Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology
SEO tends to have a bad reputation among some journalists. Many tend to see search engine optimisation as the equivalent of writing headlines for robots. But SEO isn’t about turning out bland headlines for Google. It is about helping readers find what they are looking it. It is about matching readers searching for specific news [...]
Here’s the video from the session the ethical issues that arise when mainstream journalists use social media from the Conference 2010: New Journalism, New Ethics?, organised by the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 30. In a wide-ranging discussion, Katy Culver from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication [...]
In: Canada|journalism|new media|newspapers|user-generated content
13 May 2010In my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I discuss two recent developments in the Canadian media landscape. This week was marked by the purchase of the Canwest newspapers and the launch of OpenFile: Two Canadians took a gamble that local news still matters this week. The two represent the hopes of both old and new [...]
The wealth of knowledge at the International Symposium on Online Journalism continued with a session on non-profit journalism, with examples from across the US. First up, Scott Lewis, CEO of Voice of San Diego. He started by talking about the bundled model of the newspaper, which obviously changed with the internet. But, said Lewis, the [...]
Paul Steiger gave an insight into the first two years of ProPublica at a talk in Toronto on Monday. The CEO of the investigative journalism non-profit said they were “a year ahead” of where they had expected to be. The initial challenges were brand recognition, getting partners and concerns about bias due to its left-leaning [...]
I’m very pleased to announce that the UBC Graduate School of Journalism has joined the DocumentCloud project. We’re the first first Canadian j-school to sign up for the project designed to help share, find and deal with the mounds of documents that investigative reporters unearth. I discussed working together with project co-founder Aron Pilhofer, and [...]
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 [...]
The BBC has made changes to its news website to make its headlines more SEO friendly. The headlines appearing on index pages are short and concise as usual, but clicking through to the story reveals a longer headline with search keywords. For example, the index headline on the story on Google’s Chrome browser is “Google [...]
This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.