Late last year I was asked to put together some presentations giving advice on verifying information, finding people and stories online, ethics, and news values. These were translated by Anas Qtiesh into Arabic as part of CheckDesk, a project to support Middle East citizen journalists created by Meedan at Birmingham City University.

The materials are collected at ArabCitizenMedia.org. I’ve linked to each presentation above.

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I’ve recorded a 48 minute presentation covering ‘Blogging, Twitter and Journalism‘ for the Henry Stewart series of talks. It’s designed for journalism students and covers

• How blogging differs from other journalism platforms;
• Key developments in journalism blogging history;
• What makes a successful blog
• What is Twitter and how is it useful for journalists and publishers? and
• Why RSS is central to blogging and Twitter and how it works

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Given that I start teaching the undergraduate module in online journalism again next week, I thought I should finish uploading the presentations from last year. The following is the presentation for my session on video.

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Nicholas Moerman has put together an impressive collection of graphs showing a general decline over the past year in visits to mainstream websites across a raft of categories, from content and commerce to portals and porn. The only sites that buck the trend? I’ll let you guess.

He doesn’t know why this is (or even if he’s seeing things), which is rather refreshing, but offers some ideas, and it’s certainly food for thought. Here it is:

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Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.

Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.

Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.

Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.

I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:

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I’ve been rather tardy about getting all of these online, so here’s the 6th of my presentations from the Online Journalism class of Spring 2009, looking at Interactivity. Much of what I talk about here is also in my lengthy post on the topic:

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Here’s a presentation I made yesterday at the Fazeley Digital event. It’s intentionally provocative – and I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to read the real points I’m making here. Anyway, comments welcome.

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Insightful presentation from Development Editor Jo Geary on some of the lessons she’s learned while building the Birmingham Post’s presence in social media. You can also find it on her blog here.

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Continuing my practice of putting online journalism lessons online, this is the second part of the week 1 lesson, where I introduce students to Twitter.

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This year I’m aiming to blog all of my course materials for online journalism. Yesterday was the first class, so below is the PowerPoint for what I call Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering: using RSS and social media for newsgathering.

Note: the Online Journalism module is aimed at second year undergraduates on the degree in journalism I teach on.

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