Results matching “a discussion on”

From college students on Facebook, to moms, and even the EU parliament, it seems everyone these days is jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and journalists can, too. 10,000 Words recommends these sites for journalists:

Wired Journalists



The place for journalists to network and discuss the changing world of multimedia journalism. "WJ's strength," writes 10,000 Words, "is in its groups, in which members discuss topics like tutorials, audio techniques and student journalism"

LinkedIn

With 23 million members, LinkedIn offers an interactive database of hundreds of thousands of resumes; where professionals can keep in touch with current and former colleagues and be introduced to mutual contacts.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a hub for page designers, graphics journalists, and web producers. The site offers searchable color schemes and patterns, groups and a blog.

Twitter































Where news breaks first (and where social networking and microblogging converge). As 10,000 Words notes, "the site is still great for keeping up with the world in 140 characters or less."

Flickr

The after hours refuge for the photographers. Flickr offers both inspiration and a worldwide audience for amateur and professional photographers alike, as well as a place for discussion on lenses, filters and camera types.

Source: 10,000Words.net

Sky News has relaunched its website today with a raft of new features. The revamp is aimed at personalizing the site for users and expanding its range of user-generated content and videos.

Steve Bennedik, the editor of Sky News Networked Media, states that, "The features we are introducing to personalize the site are just the start of a process aimed at allowing our users to tailor sky.com/news to suit all their online needs."

Sky is introducing an online community element to its website, powered by Pluck, enabling users to have their own blogs, to comment on other people's blogs, and discussion boards.

The redesigned website will incorporate SkyCast, a video platform powered by a "white label" version of Google's online video technology, into its news pages to encourage users to submit their own videos relating to news stories.

The new Choose Your News function allows users to hone their news search with categories including most popular stories, most recent video clips and "special interest" topics.

A Story Tracker function will automatically update users on news stories they are following.

Sky News is also launching a news service, powered by news aggregation company Daylife, which will provide readers with any related stories from "external sources" from the UK and international providers.

The website will also include more video, graphics and a new "bold design", as well as an interactive and searchable weather map of more than 4,500 destinations.

Source: Guardian

The Washington Post has launched a new Sunday column called The Financial Lobe, focused on how people invest and relate to money.

In the first edition, Michael Rosenwald attempts to demonstrate how the public gets manipulated by pricing strategies.

"I thought that with our wallets feeling lighter these days, with high gas prices and depleted home values, a discussion of what provokes us to buy and invest in the things we do would be a perfect start for my new monthly column," wrote Rosenwald.

For example, he mentions the iPhone, which was launched at an initial price of $599. It's no surprise than when the device's price was lowered to $399, many people felt like they were getting a $200 discount and rushed to get the new phone. And now the iPhone is down at about $200!

"We compare it to the higher price. I don't know if Steve Jobs planned this or not, but if he manipulated based on anchoring, he did a very nice trick," said Dan Ariely, a Duke University behavioral economist and the author of "Predictably Irrational."

In the golden age of consumerism, an age in which "we have no easy way to judge the value of the things we buy, and we especially have no fast and sure way to value the utility we would get from the purchase," this is a straightforward idea for a column that can appeal to - and be instructive for - readers.

Source: Washington Post

Generating - and maintaining - an online audience is the perpetual challenge of news websites. Whereas print readers report spending 16 minutes a day with their dailies, the average nytimes.com reader spends just 68 seconds a day on the site. 

Interactive features may be sites saving grace. USA Today's Candidate Match Game has drawn more than 2.5 million unique visitors since its launch last September, and Senior Designer Juan Thomassie reports the feature can keep readers engaged for five to six minutes.

The Poynter Institute recently interviewed Thomassie on the development and success of the project. What follows is an edited version of the transcript that appears on the Poynter Institute's website.

How did interactivity help to tell the story?

Thomassie: Some candidates had a very high profile and some were not so well-known. The candidate match game was a way to use some issues-related questions and multiple choice answers to help readers get an idea of which was closest to their views.

The presumption was that readers might not be so well-informed about candidates. We just posed them as a Q&A, a blind quiz. Each time you chose your answer, we'd reveal question by question which things matched.

We were surprised that most people who took (that version of) the quiz said, "I had no idea I agreed with this candidate."

How many ideas were on the table?

Thomassie: We actually drew up a few storyboards and kind of played around with the idea of a horse race theme. As you answered the questions, the candidates who you are most like would go farther on the track. We decided that idea was a little too light. It wasn't just a game.

The challenge for us was to find that sweet spot between newsy and informative and fun and interactive. We pulled back from the horse race and used the vertical bars format that we ultimately used.

What were the important talents involved in producing this interactive graphic?

Thomassie: A collaborative effort between the political editor, the producer and myself.

This represented many months of meetings, conceptualization, brainstorming, storyboarding, development of prototypes. As we'd get feedback from prototypes we'd rebuild things -- make significant changes to the model in key points in the process. But each time it got better and was a really useful process.

This is such an investment of resources. How did you let people know that the feature was there?

Thomassie: We promoted it heavily on the USA Today homepage, on the politics homepage and in the newspaper.

Then, thru blogs and word of mouth, it really started to get some play in the media. It steamrolled from there. We saw the match game discussed on a local TV station where they talked about how helpful it was. We saw a discussion on C-SPAN about it. It just caught on in political blogs, news blogs and interactive graphics blogs, and we were a bit surprised by the steady stream of traffic it was generating.

Again, something like this takes so much time. How do you decide what is worth the time it takes to create something like this?

If someone comes to the page, interacts with the graphic, spends time digging for more content -- spending at least 5 or 6 minutes on a page -- it's worth it. We can track that.

What about interactivity for daily publication?

Thomassie: On a daily basis, if it's a breaking news story, then there's a compelling push to do a news graphic. But to determine if it should be interactive, you have to ask if it will be of interest in two weeks or down the road.

With 14 months before the election date; We knew that there would be a long-term interest.

Though it took weeks of development, the results we got from this are a resounding "yes" when we get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, for months and months and months.

Source: Poynter Institute

For the second year, the Newsroom Barometer, a survey organized by Reuters and the World Editors Forum and conducted by Zogby International, was presented at the 15th World Editors Forum conference, being held this year in Göteborg, Sweden. The Barometer is an exclusive international survey designed to give insight into newsroom strategies.
The survey represents newspapers throughout the world including international, national, regional and local papers.

John Zogby, President of Zogby International, USA introduced the study. He announced that two of the most important results found in the survey was that newsrooms today need to train journalists to be multimedia oriented for the approaching dominance of integrated newsrooms.

When asked about the multimedia capabilities of their own newsrooms, 54% of survey respondents said that their newsroom is already integrated. Another 30% said that they will have an integrated newsroom within 5 years. But Zogby pointed out that there is no standard definition of what an integrated newsroom actually is, and that this is a discussion that must occur amongst media executives.

The biggest problem for printed newspapers is the declining readership of young people, especially in United States. Linked to this problem, many young people read their news on the Internet.
Despite the seemingly bad news, the survey shows that 85% of editors-in-chiefs around the world are very or somewhat optimistic about the future of newspapers.

George Brock, chairman and Editor, Saturday TImes, UK answered that today headlines repeat themself. "The challenge for us is the generation shift. Young people have new habits and they are not going to change," said Brock. "If we would deliver more depth it might raise their interest level. It's not only the content that needs to change but it's the way we deliver it as well. Chances are if you deliver on YouTube it will reach it's audience."
Brock also said that there is a new generation of adults that have adopted a new set of tools, and they are not going to change.

The general lesson from the session was that publishers have to develop and intergrate all media. Their job is not only finding the right media on which to tell the story but also finding the right media on which to find the audience.

As new media makes the world an increasingly transparent place, plans are currently being developed to launch a social networking site connecting MEPs and MPs across Europe.

The site - Myparl.eu - will be officially launched in October and hopes to foster debate about pending legislative proposals coming both from Brussels and national parliaments. The site's foci will be the future of Europe, climate change and intercultural dialogue.

Myparl, which will be translated into French, German and English, could potentially involve up to 20,000 people; although only MPs and MEPs will be able to post comments, the site will be open to the public, who can react to the discussion with letters to the editor.

Source: European Journalism Centre

The Recovering Journalist recently blogged on the Norwich Bulletin's (Connecticut) brief adventure into user commenting - The Bulletin gave readers free range to comment on the site, only to find that comments that are entirely anonymous and unmoderated can quickly spiral out of control. Apparently posters were relentless even when it came to wedding announcements.

Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Group recently blogged on 9 Ways to Improve the Quality of Comments on your Website:

1. Have moderators and staff actively participate on the comment board; when staff post frequently they can help lead the discussion and improve the level of discourse
2. Require users to have one comment pre-approved before they can post freely
3. Filter out the profanity
4. Allow users to report inappropriate comments
5. Use other users feedback to bury or promote comments
6. Require registration for posting
7. Threaded comments foster discussion; when users can reply to a specific comment it allows for multiple lines of discussion to coexist
8. Let users ignore other commenters
9. Create a comment policy; transparency is always best

By following these guidelines news sites can reap the benefits of online user discussion, without the swear words.

Sources: Recovering Journalist through David-Black.org, The Bivings Report

After a tour of The New York Times this week, blogger Robert Scoble discussed some interesting additions at the Grey Lady.

Gadgets coming out of the Research and Development department included:

-a prototype newspaper rack that could print out a customized version of the paper

-a thin book reader following a discussion of metadata being collected by the Times. Scoble writes, "They have these gadgets so they can develop new ways of delivering content to those devices."

-a display featuring the results of NYT's new partnership with Google Earth

He reports that The Times' new archive initiative, the Time Machine, which debuted late February in beta, will be released soon. Scoble also learned that a Mac version of the Times Reader will be available in the next few days.

Source: Scobleizer through Journerdism 

Reetta Meriläinen, editor-in-chief of the Helsingin Sanomat in Helsinki, Finland, will discuss the paper's print and online hyperlocal strategies at the upcoming World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

The Editors Weblog is carrying a few 'teaser' interviews featuring speakers of the upcoming Forum.

Meriläinen's presentation focuses on three essential aspects of hyperlocal news:

- hyperlocal is not only about geographic, but also mental proximity - covering issues that are close to readers' minds:
Newspapers "often think of hyperlocal as just a geographic term but it isn't just that," she said. Instead, "We are here to serve people and to try help them in their everyday life."
For example, if there's a problem with city traffic or issues about daycare, the Helsingin encourages people to voice their concerns and submit questions, such as "How to find daycare for my children." These questions are then forwarded to the mayor's office, daycare facilities, and any relevant policy group. The Helsingin also creates many forums to connect people around those issues.

- focus on hyperlocal news to build a community:
A soft news story with local focus can help build a strong community of readers, as was the case when the Helsingin wrote about Bubi, the owl that landed on the goalpost during a local football game - and stayed to watch the game.
Helsingin Sanomat's website features its own local service site, "Oma kaupunki," which means "my own city." This section of the site combines local and hyperlocal news, with reader services and forums. In effect, it's perfect for local search, both for news and as a local guide, according to Meriläinen. In the future, the Helsingin plans to open this platform to user-generated content.

- hyperlocal means moving from virtual encounters to real encounters:
Last summer, the Helsingin led a print and online campaign to restore the Kaisaniemi park in Helsinki, which was dangerous and badly kept. The paper encouraged people to find ideas for the park and submit them. It also organized events "to keep the park alive," including a fun fair, complete with stands, balloons, food and games, and a panel discussion about the issues. Whereas the paper expected between 1,000 and 2,000 people, a massive 5,000 showed up. This event helped to build a real relationship amongst the community, and the ideas that emerged during the whole campaign were sent to the municipal county. There are now plans for improvement of the park.

Reetta Meriläinen, editor-in-chief of the Helsingin Sanomat in Helsinki, Finland, will discuss in detail the paper's print and online hyperlocal strategies at the upcoming World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

To mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3, the Council of Europe is launching an online discussion forum on media freedom in times of crisis, reports the European Journalism Centre.

The forum, intended for both journalists and anyone else concerned about freedom of expression, will center on how journalists do their job in the face of government restrictions during wars, terrorist threats and political instability.

This year's World Press Freedom Day comes days after a report by lobby group Freedom House concluded that global press freedom declined in 2007. According to the survey, Iraq and Somalia remain the most dangerous countries for journalists.

Sources: EJC, AFP

Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles writes that "there's no such thing as 'off the record' anymore," with the Internet making it nearly impossible to keep anything private, and with citizen journalism gaining popularity.

Political comments, drunken party pictures, anything can end up on the Internet thanks to Facebook, Myspace, discussion boards, etc. Niles compares the web to "life in a small frontier town, where everyone knows everyone else's business."

Case in point: U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made comments on "a popular view among many progressives, notably articulated by author Thomas Frank four years ago in his book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"," according to Niles, which in turn caused rival Hillary Clinton and other right-wing supporters to call him "elitist." Though this gathering supposedly didn't allow journalists, these comments reported for Huffington Post's "Off the Bus."

With citizen journalists and bloggers,  "any professional news reporter who agrees to respect an "off the record" request at a meeting is committing an act of unilateral professional disarmament," writes Niles. 

So why can't a professional journalist be a "citizen" journalist and gain access to events closed to professionals? After all, all journalists are citizens, argues Niles.

Ultimately, there really is no way to enforce an "off the record" request anymore. People may be forbidden from future events, but there are several other potential "citizen journalists" to fill in the shoes.

Do people now have to resort to watching what they say in public and censoring themselves? Niles seems to think so and while the Internet might increase formalities and cautiousness among people, it might "lead us in the opposite direction, where we deal with all this information about each other by ignoring it, in the way many people have learned to ignore public cursing, kissing and other displays that would have offended many more people a generation or two past."

As for journalists, Niles suggests that they keep reporting since the information will end up on the web anyway, and consolidate the information in a "smarter, sharper perspective than anyone else does."

Source: Online Journalism Review

After just six months, citizen journalism start-up Scribblesheet has shut down due to financial troubles, according to co-founder John Ndege.

Ndege thinks there's a need for citizen journalism, adding to the continuous discussion of citizen journalism's future,  however, "you need money to recruit writers but you need writers to make money."

Though other web companies with similar business models such as Newsvine and OhMyNews, Scribblesheet was the first to have completely user generated news.

Ndege believes that citizen journalism is "supposed to be about the man or woman on the street telling his or her story, not about the trained professional," thus cites NowPublic as the best business model around citizen journalism. Citizen journalists provide the website with content, and in turn, NowPublic sells it on wire services.

Guardian blogger Jemima Kiss concedes that "building up a new brand from scratch in the current web climate, without major funding or a known brand, is extremely hard." She believes that Scribblesheet may have been too confusing to the public, without a "clear context and objective" for how their news would be published and distributed. Furthermore, some of the public may not want to think of themselves as 'citizen journalists'.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Because of the Internet, the "Letters to the Editor