Extracts from a report by the UK’s National Union of Journalists’ Commission on Multi-media Working have provoked a storm of commentary online. The details are in the current issue of the NUJ magazine, The Journalist. But you can get an idea of what it says from this posting on the UK Press Gazette. Shane Richmond at The Telegraph calls it a “blinkered approach to online“. Roy Greenslade of The Guardian

I am catching up on my notes from a conference in Monterrey, Mexico – Third International Symposium: Social Information and Communication Technologies for a Knowledge Society – I attended last week. Here are some observations from on a panel on digital journalism in Europe I was on. Jean-Francois Fogel of Le Monde: Le Monde has 100,000 subscribers for paid content Only 7% of pages online are from the print edition

Earlier this month, the BBC got the go-ahead to put advertising on the BBCNews.com. This means that readers from outside the UK should start seeing the ads from November. During my time at the BBC News website, international readers would often remark that one of the things they liked about the site was the lack of ads. The BBC is going to often an option to avoid the ads. Director

Say goodbye to the idea of carrying around a laptop and a dozen other gadgets to be able to file from the field. Reuters, in partnership with Nokia, have been trying out a mobile journalism toolkit that fits into a small backpack. With a Nokia N95, bluetooth keyboard, an external microphone, basic tripod and solar-powered charger, reporters will be able to send stories back from anywhere where there is a

Just returned from a lightning trip to Monterrey in Mexico for a conference. It went by the unwieldy title of: Third International Symposium: Social Information and Communication Technologies for a Knowledge Society. I was fortunate to be part of a great panel on digital journalism in Europe, with Jean-Francois Fogel from Le Monde, Ismael Nafria from El Pais and Santiago Tejedor from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. My contribution focused

The BBC’s Nick Reynolds, currently working on guidelines for personal blogs of staffers, offers an insight into the skirmishes with the Biased BBC blog. Biased BBC is the bane of many editors as it regularly criticises the Beeb, accusing it of all sorts of bias. The article was published in the BBC’s inhouse magazine, Ariel, but Nick has posted the more than 1,000 words on his blog. He urges the

The conference of the Online News Association climaxed on Friday night with the awards ceremony. USAToday was the overall winner for general excellence as the judges were impressed how it had moved to put its audience at “the centre of news, not just at the receiving end”. One of the most interesting aspects of the awards was how blogs won many of the 20 categories. Blogs won in: Online commentary

Mike Oreskes, executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, was the keynote speaker on day two of the Online News Association conference in Toronto. The main thrust of his talk: quality journalism is good for society, it creates a democratic society and that builds wealth. Some highlights: Journalists can help audiences deal with information overload. The proliferation of sources online is increasing the need for journalists, but these same forces

If you are a journalism student, this is what senior editors are looking for. Speaking at the ONA 2007 conference, Kinsey Wilson of USAToday said J-school students need a grounding in the fundamentals of journalism – research, reporting, writing. But secondly, they need a complete immersion in the news media and the technology that surrounds it. Wilson wants students who are comfortable and conversant with the new media tools, and

The first ONA panel on day 2 is about how to manage a newsroom in the 21st century. Despite starting at 8.30am, the session is pretty packed. This is understandable, as just about every newsroom is struggling to bridge the cultural differences between print, broadcast and online. Jim Brady from the WashingtonPost.com admitted that managing the relationship with the print side was still the biggest challenge he was dealing with.