Article Archive
Readers' Blog
Ethics
Events Calendar
Making Money
Reporting
Video Production
Writing
Log-In
Register
About OJR
Privacy Policy
OJR by E-mail
Article Feed Blog Feed
February 2006
Article Dashboard launches politics category for authors and journalists
2006-02-01By Jason Bradley: Article Dashboard -- owned by Jason Bradley, the author of this post -- has launched a category for authors and journalists who write about political issues. The sub-categories currently include political commentary, current events and political history. Submitting articles to article directories is a great way for authors to have their content easily syndicated online and also provides an excellent platform for promoting one's work and viewpoints.
LA Times online feature 'The Envelope' mainly targets industry insiders
2006-02-01By Jorge Morgan: The Los Angeles Times launched its online entertainment feature The Envelope in November to cater mainly to the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, according to the site's executive producer Scott Robson.
"The LA Times decided it needed to do a better job of serving the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles," he explained. Robson, who was a founding editor and editor in chief at E! Online, said the second priority of the site was to appeal to dedicated entertainment fans. Lastly, Robson said the site is also trying to reach the casual entertainment fans who get interested right around the time of award shows.
According to Robson, what sets The Envelope apart from other entertainment sites is the focus. Robson said that other entertainment sites are primarily interested in covering awards from a red carpet standpoint whereas The Envelope is interested in who is winning, who is not and why.
"We're not trying to duplicate the things that the Hollywood Reporter or Variety do, ... we want to do what the LA Times does really well, which is broader in coverage in the entertainment business from a industry standpoint and consumer standpoint," Robson said.
The six people who contribute to the site are entertainment veterans who have worked for such publications as Rolling Stone and E! Online. According to Robson, the writers are well-connected people who know the town well.
The site covers the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Grammys, SAG Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, Guild Awards and Critics Awards.
Since The Envelope is in its early stages, people who want to find news on MTV's Video Music Awards, BET Awards, or the Tony Awards will not be able to. Robson said that because of the lack of resources, the staff is not able to cover certain award shows; however, he said that by next year some of these award shows will be covered.
Blogs include Gold Derby, Oscar Beat and Styles and Scenes.
The Envelope also offers a searchable database of past winners, polls, forums, key event and award show dates and current box office information.
'Contributing Writers' instead of 'Citizen Journalists' add to the conversation at the Bakersfield Californian
2006-02-02By K.Paul Mallasch: I had the chance to ask Ray Hacke, Citizen Journalism Editor at The Bakersfield Californian, some questions about their relatively new Your Words project.
From the post:
I like the fact you used the term 'contributing writer' - did you consciously stay away from the citizen journalist term? If so, why?
Actually, we did choose to stay away from the term "citizen journalism." The reason was that we wanted average readers - people who have little to no writing experience whatsoever - to feel like they could have a voice in our paper, too. The word "journalist" has some heavy connotations to it - we felt people might hear it and think they'd have to have some formal training or be thoroughly knowledgeable about grammar, spelling, style, etc., to write for us. We figured that might scare them off, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Our overriding mantra for citizen journalism is, "Journalism is a conversation," and we want people from all walks of life to sit down at the table and join in. So far, we've actually been pretty successful in that regard — we've gotten contributions from writers as young as 12 and as old as 90, from janitors as well as doctors.
Keyword cloud boosts speech coverage
2006-02-02By Robert Niles: Latimes.com borrowed another feature from the blogosphere with its coverage of President Bush's State of the Union address.
The Times' Eric Ulken (a former OJR staffer) constructed a keyword cloud using the 50 most frequently used words in Bush's 2006 and 2002 speeches. The clouds, which give more visual weight to more frequently used words, allow readers to get a quick visual impression of the speech's content.
Ulken used an online cloud generator to start, then narrowed that list to the top 50 words to build his custom clouds. "If I were a programmer, I'd have written a script to do this. Instead I used Excel to compute the point sizes and alphabetize the list," Ulken wrote.
Clouds are often found on sites that make heavy use of tagging, such as Flickr. But the principle works on any leaden block of text that needs visual punch to grab readers online. As Ulken and the Times have shown.
Expect more spam from AOL, Yahoo e-mail plan
2006-02-06By Robert Niles: Yahoo and AOL have announced a plan to charge senders of e-mail to bypass the companies' junk mail filters. The charge would range from one-fourth to one cent per message.
How will this affect the average e-mail user? You should expect to see more unsolicited commercial e-mail if you use an AOL or Yahoo e-mail address.
Why?
Let's look at the economics. Would you spend a buck to send 100 e-mail messages to AOL or Yahoo users if your messages were already getting to them just fine? Of course not. So who would spend the money? Senders whose messages are getting stopped by the companies' filters.
Now, most mom-and-pop spammers, the folks responsible for the bulk of the sex-pill and mortgage pitches littering in-boxes, won't have the budget to ante up. But big companies will. An AOL representative told the AP that the New York Times Co. and credit report company Experian already have signed up.
Blog offers straight talk about healthy sex
2006-02-07By Lauren Hamilton: While searching the Internet, Alexis Katehakis, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist based in Los Angeles, thought that Web sites about sexual health were static. She wanted an outlet where she could easily provide up-to-date information and saw blogs as a way of doing this.
"Blogs are more alive and active," she said.
So Katehakis opened a Typepad account and started her own blog, Center for Healthy Sex, in August 2005.
Katehakis said she also saw a need for more sites on sexual health because of the lack of discussion by society.
"I think there is very little news coverage about sexual health. When there is coverage, it tends to be on the conversative side re: AIDS, teenage pregnancy and the problems of youth engaging in sex," Katehakis wrote in a follow-up e-mail.
"There's very little that's sex positive that encourages people to explore the beauty of sex, the spiritual component that sex brings into relationships."
Posts featured on the site range from general sexual topics to more specific entries on cybersex addiction and sexual dysfunction. Additionally, the blog makes it easy for readers to find help from other sources, including links to Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) and The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health.
Katehakis dedicates one to two hours a week to her blog in addition to her practice. She has written articles for the blog with topics ranging from overall sexual health to sexual addiction. Her articles, which she writes with the aid of Google Alerts, promote sexual education and well being.
The Internet can be a powerful tool for disseminating timely health information, Katehakis said. She said she hopes that education will help lower the negative stigma associated with sex so individuals feel more comfortable with their sexuality and that her blog will help make sex addiction something less shameful and more understood by our society.
The cartoon protests: Smart mobs at work?
2006-02-08By Robert Niles: Are the protests over Danish editorial cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad the latest graphic example of smart mobs? One report suggests that is the case, citing Syrian protestors.
"'The sheikhs told us to send five text messages to every true Muslim we knew urging them to participate,' said a student from the Abu Nour Islamic Institute in Damascus."
Interesting. (And thanks to Jon Garfunkel for the link.) The BBC also provides welcome perspective on the controversy.
Ad-free news site tries to set 'The NewStandard'
2006-02-08By Jonathan Solis: The staff of The NewStandard, a reader-supported hard news website, once tried offering content to prominent websites and bloggers who appeared to approach news media with a similar mindset, said The NewStandard's co-founder and editor Brian Dominick.
"I won't name specific sites," Dominick said, "but they include many of the most popular 'progressive' web destinations."
"We are trying to provide them with content that is closer to their standards of ethics and principles, and of greater journalistic accuracy and integrity than the corporate media," Dominick wrote in a follow-up e-mail. They were offering this free of charge so these sites would not have to "rely on content generated by giant corporations. In return, we just asked for acknowledgement."
But their efforts fell short.
Dominick noted the "lack of solidarity and mutual aid" among alternative and independent media organizations.
The nonprofit NewStandard is ad-free and also bills itself on the site as "independent and uncompromised."
The site faces many of the usual financial challenges faced by nonprofit organizations. Because they do not charge for content, it is extremely challenging to convince a substantial portion of those visitors to regularly donate, Dominick said.
"The reason we consider this so paradoxical is that, when they do pull out their wallet, the vast majority give at well above the monthly minimum of $3," Dominick said. "The mode and median donations are $10, and we [have] just as many members donating more than $10 a month as we have donating less than $10 a month."
Only a small fraction of the NewStandard audience donates at all, Dominick said. Even still, Dominick said they received nearly $60,000 in monthly donations over the last year. One-time donations account for another $50,000 or so, Dominick said. The site is growing, according to Dominick, so they are poised to bring in more this year.
Because The NewStandard is a nonprofit publication, the tiny staff of four salaried employees often turns in hundred-hour weeks, Dominick said.
"One [of the things that is too difficult to convey on a website] would be how hard we and our writers work," Dominick said. "I am fairly certain there is no one in the business who puts in more hours under more demands."
The work is especially tough, Dominick said, because of the staff's meticulousness.
There is no staff of researchers, so The NewStandard has two full-time editors and an unsalaried part-time editor do the fact-checking and source-vetting. The staff also cross-references most facts and anything controversial, Dominick said, before reporting on any subject.
"We even vet our freelance contributors -- we accept no unsolicited submissions," Dominick said. "Rather, there is an application process just to get into our pool of contracted writers."
Be careful when syndicating Web headlines
2006-02-09By Robert Niles: Here's another example of what can go wrong when you send your publication's headlines to another website.
I was looking for a specific L.A. Times story on Yahoo News this morning. And on Yahoo's L.A. Times headlines page I found the following link five stories down:
"Major Quake Jolts San Fernando Valley
Thu Feb 9, 7:55 AM ET"
What the heck?!? I didn't feel a quake, and I'm in nearby Pasadena. Did I sleep through it? What's going on?
I click the link in about 3 microseconds, only to find a story with the overhead "TIMES PAST: FEB. 9, 1971."
Nope, I didn't sleep through that quake. In fact, I remember it well. But it ain't exactly news anymore. So why scare readers by including it in a daily news feed?
Fear and shivering in 'Second Life'
2006-02-13By Jason Boog: On my web writing blog, The Publishing Spot, I recently tried a new experiment -- running a bit of feature journalism alongside my usual interviews and publication tips.
In "Fear and Shivering in Second Life," I'm trying to explore how the first-person reporter POV changes inside the online world of Second Life. This is only the first installment, and I'm looking for some advice from other journalists about how to proceed ...
"My super screwed up last month, leaving my building without heat for 5 days; without hot water for 7 days; without a stove for two weeks. Gas companies were called and city inspectors inspected, but I still spent $110 in electricity running a space heater 24 hours a day. On top of all that, I lost my shot at publishing the best story I had all year.
"As I contemplated burning furniture for warmth, I 'escaped' to a wacky press conference held entirely inside the computer-generated world of Second Life. Time has passed, wrapping both these events together in my head—much like a wooly mammoth and a diamond mine buried under the same glacier. Something compels me to tell both stories, even after the editors killed them.
"In real life, I was pounding away on my laptop and breathing puffs of frozen air. In Second Life, I was lounging on the tropical island pictured above, with a crew of pixilated characters that included a blue skinny Martian, a Goth girl with a shimmering halo, a foot-tall monkey with cymbals, and some guy dressed tight black pants who floated in mid-air, bitching about everything he saw."
Reader reporting finding flaws in Cheney story
2006-02-14By Robert Niles: If you are looking for a strong example of reader-driver distributed news reporting, click over to Josh Marshall's TPMCafe.com today. Under a post by Paul Begala, readers are filling in the details of Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting a fellow hunter in Texas over the weekend.
Readers with hunting experience are blowing a hole (I know, really bad pun) in newspaper reports that Cheney stood 30 feet to 30 yards away from the victim when the vice president shot him. Based on the reported number of pellet strikes, the hit pattern and the number of pellets in a shell, readers are concluding that the victim may have been shot at close to point-blank range.
Another administration cover-up? Whatever the case, this incident may yet provide another example of how the Internet can connect thousands of sharp readers who, collectively, can find flaws in stories that a small handful of traditional reporters might miss.
Here's the Olympics link of the day
2006-02-15By Robert Niles: Everyone else tells you about the Winter Olympics' winners. But here's a blog with news about the athletes at the back of the pack: DFL celebrates the competitors who won't be taking home any hardware from Turin. (Unless you count stuff from the ER....) It's not a spoof site, though. Every competitor has a story, not just the winners who show up on TV. As the blog's tag line says,
"Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not."
Web radio project helps youth reach large audiences
2006-02-15By Kamara Colson: A new generation of youth is pushing forward to challenge the boundaries of radio, mixing the old ideas of radio with the new movement of online journalism to create an interactive experience. Youth Radio, a public radio station based in Berkeley, is using their website, Youth Radio, to transform the auditory-only face of radio.
Hon Hoang, who originally worked for Youth Radio as a young adult, has returned as director of new media and conversion.
"Once you get online, people aren’t just trying to listen to things they missed on the radio. You want to engage them visually and through all of their senses. The website is where convergence really takes hold of everything," she said, explaining that on the site they provide transcripts, audio and some video too.
The website is an interactive option that is beneficial not only to those people who want more depth on a story, but also for those living out of state. Hoang finds that "radio is no longer limited to a local [audience], or even nationally. It is transnational."
The station, which is mainly funded through foundations and corporate sponsors, has 27.5 million radio listeners, Hoang said, adding that this audience has "increased 400 fold. It’s a cross-promotional kind of thing. There is promotion of the website on the show. You can get the show as a Podcast online."
The multitude of methods that viewers can use to get information from the website and radio station has led to its growth. These options help to create an overall experience that aids in allowing the audience to relate to the person giving the story. "It was designed to make the reader feel like they were getting a lot out of it," explained Hoang.
A unique aspect of Youth Radio is that it is driven by the youth, creating a better understanding of the way issues affect young people. One student who works for the station, Lauryn Silverman, won a Gracie Allen award for Hunger’s Diary, a commentary about her personal battle overcoming anorexia. This award is given by the American Women in Radio and Television, Inc. to acknowledge progress toward well-rounded depictions of women in the media.
Having the script and audio for broadcast stories like Hunger’s Diary posted online gives more depth to the audience’s experience, Hoang said. Many of these stories also include poetry, pictures and additional resources, among other features, for interested readers and those going through similar problems.
"The new generation is definitely going to be more aware of sensory things, it is no longer going to be a one-way track -- it is going to be more dimensional," Hoang said.
"Now people are graduating in journalism with a focus in multimedia degree, which is great. This is really where everything is going."
Want readers? Then cover what they care about.
2006-02-16By Robert Niles: Nielsen Media Research reports 27 million watched 'American Idol' on TV last night. But an average of just 18.6 million watched the Winter Olympics.
So I open the local newspaper this morning, then cruise around news websites, and I see plenty of expanded coverage for the Olympics. But I don't see those news outlets running columns covering what happened on 'Idol' and inviting readers to talk about it.
Why not? I thought the journalism industry was in the business of attracting readers. And that news execs are blowing millions on consultants and makeovers to reach younger readers. If there's a contest going on in this country that's attracting 27 million viewers, many of them teens and young adults, why wouldn't the news industry want a piece of that action? Why leave it to morning radio shows and fan websites?
I'm not calling for eight-page special sections. But how much work would it take to assign an entertainment columnist to write a blog and print column with recaps, previews and analysis? Plus an invitation for readers to leave comments at the paper's website?
Surely, some newspaper has figured this out. If you know of one, submit its link below.
Online publishing is no 'crock'
2006-02-17By Robert Niles: Writing today in the Financial Times, Trevor Butterworth questions whether blogging is "just another crock of virtual gold." And his answer seems to be... yep.
It's a point of view that I, selfishly, love to read in mainstream media. Because the longer that mainstream media managers fail to understand what is happening online, the longer individual journalists and independent Web publishers have to establish their own publishing businesses on the Web.
Like many writing in the mainstream media, Butterworth mistakenly conflates "blogs" with "web publishing." Blogging represents just a fraction of independent publishing online. Online journalists and other web publishers use a variety of publishing tools to communicate with their audience, including blogs, discussion boards, wikis and even trusty, old-school flat HTML files.
Yet too many people opining on web publishing rarely venture beyond sites, usually blogs, that provide the bulk of their content linking back to "old media" writers and publications. Take a look beyond the parasitic Web and one can find independent journalists doing investigative reporting. As well as reader-driven story collections, discussion boards (personal link), wikis, and yes, even blogs, breaking news.
Of course, breaking news is one thing. Making money is quite another. And Butterworth repeats the common criticism that "blogging" is not a viable business.
"Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable businesses, the economics are daunting," Butterworth writes.
"After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics," he continues.
Yes, the economics are daunting -- just as they are in the offline publishing business. (Ask anyone who's started up a magazine lately.) Most new publishing ventures will fail to become economically viable. But political/gossip blogging is just one publishing model to make money publishing online.
Speaking from personal experience, Butterworth's numbers are quite low. An informative website well-targeted to its niche (and, by the way, politics is a lousy niche for making money outside an election year), easily can pull in two to three times that, with the same number of visitors. Sure, that's nothing to a multibillion-dollar corporation. But how many journalists would love to leave behind the hassle of their corporate bosses for a salary of $70,000 a year?
The trick, of course, is targeting. Web publishing, at this moment, does not follow the traditional newsroom publishing business model. At this point, this is a field for individual entrepreneurs, who can elicit and manage tips from readers, building a low-cost "virtual newsroom" to gather and publish information to audiences who have not found their need for news met by increasingly generalist mainstream media.
Successful web businesses target well-defined niches and construct their coverage, publishing systems and page design to communicate that focus both to human readers and to the automated agents that drive readers and advertisers to websites.
Butterworth closes with a depressing vision of blogging as "instant obsolescence." But what is more obscure, a Web document that can be found by billions through Google or Archive.org, or a newspaper article or academic journal that persists only in a paid archive, accessed by a shrinking audience of researchers?
One can make the argument that access in an archive of terrabytes provides little hope for recognition. That's true. Welcome to the new marketplace of ideas. Unlike the old marketplace of monopolistic newspapers and a handful of national magazines, publication no longer provides a guarantee of public visibility. You've got to compete with every single post you write.
This is no "virtual tomb," as Butterworth writes. It's more like a vibrant nursery, where all individuals can have the chance to plant a few seeds, to grow public discourse. And, yes, make money doing it, too.
NAA announces 2006 Edgie Award winners
2006-02-20By Robert Niles: The Newspaper Association of America has announced the winners in this year's Digital Edge (aka Edgie) Awards, for newspaper-affiliated websites. (Full disclosure, I was on the jury for the Best Overall site awards.)
The Washington Post won the honor for best overall site in the top circulation category. (Slots in the Edgies are based on newspaper print circulation totals.) Winners in other circulation categories included The Spokesman-Review (Wash.), The Modesto (Calif.) Bee and Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World.
'Joe-average' blogger: Practical attitude brings readers to Diet Blog
2006-02-24By Marissa Latini : Jim Foster does not claim to be an expert on health, exercise, dieting or nutrition. Instead, his identity as a self-proclaimed "joe-average person who has tried to get to grips with the reality of diet and nutrition" is what brings in new readers to his site Diet Blog on a regular basis.
Foster’s attitude about weight loss, according to his site, is "that different things work for different people. Nutrition is individualistic."
Foster, who took over the blog from online entrepreneur Dane Carlson in 2004, wrote in an e-mail interview that a goal for Diet Blog is "to be the most-read source of diet information and opinion." He wrote on his site that there is "an awful lot of noise out there about dieting and weight loss," and he indicated that his site hopefully makes it easier to sort through all of the information on the Web.
Diet Blog boasts a wealth of information, reviews and commentary on popular diets, weight-loss fads, health, fitness and celebrity endorsements. An entire section of the site is devoted to reviews of the most popular diets including eDiets, the South Beach Diet and NutriSystem.
"It’s very difficult ... to stay balanced," Foster wrote, especially when reviewing different diets.
"[My] own interests and experiences with trying to lose body fat are a major part of the impetus behind the blog," Foster wrote, but he tries not to only support things that worked for him and criticize things that didn't.
Foster noted that his site can be helpful to those in need of information and guidance. In addition, he wrote that he believes his site "cuts to the heart of the issues - why do you want to lose weight? Should you? What really works? And why are we so obsessed with our size anyway?"
On top of comprehensive reviews of popular diets, Foster has a lengthy archive section that is updated a few times a day. His topics range from humorous ("Chocolate Worship") to informative ("Reduce Carbs and Eat More Protein") and socially conscious ("Ever Been Humiliated?").
Foster does not advertise or promote Diet Blog, and according to him, "all the readers just come from word of mouth, or other people mentioning the site." Diet Blog is recognized as one of Forbes.com Best of the Web in the health and fitness blog category.
On the front today...
2006-02-26By Robert Niles: For those of you who might come straight to my blog page, I've been absent the last few days while working on this commentary for the OJR front page.
I hope you'll give it a look.
Alternative music: College Music Journal finds longtime home on the Web
2006-02-28By Elizabeth Kusin: One must only walk through any college campus to grasp the tremendous importance that music plays in the lives of American college students, as evidenced by the ubiquity of ear buds and iPods. Student-run college radio has historically played a part in that relationship.
The College Music Journal was started by a student in 1980 to cover what was being played on college radio stations. In 1994, the journal went online.
"Major commercial outlets review the same things all over," said Steve Ciabattoni, a 19-year music industry veteran and editor of CMJ New Music Monthly.
"Our focus has been to cover bands that don’t get that sort of coverage," he said. "We know that there’s an underserved cultural community and artistic community, and we know that there’s an appetite and market for it as well."
CMJ speaks to those interested in new alternative music and averages 200,000 hits monthly. But according to the site, that number reaches 2 million when CMJ holds its annual Music Marathon, where various bands perform at clubs throughout New York City and panels give attendees an opportunity to learn more about the music industry.
The site features album reviews of relatively unknown artists as well as daily music news. It also offers music charts such as the top Radio 200 and other charts from various genres of music.
According to Ciabattoni, college-aged kids are still demonstrating the same passion and drive for new music as they did when CMJ started cranking out issues.
"It’s really exciting to see that many people that interested in music and that excited to be a part of a medium where they can say something different than what’s being said," he said. "There’s always something new to talk about."
And with a lot of alternative stations fading out and turning into other types of stations, Ciabattoni noted that college stations play a vital role in the new music world.
"It’s even more important now that college stations are expressing themselves and are serving their community in a different sort of way," he said.
Remembering Chandler: 'If I were starting out today...'
2006-02-28By Robert Niles: Kevin Roderick at L.A. Observed today excerpts author Dennis McDougal's recent lecture on former L.A. Times publisher Otis Chandler, who passed away Monday morning.
McDougal literally wrote the book on Chandler, and muses on what has happened to the once free-spending Times and its pursuit of editorial excellence under Otis Chandler. The final graf is stunning:
"I didn’t come here to elevate the good old days, but to tell you that I envy you. If I were starting out today, I’d be pouring my energy into building my own website or joining one already in progress and asking myself the hard questions of what it is I care about, what it is I want to report on, what it is as an individual I have to say. I can’t help but believe that Otis would agree."