Category Archives: Links

Palgrave Pivot: new publishing model for academia

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Palgrave Macmillan announces Palgrave Pivot:

Palgrave Macmillan is delighted to announce a new imprint: Palgrave Pivot. Launching globally in Autumn 2012 and publishing across the Humanities and Social Sciences, Palgrave Pivot liberates scholarship from the straitjacket of traditional formats and business models. It offers authors the flexibility of publishing at lengths between the journal article and the conventional monograph. The new imprint will be available as digital collections for libraries, including via Palgrave Connect, individual ebooks for personal use, and as digitally-produced print editions.

Palgrave Pivot will emphasize speed of delivery as well as innovation. The imprint undertakes to publish within 3 months of acceptance after full peer review.

 

Titles for Palgrave Pivot are:

  • focused on new important research, or are a review of an area with broad appeal
  • shorter than a typical scholarly monograph, at an average of 100 pages (or 35 thousand words), meaning that they are faster to write, concise and more digestible for readers
  • published exceptionally fast to make new or timely research available more quickly
  • rigorously peer-reviewed
  • published in print and ebook formats

via Palgrave Macmillan – Palgrave Pivot.

Journalism of the Web, not just on it

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Jim Brady discussing rationale behind TBD.com, explains difference between journalism OF the web vs journalism ON the web.:

The concept of TBD was to produce a local news operation that wasn’t just on the Web, but OF the Web. What that meant, in my view, was avoiding the trap of producing traditional journalistic forms and just throwing them up on the Web. To truly be OF the Web, you have to produce journalism in ways that works in that medium. Sometimes, that still means producing a traditional all-text narrative. But, more than that, it means truly engaging with your audience, which we did via very aggressive conversation and newsgathering done via social media, via live chats and by building a network of more than 200 local blogs and linking to them and selling advertising for many of them. Being of the Web means linking to other sites, so that you can become the first stop for readers interested in a topic and expose them to multiple voices in a region. It means not viewing mobile at something you have to do to check a box, but truly making an effort to produce a mobile site that thinks about that kind of information someone would want when disconnected from a laptop or desktop. It means not viewing the Web as just another platform. I hate the term “platform agnostic.” I think it’s totally backwards. Some content works on multiple platforms; most of it does not. So we tried to blend these elements — all of which had been done separately in other places — into a unique local blend. And the audience response and traffic suggests TBD is on to something. And many of the calls I’ve gotten about consulting are asking for guidance on how we built TBD, which suggests others see it as a viable model as well.

Centre for Korean-American Peace threatens nuclear war

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Tania Branigan emailed this gem from Beijing to the Guardian about
North Korea’s attack on South Korea. Note the place where the guy works ;)

“We repeatedly warned South Korea to stop its dangerous war games. If the South continues its dangerous behaviour, Seoul will be the next target. It will be a sea of fire. Nuclear war could start at any point,” said Kim Myong-chol, executive director of the Centre for Korean-American Peace. He said it was fair to describe him as speaking on behalf of the North’s government.

Courtesy of David Curran.

Why Twitter matters for media organisations

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Alan Rusbridger claims saying that Twitter has got nothing to do with the news business is about as misguided as you could be and explains why Twitter matters for media organisations:

1. It’s an amazing form of distribution
2. It’s where things happen first
3. As a search engine, it rivals Google
4. It’s a formidable aggregation tool
5. It’s a great reporting tool
6. It’s a fantastic form of marketing
7. It’s a series of common conversations. Or it can be
8. It’s more diverse
9. It changes the tone of writing
10. It’s a level playing field
11. It has different news values
12. It has a long attention span
13. It creates communities
14. It changes notions of authority
15. It is an agent of change

Well worth a read for how he explains each point in turn, and then concludes that:

Increasingly, social media will challenge conventional politics and, for instance, the laws relating to expression and speech. [...] we can be sure that the motivating idea behind these forms of open media isn’t going away and that, if we are blind to their capabilities, we will be making a very serious mistake, both in terms of our journalism and the economics of our business.

Nick Clegg’s dishonest defence of his fees U-turn

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George Eaton on Nick Clegg’s dishonest defence of his fees U-turn:

Clegg’s suggestion that “things were even worse than we thought” is dishonest. In the period between the election and the coalition taking power, the state of the public finances improved, rather than worsened. Just ten days after Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister, the deficit was revised downwards from £163.4bn to £156bn, having previously stood at £178bn.

And then the clincher:

As the sixth-largest economy in the world, Britain can easily afford to fund free higher education through general taxation. In public expenditure terms, the UK currently spends just 0.7 per cent of its GDP on higher education, a lower level than France (1.2 per cent), Germany (0.9 per cent), Canada (1.5 per cent), Poland (0.9 per cent) and Sweden (1.4 per cent). Even the United States, where students make a considerable private contribution, spends 1 per cent of its GDP on higher education – 0.3 per cent more than the UK does.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, enter the iPhone

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Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple’s Next Macintosh OS:

The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning — and in the market — the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.

Enter the iPhone.

Courtesy of John Gruber.

We need more world news, not less

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Martin Moore:

You could say this was just a reflection of cost-cutting across the news industry. Foreign coverage is expensive, even in these days of cheap flights, mobile smartphones and instant publishing. But, if you talk to foreign correspondents, it seems that newspapers have lost confidence in the role it plays. Is foreign news something people expect to see but do not really read?

[...]

The golden age of foreign correspondents may have gone (if it ever existed), but the need for someone to report on, filter and make sense of the world is greater than it has ever been. Mainstream news organisations are still in a strong position to do this.The findings of this report indicate, though, that many are shying away from the challenge. If the decline continues, and news organisations withdraw still further from original foreign reporting, we will all lose out.

For a more international perspective, you could do worse than checking out Al Jazeera English.

Source

Twitter: breaking news before there is anything to officially break

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Bill Simmons:

Twitter, which exacerbates the demands of immediacy, blurs the line between reporting and postulating, and forces writers to chase too many bum steers. With every media company unabashedly playing the "We Had It First!" game, reporters' salary and credibility hinges directly on how many stories they break. That entices reporters to become enslaved to certain sources (almost always agents or general managers), push transparent agendas (almost always from those same agents or GMs) and "break" news before there's anything to officially break. It also swings the source/reporter dynamic heavily toward the source. Take care of me and I will take care of you.

From great article on the accidental Tweet…

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So just who does get social media?

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Matthew Eltringham:

In the last decade or more, the pressure of diminishing resources and increasing output has taken away the opportunity for journalists to do their job properly: to get out of the office and talk to real people about real things.

But the social web has given us a second chance to reconnect with people – albeit in a virtual way – and we should grab hold of that opportunity with both hands. Collaborative journalism, networked journalism, distributed journalism, mutualised journalism – call it what you will, this is the real prize that social media offers media organisations.

We should grab it with both hands, because if we don't the audience will grab it for themselves.

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