[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Matthew Buckland at Poynter highlights a great example of “how effectively blogging and online multimedia can be used to report on an event on almost zero budget.”

To quote:

“At the recent launch of Creative Commons South Africa, attended by none other than the father of Creative Commons himself, Lawrence Lessig, a group of Rhodes University (South Africa) new-media journalism students blogged the conference in real time, on their laptops and with their mobile phones and video cameras. The site was continually accessed by delegates in real time via wi-fi as the presentations happened.

“The innovative students even built their own content management system for the conference. They note on their website, “… One of the features we identified quite early is the use of mobile phones to post images directly from the event to the website. This is done by conference delegates by posting pictures from their camera phones via MMS-to-Email. Our server checks the POP mail account for new images and publishes them on the site. This type of innovative journalism is a small part of our broader approach to change journalistic practice in Africa.” “

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. When journalists blog, they stick pretty close to the traditional role of information provider, according to an article in the latest issue of the Journalism journal (link is to subscription content, but the abstract’s free). That shouldn’t be news to anyone who reads j-blogs from inside news organisations, but it’s a reminder that we’re a long way from the we media that so many commentators are waiting for.

Jane Singer found that almost none of the 20 US j-blogs she studied allowed users to post comments. Some regional or local newspaper blogs quoted and referred to their readers’ feedback, but the big national media had almost no reader content. She also found that, although postings often had links (an average of 2.3 per post), the overwhelming majority were either to the host news organisation website or to a small number of elite news sites (Washington Post, NY Times, etc). Her conclusion: journalists ‘are unwilling to relinquish or even share their gatekeeping role’.

I think she’s right on the reason why. Most journalists doing blogs for their news organisations see blogging as a high-tech extension of their existing job rather than as something different. Columnists write blogs like their columns and reporters provide info, with links to the places they always get their news from.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. “Two-thirds of reporters still think working in print is more prestigious than web journalism,” reports the Press Gazette, based on a survey by Greatreporter.com, although it seems a pretty unusual sample: the survey’s respondents were “drawn from greatreporter.com‘s 2,000 registered members, who use the site to syndicate and sell their journalism worldwide”.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. So says this survey, reported by Poynter, who say:

“Salaries for new-media types compare very favorably with those in advertising, public relations, and marketing. They blow away the newspaper, magazine, radio, and television salaries for all but the national media in the Northeast.

“The survey shows that the median salary for online/new-media personnel ranges from $53,000 in the South and Midwest to $60,000 in the West and Northeast.”

Hopefully, as with many things in the US, the UK will follow.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. …is to share content, as are the Wall Street Journal and Post according to The Guardian. Is this the beginning of consolidation in the industry?

Perhaps only in the West, as rising sales in markets outside of the US, Europe and Australia mean that newspaper sales overall are up.

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Thanks to Poynter for collecting a number of examples of Flash journalism around the story of “the Chilean armed forces’ worst peacetime disaster” when “Thirty-five young, inexperienced recruits died after they were sent to the mountain while a fierce snowstorm was beginning.”

Many of the examples are in Flash but you still get a good idea:

“The media had to figure out how to show the place, as Emol.com did (Spanish) with a satellite photo, or to explain the local political circumstances, as the New York Times did.

“[T]he medical effects of low temperatures … are well explained with a Flash animation, where you slide a bar on a thermometer and see what happens to the human body.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Here’s a discussion piece from the OJR about magazines’ future with some interesting opinions. As usual in my editorial role I’ll pick out the best bit:

“Jay Rosen: People who hope that the fundamentals of journalism won’t change tend to attach those hopes to statements about unchanging media forms, like, ‘I’ve lived through the death of print three times already. Remember the paperless office?’ Whereas those who are hoping for change in journalism tend to get ‘attached’ to platform change as a kind of dynamo. I have no firm sense of what will happen with print, paper and ink. But I do think this: The strength of print is still that is scaled to the human body and what ‘works’ for it, or doesn’t. The body and its requirements do change, but far more slowly than technology –and journalism — do.

“Nina Link: We know from the Northwestern Magazine Reader Experience Study that people talk about magazines with some of the following words: ‘it’s my personal time out’; ‘I lose myself in the pleasure of reading it’; ‘it stimulates my thinking about things’; and ‘it makes me smarter.’ The physical attributes of a magazine are very much part of the experience of reading a magazine — the size, the portability, the quality of the graphics and the ease of use. I believe strongly in the future of the paper-based magazine. It’s been with us for more than 260 years. Paper-based magazines are a timely and timeless medium.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. That’s the upshot of this article from the American Journalism Review, which highlights a number of new companies venturing into online news – as well as recent trends in major news organisations buying into online operations like About.com and MarketWatch. The most useful point comes right at the end of the article, however, in these caveats:

“Jai Singh, editor in chief of CNET News, cautions that while it’s easier to get into Web publishing, serious challenges await new entrants to the field. “The real cost is that to do good journalism, you’ve got to pay good wages to good reporters and editors,” he says.

“Building a brand is not easy either, he says. “Can you be big enough to have the scale to compete with established news organizations? These things will have to be part of the business plan beyond the fact that the technology is cheaper and the ad market is strong,” he says.

“According to Nolan, the key to success isn’t simply getting your site up on the Web, it’s getting people to read it. “The barrier to entry in this new business isn’t getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience,” she wrote on the blog Pressthink.

“The new sites will have to market themselves intensely, either formally or by word-of-blog; spend money to optimize their sites (so they appear higher in search engine results); and stay current on publishing technology while keeping content fresh and accurate so that visitors will return. Those that do succeed may help online journalism fulfill some of its early promise by bringing a wide variety of fresh, independent voices to the Web.”

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. The NUJ’s New Media Industrial Council has launched its own blog at http://nujnewmedia.blogspot.com/ – quite empty at the moment but expect it to fill up as contributors sign up (including me).

You can also subscribe to the Council’s mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nuj-newmedia/

[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Poynter provides links to in-house publications at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times that “offers an interesting behind-the-scenes look at The New York Times. Among the topics covered recently: redesign efforts at the newspaper, focusing on the new Travel section and Book Review; […] and a look at the Public Editor’s first year on the job.”

Sadly the links on the WSJ page all seem to be dead, but perhaps someone else can track them down…?