Another potentially useful website for online publishers, the Subscription Website Publishers Association promises a great deal for publishers, but seems so enamoured of the membership concept that it hides most of its content and all of the tools from casual browsers. You can, however, view sample articles, and some of these do look interesting.
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. The April/May issue of the NUJ’s Journalist magazine contains a particularly useful column from Humphrey Evans on websites for subs (or, as he points out “in the USA it’s called copy editing. HTat’s the phrase to enter in the search engine”). These include:
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Article on Search Engine Watch about Aware, which “joins the class of “research manager” programs that we’ve written about, such as Onfolio, Nextaris and others. These tools go beyond search by providing a suite of tools that let you manipulate search results in interesting ways not possible with search engines.”
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Have just discovered this excellent resource for online journalism from Mindy McAdams of the University of Florida: it includes plenty of examples of OJ forms, plus resources and a helpful page on media types that stimulates some analytical thinking about what media you’re using.
It also looks like she’s publishing a book very soon on ‘Flash Journalism’ (see the supporting website). Good to see someone else plugging this area…
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. OJR goes inside Yahoo News and their redesigns. Very interesting…
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Some interesting thoughts from Dan Gillmor about what he calls ‘Distributed Journalism’, “where lots of people can work in parallel on small parts of the bigger question and collectively — and relatively quickly — bring to bear lots of individual knowledge and/or energy to the matter. Some open-source software projects work this way. The important thing is the parallel activity by large numbers of people, in service of something that would be difficult if not impossible for any one or small group of them to do alone, at least in a timely way.”
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. Well worth bookmarking for the next month, the Guardian’s foray into the blogging world looks very good. Not least for its incorporation of a folksonomic zeitgeist (explained here) which draws on tags to show what the current talking points are.
At the time of writing these were sadly quite useless: Tony Blair, labour, Michael Howard and tories are the most used, followed by pope, conservatives, politics, and it’s only after those that you see some more useful terms: howardflight, postalvoting, asylumandimmigration… Click on the term to see reports tagged with the phrase.
[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. What everyone else already knows – but it takes a senior figure saying it to get people actually acting…
Guardian Unlimited‘s assistant editor Neil McIntosh is quoted in Journalism.co.uk as saying two issues are particularly difficult for news sites to overcome when exploring the blog format.
First, the blogosphere is very hostile towards journalists and the mainstream media – as demonstrated by the Rathergate episode last year. US broadcaster CBS sacked four employees after bloggers helped to expose flaws in a story about President Bush’s war record.
“Blogs are an editorial innovation, and it’s important that we pursue them for that reason. But a blog launch isn’t a blog launch without sarcastic comments saying they shouldn’t be there.”
Second, editors often approach blogs in the wrong way.
“They lean back in their chairs and ask: ‘what can blogs do for me when I’m trying to build a brand that will last for 100 years?’ Bloggers are undermining that business case,” added Mr McIntosh.
“Being an innovator and pushing boundaries is the future,” said Mr McIntosh.
Wired provide a good overview of the different newsreaders you can download and the different tools that come with that. For instance, “You can look for new feeds in NewsGator by searching on a keyword. For example, I searched on “Portland” (since I just moved to Oregon) and added several feeds about the happenings in the City of Roses.”
My Google Alert on the phrase “online journalism” threw up this result today: The NetMedia 2003 | EOJ Awards 2003 winners:
“Barcelona, 3 July: War and peace and corporate corruption and greed were the two stand-out story themes in the shortlists for the 2003 European Online Journalism awards, and eight of the winning entries featured one of these themes.
“For the second year running, journalists from BBC News Online have dominated the proceedings, winning eight of the 21 prizes on offer.
The most coveted prize, the Internet Journalist of the Year, went to Vincent Landon, science correspondent of Swiss Radio International for his contribution to ‘The malaria business, a remarkable investigation of a largely neglected story – the devastating impact of malaria on the health of children in developing countries.
Best Overall Journalism Service went to Lamalla.net, the news and current affairs portal for the Barcelona region.
Transitions Online, the Prague-based online news magazine which covers the post-communist region of Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, won the Best Innovation in Online Journalism category.
The Best Use of Multimedia award went to two journalism students from the Danish School of Journalism, the first time student journalists have won any of the prizes.
Dr David Whitehouse, the BBC’s science correspondent, winner of the Best News Story Broken on the Net category, has now won awards for four years running. The Outstanding contribution to online journalism in Europe award went to Mike Smartt, editor-in-chief of BBC News Interactive.”
Online Journalism Blog 