[Keyword: onlinejournalism]. There’s an article on Gamecube bemoaning the lack of quality games journalism in print at the moment and heralding its online counterpart in comparison. Key quote:

“Videogames journalism is perhaps the most sterile, bland and boring area of writing today. Online journalism is its one saviour, where journalists can write about aspects of gaming culture that print magazines don’t yet touch.”

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:

• www.theslot.com – includes a link to an accompanying blog, which includes informed comment on lazy writing.
• www.copydesk.org – click on ‘Resources’ in the top corner for useful articles.
• www.poynter.org – which I was familiar with but had never noticed had a dedicated search engine which “claims to trawl 221 journalism sites”
• www.copyeditor.com – the description in Evans’s column makes it sound pretty esoteric, and as the link wouldn’t load, I’ll let you find out…
• www.sfep.org.uk (Society for Editors and Proofreaders – sadly seems to restrict most of its content to members)
• www.londonfreelance.org/uksubs – an email network for subs.

[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.”