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It is an honour to be recognised as among the best in online media in Canada.

My wife, Rachel Nixon, picked up the award for me

I would like to thank the judges, drawn from highly respected industry professionals and experts from Canada and the U.S., for the recognition.

Two other projects that I supervised at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism were also nominated for awards in the best video and best community feature.

A heartfelt congratulations to all the winners and nominees who are evidence of the strength and vibrancy of the online media community in this country.

Reportr.net won in the business-to-business, professional association, farm and scholarly division.

The three posts entered for the award were:

• Why journalists are uneasy talking about Twitter as journalism
• FoJ09 talk: Twitter as a system of ambient journalism
• How blogs became part of BBC News

I created Reportr.net when I joined the UBC Graduate School of Journalism in mid-2006, after 16 years at BBC News.

However, I first started blogging in January 2004, seeing blogs as a way to share and discuss ideas in a conversational and informal style. During my time at the BBC, I was the first BBC live blogger in 2006.

For academics, blogs offer a way to do what is known in the jargon as “knowledge mobilisation,” defined in Wikipedia as “putting available knowledge into active service to benefit society”.

Through blogging, academics can provide a window in their work, engage with readers, and make their research accessible to a broad audience.

I still write papers for scholarly journals and contribute to academic books. But I see blogging as part of my as an academic role to provide new ways of looking and understanding our world, to use the new technologies to experiment with ways of sharing and engaging with a range of publics.

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This was a wide-ranging discussion so this entry only captures snapshots of the debate.

Speaking first, Kristin Czubkowski, blogger, Laptop City Hall , and government reporter, The Capital Times, questioned whether verification had gone away.

But at the same time, she cited an example when she retweeted some breaking news, and only afterwards thought that, maybe, she should have checked it out.

Scott Cohn, senior correspondent, CNBC, added that the need to push content increases the potential for inaccuracies.

Cohn insisted “tweets are not journalism,” arguing that journalism is reporting of the facts based on an editorial process.

(I have written about Twitter as ambient journalism. I would argue that Cohn’s approach ignores how this editorial process can take place in a distributed and collaborative manner on social media, outside of the formal structures of journalism.

It also fails to recognise that Twitter is a platform, and as such, can be journalism or not. Journalism is not about the medium but about the content.)

Sue Robinson, journalism professor, UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said her study on audience perception found that many people think tweets from a journalist are journalism.

Robinson also made the point that we need to consider audience expectations and whether they view news stories as differently from tweets.

She said that the audience has an ethical obligation to understand the different forms of media, point to Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive project.

Phil Rosenthal, media columnist, Chicago Tribune, joined the discussion by saying that a tweet can be news if it is properly vetted.

He pointed out that the internet provides a channel for instant feedback if you make a mistake. “The audience will always hold you accountable,” he said.

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“As we create new financial and editorial models of journalism, we are also collectively creating the ethical ground rules for these forms of journalism,” he said

Sawyer talked about how the Center had used the internet to amplify the journalist’s voice, to extend the reach of its journalism.

But for the bulk of the address, he talked about the ethical issues surrounding a specific project: reporting child sacrifice in Uganda published in its Untold Stories site.

The child sacrifice story is not one the Center initially funded. The photojournalist, Marco Vernaschi, was supposed to work on a story on maternal mortality in Nigeria but ended up going to Uganda first.

The Uganda story was eventually funded by the Pulitzer Center, after Vernaschi had already done some of the investigative reporting. But Sawyer said he was confident that the story would have being funded, had it followed the standard funding procedure.

The issue was over photos published showing the violence against children. Sawyer said Vernaschi argued that he was searching for visual evidence to compel public attention and response.

Sawyer said it initially published some of the controversial images on its site. It later removed them following criticism, partly on photo blogs, about the images and the circumstances in which they were obtained.

Despite the controversy over the images, Sawyer defended his decision to publish the story and keep it online. He argued the project was bigger than these controversial images.

“The internet is both blessing and curse, and must be approached as such,” reflected Sawyer. He noted how the discussion on the photos took place on the web.

“The blog debates were useful feedback for us and I want to thank them for that,” he said.

But Sawyer also noted that the blogs were also full of half truths and personal attacks against the photojournalist.

One of the lessons of the Uganda story, said Sawyer was that the Center was short on staff for editorial supervision and should have devoted far more attention to the child sacrifice project.

Sawyer concluded by emphasising that the child sacrifice story fit exactly with the aims of the Pulitzer Center – to shed light on issues that would otherwise go unreported.

He hoped that by being open about the project, the mistakes and what the Center was doing to address these, the focus would return to the main issue: the treatment of children in Uganda.

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In a session at International Symposium on Online Journalism on blogs and UGC, Joshua A. Braun of  Cornell University outlined how broadcasters in the US were adopting blogs.

This is an area close to my heart, as I have published research in how the BBC adopted blogging for accountability.

Braun look at the news divisions of the three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC,

In his presentation, he remarked how most broadcast blogs did little new. Some were used as venues for news video, or as ways of posting promotional material. But they were not used for transparency, to provide a more behind the scenes account.

He found that blogs were used as an easier way of pushing out news content, as I have in my research on the BBC.

One of the reasons for their adoption in US networks, Braun said, was that blogs were easy to deploy and update, compared to existing content management system used by a network.

US networks maintain authority through stage management, concluded Braun. But he added that there may be a role for what he called enclosure – maintaining control of professional spaces online.

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The Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against a 92-word blog post by Rod Liddle published on The Spectator’s website.

In the entry, Liddle claimed that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.

The PCC ruled that the entry “contained inaccurate information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice”.

The Spectator had argued that blogging was a conversational medium in which readers were able to disagree with the writer’s opinion immediately. It sought to persuade the PCC that it should consider the comments, as well as the entry itself.

The press watchdog acknowledged that blog posts are often provocative and conducive to discussion. But it said that the magazine still had a responsibility to accuracy, even though people could comment and dispute Liddle’s assertion on the post itself.

It also insisted that the assertion could not be considered Liddle’s opinion, but rather a statement of fact.

PCC director Stephen Abell, said:

This is a significant ruling because it shows that the PCC expects the same standards in newspaper and magazine blogs that it would expect in comment pieces that appear in print editions. There is plenty of room for robust opinions, views and commentary but statements of fact must still be substantiated if and when they are disputed. And if substantiation isn’t possible, there should be proper correction by the newspaper or magazine in question.

The ruling is  a clear signal to the media in the UK that the same rules apply in journalistic blogs as in other published material.  Blogs are not an excuse for sloppy journalism, but rather a medium that allows for a more personal, informal and at times opinionated form of journalism.

(Via Journalism.co.uk)

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Among the examples I cited as different approaches to blogging were Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, BBC environment correspondent Richard Black’s Earthwatch, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, and the Neuroethics at the Core group blog at UBC.

My five tips for successful blogging:

• Have a focus
• Offer a critical perspective
• Create value for your audience
• Engage with the community
• Make it personal

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Buried in the document is a phrase that is reminiscent of how big media used to talk about the Internet a decade ago.

In a discussion of public space in the digital age, the review talks about the “vast and unruly world of the blogosphere.”

I was surprised at the language.  Unruly? Well, to an extent, yes. But why not say vibrant, lively or even boisterous?  In its choice of words, the BBC appears to dismiss the contribution that blogging is making to the public sphere.

Maybe someone should remind Mark Thompson that the BBC, itself, is part of the blogosphere, with dozens of BBC blogs.

Perhaps Forrester analyst Nick Thomas when he says that “Mark Thompson does not ‘get’ digital in the way that even his much-maligned predecessor John Birt did.”

It seems odd that the strategic review says the “internet is now the BBC’s third core medium” and that the”internet then is not an optional extra: it is the future for the BBC.”

But there is little about investment in the web, and more about cuts and “refocusing”, with the corporation spending 25% less on BBC Online by 2013.

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31 essential online tools for journalist

FoJ09 talk: Twitter as a system of ambient journalism

How to find out anything about anyone online

Twitter CEO sees journalists as curators

Social networking sites challenge journalist

10 top tech trends that every journalist

Video: Gina Trapani makes sense of Google

The new roles for journalists in a multimedia world

Create a breaking news site in minutes with WordPress

The skills every journalist needs

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and I wish you all a joyful and prosperous 2010.

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Blogs that focus on citizen, or grassroot, journalism, personal blogs from professional reporters, journalism school-supported blogs, blogs on a new media focus, organizational blogs and self-professed bipartisan resource blogs that provide primary resources for investigative writing.

There is a broad cross-section, from Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog to the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Some of the categorisation of the blogs is a little strange. Jon Dube’s CyberJournalist.net is under the label “citizen journalism”.

This blog makes the list, which is wonderful. Though it is wrongly labelled as  “school-supported blogs”, rather than “personal blogs”.

Still, this is a minor quibble about a list that should be on the readings of all journalism students.

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