But I think many editors are remiss when it comes to the visual side of journalism. They don’t demand the same high standards of visual journalism as they do on the words side.

We’ve seen graphics that are skewed, or just plain wrong or misleading. We’ve seen illustrations that are way below par. And we’ve seen zillions of news photographs that are set up.

Take this one, from the Aug 21 issue of the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney, Australia. The story was about the effects of putting children in forward-facing prams.

The photo shows four mums at a park but unfortunately, you can tell it was set up because it is just unnatural to gather to chat like that! And look at those two kids in the pram! One’s in a forward-facing pram, and the other in a backward-facing one. How appropriate!

Or this one from Page 2 of The Australian today. The story was about how some Libyan families in Australia were celebrating the fall of Qaddafi.

The story clearly said that the mother was sitting in the lounge watching events unfolding in her homeland. But the photo showed her entire family outside the house “celebrating”. The youngest child was waving a flag and another member of the family waving two balloons.

Lovely, but I wonder why they would celebrate standing in a group outside the house?

Sadly, we see a lot of news photos that are set up in many newspapers, especially those in Australia and the UK.

But what’s wrong with posing? you ask.

Plenty, I’d say. News photos must capture what the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”.

If we do not set up stories, why do we set up news photos? Shouldn’t news photos tell the truth on the same basis as words, i.e., as it happens?

This is the 21st century, but still many newspapers stick to very old rules about photographs.

Take for example, The Australian, this morning.

Reporting on the arrest of an Australian man in Kentucky, USA, over a bomb hoax in Sydney several weeks ago, the paper used a picture of him being led handcuffed, presumably to a waiting police car.

His photo had a black strip plastered over his eyes, presumably to hide his identity since the case is still before the courts. But strangely, the story had his full name and even some details about his movements. Here it is:

I find this to be a very strange rule because across town, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a picture of him without masking his face! Here it is:

But in today’s interconnected world, newspaper readers can read about him in other newspapers, such as the The Sun in the UK, several thousand kilometres away.  Here it is:

I am sure if you are determined enough, you will find his photo in many other newspapers. Makes The Australian look a bit silly, doesn’t it?

Surely it is time newspaper editors examined all the old rules we have lived with for decades which are actually quite meaningless today. Over to you, editors.

Here it is:

The logo was created to promote the country’s rich and diverse culture. An Argentinian company was hired to create the friendly and joyful look.

The Bree typeface was stylised and customised by Type Together to give a breezy feel to the whole advertising campaign.

Have you seen beautiful logos? Or ugly ones? If so, send them to us.

The covers every week have been mostly eye-catching, with content to match.

What’s the secret? Get a top-notch art director.

That’s exactly what the magazine, renamed Bloomberg Businessweek, has done. David Thurley and his team have consistently come up with great covers.

Here are just  few examples:

After all, there is nothing original under the sun.

But I can’t help seeing blatant plagiarism by a Valentine’s Day card designer. Here it is:val2.pdf as first shown on 10,000 Words, a blog on journalism and technology (http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/).

Whoever designed that card must have stolen the idea from Nicole Peterson’s cover of Dante’s Inferno which she designed in 2008.  Here it is: dantes-inferno.pdf

You can also find it at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicole-peterson/2421871810/

What do you think?

Being a soccer fan, I wanted to know the results of the other matches to see who would progress into the next round.

Frustratingly, ESPN did not show the results in a corner of the screen as the matches were being played.

So like many soccer fans, what did I do? Go online, of course.

With my iPad logged into various soccer sites and ESPN’s own soccernet.com, I kept track of all the other matches. I knew the result of every one of those 7 matches they were being played. Why, if I wanted to, I could also have watched snippets on internet TV.

It was only at the end of the Spurs-Inter match that ESPN showed all the other results. Except for one – that between Manchester United and Turkish club Bursaspor.  Why? Because ESPN was going to show the match right after the one being telecast live and didn’t want to “spoil” the thrill for ManU fans!

Now, isn’t that pathetic?

Does ESPN think fans would not know the results before watching the delayed telecast? Are they dreaming? The irony is that its own website has a live commentary on all the matches!

The same can actually be said of newspapers.

Yesterday, the morning newspapers carried the story about Canadian Air Force Colonel  Russell Williams’rape and murder of two women, including a photo of him cross-dressing in one of the many lingeries he had stolen from these and other victims.

The story was no more than 600 words long. But it was a gripping story that made Page 1 in many newspapers around the world.

There were numerous stories in Toronto’s  National Post and The Star. You could get all the juicy details in as many papers as you like, especially Canadian ones like the National Post and the Ottawa Sun (below).

In fact, if you were an online fanatic, you could read the story well before the morning papers hit your breakfast table.

Which brings me to the following questions: Why are newspapers and TV news so awfully bad at coping with the instant availability of online news? What are they doing to counter this massive threat to their existence?

Almost every “news” story we read in the morning papers is more than 24 hours old. You can name as many stories as you like – from the rescue of the Chilean miners to 911.

More importantly, why aren’t editors thinking of how to bring a story forward instead of merely rehashing what they get from the wires?

Imagine the frustration that readers, especially younger ones who are well plugged into the internet, feel as they flip through the pages of newspapers (if they do at all). No wonder they aren’t reading and buying newspapers.

Editors should wake up before they find themselves outplayed. Like Spurs who lost 4-3.

P/S: The National Post carried the story on Page 1 as a single column. Its main image was the skyscraper home of the Ambani family in Mumbai. I first saw this photo and read the story in Forbes magazine and several other Indian newspapers and magazines more than six months ago. Are Canadians so way behind the times?

The Ottawa Sun’s Page 1 is a typical tabloid. But the killer colonel story was all radio and TV the night before.

But now it is ready to flex its journalism might.

A few days ago, Newsweek reported how Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s propaganda wing, is setting up bureaux all over the world and making its presence felt.

Today, I can reveal that another government outfit, the China Daily, is readying itself to start publishing two international editions – one for Asia and one for Europe.

These new editions are intended to give the Chinese view to the news. For long, China has viewed the West’s interpretation of events with suspicion. And it believes the only way to counter western opinion is by publishing an English-language paper that has all the hallmarks of an international newspaper.

That was why China Daily recently hired a handful of westerners, including former SND board member and managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun, Bill Gaspard. Bill redesigned the English-language paper which is published out of Beijing, giving it an international, classier look.

Take a look at the Sept 7 edition:

A senior journalist, Ravi Shankar, who has worked for China Daily for about 10 years has been dispatched to London to head up the European operations.  It is believed that the European edition of China Daily will hit the streets sometime towards the end of this year or early next year.

The Asian edition is still in the planning stages.

China now has the financial clout to publish what will certainly be loss-making newspaper operations, but profit is of the least importance to the authorities. Flipping through the current issue of the paper, you will notice that there are hardly any ads. Yet the paper employs more than 1,000 people including about 250 journalists.

The paper is headed by a senior Communist Party official with links to top government brass. Each day, journalists take instructions on how to play stories. Many subjects are taboo and will never see the light of day.

One journalist who has worked there for years tells me it is not easy coping with such a system, especially after having worked in a free press. “But the money is good,” he adds. “You just have to accept that this is the way the Chinese do things.”

And do things their way, the Chinese surely will. After all, money is of no object. It’s the war to win over minds that matters more to them.

Take the Jawa Pos group, the second biggest media organisation in Indonesia after Kompas., for example.

Helming the newspaper division is Azrul Ananda, who is under 30, having taken over operations from his father.

Azrul tells me that a majority of his journalists are very much like him or younger. Here he is holding the latest issue of Asian Newspaper Focus published by WAN-Ifra with him and his dad on the cover.

The Jawa Pos group has about 140 newspapers throughout Indonesia, plus  20 TV channels. Its biggest paper is the Jawa Pos in Surabaya, with a readership of 1.45 million, which is more than Kompas the national newspaper based in Jakarta.

Jawa Pos is perhaps one of the few, if not the only, paper to have a daily youth section. This “Deteksi” section has three pages each day and is entirely run by young journalists whose average age is just 20.

Move over to Croatia, and there, too is a very successful newspaper called 24 Sata, which, again is run by a team of young people.

Boris Trupcevic, the editorial director, is just a touch above 30, and the CEO of the group is not much older.

24 Sata is an A4 newspaper started about four or five years ago. Its strength is in short and snappy stories, the longest of which is six paragraphs!

Is it not quite clear that newsrooms all over the world need to dust off the cobwebs and turn to youth?

Here’s a photo taken from my car while driving around Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago.

What’s amazing is that morning papers are still being sold in the evening.

Does that mean the morning papers are not doing as well?

Latest circulation figures show that many papers there have taken a hit in sales. The top-selling paper, The Sunday Times, suffered a 40,000 decline year on year in the last quarter.

Drops of 20,000 is not uncommon.

Nobody seems to have any idea why. But one thing it does show is that it is absolutely not true  that newspapers will sell if there are lots of things above the fold.

This comes as a shocker since she is the media writer for the paper!

While it is true that it is very much a boys’ club (in the words of Caroline, “the vibe was very much like that at Car Dealer  of the Year” with “945 men plus three women, one of whom had to play barrel girl”) it is quite wrong to dismiss an organisation that has done much for newspapers, especially those in Australia and New Zealand.

Unfortunately, Panpa has not grown out of its Australia-New Zealand axis despite having been around since 1969 (probably longer than Caroline has lived).

Most of the attendees at its annual conference over the years have been papers in these two countries, although its name suggests it should really represent publishers in the Pacific area which is quite vast.

Journalistic awards dished out at its annual gala dinner have been anything but world class, save for a few of the bigger papers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.

Only a handful of the papers that win awards at Panpa will ever make the cut at international competitions such as the Society for News Design’s annual design competition or the International Colour Quality Club.

To be fair, many of the awards for marketing, circulation and non-journalistic ones have been of a very high standard.

Does that say something about the standard of journalism, especially in the smaller cities and towns of Australia  and New Zealand?