Robert Niles: October 2009 archive
Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners
October 29, 2009
My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start.Here is your guide and checklist.
Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success. More...
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Does your site really need to be in Google News?
October 28, 2009
With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page.
But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.) More...
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Freedom of the press ought to belong to all... not just to approved 'journalists'
October 16, 2009
Can you do journalism and not be a "journalist"?Do people declared "journalists" get special speech and press rights that other American citizens do not enjoy?
Can anyone enjoy the right to free speech and free publication, even if that individual is not a full-time professional reporter?
These are some of the important legal questions that American politicians and bureaucrats must confront now that the Internet has made possible for people other than employees of major media companies to reach large and widespread audiences.
In recent weeks, federal officials seems to be favoring a view that certain individuals enjoy more speech and publication rights than others. New regulations from the Federal Trade Commission and a proposed federal shield law create legal double standards for individuals creating information for the public - one for employees and contractors of media companies and another for everyone else, including self-employed publishers.
This split calls into question what the First Amendment means, and whom it was intended to protect. Henry Mencken famously said that "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." But with the Internet making a "press" available to anyone for free, does that "press" have to be of a certain type, or reach a certain number of people, to qualify for First Amendment protection? More...
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No more whining at 2009's Online News Association conference
October 2, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO - If there's a theme to this year's Online Journalism Association conference, it'd be: "No More Whining."Several of us have commented on the lack of the whining from newspaper-dot-com employees, which weighed down past ONA gatherings. Perhaps now, at long last, a tipping point of online news managers from traditional news companies have moved beyond the old print-driven model of trying to protect crumbling monopolies, and instead are now embracing competition, so that they may engage it.
Or, maybe, most of those folks got laid off and now they have no choice but to compete.
Either way, the focus has moved beyond protecting the past and on to finding one's way through the future. As Paul Bass of NewHavenIndependent.org said during a session yesterday, "The only people who think journalism are dying are working at dying news organizations." More...
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