Television news refers to disseminating current events via the medium of television. A “news bulletin” or a “newscast” are programs lasting from seconds to hours that provide updates on world, national, regional or local news events prreach.com is very image-based, showing video of many of the events that are reported. Television channels may provide news bulletins as part of a regularly scheduled news program. Less often, television shows may be interrupted or replaced by breaking news (“news flashes”) to provide news updates on events of great importance.
Television review: BBC’s ‘The Hour’ is time well spent
When the BBC’s six-part period piece “The Hour” premiered last year, critics were divided — mostly by the Atlantic.
In Britain, reviews of the show, which revolves around the creation of an envelope-pushing television news magazine called “The Hour” in 1950s London, groused about the slow pace, the outlandish spy intrigue and its occasional preachiness. In the U.S., the reaction was more of a collective swoon; the mood, the costumes, the writing, the cast (and of course those accents!) were so intoxicating that even an increasingly absurd plot proved only a minor distraction. Ironically, the second season begins as BBC News finds itself embroiled in a reporting scandal that would serve nicely as an A-plot for the show. “The Hour” holds, as most journalism-based theater does, that hard-working reporters are too often undone by keepers who cower behind a Potemkin village of “standards” and “policy” in an effort to avoid controversy — unless controversy pays the bills, in which case they manufacture it.
But “The Hour,” like “Mad Men” to which it has been exhaustingly compared, is more concerned with its workplace as a window on an era and a nation than it is exposing the inner-workings of journalism. As Season 2 opens, the show within the show is now solidly successful, having made its anchor, Hector Madden (Dominic West) enough of a star that he now wiles his time away in nightclubs, signing autographs and consorting with chorus girls, only to skid into the studio with seconds to spare. Watching the clock and sighing in irritated resignation is producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), who puts up with Hector’s antics for the same reason his wife, Marnie (Oona Chaplin), does — because he is talented and charming and because, as women in the 1950s, they may have increasing influence but they do not yet have real power. Randall Brown (Peter Capaldi), Bel’s new boss, on the other hand, does have power.
Within minutes of the first episode, he not only gives Madden an ultimatum, he brings in a co-host/possible replacement, none other than Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), the dogged young firebrand around whom last season revolved. After broadcasting an interview that questioned the British government, Freddie was fired, leaving Bel bereft of both a constant if unrequited suitor and her most brilliant news gatherer. FULL COVERAGE: Television reviews
So this season’s cast, which includes the deliciously oily government press secretary Angus (Julian Rhind-Tutt) and the wry, dry foreign news editor Lix (Anna Chancellor), is not just as terrific as it was last season, its better. Capaldi’s Brown may seem buttoned-down and OCD finicky, but he’s here to turn the heat up, not down. He not only questions “The Hour’s” rather smug self-confidence, he clearly has a past with Lix, which means we may finally get to see more of Chancellor, who already steals every scene she’s in by simply squinting through the inevitable plume of cigarette smoke.
Con artists are stealing the identities of real journals to cheat scientists out of publishing fees.
Scientific publishing, meet cybercrime. Two reputable European science journals have fallen prey to identity theft by criminals who have created counterfeit journal websites. These online doppelgangers have duped hundreds of researchers into paying author fees, with the ill-won gains being funneled to Armenia. Editors of the victim journals first learned of the scam last year, but their attempts to put a stop to it have so far come to nothing. The crooked websites are masquerading as Archives des Sciences, a multidisciplinary journal founded in 1791 and published by the Society of Physics and Natural History of Geneva (SPHN) in Switzerland; and Wulfenia, a botany journal published by the Regional Museum of Carinthia in Klagenfurt, Austria. The scammers attend to the closest of details, displaying on multiple websites not only the titles of the authentic journals, but also their impact factors, postal addresses and international standard serial numbers — the unique codes used to identify journals. Editors of the authentic publications fear that the ruse has tainted the reputations of their journals. “Victims are regularly contacting me to ask about the status of their papers: they transfer money and don’t see their papers published,” says Roland Eberwein, editor-in-chief of the authentic Wulfenia and head of the Botanic Center at the Carinthia museum, which includes a herbarium of more than 200,000 specimens.
“We are currently wasting our time trying to fight these people,” says Robert Degli Agosti, editor-in-chief of Archives des Sciences and a plant biologist and electrophysiologist at the University of Geneva. Neither of the authentic journals has its own dedicated website, making them easy prey for imposters. In response to the scam, however, the SPHN and the Carinthia museum have put warning notices on their home pages, and Wulfenia has started publishing its back issues online.
The forged sites look so convincing that they initially misled Thomson Reuters, a metrics company based in New York that produces the Scientific Citation Index and compiles journal impact factors. But by May last year, the company had become suspicious, writing to the SPHN for an explanation of the “huge discrepancy” between the content of articles in print issues of Archives des Sciences — which Thomson Reuters indexes — and on the website. It noted, too, a discrepancy in publishing frequency: “We receive and index 2 issues of each volume for each year, while the website is now listing 12 issues per volume, one each month,” it wrote to the society. One of the imposters had even persuaded Thomson Reuters to include a link to the false journal in its list of indexed publications; the company moved swiftly to remove the link when the scam was uncovered. The action triggered “a barrage of complaints and requests to reactivate the link from representatives of the false journal”, says Marie McVeigh, director of content selection at Thomson Reuters. She says that the company has also received enquiries from customers “asking why the articles that had been accepted by one of the false journals were not appearing in our indexes”. “The quality and integrity of our content is of the greatest importance to us,” adds McVeigh.
In a further impudent touch, the various counterfeit Archives des Sciences websites list an editorial board with 87 members, including Daniel Gamelin, a chemist and materials scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Gerald Cleaver, a high-energy physicist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Both are perplexed — and annoyed. “This is the first I have heard of this website or of my listing; I have no affiliation with this organization, nor have I ever,” says Gamelin. Cleaver, too, says that his name is being used without his permission. The ‘editor-in-chief’ of the fake Archives des Sciences journal is named on the counterfeit websites as “Prof. Dr. Eliana Schmid”, with the affiliation “Geneva, Switzerland”. The counterfeit Wulfenia sites give as the editor-in-chief Vienna S. Franz and list 35 editorial-board members, with most affiliations giving only city and country. Eberwein and Degli Agosti think that these named editors-in-chief are fictional. Researchers who have submitted to the fake journals pay dearly.