Social bookmarking – The Guardian way (Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story: addendum)

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The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.

By clicking on the scissors icon (clipping icon) next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway – but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.

These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights. Continue reading →

JEEcamp – when the cottage news industry met mainstream media

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What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? Continue reading →

JEEcamp live coverage – take part from your desktop

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If you’ve not been able to attend JEEcamp, you can still take part online. We will be running live coverage at JournalismEnterprise.com – and taking your questions and comments.

We’ll be using CoverItLive, which allows users to post comments, chatroom-style, and we’ll be incorporating these into the event itself.

Here’s how it (should) work: there will be five topics being discussed during the event: funding; business models; online news models; legals; and building audiences and community.

Each topic will have a correspondent attached – a journalism student from Birmingham City University who will be reporting what’s being discusse, but also feeding back any comments or questions from people following JEEcamp online.

That’s all assuming the wifi works, of course…

JEEcamp already has a fantastic mix of people from the news and tech industries – with people coming from as far away as Latvia, Sweden, Spain and South Korea too.

To join in online go to http://journalismenterprise.com/jeecamp-live-coverage/ from 9am till 4pm GMT on Friday March 14 (to convert to your own time zone use this converter)

Ahead of the event you can also add to the event wiki at http://jeecamp.pbwiki.com – in particular any questions under the themes being discussed (http://jeecamp.pbwiki.com/topics)

And finally, there’s an aggregator blog at www.jeecamp.com for anything tagged ‘jeecamp’ on WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, or Delicious (also search results for ‘jeecamp’ on Twitter, Google Blog Search and Technorati).

Look forward to meeting you (virtually)…

Brijit.com reviewed at JournalismEnterprise.com

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A new site review at JournalismEnterprise.com:

Brijit, says Nico Luchsinger, “gives me a quick overview of interesting long-form content that I might otherwise miss. The editorial process and payment method ensure that the abstracts are actually well written and helpful in deciding whether I should read the whole thing. There are various ways to access to browse the content, and a lot of different RSS feeds you can subscribe to.” Read the rest of the review here.

Want to fly to JEEcamp from the US or Canada? Sponsorship available

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If you live in North America and would still like to come to JEEcamp but for the cost of flying to the UK – help may be at hand.

I’ve managed to secure sponsorship from the European Journalism Centre to support up to five attendees. So if you’d like to come to JEEcamp but had discounted it because of cost, contact Kathlyn Clore at the European Journalism Centre on clore@ejc.nl

She will be able to identify if you qualify for some sponsorship.

We are now expecting over 50 attendees from across the spectrum of news organisations and startups. Full list at jeecamp.pbwiki.com, where you can also sign up to attend.

UK online journalism innovators – what questions would you ask them? (JEEcamp)

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Friday will see over 40 of the UK’s innovators in online journalism (plus some from other countries) gather for JEEcamp – the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship unconference. They include people who have launched journalism startups like Scoopt and Yoosk; local journalists who oversee hyperlocal and blogger projects; freelancers with an eye on the digital future; and national journalists who have built online communities around their brands (for a full list – or to sign up to attend yourself, see the JEEcamp wiki).

The unconference will, broadly, discuss five areas. These are:

  1. Business models (including advertising)
    • Audience development (including communities)
    • Funding
      • Legals
      • Online news models

      But that’s just the start. Within those areas, what questions do you think we should be discussing? What questions would you ask?

      Magazines and online journalism: answers to a student questionnaire

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      Lucy Hart, a final year journalism degree student at South East Essex College has emailed me some questions. I always like to post the answers on my blog in case other students are thinking of asking the same. Here they are:

      How has online journalism affected magazines over the past few years? It is clear that they are constantly adding additional features to their websites, such as blogs and forums.

      The web (rather than online journalism) has affected magazines enormously, just as it has every part of the media. However, as magazine sales have not suffered the same across-the-board declines as newspapers, the changes have not been as pronounced, and they have reacted differently. Continue reading →

      Something for the weekend #3: email meets RSS (9cays)

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      This week’s Something for the Weekend is email tool 9cays. At a basic level it’s a tool to help you improve group email conversations – like a mailing list with bells on. The service makes it easier to copy (cc) in people, and creates a permanent webpage so people can catch up on previous emails if they’ve just joined. But what makes 9cays interesting to me is that it also provides an RSS feed.

      Having an RSS feed opens up a number of journalistic possibilities. Here are just some:

      • You could carry out an email interview with a public figure – or a number of public figures – and allow people to subscribe directly to the correspondence.
      • Or you could display the feed on your news site.
      • You could aggregate a number of feeds from different conversations on the same topic
      • Likewise you could use it to display correspondence with readers by cc’ing the 9cays conversation email address in your replies (this would however, sign them up to future emails).
      • You could ask readers to cc the address in their correspondence with public figures (warning: issues around privacy and ethics here)
      • If you don’t have a comments RSS feed you could set up your CMS to forward comments to the 9cays address to create one.
      • Alternatively, you could set up your email account to filter comments from your blog and forward them to different 9cays addresses for different feeds (probably too much effort, but an idea nonetheless)
      The fact that it’s email makes this particularly accessible for non-web-savvy readers, too. Your ideas?

      Ten ways journalism has changed in the last ten years (Blogger’s Cut)

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      A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

      The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

      From a lecture to a conversation

      Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

      You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with… Continue reading →