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Photojournalist Nilüfer Demir was on duty, pool photographer accompanying other Turkish journalists reporting on refugees attempting to across the Aegean Sea from Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos and from there, hopefully, escape the tempast that is Syria for safety. She has seen many refugees, many little inflatable boats. She saw on the beach early Wednesday morning (September 2) a tiny lifeless human being and took the picture.
“At that moment, where I saw the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, I was petrified,” she said, quoted by Dogan News Agency (DHA), her employer (September 3). “The only thing I could do was to make heard his cry. At that moment, I believed I would be able to achieve this by triggering the shutter of my camera and took his picture.”
Within hours that and other of her photos and videos were instilled across the globe. “I have a mixture of sadness and satisfaction,” she said to Le Monde (September 3). “I'm glad to have been able to show this image to so many people, of having testified, and on the other hand, I would prefer that this boy is still alive and that this image should not be around the world.”
“I have pictured, witnessed many migrant incidents since 2003 in this region, their deaths, their drama,” said Ms Demir. “I hope from today, this will change.”
This week about 5,000 people a day have crossed the Aegean Sea into Greece, reported the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in a press statement (September 4). There's no estimate of those who didn't make it.
Newly installed French public TV broadcaster president Delphine Ernotte wasted little time putting together a new senior team and presenting ideas for the future. France Télévisions has drifted in a climate of increased digital competition and reduced advertising revenues. Mme Ernotte had been CEO of telecom Orange France, succeeding Rémy Pflimlin, whose term expired.
One idea, not necessarily new, is collaborating with France Radio, a separate organization, on an all-news channel in the digital sphere within the next year. France Télévisions already operates all-news TV channel France 24 and France Radio has all-news radio channel France Info, both available online. Germain Dagognet, newly arrived from TF1’s digital all-news channel LCI as deputy news director, and France Info news director Laurent Guimier will lead the project with “calm and harmony displayed,” reported Le Monde (September 2). Mme Ernotte said getting approval for a digital TV license is “secondary” to other considerations. (See more about media in France here)
"I expect to learn more, but of course, I am very supportive of this project,” said Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin, through whom all French public broadcasting projects must pass, on France Info (September 2). Minister Pellerin was more reserved on suggestions from Mme Ernotte that ads on France Télévisions be returned to early evenings and that license fee contributions be extended to digital natives.
Commercial radio broadcast licenses in the Netherlands, set to expire en masse two years from now, are likely to be extended for five years. All commercial broadcast licenses - AM/MW, FM and DAB+ - will be affected. It does not mean the regularly scheduled fee auction will be put off.
As explained by Economic Affairs Minister Henk Kamp in official correspondence, quoted by media magazine.nl (September 1), “the plan will need to demonstrate a convincing acceleration of digitization.” DAB+ broadcasters, virtually all Dutch stations, will need to “improve indoor coverage by January 1st 2016 and increase marketing efforts to convince consumers to switch to digital platforms.” (See more about digital radio here) None of this affects the scheduled auction of new DAB+ licenses early in 2017.
During the remainder of this year Minister Kamp will have a “robust” consultation with broadcasters on a variety of issues, digital and otherwise. One is ownership limits and the potential to lift restrictions. Another is geographic restrictions, less likely to change. Program formats - part of a broadcaster’s license - are not likely to be made more flexible. (See more about media in the Netherlands here)
The marketplace for online news portals - pure players, not simply brand extensions of publications - appears unlimited. Though, perhaps, no longer springing up like mushrooms writers, editors and entrepreneurs continue to be drawn to the web for the promise of financial gain or, more often, a little ego boost. The online news scene - censorship issues notwithstanding - is quite robust.
Over the last decade or so a few of these online news brands have taken to international expansion. The gossipy news aggregator Huffington Post (HuffPo) moved into Canada and the UK in 2011 followed by French-language editions separately for France and the Canadian province of Quebec. After that it was on to Spanish-language editions for the US Spain and Latin America then Italy, Japan, Germany and Brazil. HuffPo, owned by AOL and directed by founder Arianna Huffington, ventured into France in cooperation with legacy newspaper Le Monde, Italy with Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso (La Repubblica), Japan with Asahi Shimbun, Germany with the weekly news magazine and portal Focus (Hubert Burda Media) and Brazil with Abril Group. Other expansion announced a year ago has yet to materialize.
Following much the same track Business Insider, a news portal focused on business and technology targeting a “younger” audience, will in the next few months have German and French editions. Heretofore it has expanded from the US to the UK and Asia/Pacific in English. So excited by the Business Insider brand, Axel Springer took a stake in the publisher, somewhere between 7% and 10%, intending to produce a German-language edition later this year by coupling with its business news portal finanzen.net. (See more about online news here)
The French edition of Business Insider will be produced by Prisma Media, part of German publisher Gruner+Jahr, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, under a license agreement. “The Business Insider brand is an opportunity to speak to a younger, more techie target,” said Prisma Media editorial director Martin Trautmann, quoted by Les Echos (August 30). "We have invested a lot in digital and this agreement will allow us to learn more and exchange good practices.”
Slate, Buzzfeed and Mashable have French editions with varying degrees of success. Axel Springer and gossipy political news portal Politico earlier this year launched a European edition - politico.eu - focused on Brussels institutions in English. Site traffic exceeded the million eyeball threshold in July, said an Axel Springer statement quoted by horizont.net (August 4).
The horrific discovery and subsequent worldwide reporting of people who had suffered ghastly demise inside a sealed van near the Austria-Hungary border raised further outrage over the crime and its victims. News media during that final week of summer holidays raced to the scene and were, by most accounts, thoroughly sickened, a view expressed over and over. Explicit descriptions were chilling, as they should have been.
The Austrian Press Council is meeting this week to pass judgment on the “ethics” of tabloid Kronen Zeitung publishing online (August 28) photos of the victims - only faces pixelated - before they had been removed from the van. It is assumed, reasonably substantiated, that the photos were provided by authorities on the scene. Austrian law, similar in many countries, forbids publication of identifying information about victims of a crime before allowed by a court. Public criticism of the publication was “massive,” reported Austrian news portal kurier.at (August 28).
"The faces of the fatalities are not visible, thereby protecting the identity,” explained Krone Multimedia spokesperson Richard Schmidt, quoted by Der Standard (August 29). “In a tragedy of this magnitude corresponding illustrations must be possible.” Kronen Zeitung is Austria’s biggest newspaper by circulation, very anti-immigrant, very eurosceptic. It is jointly owned by the founding Dichland family and German publisher WAZ Mediengruppe.
The German Press Council (Deutschen Presserat) is also looking into “inappropriate sensationalism,” said spokesperson Edda Eick, quoted by tagesspiegel.de (August 31), as the same photos were published by tabloid Bild and Berliner Zeitung (BZ), rights apparently sold-on by Kronen Zeitung. Herr Schmidt of Krone Multimedia said money from sales of the photos would be donated to NGOs supporting refugees. The right-wing populist tabloid Bild is owned by publisher Axel Springer. Center-left Berliner Zeitung is owned by publisher M. DuMont Schauberg.
Spotify’s recent changes in user contract terms prohibiting playlist curators from accepting certain gratuities from music labels raises, again, the naive but widely-held belief that cool stuff online is authentic in contrast with the realities of commerce, digital or otherwise. Some online music playlist curators are getting paid as much as US$10,000 through music companies marketing channels to include certain tunes, reported music industry trade portal billboard.com (August 19). Payola’s dark art is back in the headlines.
“We are absolutely against any kind of pay to playlist or sale of playlists,” said a Spotify statement, quoted by the Independent (August 20). It’s bad for artists and it’s bad for fans. We have a strict policy against allowing any user to accept any kind of compensation for placing a song or an artist on a playlist.” The big four music companies - Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI - are equity stakeholders in Spotify, which competes in the music streaming business with Apple Music, Deezer and others.
Financial arrangements between music companies and online music streaming services is completely legal. It just smells bad. "It's a logical extension of our marketing services,” said Universal Music France president Pascal Nègre, quoted by Les Echos (August 25). “We now have people dealing with the exposure of our tracks in playlists. Playlists are taking center stage.”
Old fashioned payola - made illegal for radio broadcasters last century in the US but nowhere else - migrated from cash and contraband to DJs, then program directors and up the proverbial ladder. US broadcasters are lobbying for further relaxation of payola rules. Marketing people in other industries scratch their heads, mildly amused: grocery store shelf space has long been sold to the highest bidder.
Unhappy with the presence of a RAI news team in their gated Rome suburb family members of a recently departed loved one became rather indignant. Indeed there was a fair bit of yelling and screaming, jostling and rather blunt demands for a video camera and mobile phone, all reported by public broadcaster RAI News (August 23). Police stepped in to diffuse the situation and, as the camera operator was slapped around, arrested a couple of family members.
This wasn’t a ordinary domestic disturbance involving nosy journalists. Those “family members” are part of the Casamonica and Spinelli clans best known for unsavory occupations including extortion, drug trafficking and racketeering. A few days earlier the lavish funeral of “godfather” Vittorio Casamonica - horse-drawn cortège, rose petals dropped from a helicopter - was the big headline grabber in Italy, August being what it is. (See more about media in Italy here)
“A man threatened to kill me, telling me repeatedly ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t give me the camera’,” said RAI 3 journalist Alfonso Iuliano. “We were surrounded by a dozen people. Only the intervention of the police prevented the worse.” Earlier a reporter for news portal fanpage.it tracking down that helicopter involved in the funeral was threatened with burial in ”an empty swimming pool.”
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