Online Journalism Blog

I’ve set up a Facebook group for journalism and news entrepreneurs - a place to network, share ideas and gather support. Join it if you think it’ll be useful.

PS: If you’ve not joined the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group, please do. It’s great.

See this video and respond on Seesmic

I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.

It isn’t.

It’s social. (more…)

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. (more…)

In his first post for the OJB Wilbert Baan looks at sorting news by systems

The website as we know it is breaking apart. Widgets, API’s and feeds take information to other places outside the domain. In a network culture we like to take our information with us. Your mobile phone, desktop, widgets, websites, digital television, everywhere. For the EN project I am thinking about how we can interact with news as an object. How can we take the article everywhere or use it to make new collections.

The article as a social object

For example on Flickr the picture is the social object. It connects you to your friends. You have a personal contact page where you see the pictures that are relevant to you. All of these photos are probably public information, but it is the selection based on your personal network that makes this page interesting for you. (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.” (more…)

There’s the image, here’s the post. (via SteveBridger)

Part four of this five-part series looks at how interactivity forms the basis of true online journalism, and explores ways to think about interactivity in practice. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism - comments very much invited.

In his 2001 book Online Journalism, Jim Hall argues that, in the age of the web, interactivity could be added to impartiality, objectivity and truth as a core value of journalism. It is that important.

Interactivity is central to how journalism has been changed by the arrival of the internet. Whereas the news industries of print, radio and TV placed control firmly in the hands of the publishers and journalists, online you try to control people at your peril.

It is important to remember that people use the web on devices - whether a computer, mobile phone or PDA - with cultural histories of usefulness or utility, very different to the cultural histories of television, radio or even print.

People go online to do something. Companies that help with that process tend to prosper online. Those that attempt to curtail users’ ability to do things with their content often find themselves on the end of a backlash.

News is, of course, a service. But up until now news organisations have been under the mistaken impression that it is a product. The web is reminding them otherwise.

What is interactivity?

Interactivity is not video, or ‘multimedia’; it is not flashy bells and whistles. At its core, it is about giving the user control. (more…)

Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right. (more…)

Last Friday I tried a little experiment with Twitter: I used it to live-review the Clay Shirky book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Amazon US).

Why did I do it?

It wasn’t a preview copy, so there was no ’scoop’ here.

It wasn’t a live event, either. As Dave Lee pointed out, “A book is a book. It’s not changing. Read it all and then tell me whether it’s any good or not.”

I did it, well, because I could. Because I wanted to give myself a reason to read the book without distraction. Because I wanted to see how viral it would go. Because I wanted to see how social you could make that most anti-social of activities: reading a book.

The thing is, Dave was mistaking Twitter for a pure publishing platform. What I discovered was this: it was about a conversation, not a publication: (more…)

That’s the question Birmingham Post reporter Joanna Geary has been asking herself, and has come up with the following rather lovely graphic:

Clickon the image for a larger, more readable version - you’ll see she’s looking for availability of email contacts, use of things like maps, blogs, bookmarking, video (is that interactive? Or multimedia?), email newsletters, mobile alerts, RSS, podcasts, chats, forums - and Twitter: “I know it’s not yet a mass communication device but I think it’s a good indicator of those who are thinking about the development of the market” (more…)