Congratulations to all the winners and finalists in the Online Journalism Awards. The General Excellence Awards went to BBC News, The Globe and Mail, Voice of San Diego, NJ Spotlight, OWNI and La Nacion in their respective categories. The UBC Graduate School of Journalism was a runner-up in the Online Video Journalism (small site category). Here is the full list of winners: Knight Award for Public Service Barnegat Bay Under Stress –
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Emily Bell, professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, kicked off the Future of Journalism conference discussing the many futures of journalism. Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves. She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist
BBC News political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg built up a large following on Twitter with her mix of news, commentary and colour. Her move to ITV News in September has raised questions over who “owns” the almost 60,000 people who follow @BBCLauraK. The Guardian suggests that “rather than handing her old account login back to the BBC to start from scratch with a new ITV account, the sensible thing to do is to
A timely start to the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin with Vivian Schiller, ex-president/CEO of NPR. While quoting some of the bad news in the annual State of the Media report for 2011, Schiller outlined seven reasons to be cheerful: Conditions finally right to give paywalls a fair shake. What has changed, she said is that while scale still matters, brand is back. The other thing is that you
Innovation has become something of a buzz word in journalism. Usually the focus on innovation is on developing new products or services. While it is important to figure out how to create and provide journalism in new ways, the real key to innovation lies in the way we think of journalism. The challenge here isn’t a lack of new ‘innovative’ products; it is adopting what is often called a digital mindset.
Finally a solution to the problem of inane comments on websites. Thanks to the wonderful xkcd.com Print
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 and information with the content on your site. Here are five free SEO tools can
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 and myself tackled some of the challenges and opportunities of social media. We held it
In 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 media. One was a $1.1 billion buyout (in Canadian dollars) of Canada’s largest newspaper chain,
In the quest for a new business model for journalism, Geoffrey M. Graybeal and Jameson L. Hayes, University of Georgia, made a case for a micropayment model at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Their micropayment model is based on the notion of the social web. Their model has four strands. First is the idea of microearn which functions like a rewards program. A user pays for the article, but