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Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology

August 31, 2007 • 1:49 pm 0

Google takes another bite out of online news

Google has taken a major step into becoming a publisher of news. It is now hosting news stories on its Google News site, rather than just linking to the websites with the material.

The deal covers five major news services: AP, Agence France-Presse, the UK Press Association and the Canadian Press. Here’s an example of what a CP story looks like on Google. It is very simple and clear, with no ads but with links to related news stories.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a way of just getting an agency’s stories all on one page. Going to canadianpress.google.com just takes you back to the Google homepage.

Even so, some new websites which rely heavily on agency copy may have cause to be concerned. As an AP story on Forbes says:

It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies’ Web sites where those stories and photos are also found – a development that could reduce those companies’ revenue from online advertising.

Google’s response is that while some publishers may lose traffic, “it will allow more room for their original content”.

The message is clear. Start building up your original content, be distinctive, offer something that readers cannot find elsewhere, rather than simply filling up your news site with recycled agency copy

Filed under: Canada, Google, innovation, internet, journalism

August 29, 2007 • 11:52 am 1

Understanding why blogs are important

As a respite to all the recent exchange of verbal blows over blogging and journalism, this is a refreshing op-ed in The Guardian from co-founder of Salon.com Scott Rosenberg.

He avoid getting into a fruitless debate about whether blogging is journalism and instead talks about how “from the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable”.

Most journalists’ understanding of the nature of blogging has been circumscribed by a focus on how it might affect our profession. We write articles about whether blogging can be journalism, we worry about whether bloggers can or will replace journalists, and we miss the real stories.

Blogs provide a tool for free expression, and this is something that journalists regularly campaign for. So it is ironic that they should fear, dismiss or undermine others who seek to have a voice.

As Rosenberg argues, “blogging has redrawn the line between private communication and mass publication”, as it allows anyone to share their life experience with an audience.

Rosenberg’s insight is to make a distinction between the publication of a post and the viewing of a post. “When anyone can publish anything, the moment of truth isn’t when you press the post button, it’s when others choose to read what you’ve said.”

This is a fundamental point. The value of a blog is not decided by its author but by its readers. Each of us can decide whether or not to spend our time on a blog. How we value the contribution of each and every blog is a personal decision. The web means we can be our own editors, investing our time in the media that helps us understand the world, be it a blog or a newspaper website.

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, blogs, journalism

August 28, 2007 • 8:42 am 0

The skills every journalist needs

If you want to get an idea of skills journalists should be learning, check out Mindy McAdams’ new course at Florida, Journalists’ Toolkit.

Over two terms, the course will look at how to use audio, audio slideshows and blogs in journalism, and later focus on video and other motion visuals.

This is the sort of training that should be happening in newsrooms across the world, as journalists move beyond the printed word into a world of multimedia story-telling.

Filed under: education, innovation, journalism

August 19, 2007 • 10:25 am 1

Taking a break

Off for a week’s holiday. Normal service will be resumed on Monday 27 August. Thanks.

Filed under: new media

August 17, 2007 • 10:36 am 0

BBC News embraces the sociable web

Some visitors to the BBC News website will have noticed a little box appearing at the bottom of stories with a range of social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit.

With a simple click of a button, you can now share a BBC story with your friends. It explains, for one, why so many BBC stories are appearing on my friends’ pages in Facebook.

Writing on the BBC Editors’ blog, Paul Brannan readily admits that other sites already offer such tools. He also explains the rationale behind the choice of social sites:

There are a huge number of social bookmarking sites out there. The five sites we’ve chosen – Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon – are those which we believe are going to be most useful to our audience. We’d be interested in what you think, though, so please do let us know.

As one comment on the posting points out, the same buttons are not available on the Editors’ Blog, though Brannan replied that they will be coming soon.

Filed under: BBC, Web 2.0, broadcast, social media, social networking

August 15, 2007 • 10:45 am 1

Using a blog to “etch yourself into the memory of the web”

At last week’s AEJMC convention in Washington DC, New York University professor Jay Rosen talked about the philosophy behind his influential blog PressThink.

Rosen explained how blogging was ideal for the diffusion of ideas as you can, in his words, “etch yourself into the memory of the web”. What he means is that, for example, when you run a Google search for the words Eason Jordan, the second listing is Rosen’s posting on Jordan’s resignation.

PressThink is an example of how scholars can use blogging to reach a much wider audience than through publication in journals.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: AEJMC, academics, blogging, education, journalism

August 14, 2007 • 11:58 am 1

How to grow a positive online community

The list of 12 tips for creating an online community produced by the Knight Citizen News Network is a worthwhile read.

It hopes to help anyone struggling to keep their online community civil, constructive and lively. Among the tips is:

The “if you build it, they will come” approach to online community rarely produces good results. Most people don’t want to be the first one to strike up a public conversation. It’s helpful to do some behind-the-scenes recruiting of knowledgeable, reasonable, friendly, interested, and gregarious people to check in with your community regularly.

This was the experience of NewWest, a network of hyperlocal pro-am sites in the Rocky Mountains. At the AEJMC convention last week, managing editor Courtney Lowery provided an insight into the growing pains of NewWest.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: AEJMC, citizen journalism, journalism, newspapers, social media, user-generated content

August 13, 2007 • 12:30 pm 1

Gillmor on why failure is a positive quality

One of the more interesting speakers at last week’s annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication was Dan Gillmor.

During a panel on citizen media, he talked about the need to accept failure as a learning process. Gillmor is speaking from experience, having being behind the failed Bayosphere site.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: AEJMC, citizen journalism, journalism ,

August 10, 2007 • 9:34 pm 1

Journalism conference shuns online in favour of print

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference brings together academics from all over the US and beyond to present research, discuss trends and network with colleagues.

The hotel lobby is full of people with laptops, as the wifi is free there but paid for in the rooms. But as J D Lasica found out, you’d be hard pressed to find out what people are saying at the conference unless you are actually here in Washington DC.

Despite the number of laptops, no one seems to be blogging from the event. Ironically, though, the AEJMC has assembled a crew of undergraduate and graduate students, led by faculty, to produce a daily newspaper on the talks and discussions.

So J D Lasica should be able to get all the information he wants. The problem is that he needs to be in DC as the AEJMC Reporter is not available online. It is only available as a print product.

I find this astounding, especially since last year’s AEJMC Reporter was on the web. For a profession all about the diffusion of ideas, this seems a staggering step backwards.

The only information on the AEJMC site is a handful of entries on its blog and none of it is that informative. As the print paper says, “student reporters will also be posting stories and images, occasionally, on the AEJMC forum”. They should be posting ALL the material online, not just some bits and pieces.

If you are really desperate to get an idea of the research being presented here, at least you can read the abstracts. The full papers are supposed to follow.

UPDATE: Since this posting, the AEJMC has put up a bunch of articles about the conference on its forum. They were all posted on Sunday, the last day of the conference. It is good to see this material online, but it would have been better to have the reports posted in a more timely fashion.

Filed under: AEJMC, academics, education, journalism, newspapers, online

August 9, 2007 • 5:51 pm 1

“If you’re platform agnostic, you’re going to be dead”

I’m at the AEJMC conference in Washington DC this week. This is the time of year when educators in journalism and mass communication get together to present papers, share experiences and generally discuss the state of education.

With simultaneous panels taking place back to back, there is little time to report back on the sessions in detail. So I wanted to highlight the best thing I heard today, during a panel on that perennial topic, the future of news.

The most striking comments came from Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

First he said that news producers needed to go to war, and he stressed “go to war”, with broadband providers and Internet aggregators. He argued that while Verizon and Google get paid, the providers of the content they carry was not getting a cent. One solution, he proposed, was to add a little extra to bills to pay news providers.

Rosenstiel was equally blunt about news organisations that describe themselves as platform agnostic. He said that this implied you did not believe in the web, whereas your competitors are driven by a belief they can do things better online.

If you’re platform agnostic, you’re going to be dead and you deserve to be dead

There is something to Rosenstiel’s point. The big names on the net, the likes of Google, YouTube and Facebook, are successful because they realised they could do something online better than on any other platform.

Media companies could do with learning this lesson and instead of being “platform agnostic”, focus on what they can do better online than on any other medium.

Filed under: education, innovation, internet, journalism

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Alfred Hermida
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