Since I was on the last research panel at ISOJ, I was not able to blog about the strong papers by my fellow presenters. Fortunately, the ISOJ student team wrote a short wrap up. But I wanted to share the slides and text of my paper presentation for those who weren’t about to make the conference. The paper is also available as PDF. The Active Recipient Thank you. It is

The first panel on day two of the ISOJ tackled one of the big questions in journalism – is nonprofit journalism online sustainable? “We don’t know,” said Lisa Frazier, President & CEO, The Bay Citizen, one of the new startups in this area. The Bay Citizen has a clear civic mission to provide local news and, secondly, to stimulate innovation in journalism, with 27 people working in editorial and innovation. Since its

The final research paper at the ISOJ focused on how newsrooms were using Twitter. Dale Blasingame from Texas State University, San Marcos, looked at how Twitter was changing TV news. He started by saying that a web first approach in newsrooms is no longer enough due to the instant dissemination of news via Twitter. Twitter allows both professionals and citizens to “jump the gate” and send news directly to audiences,

Eivind Thomsen from Norway outlined how the Schibsted Media Group had shifted its financial base from print to digital at the ISOJ. Newspapers are popular in Norway, with the average user reading 1.3 newspapers a day. But this is declining, from 1.6 newspapers in 2009. Thomsen said part of the reason for this was virtually universal broadband and mobile penetration, plus the growth of social networking – 64% of Norwegians

In the session on paywalls at the ISOJ, Jorge Meléndez, vice president for new media, Grupo Reforma (Mexico), explained how the newspapers have had paywalls since 2002. The newspaper sites were free for the first two years. But they realised there was a very small online advertising market so the group just did it. Part of this involved an active strategy to convert newspaper subscribers online. The impact of the paywall was

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

One of the topics of discussion at the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin was producing news products for Apple’s iPad. Dan Gillmor has expressed concerns about Apple’s ability to decide what appears on the iTunes store and hence the iPad. I asked Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a co-founder of Global Voices, for his thoughts on

One of the final presentations at ISOJ looked at the content of comments. The study, Comments in News, Democracy Booster or Journalistic Nightmare (PDF), analysed comments on newspaper websites in Catalunya in Spain David Domingo, Universitat Rovira i Virgilli (Tarragona, explained that the analysis was based on Habermas: were comments an expression of a democratic debate, expressing logical and coherent arguments. Most users only left one comment in a debate.

A paper presented at ISOJ by Monica Chadha, Alex Avila, Homero Gil de Zuñiga, University of Texas at Austin sought to answer: Who listens to podcasts?And are they engaged with politics? Quite rightly, they defined a podcast as an audio programme that you subscribe to, rather than audio downloaded from the net. The study found that podcasts were most popular among people in their thirties and in their fifties. In

At the final session of the ISOJ 2010, Andrew Lih, University of Southern California presented his research into the health of Wikipedia (PDF). His interest is prompted by talk about Wikipedia reaching its limits and a slowdown in the growth of the site. Lih notes that Wikipedia had grown so quickly that from 2006-2009 there was no data, until a massive data dump towards the end of 2009. Stats from