The Guardian opened a dedicated space on its website for videos produced by Newton, a public service science channel, the newspaper reported last week. The new website will feature “interviews with scientists, fascinating lectures, heated debates and topical reports, and perhaps even science-y meetings in pubs that might be of interest to an even wider audience”, the announcement said.

The partnership between the Guardian and Newton started originally 18 months ago, but previously the videos produced by the channel had been hosted among the Guardian’s other video offerings. The new dedicated space comes “As part of our increasing commitment to online video”, the paper said.

Newton TV specialises on science films in particular, and correspondingly the newly launched Newton Channel is part of the science section of the Guardian’s video pages. Newton will operate independently, but there would most probably be plenty of Guardian collaborations as well, the newspaper said.

The strengthened partnership follows closely other news of newspapers taking steps to producing and featuring video content more prominently. Last month The Washington Post launched its 59-second news round-up, and The New York Times started a business-related programme, broadcast from the Times newsroom.

However, the new videos that the Washington Post and the Times produce in-house require few resources and little expertise on the production side, concentrating mainly on talking heads. By contrast, science videos require more time, money and knowledge to make. Thus a partnership with a video production company seems like an ideal solution for a newspaper. As John Domokos, video producer at the Guardian, said at news:rewired earlier this year, a newspaper cannot hope to beat TV at its own game.

Newton’s videos are also longer than those produced by newspapers on average. The fact that science coverage may require a more thorough approach than what we usually expect from newspapers is exemplified also by the forthcoming launch of Matter, a new platform devoted exclusively to long-form science and technology journalism.

As video becomes more and more common at online news sites, will other newspapers follow the Guardian’s example of forming partnerships with video production companies?

Sources: Guardian, Newton TV

While new technology has changed just about everything when it comes to newspapers, some aspects persist. One of them is the regrettable presence of errors - they used to exist in print, and now they occur also online.

Thanks to technology, however, there are new tools that help combat mistakes in reporting. Writing for Poynter, Craig Silverman examined how the New York Times keeps track of - and reacts to - errors on its pages and website.

Thanks to an internal database that the Times uses to track errors and corrections, the paper noticed that articles by one of its freelancers were being corrected increasingly often. This allowed it to investigate the issue - and eventually to find a solution.

What the Times discovered was that the writer in question was being commissioned by several desks and was, probably, overworked. This resulted in a spike in errors. Thus, the paper cut back the number of assignments, and correspondingly the accuracy of the freelancer's reporting improved.

The case of the freelancer was one of the aspects that Arthur Brisbane, the Public Editor of the New York Times discussed in his column, which discusses the issue of errors and corrections at the paper and in the press in general.

In addition to excessive workload, Poynter's article mentions several other factors that sometimes explain a surge in errors, such as lack of research, sloppy writing, or changes in the traditional workflow. But the point about a corrections tracker is that it helps to pin down an upsurge in corrections, and then investigate what the reasons behind are. In short, it is a tool that gives access to data to identify a problem - and to increase the overall quality of the paper.

Last month, Silverman wrote about correction tallies - columns in which newspapers give a review of the number of corrections published during the previous year. Such transparency is laudable. Although slight inaccuracies or misspellings hardly compare with unethical editorial judgement (see: phone hacking), small errors still suggest carelessness which, the reader may presume, generalises to the publication's overall reporting. Similarly, correcting mistakes openly implies that the newspaper puts a high value on accuracy and transparency.

But it is revealing that even the most highly valued publications make the simplest mistakes: Poynter pointed out that the Wall Street Journal had misspelled the name of one of its reporters in a byline. It would make sense therefore to excuse the odd error when it happens - as long as it is later openly admitted and corrected.

Sources: Poynter (1), (2), (3), New York Times

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Engage. Listen to your readers. Build a community.

All good advice coming in newspapers' direction. But when it comes to responding to comments on their websites, disappointingly few are putting it into practice.

The Washington Post is one of the exceptions. Nieman Lab recently reported that the paper is encouraging its reporters to take part in the conversation on its website. In addition to the six people dedicated to comments full-time, over 40 reporters have contributed to the comment threads over recent weeks, Joe DeNunzio, the Post's interactivity editor, wrote in a blog post.

"The interactivity team here started taking a more active approach to getting reporters into the comments late last year because we were pretty sure it could help the comment threads - and the journalism," DeNunzio told Nieman. Based on the evidence so far, it appears that this is exactly what has happened.

The Nieman article highlights some examples of how reporters' presence successfully fended off speculation and hateful messages based on misinformation. Moreover, in some cases, the journalists have been able to tap into an active comments stream and bring in a researcher to join the discussion, turning the comments into a natural extension to the original article.

This could set an interesting precedent - when you anticipate a strong reaction from readers, it makes sense to prepare for it by having experts to answer their questions online.

Not only did the newspaper's journalism benefit, but the experience has also provided evidence for something that many people have suspected for some time: having the newspapers' staff showing up in comments, and exemplifying the kind of behaviour they would like to see from their readers, has a positive effect on the quality of the conversation. The Nieman piece noted that the Post has also taken other steps to improve the level of its online comments by, for example, rewarding high-quality commenters with badges more frequently and banning the trolls more aggressively.

A way to civilise an unruly bunch?

This method of fostering civilised debate would seem to bypass a question that online news outlets have been mulling over for some time: does barring anonymous commenting increase the overall quality of online forums? The argument is that if people know that their messages are published under their own name, they think twice about what they publish. With this in mind, some sites have turned to Facebook Connect for their comments, effectively linking readers' comments with their Facebook accounts.

Interestingly, this view is now contested by findings of Disqus. According to the online commenting service, commenters using pseudonyms are "the most important contributors to online communities", Poynter reported.

In the light of the Post's success, it seems that encouraging newspaper staff to participate in commenting improves the quality and keeps trolls away. As the Nieman article noted, the tone of the discussion softens up a lot when reporters get involved.

Although still a rare practice, the Washington Post is by no means the only newspaper that takes an active approach to its comments streams. The staff of the Guardian, for example, participates in the conversations on its site, and the publication has issued clear guidelines for its journalists' blogging and commenting activities. Like the Post, comments from Guardian journalists are highlighted with a badge.

Of course, the time reporters spend interacting with their readers is time away from writing news articles or pursuing other stories. But at a time when journalists' direct relationship with their audience is becoming more and more crucial, this is arguably hardly a wasted investment.

On a lighter note, FishbowlNY reported that Gizmodo banned its own editor from commenting on the site, after he had insulted other commenters...

Sources: Nieman Journalism Lab, the Washington Post, Poynter, the Guardian, FishbowlNY

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While Steve Jobs's resignation as the CEO of Apple sent major shockwaves throughout the news media, there was also another statement yesterday that caused tremors in the media world: Jim Romenesko's announcement that he was to retire as a Poynter Institute's full-time blogger.

The departure doesn't mean that Romenesko's career as a media journalist is to come to an end, Poynter noted, as he will continue a part-time Poynter employee as from 2 January 2012. As part of the new arrangement Romenesko will also launch a personal website, jimromenesko.com, in January.

Romenesko's significance as a media blogger was apparent in the wave of reactions that followed the news of his semi-retirement. "Jim & a few others inspired me to start @TVNewser--& to treat aggregation as journalism," The New York Times's media reporter Brian Stelter tweeted. Journalism professor Jay Rosen called Romenesko "The man who taught much of American journalism what 'blog' and 'aggregation' are." Poynter has a Storified selection of people's responses.

Poynter's Bill Mitchell wrote a lengthy piece about Romenesko's influence as a blogger and the importance he has had to the site's success. He noted that Romenesko had a huge role in turning aggregation and curation into respectable and significant forms of journalism.

"Life without Romenesko. It's impossible to contemplate," wrote the American Journalism Review, noting that Romanesko "essentially created the world of media news aggregation." In the future, however, Romenesko is more interested in doing reported items than aggregation, he said to The Huffington Post.

As for Poynter, things are to stay more or less the same, and the site already revealed that it would hire a new media reporter in the near future.

Yesterday the news also came out of Slate's editorial changes, which include the laying off of four employers, among them the renowned media critic Jack Shafer. However, Shafer said to Adweek that he would continue as a contributor to Slate. By coincidence, the American Journalism Review published the same day an appraisal of Shafer's work.

Sources: Poynter (1), (2), AJR (1), (2), The Huffington Post, Adweek
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