links for 2009-08-03

Glad to see that taking BBC video hasn't stopped this story making the network front this morning...

...although this was harder to find online. Despite being the front page face of today's Mail and a two page spread inside, this story about the BBC only made story #13 in "Today's headlines" down the left-hand side of the Mail's homepage at 8:42am this morning.

"The latter point, while the most coherent of a bad bunch, still illustrates a major problem all newspapers face and highlights the reason the web is killing print. Everybody - even the Keith Duttons of this world - thinks they would make a better editor - because they know what they like: drop the football; give us more food and restaurant reviews; stop covering pop music; focus on UK not foreign news, don't write about 'the ethnics', etc…Sad but true, it reads like a perfect synopsis of why people choose RSS, Google News and aggregation of news and comment from multiple sites, rather than the broad mix of content from one outlet."

"More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chávez’s drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media. The association of radio broadcasters said 13 stations had stopped transmitting, following an announcement Friday night by government broadcasting watchdog Conatel that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations."

"The number of news-site oriented open source projects that are in the offing seem much more than I had imagined. I had referred to a couple of open source projects in an earlier post just a few days ago; here are a few more I came across in recent times. The first one is from the New York Times: it’s called NYT Transformer and is made up of 10,000 lines of PHP code: it can be used to process data using generic input and output objects."

Discussing the BBC Journalism Blog post on their iGoogle widget James says "The writing of this blog is rather patronising – as if nothing users could do themselves would be anywhere near as good as the BBC's crack team of perl monkeys – and totally ignoring the obvious question: 'What took you so long?'. Still, getting it installed by default means that they've already got 576,000 users at the time of writing, which can't be bad. That must annoy ITN: who'd run a business doing news when the BBC will supply it free to anyone who wants?"