I’ve decided to respond to student questions now via video. The latest collection are from Jess Barlow, and are copied below. The video responses are split into three videos - and there is a transcription of the responses at the end:
Which online tools and resources do you use to keep up to date with breaking news stories, and why do you use these?
Do you keep a personal Blog and if so how regularly do you update it, and why?
How important is Blogging to you personally, and in your opinion for online news production?
I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.
Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.
“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.
Someone recently posted on my Facebook wall: “Paul, I don’t understand, and fear I may be too old for all this already… but… what exactly is the point of twitter?”
I can come up with at least nine answers. I’m sure you can come up with more:
It’s a great way to publish to mobile devices;
it’s a social networking tool to make contacts and carry on conversations;
it’s a way of discovering new information (through tips and leads);
it’s a great way to follow what’s happening through your mobile (set Twitter up to send you mobile updates)
Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine - Things.
She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.
The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.
What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups - and get them talking?
That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? (more…)
The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…
From a lecture to a conversation
Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of - and expectation of involvement by - the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.
You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with… (more…)
In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist - but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism - comments very much invited.
The adaptable journalist
A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:
(Hyper)Text
Audio
Video
Still images
Audio slideshows
Animation
Flash interactivity
Database-driven elements
Blogs
Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
Community elements - forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
Live chats
Mapping
Mashups
This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:
‘That story would have real impact on video’;
or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’. (more…)
Norway is one of the most newspaper-reading in countries in the world, a fact also reflected in the country’s online media environment. In contrast to many other countries, Norwegians seem to prefer news-driven sites with journalistic content to all others.
Early starters
Early adoption has put Norwegian online media at a great at advantage, some of the online players even earn good money. (more…)
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