Online Journalism Blog

I spent today at the hyperlocal C&binet event, organised by Creative Industries MP Sion Simon at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. I’ve already blogged my thoughts leading up to event but thought I would add some more links and context.

For me, it is significant that this happened at all. Normally these sorts of events are dominated by large publishers with lobbying muscle. Yet here we had a group combining hyperlocal bloggers, successful startups like Facebook, Ground Report, Global Voices and the Huffington Post, social media figures like Nick Booth and Jon Bounds, and traditional organisations like The Guardian, BBC, RSA and Ofcom. Jeff Jarvis pitched into the mix via Skype.

As for the event itself, it began the previous afternoon with a presentation from Enders Analysis, embedded below: [Read more]

So, students at CUNY have delivered their much-awaited New Business Models for journalism - four in total, that aim to answer “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?”

The post introducing the models is surprisingly succinct: the real work has gone into 3 spreadsheets which are linked to under each heading (there are only 3 as 2 of the business models have been presented together).

Each model has a separate post which is equally succinct, but invite comments. They are:

• Hyperlocals and the Framework
• New News Organization
• Not-for-Profit News Organization

Much credit goes to CUNY. Although this has the luxury of being funded by the Knight and McCormick Foundations, it is always going to attract much criticism. And I’m not going to shy from being critical: I’m disappointed. [Read more]

While talking to an editor at a newspaper that had made a splash with a crowdsourced investigative story a couple years ago, I remember the subject of payment coming up, to which she made an interesting point. The citizens who contribute their time and effort have a personal interest in the story and do it because they want to help the paper �" this is a citizenry interacting with its hometown newspaper for the betterment of the community and for the good of democracy. It was a valid point. After all, if they paid their citizens, they wouldn’t just be citizens anymore, they’d be employees.

News organizations have long been excused from digital sharecropping, a label that has been attached to crowdsourced businesses that exploit free labor from the public without offering compensation. Perhaps, media entities benefit from the altruistic and democratic nature of information sharing. The millions of Internet users that voluntarily put content out for free are more than a testament to that.

But where should the line be drawn? When should news organizations and media conglomerates begin to have to start paying for utilizing the time and resources of their volunteer contributors while holding complete ownership of the product �" or at the very least, making revenue off of an individual’s product? [Read more]

This afternoon I will once again be working with a group of editors as we look at business models for online news. To their credit, the micropayments/paywall issue rarely comes up – and then only as a ‘devil’s advocate’ question. But it seems others have been asleep for the past 10 years. To those and the unfortunate souls having to field these questions, I offer you the following primer culled from recent coverage of this pointless debate: [Read more]

UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

1. @davelee - former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
2. @channel4news - example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable) [Read more]

Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in. [Read more]

This week the Times Educational Supplement relaunched its website TESconnect.co.uk as part-social network for half a million users to share and rate teaching materials . Alex Lockwood spoke to Head of Internet Edward Griffith:

“When we launch, we’ll have the largest single professional network online in the UK. The community lends itself to a social media network.” [Read more]

The New York Times and LinkedIn have entered into a partnership that will see LinkedIn users “shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals … and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.” Meanwhile, NYT readers will see a widget directing them to LinkedIn (see image below). [Read more]

Guest Blogger Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant.

‘A newspaper is like an oil tanker,’ editors in chief call out in despair again and again. Changing the direction is often slow and difficult. But that of course just depends on whether you have the right rudder or not. Because the captain is still steering the ship. Yes, journalists can be quite nasty and stubborn, but mutiny is still a step too far for most of them. [Read more]