Keyword: onlinejournalism. Thanks to About.com for a useful brief piece on adding a forum to your blog. Really, it’s just ‘how to create a forum’ using QuickTopic, but still very useful.

I’m currently trying it out – you can see a cute little link below to the first attempt at a forum (the code is generated by QuickTopic but use the simple, javascript-free version as Blogger doesn’t like it).

Feel free to contribute and/or subscribe – and expect a few more of these to come…
Discuss: What makes a good blog posting?

Keyword: onlinejournalism. And they say bloggers aren’t journalists…

Keyword: onlinejournalism. It’s located at www.indianonlinejournalism.org if you want to take a look. I should declare my interest here: I have written for the newsletter.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. This is really quite lovely, and quite simple. You can now click on ‘customise this page’ on Google News and set up your own news sections, in their own order, including customisable news ‘sections’ (I created one for the phrase ‘online journalism’ for example). ZDNet reports on the development, while Google’s own pages explain in more detail…

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Useful page at the USC Online Journalism Review about ethics for online journalists. It’s also a wiki, so you can contribute your own ideas on the subject. And you can also post questions – this includes an interesting one on using other people’s images in your blogs.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. So reports Journalism.co.uk: the blog is here, and I can see it doing a nice job of keeping people informed of new articles in their particular areas, more than the claim about increasing editorial transparency. Still, a nice window into national media.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Online business journalists should keep an eye on this case (also reported on CNET and Journalism.co.uk, but particularly well at the San Francisco Chronicle and analysed by the Media Guardian and ITworld.com) involving Apple taking a number of websites to court in order to find out who supplied them with trade information. Why is it important?

“Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing several of the Apple-themed Web sites, say allowing Apple to force the sites to divulge their sources, or forcing the sites’ e-mail providers to give up records of their e-mails, would be deeply destructive to journalists’ ability to cover business.

“”Apple is saying that trade secrets are an exception to reporters’ privileges,” said EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl. “If trade secrets are an exception, then a business writer should be concerned every time he or she gets a tip in their e-mail box.”” [source]

There’s a wider issue here, of course, about divulging your sources. In an electronic world, it may no longer be up to the journalist to protect their sources – a complainant can go straight to their email provider, and chances are they may not be as concerned about the ethics of protecting sources.

UPDATE (March 9 05): Interesting viewpoint on the World Copywriting Blog that argues the reasons for protection of sources don’t apply here. I take his point, but the wider ramifications for those who have much stronger reasons are still there.

Axcess News also debates the central issue of whether bloggers – and web publishers – are journalists.

UPDATE (March 15 05): Apple wins, and the BBC reports.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Particularly well informed piece by Howard Rheingold about how the cameraphone may develop as a social medium. Here’s a lengthy quote:

“Cameraphones enable an expanded field for chronicling and displaying self and viewpoint to others in a new kind of everyday visual storytelling,” wrote [Keio University researcher Daisuke] Okabe, in a paper delivered at a conference in Korea at the end of 2004. Okabe’s findings make a case that cameraphones represent a new opportunity to tell the story of our lives to ourselves as well as to others, and to share a sense of continuous, multisensory, social presence with people who are geographically distant. Tokyo youth have added a visual element to the flow of phone calls and text-messages among small groups of intimates that Okabe and colleagues have come to call “distributed co-presence.”

Keyword: onlinejournalism. The International Journal for Communication Studies has just published a special issue (Volume 67, Number 1) on the Impacts of the Internet on Newspapers in Europe (Contents and abstracts at http://gaz.sagepub.com/content/vol67/issue1)

Papers include:

• Impacts of the Internet on Newspapers in Europe;
• Online Competition and Performance of News and Information Markets in the Netherlands;
• Mediatization of the Net and Internetization of the Mass Media;
• Delivering Ireland: Journalism’s Search for a Role Online;
• The Lack of Interactivity and Hypertextuality in Online Media; and
• An Immature Medium: Strengths and Weaknesses of Online Newspapers on September 11

The last article is available free until 31st March 2005.

Keyword: onlinejournalism. Interesting developments in the US regarding ‘illegally’ linking to politicians’ websites, in the context of American campaigning laws.

UPDATE: Mar 9 05: Rexblog helpfully reports the fact that the claims are exaggerated, with a link to another article on CNET saying just that.