Online Journalism Blog

The team at JournalismEnterprise.com have been busy – here are some of the most recent reviews:

Pownce: a Twitter with bells on.

EveryBlock: Adrian Holovaty’s much-anticipated news mapping service gets a five-star rating.

Newstin: multilingual news search: “Its taxonomy engine goes way beyond the usual keyword and tags approach. For each article, Newstin’s engine is able to tell you what it’s about, who was mentioned, where it happened, etc.”

Gnooze:  satirical daily news show for YouTube browsers.

Skewz: “a political Digg that goes both ways. You can submit any news story and the community can vote on how “liberal” or “conservative” the story is.”

As always, the review is only the start of the process: please add your own comments on the sites. And if you want to review sites for JournalismEnterprise.com, what’s stopping you? Send an email to info@journalismenterprise.com to join.

In the final part of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom I look at how new media has compounded problems in news organisations’ core business models – and the new business models which it could begin to explore.

Let’s start by looking at the traditional newspaper business model. This has rested on selling, in a broad simplification, three things:

• Advertising. Put more explicitly: selling readers to advertisers.
• Selling content to readers, and, twinned with that:
• Selling the delivery platform to readers – i.e. the paper

Developments in the past few decades have eaten into each of those areas as follows: [Read more]

The Online Journalism Atlas continues, with Kristine Lowe looking at online journalism in Norway, where some newspapers make more money online than in print. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

Norway is one of the most newspaper-reading in countries in the world, a fact also reflected in the country’s online media environment. In contrast to many other countries, Norwegians seem to prefer news-driven sites with journalistic content to all others. 

Early starters

Early adoption has put Norwegian online media at a great at advantage, some of the online players even earn good money.   [Read more]

The Telegraph is starting to make a habit of combining Flash and databases to impressive effect. Their latest project brings in mapping too, to produce a political map of the UK which has real depth behind its Flashy appearance.

[Read more]

So the Independent has relaunched its website. At first glance there’s nothing spectacularly new or innovative, but a deeper look reveals some intelligent changes – particularly on the business side of things. Here are the headlines: [Read more]

Last week I interviewed Mike Hill, Deputy Editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, for an article on changing tools and approaches in local newsrooms (due to appear on Journalism.co.uk). Mike has some interesting plans on using surveys beyond the simple reader poll (since reported here), and experiences of the weaknesses of geotagging, among other things. The interview can be heard here - it’s around 10 minutes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In two weeks I begin teaching the 2008 class on Online Journalism. As a way of inviting ideas and being open source and all that, I thought I would post 2007’s classes online. The first lecture is below…

[slideshare id=238451&doc=online-journalism-week-1-why-1201105913554634-2&w=425]

…it’s very much one-word slides with me riffing off them, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what areas I covered. The idea here is to get students thinking about their own motivations before they begin, and for me to get an idea of why they’re doing this. [Read more]

Eric Ulken has taken “all the online job descriptions on JournalismJobs.com from this year, omitted the non-technical words (like “editor”, “seeks” and “self-starter”) and built a tagcloud out of the rest”. This is the result:

Eric Ulken | Technical skills in journalism jobs

Blogged with Flock

Last semester (Nov 2007), as part of a module I teach called Magazine Design, I asked students to contribute to a wiki looking at magazines’ new media ventures. Each student was assigned a particular magazine sector (e.g. B2B or computing) and had to explore the websites, find information etc.

Some will think me cruel for making students look at the websites of the likes of Uniforms Magazine and Mailing Systems Technology. [Read more]

Two weeks ago I conducted a mini-survey of readers. For those who responded, thank you very much – for those who tried to but couldn’t because it was closed, apologies (Surveymonkey’s free version only allows 100 responses and it reached that point within two days). Here are the results:

Employment

• By far the biggest category, 47% of readers are online journalists. 29% described themselves as print journalists, and 6% broadcast, but as respondents could fill in more than one category, I’m guessing the majority of online journalists write for print or broadcast as well. [Read more]