What this means in plain English is: to keep following the OJB you need to update your RSS feeds as follows:

Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinejournalismblog

Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnlineJournalismBlog_comments

The new site will allow me to do lots of new things with the blog, beginning with allowing you to make video comments. Hope you can join the conversation.

We stand against this trend. We are sure that journalism is getting better and stronger by the day. And that journalists will benefit from this.

More than just a big vent session for happy or angry journalists, we want to list the reasons why journalism is going in the right direction. Why it’s easier than ever for young journalists to access sources. Why journalists have more power than ever against their editors. Why journalists will have a more positive impact on society.

This is why the Online Journalism Blog team created JollyJournalist.com, a place where you can tell the world why you think that these are good times to be a journalist. We’ve added ten reasons to get you started below. Once you’re done reading them, please head over to JollyJournalist.com to comment on them or add your own!

Spread the joy !

<a href=http://windowonthemedia.com/JollyJournalist ><img src=http://windowonthemedia.com/JollyJournalist/jolly_journalist.jpg border=0 width=140px height=153px></a>

Copy and embed in your blog!

Oh, and the more people participate, the jollier it gets – so please help us spread the word by blogging about JollyJournalist.com or also by putting our nifty badge on your site!

1. The power of organisation without an organisation. Social networks allow you to find people with the same interests, with different abilities and a commitment to the same goals – regardless of location or status. The news team is no longer within the same four walls, they can change with each story.

2. Write what you want and build a personal brand. Your editor doesn’t like what you have to say? Start a blog and post it there – if it’s interesting and well written, the world will notice.

3. Be the paperboy. That’s actually better than it sounds: As a journalist, you can now also take care of the distribution of your content – and decide whether you want it to be an article, a blog post, a video, a podcast or whatever.

4. The death of churnalism. News is consumed in such a way that commoditized wire content can be delivered at zero marginal cost. There’s no need for rewriting. Journalists can focus on fact digging and analysis.

5. Information like it’s Christmas. Google allows for journalists to get information without having to go the library. Most importantly, scholarly data and free-to-use databases offer the critically-minded with thousands of references to build an argument and add value to an issue.

6. Whistleblowers at arm’s length. Wikileaks and the like have made it really easy for people with sensitive information to bypass censorship and reach a journalist. That means more insider information in the newsroom.

7. Real-time fact-checking. Interviewing a politician who’s bluffing you with tons of statistics? Ask her to quote the source and confront her to Google on your 3G cell-phone.

8. Ask people who actually know something. Browsing blogs or academic work gives you access to hundreds of contacts in just a few clicks. The address book isn’t nearly as valuable as it used to be, therefore opening up the profession. (OK, political journalists not included).

9. Interview the world for free. Skype means free interviews for freelancers. What’s more, asynchronous e-mail interviews mean you can get answers from New-Zealand while sitting comfortably at your desk in Europe.

10. Feedback that’s not from mom. Reading comments, blog-searching or twitter-watching let you see what others are saying about your article or your area of expertise. You know when you do well. And when you need to improve.

(We also have a French version and a Czech version!)

By Paul Bradshaw, Nico Luchsinger and Nicolas Kayser-Bril

When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.

Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.

This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.

A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience.

News on the web is presented like news on paper. This is good since text on the web is – apart from certain screen specific style rules – the same as on paper. An article is written, checked and published.

Spreading the news
These services like Twitter are making reporting news a more public process. For example if something happens the first people who notice are there when it happens. Uploading messages, pictures and video, to a personal community or group of friends.

With Twitter people start repeating (or retweeting) messages distributing the news among followers and informing a very large audience within minutes. This is the signaling part. It’s not about being a citizen journalist. It is about telling your friends what you are doing, or what you are seeing.

The signal reaches the audience at the same time it reaches the journalist. A journalist has to check the story, is it true? Should I publish about this or wait until it is checked? The reader is expecting that his favorite news website knows more about it and visits the website after hearing about the news. Often resulting in a bad user experience, since there is nothing on the news website about the subject.

What is the role of journalists and media in this? Should they directly report serious rumors? Should they check for more sources. I don’t know. It has to be somewhere in the middle I think. A situation where journalists are producing with updated versions.

CNN
I think CNN is giving this a very prominent place on the CNN website. Maybe because they are from television and reporting breaking news is what they are good at. They are using storytelling mechanisms on the website. Reporting what is happening right now, and directly updating it when the story turns out to be something different.

These are the breaking news messages CNN showed last week. I heard the news about Hillary ending her campaign through Twitter and CNN was one of the few news websites with the news on it.

CNN message before

CNN message after

Your thoughts
What are your thoughts about this? When should news be published on a web site and should we adapt the design of news sites to make space for a more storytelling ‘as-it-is-happening’ approach? Or does this make news websites vulnerable for misinforming the audience?

By: Wilbert Baan

1. smokes - e.g. “ryanlim smokes another wimpy rollup”. In an attempt to generate revenue, users will be charged a 15% tax on every smoke-Plurk. However, due to health and safety regulations they will not be able to smoke-Plurk indoors.
2. shouts - for users who accidentally leave caps lock on. e.g. “ryanlim shouts GOING HOME NOW”.
3. lies - for double-bluffing Plurk users.
4. lurks - for users who are only there to read other Plurks. Lurk-Plurks are invisible.
5. waffles - for users who, even with a 140 character limit, still manage to talk too much.
6. dies - for users who smoke-Plurk 60 times a day.
7. rhymes - for hip hop artists, poets and drunkards.
8. impersonates - for identity thieves.
9. mutters - for users who really don’t want to be heard. mutter-Plurks disappear after two seconds.
10. reincarnates - depending on a user’s karma score, they may be reincarnated as follows:
    • 0.00 to 21.00: a bee
    • 21.00 to 41.00: a big bee
    • 41.00 to 61.00: a wasp
    • 61.00 to 81.00: a small mammal
    • 81.00 to 100.00: a drummer in a tribute band
11. steals - Plurk “warns users that valuables are left on Plurk at their own risk”.
12. denies - for users who have been accused of steal-Plurking and Plurk-lying.
13. shags - Plurk-porn is a further business model being considered by the founders, who promise shag-Plurks will be done tastefully and with great lighting.
14. gloats - for users with inordinately high karma scores
15. leaves - for Plurkers who have decided one Twitter service is enough.

Paul Bradshaw

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months – the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know.

The share of users that asked Google for “bbc.co.uk” actually rose over the years, meaning that web-literacy did not increase. Some users still do not understand the difference between the address bar and a search engine. As internet penetration continues to grow, late-adopters are forced to go online. Their behavior is far from the gorgeous image constantly pictured by geeky web consultants.

Should we jump to conclusions and withdraw all the theories on network building and SEO? Rich Gordon, from the Readership Institute, argues for instance that the answer for news outlets lies in building destinations, not bridges nesting deeper into the user’s head so as to see her come back more regularly.

Even though the figure of 54% of URL requests without referrals is impressive (and growing), it does not imply that web users are stuck in some 1995-like behavior. Asked by e-mail about the discrepancy between what some webmasters report, with Google traffic being the main concern, and his research, Mark Meiss offers several answers.

Quite surprised himself, he admits first that his experimental design considered requests from AJAX pages or RSS readers as having no referral. He also stressed the difference between some heavily visited websites, such as Facebook, and those on the news market. Users looking for news can be dwarfed by the new usages that emerged recently and that focus on a few websites (read: social networking). The full interview can be read here.

Although users do not adopt the newest surfing technologies as fast as the geek elite would like them to, the strategic visions centered on the power of the link should not be dismissed. AOL locked-in system failed years ago, and so will Facebook’s.

Journalists should not consider this research as a confirmation that they the ultimate destination for news, as some of them would like to think. Success lies in information flow, not in puddles of still articles.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Below you’ll find my ‘Model for the 2st century newsroom’ and, below it, Beckett’s own “conceptual structure”,

Beckett acknowledges that “In my attempt to give some sort of conceptual structure to this process I am indebted to the work of Birmingham City University’s Paul Bradshaw and his “Model For A 21st Century Newsroom” at his website, Onlinejournalismblog.com.”

Unfortunately, he’s not indebted enough to directly reference the post that included the model (despite numerous footnotes referencing other blog posts) – or to include the original model in the book – or, of course, to mention it on the page containing the model (i.e. the one that will be photocopied, etc.).

Because, for all his talk of indebtedness his personal claim to the model is quite clear when he introduces it: “As part of the definition of this more connected or “distributed” journalism I want to imagine a different kind of “newsroom.”

Except that “conceptual structure” had already been created back in September 2007, and this is merely a slightly tweaked reproduction.

I’m not laying any claim to the constituent ideas behind the 21st century newsroom (which are linked to in the original post). And this isn’t an ego trip – I’m more than happy for anyone to rip the model to pieces, rebuild it, adapt it or build on it. That’s why I published it. That’s why I write this blog. What is frustrating is the absence of the transparency we should expect from academic publishing and aspiring networked journalists. (The proper academic thing to do – and what the editor Anna Feuchtwang should also have done – is use the phrase “adapted from the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom, Bradshaw, 2007″).

Even more frustrating is… well, couldn’t he have done something better with it? Surely there’s some holes to pick in it? Or big improvements to make? It’s a nice illustration of how it works in practice, but…

But perhaps I’m missing something – perhaps indeed, Beckett’s model is so substantially different as to not warrant any more than a mention of my name. Perhaps I’m expecting too much academic rigour from the head of a university thinktank, or ‘networked journalism’ standards of transparency. I’d love to know your thoughts.

If you want to see it in context the graph and its attribution can also be found on pages 54-57 of chapter 3, available for download from Harvard University (PDF):

My original post that introduced the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom, is here.

UPDATE: Charlie emailed quickly to clear things up: “Any fault in attribution is down to me and my transfer from TV journalism to book form. It was a very late addition and I wasn’t careful enough. I’m not a trained academic and I don’t pretend to be one. I spend a lot of time linking to your work, both literally online and in referencing your work to other people.”

He has also agreed to amend the PDF with appropriate references, and include an addendum slip in the US edition clarifying the origin of the model.

Thanks Charlie, now, as you say, Let’s get back to the real issue which is the future of journalism.

Most of us would look at the browser’s status bar, but it can be difficult for regular users to determine whether a link is safe for work or if leads to any interesting content. For all the value the attribute adds to user experience, it takes an awful lot of time for a journalist to fill in all the fields. 30 seconds per link, 10 links per article and that’s 5 additional minutes per story.

Asked by email, French usability guru Fred Cavazza hesitates but admits that for all its benefits, titling every link requires some courage.

There’s no evidence that the ‘title’ attribute improves SEO, and some even say that it messes up the programs used by users with disabilities.

Wikipedia (picture) makes an excellent use of the title attribute. In mainstream media, very few articles have links and even fewer display a title. When they do, it’s automated and only includes the linked text (on nytimes.com and chicagotribune.com, for instance), adding little value.

Do you title your links? Do you have a plugin that automates the process? Do you think it’s something news organizations should focus on?

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

If you could pass on the link to other journalists who blog I’d be very grateful too.

It’s all anonymous, and the results will be published here as soon as I compile them, with an email notification to members of the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group.

If you want to say more on the subject, please email me at paul.bradshaw@bcu.ac.uk – or indeed, blog about it yourself and link back here so I know about it.

Many thanks.

Google

-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.

It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.

Microsoft

-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap.

-The Microsoft/Yahoo struggle is still ongoing – rumor has it that Carl Ichan is buying up stocks in Yahoo to replace board members
who will sell to Microsoft. Seems he is replacing board members but his plans are not evident

Twitter

-Poynter did a good roundup of the Twitter coverage of the Chinese earthquake. Also gave news of situation and stories in Burma.

-Twitterfone is a new app for mobiles that allows users to call and leave a voice message, which is translated to text and then posted on Twitter. Has issues like knowing how to end the call.

-Funny meme on Twitter is finishing this sentence: “When Obama wins, …” Mine was “When Obama wins, college will be free and pizza will be subsidized”

Tech

-AP trying to get a button on the iPhone

-Effort underway to make clickstream tracking opt-in only in US. Marketers say it will be the death of their industry, but will most likely be like opting out of telemarketers.

-RIAA and MPAA still insist on using DRM on content bought to limit customer .Microsoft may also be planning to use a copyright ‘cop’ on the Zune for NBC. EA backs down on using DRM after user outcry at the idea

-Wikipedia to become a print edition, some debate about if the authors should get paid but Techdirt says it is non-controversial and they should not be paid.

-The FBI backs off of the Internet Archive – they wanted records of who used it now journalists can rest more at ease

-In the case against Ray Niro, writer of Troll Tracker blog, tried to prove he was not a “real” journalist and could not claim rights as one because he wasn’t trained, was bias and that he was a corporate mouthpiece. Defense took apart the claim of what it really means to be a journalist.

Nimbuzz moving in on Skype’s territory by making an app for both mobile and PC

Comcast bought Plaxo Inc., the social networking site. It turns online address books into online networks.

Other

Bush gave his first online interview Tuesday

Adrian Monck moved to WordPress http://adrianmonck.com/

Social

Quarter of social net users are using their mobiles to be social online in the UK.

Social Networks boom in Europe, projected to reach 107.4 million people in 2012. UK expected to be largest with 27.1 million projected.

How marketers are using social media and how often

Employers continue to ban Facebook and other social media sites at work without recognizing the possible benefits from these sites.

A new social site for health issues is iMedix, and although in beta is pretty poor in the community department. The people on it now are rather ‘happy-go-lucky’ as is some of the content which may not be appropriate for the kind of users it wants to attract (people with health problems)

-Social Networking Sites are now allowing people to basically export their data to other sites: MySpace with a few other partnered sites, Facebook to anyone, and Google to anyone. Although Facebook is closing access to journalists and is looking to take off its 5000 friends limit.

Web

Two sites, Newstrust and Newscred, have set up a system to rate the credibility of Web sites. Buzz Machine says it won’t work because there is just too much bad stuff and too easily discredited good stuff.

LiveNewsCamera.com allows viewers to see the news as it’s happening, uncut. Pope speeches, Iraqi parliament hearings, and the like.

PRWeb now allows users to search for their press releases, although this may bring fewer balanced results in a search

Harry McCracken from PC World has left to start his own tech web site.

A lot of talk going on about Seesmic: consensus seems to be that it is rough now with great potential and it is hard to imbed on some sites.

MSNBC has created a new widget to scroll news and also two games to see main news headlines. Not sure if they’re effective, but they’re trying

Media

Time Warner may be looking to unload that do not transfer well to web (i.e. Coffee table mags)

Using video to truly enhance a story – not having it be a stand alone piece but a short snipit filled with things print can’t show, like emotion.

The BBC will be using the Parliamentary channel coverage to instead cover the Olympics

From Thoughts of Nigel: 3 ways China should handle Western media – give access to reporters, don’t freak out on negative coverage, and work on building a worldwide reputation

ReinventingClassifieds.com is looking to create a new business model to keep the classified section alive

Dutch free dailies are increasing circulation and so are free Italian papers

Irish paper group, River Media, appears to be in trouble and is looking for $16 million in help.

Guatemalan journalist, Jorge Merida Perez, shot dead in his home. He worked for the Prensa Libre.

From Adam Tinworth: The possibility of journalists being paid for increasing defined traffic online is being looked at, although still skeptically

The Liverpool Daily Post liveblogged the making of the paper Tuesday

The INMA drops “newspaper” from their title and adds “newsmedia”

Cablevision buys Newsweek over Rupert Murdoch, but it is also speculated Murdoch might end up with it in a few years anyways

Upcoming book Super Media has some chapters free online and discusses how journalism can save itself and the world through network journalism

Daily Mail site just pulled Flickr photos to write an article about fat pets without asking permission or attributing credit.

Boston NOW closed

Andy Bull writes on the blandness of sports journalism with the double speak and untruthfulness of players, teams and journalists

Wall Street Journal hires on chief technology officer, Sarabjit “Ruby” Walia

But London Evening just cut their media reporter, which is just the beginning of changes there they stated

I’ve set up a Facebook group for online journalism educators and academics. I don’t know about you, but I find Facebook groups very useful for organising things quickly, asking for feedback, or finding the right people quickly. Teaching or studying online journalism can be like taking a shot in the dark sometimes, so I hope this will become a place to network, share ideas and gather support. Join it if you think it’ll be useful – I’ll try to assign an admin in every country so we can make it as useful as possible.

PS: There is also the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group.