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 unbundling of information meant you have to go to it, rather than have it come
PDF 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 funders. Steiger admitted that the timing of ProPublica’s launch in 2008 had helped in setting
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 editor of interactive news technologies at The New York Times, at the ONA conference last
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
Image via CrunchBase The annual list of 100 essential websites from The Guardian indicates how the web has matured. The list is dominated by web services rather than web sites, reflecting how the internet has shifted from a platform for consumption to one for collaboration. The darling of 2009, Twitter, even gets its own mini-section, and includes services such as Twitter Tim.es, which creates your personal new site based on
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 previews operating system”, which lacks search keywords. But click on the story page, the headline
This list of top 50 journalism blogs offers a good starting point for tapping into current trends in the media. It includes: 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
Putting the words Twitter and journalism into the same sentence seems to provoke a spasm from professional journalists. At a “curated unconference” hosted by Reuters Thomson in London, the value of Twitter in journalism was once again under scrutiny. The report in The Guardian suggests there was a deep-seated level of unease in talking about Twitter as journalism. The head of the BBC’s global news division, Richard Sambrook, argued: Twitter
The brains behind Google News, Krishna Bharat, braves the crowd at the Online News Association Conference. Bharat might be seen as both friend or foe, so there is a great deal of interest in what he has to say. He uses his time to explain how Google News works, crawling for news material that is arranged into story clusters. “We rank news primary based on how important editors across the
The ONA conference session on SEO is packed, reflecting the intense interesting in understanding this dark art. Jennifer Grappone, co-author of “Search Enginge Optimization an Hour a Day” provides a good grounding in how to ensure your site is visible. One factor is age – an older domain is considered by Google to be more credible. Moreover, adds Grappone, fresh news content is an advantage for news sites but a