Image by lynnftw via Flickr A Vancouver blogger, Lisa Bettany has written a thought-provoking piece for The Province on how celebrity sites like Perez Hilton are giving blogs a bad name. As a well-known blogger, Bettany, has a personal stake in the issue. She argues that part of the blame lies with the established media: The mainstream popularization of trashy, trite, and slovenly written blogs like PerezHilton.com is giving bloggers
PDF In this guest post, my friend Jason Tanz, senior editor at Wired, explains the reasons behind the magazine’s experiment in journalistic “radical transparency” around an article on Charlie Kaufman: Every journalist has probably had that feeling – you’ve got a pile of material, a recorder full of interviews, you’ve been studying and speaking with subjects who have been gracious enough to let you into their lives – and now you
Spain made a big impresson at the Online News Association awards, picking up the two awards that non-English websites were eligible for. Elpais.com took the newly created award for general excellence by a large non-English site. Its compatriot, Soitu.es, won the general excellence title for small site. One is an example of how a print newspaper is reinventing itself online. The other is a an independent, web-only new site, just
Image via Wikipedia Amy Webb races through 10 tech trends at the ONA annual conference. Fortunately, she also has posted the list online. First up are 2D, or QR, barcodes and how mobile phones can be used to scan these. The codes are already used in promotional ads but also in magazine ads. Webb talks about how a news outlet could use these point readers to resources online. The easy
Image via CrunchBase, source unknown Robert Scoble sets the theme for his keynote at the Online News Association conference in DC by doing something that wasn’t possible a year ago – video streaming his talk live via a mobile phone. This changes journalism, he argues, as people can send questions as an interview takes place live. Scoble says this takes advantage of the audience, who is smarter, richer, more educated
A student at New York University provides a glimpse of the challenges facing media courses in a piece for PBS Mediashift. Alana Taylor, a junior double-majoring in journalism and history, makes a harsh assessment of the undergraduate journalism classes at the university. His disappointment is palpable as she writes that NYU focuses on learning about how to work your way up the traditional journalism ladder I was hoping that NYU
Over at PBS Mediashift, I have looked at how to get ready for the start of j-school this week. During the summer, here at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, we made a couple of significant changes. We cut back on the number of required textbooks, and instead added a good quality digital audio recorder, the Zoom H2, as a requirement for students. We also discussed how to teach students
In an article for PBS Mediashift, I looked at the challenges facing journalism schools in teaching technical skills without losing sight of the journalism. This is a difficult area for j-schools as journalism becomes ever more interwoven with technology: The challenges for journalism schools are two-fold. First, students need to be taught how to use a wide range of technical tools. Second, and more importantly, they have to learn how
Georgia Logothetis is better known as Georgia10, contributing editor at liberal blog the Daily Kos. During a panel discussion at the AEJMC annual conference, she described blogs as an example of people empowerment. I caught up with her after the session. [vodpod id=Groupvideo.1463623&w=425&h=350&fv=] (Shot on a Nokia N95) Update: Bryan Murley has posted a write-up of the panel Georgia was on. It is well worth reading. Print
During a wide-ranging discussion on the impact of the internet on the US presidential elections at the AEJMC annual conference, one of the panellists raised a startling point. Aaron Smith, a research specialist at Pew Internet and American Life Project, make a prediction about how campaigns might be able to reach voters as the moment they are casting their ballots. He suggested that eventually a smart engineer would figure out