Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news
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Could the BBC be funded by a tax on web and mobile? In France President Sarkozy has just announced that, from next year,
“prime-time advertising on public television will be phased out, with the lost revenues to be replaced by taxes collected from internet, mobile phone and commercial broadcasting companies Continue reading
Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends. It would read through the Wikipedia pages of a given theme and summarize key concepts. A semantic algorithm would bring a selection of the most authoritative people on a subject.
The journalist is left with what she does best: checking and analyzing the data.
That means avoiding the pitfalls of redundant news content. That means escaping the trap of writing about topics without having a clue of what’s at stake. That means interviewing people who do things rather than those who talk about it.
This article is the first of a 4-part series. We’ll explore semantic hacks for newsgathering, writing and publishing in the coming weeks. Continue reading
A couple months ago I was leafing through the Broadcast Journalism Training Council guidelines. Drawn up a few years ago (well, 2005), they look worryingly similar to those ‘web journalism’ courses that simply consist of teaching journalists to design webpages. In their guidelines [PDF – page 21] they say students should produce: Continue reading
“This book is my manifesto for the media as a journalist but also as a citizen of the world. As a journalist you are constantly being told that the news media have enormous power to shape society and events, to change lives and history. So why are we so careless as a society about the future of journalism itself ?” [1]
Charlie Beckett is a journalist with a 20 yearscareer at the BBC and ITN, and he is also the founding Director of POLIS, a think tank about journalism and society at the London School of Economics. “SuperMedia” is a work that gathers and structures several streams of thought about the future of Journalism as a essential service to contemporary societies, and how the changes in the news industry, beyond inevitable, are necessary.
Alex Gamela posed a few questions to Charlie Beckett about his book (Portuguese version available here). Continue reading
My live coverage of the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference seemed to polarise opinion among the Twitterati. The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh and Charles Arthur, the BBC’s Bill Thompson, and Pete Ashton all unsubscribed from my updates – and those were just the ones I know about. Continue reading
I’ve had an email about The Sky Young Journalist Awards which “aims to find and celebrate the very best journalist talent across online, television, radio and print.” Its aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds to report on local, national or international news stories that matter to them.
It sounds pretty worthy, so here’s the rest of the fluff: Continue reading
The following are answers to a question posed by Greg Manset (via Facebook, naturally):How can journalists use Facebook?
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Yahoo! have released a family of Reputation patterns:
“They don’t tell you how to lay out a page or where to put an interactive widget. Instead, they address how to design a reputation system for your social software.”
Why is this important? The patterns are a wonderful resource for any news organisation looking to plan a community element in which reputation performs a role. In my experience, reputation systems are pretty important in encouraging users to keep coming back to your online community – you could argue, for instance, that the number of friends in Facebook or followers in Twitter is one simple example. Plurk more explicitly uses ‘karma’, as does (in a much better way) Slashdot (for more on Slashdot and karma systems I thoroughly recommend Gatewatching by Axel Bruns).
Yahoo say these are “the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we’re working on,” so worth keeping an eye on what comes next.
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