Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom WordPress or Blogger are still too fiddly.
Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. Continue reading
Twit2art is one of those wonderful ideas that captures the age we’re living in – and heading towards. A project by Belgian artist Jan Leenders, it works like this: you send a tweet @twit2art and he’ll make an artwork with it.
So far, so good. But this is where it gets interesting:
“If you’re fast, it’s cheap. The first twit (thus the first painting) costs € 1. The second € 2, the third € 3 and so on. The price includes everything. Material, packaging, shipping, taxes. Everything. Continue reading
Here’s a little graph using Google Trends to compare how many people have been searching for the terms ‘celebrity’, ‘politician’ and ‘footballer’ in the past few years – more interestingly, along the bottom is how often those terms are mentioned in news articles. Even since 2004 the gap between ‘politician’ and ‘celebrity’ has noticeably widened – particularly since 2007 (narrowing this year, presumably due to the US candidate elections). Continue reading
Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news
WordPress
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]
This is how Charlie Beckett presents his book “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), in which he tackles the main challenges to journalistic practice in our days, and its influence to maintain free and democratic societies .
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
Online Journalism Blog 