The finalists in the 2011 Online Journalism Awards bring together an impressive range of digital media from around the world. In a year marked by momentous events such as the Arab Spring and distressing disasters like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the list includes heavyweights such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and BBC News. Al Jazeera is also up for two awards, as are a host
PDF My latest piece for PBS Mediashift looks at how the latest UBC j-school investigation into shrimp came together. The project was the work of the International Reporting class led by my friend and colleague, Peter Klein. 10 students travelled to Thailand to uncover the economic, social and environmental cost of North America’s appetite for all you can eat platters of cheap shrimp. The investigation published in partnership with with the Globe
John Russial of the University of Oregon posed a provocative question at the AEJMC annual conference. In a research paper, he and co-author Arthur Santana studied whether the industry wants every journalist to have cross-platform skills. In a survey of 210 US newspapers, he found that different members of the newsrooms rated skills differently. Russial argued that if role convergence was real, then newsrooms would share a common view of the
At the AEJMC annual conference in Denver, Aug 4-7, I am taking part in a session entitled Planning, Launching and Running a Convergent Student News Website. I will be explaining how we created and launched the student publication, TheThunderbird.ca, at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. We use WordPress for the site, using a number of plugins to extend its functionality. Here are the ones I will mention in my presentation:
One of the topics of discussion at the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin was producing news products for Apple’s iPad. Dan Gillmor has expressed concerns about Apple’s ability to decide what appears on the iTunes store and hence the iPad. I asked Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a co-founder of Global Voices, for his thoughts on
It’s time to wrap up 2009 with a look at what you have been reading on Reportr.net. Here are the 10 most popular posts of the past 12 months. 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
This compilation of the top 100 tools of 2009 for learning published by social learning consultant Jane Hart could just as well apply to journalism. The darling of the year, Twitter, came top. Other valuable tools in the top 10 are Delicious, YouTube, Google Reader, Google Docs, WordPress, Slideshare, Google Search, Audacity and Firefox. I, for one, find all of these pretty indispensable. Are they part of your classroom or
Deborah Wenger of the University of Mississippi looked at what the top US news companies were looking for in new hires. In her presentation at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, she outlined what skills and attributes were mentioned in job listings. They found 715 job postings. In newspapers, a third of them for reporters and just 12% for web writers/multimedia producers. In postings for reporter positions, the most
The final panel of the day at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas looked at visual and multimedia story-telling on the web. María Teresa Ronderos, Editor of Semana.com from Colombia showed some of the site’s impressive work in using multimedia to explore and explain different types of stories. Semana.com put together an in-depth on the FARC rebels. It also sought to use multimedia to explain complex
This video interview with Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, is timely for the j-schoolers graduating in a few week’s time and for the new crop of students getting ready to come to journalism school. In the interview by Nieman Journalism Lab, Murray talks about what he looks for when in online reporters: In the digital area, you do want people who can be very fast