Stephen Quinn on mobile journalism

“You need to have the fundamentals in place before you start playing with new technology. The skills are the same as for traditional media plus an awareness of what’s possible, and a willingess to play with the tools, a willingness to accept that journalism may move beyond what we currently know,” Stephen Quinn, academic and author of Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom, told Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog in this interview.

Quinn discusses mobile journalism and how the mainstream media are getting involved:

links for 2008-06-26

• Why Media Gets Community Wrong - One Man and His Blog
  “most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”
  (tags: blogging)
• Lost Remote » Local business video spending to skyrocket
  “A study by The Kelsey Group predicts that small and medium-sized businesses in local markets will increase their video spending from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012.”
  (tags: ads video)
• Sky News Blogs - Editors Blog
  “Welcome to the new-look home of Sky News online. I hope you will find it useful, informative, entertaining, and an improvement on its predecessor.”
  (tags: skynews revamp)
• Associated Press Begins Member Choice Pricing Rollout
  The Associated Press will begin rolling out details of its new pricing to members this week, a plan that will return up to $21 million to its U.S. member newspapers.
  (tags: ap newspapers usa)
• Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching
  As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap
  (tags: blogging ap journalism copyright)
• SacredFacts: State of Journalism
  Alan Rusbridger ruminates at the Frontline Club, pressed by Stephen Sackur, on the changing face of news and the problems of going 24/7:
  (tags: video guardian rusbridger)
• Inside Facebook » Facebook Launching Mini-Feed Comments Today (Updated Screenshot)
  Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments later today.
  (tags: facebook)
• Semantic Journalism: Ideas | Online Journalism Blog
  Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends.
  (tags: journalism web newspapers)

The European News Interactivity Index

Nicolas Kayser-Bril, contributor to the Online Journalism Blog and Observatoire des Media, has created an index of the interactive tools used by European news websites.

The index compares and contrasts which media organisations make use of tools such as Twitter, mobile alerts and social networks, as well as noting their policy on user registration for interactive services.

News sites from the UK and France, to Macedonia and Hungary are featured - entries for additional organisations should be submitted to nicolas@observatoiredesmedias.com.

Below is the index’s comparison of interactive features used by Sky’s site vs Guardian.co.uk:

The project is an extension of the work by Birmingham Post reporter and blogger Joanna Geary, who looked at the use of interactive tools by business news sites.

Sneak preview of BBC hyperlocal web service

Andrew Williams, over at the Online Journalism blog, reports on a preview of the BBC’s hyperlocal web service, which will utilise geotagging and mapping, given at last week’s Broadcast News and the Active Citizen Conference at Leeds University

According to BBC Yorkshire’s Catherine Hearne, who unveiled the plans, 60 such sites are planned offering customisable local content as well as an increase in multimedia.

“There are of course other local news providers and we see ourselves as complementing the work that they do. Clearly the local newspapers will be offering a much more localised service that [sic] we will be doing even with this advance,” Hearne told conference delegates.

Online Journalism Blog launches sister review site

The Online Journalism Blog has launched a sister site to review journalism startups - Journalism Enterprise.com.

The blog, which will be written by a team of reviewers, will feature simple, six question write-ups of new sites aiming to make a profit from the web as well as new non-profit online journalism projects.

In a blog post on the Online Journalism site, Paul Bradshaw explained the idea behind the new launch:

“There are so many experiments by so many people in so many fields - from journalists going it alone to large news organisations trying new projects, from amateurs who feel passionately about their field to non-profit organisations who see the potential of the web, and from internet startups to established new media players, I thought we needed a blog to keep track of it all and provide a place for debating the issues involved.”

OJB: Archant web editor on geotagging

Archant web editor James Goffin guest posts on the Online Journalism blog about the opportunities created by geotagging.

RSS feeds for search results at The Sun

Paul Bradshaw has flagged up an interesting (and handy) feature on The Sun’s website through the Online Journalism blog, namely that the newspaper site offers users an RSS feed for stories relating to a search term.

After using the site’s search, the option to set up an RSS results feed can be found at the top of the results page.

As Paul points out, this is similar to the serviece offered by Google News, but a quick search suggests that this is not a feature on any of the other national newspaper websites in the UK.