The BBC has finally got the go-ahead to offer its programmes for download over the internet. But it has not got everything it wanted. The BBC Trust only greenlighted the iPlayer project after imposting some significant restrictions. The reason, concerns about the market impact. In other words, it listened to the BBC’s commercial competitors. Some of the limitations make sense, such as only letting people store a programme for 30

More hints about the direction CBC is taking online. A memo to staff from CBC TV executive Richard Stursberg talks about moving to a Web 2.0 environment. Among the ideas in the memo are allowing the audience to comment and to send in user-generated content. This all sounds similar to what CBC editorial head honcho Tony Burman outlined in an article to The National Post: We’ll be looking for more

As news organisations grapple with the concept of citizen journalism, one US TV station has decided to fire most of its staff and rely instead on user-generated content. The Santa Rosa station, KFTY-TV Channel 50, is replacing its nightly newscasts with material from viewers. In the words of the station’s general manager John Burgess: We want viewers to tell us and supply us with the content that they want. It’s

How do you reach a generation who plays video games and doesn’t read newspapers? Easy. Bring the news to them. This is what Nintendo and AP are doing in what PaidContent describes as “an interesting though not-a-game-changing deal.” Gamers who have snapped up Nintendo’s new Wii console will be able to read national and international news, sports, arts and entertainment, business, science/health and technology. In the words of Nintendo of

There are likely to be lots of column inches about the plans announced by the Los Angeles Times to to shift its priorities from print to the web. The key points from the memo to staff from publisher David Hiller are: Accelerate our growth on the web by allocating more resources, and speeding product development, to improve the site and grow our online audience. Re-orient/re-tool the whole company to think

Over at Poynter Online, there is an interesting tidbit of news. It reports on futurist John Naisbitt’s address at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. He discussed how the world is moving towards a more visual culture and the impact on text media such as newspapers: Newspapers and magazines have to reinvent themselves, as people are reading less, especially young people. Then again, you have all the visual images

As a former BBC journalist now teaching multiplatform journalism in Canada, I am struck by the attitudes of students to new media. Some embrace the potential wholeheartedly, while others are more circumspect. Mindy McAdams highlights this issue in a post about the response to an earlier entry about getting a job in journalism. Some of the journalism students who commented on her post are harking back to the days of

A heads-up to everyone who is interested in the changes taking place in journalism. Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism has released the winter 2006 issue of Neiman Reports, entitled “Goodbye Gutenberg.” There is a rich wealth of material on how the impact the internet is having on journalism. Having read just a couple of the articles, this struck me from Jon Palfreman’s piece: Before the Web, storytelling was platform

One of the issues about online journalism is who regulates what is published on the net. In the UK, newspapers have agreed to have the press watchdog regulate audio and video on their websites. The head of the Press Complaints Commission, Christopher Meyer, described this as an extension of the organisation’s remit to regulate the electronic version of newspapers. The agreement hasn’t been officially announced yet. But it is an

The world of multimedia, multiplatform journalism should be creating a wave of new jobs in the media. Instead, established media organisations are retrenching, with Time being the latest. It is cutting 289 jobs – 172 from the editorial side and 117 from the business side across all its magazines, including Time and People. The job losses are needed to help Time “move quickly into a future of flexible, multiplatform content,”