Online Journalism Blog

What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? [Read more]

Could 2008 be the year geotagging breaks through? Archant are the ones to watch in the UK with (delayed) plans to geotag all their stories. I asked Suffolk’s Web Editor James Goffin to write a piece for the OJB on his experience with the process – and the opportunities it’s opening up. 

Journalists have always asked the question “Where?”. People are interested in news from where they live, and it’s a sad fact that tragedies abroad have more resonance when there’s a British passport holder involved.

As communities have become more mobile, those associations have become more complex â€" people reminisce about their home town, where they used to work; they are interested in where they live now, where their brothers and sisters have moved to. The world around them has become more complex too, as has the sheer amount of information being pumped out around them. [Read more]

The fourth post of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom looks at how distribution is changing from a push/pull model to a tripartite, push-pull-pass, one.

In the 20th century, commercial distribution of news was relatively straightforward: if you worked in print, you published a newspaper or magazine at a particular time, it was transported to outlets, and people picked it up (or it was delivered). If you worked in broadcast, you broadcast it at a particular time, and people watched or listened.

Simple.

In the 21st century, the picture is a little more complicated. [Read more]

[Keyword: journalism, online journalism]. I’ve only just caught up with Shane Richmond’s post on the future (or proposed death) of newspapers, following a seminar which suggested in the year 2012 “a typical media group will have a stable of publications: a daily premium news magazine, a free daily paper, a portfolio of websites, an internet television channel and a hyperlocal publishing network.”

Richmond disagrees with the magazine element because “people are less and less inclined to pay for bundles of content” and the RSS-fuelled Daily Me (Frighteningly, Negroponte’s idea is over a decade old) is a “model of media consumption that leads me to believe that media delivery to portable devices (phones, PDAs, electronic readers, flexible displays etc) will, at some stage in the future, supersede ink-on-paper media. I think so, others in the room disagreed.”

I’m of the mind to agree that portable devices and the My Google-style personalised news page will come to dominate news consumption, but that paper will continue to have an important role for the reason that RSS still requires you to select what interests you, whereas paper presents a browsing experience different to the ’search-and-scan’ approach online. Research shows people are very task-oriented when they go online; a paper is an opportunity to come across stories you wouldn’t otherwise find; and in a local paper context, get an overall picture of what’s happening.

Now, two things may change this: first, social recommendation. When those whose judgement we trust begin to drive our news consumption in a mainstream way, the editor’s role becomes, if not redundant, at least transplanted. Second: screen resolution. When reading a story online or on a portable device becomes as comfortable as reading paper, we may drop the search-and-scan approach.

As for magazines, as I’ve written elsewhere, I think one future for them is as facilitators of virtual communities – a forward thinking magazine publisher will be investing in social recommendation software, forums, reader-editors and expert bloggers right now…

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Paul Bradshaw lectures on the Journalism degree at UCE Birmingham media department. He writes a number of blogs including the Online Journalism Blog, Interactive PR and Web and New Media