Dave Molloy

Many of you will probably have heard of the Your Country, Your Call campaign which was launched this last Wednesday. It’s an initiative looking for two ideas to revitalise the Irish economy, and is willing to pay €100,000 for each of those ideas. I am, by nature, slightly cynical, in that I always ask where the money is in any new project- who benefits? After all, no-one does anything like this without a good reason.

At a preview evening for this new initiative, however, I was massively impressed by the genuine enthusiasm and positive thinking of the group behind this- specifically, people like Martin McAleese and Ferdinand Von Prondzynski. There’s certainly no cynicism there. These men and women behind the project genuinely believe in what they’re doing. And at this event, no mention whatsoever was made of the sponsors, contributors, etc- the website itself doesn’t seek publicity for the financial contributors either.

In short, while many, and I include myself in that, may have low expectations for the outcome of this project (I don’t think we’ll kick-star the entire economy, I’m afraid), I hope I’m proven wrong. McAleese and his co-workers are doing something good for the country with the best of intentions, and I hope they get hundreds, thousands of excellent ideas and make something great out of it. It’s so rare to see something so apparently pure of motive, and it deserves as much attention and success as possible.

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I’ve got to take the hat off to Nick Petrie over at Redbrick (the paper of Birmingham University) for doing something I wasn’t aware could easily be done: creating an iPhone app for his paper.

The app is powered by a service called MotherApp, which takes content from RSS and Twitter feeds and plugs it directly into a pre-established template. Simple, yet effective. The app splits advertising revenue 50/50 between MotherApp and the content provider, or it can be taken ad-free for an annual subscription of $99.

Now, it’s not exactly perfect. There’s only an option for a single RSS feed, so far as I can see, so there’s no way of splitting content into news/sport/features etc. But for a starting point, it seems like a great and cheap (even free) way to dip into the mobile sphere. Now, there’s obviously the problem that it requires a consistently up-to-date web service, which, sadly, is a challenge for many student papers (my own included). But, if you are running a tight online ship that’s keeping your visitors coming back for more between publication dates of your print issues, it might e something to consider.

And, of course, it’s easy to point out that this functionality could be made available via a mobile web browser.But that’s not the point- Petrie is giving his audience options, and maybe many of them will appreciate having a dedicated app for the purpose. And, short of having a programmer to hand or employing one (who knows Cocoa, Objective-C etc.), simple yet effective services like this are the only real way for the student press to do this kind of thing.

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There’s an excellent piece published on The Guardian today, titled “Waking up to press slaughter”. In it, Jim Boumelha, President of the International Federation of Journalists, argues that the press need to take more responsibility for publicising the plight of their own kind, and mount pressure on the international community to combat the targeted assassination of journalists. There’s an interesting point to be made here. From the above-linked article:

For many years the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has been publishing on the first of January the list of journalists killed in the past year, but it’s rare for commentators to show the slightest interest. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record, with the IFJ listing 137 journalists and media workers killed across the world. Only a few newspapers, among them the Guardian, bothered to report it. Imagine if these were killed politicians or killed policemen. In almost every corner of the globe, journalists continue to be targeted, brutalised and killed. Some say they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But journalists have a duty to be on the spot when news is in the making.

On a day when most media headlines and blogs will be devoted to the decision by Google to stop censoring its search results in China, I thought I’d encourage you to read the piece and think about the genuine dangers of a career in serious investigative journalism.

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This is something that was pointed out to me a while back, but I’ve only noticed it myself now. Both Trinity News and The University Observer are being indexed by Google News, apparently since the start of this academic year.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons- I know with Trinity News never specifically added itself to Google News. Yet, somehow, we’re recognised as an information portal. We’re currently running on Joomla, whereas the Observer is running on WordPress- meaning that the choice of CMS seems to have little to do with compatibility. Inclusion also raises the stakes for student publications here, as any error or possible defamatory statement could, in theory, be carried in Google News Alerts, delivered by e-mail directly to those whom they refer to. While I’m not suggesting that student papers shouldn’t take due care, it’s a reasonable concern for institutions with such limited resources. I’d also see it as an indicator that Google is listening to all the critics who have been pushing for a focus on hyper-local news.

With some major news organisations complaining about Google’s aggregation, etc, I feel rather privileged to have my institution deemed important enough to join its ranks.

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