Resources - Spotlight Archive
Stroome
Collaborate with journalists worldwide on your multimedia projects with this online video editing community. (read more)
Six web resources for the Next Generation Journalist
Welcome to the age of the Next Generation Journalist: someone who is prepared make change happen in the industry, by doing, by innovating and by experimenting. (read more)
ScraperWiki
Data driven journalism just got easier with this online resource, which encourages journalists and researchers to discover - and collaborate on - new datasets.
(read more)
Listorious
Looking for an expert to interview but drawing a blank? Listorious suggests some of the best people talking about your chosen topic on the web, and even allows you to ask questions directly to them. (read more)
Prezi
Create dynamic multimedia presentations with flow - introducing free-to-use online Flash-based virtual whiteboard Prezi. Link various media – words, photos and videos – dynamically. (read more)
Wikileaks
When Wikileaks unencrypted and published exclusive US military footage of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter gunning down 12 people in Baghdad – including two Reuters journalists – the organisation gained new viewers and more international attention than ever before.
Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School, told The Independent:
“This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up. It's not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."
Wikileaks is a loosely connected group of tech-savvy editors, cryptologists and activists. It doesn’t have a headquarters or office.
But it manages to break major stories the mainstream press was unable to report. Reuters had been working for two years to access the Baghdad video through the Freedom of Information Act.
In less than a week, the 18-minute version of the black-and-white footage – to which Wikileaks added narrative text and subtitles - was watched 4.6 million times on YouTube.
A 40-minute, unedited version was viewed half a million times. (read more)
Poynter Center and NewsU
As journalism evolves, so must journalism training organisations.
“There is the need to be nimble, to be working on a variety of strands in order to meet the desire for learning,” said Stephen Buckley, a former international correspondent who presently serves as interim dean of the Poynter Institute.
Indeed, as working reporters and editors scramble to expand their professional proficiencies – learning to create content for smart phones, for example – training organisations are trying to meet their needs.
The Fifth Estate, a growing group of attention workers who are not professional journalists, also clamours for training. They are people like the owner of Captain Al’s, who came to Poynter to discover ways he can use online publishing to improve his business.
“Journalism skills and values are the core that people have come to know and expect from us,” said Karen Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute.
“Increasingly we’re hearing from folks who may or may not be not interested in traditional journalism skills and values but do want to know how to discover the power a blog can bring to a business or how to ask more effective questions.”
Both groups are served with NewsU, an e-learning platform offering skill-specific training to journalists and Fifth Estate attention workers.
Howard Finberg, who worked as a newsroom manager, lecturer and independent consultant in Chicago and San Francisco before joining Poynter, launched NewsU in 2005.
As it exists today, NewsU affords any journalist anywhere a chance to improve her skill sets, provided she is proficient in the English language. But Poynter is working with the ICFJ to translate some of these into Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese. Its first non-English courses will be in Persian and geared to Iranian reporters. (read more)
Creative Commons
Cash-strapped editor seeks easy creative collaboration online:
Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.
You: A talented photographer who reads Lawrence Lessig on the weekends. Have posted your creative photograph on Flickr. Like to put your work under Creative Commons licensing. Mainly looking for Attribution-Noncommercial, but Attribution-Share Alike is OK.
Our collaboration will hopefully go viral.
My attribution gets your picture, free and clear.
So, what is Creative Commons?
(read more)Bloggingportal.eu
They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.
“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.
“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”
The remark came at the end of a post describing information flow within the community of bloggers concerned with the daily politics of the European Union.
One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. A team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.
“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.
“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.” (read more)
COP15 Coverage
Is the threat of climate change what legacy media brands needed to finally implement innovative new media strategies?
Starting with a syndicated editorial that ran in 56 newspapers, the international press have demonstrated far more collaborative spirit in coverage of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen than the politicians who have been sent to Denmark to take action.
The editorial, penned at The Guardian, notes:
“If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.”
In addition to 16 newspapers from Asia, 20 European countries ran the editorial. The 1,113 words - in English - of the editorial were translated into 20 languages.
Indeed, COP15 has been a boon for syndication, distributed coverage, interactivity and aggregation. (read more)
New Science Journalism
Growing up on an Australian farm, Alison Binney watched animals and clouds to forecast the weather. Now she spends her days taking a more active role in the sciences, facilitating the future of science journalism.
As a child, Binney learned to watch turtles, noticing if they were moving toward or away from water. She watched snakes to see if they shed their skin earlier than usual. If the clouds were rolling in lower or faster than the previous day, she knew.
On World Environment Day - 5 June, 2009 - Binney launched New Science Journalism, or NSJ, from her adopted home in Germany. The platform allows students and young professionals to showcase their science reporting, environmental reporting in particular, and earn a percentage of ad revenues.
It also allows Binney to study the tendencies and motivations of science reporters.
“I chose to focus intensively on science communication mainly because I feel there is a general ignorance of what is really going on in our world - and I too am ignorant on issues and want to dig a bit deeper,” Binney said via e-mail. “I am instinctively connected to environmental issues as I grew up on a farm in Australia.”
NSJ is an attempt to create a respected destination site for researched, journalistic content. Both students and professionals are invited to contribute, but the focus is on emerging science reporters who are trying to amass clips. (read more)
The Newspaper Club
The Newspaper Club takes journalism centuries backward in order to make a giant leap forward for niche publishing.
The British startup is still developing – in beta - and looking for funds, but it was partially funded in July by a development wing of Channel 4, called 4 Innovation for the Public, or 4iP. The project aims to allow anyone to mashup original articles or photos with other rights-free content from various registered content producers. Content slides into an automatically generated layout before it is run on a web press, as are newspapers like The Guardian. (read more)
Value Added News
Value Added News is all the rage in the blogosphere this week.
Or, more accurately, it’s prompting all the rage.
Together with The Associated Press, Value Added News, part of a London nonprofit called Media Standards Trust, has developed and released a digital rights management system called hNews.
The behemoth wire service announced mid-July that it will by 2010 fully implement hNews and then take action against bloggers who re-use content in a way that violates the AP’s terms of use. Spam bloggers in particular will draw the ire of the AP, one vice president of global development at AP told CJR.
This DRM tool is the result of a $350,000 USD Knight News Challenge grant won by Tim Berners-Lee and longtime journalist Martin Moore. According to their winning pitch: “The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of ‘source tagging.’”
Prominent blog sites like TechCrunch, BuzzMachine, BoingBoing and the Online Journalism Blog have posted reactions ranging from sceptical to dismissive about hNews, a microformatting product. (read more)
The Investigations Fund
Sitting on a story of systematic institutional abuse?
Veteran investigative journalists in England are trying to make sure the breakdown in business models for journalism does not prevent important stories from being told. The group of 12 journalists have started The Investigations Fund, a grant fund launched this month to subsidise investigative journalistic work.
Journalists who have a story in their notebooks begging for serious, considered investigation are invited to apply to the Fund in order to be able to afford to do the work of investigation.
“I think the idea of an investigation usually involves a story where somebody is actively trying to stop you from getting information, be it in high finance or government or politics,” said Nick Davies, one of the journalists supporting the Fund. He contributes to the Guardian and is the author of Flat Earth News.
“And it’s a story that’s important.” (read more)
HerdictWeb
It is the most ominous number on the Internet: 404.
Error, file not found.
When you’re one man behind one monitor, a 404 message telegraphs little. The site won’t open. But why? Is it under construction? Or are you being blocked?
Thanks to HerdictWeb, beached surfers can find out if other users are also unable to access an unavailable site. An exercise in crowdsourcing, HerdictWeb asks Internet users around the world to report which sites they cannot access. Others in the herd then report if they can see the same site.
When a group of users in one location cannot access a site, HerdictWeb staff can usually always figure out why a site is unavailable, project manager Vandana Aneja said. Sometimes it’s a server error; sometimes a government has arranged for the site to be blocked within its borders. (read more)
Media Helping Media
When lack of time and money began preventing senior British editor David Brewer from accomplishing everything he wanted with his media development projects around the world, he turned to a place where time and space don’t exist.
The Internet.
“It's about cost, capacity and accessibility,” he said via e-mail. “It was clear that there was a need for training resources to be made available, free-of-charge, written to address the client's training need. It was also a matter of helping them train their own staff.”
Media Helping Media, a 7-year-old website full of resources for developing media outlets, began as a basic forum. Today it is a rich hub of resources geared to aid media in post-conflict areas.
Four deep sections of static modules are available: media management, editorial ethics, journalism training and investigative reporting. The site also hosts issues-themed articles from around the world. It also boasts a new forum section.
Everything is published is under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, so content on the site may be redistributed with attribution for noncommercial use.
Brewer pays for it all out of his own pocket, often writing training modules while travelling, often in airports or on planes.
Brewer got his start in newspapers before moving over to radio. He worked seven years with Radio Merseyside in Liverpool before continuing on to the BBC for another radio gig. He served nine years as political editor for BBC Regional Political Unit. In 1997, he was selected to launch BBC News Online. He launched CNN.com Europe, Middle East and Africa in 2000.
It’s possible to follow him on Twitter. (read more)
Community Media Sustainability Guide
Passion is always the currency in which community media endeavors trade. But it never pays the bills.
Prudent planning and careful considerations, therefore, are at the heart of the recently published Community Media Sustainability Guide. The 80-page manual draws on the experiences of community media outlets in Haiti, Nepal, Rwanda, London, Peru, Afghanistan and the United States.
It is divided into two halves. Both will have readers taking notes.
The first half (pages 11-37, to help cut down on your reading) is a must-read for anyone working at a community media organisation or trying to start one. This section is for sure mechanical and not a leisurely read. But it clearly defines and gives guidelines regarding models of sustainable funding, business models and plans, how and what to research and tips for writing grant proposals.
The latter half of this well-researched Guide, published in February, 2009, is dedicated to vignettes about community projects around the world – like Radio Desi in London and The Coffee Lifeline in Rwanda. These stories are told in a more narrative fashion and are thus easier to read, but lessons still abound.
You’ll want to have a highlighter. (read more)
IAmNews
No matter where you sit, the nearest newsroom is within a click.
Starting Monday, that is, when IAmNews.com opens the initial sections of its much-anticipated online newsroom. The full version will be available in April.
A private version of this platform launched in September, 2008, when creator Nir Ofir won the TechCrunch50 People's Choice Award and prompted widespread interest in his project.
After its initial splash, though, the vision behind IAmNews shifted. The platform was initially tailored specifically to facilitate the newsgathering process. But now it will address a more complicated problem, that of reporters being forced to work more often on a freelance basis.
Ofir says he's found himself increasingly in touch with journalists laid off by cost-conscious managers. So he decided to use the site as more of a vehicle to narrow the world between reporters and editors.
“Our mission is to create the most efficient space for both sides to work together and discover each other,” Ofir says. “We think that the need is so, so big. Try to look up who is reporting in Peru and South Africa. Try to find them in Google. There is no one place that is doing a great job in connecting publishers and contributors and basically we think that this need is one to be solved.” (read more)
Radio Lajee
The sweetest stories to escape the Gaza Strip are at Radio Lajee.
The blogging and podcast site is a media literacy advocate’s dream. It’s a colourful platform on which Palestinian youth record stories about their dreams, give recipes for dishes they’re cooking and discuss their art projects. The contributors range in age from 7 to 22.
The reality of life in Gaza obviously colours their perspectives, but the optimism of youth comes across in their podcasts as brightly as the colours in the site’s logo. That’s what makes Radio Lajee so great: It puts that coveted human face on what is so often portrayed as a negative story.
The site got going in November, 2008, when Australian journalist Daz Chandler travelled to Bethlehem and began working with an established youth centre called the Lajee Center. Lajee translates to ‘refugee’ in Arabic. It is located in Aida Camp, a refugee camp north of Bethlehem.
Chandler started off with leading her podcasters through radio workshops in Bethlehem. According to the Lajee site, these workshops covered sound recording, presentation and interview techniques. The podcasters were taught to audio editing, program structure, new media possibilities and online marketing. (read more)
GlobalPost
GlobalPost illustrates the life of the correspondent nouveau.
Its 65 professional correspondents living around the world earn $1,000 a month for filing news stories and blog posts interesting to a Western, English-speaking audience.
Certainly, there is a need for alternatives to content machines like AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press. These bureaux are forever doing more with less, leaving publics around the world consuming news stories with little background information. Further, wire stories add tremendously to the echo chamber that can be the Internet. Online, the exclusivity of wire content is nil, making its ubiquity at times puzzling.
To wit: in 2006, the content of the top six online aggregators – AOL, Yahoo, Nando, Lycos, Excite and Alta Vista - was comprised of 85 percent wire service copy. Even MSNBC, CNN, BBBC, Sky News, The Guardian and The New York Times are stocked full of wire copy – 50 percent in 2006.
It’s important to note: the mission of Global Post is to better inform American citizens about world affairs. It’s a mission they share with The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. And it’s why all Global Post correspondents, like Teri Schultz, who covers the European Union, are American.
But the mission statement begs the question: is an all-American cadre of stringers the best crew for tunnelling out of the echo chamber?
That’s what Georgia Popplewell, the managing editor of Global Voices, wonders.
"I still think that in the current climate a more sustainable model for an international news bureau would be one that cultivated local journalists," she e-mailed Mark Glaser of Media Shift. "The main reason for the closure of foreign desks is financial -- yet a good portion of [GlobalPost's] budget is obviously going to be devoted toward paying the living expenses of their non-local correspondents...I'm not denying that knowledge and experience count for a great deal in journalism. I'm saying, rather, that there are often local journalists with knowledge and experience equivalent to or greater than that of the people GlobalPost is sending in."
(read more)
Twopular
Many a Twitter aggregator corrals and categorises the chirps of microbloggers around the world.
But until Martin Dudek launched Twopular at the end of 2008, none of these services existed solely to monitor general trends across the entire Twitter Universe – at least not to his knowledge.
“I haven't come across any other trend aggregator,” he shrugs from India via e-mail. “If there are some out there I would appreciate if you can send me the links.”
Twopular uses Twitter’s own search API to index Twitter conversation trends every five minutes. The data is displayed in an extremely simple layout. It’s possible to see the most popular terms over the past hours, days, weeks or months.
Dudek’s platform provides an excellent window into the world of Twitter, a planet which is for most journalists much like Mars: For all the outside interest, there’s still a lot of uncertainty. (read more)
What is financial journalism for?
A Harvard economist was invited by the New York Times to write about stock build-ups in the United States. He penned a prediction saying the stock market would crash.
Upon review, The Times did not run the article, calling it too alarmist. One year later, in 1987, the market crashed.
That economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, is among scores of sources cited in an academic treatise on financial journalism published 15 November. It’s a time-consuming read but worth the printer ink.
Galbraith’s experience with the NYT is typical of the world of financial reporting as presented in the study, What is financial journalism for? Ethics and responsibility in a time of crisis and change.
According to this POLIS report, boosterism and group think plague business sections in the United Kingdom and United States.
The “digitally driven speed” of reporting in the Internet era exacerbates this tendency, as does the proliferation of public relations professionals.
This in-depth examination of the business journalism landscape begs many questions, chief among them: Are financial journalists to blame for the credit crisis?
(read more)
Know the News
Practicing basic video production skills does not require access to a television station or purchasing expensive editing suites.
Anyone trying to develop a deeper appreciation for broadcast journalism can cobble together clips from professional packages into their own news programme at Know the News, a new offering of the non-profit satellite channel Link TV.
Users may use the platform’s sleek interface to clip material produced by stations like ABC, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Asia Today, BBC, Fox News, Deutsche Welle, TV 5 (France) and CCTV. All material is usable under the American practice of fair use, by which copyrighted material is available for comparative analysis.
Link TV received a one-year $235,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in early 2008 to “create online interactive modules that support global news literacy,” said a communications assistant via e-mail from the 58-year-old American foundation. (read more)
AllVoices
With so many question marks surrounding the future of journalism, its easy to grant the dynamic team at AllVoices.com multiple exclamation points for doing enough mental yoga to wrap their minds around an idea that seems to have lost credence in the mainstream: That readership and “reach” are a result of paying reporters and writers for quality content. Regardless of if those contributors are “just” citizens or from the increasingly endangered species known as journalists.
AllVoices is a start-up platform to which anyone can contribute via SMS, MMS, e-mail or telephone. Authors create their own pages on which to post content. Stories and images are tagged and shuffled into the following categories: Politics, Business, Conflict & Tragedy, Science & Technology, Sports and Entertainment. Stories culled from around 3,500 mainstream news feeds are also folded in. (read more)
Osocio
Non-profit organisations and activists are increasingly turning to viral marketing as a means of spreading their message.
A three-year old Dutch initiative provides the cosiest spot on the Internet to learn about best practices in viral marketing endeavours. Osocio, initially published in Dutch as the “Houtlust Blog”, is now an English-language blog with a team of contributors. It started in 2005.
Updated daily, Osocio provides several useful services. A great place to start is its dictionary. This is a brilliant attempt to clarify the jargon surrounding social media and viral marketing. It’s a great resource to bookmark or even print out for any individual or organisation trying to correctly use the terminology associated with this emerging trend in advertising. (read more)
Soup.io
Buzzwords fly around Internet communities faster than they swarm the jargon-laden halls of Brussels.
Here’s one: “tumble blogging”. According to Wikipedia, a “variation of a blog that favours short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.”
Also known as a “tumblog”. Doesn't the term sounds like the title of a children’s game.
And with Soup.io, it is.
The year-old site allows users to easily amalgamate various social media, blogs and RSS feeds into a literal stream of consciousness. Your Twitter, Flickr and favourite RSS feeds can pour into your Soup.io stream. With a slick interface reminiscent of so many free Web 2.0 services.
“I keep this Soup to share all that stuff with friends to allow ambient intimacy, with people who don't know me yet to provoke serendipitous new contacts, for myself to build an archive I can later look back upon – and to a large extent just to indulge in the joy of creation,” writes creator Christopher Clay. (read more)
MultimediaShooter
Richard Koci Hernandez is one of so many journalists who have mastered multi-media skills ... and left the mainstream media for more innovative pastures. The former deputy director of photography and multimedia at the San Jose Mercury News in California is now a Ford Foundation fellowship at the University of California in Berkeley.
One of Hernandez’s greenest pastures has been MultimediaShooter, a dynamic platform bursting with tips and tools useful to anyone interested in producing multimedia content.
The insightful site was revived in August after a five-month hiatus.
Particularly useful are Hernandez’s tutorials, which are all about using Flash, editing video, using Wordpress and various up-and-coming Web 2.0 tools.
The Gear section is also a must-read. Hernandez’s background is in photography, so his tips and tricks here are coming straight from a pro. His advice seems quite trustworthy.
Also, Hernandez has started a “Two Cents” section in which he offers willing participants a thorough video critique. The current critique, of a newspaper video about Joe Brown, a man living with difficult disabilities, is Hernandez’s first. It’s worth watching - as is the dialogue in the comments section.
Once you’ve been impressed there, take a look at Hernandez’ personal page, which includes photography, multimedia and video. Particularly cool and seemingly emblematic of his approach is his arty take on the fall fashions of 2007. (read more)
Polymeme
I wasn’t entirely sure about Polymeme on my first visit. I realized it was an aggregator of offbeat news content that had an intellectual bent. But I couldn’t quite tell what made it different. Were readers recommending stories a la Digg? Was this an aggregation of blog posts, a kind of Hype Machine for writing?
Not feeling up to wading through the About and FAQ pages, I popped the site’s main feed into my RSS reader to size it up.
Turns out that’s probably the best way to see what Evgeny Morozov’s site can do.
Polymeme drenched my “news” section of feeds with an Amazon River of what seemed to be miscellaneous newsworthy feature stories. And the best part: Unlike some of my other news feeds (a diverse list of news sources from around the world) no content seemed like repetitive rephrasing of items making their rounds through the news cycle. Wire copy this isn’t.
Today’s Polymeme headlines include: “The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream”, “Bohemia in Brooklyn”, “Battling pricy textbooks with open-source texts, social media”, “Scientists Create Blood From Stem Cells” and “Bike racks with a fresh flavor.” (read more)
Moodstream
If there’s one thing the giant stock photo bank Getty Images has, its - dun-dun-dun! - images.
Several thousands of which it has mashed up to create the so-called “concepting tool” Moodstream. The site, created in Flash, is a website that looks like a desktop dashboard. The control panel or ‘remote control’ allows users to choose photos and audio that will facilitate their existing or desired mood – you can choose to energise, refresh, simplify, stabilise, inspire or excite.
A few clicks of the control and you have your own “digital fireplace,” its images flickering across your screen to a flow of audio snippets. Stare into it and be inspired. Or just be entertained at the office while you put off writing that report.
“We believe that the best creative work comes out of a creatively stimulating and mentally rewarding work environment. We play with this the same ways most quality creative organizations do: flexible hours, friendly people, inviting workplaces, a lax attitude towards when you get to work, when you leave, and how much Grand Theft Auto IV you play. The best ideas come out of active and curious minds who aren't burdened with troubles - in the workplace or out.”
(read more)
The Media Self-Regulation Guidebook
If you don’t be the boss of you, somebody else will be.
That’s the underlying theme stressed in The Media Self-Regulation Guidebook, published this spring by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
This 100-page guide is available to order, free of charge, in French, English and Russian. It carefully chronicles steps unregulated media groups can take to become more self-regulating. The guide is structured in a Q&A format, proffering logical questions and then giving lucid answers in concise sentences. This creative format easily facilitates practical consideration of a rather serious topic.
The book is useful for editors, publishers and owners. It gives well thought-out advice and offers short theoretical clues as to why it provides the advice it does.
Self-regulation can save a lot of money. More importantly, codes of ethics can, when publicised and respected, increase a newsgathering operation’s credibility with – and accountability to - the public.
“Respect for a visible code of ethics significantly reduces the risk of statutory intervention and expensive legal action. The alternative to a code is the courtroom.” (read more)
Pro Publica
The answer to one of the questions tormenting everyone concerned with the future of journalism may be Pro Publica.
This non-profit newsroom, based in Manhattan, is be filled with 26 proven editors and reporters focused solely on investigative journalism. It is registered as a non-profit and will be funded by philanthropies.
Pro Publica launched 10 June. It's 20-odd journalists from some of the top newspapers in the United States have been hired to work for former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. The website, which has been creating much buzz in industry circles, promises stories are soon to come.
Non-profit journalism is not new. But what’s new is how many groups are organising for this pursuit. It is perhaps the fastest-growing arena for investigative work that is beneficial for citizens. In his paper, The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism, Charles Lewis writes:
“…If commercial journalism had been functioning well with great independence, courage and enterprise, man years ago, none of the investigative reporting centers discussed here would have even been necessary or created. They began expressly to respond to a perceived need for more and higher quality reportage. And they have been fulfilling that need, with limited capacity and sometimes difficult financial circumstances with unflinching courage, creativity and perseverance.”
(read more)
A Reporter’s Guide to Sports and Olympics Reporting
When I was in the fifth grade, I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. Clad in Barcelona T-shirt, my 9-year-old self watched Summer Sanders and Jenny Thompson win gold at the1992 Summer Olympic Games from the cool beige carpet of my parent’s suburban home.
My swimming abilities reached their limits even before the Atlanta Games, though, petering out somewhere around flip-turns and the butterfly.
It turns out I have a far greater chance of making it to the Olympics as a reporter than an athlete. According to “A Reporter’s Guide to Sports and Olympic Reporting,” published by the Reuters Foundation, 10,500 athletes – and 21,000 journalists – cover the Summer Games.
This guide is an ideal introduction for any newbie to sports or Olympic reporting. It gives practical writing and logistical tips alike. (read more)
Cafe Babel
It’s tough to own a café.
Every decision you make – be it in regards to function or fashion - dictates what kind of people will come through the door. The kind of beer you pipe in, the style of music you play, the décor on the walls.
Café Babel, one of a few truly multi-lingual magazine websites, re-launched this month. It maintains its hetra-lingualism (that’s seven languages, for those of you whose language proficiencies don’t include Greek). It continues to be comprised entirely of user-generated content. Articles are translated by an entirely volunteer set of translators.
The nature of the content remains the same: Culture and politics written for and about a young, educated, European audience, simply put.
Which gives the distinct impression that if Café Babel were a real place – which sometimes it is, as the site organises occasional meet-ups – its patrons could be described as hipsters. (read more)
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Museums are for history. Or art, but often not unless its creator is, well, history.
So it can’t be a good sign for the newspaper industry that a museum recently opened to pay it homage.
The Newseum opened in early April in Washington, DC, to mixed reviews. So even though the weak dollar means museum visits in the States are cheaper than a visit to your local friture, there might be better places for media wonks to spend their holidays.
Journalism enthusiasts interested in the future of the news industry are better to traverse up the East Coast to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which is part of Harvard Law School. In fact, on 15 May, the Boston-based Center will host Berkman@10, a two-day anniversary conference. (read more)
Big Think
Some people know more than you do.
At least, they know something different from what you know. One of the best places to find some of these people is at an easy-to-use video platform called Big Think.
The cleanly edited vault of videos at Big Think is a direct antithesis to the chaos of YouTube. The site, which launched two months ago, was founded by two graduates of Harvard University, Peter Hopkins and Victoria Brown.
“We interview thought leaders from almost every pursuit. From rock star to Nobel Laureate, our aim is to collect the thoughts and expertise of these individuals and use it to catalyze a global conversation around issues and ideas,” Brown, 33, said via e-mail.
(read more)
News Videographer
Journalism has always been a profession which requires practical experience.
No matter the medium, certain skill sets are paramount. These do not develop overnight, or in a university library: an ability to relate to a variety of people, an ability to make deadline, consistent production of professional work, gut instincts and a wicked work ethic.
These abilities are the little black dresses of journalism; they won’t ever go out of style. But with video for the web increasingly en vogue, there are some new trends to master.
One of the best style guides for video on the web is the News Videographer blog. (read more)
Ushahidi
In Kenya, purveyors of press freedom are struggling.
The government there declared a media blackout when violence broke out as a result of bitter contention and opposition to over the 27 December elections, which saw the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki re-elected in what international observers called a flawed and questionable process.
It was in this fiery climate that prominent Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh, who writes at Kenyanpundit.com, teamed up with friends to found Ushahidi.
The site allows anyone in Kenya with news of post-election violence to report it – via SMS, or e-mail. Then editors like Okolloh will then verify the report with local NGOs or other reputable sources before posting it. The homepage of the site features a map mash-up showing where incidents – like property damage, deaths, looting, government forces or peace efforts - have occurred. (read more)
Online Journalism Blog
Calming, thoughtful voices – with a European accent – are not so easy to find among popular journalism blogs.
But the Online Journalism Blog, run out of Birmingham, England, is a professional resource infused with ideas both scholarly and practical. It covers a potpourri of subjects relating to the Internet and the capabilities it offers the ever-evolving profession of journalism, particularly in terms of interactive storytelling, blogging, citizen journalism, podcasts, computer assisted reporting, photoblogging, vlogging and uses for automations like RSS. (read more)
Regret The Error
Nothing wrings a reporter’s innards quite like being tersely informed there is an error in a piece of work he’s published.
However, the queasy stomach and glowering editor are a dozen roses next to the eye-popping terror of seeing the inevitable correction globally publicised … courtesy of Regret The Error, a three-year old weblog addressing corrections in mass media.
But for the hoards (dwindling though they may be) of everyday citizens who get their news from the mainstream media, sites like this one, whose Canada-based author, Craig Silverman, is the author of a recently published book by the same name as his blog, are entirely reassuring: at least there’s one place to go where it’s easy to check up on the writers and reporters who ladle out the daily bulletins.
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The Hub
This autumn, an international advocacy group launched the Hub, which has become an award-winning portal to that two-way street called participatory journalism – an avenue whose founders hope will increase the ability of the everyman to document human rights abuses.
Available in English, French and Spanish, the Hub allows users to create an account and upload video. It does not act as a gatekeeper or editor – and as such cannot guarantee the authenticity of any material on its site – but allows the users of the site to rank and rate the videos it hosts.
The top-rated video at this time depicts police officers in Egypt slapping a man in their custody. The same video was submitted to YouTube, which initially took it down. (read more)
Mogulus
Since BBC, MSNBC and CNN are often simultaneously airing the same stories anyway: a more personal 24-hour programming choice.
The idea of continuously live television channels becomes far more democratic at Mogulus, an online television studio that makes it possible for those of us who are not Oprah or a BBC broadcaster to create and produce our own television station.
The site, which launched its beta version earlier this year, allows anyone to start and manage their own television channel. Users can alternate between third-party clips hosted at elsewhere (platforms like YouTube or Google Video), and live streaming. (read more)
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
October has been a good month at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: The non-profit grant foundation saw reporters it sent to China and Iraq publish extensive reporting projects that gained attention across the United States. It also won an honourable mention from the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.
The Pulitzer Center not only addresses the dearth of foreign reporting in American media with its travel stipend program for reporters. It is also trying to create more demand for quality international coverage with its Global Gateway initiative.
The Center awards travel stipends to experienced freelance or staff reporters so they can report from around the world on stories which have been under-reported or inaccurately reported in the American press. The Centre is funded primarily by the Pulitzer family, former owners of the St. Louis Post Dispatch - for which the Center's director, Jon Sawyer, used to report from Washington, D.C., and around the world.
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AfricaNews
Europe and the world are turning an eye on Africa, looking for genuine news and images from the continent. Increasingly, Western media companies covet any news local African people can capture with a telephone mobile or a small video camera. They are building multimedia platforms to offer webloggers, photographers and citizen journalists who have access to these Internet and mobile technologies a place to contribute to the news from the continent.
Netherlands-based media company Africa Interactive has started AfricaNews to feature user-generated content coming from Africa. The website is sectioned traditionally, with business, society, culture, microcredits and travel pieces. Everything is published in English – and also in Dutch, at AfricaNieuws.
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Mizzima News
The military junta in Myanmar may have blocked the Internet, but it has not been able to stop Mizzima News.
The 9-year-old news site is operated from New Delhi, India, where its exiled Burmese editors reside. It relies on a small network of professional journalists – and a mass of citizen journalists who send information and photos via telephone, text messages, and, when possible, e-mail.
Starting during the September protests, when threats to foreign journalists began to escalate, Mizzima News reports and photographs have provided information picked up by Reuters, the Financial Times, BBC, Washington Post, AFP and The Wall Street Journal, among others. (read more)
Knight Citizen News Network
There is much hand wringing on the part of classically-trained reporters and publishers now confronted with the notion of being complimented - replaced? - by citizens wielding camera phones who voluntarily submit multimedia content to newsgathering operations.
The Knight Citizen News Network seeks to educate skeptics and enthusiasts alike in the art of citizen journalism. (read more)
Global Politician
Global Politician is a serious journal about politics and world affairs. It was started in 2004, with the objective of providing news, analysis and views not covered by mainstream media.
Editor-in-Chief David Storobin says that Global Politician doesn’t follow party lines, but instead publishes stories written from all points of view: left, right, Islamist, Zionist, radical, mainstream, centrist. (read more)
RealTravel
The travel logs at Real Travel.com are sure to energise holiday plans and daydreams alike.
Whichever needs a bit of inspiration, the travel diaries and photographs created by people who have been where you want to go – or to places you haven’t yet heard about – won’t disappoint.
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Off The Bus
OffTheBus is Jay Rosen and Arianna Huffington’s new project, one that will allow ‘the crowd’ to cover the 2008 presidential campaign. The campaign has already been characterized by new media experiments, such as the CNN/YouTube debates.
The project was announced on March 2007 at Press Think. Jay Rosen said it would consist of “campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus,” the same bus that reporters “have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.” (read more)
Newser
The recent proliferation of online news aggregators – like the recently-launched Newser – has infused morning headline perusals with a distinctly Web 2.0 flavour.
Newser, which launched earlier this summer, has essentially animated the role of your local news editor in an attempt to “deliver the best information in concise, efficient summaries, together with photos, video and audio and links to original stories.”
Each section of Neweser – which is divided like a traditional newspaper, with “News” “Business” “Sports” and “Culture” tabs – consists of a web page featuring nine squares. Each square features a headline, news photo and one-sentence summary. (read more)
Boing Boing
You don’t need a tetanus shot to sift through the bric-a-brac stockpiled at Boing Boing.
Instead of rusty antiques, this virtual street market offers a bevy of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. Or, as the creators call it: “A directory of wonderful things.”
At the popular search engine for user-generated media Technorati, Boing Boing is ranked as the most popular blog, with statistics saying it is visited by 1.75 million people every day. (read more)
Center for citizen media
The author of 'We the media' says journalists need to unshackle themselves from growing media empires.
“We’re on the road,” Dan Gillmor said. “But we have a long, long way to go.” Gillmor’s book addresses the role of Internet in helping independent journalists function within large media conglomerates. In July, he delivered the keynote speech at the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum. On that occasion, he was inspired to make an assessment of the current state of citizen journalism. (read more)
Eyes on Darfur
In a time where media are accused of enhancing voyeurism, like in the Big Brother case, and that the latest Google’s map service "Street view" raises privacy fears, Amnesty International and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) developed a virtual eye to look over and protect the population of Darfur. The project "Eyes on Darfur" was funded by the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC), an organization which fights to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in the region. (read more)
BBC On This Day
"I was 30 years old, and was watching TV while my wife was at work. All of the sudden, a news bulletin came up. It said "one of the Beatles has been shot and killed." I remember thinking "Please let it not be John." But it was. I still think to this day that John Lennon's death marked the end of the 60's. It marked the end of a generation." The BBC website includes a section called On this Day, an archived site that offers a choice of reports drawn from the years 1950-2005 and 1939-45 and "some of the quirkier stories broadcast by BBC News since 1950". (read more)
6 Billion Others
“My parents didn’t teach me anything except how to be a shepard”, a man from Algeria reckons in front of the video, laughing after he finishes his sentence. For an old man the biggest dream today is “to succeed in growing, in our freezing Siberia, delicious tomatoes and garlic as big as my fist”…and looking at global warming reports he may see his dream fulfilled before he dies. 6 Billion Others is a project by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. (read more)
Bill Moyers Journal
It takes two to party. “Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on”, reckons Bill Moyers.
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Creative Commons
First, it was the music industry that witnessed an incredible amount of illegal usage of traditionally copyrighted materials. Kazaa and similar file-sharing networks have made sure that millions of mp3 music files have been exchanged "uncommercially" on the internet. That has supposedly led to the demise of the previously very lucrative music industry. But all efforts at copyrighting materials seem to have failed.
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Press Under Surveillance
The World Association of Newspapers has launched a website dedicated to its annual campaign for the World Press Freedom Day. This year the theme is “Press Under Surveillance”. The movement seeks to inform the public on the implications of governmental measures against terrorism and other security regulations that can affect the ability of the press to inform. (read more)
Innovation Journalism Blog
The Innovation Journalism Blog “comments on the development of the concept and the community of Innovation Journalism”. Innovation Journalism is a concept coined in 2003 by David Nordfors. It identifies and reports on key issues in the innovation ecosystems, such as the most important emerging concepts, the interaction between the main actors, or what is happening in innovation value chains. Instead of focusing on certain aspects of innovation processes, it covers innovation itself. (read more)
The State of the News Media 2007
The news business is entering a phase of limited ambition, according to the annual report "The State of the News Media 2007", as news organizations are basing their appeal less on how they cover the news and more on what they cover. Branding and targeting are highlighted as the main trends in the study that the Project for Excellence in Journalism released on March 12. (read more)
The Journalist’s Toolbox
The American Press Institute offers an online research tool for reporters. The Toolbox helps covering news, business, sports, science, technology, crime, etc. and provides links to journalism job sites, online discussion groups and databases. Its sections contain a variety of useful sites for inspiration and reference when writing a story. (read more)
Newsroom Barometer
In September 2006 a front-page story by The Economist asking “Who killed the newspaper?” inspired an initiative of the World Editors Forum and Reuters to gain an insiders view of this forecast. A Newsroom Barometer was set up by the WEF with Reuters and Zogby International, focusing on the perception of editors in chief and senior news executives toward free papers, online media, citizen journalism and the future of news. (read more)
Frontline’s News War
Frontline's News War is a four-part series examining the news media today and the future of journalism in the age of media convergence and the internet revolution. The last part of the series starts on March 27 on Frontline's World edition, Stories from a Small Planet, and examines media around the globe to see how international news influences American journalism, focusing on Al Jazeera TV. (read more)