It is no surprise that a session on entrepreneurship at the Online News Association conference is packed. Ann Grimes from the Graduate Program in Journalism, Stanford University starts by talking about a new capstone course that combines journalism, business and technology students. Her twentysomething students are interested in doing their own start-ups. Her advice to budding entrepreneurs is to fail and fail fast, learn from failure, get feedback and revise
PDF Image via Wikipedia Buried at the end of the recent New York Times report on the relaunch of NPR’s website is an intriguing comment about video. While the new site gives more prominence to text versions of stories, visitors are unlikely to find much video: An experiment a year ago of adding more video to the site particularly irked local member stations, who did not want competition from video. Video
Vancouver-based Orato.com used to describe itself as the “only news site in the world dedicated to First Person, citizen-authored journalism”. The citizen journalism site is perhaps best known for assigning two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women whose remains were found on his farm. The concept behind Orato was
The Vancouver-based Tyee online publication has raised almost $15,000 in donations since it asked readers to give money to pay for provincial election coverage. The experiment has exceeded the expectations of Tyee editor David Beers, who expects contributions to hit $15,000. That amounts to double its monthly reporting budget. The appeal comes as Canwest, the owner of the two Vancouver daily newspapers (the Vancouver Sun and Province) is cutting costs
It should come as no surprise that online journalists are more optimistic about the future of news than their counterparts in traditional media outlets. But this optimism is tempered with a healthy dose of concerns about where journalism is going, according to the survey (PDF) of select members of the Online News Association (ONA) produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The online professionals believe that
The comprehensive look at the media in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just been published. The State of the News Media 2009 report paints a sombre picture: Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder. This
Over at Journalism 2.0, Mark Briggs poses a question that has been bugging me for weeks – what do we call this new form of journalism and media? As Mark points out: The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is “interactive” and it’s not really “new” anymore. Much as I don’t like the
For my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I’ve written about a new undergraduate course I am teaching at UBC: The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage
The exponential growth of the information age globally raises more questions than answers. (Via Rob Fields, Heleana Quartey) Print
Supporters of network neutrality have suffered a setback with the CRTC ruling in the case against Bell over Internet throttling. The communications regulator denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers’ (CAIP) request that Bell Canada cease the traffic-shaping practices it has adopted for its wholesale services. However, this is turning out to be just the first round in the battle over network neutrality. The CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein acknowledged