Results matching “the best blogging newspapers”

In a recent survey, 200 blogging journalists from 30 different countries were interviewed about the effects of blogging on the process of journalism.  According to the survey, respondents came from all sectors of the news industry; almost half worked in the newspaper industry, and one third were online-only or freelance.

The survey found that as of 2008, 70% of US newspapers, 85% of UK news organizations, and 44% of European news organizations were offering journalist-authored blogs.

Blogs of the past were considered a tool for amateurs and were casually dismissed by the media industry.  Today, everything has changed;  blogging has significantly altered the landscape of the news industry.  According to the survey, blogs have become a "global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream".

An astounding 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.  They have become a vital part of reporting, "The lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear."

The shift in the attitude towards blogging has been explored in the first part of an annual report published by Technorati, entitled, "State of the Blogosphere."  Part I, "Who are the Bloggers?" attempts to unearth and analyze the trends and themes of blogging and bloggers.

Los Angeles Times writer James Rainey questions whether blogging sites like The Huffington Post would ever have original reporting instead of being solely a news aggregator focusing on the political left with the occasional scoop or two.

The site offers content on presidential candidates and a variety of comments ranging from the banal to the provocative, but it is still newspapers and other news organizations that do "heavy excavation" and provide investigative reports on secret terrorist prisons, illegal wireapping and other controversial state activities.

TechPresident.com's Joshua Levy said that investigative or educational journalism "takes lots of time and reporting and lots of resources."

"The real question is who is going to be paying for all of this work," said Arianna Huffington, the site's founder. "Where is the advertising and how quickly does it move online and how quickly do the rates increase. That is going to be key for all of us."

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Mike Leary, Philadephia Inquirer's managing editor, announced last week that the paper would be publishing certain stories online only after they have been published in print, apart from breaking news stories.

Even though the new policy provoked some criticism from Steve Outing and Jeff Jarvis, it is meant to be a strategic leap towards formulating "complementary differentiation between the roles of the print and online operations", according to Poynter.org's Amy Gahran.

Differentiating between print and online operations may be the key to helping papers that are in financial trouble. One of the strengths of print may be feature stories, whereas the Web's immediacy allows for a possibly better environment for breaking news coverage.

The move may be seen as restricting bloggers by limiting the stories they may work on, so as not to publish content that is in progress for the print edition.

However, Chris Krewson, the paper's executive editor for online/news mentioned that it is blogging that is the "easiest" method for breaking news coverage. In fact, he pointed out that there was a 700% increase in traffic on Philly.com blogs.

"There's no quicker way to break news than on a blog, and no better way for us to leverage our staffing advantage over other local media. In addition, beat reporters with blogs say the process has helped them cultivate and nurture sources," said Krewson.

Gahran wrote that eventhough it would be "nice" to have news organizations reporting on breaking news, enterprise and feature stories as well as interacting with the community, financial difficulties may not permit that.

Source: Poynter Romenesko

See also:
US: Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor takes "backward step"?

Mobile technology seems to be gaining popularity in Flanders after the launch of the iPhone as some newspapers began to offer mobile services, reported Dorien Aerts from the Online Journalism Blog.

De Standaard's mobile site, which was launched on June 16, has news, weather forecast and updated traffic information. The paper was also the first to introduce blogging to its site.

De Tijd is finance-oriented, providing mobile users with daily news, currency information and the users own "investment wallet".     

Local papers Het Belang van Limburg and Gazet van Antwerpen have mobile sites offering both national, international, sports, cultural and society news.

Aerts pointed out that Flemish papers like Het Laatste Niews, De Morgen and Het Nieuwsblad have not yet launched mobile sites. He also mentioned that so far no Flemish papers have used mobile widgets or localization and personalization functions.

Source: Online Journalism Blog through IFRA Executive News Service

France: Le Figaro launches iPhone site
US: NYT launches iPhone application
AP launches native iPhone application
IHT.com launches iPhone-optimized site

In a recent On the Media interview with Carole Tarrant, the Roanoke Times editor defends the place of user comments online - an embattled subject in recent weeks, one taken up by blogging heads Gawker and BuzzMachine, alike.

While many have pointed to a void of thoughtful discussion in the comment box, as Gawker's Sheila McClear recently said, "...There is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers."

Tarrant disagrees, saying that users moderate themselves once the community has been defined.

"...When you've been doing it long enough, I think the community of people participating, they know what the ground rules are. And I really believe if you're a newspaper online and you don't allow this, you're not really online," said Tarrant. "We have a whole generation that's trained to expect to be able to voice their opinion, not just to read the news but to talk about it or share it, and that may be ugly or it may be really provocative, but I want to hear it."

Tarrant also points to the Virginia Tech massacre, a local crisis, that the paper felt necessitated creating a place for readers to share.

 "We initially put up just our generic message board (but) there were a few people that tried to hijack it and talk about gun control. So we pulled down that message board and we went to something called legacy.com, which is a vendor many newspapers use to post their obituaries, and attached to those obituaries are moderated message boards. And they are very much screened. Comments are not posted live. They're looked at by editors within legacy.com," explained Tarrant. "And we personally couldn't spend the time right then to look at those comments because we were so busy trying to cover the news."

Although figuring out a comment solution that worked took trial and error, for Tarrant, it was worth it. "To not have that just would have been a huge disservice to the community."

Source: On the Media

Local newspapers might benefit more from having healthy relationships with citizen journalists and bloggers, instead of seeing them as cheaper sources, according to Guardian.co.uk's Dave Hill.

 "Good local media are important to the neighbourhoods they serve and could be great innovators, showing the way forward for journalism. In an age of rapid change in every corner of Britain they have the potential to tell grassroots stories that are not only significant in their own right but may have wider implications that national counterparts are unlikely to find or tell so well," he wrote.

He condemns the way that local British papers (namely London's Hackney Gazette) use bloggers' material to write up some articles. He mentioned that newspapers like the Gazette are allowed to refrain from mentioning the source of material (which may be a blog) but that blogs may not be "worthy of this courtesy."

Source: Guardian.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Posterous, a new blogging platform powered by email, could allow newspapers to attract more users to their blogging communities.

According to Poynter's Paul Bradshaw, Posterous is "fantastically intuitive, quick, and easy".

Bradshaw gives several examples to demonstrate Posterous' user-friendly platform: create a Posterous blog by sending an email to post@posterous.com; email photos, video, or audio to Posterous and the files will be uploaded in a posting; check blog comments through automatic email notifications.

"It's a very new service, but I think Posterous could become a hugely popular blogging tool, as well as a great tool for blogging on the move," he writes.

Source: Poynter Online

According to News & Record editor John Robinson, Kubler-Ross' model of accepting death can be applied to the current state of the newspaper industry in the US: it is time for acceptance.

In Kubler-Ross' model, the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

In April, Terry Heaton, AR & D's Media 2.0 senior vice president, said the industry was at the depression stage.

Now is time of acceptance - not of death though, but of the need for change.

Reporter and blogger Doug Fischer wrote that although it may seem that newspapers are dying, they would continue to "exist in radically different frequency and content."

Journalists need to deal with the economic reality and think about the challenges ahead, Robinson wrote.

"That means we understand how the world has changed, and we understand how our journalistic skills and assumptions must change. For instance, learning what it takes to be a digital journalist is vital. Reaching readers -- information consumers, really -- where, how and when they want it is good for journalism. Listening to and learning from them is even better," he said.
 
Two years ago, the Economist published a special report in which it said that the newspapers might survive in the long term if they "reinvent themselves on the Internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices."

The situation of the US newspaper industry does seem critical, in light of the massive wave of layoffs in recent weeks and the overall advertising decline. But Robinson pointed out that future journalistic opportunities lie in microblogging, beat blogging and social networking. Journalism is, in his opinion, on the verge of attracting different customers.

Source: News-Record.com
 

Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times "The Big Picture" column has launched a blog, joining more than 40 other L.A. Times bloggers.

The Big Picture blog will be in the same style, but, says Goldstein, will had "be broader in scope" - a possibility for a daily blog that has become increasingly difficult in a weekly column. The Big Picture will incorporate new interactive elements, more news and analysis, as well as invite guest bloggers - most recently a 10-year-old girl - to share their views.

Goldstein, in a blog post explaining the launch, said, "...Soon our blogs will be the backbone of the paper...information is everywhere these days. But readers still crave informed analysis and lively writing, which is something we can focus on as newspapers..."

Last week, Nebraskan newspaper the Grand Island Independent used live blogging tool CoverItLive after the relaunch of its site for a live Q&A session between readers and web staff. It remained available for an additional two days because of its popularity.

The feature was advertised in the print edition of the newspaper and as a link on the site's homepage. It garnered a lot of reader feedback, including reports of glitches in the new site, which were quickly fixed, according to Stephanie Romanski, web editor of the Independent.

"The whole errors issue surprised me and was an unexpected bonus to holding the Q&A. I mostly expected either 'Love it/Hate it responses or a lot of 'I can't find...' questions. I think we impressed some readers by being able to respond to their issues so quickly," said Romanski.

The Independent may be experimenting with other tools for sports and political coverage and for setting up a regular weekly chat with staff.

"I believe that newspapers that embrace the web and the awesome and often free tools available out there will be the newspapers that make it through the current slump the industry is experiencing and will thrive in the future," Romanski remarked.

Source: Journalism.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Despite the slim down of newspapers, Birmingham, Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI) is continuing to pay for investigative stories in its 90 plus daily newspapers using corporate resources, since the small papers would not be able to supply in-depth reporting themselves.

This program, started two years ago, is called the Elite Report-ing Fellowship Program, and is headed by Bill Ketter, CNHI's vice president of news. The first report was on April 2006, a three-part series on gambling addicts. Following series dealt with topics such as the "Interstate Highway System's crumbling infrastructure." All stories have a national focus, "a direct relevancy to communities," according to Ketter, and emphasis on human interest.

"We felt very strongly that good journalism is good business," says Ketter. "There's been so much negative publicity in our craft about the demise of in-depth journalism, and this more vigorous journalism has almost been eliminated. [The fellowship] creates a regular flow of high public service journalism."
 
The Fellowship program accepts applications from all CNHI reporters. Once accepted, the reporter is assigned a topic and released from newsroom duties for the duration of the project, which can last from a month to six weeks. They are supplied with audio and video equipment, which their papers can keep as benefits.

The program has also influenced many of CNHI's papers to incorporate more multimedia. The Iowa based Ottumwa Courier is now listing multimedia and live blogging as a priority.

"I'm a believer in the watchdog role of the press," Ketter says. "We're a guide dog and we're a watchdog. Every newspaper, no matter how small, has to fulfill those roles."

The stories are also available on the websites, accompanied by graphics and videos.


Source: AJR through IFRA Executive News Service

Ball State University and the University of Nevada, Reno have conducted a study on newspaper blogs that found that newspapers did not create much interaction between bloggers and audience during the week before the fall 2006 elections.

The results of their five day study:
- Some blogs contained frequent posts as high as 57, but the average was 8.2, and almost 25% had no posts.
 - Though the average number of comments was 33.5, or an average of 6.7 per day, this was skewed by the few bloggers who received as many as 100 posts daily.
- About 58% of people responding to blogs contributed more than one comment.
- 80% of bloggers posted no responses to readers' comments.

Nielsen/NetRatings reports that "unique visitors to the largest Internet newspaper blog sites rose from 1.2 million in December 2005 to 3.8 million in December 2006." The blog's rise in popularity explains why more newspapers are experimenting with blogs, which causes an increasing haziness between professional journalism and blogging.

However, "newspapers will have to change the way they approach blogging if they are going to be a force in increasing public dialogue on political issues," according to Ball State University. "To be as effective as some of the more popular citizen-produced blogs, however, newspaper versions must attract an audience and generate a conversation," said Ball State journalism professor Mary Spillman.

She believes that politics may not be the best topic for newspaper blogs: "While experts have pointed to blogs' potential to transform democracy, it is possible that blogs generate more citizen participation when the subject matter is sports, parenting or other lifestyle topics than politics."

Source: Ball State University

"Digital magazines are either passé or the next big thing - depending who you listen to," writes Robert Andrews, editor of Paidcontent:UK.

Digital magazines, in PDF version, are online replicas of a print product that offer readers the experience of reading a traditional magazine. Many magazines use this format to be eco-friendly.

In line with the argument of digital mags being passé, Drift, a digital surfing magazine launched in 2005, is switching to a printed format. It originally began in a paperless format as an alternative to tree-based paper.
 
Drift Editor Howard Swanwick said, "With the internet there's a lifecycle with these things - buzzwords such as digital magazine, podcast, blogging - they tend to come and go. I think digital magazines have had their day. As a medium to put features in, they don't work."

Drift also had problems selling space because "advertisers did not understand the digital format" according to Swanwick.

On the other hand, The National Union of Journalists' monthly mail-out members' magazine The Journalist is going online, ending all print publications to save print, post, and packaging costs.

Furthermore, Courrier International.com peruses an article in Die Tageszeitung by correspondent Gina Bucher, who deems PDF magazines such as John Magazine and Dot-to-dot-mag to be the new trend on the Internet because of their layout. Text, photographs or illustrations are displayed exactly the same on everyone's copy because PDF is a file format compatible on various platforms.

Magazines, digital or not, are still figuring out which platform works best, but newspapers may want to further experiment with PDFs or other digital formats on certain sections to save costs.

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