dispatches is a new current affairs quarterly with a companion website, Rethink-Dispatches.com featuring original content as well as extracts from the magazine.
Virtual Intern Natalie Chillington put forward a few questions to editor and art director Gary Knight about the online side to dispatches. Continue reading
The other day I realised that this blog had passed the milestone of 1000 posts without me noticing. This seems as good a time as any to look back and pick out the 1% that are worth highlighting.
You’ll notice that the (coincidental) redesign of the blog has an ‘OJB Highlights’ area in which I’ve picked the posts which – from my memory at least – have proved particularly popular or comment-worthy, or at least those I’ve spent most time on.
But that’s just my opinion. I’d love to know if you think I’ve overlooked any posts that should be included.
I’ve written a piece in the latest Press Gazette about the need to “take down the walls, stop mystifying investigative journalism and include readers in the process, starting now.” Sadly, they’ve pigeonholed it as being about “blog investigations”. Never mind: you can read it here.
Last Friday the Guardian published it’s ‘Ultimate Summer Pop Quiz’ – a typically original take on the pop quiz format with a gloriously, insanely difficult set of over 100 questions such as “The opening lines of which post-punk song were inspired by the above passage from Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky?”
Having only managed 31 answers (and 24 guesses) over the weekend, I took to the web on Monday to see who else was doing it – and if it was on the web so I could send it to friends. Continue reading
I’ve recently been reading ‘Making Online News‘ a book of ethnographic studies of online news production. Tucked towards the back of the book is a chapter called The Routines of Blogging by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta. It is one of the few studies I’ve read to look not at journalists, but at the work practices of bloggers – specifically, political bloggers.
And their findings support what I’ve increasingly suspected: “the more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists.” Continue reading
There are a number of services that allow you to receive web pages by e-mail. These include Web2Mail; PageGetter.com; and WebToMail
All you do is send an email to the address used by the service with the URL of the web page you want in the subject line. After a few minutes (they say) you receive the web page in HTML format in your email.
How is this useful? I can think of a number of ways: Continue reading
PaidContent has a summary of Trinity’s half-year reports with some silver lining accompanying the now familiar announcements of increasingly declining print ad revenue:
“Digital revenue is up a whopping 100.6 percent during the period to £2.8 million (UK titles up 145.4 percent, Scottish up 34.8 percent).” Continue reading
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. Continue reading
How remiss of me not to mention that the second edition of Investigative Journalism is now out, including a chapter on ‘Investigative Journalism and Blogs’ by yours truly. As it happens, if you buy it from the OJB Amazon affiliate shop (or anything else for that matter) the commission will go towards an ‘open source’ investigative journalism venture I’m putting together.
Here’s the good news for mobile phone websites: Vodafone has “seen a 50% rise in revenues from its data services over the past quarter, after the number of its customers using the web from mobile devices more than doubled.” Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 