A glossary of online news terms

Astroturfing: Fake "grassroots." Any attempt by an individual or organization to use websites or comments posted to website -- published under false or misleading identities -- to create an impression of grassroots support for something, usually in the individual's or organization's interest.

Blog: Derivative of "weblog." A series of entries to an online journal, posted in some chronological order. Sometimes used, incorrectly, by writers to describe discussion forums or even all websites not affiliated with offline publishers. A blog can be written by an individual or a group. It can allow comments to entries or not.

Citizen journalism: AKA "grassroots journalism." The collecting and publication of timely, unique, nonfiction information by individuals without formal journalism training or professional affiliation. Examples include the publication of cell phone photos from a breaking news scene, blog reports covering local government meetings and discussion forums reporting results from international competitions.

Cookie: A line of text recorded on a reader's computer when that reader requests content from a specific Web domain, either an entire Web page or just an element on a Web page. The cookie includes the name of the domain, a unique visitor number and values for whatever other variables the visited domain wishes to set. The cookie can be read only by a server from the domain that set the cookie. Cookies can be used to track unique visitors to a website, to maintain shopping carts in e-commerce stores and keep visitors logged in to discussion forums and blogs.

CMS: Content management system. The computer software, housed on your site's Web server, that manages the publication of content to your website. Popular examples include Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal and Geeklog.

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions (M being the Roman numeral for 1,000). In advertising, the rate than an advertiser will pay a publishers to have his ad displayed on 1,000 page views. Or, the revenue from advertising that a publishers will receive for every 1,000 page views served.

Crowdsourcing: A subset of grassroots journalism. A process in which readers submit individual reports that are collected into a larger dataset for use in reporting a story. Examples include damage reports in earthquakes as well as watchdog efforts to track various elected officials' stands on an issue. Also known as "distributed news reporting."

Hits: Requests for any single file on a Web server. A hit can be a request for a Web page or any element of that page, such as an image, a stylesheet or an external javascript. Therefore, "hits" is a meaningless statistic for measuring Web traffic. A large number of hits on a website might mean that a site uses a lot of images or scripts on its pages, rather than that many people visit the site. "Unique visitors" over a defined period should be used to measure a site's popularity instead.

HTML: Hypertext markup language. A language in which content is formatted to display as a Web page. It is a subset of XML. Web pages no longer need to be written in HTML. Most modern Web browsers can display an XML document as a Web page if the document's Web server specifies a style sheet for the browser to use when rendering the XML document.

Open source reporting: A method in which reporters, or readers working as reporters, make their source list and gathered information public while they are working on their report, instead of merely revealing selected information from their newsgathering available in a traditional report at the conclusion of the project.

Open source software: Software for which the uncompiled source code of the program is freely available for users to see and modify. Open source software is typically made available to users for free, under the General Public License [GPL].

PPC: Pay per click. An advertising system, such as Google's AdWords/AdSense, where advertisers pay publishers each time a reader clicks on their ads, and only when the ads are clicked on.

RSS: A method for syndicating website content to another website or online application, such as a news reader. RSS has been described as standing for "rich site summary" or "really simple syndication." It is a text file, marked up in XML, that includes formatted headlines, summaries and URLs for articles, blog entries or discussion topics on a website.

Shovelware: Publishing stories from one media, usually a print newspaper, in another, usually a website, without substantially altering the content. Newspaper websites without online original content, such as blogs, midday updates, discussions and video, are derisively called "shovelware."

Sock puppetry: An attempt by a Web writer to make a site look more popular than it is by posting comments under multiple aliases. Reference comes from comedians who wear a sock puppet on one hand to carry two sides of a conversation by themselves. Can be considered a form of "astroturfing."

Style sheet: A set of instructions to a Web browser on how to display various elements on a Web page. Style sheets can declare font styles, image positioning, page layout and mouse behavior across a Web page.

Troll: A person who posts to an online forum or blog to provoke a hostile response from other readers.

Unique visitors: Originally, the number of unique IP addresses from which requests for content were made a Web server over some defined period of time (usually per day, week or month). Due to the use of proxy servers, a more accurate count of unique visitors can be made by setting cookies to each site visitor and recording how many unique cookie identities visited the site over a period.

XML: Extensible markup language. A way of organizing text information by labeling it with specified variables in a fixed format.

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