http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/ Newest blog entries from Online Journalism Review en-us http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1081/ By Geoff Rynex: Geoff Dougherty had had enough. No more working hard to uncover a story, sometimes for a year, only to have it pulled at the last minute. No more bosses. No more corporate interests getting in the way of solid investigative journalism. No more Chicago Tribune. After more than a decade in the mainstream media, Dougherty decided to call it quits at the Tribune last Novembver and start up his own news organization. The website he created took the name of a legendary Chicago paper: the Daily News. With the Chi-Town Daily News, Dougherty saw an opportunity to do everything he thought the mainstream media was failing to do, especially in the realm of the Internet. "That’s really where the future of the industry lies, so my thought was 'Well, rather than wait around ten years to see how that develops, why not actually be in a position to develop it?'" Dougherty said. In the mainstream media, Dougherty saw a trend of newspapers striving to meet the demands of Wall Street at the expense of the readers and at the cost of quality. He was dismayed to see newsrooms cutting staff and stories in order to maximize profits. "There’s an assumption embedded in that which is that people are so dumb that they’re not going to notice that it’s a worse product," he said. "But that’s clearly not true. They are noticing that it’s a worse product because they’re not buying it anymore." So how will the Daily News revive and innovate the news? Along with a non-profit corporate model run by PublicMedia Inc., of which Dougherty is the CEO, his plan is to include hyper-local coverage reported by citizen-journalists and to spark discussion about local issues on blogs. "To tap into that knowledge base and create a dialogue rather than a one-way flow of information I think is a great and powerful thing," Dougherty said. But Dougherty's website takes advantage of more than just citizen journalism and news blogs. The Daily News hyper-local coverage includes podcasts about Chicago sports teams and the local music scene, RSS feeds, and plans are in the works for a cooking blog. The key to the Daily News’ success however, aside from staying on the cutting edge of media, will be an unusual dedication to local news. Dougherty concedes that papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune will keep the market in national and statewide coverage, but believes that the Daily News will become the destination for in-depth local news in Chicago. Dougherty hopes soon to have a dedicated citizen journalist in every neighborhood of the city. "It empowers people to take action to make their lives better and the government more responsive. I think this kind of reporting is the most important kind of reporting we can do." Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:28:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1126/ By Robert Niles: Just curious here, but under what conditions would a professional newsroom ever have need to block its journalists' access to a website? Kevin Roderick details how the Los Angeles Times is blocking newsroom access to certain websites here and here. (On the topic of blocking websites, the state of Kentucky appears to be blocking on state computers liberal websites that have been critical of its GOP governor, too. It's not the news business, but certainly that's a significant and emerging national news story.) Certainly, businesses have the right to control what information its employees access using company property (including computers and networks). And I'll concede that a news business might want to restrict non-editorial employees' access to sites that contain illegal content or services or that promote a hostile work environment. But journalists need access to information. All information. I'd love to hear from OJR readers their experiences with -- and opinions on -- newsroom Web filtering software. Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:49:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1070/ By Micah Ailetcher: New search engine Kosmix.com is taking a different approach to the typical Internet search by categorizing its results. Rather then presenting search results in a standard list form that can be thousands of answers long, the results are organized and sorted into different categories. The goal, according to product manager Mark Johnson, is to provide better answers. By presenting the search results in categories, Johnson feels that they have an advantage by allowing the user "to see the data in a lot of different ways." In this way, they see themselves more as a "compliment to something like Google or Yahoo" rather than a replacement. For example, Kosmix’s U.S. Politics search engine categorizes its results as "Conservative," "Liberal," "Libertarian," or "Political News." The site currently hosts five different search engines: Health, Video Games, Finance, Travel and U.S. Politics. Kosmix started with its Health search engine. A query in this engine, for example, for breast cancer produces results that are identified as "Basic Information," "Expert Information," "Message Boards," "Blogs," "Alternative Medicine" and over a dozen other categories. The right side of the results page presents Websites in the familiar search engine format, which includes the individual Website’s category in Kosmix in addition to the Website’s summary so users will know before they navigate away to a web page whether it is classified as a "Quiz" about breast cancer or as the findings from a "Clinical Trial." On the left side of the results page is a list of links that allows the user to display the search results by a specific category. For example, this can be helpful if a user only needs to view the results for breast cancer that are categorized as "Symptoms." With its patent-pending algorithms, or as Johnson calls it, their "secret juice," Kosmix crawls the web and classifies different sites by the different "signals" that they provide. There is an amount of subjectivity involved in classifying sites as "Liberal" or "Expert Information," but once a classification is made, the algorithm moves on to classify new sites by looking at things such as what classified sites the unclassified site is often linked to. "When you are dealing with a very nuanced subject, like politics, there are always going to be gray areas," Johnson said. These "gray areas" are exactly where Kosmix sees itself coming into play by helping the user to sort out the type of Website that they are looking for in the search stage. "In some cases, the algorithm can do a much better job than we can in figuring out [a Website’s] subtlety," Johnson explained. Kosmix hopes to add more categories to its search results. For the U.S. Politics engine, one consideration is a "Green Party" category. The Video Game and Finance engines are the latest additions to the site, but Kosmix is hoping to add more diversity to their search engines. "The endgame is clear," Johnson said. "The goal is to categorize the entire Internet. Eventually, no matter what query you type in, we will have the categories that are appropriate for it." Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:15:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1119/ By Robert Niles: Deadlines come next week for two major journalism awards. Entrants for the Knight-Batten Awards must get their snail-mailed application to the University of Maryland by June 15. The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. The deadline for the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards is also June 15, but those entries are submitted online, allowing journalists and extra few days to get their entries together. The Online Journalism Awards are administered by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which also publishes OJR. Thu, 08 Jun 2006 10:25:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1100/ By Cameron Bird: Scott Stevens may be best known (or unknown) as an Idahoan meteorologist turned conspiracy theorist, but his online labor of love, Weather Wars has transformed him into an Internet-stationed social activist. The simply-designed site is a collection of links to news stories and personal entries that revolve around a seemingly fringe message. Stevens’ claim: that The Powers That Be harness the technology to control the world’s climate and with it, are engaging in international warfare. "I’m using the site as a tool to point out the obvious," he said. "I have to present the information in a simple manner because the manipulation of our weather is obvious once you choose to look." Stevens said he doesn’t expect people to take his word for it, but rather, for his claims to trigger a sense of "intellectual curiosity." His own inquisitiveness drove him to quit his day job as a local weatherman last year and commit full-time to research and Webmastering. After this transition, and even more so after he attributed Hurricane Katrina to Japanese weather-manipulation weaponry, Stevens started to turn heads in the media. He’s been a guest on Coast to Coast AM, The O’Reilly Factor and some 30 other shows. He has also been the subject of print media news features. The response of personalities and journalists has been hesitant, he said, but ultimately affirmative. "They’re always a little skeptical at first, but once I give them the clues that I use to follow the rabbit down the hole, then they come out going, 'Oh my, there is something to this.'" Stevens said he hopes to gain as much readership as possible and for believers in his proposed theories to put more pressure on the government to take weather-manipulation seriously. He cited a bill moving its way through Congress that would establish a national weather modification policy without oversight from experts and a realistic view of how advanced the technology currently is. "There are not many topics that affect as many people at the same time as our environment. It’s absolutely essential that if we can control our environment that it’s done for the betterment of mankind ... I suppose I’m the right messenger for the right message," he said. Mon, 05 Jun 2006 12:40:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200606/1117/ By Robert Niles: The Guardian reports that the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune has cut a deal with South Korean grassroots journalism site OhMyNews to feature OhMyNews headlines on the IHT website and, possibly in the future, articles in the paper. From the Guardian report:It is not yet clear whether such articles will be treated in a similar manner to those from established news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press, but sources close to the negotiations believe it is likely that the newspaper itself could run such stories in the near future. OhMyNews claims more than 40,000 contributors and is said to be negotiating syndication deals with other media companies. Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:57:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200605/1115/ By Robert Niles: A California appeals court has overturned a ruling that would have forced bloggers to turn over to Apple Computer the identity of sources that leaked information about upcoming Apple products. The Mercury News provides initial coverage. The court rejected the lower court judge's ruling that California's trade secrets law trumped its shield law, and went further to refuse to draw a distinction between people publishing news via blogs and those who publish in newspapers or on TV. "We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism,'" Justice Conrad Rushing wrote for the court. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news." Sat, 27 May 2006 10:13:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200605/1099/ By Heather Hart: After seven years online, Grist Magazine is known for its in-depth coverage of environmental issues -- and its tongue-in-cheek humor. Bringing humor to the headlines was "a late-night, fevered, overworked idea, but now it’s kind of become our signature," said David Roberts, a Grist staff writer. Based in Seattle, Washington, Grist began as an alternative to the stuffy sources of environmental news that existed at the time. "There’s just so much bad news and ... fear and angst out there that it causes a lot of people to tune out. A lot of people have actually expressed relief." Roberts started working at Grist nearly three years ago with very little formal training in journalism. He said that helped him bring a fresh perspective to both journalism and environmentalism. "People get stuck in that old-fashioned, formal style of journalism and they can’t see past the inverted pyramid. There’s great value in that kind of traditional journalism, but it just doesn’t always fit with online. Our readers are younger, they skim a lot and have less patience for that," he said. "At Grist, we attempt to balance formality and keeping things sounding personal while still maintaining trust and keeping our facts straight," Roberts said. Roberts spends most of his time working on Gristmill, the site’s blog, but also occasionally contributes stories and columns. Aside from Roberts and "muckraker" columnist Amanda Griscom Little, Grist relies on submissions from freelance writers for much of its content. In just the two years since Roberts started working at Grist, the online magazine has grown by leaps and bounds, doubling their monthly traffic – now about 600,000 visitors a month – and nearly tripling the staff. "We’re trying to speak to a younger generation" in order to get them interested in preserving the environment, Roberts said. Online is the future of the news media, according to Roberts. "All major print media outlets are aggressively moving online. In the next two to three years it looks as though their online operations will be more important than the traditional print medium." Online journalism is still a relatively new and untested medium, Roberts said, so it will still be a long time before it will realize its full potential. In the coming years, he predicts that online journalism will "continue diversifying. It looks as though it will become much more community-based with a lot more multimedia, allowing more interaction from readers and minute-by-minute accounts. Online has the benefit of moving much faster than traditional outlets, even TV." The publishers of Grist have also been turning their eyes to the future, said Roberts. "It’s tricky to keep what works and what people like and also evolve with the changes" in the medium, he said. But the future of Grist will probably include a lot more community involvement and multimedia and adding more impromptu and spontaneous elements to the blog. "Even with all of that, though, I don’t think we’ll ever really lose that tight, old-school, heavily sourced and fact-checked style of magazine writing. There’s a certain credibility and more trust that comes with that kind of journalism." Fri, 19 May 2006 07:21:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200605/1080/ By Laura Ybarra : On The Tranquilo Traveler, Joshua Berman blogs his 16-month around-the-world trip and extended honeymoon. "The blog is a fun way to connect with people — other writers and travelers, long lost friends and new readers," Berman said in an e-mail interview. "Ultimately, I hope the content will serve as raw material for a book about this trip," Berman said. "It also serves as a way to further brand myself as a writer, to build an audience." After traveling to Paris, Dubai, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, Berman says the Hunza Valley in Pakistan stands out. "The Pakistan Himalaya, or the ‘Roof of the World’ has had very few foreign visitors since 9/11. We spent two weeks in Karimabad, drank dood chai with the Mir of Hunza, and trekked across glaciers and into a tribal shepherds’ village where a ram was slaughtered in our honor," Berman said. Although the blog doesn’t make money, Berman said he’s been contacted by editors which, in turn, has led to writing sales. "If you do strange, extraordinary and scary things, you’ll have strange, extraordinary things to write about," Berman said. "Next is learning how to play the game: how to contact editors, where to publish for free, how to get your name out there. I talk about this more on my FAQ page." Berman said the BootsnAll Travel Network helps him support the site. "In addition to hosting and including me in their massive network of traveler, they provide excellent technical support. Very low-key and friendly," Berman said. Berman said he uses the latest version of Moveable Type. He admits to tweaking some details since the blog launched in May 2005, but says he likes the current structure. "The ‘scheduled post’ feature is nice, where I can post future entries on an assigned date, in case I know I won’t have access for a while, like during my 10-day meditation retreat in Bodhgaya, India," Berman said. As for dealing with technology, Berman offers this advice: "If you’re planning on putting any amount of serious time into your blog, bring a laptop, digital camera, and several USB flash cards—especially if traveling to less developed parts of the world." WiFi is a "rare treat" that is found in capital cities, and broadband ports are "increasingly available," he said. The trip will end this August in Colorado where Berman hopes to start a writing fellowship. Tue, 16 May 2006 15:36:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/blog/200605/1105/ By Robert Niles: The Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School of Communication (publisher of OJR) will open the annual Online Journalism Awards for entries, starting Monday, May 15. The entry period will close on June 15 and the awards will be presented at the ONA's annual convention, in Washington, D.C. this fall. This year's awards include a new category, the first to pay a cash award. The $5,000 Knight Award for Public Service will honor the use of journalistic resources, digital techniques and public information that produces compelling coverage of a vital issue and engage a geographic community. "While the online world allows people to form virtual societies divorced from geographical limitations, this prize acknowledges the power of digital news media to move citizens to improve the physical communities that still define their democracy and their day-to-day lives," the ONA said in a statement. "As more Americans receive their news and information online, it remains critical that online journalism be held to the highest standards of the profession. We are delighted that Knight Foundation continues to support outstanding journalism and look forward to using this award to spotlight the best online journalism that serves its readers and the public at large," Michael Parks, director of the School of Journalism at USC Annenberg, said. For more information about the awards, or to enter, starting Monday, visit http://www.journalist.org/awards/ Fri, 12 May 2006 10:51:00 MST