Jun 29th, 2006 | Blogs, Citizen Media, Reimagination | No Comments
Another round-up post with links to some articles and blog posts that relate to our central themes:
- Dale Dougherty left his job as a newspaper reporter to start a local online media outlet called the Chi-Town Daily News, and the Online Journalism Review had a piece about him recently.
- Jay Rosen of PressThink has a long treatise looking at the evolution of what he (and others) refer to as “the people formerly known as the audience.”
- The BBC launches a blog written by its senior editors, which is called simply The Editors. There’s some discussion of the blog at Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine.
- Some good advice from Steve Outing, columnist for Editor & Publisher, on “How to make your website more conversational.”
- Jack Shafer at Slate magazine has a piece in which he argues that newspapers are shrinking but the desire for news is growing. There’s some comment on his thoughts from the Center for Citizen Media.
- Donna Bogatin has a column at ZDNet in which she talks about Wikipedia and whether such social networks actually produce anything of value because of what she calls “social freeloaders.”
Jun 22nd, 2006 | Media 2.0, Reimagination | No Comments
Here are a bunch of things I’ve come across recently:
- Editors Weblog did a nice job of looking at the Times Select pay-wall dilemma, which obviously applies to us as well. It notes that numbers have flattened out since January, and “for a new product to stop gaining new users 4 months after it begins doesn’t really bode well.”
- The Washington Post is trying to turn all of its foreign reporters into multimedia journalists by equipping them with digital video cameras that will take photos and video, and more local reporters are being asked to file photos or video with stories as well.
- Blogger Frankie Roberto is taking part in an experiment with the BBC, in which he is effectively working as a “citizen journalist” from the BBC’s newsroom, reporting and interviewing and blogging both for the BBC and for Wikinews, the journalism arm of Wikipedia.
- Craig Saila passed on a “citizen reporter” site based in Vancouver that is run by former Globe columnist and longtime journalist Paul Sullivan called Orato.com, which says it has 1500 “citizen journalists” around the world contributing to the site.
Jun 13th, 2006 | Blogs, Reimagination | No Comments
The Online Journalism Review has a decent article with some advice for newspapers that are trying to get their reporters to blog, and to respond to reader comments:
Asking reporters to blog, and to then interact like successful bloggers, is perhaps at this point in time asking for a quantum leap in the ways in which reporters have been instructed to perform their jobs. Misperceptions about blogging abound — in part because of the constant negative attention that is given to contentious comments and snarky blogs as much as it comes from simply not knowing the community.
Focusing on the negatives, however, only serves to feed a fear of interaction. Positive interaction can occur, but reporters must first cultivate a non-confrontational temperament and other subtle skills — such as interpretation of syntax and a level of transparency — if they are going to interact successfully.
Jun 13th, 2006 | Blogs, Reimagination | No Comments
Mark Glaser of the PBS blog Media Shift wrote a column recently calling on the New York Times to tear down its pay wall because its columnists are no longer part of the blogosphere conversation, and he followed it up recently with another column in which he looked at what might happen if the Times moved its columnists out from behind the pay wall and made them all bloggers, and then sold advertising around that:
As a guess, let’s say that columnists get 40% of the page views, archives get 40% of page views, and other TimesSelect features get 10%. So the columnists, as a whole, would account for 40% of $4 million to $5 million, or about $1.8 million. Now what if those columnists became bloggers? And what if the Times helped direct its massive online traffic to help promote these bloggers?
Jun 13th, 2006 | Blogs, Reimagination | No Comments
Mark Glaser, the PBS columnist who writes a blog called Media Shift, recently asked for comments on what newspaper blogs people preferred, and what kinds of suggestions bloggers might have for newspapers thinking of adding them, and he pulled that together in a recent post. He also got some comments from Jay Rosen, a prominent journalism teacher and blogger:
Rosen has three theories on ways that blogs can work in a newspaper setting: 1) find the fanatics in the newsroom and let them write about topics the newspaper never writes about; 2) create blogs for reporters who can engage their audience to help in the reporting; and 3) recruit people from the community with “drive and knowledge and moxy” to blog, similar to what Silverman has accomplished at the Houston Chronicle.
