Even though I rarely contribute direct to my news agency's newswire, I do routinely check the general Russian wire for hundreds of news headlines and read at least couple dozen or so stories a day. Social media exchange notwithstanding, of course.

Quite often the general news contain dry reporting on violence and murders based on information the agency gathers from its sources in the Interior Ministry, Investigative Committee…

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Novelty media tools for communicators were presented and discussed in Davos, Switzerland on 10 February during a panel on media communications at the Communications on Top forum. The three presentations on social media, semantic Web, and visualization were done by Jochen Spangenberg, media manager, Nikos Sarris, R&D…

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On November 21-22 the 6th Forum of European and Asian Media (FEAM) was held in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Over 250 top managers, editors, journalists and bloggers from traditional and new media of CIS countries, the Baltic states, and Georgia shared their views and opinions. Here are some of the highlights from the forum as tweeted in English. Hope you will find them useful.…

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On both sides of the communications barricades news agency reporting is often compared to producing commodities. At RIA Novosti top editors often use the phrase 'sausage factory' to illustrate our way of making newswires. There are two strong points in favor of such approach – consistency of content and balance of its accuracy.

Heisenberg uncertainty…

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Today’s editorial in Russia’s financial daily Vedomosti  is about well-known bloggers that basically serve as citizen beacons by focusing on particular areas where the respective government agencies have been slow to act. All these bloggers are first of all activists that have dealt with the public service’s bureaucracy, incompetence, silence and blatant wrongdoing for many years.

The column mentions some of them together with functions of the…

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One week ago experienced journalist and blogger Nikolay Troitsky wrote in his Russian language blog he dreamt of blowing up all the gay people with a special bomb. If you haven’t heard of this, please refer to this post in my journalism-related blog.

Probably the most surprising was the polar feedback coming from Russian journalists, bloggers, officials and social activists. However most feedback dealt with the context of…

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Nikolay Troitsky, a political commentator and columnist at RIA Novosti, has been reprimanded and dismissed over homophobic blog posts addressing the gay parade in Berlin and the gay community of Russia.

The blog posts appeared early this week in Troitsky's personal LiveJournal blog. Russian bloggers were…

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Please see my blog post here.

While much talk is devoted to the bloggers vs. journalists issue, the bloggers vs. traditional media one is often overlooked. Here's one case where it was presented with a strong anti-media bias.

 

At the recent MediaBusiness…

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An excerpt from my interview with PR guru Paul Holmes. The full version can be found here.

 

Paul Holmes: I think journalists are going to have to, to a certain extent, think more like PR people, journalism is becoming much more about individual brands,…

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This is a repost from my IABC blog



National news agencies have served traditional media like newspapers, radio and TV in their respective countries for dozens of years., limiting themselves to the b2b segment. No matter what the ownership - private, semi-private, public or state - they kept faith in their media stakeholders and clients, concentrating solely on their information needs, relying on such clients to convey the… Continue