Category Archives: online journalism

Do you need a licence to be a journalist?

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In Portugal you do. A Portuguese journalist has written with the following information as a prelude to a question:

“In Portugal there is a comission that grants journalistic licences of all sorts: for freelancers, collaborators, full time journalists. This licence puts its owner under a special condition before the law and finance.

“To get one of those licences I need my employer to declare I’m working for them; then I need two licensed journalists to sign a term of responsibility on my behalf; I need also a supervisor inside the company I’m working at to follow my work during a training period; this training period is variable, and the minimum is one year of “evaluation” for those who – like me – have a degree in Journalism.”

So here’s the question:

  • In which countries does a journalist need a licence?
  • Who and how grants it?
  • Is it really needed?
  • And why?

I would love to know your own experiences.

Two years of archive uploaded

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While I was fiddling around with my WordPress backend (no sniggering at the back) I decided to import all the posts from the two years this blog spent on Blogger (Oct 04-Jan 07).

So, if you really want to know why the James and the Blue Cat blog was so significant, what I thought magazines would look like in 2016, and why FHM was an online innovator, feel free to browse away (10 points for every correct answer).

Note: In Blogger, headlines could be links to sites – but on WordPress these seem to have been converted to internal links to the post itself, so apologies for articles without those links. Also, it’s messed up my categories, so will have to spend some time housekeeping…

Interview with the editor of the Público website

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Alex Gamela talks to António Granado, editor of the online edition of Público, a reference newspaper in Portugal, as they relaunch their website.

António Granado Público have always been ahead as far as online presence is concerned, and recently the newsroom created a video team, as well as launching a redesigned website. In this short interview, we tried to ask a very busy António about his views on online journalism, a subject he discusses in his blog PontoMedia. Granado is also a lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and is one of the best Portuguese minds dealing with the new media issues. Continue reading →

Five Ws and a H that should come after every story – update

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Since I wrote the Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story post I’ve been responding to the hugely helpful posts and leads, and developing the idea further. As the deadline for Round 2 of the Knight News Challenge looms on Friday I thought I would post the latest on how the idea is shaping up, including a mockup (click for full size):

Conversation Toolkit mockup

So here’s what’s happened since that first post: Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing + investigative journalism = ? (help make it happen)

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Following my research into investigative journalism I’ve been thinking about its future. One path clearly lies in tools of crowdsourcing and community being applied to local investigative journalism. It’s not a new idea, but it’s not happening nearly enough. So here’s the twist I’ve put on it as I seek to get funding to test it out: hand over the agenda to your public, and you have a potentially bigger, and more committed, workforce. Continue reading →

Product reviews the wiki/social way

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Interesting use of wikis for journalism over at ProductWiki: from TechCrunch:

“The idea behind ProductWiki is to create collaborative product reviews that boil all the judgments about a product into one single review. It avoids revision wars by requiring every reviewer to list both pros and cons, and then every other ProductWiki reader can vote on each pro and each con until a consensus emerges.

“Last week, the site turned on three new features which Ismail hopes will allow him to create the ultimate “product graph” (this is like a social graph for products, showing how products are related or connected to one another). Reviewers can now identify competing or related products, and vote on which ones they like better in a head-to-head, A-B fashion. The third feature is a product rank derived from the first two features. For instance, based on 15 votes, the iRex iLiad beats out both the Kindle and the Sony Reader in the e-book category (so far).”

What RSS reader do you use and why?

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I’m a Bloglines man, because it’s social and easier to click through than Google Reader. But what do you use – and why? Apart from anything else, it strikes me that there may be global differences in RSS reader use, in the same way there is with social networks (see below). You can also discuss this at the Online Journalism Blog Facebook Group.

Social networks map