Tag Archives: launch

Online Journalism Review finds new home at Knight Center

The Online Journalism Review, run by the University of Annenburg’s journalism school, has been resurrected by the Knight Foundation’s Digital Media Center, Geneva Overholser, the university’s new director of the school of journalism, announced yesterday.

The site closed in its previous incarnation in June after 10 years of reporting on the ‘transition from other media to online reporting and production’ for mid-career journalists.

Major OJR contributor and media academic Robert Niles will continue to write for the new-look site, which will focus on the following:

  • Reporting and writing in a conversational environment
  • Investigative reporting in the internet era
  • Entrepreneurial journalism
  • ‘Guerilla-marketing’ the news

New articles will be added to the site twice-weekly on Mondays and Fridays.

What’s new in the WSJ.com redesign

The Wall Street Journal set its revamped site live today, so here’s a breakdown of what’s changed and what’s new:

New

  • Journal Community – a social networking feature for the site’s paying subscribers, which lets them comment on articles, ‘ask the expert’ and join topic-based networks and discussion groups
  • Subscriber-only sections marked with a key icon and available for preview by non-subscribers
  • Newsreel – a scrolling, horizontal panel topping article pages, which links to other top stories. (Seems to be on most US stories at the moment, as shown in the picture below)
  • New video player and slideshow viewer
  • A new WSJ.com mobile reader for the Blackberry
  • New management section – available to subscribers only

Changes

  • Expanded content across its What’s News, Heard on the Street, small business, technology, US and world news, politics, personal finance and lifestyle sections
  • Improved navigation – including horizontal menu bar across all pages
  • Redesigned article pages to support more multimedia content and provide ‘related analysis’

Paying subscribers to the site, which WSJ claims have risen to more than 1 million, will also have increased access to the site’s archive.

SpinSpotter: unspinning online news?

Aimed at uncovering ‘bias and inaccuracy’ in online news stories, new service SpinSpotter has gone live.

The site, which describes itself as ‘very beta’, lets users install a special toolbar – Spinoculars – to identify, share and edit online articles, which they consider biased.

“I believe that journalism has become spin-heavy because journalists operate in an echo chamber. They eat with other journalists, socialize with them, and ride in cabs together. Closeness of groups can drive closeness of opinion and intellectual laziness,” said Todd Herman, founder and chief creative officer of SpinSpotter, in an open letter.

SpinSpotter has attempted to create an objective criteria for what is and what is not biased by working with US journalism schools and using the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

“Their [the journalism schools’] expert knowledge (…) were then combined with guided user input and sophisticated algorithms to identify each instance of bias and inaccuracy in online media, whether it is a reporter stating opinion as fact, an unattributed adjective, a paragraph lifted from a press release, or an expert source with a clear conflict of interest,” a press release from SpinSpotter said (it’s okay, I’ve flagged it up and linked to the release).

Looks like the Spinoculars are only available for Firefox at the minute. Once downloaded and turned on they’ll identify if elements of a news story have previously been identified by another SpinSpotter user.

You can also use them to select and report articles or parts of stories that are biased according to different ‘rules of spin’, whether its as a result of the reporter’s voice or a lack of balance. <p>Discover the charm of the Fujifilm X-A3, a camera that combines vintage aesthetics with modern digital technology https://www.digitalcamcentral.com/fujifilm-x-a3-review/ . Its compact size is perfect for on-the-go photography, capturing high-resolution images effortlessly.</p>

SpinSpotter comes hot on the heels of NewsCred – a site aiming to gauge the credibility of news sources – launched late last month.