[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. What everyone else already knows – but it takes a senior figure saying it to get people actually acting…

Guardian Unlimited‘s assistant editor Neil McIntosh is quoted in Journalism.co.uk as saying two issues are particularly difficult for news sites to overcome when exploring the blog format.

First, the blogosphere is very hostile towards journalists and the mainstream media – as demonstrated by the Rathergate episode last year. US broadcaster CBS sacked four employees after bloggers helped to expose flaws in a story about President Bush’s war record.

“Blogs are an editorial innovation, and it’s important that we pursue them for that reason. But a blog launch isn’t a blog launch without sarcastic comments saying they shouldn’t be there.”

Second, editors often approach blogs in the wrong way.

“They lean back in their chairs and ask: ‘what can blogs do for me when I’m trying to build a brand that will last for 100 years?’ Bloggers are undermining that business case,” added Mr McIntosh.

“Being an innovator and pushing boundaries is the future,” said Mr McIntosh.

Wired provide a good overview of the different newsreaders you can download and the different tools that come with that. For instance, “You can look for new feeds in NewsGator by searching on a keyword. For example, I searched on “Portland” (since I just moved to Oregon) and added several feeds about the happenings in the City of Roses.”

My Google Alert on the phrase “online journalism” threw up this result today: The NetMedia 2003 | EOJ Awards 2003 winners:

“Barcelona, 3 July: War and peace and corporate corruption and greed were the two stand-out story themes in the shortlists for the 2003 European Online Journalism awards, and eight of the winning entries featured one of these themes.

“For the second year running, journalists from BBC News Online have dominated the proceedings, winning eight of the 21 prizes on offer.

The most coveted prize, the Internet Journalist of the Year, went to Vincent Landon, science correspondent of Swiss Radio International for his contribution to ‘The malaria business, a remarkable investigation of a largely neglected story – the devastating impact of malaria on the health of children in developing countries.

Best Overall Journalism Service went to Lamalla.net, the news and current affairs portal for the Barcelona region.

Transitions Online, the Prague-based online news magazine which covers the post-communist region of Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, won the Best Innovation in Online Journalism category.

The Best Use of Multimedia award went to two journalism students from the Danish School of Journalism, the first time student journalists have won any of the prizes.

Dr David Whitehouse, the BBC’s science correspondent, winner of the Best News Story Broken on the Net category, has now won awards for four years running. The Outstanding contribution to online journalism in Europe award went to Mike Smartt, editor-in-chief of BBC News Interactive.”

This extention for Firefox allows you to select text from any site and post it to your blog. Blog software supported includes “Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio Userland, TextPattern, TypePad, WordPress, journalspace, b2evolution and BLOG:CMS. Plus you can add any weblog type you want through the Custom… setting.”

Strangely, it didn’t work for me immediately with Blogger, and I’m not sure why it suddenly did work… I’ll keep this updated, as I’m sure I won’t be the only person to have this problem…

UPDATE: Okay, I think I’ve sorted it. To make it work, you have to do the following:

1. select the text you want to blog.
2. Right-click on that text and select JustBlogIt!
3. On the window that appears type in the name of your blog (e.g. ‘ojournalism’), and select the blog provider (e.g. ‘Blogger’). Click OK.
4. Now here’s the crucial part. Right-click on the text again and select JustBlogIt! This time the window that appears should be the Blog This! one that you get on all Blogger blogs, allowing you to type in your posting in raw HTML (the selected text and URL will have already been inputted), and select which blog to publish to (top right corner). When you’re done writing your posting, click ‘Publish’ in that top corner.
5. NOTE: I did this while already logged on to Blogger in another window, so that may also be factor.