and blog posts across the Huffington Post empire. Labs co-founder Conor White Sullivan explains that there are two ways a reader can “vote” for a sentence: either by selecting the text and clicking the new “Highlight” button that will start appearing on Huffing Post today, or by simply copying the selection. The sentences are also judged by the ratio of highlights to page views, since articles and blog posts that are featured on the front page of Huffington Post or AOL.com get more traffic than posts that are deeper in the site’s navigation. So a sentence that received lots of highlights even though it got a relatively small number of page views will be treated as very interesting on the Highlights page. This should help surface interesting stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

Original source

31 August 2012 | AFP

Twitter allows “promoted tweets”

Twitter on Thursday began letting advertisers target users with “promoted tweets” based on interests expressed at the globally popular one-to-many texting service. Twitter also slashed to a penny the minimum opening bid in its auction-style ad-buying system. “We're taking an important next step by allowing you to target your Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns to a set of interests that you explicitly choose,” Twitter product management director Kevin Weil said in a blog post. “When people discover offers and messages about the things they care about on Twitter, it's good for both marketers and users.” Twitter ad products tap into a “real-time interest graph” to target promoted “tweets”, terse text messages, in hundreds of categories ranging from gardening and hobbies to pets and investing. Factors that go into determining interests include which Twitter accounts people follow, such as sports teams or chefs. The San Francisco-based firm boasts having 140 million active users

Original source

31 August 2012 | Reuters

Tunisian TV channel owner jailed

The owner of a private television channel was jailed in Tunisia on Thursday pending trial for corruption, an official said, in a case he has described as an attempt to stifle the media. Sami Fehri, who launched the channel in partnership with Belhassen Trabelsi, the son-in-law of former President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, handed himself over to the authorities after an arrest warrant was issued a few days ago. In an Internet video broadcast shortly before, he said the government was punishing for him for a comedy programme on his channel that mocks symbols of power - thereby muffling the media and giving up gains made when Ben Ali was ousted last year. "Tounissia tv" broadcast a satirical programme called "Political Logic" which made fun of Tunisia's President Moncef Marzouki, Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali and Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the ruling Islamic Ennahda party. A Justice Ministry official told Reuters an arrest warrant had been issued on charges of corruption. The government has faced criticism for seeking to control the media. Press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticised Fehri's detention, saying in a statement that defects in procedures had accelerated the issue of his arrest warrant. It called for a fair trial without government interference.

Original source

31 August 2012 | Knight Center

Article 19 report outlines state of Internet freedom in Brazil

The freedom of expression organization Article 19 announced the release of the report "Digital Freedom in Brazil," which aims to serve as a resource to bring Brazil in agreement with international freedom of expression standards and improve online expression in the South American country. According to Article 19, the report presents international legislation on freedom of expression on the Internet, examines online censorship in Brazil, and describes major challenges. The report also presents debates over Internet access, bandwidth and policies for digital inclusion. The report cites current bills to regulate online content, like the cyber-crime bill, which could force Internet providers to monitor and report alleged violations to the criminal Internet law, turning providers into a proxy for the police. Another bill mentioned was the Internet Bill of Rights that would define rights and duties of users and businesses that surf the net.

Original source

30 August 2012 | USA Today

Yahoo fires reporter after comment about Romney

Tensions between Republicans and members of the news media continue: Yahoo! News fired its political director Wednesday morning after he was heard in a video commenting that Mitt and Ann Romney "are happy to have a party with black people drowning'' – an apparent reference to Hurricane Isaac's damage potential. David Chalian, the online news site's political director, made the remark in a short video on YouTube that appeared to be a test of a Yahoo!-ABC News online news program. The two news organizations have partnered to provide live-streamed coverage of the two conventions. A report in Politico says Yahoo! fired Chalian immediately and, in a statement, said that his comment was "inappropriate" and that the news organization had apologized to the Romney campaign. Chalian was fired just three hours after Newsbusters, a conservative media watchdog site, posted the video on its blog – and noted that the Republican Party had canceled the first night of its convention in deference to the approach of the storm. Chalian is a longtime political journalist who has also worked for PBS NewsHour and as political director for ABC News.

Original source

30 August 2012 | BBC News

UK: Journalist arrested in computer hacking probe

A journalist has been arrested as part of the Metropolitan Police's inquiry into allegations of computer hacking. The man, understood to be 28-year-old reporter Patrick Foster, was later bailed until November, police said. The Met said he was "questioned about alleged computer hacking relating to the identification of a previously-anonymous blogger in 2009". It is believed it relates to the outing of an police blogger known as Nightjack, by the Times in 2009. He is the 11th person to be arrested by detectives from Operation Tuleta which is taking place alongside the phone-hacking scandal investigation, Operation Weeting. Mr Foster was also arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The Times, owned by News International, named Lancashire detective Richard Horton as the author of the blog in June 2009 after the High Court refused to grant him anonymity. The paper's then-legal manager Alastair Brett admitted at the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics that legal documents filed as part of the case did not give the "full story". Mr Horton is now claiming aggravated and exemplary damages from Times Newspapers for breach of confidence, misuse of private information and deceit.

Original source

30 August 2012 | Journalism.co.uk

Flipboard tops 20m users and launches curated video sections

Social newsreader app Flipboard has reached two milestones this summer: it has celebrated its second birthday and topped 20 million users. It has also announced that it has launched 'Flipboard TV', which consists of curated video sections. The app, which is available for iPad, iPhone and Android and has 1.5 million daily users, encourages people to connect their Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, and delivers a page-turning magazine-like experience. The 'TV' pages of videos are "powered by popular YouTube channels", Flipboard states in a blog post, and are organised into topics, such as 'cooking', 'news' and 'catwalk'. According to Flipboard, 'News TV' allows users to "stay updated on current events via leading news outlets". Users could access both video and audio via Flipboard prior to the launch of Flipboard TV.

Original source

30 August 2012 | Hollywood Reporter

Leveson report to contain strong criticism of British newspapers

Justice Brian Leveson's final report on his investigation into U.K. press standards and ethics is expected to contain strong criticism of the British print media and comments on various topics - from privacy protections to press self-regulation. The Guardian said that a five-page summary that has been mailed to newspaper companies lists the areas, on which Leveson is planning to comment in conclusion of his probe that was launched amid the phone hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It quoted people who have seen it as saying that he has thrown the "kitchen sink" at the newspaper industry. "It is excoriating," one source told the paper. The final report is expected to be published in late October. The summary covers such themes as accuracy in the media and public interest. A section on current self-regulation of the press says "self-regulation has failed," according to the Guardian. The news came after a report that Leveson had prepared letters warning all those who will be criticized in his final report in October, even though it wasn't clear which individuals and companies would be censured.

Original source

30 August 2012 | New York Times

Pandora posts a loss but continues to expand

A year after going public, the popular Internet radio service Pandora is still expanding rapidly, with growth in audience size and revenue. But Pandora Media, the company behind it, continues to post a loss, as its revenue has not kept up with music royalties and other costs. Pandora, which lets users create free music streams tailored to their tastes, had USD 101.3m in revenue for the three months that ended July 31, a 51 percent increase from the same period last year. That was slightly better than the $100.9 million that analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters. Pandora now has 54.9 million listeners each month. In the last three months they listened to 3.3 billion hours of music, up 86 percent from last year. Revenue related to use of the service on mobile phones — which counts advertising as well as some revenue from paid subscriptions — was up 86 percent to USD 59.2m. A majority of the listening to Pandora is done on mobile phones, although the company has struggled to increase the amount of money it can make from mobile advertising. But Pandora had a net loss of USD 5.4m, or 3 cents a share, for the quarter, its sixth quarterly loss in two years. For the same period last year, the company lost USD 3.2m, or 4 cents a share. Pandora’s largest expense is music royalties, which increase with each listener. To offset rising royalty costs, Pandora has been building up local advertising sales teams around the country, and also pushing to be included in ad networks that would put its service into direct competition with terrestrial radio stations. After withdrawing from many foreign countries several years ago because of music licensing problems, it is now taking its first steps to return to overseas markets, starting with Australia and New Zealand.

Original source

30 August 2012 | BBC News

China’s search giant Baidu ‘in war’ with rival Qihoo

China's search giant Baidu is trying to fend off rival search engine Qihoo 360, launched less than a fortnight ago. Qihoo said that the market leader had been using aggressive measures to preserve its user base. It said that when people used its new engine to search for a Baidu-related service, its rival re-directed them to its own search page. Qihoo said it had now decided to prioritise services other than Baidu's in its results. One analyst said that it was unlikely Qihoo would threaten Baidu's lead in the short term, but the dispute was already frustrating web users. At the moment, Baidu has an 80 percent share of the Chinese search market. Qihoo, originally an anti-virus provider, launched its search tool on 16 August. The company's chief financial officer Alex Xu said that Qihoo had noticed Baidu interfering with search results a few days later. Baidu has not faced any strong competitor since Google shut down its Chinese search site at Google.cn and started re-directing visitors to its servers in Hong Kong in 2010.

Original source

29 August 2012 | Knight Center

New Twitter guidelines, recent censorship draw criticism from journalists

Recent changes to Twitter’s application programming interface (API) rattled some critics concerned about how journalists will use the popular social media platform to cover news in the future, according to Alfred Hermida on his blog Reportr.net. Beyond the recent API announcement, Twitter has seen a progression of censorship as the company matures that may threaten its credibility as a news source. The new Twitter guidelines have prompted questions about how, or whether, journalists will be able to aggregate various tweets, combining them with non-Twitter content. In order to “deliver a consistent Twitter experience,” Twitter now requires all posted tweets to include a linked @username and Twitter actions, like Re-tweet, reply, etc. Along with new display guidelines, Twitter requires all applications to be certified by the company before they are released. Twitter announced that failure to comply with these guidelines could result in a revocation of the application's access to tweeted content. This trend toward greater control over the appearance and content of tweets reflects Twitter’s development as a business but also raises concerns about censorship. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter chronicled Twitter’s history of censorship, noting that the company said it would start censoring certain tweets in certain countries in January 2012.

Original source

29 August 2012 | The Guardian

UK: Prince Harry complaints top 3,600

UK's press watchdog has received more than 3,600 complaints about the Sun's publication of pictures of a naked Prince Harry in Las Vegas. The Press Complaints Commission received a deluge of complaints over the weekend about the Sun's front-page story on Friday. Most of the complaints had been received by Tuesday afternoon over an alleged invasion of Prince Harry's privacy. The PCC generally does not investigate third party complaints, and it said Prince Harry's representatives had not complained as of Tuesday afternoon. The last time the PCC received more than 1,000 complaints about an individual story was in May, when the Sun ran a front-page splash about the England football manager, Roy Hodgson, headlined: Bwing on the Euwos. This was not investigated. The Sun was the only British newspaper to reproduce the grainy mobile phone images of the prince after they appeared last week on the US celebrity gossip website TMZ. The News International title defied legal warnings from Clarence House to print the pictures, which it defended as justified in the public interest. The bold move won the backing of the News Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch, on Saturday, when he said publication of the pictures was important to make a point about the lack of a free press in Britain. While the Sun has remained unapologetic about its decision to publish, several MPs and celebrities have said the paper overstepped the mark.

Original source

29 August 2012 | Knight Center

More than 100 employees laid off as Uruguayan newspaper ends print edition, goes digital

After circulating for more than 30 years, the Uruguayan newspaper UNoticias ended its print edition and moved exclusively online as of Monday, Aug. 27, according to the news portal El Pais. This digital transition resulted in the layoff of more than 100 UNoticias employees, who occupied the old newsroom defending their jobs and demanding labor debt payments, reported the Uruguayan PressAssociation (APU in Spanish). In a statement, the newspaper's publisher Impresora Polo S.A. said that the suspension of the printed version is due to "changes in consumers' reading habits, which happens everywhere in the world, and isn't different in Uruguay, where more readers choose to be informed through new electronic communication platforms each day." The news surprised the newspaper's employees, even the editors, who were not informed previously. The Federation of Journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean expressed solidarity with the newspaper's employees in a story published on Sunday, Aug. 26, and said that it would follow the negotiations in defense of the workers rights of UNoticias employees.

Original source

29 August 2012 | CNET News

One consumer in five uses the Web via TV - survey

Televisions were once a reprieve from the online world. Now they're turning into just another way to stay connected. In a new study published last week, research firm NPD revealed that 18 percent of consumers across 14 countries, including the U.S. and U.K., access Web-based services and media from their televisions. That figure includes both people connecting to the Web from their televisions, as well as through set-top boxes hooked up to their sets. NPD found that 25 percent of consumers who view online services from their televisions do so "several times a week." Vendors have been making it much easier on consumers to stream online TV shows and movies on their televisions. A host of TV makers, including Samsung and Vizio, offer built-in applications in some of their sets. Several Blu-ray makers allow consumers to connect to the Web and access other services. Even game consoles offer access to the Internet. But NPD also found many folks unwilling to join the Web stampede in the living room. Some 44 percent said that they "have no interest in viewing Internet content on TVs." Another 30 percent of respondents said that they don't own the devices they need to make it happen.

Original source

29 August 2012 | News and Tech

U.S. pay meters nearing 300

The number of U.S. newspapers with metered paywalls or other digital-subscriber initiatives has more than doubled in the past year as publishers race to boost their digital circulation revenues. By mid-September, close to 70 of Gannett Co. Inc.’s 80 U.S. Community Publishing papers will have metered plans in place while Lee Enterprises will have had similar initiatives launched in a majority of its 52 markets. In fall 2011 only a handful of USCP and Lee dailies were charging for their digital content. Some 300 U.S. newspapers are now charging a fee to read their digital content, according to News & Tech research. New York, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina are among the states that boast the most dailies with meters or other online content restrictions. Among papers that have recently flipped the switch on metered plans are The (Phoenix) Arizona Republic, The Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire, Wis., The Indianapolis Star and The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. The Chicago Tribune rolled out a membership program that managers said will likely be the first step toward digital subscriptions. McClatchy, meanwhile, said it will expand its digital-subscription strategy to additional markets in the fourth quarter of 2012. The publisher, which now has a metered plan in place at The Modesto (Calif.) Bee, is adding meters to five other papers this fall, including the flagship Sacramento (Calif.) Bee.

Original source

29 August 2012 | Dutch News

Netherlands: Telegraaf Media Group takes over free newspaper Metro

The Telegraaf Media Group is taking over Metro Holland, which publishes the free daily paper Metro, as part of its strategy to strengthen its leading role in print publications. Financial details were not disclosed but Metro, with a print run of 434,000, will become part of the TMG stable from September. TMG already owns freesheet Spits. The publisher says the two papers will reach a combined 2.3 million readers a day. TMG says it is studying possible cost reductions by combining the printing and distribution of both papers. This will lead to job losses, the publisher of the Netherland’s biggest daily paper, the Telegraaf, said.

Original source

28 August 2012 | The Telegraph

Apple outlines eight Samsung devices to ban

Since a US jury found that Samsung had violated parents used in the iPhone, and ordered the South Korean company pay USD 1.05bn in damages at the end of last week, Apple has wasted no time in stipulating which products it wants banning from US shops. According to a notice Apple filed with the court, Apple wants the following eight smartphones banned in the US: Galaxy S 4G, Galaxy S2 (AT & T), Galaxy S2 (Skyrocket), Galaxy S2 (T-Mobile), Galaxy S2 Epic 4G, Galaxy S Showcase, Droid Charge and Galaxy Prevail. Apple will still have prove to the court that it will be irreparably harmed if these handsets are not banned in the country. Last week the nine-person jury in San Jose, California, found Samsung infringed six of the seven Apple patents in dispute and did so wilfully in five of the cases. The jurors also upheld the validity of all seven of Apple patents, many of which covered the design of the iPhone. Apple had sought up to USD 2.75bn in damages, alleging that Samsung infringed four design patents and three software patents. Samsung, in turn, counter-sued, claiming that the Californian company infringed five of its own patents. Lawyers for the South Korean company argued Apple was trying to thwart legitimate competition. The legal battle in California was one of several being waged across the world to determine the future of the USD 200bn smartphone industry. While Apple has pursued legal action against manufacturers such as Samsung, experts says its real target is Google.

Original source

28 August 2012 | AFP

Swede launches site for net’s ‘top one percent’

Swedish social media entrepreneur Erik Wachtmeister on Monday announced the launch of a new social networking site targeting the "top one percent" of internet users, called Best of All Worlds. The site, which helps users find events and contacts, counted 20,000 members even before its launch. Wachtmeister, 57, created one of the world's first social networking sites, aSmallWorld, in 2004, the same year as Facebook. He left the company in 2008. The site was dubbed the "MySpace for millionaires" by the Wall Street Journal and highlighted by Forbes magazine as one of five social networking site for the wealthy. Best of All Worlds is targeting the same audience, he said. "The top one percent of the online audience, people who are leaders in their field, investment bankers, PR people, media, fashion, government... It's not about jet-set or rich people, but sophisticated people who have good taste," he said. "It's more three million people than a billion," he added, a reference to Facebook's announcement in July that it had more than 950 million subscribers. Best of All Worlds helps users get in touch with each other to find what's going on where they are, which Wachtmeister said was an improvement on Facebook's service which "looks backwards (and) gives you unstructured information that shows what your friends have done." Subscription to Best of All Worlds is by invitation only. Wachtmeister did not specify how or when the company would turn a profit.

Original source

28 August 2012 | Financial Times

US: TV ad campaigns fail to reach audiences

Nationwide US television advertising campaigns are failing to reach a large portion of their target audiences, according to new research based on TV viewing data. Using figures from Nielsen and Kantar Media, ad targeting company Simulmedia has found that in many cases as many as three-quarters of marketers’ TV ad impressions are viewed by just 20 per cent of their target audiences. According to its report, Unilever’s USD 6.3m TV ad campaign for its Axe body spray was not seen by 60 per cent of the 18 to 24-year-olds it was intended to reach in March this year. Similarly, Progressive Insurance spent USD 31.9m on television ads in June, but a fifth of all adults older than 20 did not watch any of its TV ads that month. Similar patterns were observed during ad campaigns run by several of the largest advertisers in the US. In spite of the fragmentation of audiences across new media, TV ad spending remains the bulk of many companies’ marketing budgets. US advertisers are expected to allocate 42.2 per cent of their total spending – USD 64bn – to TV ads this year, an increase on the 39 per cent share five years ago, according to WPP’s GroupM. But the new research provides further evidence of the long- suspected shortcomings of TV as a medium for reaching broad audiences – which is likely to have ramifications for budget allocations across the media business.

Original source

28 August 2012 | Paid Content

Wall Street Journal offers free Wi-Fi in NYC and San Francisco

Newspapers have been trying all sorts of gimmicks, from paywall promos to “open houses,” to get readers to discover their websites. The latest by the Wall Street Journal is clever: thousands of free Wi-Fi hotspots throughout New York City and San Francisco. Through the month of September, readers will be able to use, courtesy of the Journal, 1300 hotspots blanketing large swathes Manhattan, including high traffic neighborhoods like Times Square and West Village. The service is also available in parts of three other boroughs. In San Francisco, the Wi-Fi will be available in places like Nob Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf. So why is the conservative Journal giving out free internet service to all comers? According to a spokesperson, “We’re always looking for ways to give people the opportunity to sample The Wall Street Journal. This is the latest in a long history of those efforts.” This is one of the paper’s more novel initiatives but it may prove effective. The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

Original source

28 August 2012 | International Business Times

Newspapers snub women reporters for election coverage: study

According to a report released on Monday by the Women's Media Center, three-quarters of newspapers' presidential election coverage is written by men. The report, based on a survey of local and national newspapers, found that men wrote 76 percent of the election coverage during the primary and 72 percent of the coverage so far during the general election. The research was compiled by the Fourth Estate Project, an organization that has been collecting statistical information about the 2012 election using online analytics. According to the Women's Media Center, the results of the new study show that bylines skew overwhelmingly male for newspapers' election coverage when compared to the overall population and to the gender makeup of most newsrooms. According to employment census data by the American Society of News Editors, 62 percent of newsroom reporters are men. For the study, Fourth Estate chose 35 newspapers based on strategic and geographical diversity. The papers included national "conversation setters" such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, along with regional powerhouses such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Seattle Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study did not include blogs or opinion columns, nor did it include broadcast media.

Original source

28 August 2012 | Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union

Smartphone-toting journalists help Wall Street Journal launch a video channel

The Wall Street Journal on Monday announced the launch of WSJ WorldStream, a global video newsgathering and publishing platform for short-form videos shot via smartphone by journalists from across its global news organisation. WSJ WorldStream is the latest addition to WSJ Live, the Journal's video initiative, which has launched four new shows in the past year from New York, London, Hong Kong, and Washington, DC. It is Available on WSJ.com and as a free web app. WSJ WorldStream is video for the social media and mobile age. It consists solely of footage captured on smartphones utilizing the resources of more than 2,000 journalists worldwide. Each video is under a minute, and all footage is reviewed by an editor before being posted to the stream. Using a custom video publishing app, turnaround time is condensed to just a few minutes between shooting and posting video so that the content can be delivered from the journalists in near real-time.

Original source

27 August 2012 | The Guardian

UK firm develops software to unmask fake Twitter accounts

Lady Gaga has almost 30 million, Wayne Rooney nearly five million and David Cameron a more-than-respectable two million plus. But how many of their Twitter followers actually exist? A British start-up company has pledged to root out and expose the phantom, fake and fraudulent followers being used to massage the numbers claimed by celebrities, politicians and the merely insecure within the Twittersphere. The company, Status People has devised a software tool that divides followers into the fake, the inactive and the good. Company executive Rob Waller said it had been decided to create the "fake follower" tool after reports that former Tory MP Louise Mensch had 40,000 fake followers. The fake follower tool aims to expose the true extent of the problem of phantom Twitter followers. Almost every Twitter account has a small percentage of fake followers because, unlike Facebook, anyone can follow you – from a genuine friend to a computer-generated account set up to promote pornography. That freedom has created a market for the sale of Twitter followers. Scores of internet sites offer thousands of Twitter followers for small sums of money. According to the New York Times, it would be possible to buy 220,000 followers for GBP 260.

Original source

27 August 2012 | AFP

I. Coast papers halt publication after arson attack

Opposition newspapers in Ivory Coast that once supported ousted president Laurent Gbagbo on Friday suspended publication for two days following an arson attack on a press group. Notre Voie, the daily of Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), and five other papers were absent from the newsstands to "protest against... sanctions, threats and now aggression," they announced in a joint statement. The headquarters of the Cyclone group, which edits the daily Le Temps, was vandalised and partially burned down by raiders overnight on Saturday. Hours earlier, an armed group attacked the FPI headquarters in Abidjan, abducting two people and wounding three. In suspending publication, newspapers close to the former president said they wanted to alert the public "to the danger of death that hangs over their journalists and their workers", according to the joint statement. The papers also denounced "threats and intimidation combined with heavy targeted sanctions by the National Press Council", the authority that regulates the press, which has several times taken action against opposition papers for failing to uphold professional standards.

Original source

27 August 2012 | V3.co.uk

Philippine police arrest 357 in cyber crime raid

The Philippine National Police said that early Friday morning officials raided some 20 residences and arrested 357 people as part of a massive investigation into online fraud and account theft ring. According to police, the groups had been calling individuals in China, posing as Chinese state police members. The scammers told victims that their bank accounts had been compromised by hackers and instructed them to transfer all of their funds to a supposed "safe account" controlled by the criminals. Police said that the suspects were mostly nationals of Taiwan and mainland China who had moved their operation to the Philippines following a Chinese police crackdown on cyber crime and fraud operations. Sophos security blogger Paul Roberts noted that the large-scale raids were part of a larger joint operation between authorities in China and the Philippines to target criminals who were preying on Chinese citizens from abroad.

Original source

27 August 2012 | Orlando Sentinel

Pew study: different media skew campaign coverage differently; most balanced: newspapers

A new study of news coverage by mainstream media, released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, confirms what everyone pretty much has assumed for a while regarding campaign coverage of President Barack Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney: “Portrayal in the news media of the character and records of the two presidential contenders in 2012 has been as negative as any campaign in recent times,” the project reports. But then there’s this: “Neither candidate has enjoyed an advantage over the other.” As it has done in the previous three presidential campaigns, the Pew project set out to study news reports on presidential campaigns in a few dozen select media to see how much of the coverage could be characterized as positive and how much negative. The study pored over reports from May 29 through August 5 and also found this non-surprise: whether the candidates are most likely portrayed positively or negatively depends on the news medium. And this: the most balanced of all news media, including on-line media, are newspapers. Overall: Pew found news reports on Obama were 28 percent positive and 72 percent negative. For Romney, the references were 29 percent positive and 71 percent negative.

Original source

27 August 2012 | Advertising Age

Magazine publisher Bonnier creates accelerator program for media startups

Magazine Publisher Bonnier Corp. is beginning an effort to identify promising early-stage startups in the media space and accelerate their development. The accelerator, called Bonnier Innovation Lab, is asking for applications from companies trying to change the way content is created, distributed or consumed. It will select four to receive at least USD 25,000 in seed funding as well as services and support in areas such as public relations, e-commerce, web hosting and human relations. The four startups will also participate in a 14-week program at Bonnier's Boulder, Colo., office to go over topics such as content strategy, audience development, search engine optimization, social media, product development cycles and investor relations. Other magazine publishers are seeking or encouraging digital innovation in various ways, hosting showcases for startups, maintaining units to incubate ideas internally and buying or investing in various digital enterprises. But Bonnier's accelerator program might help it better identify and integrate startups early. Outside of print, Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting unit recently created an accelerator program called Media Camp. Its Media Camp Academy offers participants up to $20,000 in funding.

Original source

27 August 2012 | AP

Spain: Bullfighting returns to television

Spain’s state television said Friday that it would again air live bullfights after a six-year halt, helping a tradition hit by falling popularity and the economic crisis. The policy change comes under the new conservative Popular Party government, which opposes all attempts to curtail bullfighting in Spain. Under the previous Socialist government, state television had stopped showing live evening bullfights for economic reasons and because they coincided with children’s viewing times. Bullfighting has been hit hard by the economic crisis, with fewer bullfights and smaller attendance. In 2011, the northeastern region of Catalonia became Spain’s second Spanish region to ban bullfighting, joining the Canary Islands, which stopped the practice in 1991.

Original source