Online Journalism

“The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no long sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it–digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.” — Phil Meyer, author of “Precision Journalism”

Briggs starts out the third chapter of “Journalism Next” by writing about how today’s journalists are embracing technology more than ever and using information gathered from citizens to help them assemble their news.

What Briggs writes about reminds a lot about what Mandy Jenkins was talking about when she visited to speak about TBD. TBD uses tweets from people to learn about events and incidents that are happening around the area because TBD is limited to only 15 reporters who can be out on the streets. It also reminds me of Patch as they do the same thing where the editors allow people to e-mail them or tweet them with tips about what’s going on or what they would like to be covered.

The most interesting term I found from the chapter was pro-am journalism. This is the kind of journalism that allows people to publish directly to the same platform the journalists use to publish their news, which also reminds of what Patch does a little bit.

Briggs then goes into detail about crowdsourcing and why it is important for journalists. Crowdsourcing allows communities to focus on a specific project where they can outperform a small group of experienced journalists because they can employ more manpower.

Briggs then talks about invaluable links are to writing for online media. Just a few years ago, linking to the competition was pretty much forbidden, but now it is welcome and many online journalists use it to link to valuable information from other journalists. They do this in the hope that readers will come back to their website because they find that what they link to is credible.

Briggs’ final point is that these types of collaborative journalism aren’t going to go away. With the access to technology that we have now, people are more invested in what is going on right around the corner from them. With companies laying off journalists, media platforms are going to need contribution from ‘regular people’ now more than ever.

“The great thing about a blog for an old-fashioned beat reporter like me is that it is journalism at its core–pounding the pavement looking for the next scoop and making sure that you stay two steps ahead of the competition. That drive was always in me as a beat reporter, but a blog elevates that to a much higher level.” — John Cook, co-founder of TechFlash

In Mark Briggs’ second chapter of “Journalism Next,” Briggs talks about the many advantages of having and maintaining a blog.

• Blogging helps develop community with readers or viewers so they can test ideas, receive early and direct feedback and publish or broadcast in the timeliest manner.
• Can help build an audience as a college journalist.
• Helps establish deeper relationships with readers and can help broaden coverage.

One of the interesting things Briggs points out is that with blogging, their isn’t as much of a sense of competition because people are more willing to share information online. In some blog posts, people link to other people’s sites or blogs and compile info from other resources online to establish their content.

How popular and powerful are blogs now? According to a report done by Technorati, “blogs have more total unique visitors than either Facebook or MySpace.” Blogs help motivate journalists and organizations to be #1. As Joel Achenbach mentioned in his article from “The Washington Post,” journalists are motivated by page views; in this case being a highly viewed blog is a great feeling.

Briggs then outlines some of the jargon associated with blogging, some of the boring stuff.

Then he outlines some tips for how to build a successful blog:

• Put the reader first
• Organize your ideas
• Be direct
• Be the authority, with a personality
• Wait 15 minutes after writing to edit yourself dispassionately.
• Make your posts scanable
• Link, summarize and analyze
• Be specific with headlines
• Have a good attitude
• Use photos and screenshots
• Post early, post often (at least once a day)
• Participate in the community
• Comment on and read other blogs
• Link to other blogs
• Use RSS feeds

As you can tell by these guidelines, a lot of these tips apply to traditional print journalism. That’s because blogging is similar to traditional print journalism, but it can be updated more often and it is more connectible to the audience than a newspaper is.

Related articles

• What’s the State of Your Blogosphere? (blogworld.com)
• Don’t Feel Guilty If…You Give it Up for Free (hollabackhealth.com)
• Oprah: “Know Your Viewer” (blogworld.com)

Image by Lars K. Jensen via Flickr

In the first chapter of Mark Briggs‘ “Journalism Next,” Briggs starts off by stating that we as a society take the Internet and e-mail for granted.

He then goes on to define ‘digital information’ and how to create and save text files, audio files, picture files and video files. One of the tips that Briggs advises for Internet etiquette  is to never send a file larger than 1 MB through e-mail, because it can clog your server and the recipient’s server, particularly if it’s a company address you’re sending it to.

Briggs then explains how the Internet works and what the cache is and that it’s a good idea to clean it out regularly to help your system run faster and more efficient. Briggs advises uses RSS feeds (as we did for our blogs) because it’s the easiest way to consume massive amounts of information; it reminds me a lot of Twitter.

He then outlines how to quickly build an HTML page. As anyone who has perused the Internet, he recommends adding images and other visuals to make your Web page not so boring. After explaining HTML, Briggs details CSS which helps to further delve into a Web page to make it look better. He advises to have  at least a small amount of CSS knowledge so as to be able to tweak the sites you may potentially work with.

Image via Wikipedia

In Joel Achenbach‘s article, he writes about how journalists across all platforms have become more obsessed with how many people are viewing, listening or reading their works than the quality of their works and how it impacts people.

Obviously, journalists want as many people as possible to view their work, but Achenbach raises the question: at what point does journalism become marketing?

Achenbach raises a good point in his article: journalists just need to focus on writing a good story. If the writing is good and it’s worth reading, people will read. Journalists need to do what they have been doing for the past 50 years: write well and write about what matters.

That’s what got such renowned journalists as Michael Wilbon, Edward R. Murrow, Bob Woodward and other journalists of different fields to be as well regarded as they are: reporting on what matters and doing it in the right fashion.