Feb 19, 2009
February 19th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw
Another question answered by the Twittersphere – if you know of any other examples let me know: [Read more]
Jul 30, 2008
July 30th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Recently my long love affair with Bloglines has been hitting the rocks. I’ve been seeing another RSS reader. Yes, it’s Google Reader.
It started on the bus to work. You see, the mobile version of Bloglines doesn’t do it for me. My ‘morning paper’, now, is to scroll through the headlines from the dozens of blogs I subscribe to – in Google Reader mobile. If it’s something I might want to return to later, I ’star’ it. If the blog post supports it, I might even bookmark it on del.icio.us. [Read more]
Apr 21, 2008
April 21st, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw

Just when I thought I’d put the 21st century newsroom to bed, along comes a further brainwave about conceptualising newsgathering in an online environment (the area I covered in part 2: Distributed Journalism). It seems to me that the first stage for any journalist or budding journalist lies along two paths: subscribing to a reliable collection of RSS feeds (and email alerts); and exploring a collection of networks. The first part is passive; the latter, more active. So I’ve called it, tongue-in-cheek, “Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering”. But if that sounds too Woody Allen for you, you could call it “Aggregating-Networking Newsgathering”.
Not quite as catchy, though, is it? [Read more]
Feb 28, 2008
February 28th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
As you have probably worked out, this year’s Online Journalism students have been building up towards launching an environmental news website. This week the site went public, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned so far…
The Background
The site is the final year project of two final year journalism degree students – Azeem Ahmad and Rachael Wilson. The decision was made to launch an environmental site because of the increase of investment in this area from a number of news organisations, and also because of a local connection – more of which later.
Azeem is responsible for the more technical side of the site, which he has built from scratch using the open source content management software Joomla.
Azeem has been blogging his progress with the software, including the frightening experience of having the site hacked into by the creator of a theme Azeem installed.
Rachael has the responsibility for editorial, which means writing for the site herself, but more importantly managing 14 second year students on the Online Journalism module as they try to build a news site on a subject most have never written about. She’s also been blogging her experiences.
Week One: Choosing a name, assigning beats, making connections
After some cheesy brainstorming, the very literal name ‘Environmental News Online‘ was chosen for the site for the simple reasons of search engine optimisation and domain name availability. The abbreviation ‘ENO’ lent it more character. [Read more]