I’ve held back from commenting on the NUJ’s initial remarks on multimedia working but a call for reaction to Donnacha DeLong’s accompanying piece on the NUJ New Media mailing list – and some of the comments in response – have finally got me typing in frustration. In particular, one person’s remark that “The biggest problem is that on the web everyone thinks they are equal (and capable)” got me spitting. Continue reading
The third part of this draft book chapter (read part one here and part two here) looks at how blogs have changed the sourcing practices of journalists – in particular the rise of crowdsourcing – and provided opportunities for increased engagement. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.
While the opportunity that blogs provide for anyone to publish has undoubtedly led to a proliferation of new sources and leads – particularly “Insider” blogs produced by experts and gossips working within particular industries (Henry, 2007) and even ‘YouTube whistleblowers’ (Witte, 2006) – it is the very conversational, interactive and networked nature of blogs which has led journalists to explore completely new ways of newsgathering. Continue reading
How do you react to a local disaster in the new media age?
San Diego TV station News 8 … has responded to the crisis on its patch by taking down its entire regular web site and replacing it with a rolling news blog, linking to YouTube videos of its key reports (including Himmel’s), plus Google Maps showing the location of the fire. Continue reading
In the second part of my book chapter I look at the criticisms leveled at both bloggers and professional journalists. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.
Blogs have attracted criticism from a range of sources for being susceptible to mob rule (Allan, 2006), for containing ill-informed and biased opinion, for being an ‘echo chamber’ of homogenous voices (Henry, 2007), for lack of editorial rigour, and as representing the rise of the ‘cult of the amateur’.
At the same time, professional journalism itself has been under attack for the rise of a corporate culture (Gant, 2007), with many journalists seeing “their autonomy diminishing as newsroom standards of ethics, rigour and balance lost out to management goals of saving money and trivializing the news” (Beers, 2006: 113), while under-resourced newsrooms have faced criticism for running unedited PR videos (Henry, 2007), or relying on only one source (Ponsford, 2007), and investigative journalism specifically has been criticised for allowing sources to set agendas (Feldstein, 2007). Continue reading
Consider this my first attempt at a photoblog entry. For those who prefer video or text you can see both at http://www.ejc.net/seminars/picnic_2007_3
In the first part of my model for the 21st century newsroom I looked at how a story might move through a number of stages from initial alert through to customisation. In part two I want to look at sourcing stories, and the role of journalism in a new media world.
The last century has seen three important changes for the news industry. It has moved… Continue reading
On Thursday I’ll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff. As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the ‘official’ version.
Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights: Continue reading
As previously reported, I’ll be at the first European Bloggers (Un)Conference, in Amsterdam, on September 27-28. I’ve now set up a Facebook group and event if you want to sign up.
Attendees are listed on the unconference wiki and include Nicolas Ebnother of Internews, Oleksander Demchenko of the Ukrainian LiveJournal journalism community, Andrew Davies of the Greenpeace makingwaves blog, Vadim Sadonshoev, Irakli Jibladze of Steady State, Luca Conti, Abdul Gamid, Leila Tanayeva of New Eurasia, Mikhail Doroshevich of e-belarus, photoblogger Anush Babajanyan, Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy, and Wybo Wiersma of OgOg. Guest speaker Evgeny Morozov of Transitions Online plans Continue reading
I’m calling it Indie Journalism: journalists going it alone with new business models for the new media era. And having interviewed indie football journalist Rick Waghorn recently on his relaunch, I thought I’d do the same with James Fryer, who, with fellow journalist Michelle Byrne, recently launched SoGlos, a local online-only magazine for Gloucestershire. Continue reading
There’s a great journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing over at the OJR, which is close to being added to my must-read online journalism blog posts due to this quote: “Ultimately, journalism is social science, and journalists who want to make best use of crowdsourcing need to get familiar with the mathematics of social science.” Here’s some more:
“if you want to attempt a true crowdsourcing project, someone in your newsroom will [need programming skills]. Free online survey tools and mapping websites can help you collect and publish great reader-contributed data. But if you want custom information to move from survey form to published report in real time, you can’t do that yet without a programmer on your team.
“… The interviewing and document searches of 20th-century investigative reporting will look incomplete as savvy journalists and newsrooms learn to harness the Internet’s wide reach and interactivity to gather massive databases that only formal social science techniques can effectively manage and analyze.”
Online Journalism Blog 