[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism, blogging]. For most big news stories now there’s some sort of citizen journalism component, and the apparently thwarted aeroplane bombing plot is no exception. The Toronto Globe and Mail, of all news sites, has a thorough rundown of the CJ angle on the story, which include links to the BBC’s Your Say facility and images on Flickr. Given the saturation coverage-verging-on-repetition of this on BBC in particular, you wonder why they haven’t covered this angle in addition to all the others.
(thanks to Dan Gillmor for the link)

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[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism, blogging]. I’m about to meet the man behind a new investigative journalism website to talk about how I can offer assistance and advice – and it’s prompted me to identify what exactly makes a good online journalism project. I’ve boiled it down to these five elements:

• User involvement: in the age of citizen journalism and blogging there is no excuse to exclude your users from the conversation. At the very least you should allow users to post comments to stories – and equally importantly, respond to those comments and incorporate corrections in stories. Beyond comments, you can also offer forums where users can discuss and suggest stories or angles, or just form a community of opinion. And for a quick and simple user opinion, incorporate a regular poll.
  Then there’s the invitation for users to contribute – whether that’s pictures, video, audio clips or full articles. These don’t have to be big news events they happen to have witnessed (although that’s nice), but can be personal ‘video diary’ type experiences (where topical) or records of public events.
• Update: Online is always accessible, searchable, and archivable. It is not tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. Therefore articles should be updated when new information appears, or newer articles should link to older ones on the same subject, and vice versa.
• Linking and transparency: An online article without links is ignoring one of the fundamental characteristics of the web, and presenting the user with a dead-end. If I read an article about breast cancer, there should be links at the end to more information, organisations, and help. If I read an article about a policy document, there should be a link at the end to that document. And the latest piece about the Middle East conflict should be giving me the opportunity to find out the background to the whole situation, through links. Equally important – but perhaps harder for journalists whose living is based on rewriting press releases – is linking to your sources. If you’ve used anything online, link to it. This transparency can only improve media literacy, and hopefully, pressure journalists to use a range of sources.
• Get interactive: This is the biggest paradigm shift in news and the one that news organisations seem to struggle most with, but one of the advantages of online news is the way you can engage the user and explain complex concepts with multimedia. Not considering this is like TV news not considering images or radio not considering sound.
  At its most glamorous, this might involve a Flash interactive as done so well at The Guardian and BBC; but you might also consider quizzes (search for simple JavaScript or PHP templates), live chats with interviewees (invite users to post questions ahead of the interview if you don’t have the technology for a live chat), or just a simple range of guides accessible by drop-down menu. The key thing here is giving your user control, and/or using the range of media available to provide depth.
• Write for the web: brevity and scannability are the watchwords here. The BBC do this impeccably – one point per paragraph and a liberal use of subheadings – perhaps because of their broadcast background. Unintentionally, tabloids do this well too, simply because their simple style translates well. Broadsheet style works less well, especially as they tend to shovel their printed articles without any editing. But as people tend to scan-read online much more (because of the lower resolution), an increased use of subheadings can make the experience much easier for readers, while employing bullet lists where appropriate is always a winner. Splitting paragraphs to make it easier to read is not dumbing down.

Now, I’m sure I’ve missed something glaringly obvious here, as it seems there must be more than five items to this list, but perhaps it really is that simple. Answers on a comment please.

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[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism]. TVtechnology.com reports on the launch of citizen journalism initiative CommunityCorrespondent.com by TV station group Pappas Telecasting. As you’d expect, the site “allows any local individual to load images or post a news story to the CommunityCorrespondent.com Web site” and “allows users themselves to determine what is news by automatically publishing content from cell phones, e-mail and the Web site.”

Nebraska’s NTV is hosting the pilot, while Pappas “plans to roll out Community Correspondent at all of its 27 stations over the next several months, beginning with KMPH-TV Channel 26 in Fresno, California.”

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[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism, blogging]. Here’s a useful article on the Wall Street Journal if you want a summary of the “powerful players” in blogging, viral video, and new media in general. For instance:

“Christine Dolce, whose MySpace page boasts nearly one million friends — making her arguably one of the most connected people on the Internet. A 24-year-old cosmetologist who until a few months ago worked at a makeup counter in a mall, she now has a manager and a start-up jeans company and has won promotional deals for two mainstream consumer brands.

“…A video by a 30-year-old comedian from Cleveland has now been watched by almost 30 million people, roughly the audience for an average “American Idol” episode. The most popular contributor to the photo site Flickr.com just got a contract to shoot a Toyota ad campaign.

“…Each week, about half a million people watch a two- or three-minute video starring a man in a ninja costume that includes a Lycra ski mask bought
for $6. He typically delivers a sarcastic comic monologue in response to a ninja-themed question a viewer has emailed in. (“Do ninjas catch colds?” was a recent topic.) In May, “Ask a Ninja” launched an online store and now sells about 150 T-shirts a week, Mr. Nichols says. They’ll soon begin selling premium subscriptions at $1.50 a month to fans who want early access to new episodes. This month, they added their first advertisement to the series, a mention of the Sony movie “Little Man” at the end of an episode.

“…The flagship crossover star in digital entertainment is known by one name: Brookers. …20-year-old Brooke Brodack of Holden, Mass., has posted a
range of videos starring herself … Though Ms. Brodack’s videos have a distinctly amateur feel — they feature her lip-synching songs, dancing goofily around her bedroom and occasionally adopting silly character voices — they inspire a passionate following … Last month, Ms. Brodack, who works as a receptionist, got an email from an executive at the development company of former MTV star Carson Daly. Mr [signing] her to a deal to develop entertainment ideas with his production company for TV and the Web.”

There’s a great sidebar on ‘What to Watch’ on YouTube as well…

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[Keyword: online journalism]. Here’s a move that will have surprised a few newspaper editors, particularly those of the Metro freesheets: Press Gazette reports on The Guardian’s launch of G24, an 8- to 12-page PDF version of the top stories from The Guardian website (you can also choose a particular version, such as ‘World’, ‘Media’, ‘Sport, or ‘Business’).

The PDF, even more impressively, is updated every 15 minutes, which suggests that it is automatically generated. There is some empty space at the end of some articles as a result, but generally the layout is good for an automated system.

The whole is designed to be read on the move, and is free, with the revenue seemingly coming from sponsors BT. I’m guessing, though, that most people will print this off at work to read on the way home, rather than the other way around, which may give some comfort to Metro publishers.

[Keyword: online journalism]. That’s the message of this article from Corante, which argues that media companies expecting to make a mint from the internet are set for a disappointment. Vin Crosbie makes a comparison with the Industrial Revolution manufacturers who “believed that industrialization would just markedly decrease their costs of production, enlarging their profit margins. But as the Austro-American guru of management Peter Drucker (1909-2005) noted, “Not only did the cost of production markedly decline, but so did the value people were willing to pay for the products.”

“The value people were willing to pay for those products declined. And that was when those products had been scarce. We today live an era when we’re already
awash in information. It’s surplus, not scarce.”

[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism, blogging]. This is one of those articles I’ll just quote in full. It’s from Poynter on a new study by Pew on bloggers:

New Pew Blogger Study
Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released an intriguing new report: Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers

A few highlights:

39% of net users (about 57 million American adults) read blogs — a significant
increase since the fall of 2005. And 8% of net users (about 12 million American
adults) keep a blog.
Most US blogs are personal journals. Most bloggers do not consider their blogging journalism. However, 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often.” And 56% spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often.”
54% of bloggers are under 30.

US bloggers are evenly divided between men and women — so anyone who continues to ask “where are the women bloggers?” is probably not really looking. (I’m sure this will be a huge topic of conversation at the upcoming BlogHer
conference, which I’m attending.)

These were the most common primary blog topics cited:

“My life and experiences:” 37%
Politics and government: 11%
Entertainment: 7%
Sports: 6%
General news and current events: 5%
Business: 5%
Technology: 4%
Religion, spirituality or faith: 2%
Hobbies: 1%
Health: 1%

Pew surveyed 7,012 US adults by phone, including 4,753 internet users, 8% of whom are bloggers.

[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism, podcasting]. I have a number of problems with podcasting, specifically the lack of accessibility and the fact that it’s difficult for search engines to index your content. So it’s great to read a report on Poynter on free service Podzinger which, when you register your podcast feed, grabs the audio file soon after it’s published. Poynter reports how the service

“uses some ultra-sophisticated voice recognition software to create a rough transcript.
“That transcript is rough — definitely not good enough to publish, so it’s a good thing Podzinger doesn’t publish it. However, it is good enough to yield fairly accurate search results. So anyone searching for keywords at Podzinger turns up audio files which match that query.”

Helpfully, they also suggest for vodcasters

“if you publish video content, you can still leverage Podzinger. First, create a feed and make sure that every time you produce an audio file, it gets added to that feed. For video, screencasts, etc., extract the audio in MP3 format, and then add those MP3 files to your feed. Then register that feed in Podzinger. You don’t have to advertise this feed to the general audience, you can use it just for Podzinger if you want.”

UPDATE: Poynter have added some more resources for improving audio listings from reader Anthony Anderson:

“Blinkx: Keyword searching of audio and video. Submit your site to Blinkx.
Podscope: Audio/video search engine. Like Podzinger, but it’s been around longer. Podscope powers AOL’s podcast search. Submit your site to Podscope.
TVeyes: Fee-based service (real-time transcript searching of network TV, local stations, NPR, and more). Parent of Podscope. Also offers a free keyword
search service for full text (transcript search) of Web-based news video. “

[Keyword: online journalism, citizen journalism]. Dan Gillmor comments on the move by CNN to use clips from video sharing sites like YouTube. I’ve been surprised how slow media giants have been to develop an interest in what is potentially free content, but as Dan points out, the question now is whether content developers will look to get paid for their content.

[Keyword: online journalism, vodcasting]. The Press Gazette reports on the BBC’s move into vodcasting, saying:

“”Best of” compilations of the top 10 O’Clock News and Newsnight stories will be available for download, and the recently launched Story Fix, a snappy round up of the week on the News 24 website, will be adapted for vodcasting.

“The BBC has also been working on a morning show, with the working title The Breakfast Takeaway, which will headline the agenda for the day and serve as a briefing.”