[Keyword: online journalism]. Douglas Ahlers has published a useful paper in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics (Vol. 11, No. 1, 29-52) on ‘News Consumption and the New Electronic Media’ (PDF). It looks at people’s consumption of news across online and offline media, as well as the threat to newspaper advertising from the web. Ahlers argues that:

“Theories of the adoption rate of new technologies have focused on two mechanisms that overcome the costs of switching. The first is if an immediate gain can be achieved by switching to the new technology. The second is if the new technology produces increasing returns to adoption. “Increasing returns to adoption are said to exist when the net benefit to the user of a technology increases as the degree of adoption of that technology increases.” [Robin Cowan, “High Technology and the Economics of Standardization” (paper presented at the International Conference on Social and Institutional Factors Shaping Technological Development: Technology at the Outset, Berlin, May 27-28, 1991), 4.]

“With data suggesting that consumers have greater preference for the offline media or see little difference, and in the absence of a major driver to overcome switching costs, we can predict a slow adoption curve or a failure to ever produce a mass market phenomenon.”

He concludes by saying:

“A close analysis of available industry data leads us to conclude that the hypothesized migration of consumers from the traditional news media to the online news media has not happened. At least it has not happened to a magnitude that could be characterized as the collapsing of the traditional news media. We can conclude that there is no indication that the industry is in free fall or that the doomsday talk is justified.

“The online advertising component of the industry is smaller than it first appears. Most of the impact from online advertising is in the area of classified advertising, but even here we estimate the impact to be between 10 to 15 percent. The Internet also provides new revenue streams in the area of online classifieds, as traditional news media companies compete online to recapture a portion of the total online advertising revenues.

“A customer segmentation model is a more appropriate way to view news consumption behaviors. There is not a one-size-fits-all pattern of news
consumption. Instead, there is a broad range of news consumption behaviors. Some
users will go online only for their news, others will never abandon the traditional news media, some will be light users of all media, and still others will embrace all media and be multichannel news consumers. For only a small group, the online news media will act as a substitute for the traditional news media. For the majority, it will act as a complement.” (p48)

[Keyword: online journalism]. It would be easy to overlook ‘Lads’ Mags’ in looking at online journalism, but a quick tour around the likes of FHM.com brings up some innovative uses of the medium. The site makes particularly strong use of video – showing, if nothing else, that they know exactly what their readership wants. The centrefold shoot? So old hat. How about the video of the centrefold shoot? How about photo galleries? Screensavers? Desktop wallpaper? An email newsletter? Yes, it’s all as titillating as you’d expect, but add in Web TV, mobile content and FHM on your PSP and you can’t argue they’re not making the most of the medium.

[Keyword: online journalism]. I’ve yet to see the print version but Press Gazette’s website has already published the articles from this week’s Reporter’s Guide to Citizen Journalism: here’s the page’s text with links in full:

“Our Reporter’s Guide to Citizen Journalism is introduced by Mike Ward of the
University of Central Lancashire, who argues that professional news organisations cannot afford to ignore citizen journalism. Julie Tomlin interviewed citizen
journalism doyen Dan Gillmor. Graham Holliday explained how journalists can make the best use of the blogosphere. I paid a visit to the dedicated BBC unit that sifts through the deluge of “user-generated content”. Jonathan Munro of ITV, John
Ryley of Sky News related their experiences of using content supplied by the
cameraphone-wielding public, while Nic Robertson of CNN wrote about using a cameraphone to report from Iraq. Kyle McRae recounts the early days of his citizen journalism picture agency Scoopt, and how it has made few friends on tabloid feature desks.

“For the uninitiated, we also have some links to notable citizen
journalism projectsand social news aggregators and bookmarking tools.”

PS: Thanks to Graham Holliday, who posted this link in his comment to my previous post – suitably enough, another way that journalists can make use of the blogosphere.

[Keyword: online journalism]. It’s all about on-demand services, says this article by the BBC itself. And as if Microsoft wasn’t big enough, it sounds like they’ll be able to leverage the BBC brand, as Ashley Highfield, director of the BBC’s new media division, “said the BBC would work with technology firms like Microsoft.”

[Keyword: online journalism]. Citizen journalism as a buzzword seems to be gathering pace in newsrooms around the country, and at the same time losing some of its definition. Consider this report from the latest Press Gazette, categorised ‘citizen journalism’ and sneeringly headlined The day ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ took over the news room. It covers “a one-day project that handed over the production of evening flagship news programme South East Today, as well as BBC Radio Kent’s drivetime show and Kent’s Where I Live website to 14 licence fee payers.”

It’s a typical institutional response to citizen journalism: making ‘citizens’ into ‘journalists’ by bringing them into the institution itself. But the point of citizen journalism, it seems, is that citizen journalists operate outside of those institutions, and the processes and cultures that come with them.

Consider this quote from one of my online journalism students, Masum Ullah, who was asked to investigate citizen journalism as part of an assignment:

“The idea of a citizen journalist is to harness the power of the audience to participate in the news media. If we get articles and stories written by the people, we will get a totally different perspective to the news and current affairs.

“Citizen journalism websites open up to public comment which enables readers to attach comments to articles and also gives the opportunity for readers to react to, criticise and praise what’s published by professional journalists. This concept means we are getting different perspective of the news from the audience and the institutions. Both are interacting to give a new type of journalism and news. Readers of stories may want to make their own judgements or they might want to make the story better, so that effectively a news story will change all the time.

“Professional journalists and their readers are basically working together and combining their knowledge and expertise to provide a journalistic product. Everyone who contributes is helping each other by enhancing their understanding and knowledge of a particular issue or news story.”

If the BBC or Press Gazette had only done as much thinking as Masum, they might have done more than rely on their own institutionalised ways of doing things.

[Keyword: online journalism]. Citizen journalism as a buzzword seems to be gathering pace in newsrooms around the country, and at the same time losing some of its definition. Consider this report from the latest Press Gazette, categorised ‘citizen journalism’ and sneeringly headlined The day ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ took over the news room. It covers “a one-day project that handed over the production of evening flagship news programme South East Today, as well as BBC Radio Kent’s drivetime show and Kent’s Where I Live website to 14 licence fee payers.”

It’s a typical institutional response to citizen journalism: making ‘citizens’ into ‘journalists’ by bringing them into the institution itself. But the point of citizen journalism, it seems, is that citizen journalists operate outside of those institutions, and the processes and cultures that come with them.

Consider this quote from one of my online journalism students, Masum Ullah, who was asked to investigate citizen journalism as part of an assignment:

“The idea of a citizen journalist is to harness the power of the audience to participate in the news media. If we get articles and stories written by the people, we will get a totally different perspective to the news and current affairs.

“Citizen journalism websites open up to public comment which enables readers to attach comments to articles and also gives the opportunity for readers to react to, criticise and praise what’s published by professional journalists. This concept means we are getting different perspective of the news from the audience and the institutions. Both are interacting to give a new type of journalism and news. Readers of stories may want to make their own judgements or they might want to make the story better, so that effectively a news story will change all the time.

“Professional journalists and their readers are basically working together and combining their knowledge and expertise to provide a journalistic product. Everyone who contributes is helping each other by enhancing their understanding and knowledge of a particular issue or news story.”

If the BBC or Press Gazette had only done as much thinking as Masum, they might have done more than rely on their own institutionalised ways of doing things.

[Keyword: online journalism]. So reports Journalism.co.uk:

“Inspired by visits to converged newsroom initiatives in the US, new online city editor Philip Aldrick will be leading a drive to provide early morning, breaking-markets news like a wire service, increasing the amount of content unique to the website.

“Currently around 90 per cent of content from the newspaper is reproduced online; the remaining 10 per cent is unique to the site.

“USA Today and the New York Times both announced plans last year to converge their online and offline publications. NYTimes said the company was ready to ‘raise digital journalism to the next level’.”

[Keyword: online journalism]. The Media Guardian reports on plans to link The Sun website “to the recently acquired and hugely popular MySpace.com community and networking site to create a “MySun” online readers’ network.” This isn’t a new idea – New Jersey Online did something similar in the late 90s – but it does build on a massive base of “60 million registered users in the 16- and 34-years-old category, a group highly desired by advertisers”. Early days, but watch this space…

[Also covered at Journalism.co.uk]

There’s a post by Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism: Courageous journalism: Yahoo! News about the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism being

“awarded to Kevin Sites. In case you (and your students) don’t know about Sites, he’s one of those “backpack journalists” that some old-school newsroom types might scoff at (“No one can do it all”). He’s got a video camera, a satellite phone and an Apple Powerbook in his backpack (you can read all about Sites’s gear), and since Oct. 1, 2005, he has been on assignment for Yahoo! News in Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. This week he’s in Afghanistan.”

[Keyword: online journalism]. The Guardian is promoting the launch of its CommentIsFree blog experiment with a couple of articles in today’s paper – the first, a comment piece by US columnist Arianna Huffington, who was involved in a similar experiment in the US (which, by the way, isn’t nearly as good as the Guardian’s attempt). The sharpest point of her column comes at the end, as she talks about how blogs differ from opinion pieces:

“[The] great thing about bloggers: when they decide that something matters, they refuse to let go. They’re the true pit bulls of reporting.

“That kind of relentlessness was never available to me as a newspaper columnist. When I started blogging about Judy Miller and the New York Times in 2005, it was something I never could have done as a columnist. My editors would have said: “Oh, you wrote about her last month.” […] By getting on these stories early and staying on them – and by linking to other bloggers covering the story, and having them link back to us – we helped shape and define them.

“Bloggers share their work, argue with each other and add to a story dialectically. It’s why the blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America.”

Less directly relevant is a piece by Owen Gibson on Rupert Murdoch’s “Damascene conversion” to new media. “Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch” proclaims the headline, followed by the straplines “Magnate hails second great age of discovery”; “Power ‘moving from the old elite to bloggers'”

Anyway, back to the Guardian’s blog experiment, CommentIsFree*. Firstly, it looks good. Even a cursory glance results in you getting drawn into one of the many fascinating discussions taking place. It deserves particular credit for the way it gives the user a number of different ways to navigate the content – by recency, by contributor, by subject, by activity, and so on. There’s a huge amount here, and it’s going straight into my personalised Google homepage…

*Described as “a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.”