Site changes at Sky News and Channel 4 sites

This week has seen some changes over on the Sky News and Channel 4 sites (follow links below to see the changes):

Sky news blog pages:

• A facelift on the blog home and other pages.
• Two new buttons on the blogs page: ‘Our Blogs’ and ‘Your Blogs’.
• Tags so you can display all the blogs on the same subject.
• A section in ‘Your Blogs’ where Sky News suggests subjects that users might want to blog about it (e.g Obama and the recession) which users don’t have to obey, but if they do, they will get more chance of being linked from the main page of the website.

Channel 4:

• The all-new Snowblog on the Channel 4 news site.
• A facelift on the Channel 4 mainsite

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Successful German blog Basicthinking.de sold on eBay

Basicthinking.de, one of the most-visited German blogs discussing IT and hardware topics, was sold on eBay last week for nearly €47,000, Medienlese has reported.

Robert Basic, IT expert, owner and only author of the popular forum, said in a post that he had put the blog on eBay, because it was ‘time for a change and to build up something new’. At time of writing, Basic’s last entry had received 444 comments.

Some critics accused Basic of linkbaiting, suggesting that he would not go through with the sale of the blog.

He will continue to write for multi-language blog buzzriders, but not basicthinking. The blog is now in the hands of serverloft, a German server company.

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Ben Goldacre on how blogs can be ‘more reliable’ than mainstream media

Courtesy of Conrad Quilty-Harper, of the Spalpeen blog, here’s Dr Ben Goldacre on video talking about Bad Science… in a toilet (Goldacre’s choice, apparently). With little fear of the germs, Goldacre puts the loo seat down (about halfway through) and summarizes his thoughts on sensationalised science reporting.

Perhaps most interestingly for online journalists he airs his thought on media reliability: around the seven minute mark Goldacre says:

“…blogs are potentially more reliable than mainstream media ever was – mainly because you can check for each individual blog author, how credible they are, because bloggers link to primary resources…”

His thoughts on journalists and their deliberate disguising of sources (for example, not making it clear they’re quoting a press release) are worth a listen.

The doc’s getting about in the mainstream media too: he was on BBC Radio 4 (again) yesterday, featuring on ‘Start the Week‘.

Here’s the original Spalpeen video:

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science talks about Sensationalised Science Reporting from Conrad on Vimeo.

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NiemanLab.org: ‘Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued’

NiemanLab.org publishes a video of David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard, at a conference of New England newspaper editors and also provides a full transcript. He explains Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) and ‘how it provides wide-ranging immunity to web-site publishers for what goes on in their comments,’ the NiemanLab reports.

Full story…

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PoynterOnline: Everyday ethics for journalists using social media

As part of the ‘Virtual Poynter training’, Kelly McBride discussed social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from the Roanoke Times. ‘In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere,’ McBride reports. Here’s a look at what the group came up with. Full story…

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Journalistopia: Things online editors can do to save their jobs

Danny Sanchez offers some tips to help online editors keep their jobs: “Major news organizations are beginning to merge their print and online operations, which means print-edition journalists will increasingly double up on their duties and transition over to the web site, becoming full-fledged online producers with many of the basic skills to match,” he writes. Full story…

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The Blog Herald: 9,000 are following on Twitter, but just who is @themediaisdying?

“The Media is Dying Twitter account is a phenomenon, an excellent source for anxious and curious journalists and media enthusiasts altogether. And there’s plenty of them, the account’s got over 9,000 followers,” reports the Blog Herald. Here, an interview with the mysterious bearers of bad news… Full story…

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American Journalism Review: The importance of being confrontational

A comprehensive look at confrontational interview style. Inspired by the recent release of the Frost/Nixon film, Mark Feldstein gives a ‘how to’ guide to making them work. Full story… (via the Advancing the Story blog)

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FollowTheMedia: How to preserve your inauguration newspaper

Some off-line / old school tips from FollowTheMedia via the Society of California Archivists on ‘how to make your inauguration newspaper survive the years’. Number one: ‘store newspapers papers in a cool, dry place. No attics or basements that can attract extreme temperatures and humidity.’

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VisualEditors: Link round-up of inauguration multimedia

A selection of the ‘great multimedia reports’ covering the inauguration, as chosen by Desiree Perry. Full story...

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