Online Journalism Blog

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom Wordpress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool - as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. [Read more]

Below is a video post asking, well, “What would make you post video comments?” You can see all the replies, and my own contributions to the conversation, below the main video (scroll left and right to see more). You can also post video comments directly to this blog post by clicking through to it and going to the area just below where comments are normally posted. Some very interesting discussion that’s worth browsing through, and which I doubt would have taken place without video/Seesmic.

[Read more]

Dennis’s online-only (and hugely successful) magazine Monkey is set to launch another website next Wednesday (at MonkeyMag.co.uk) with a focus on the social. It’s “for readers”, you see.

A press release says the website

“will be centred around the same type of great video found in Monkey, while also encouraging readers to interact with the site by posting their own ratings and exchanging comments on the clips. The website will also offer daily content not found in the mag, competitions and exclusive chances to vote for what you want to see featured in upcoming issues.” [Read more]

Amidst the recent furore over Max Gogarty’s unblog-like/allegedly nepotistic travel blog entry on the Guardian website, a phrase caught my eye: Director of Digital Content Emily Bell’s reference to their “duty of care” to blogger Max.

It particularly interested me because I had a similar experience recently with a student blogger, who was on the receiving end of ferocious (and partly justified) criticism on an Australian alpha blog.

What was my duty of care to her? [Read more]

Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine - Things.

She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.

“I don’t have a website,” she replied.

“But you have a blog?”

“Yes.”

“Facebook?”

“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”

“So you do have a web strategy.” [Read more]

Kudos to two of my student journalists who had the nous to report on last night’s earthquake as soon as it happened, using Twitter, blogs and the website, and sourcing from forums, Twitter, blogs, and Flickr.

Quickest off the draw was Stephen Nunes, who posted a tweet complete with link to the U.S. Geological Survey (journalistic quandary: to twitter immediately without verification, or to get the facts?)

Meanwhile, Mitchell Jones was also twittering - about his scrambling for information about the earthquake.

Once he’d gathered some facts, he blogged it. In addition to the official sources and other news outlets, Mitch had also gathered some original material from blogs and blog comments.

(And the Flickr-sourced image of a bleary-eyed housemate in dressing gown watching the news was an unusual one, but in the absence of the old lump-of-debris snap it kinda works for me as a representation of what was happening across the country - and he gets credit for thinking visually).

Cleverly, he’s obviously set up Twitterfeed to post blog updates to his Twitter account too.

Within two hours the story had gone live on the Environmental News Online website, complete with tags.

Congratulations, Mitchell, on a job well done.

What do they say it is?

“ScribbleSheet is about people expressing their opinions. It’s for people who have something to say but do not have the time to maintain a blog, or a job at their local newspaper. These opinions go unheard. ScribbleSheet wants to give everyday citizen journalism a home by making writing an article as simple as composing an email. [Read more]

Since I wrote the Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story post I’ve been responding to the hugely helpful posts and leads, and developing the idea further. As the deadline for Round 2 of the Knight News Challenge looms on Friday I thought I would post the latest on how the idea is shaping up, including a mockup (click for full size):

So here’s what’s happened since that first post: [Read more]

So far this model has looked at sourcing stories in the new media age, and reporting a news story in the new media age. In this third part I look at what should happen after a news story has been reported, using a familiar framework: the 5 Ws and a H - who, what, where, why, when and how.

A web page - unlike a newspaper, magazine or broadcast - is never finished - or at least, can always be updated. Its permanence is central to its power, and relates directly to its connectivity (and therefore visibility).

Once out there it can be linked to, commented on, discussed, dissected, tagged, bookmarked and sent to a friend. That can take place on the original news site, but it probably doesn’t. The story is no longer yours. So once the news site has added comments, a message board, ‘email to a friend’ boxes and ‘bookmark this’ buttons, what more can it do? [Read more]

What motivates you to comment on a post? Or if you’ve never commented, why not (until now)? Let’s make this the most-commented post on the blog.