Student journalists using online blog platforms for the first time, either for a project or the real thing, may find these tips from Freelance Unbound useful advice on how to get the most out of platforms such as WordPress. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.
Sense about Science has produced this useful guide for bloggers on libel law, titled ‘So you’ve had a threatening letter. What can you do?’, in association with other members of the Libel Reform Campaign. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.
The role of news aggregators was defended yesterday by journalists at an event for City University’s journalism students.
Speaking at ‘Pimp My Blog’, Patrick Smith, Karl Schneider, and Tim Glanfield argued that news aggregators add value, rebuking claims by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr that news aggregators are “parasites living of journalism produced by others”.
“I do think we are adding value,” said Smith, the editor of news aggregation site TheMediaBriefing. “We have got a semantic tagging system that actually makes this industry searchable and navigable and I think that has got a good value.”
Patrick Smith at Pimp My Blog:
Glanfield, a former Times journalist and co-founder of Beehive City, echoed Smith and questioned whether newspapers added any value or helped readers by simply “copying each other’s stories over and over again”.
“There are plenty of people who call themselves journalists out there who are basically just copying stuff from each other.
“Whereas what TheMediaBriefing and organisations like that are doing is aggregating news which is adding value.”
Schneider, the editorial director at Reed Business Information, criticised newspapers for blaming their failures on others.
“I think there are lots of examples of newspapers trying find someone else to blame, whether it is bloggers, Google, or Craigslist, it is always someone else’s fault,” he said.
“Actually I think newspapers have sat on their backsides and failed to respond effectively to a completely changing media landscape till it is pretty much too late.”
Schneider added that in the future newspapers will have to “fundamentally reinvent themselves” online, because the aggregation found in print does not make sense online.
An annual blogging conference in Shanghai was cancelled over the weekend due to pressure from the authorities, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese Blogger Conference reportedly normally attracts online commentators, digital artists and entrepreneurs, many of whom are said to be critical of government censorship. The decision to cancel is “the latest sign of tightening limits in China on free expression” WSJ reports.
This year, organizers waited until four days ahead of the two-day conference’s planned start on Saturday to announce the venue, an office building in Shanghai’s Xuhui District, near Shanghai Jiaotong University. But the planned hosts reneged late last week owing to pressure from authorities not to let their venue be used for the conference, according to one of the organizers.
[I]t is clear that a few years ago a blog really set you apart from crowd, but now with a plethora of people (including many who have no desire to become professional journalists) jumping on the bandwagon, standing out to the extent that the industry recognises you is becoming increasingly difficult – if not impossible.
Unless you have stuck upon a totally unique idea it is unlikely that your blog will be the reason you get a job. Using myself as a case study, I blog about areas that interest me (sport, Asian issues and the media) and I do okay out of it, but I don’t for one minute think that a potential employer will be impressed enough with this site to offer me a job.
If simply having a blog won’t cut it anymore, how else can journalism students make themselves stand out online?
The DailyFinance profiles Handpicked Media, an independent blogs network covering women’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle which has recently signed up new blogs and added Debbie Djordjevic, former editorial director at Hearst Digital, to its ranks.
Bloggers and the publishers get together every six weeks or so socially, and blogs keep 65 per cent of the revenue earned from their sites.
That revenue is generated because, as a collective with key opinion-formers and influential bloggers on its rosta, Handpicked can bring in more advertising and create more opportunities than any single blog, presenting agencies and advertisers with a single point of contact.
US media ethics project StinkyJournalism has done some digging into the issue of blogs on newspaper websites and whether these posts fall under the same editing process as other items on the site.
During the recent financial downturn, some US newspapers, including the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, have stopped publishing print editions altogether, opting for online-only editions. All major US newspapers have a representative internet presence and publish much more content online than they could fit into their print editions. Along with this change, social media as an integrated tool plays a role in the news landscape now more than ever. However, these changes also raise questions about ethics, legal issues and journalistic standards.
Therefore, StinkyJournalism thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about how newspapers manage blogs published on their websites. We looked at 10 major US newspapers and their 591 published blogs. We categorized the blogs based on their content and took notice of the blogs’ authors. Some of the results were unexpected, even surprising.
An interesting look at a media “watchdog” blog based in the US – Gannett Blog, run by former Gannett employee Jim Hopkins, is an unrivalled source of information on the newspaper publisher and media group.
Two things are striking about the description of Gannett Blog and Hopkins’ work in this article, firstly the description of working on a specialist subject:
Gannett, with its 80 dailies and 23 TV stations, “is like a small city,” Hopkins says, “and I’m a beat reporter. I can find things going on on a daily basis.”
And secondly, it’s “water cooler”, open comments feature:
An innovation on Gannett Blog, inspired by the fact that comments were getting more pageviews than anything else on the blog, is the open-ended “real-time comments” post that’s always at the top of the page. It simply says, “Can’t find the right spot for your comment? Post it here, in this open forum.” Hopkins refreshes that post once a week; it often garners more than 100 comments – far more than his typical posts do.
Hopkins calls this the “water cooler” – a place to “come and see what other people are thinking about.”
