By: E&P Staff
In today's edition, a New York Times article explores the idea of giving balance in coverage of wars with unbalanced numbers of casualties, some say the idea that August is a slow news month is a "myth," and photo editors weigh in on the difficulty of determining whether a picture has been manipulated.***
News Corp to Sell Films OnlineFinancial Times: News Corp?s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market. The service, which will charge $19.99 for new feature films such as X-Men The Last Stand and $1.99 for TV series episodes such as 24, will be available from October to users of the News Corp-owned gaming-oriented IGN Entertainment sites, with MySpace and others to come.
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In Wars, Quest for Media Balance Is Also a BattlefieldNew York Times: Wars in the modern media age often come complete with their own journalistic difficulties. Although doctored and stage-managed photographs out of Lebanon garnered their share of headlines last week, they are just a part of a larger, underlying issue: the role of images in fairly portraying the conflict incited nearly five weeks ago by Hezbollah?s raid into Israel and its kidnapping of two soldiers. Particularly vexing for many American news organizations is the struggle to determine how and in what proportion images of civilian dead and injured should be displayed in their coverage, when one side?s casualties greatly surpass the other.
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Is August Really a Slow News Month?USA Today: The events of this summer -- missile launches by North Korea, the reported illness of Cuba's Fidel Castro, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, a new war between Israel and Hezbollah, and now a suspected terrorist plot in London to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft -- have kept news outlets especially busy, ruining or postponing vacations for many journalists.
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Web Ads Show Just How Sexy These Clothes Make You FeelLos Angeles Times: The Internet is rapidly changing the rules of advertising -- but using naked people to sell clothes? A French clothier is testing the limits of the maxim that sex sells with online commercials that use hard-core pornography to hawk $100 T-shirts. The campaign by Shai clothing depicts French porn stars frolicking on a circular bed, clothed, at least initially, in the brand's latest styles.
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Ease of Alteration Creates Woes for Picture EditorsNew York Times: The recent discovery that a Lebanese freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated pictures he took for Reuters has raised questions about the standards of photojournalism at a time of widespread digital photography. The incident also increased pressure on news photo editors, who select and edit thousands of photographs under deadline each day, to detect digital alterations. Detecting the smoke and mirrors is a challenge. While editors for print publications commonly rely on editing systems that track each change made to an article, photo editors have fewer tools at their disposal and often rely simply on experience and instinct. As a result, the most skilled manipulations can be difficult to catch.
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AOL's Data Disclosure Reveals How People Search the WebPaul Boutin in Slate: The search records don't include users' names, but each search is tagged with a number that's tied to a specific AOL account. The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby" to "foods to eat when pregnant" to "abortion clinics charlotte nc" to "can christians be forgiven for abortion." While these case studies are good voyeuristic fodder, snooping through one user's life barely scratches the surface of this data trove. AOL's 36 million log entries might look like an Orwellian nightmare to you, but for us it's a user transaction case study to die for. Using the third-party site splunkd.com, I've parsed the AOL data to create a typology of AOL Search users. Which of the seven types of searcher are you?
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Increasingly, Bush Escapes the Media PackWashington Post: Increasingly in recent months, President Bush has left town without a chartered press plane, often to receptions where he talks to donors chipping in hundreds of thousands of dollars with no cameras or tapes to record his words for the public. Barred from such events, most news organizations will not pay to travel with him. And so a White House policy inclined to secrecy has combined with escalating costs for the strapped news media to let Bush fly under the radar in a way his predecessors could not.
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'LAT' Editor Baquet Makes 'LAT' Most Powerful ListLos Angeles Times: Yeah, we know what some will say: How self-serving to put your boss on the list. But Baquet, who won a Pulitzer Prize in Chicago and served as the New York Times' national editor before coming to L.A. in 2000, sets the agenda for the most powerful media voice in the region. With resources shrinking, how well Baquet weathers budget pressures from long-distance owner Tribune Co. will go a long way toward determining how robust that voice remains.
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