Tag Archives: Online Journalism

Ed Walker: Legal challenges in the online newsroom

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Online journalists should check out this really useful post by Ed Walker, online communities editor for Media Wales, looking at some important questions surrounding the legal challenges for online news outlets.

Prompted by a bit of media law refresher training, Walker refers to three scenarios in particular, which were put to him during training and undoubtedly reflect events in newsrooms on a daily basis:

  1. What to do when faced with a rolling crime news story: how should you cover each new piece of information? How can you ensure the content on your site is contemporaneous?
  2. How should you use content from social media, if at all. How should journalists be using social networks? Is it fair to use quotes from comments on people’s walls? What about photographs? Who would the copyright belong to?
  3. How should you deal with comments on stories? Should you pre or post-moderate? Should every story be allowed them? Should journalists respond?

While you’re thinking about what you would do, read his post in full here to see what solutions his training group came up with.

Times and Sunday Times sites launching new dashboard feature

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News International’s paywalled newspaper sites TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk are launching a new feature which aims to enable readers to keep track of stories of interest.

The Dashboard tool will become available to readers on the site over the next few days, an announcement on TheTimes.co.uk says.

We hope this latest addition to our websites will help you to personalise your news and get straight to the stories that are important to you.

The tool will notify readers when their favourite sections publish new articles and when a previously read article is updated. It also provides them with a history of read articles which they can quickly link back to.

Commenting on the new feature, paidContent’s Robert Andrews said the tool shows how the service is taking advantage of its online platform.

You can’t do that in print. It’s also somewhat unique amongst news websites, even if it is essentially a friendlier version of RSS-type functionality.

OJR: Online journalism or journalism online?

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Robert Hernandez, writing on the Online Journalism Review, tells us a bit about himself and in doing so nails his colours firmly to the online journalism mast:

I’m a journalist, first and foremost… I’m a Web journalist… what I live and breathe is Online Journalism… What can I say? I am a geek. A technophile. An iPhone addict… I’m a Web journalist.

There are certain unique advantages to each different form of journalism – the convenience of print, the visual and emotional impact of film, to name a couple. For Hernandez it is the unique advantages of online journalism, not simply the use of the internet as a publishing platform, that define it, that distinguish online journalism from journalism online. “There’s a lot of difference between the two,” he writes.

Think of it this way: Art Online or Online Art.

Take a photo of Mona Lisa, one of the most famous works of art in the history of mankind. Get a nice, hi-res image of the painting and post it onto the Web.

The single image on the Internet brings this classical piece of art to millions of people who never will travel to Paris to see it first-hand.

That is Art Online.

Now, think of art that takes advantage of, or is based on, technology and the Internet. It’s a type of art that can only exist because of the Web and the latest technology.

Full post at this link…

Americans spending more time consuming news, research suggests

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A report carried out every two years by the Pew Research Center suggests Americans are spending more time consuming news now than 10 years ago.

The research, released this week, found that rather than replacing traditional media with digital platforms, consumers spend an additional 13 minutes daily getting news online as well as 57 minutes on average getting news from traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers. In the year 2000 the survey reported a total of 59 minutes was spent by audiences consuming news, with no time reportedly spent consuming news online by respondents until 2004.

According to the report, this is one of the highest totals measured since the mid-1990s, which does not take into account time spent getting news from mobile phones or other digital devices. Only eight per cent of respondents get their news from their mobile.

The news consumption survey recorded the responses from more than 3000 adults from 8 to 28 of June. Other findings include an increase in ‘news-grazers’ who consume the news on a less regular basis from 40 per cent in 2006 to 57 per cent in 2010. The survey also found an increase in the use of search engines for news gathering, rising to 33 per cent from 19 per cent in 2008.

See the report in full here..

Knight Foundation gives $3.14m to local media projects

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Niche and hyperlocal news sites in the US are to receive $3.14 million in funding from the Knight Foundation as part of its Community Information Challenge.

The money will be divided up into grants aimed at encouraging greater investment in media-related projects by community foundations, whose funding is matched by Knight.

Receivers of the grants this year will include the Alaska Community Foundation for the Alaska Public Telecommunications project which hosts hyperlocal blogs and virtual community ‘think-tanks’ on issues such as arts and culture; ACCESS News, a website for the deaf community and West Anniston Today in Alabama, which reports on industrial pollution in that area.

The full list of community foundations and supported projects can be found here.

Hatip: paidCotent

New York Times and NYU launch new East Village hyperlocal blog

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The New York Times and New York University have jointly launched a new hyperlocal blog today covering the East Village neighbourhood of Manhattan.

According to a release from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, The Local: East Village is aiming for 50 per cent of its content to be produced by members of the neighbourhood’s community. Readers will be able to submit content to the site through its Virtual Assignment Desk, which allows readers to send in stories, photographs, multimedia, and news tips.

Some content will be paid for, says NYU professor Jay Rosen, who is acting as an advisor to the project, but the site will also rely on voluntary contributions.

Most of the site’s content will be provided by students on The Hyperlocal Newsroom, a new course in NYU’s Reporting New York program.

Editor of the site is Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute professor and former Times reporter Richard G. Jones, who calls the site “a significant step forward in pro-am journalism collaborations”. He will work alongside Times deputy metro editor Mary Ann Giordano.

The Times launched ‘The Local’ project last year with two New York hyperlocal blogs covering Brooklyn and New Jersey, both run in conjunction with City University of New York (CUNY). In July this year the newspaper passed control of the New Jersey site to Barstanet.com.

More from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at this link.

More on the The Local: East Village and NYU’s Hyperlocal Newsroom Summer School in the video below.

OJR: News publishers should look to the e-book model

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As online publishers seek new ways of making money from digital news, Robert Niles suggests that news outlets could benefit from using the e-book rental model.

Writing on the Online Journalism Review website, Niles suggests they should capitalise on a model which he says has grown by 71 per cent in the last seven years in the US, especially when it comes to publishing in-depth journalism.

Every year, some top newspaper enterprise reporting projects end up as books. What if some newsrooms flipped the development cycle, and initiated some of their more extensive enterprise reporting projects as e-books, available for sale or for rent?

(…) That makes sense to me. Even as my consumption of news online has sated my appetite for the commodity news I can find in a printed newspaper, I still keep buying books and magazines for longer, more detailed narratives. I happily pay for that content in print because I can’t find an alternative that’s better or cheaper (or both) online.

See his full post here…

Citizen Media Law Project: The laws of news aggregation

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The Nieman Journalism Lab has posted an interesting report on the legality of different forms of news aggregation based on a white paper created by Kimberley Isbell of the Citizen Media Law Project.

While the paper is based on US copyright law, it is likely to be a useful point of reference for anyone dealing in online content.

In the paper Isbell offers context by discussing recent cases and the impact on the legal environment, including the licensing agreement between Google News and Associated Press announced at the end of last month. In a wider context, she adds, news aggregators can often argue a fair use policy.

(…) news aggregators could argue that the type of consumer that would only skim the headlines and ledes on the news aggregators’ website is not the type of consumer that is likely to visit individual news websites and read full articles, and thus would be unlikely to be a source of traffic for the newspapers’ websites if the news aggregators did not exist.

Her work concludes with some useful bullet points of best practice, reproduced in summary below:

  • reproduce only necessary portions of the story, not in its entirety;
  • try not to focus on a single source;
  • prominently identify the source;
  • link to the original source of the article;
  • provide context or commentary where possible.

Tumblr improves attribution process

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Tumblr has announced an upgrade of its attribution feature which will now only provide attribution to original sources within the post content, rather than all re-bloggers.

In the announcement on its staff blog, Tumblr says the upgrade was needed to fix issues within its automatic ‘via’ system, such as links being dropped, credit being buried under re-blog links, frequent mistaken attributions and the resulting impact on post appearance.

Starting today, reblogging will no longer insert attribution into the content/caption of the post except to quote content added by the parent post.

The new feature will also enable authors to attribute content to a source outside of Tumblr which will then be attributed whenever the post is reblogged on Tumblr, while the entire reblog history will remain in the post notes. For those seeking an uncomplicated yet immersive online casino experience, wgcasino offers a seamless interface and a rich selection of games that promise hours of entertainment. Dive into a world where each game is a new adventure waiting to be explored.

Media Notes: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest?

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The battle to increase audiences is hardly a new challenge facing the media environment. Whether print readers, radio listeners or television viewers, it has generally been a case of the more the merrier.

In the world of online journalism, where there is instant access to page view and retweet counters, the ‘success’ of a story has perhaps come to be defined by these metrics. Howard Kurtz, columnist for the Washington Post, has an interesting post on the site this morning discussing the potential impact of this environment on the work of online journalists and the resulting balancing act between appealing to the search engine and maintaining a quality brand.

Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaux if they’re not generating enough clicks?

Doesn’t all this amount to pandering?

Potentially, sure. But news organizations such as the Post and the Times have brands to protect. They can’t simply abandon serious news in favor of the latest wardrobe malfunction without alienating some of their longtime readers. What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation.

See his full post here…