The Online Journalism Review has risen from the dead.

The new OJR was announced in a posting on the Knight Digital Media Center by Geneva Overholser, the new director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Annenberg suspended publication of the OJR in June as the school went through a major transition. The site is now housed with the Knight Digital Media Center, and will see the return of media academic Robert Niles.

Overholser wants the resurrected OJR to focus on:

1. Reporting and writing in a conversational environment. How can, and should, we report the news when publications are now a two-way conversation, instead of a single-direction monologue?

2. Investigative reporting in the Internet era. How can news organizations, and individual journalists, harness the power of modern computing and networking (including crowdsourcing) to investigate public data?

3. Entrepreneurial journalism. The old business model for news is broken. How do we prepare journalists to develop new ones?

4. “Guerilla-marketing” the news. This builds from topics 1 and 3, and addresses how journalists ought to be thinking about making their content “viral,” optimizing for search engines and using promotional techniques to draw audience to their content, at minimal financial expense.

The OJR was an invaluable forum for news and debate around the emergent field of online journalism since its creation some 10 years ago and the archives are still accessible.

Now, there are far more sites and blogs on journalism and the media, including this one. But the return of the OJR is to be welcomed.

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