[Keyword: onlinejournalism].
““It’s very future-looking,” the BT spokesperson says, but it doesn’t look a future shaped by public service goals. BT’s just launched a trial of radio and TV services for cellphones. Virgin UK customers, initially a trial of 1000 around London, have been able to from yesterday listen to up to 50 digital radio stations and watch clips from satellite TV. The other cell phone companies are putting their toes in the water in similar ways. Might be the future of radio, and I can get enthusiastic about the coming together of online and radio, with the tens of thousands of stations I’ll be able to tune into as I commute to work. But look at the growing power of the telcos. We’re getting closer to a situation where the same few companies control access to most of people’s digital media, and where those companies are ones that think of people first and foremost as consumers. What’s BT’s commitment to quality journalism and public debate?

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has helpfully produced a legal guide for bloggers – although, being American its applicability in the UK and other countries will vary. Any pointers for a similar guide for the UK?

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Steve Outing has put together a great 11-step guide to incorporating citizen journalism in your site – an article so good I’m thinking of ways to ‘highlight’ this posting so it stands out as a particularly useful one. Here’s the bare bones:

1. Opening up to public comment
2. The citizen add-on reporter (i.e. “solicit information and experiences from members of the public, and add them to the main story to enhance it.”)
3. Open-source reporting (“a collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product”)
4. The citizen bloghouse (adding reader blogs to your site)
5. Newsroom citizen ‘transparency’ blogs (“inviting readers to blog with public complaints, criticism, or praise for the news organization’s ongoing work. […] A milder form of this is the editor’s blog — typically written by a paper’s top editor and explaining the inner workings of the newsroom and discussing how specific editorial decisions are made”)
6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version (“establishing a news-oriented Web site that is comprised entirely or nearly entirely of contributions from the community”)
7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
8. Add a print edition
9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism (e.g. OhmyNews)
10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors (e.g. Wikinews)

Amazingly, he also provides examples of nearly all of these (note that these are not necessarily techniques he advises using all of the time, every time).

UPDATE: Outing has since added ‘wikitorials’, although he’s yet to find out what it is yet…

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. A little late to report, but it’s worth reading Simon Waldman’s speech on the opportunity/threat of RSS and news aggregators, in which he sees “three critical issues we are going to face with RSS.

“The first is what’s happening to our readers.

“The second is what’s happening to our content.

“And the third – is what’s going to happen to our classified ads.”

On the second he makes these points:

“The prioritisation, structure and design that we have given to our content in our papers – and on our websites – is lost as we all become just one feed among many.

“[…] My three tips for dealing with it are simple to say – but tricky to implement.

“The first is your content itself […] has to be distinctive – it has to be able to stand out on a global news stand.

“[…] The second is more technical – but has to do with how your site is technically marked up, to make sure that you can offer exactly the feeds that people want, and that the information is presented in exactly the right way.

“And the third is that you have to think of the story page on your site – as your front page.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Published by Poynter, this guide is a lengthy but helpful guide to the uses of Computer Assisted Reporting, with case studies to illustrate them.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Thanks again to Poynter for pointing out the latest blog search engine which allows you to search by location and subject. Sadly, Blogdigger Local only allows you to search by US zip codes and state names – surely someone can do the same for the UK, or the world? (although Blogdigger promises to expand its range in time)

For now we’ll have to settle for tools more suited to sailors: Jonathon Dube suggests, “if you want to search outside of the U.S., you can use the Blogdigger Local Advanced Search form [http://local.blogdigger.com/adv.jsp] and enter your latitude/longitude coordinates.”

So how do you easily find those coordinates? My tip is Multimap: once you’ve found a place it lists the latitude and longitude below the map.

PS: Other location-based blog search engines recommended by Poynter include FeedMap (http://www.csthota.com/blogmap): “The only blogs included in here are ones that individuals have entered. Anyone can geo-code their blog and enter it, and once they do so they get a “BlogMap” to put on their site.”

– And Videoblogger Map, “a map of videobloggers around the world (http://www.videoblogging.info/map/index.php). Click on the dots to go to individual blogs. There aren’t very many on here, but it’s a nice approach and could be handy as more are added.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Poynter’s Steve Outing has a suggestion for improving registration schemes: a big “PLEASE REGISTER” banner above the content, which will go away when they register.

“My guess is that nearly all regular users of a site employing this scheme will register, in order to make the registration-request graphic go away. One-time visitors won’t, but they’ll still get what they want — and be exposed to the site’s advertisers.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. About.com have a helpful and brief article on what types of software are best for drawing maps (whether that be interactive maps or illustrative). It’s all about vector art.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Another survey shows the take-up of broadband Internet in homes is reaching a critical mass for the industry. About half of homes in South Korea have fast connections and Europe is close to overtaking it. Nearly half of homes in Denmark and the Netherlands now have fast Internet access, and the rate of increase is pretty high, according to a Dutch research company, TelecomPaper.

In New Zealand, where I’m based, the media industry is pretty wary about putting broadcast media content online or about adding to current (essentially shovelware) online content, saying they’ll wait till dial-up is replaced by faster, always-on connections for most people. I tend to be sceptical about arguments that technology drives the media, but on this one maybe the changing infrastructure is the next big thing for online journalism, just because it’s been holding things back for so long.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Interesting article in The Guardian about research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that looked at 40 “of the biggest and most respected political blogs and the extent to which they influence and are influenced by other media.”:

“Its results show that bloggers are generally following another agenda, whether that of a political party or another medium, but also highlights the extent to which they can now influence the mainstream media on certain topics. “Sometimes blogs lead and can be very influential and other times they’re followers,” he says.

“… Rathergate showed that when bloggers were able to access primary evidence in the same way as newspaper journalists, they could run with a story.”

Writer Owen Gibson comments that in the UK, “With the odd exception (Guido Fawkes’ Order-Order.com and Mick Fealty’s Slugger O’Toole blog on Northern Ireland for example), there is little heavyweight comment and it is rare to see a blog break a story or substantially move it on” – this being attributed to the “more rambunctious nature” of the UK press, although Neil McIntosh, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited,

“says that a breakthrough Rathergate moment is inevitable sooner or later. “You’d be daft to say never. All that it takes is someone to see that a properly produced Private Eye-style blog would work brilliantly on the web. You’ll get something like that in Britain.” Cornfield also points to evidence of bloggers mobilising the “No” vote in the French referendum on the EU constitution as proof that it just takes the right kind of issue to spark interest.”