Tag Archives: Matthew Buckland

Buzz links for journalists

We’ll be back with a fuller report on Buzz for journalists once we’ve played with it a bit more and had some of our questions answered by Google. In the meantime, here’s a small selection of the good and not-so good buzz around Google’s latest launch.

[You can follow Journalism.co.uk on Buzz here: http://www.google.com/profiles/journalism.co.uk]

On the positive side:

And on the negative:

Essential journalism links for students

This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.

The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.

In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:

And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:

Organisations

  • Crikey.com: news from down under that’s not Murdoch, or Fairfax produced.
  • Press Review Blog (a Media Standards Trust project) – it’s a newbie, but already in the favourites.
  • StinkyJournalism: it’s passionate and has produced many high-profile stories

Individuals

  • CurryBet – Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism.
  • Malcolm Coles – for SEO tips and off-the-beaten track spottings.
  • Dave Lee – facilitating conversations journalists could never have had in the days before blogs.
  • Marc Vallee – photography freedom issues from the protest frontline.
  • FleetStreetBlues: an anonymous industry insider with jobs, witty titbits and a healthy dose of online cynicism.
  • Sarah Hartley previously as above, now with more online strategy thrown in.
  • Charles Arthur – for lively debate on PR strategy, among other things

Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.

Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.

South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper unveils new all singing, all dancing website

South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper has substantially revamped its website, in the process introducing a series of new features to improve usability.

M&G Online’s general manager Matthew Buckland blogged recently about the use of Thompson Reuters Open Calais semantic tagging technology to organise and cross-reference all the site’s content for the relaunch.

In addition to this the revamp has introduced a number of key features:

Registration and dashboard

  • Like the Guardian in the UK, the new M&G site now allows users to save clippings of favourite articles and story history while browsing.
  • Comment on articles and debate with other readers

New features

  • It has also introduced a topics A-Z: A list of people, places, subjects and organisations covered by the site
  • Added a feature – NewsSwarm – that allows users to see who is viewing which article in real time
  • Integrated articles with Google Maps
  • Make the popular cartoon sections searchable and tagged
  • Added easy exploration of e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping
  • Allowed users to view related articles from outside the news website.
  • Added video feeds

Semantic tagging – a key new element

  • Tag clouds of subjects, people and places on the home page and news sections
  • Articles regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city with South African news at town, city or provincial level
  • Articles are also tagged with names of cities, countries, companies or organisations, and people, which can be viewed in the Topics A-Z section