Being the sort of person who puts all their work online, I thought it might be useful to put the agenda for next week’s one-day training course up, along with useful hyperlinks. As always, contributions welcomed. Here’s what I’ll be covering: Continue reading
CNN have a fancy new tool which allows you to see the “history, context and background to a developing story”. BackStory presents previous stories in a slideshow format with links to the full articles.
I’m not sure if this is a ‘Previous Stories’ link box for the broadband age that brings new life to a story, or a waste of resources that might have been better spent elsewhere. The timeline could work well, but doesn’t seem particularly usable in the Anthrax example. What do you think?
Rachel Clark, senior producer, tells more on CNN’s Behind the Scenes blog. (via Journalism.co.uk)
If money’s what you’re after, here are some avenues opening up:
The Knight Community Information Challenge is offering $20 million to support US-based initiatives aimed at “using media and technology to better serve local communities with information.” Interestingly the focus seems to be on community organisations rather than media organisations. Continue reading
UPDATE: Seems this is too sensitive an issue for public discussion, so feel free to send me an off the record email or DM tweet instead.
UPDATE 2: Here’s one way to solve staffing issues and training issues at the same time.
Next Wednesday I’ll be teaching a small group of newspaper journalists about using social media to track breaking news. I’ve noticed that most of the attendees are employed by one particular publisher. Other publishers are conspicuous by their absense, as are broadcast journalists. Are employers cutting training? Or just doing it in-house? Has training matter changed to keep up with changes in the media, or does it remain largely traditional? As always, I’d love to know your experiences.
David Carter in Canada has added several news websites from Quebec to the Interactivity Index, which now compares the interactive features of news websites in the UK, US, France, Macedonia, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland. Scores for the Canadian websites range from Voir’s 1300 points down to Quebec Science with 300. Anyone want to add Canadian websites outside of Quebec?
Try it out below:
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.
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
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.
Online Journalism Blog 