Picking the best in online journalism

Here are the finalists for the 2009 Online Journalism Awards by the Online News Association.

Close to 100 sites are on the finalist list under dozens of award categories, from major news organization sites (bbcnews.com, nytimes.com, Wired.com, washingtonpost.com) to individual stories and multimedia presentations, all organized by topic and size.

Candidates for the Knight Award for Public Service include one site I've blogged about before, The Chauncey Bailey Project, named for -- and continuing the work of -- a former newsroom colleague of mine who was murdered while on the job in Oakland, Calif.

Other public service nominees are Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong at The Seattle Times, for Culture of Resistance, The Toronto Star, for Crime and Punishment, and The Wisconsin State Journal for Down to a Whisper: State's Native Languages Threatened with Loss.

ONA says many of the finalists are "pushing the envelope of innovation in digital storytelling and information sharing."

Student online journalism projects up for awards are:

Small Team

• Joy Lewis, Western Kentucky University, Sister Wife
• Lisa Pickoff-White, University of California, Berkeley, It Happens at Midnight

Large Team

• University of Miami School of Communication, Special Olympics Live
• NYCity News Service/City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, Election 2008: A Date with History
• UNC-Chapel Hill, Andaman Rising
• Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, South Africa: At the Crossroads of Hate and Hope

The winners will be announced at the 2009 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet on Oct. 3, at the Hilton San Francisco. The organization's partner in the awards is the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

More information about the awards, judging and organizations is available in the ONA press release.

Are you a Web designer? Sure.

Just in time for my fall course on Web design, author, Peachpit book-publishing company blogger and Web designer Jason Cranford Teague has a nice overview of the state of site-building today, under the title "Everyone is a Web Designer."

He lists skills Web designers do and don't need today, differences between being a "Web designer" and a "professional Web developer," and the need for designers to "understand what a developer does and how they are doing it."

Something similar is going on at online newspapers and related forms of journalism: Depending on the size of the organization, one person doesn't always have to do everything. But team members need to know each other's abilities, responsibilities and needs. Some are Web designers, Web developers, database-savvy journalists, "backpack journalists" with multimedia skills, or editors responsible for quality control and pulling it all together.

Speaking of backpack journalism, here's an online example of what a couple of "text-oriented" journalists accomplished in their first day using an inexpensive audio recorder and digital camera, a free audio-editing program (Audacity) and an inexpensive slideshow-creation program (Soundslides). Their (ok, our) training was part of a Freedom Forum Diversity Institute "bootcamp" earlier this month.

Also just in time for my new Web design course, I stumbled on a Ze Frank video from a few years ago that you might call "a meditation on contemporary Web aesthetics." I call it "don't be ugly."

Online college media sites and resources

With a new semester rapidly approaching, here are a few links I hope the editors of student media websites already have on their bookmark lists. A few are old friends; the others are places I'm just starting to explore. I may add a few more over the next week. Quoted comments are from the sites themselves:

Society of Professional Journalists

"The Society of Professional Journalists is the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior." (Annual convention coming up Aug. 27-30 in Indianapolis. Also see its Student Resources page.)

Innovation in College Media

"The Center for Innovation in College Media is a non-profit think-tank that was created to help college student media adapt and flourish in the new media environment." (Also see this MediaShift column by founder Bryan Murley.)

Journalism 2.0

"Mark Briggs coined the term Journalism 2.0 in 2005 when he was invited to write a book about digital literacy for journalists based on a training program he had created at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. Mark is currently working on an updated version of the book, to be published by CQPress in fall 2009." (The original is still online here.)

ReportingOn

"A professional reporting community for journalists... helps journalists of all stripes find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story or source."

Collaborative Journalism | Publish2

"Link Journalism: Bring the best of the web to your readers. Complement your reporting with links to relevant and interesting content." (Newest feature: Social Journalism.)

CoPress

"CoPress empowers student newsrooms to hack the future of journalism." It has a blog, forum and wiki as well as selling hosting service to college newspapers.

Associate Collegiate Press

"ACP is the oldest and largest national membership organization for college student journalists. Since 1921, we've offered our members resources to help their publications - newspapers, yearbooks, magazines, broadcast programs, and online publications - improve."

Education Writers Association

"The Education Writers Association is the professional organization of education reporters and editors. We support the ongoing professional development of journalists as part of our mission to help improve the quality of education reporting in the United States." (That's a link to its higher education resource page; the group also offers $30 memberships for students. Faculty have to pay $100!)

HigherEd Watch

"Analysis, reporting and commentary on the world of higher education, with a focus on college access, affordability, and quality." (A blog at the New America Foundation.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

"the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has more than 70 full-time writers and editors, as well as 17 foreign correspondents around the world." (Long-standing place where professors look for jobs. Some content is free with registration, some for paid subscribers only.)

Inside Higher Ed

"Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Whether you're an adjunct or a vice president, a grad student or an eminence grise, we've got what you need to thrive in your job or find a better one..." (All free... challenging the Chronicle since 2004, without killing trees.)

Global Student Journalists

"...an online meeting place for student journalists from around the world. Students currently enrolled in a recognized post-secondary Journalism program, anywhere in the world, can create a profile and begin connecting with other student journalists. Members can network, share ideas, upload projects and receive feedback on their work." (New, started by journalism students in Canada.)

... and, last only because I've mentioned Mindy's RGMP recently:

Teaching Online Journalism

"Notes from the classroom and observations about today's practice of journalism online," by Mindy McAdams, including her Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (RGMP).

Quite a Rugmap: Do it yourself multimedia journalism education

For her online Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency, University of Florida journalism professor of Web wizardry Mindy McAdams has spent six months compiling a terrific collection of links, lessons and sage advice for would-be multimedia reporters and producers.

(She abbreviates the heading "RGMP" at the top of each page, which I either read as "RCMP" and expect the Mounties, or want to pronounce "rugmap." hence the odd headline on this item. Come to think of it, we've been weaving the World Wide Web so long that we might call it a World Wide Rug.)

The 15 RGMP pages are part of her Teaching Online Journalism blog, where the concluding episode landed today: RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.

A key quote:

"... let go of your self-defeating ideas about how you are 'not a computer person,' or how 'computers don't like me.' These attitudes are killing you and your future in journalism."

As she mentions, many well-known practitioners and teachers of online journalism skills have learned how to do what they do on their own, or informally -- from other Web sites, online tutorials and workshops. Even today, when most journalism programs have courses in digital media, every formal college class has to stop somewhere -- but the technology keeps going.

Part of the agenda for digital media students has to be coping with change -- new technologies, new versions of old ones, and new stories to tell. With all of the new things Flashing and Twittering and Huluing around, Mindy makes an especially good point about setting priorities, weighing what to learn. She suggests asking yourself these questions about that shiny new thing:

• What will you use it for?
  
• How well does it fit with your other skill sets?
  
• And above all — is it a skill that is going to be relevant for a long time?
  

The topics discussed on her 15 RGMP posts are the basics of multimedia -- Web publishing (with a blog), digital audio editing and publishing (with a podcast), photography and basic photo editing, video and low-cost video editing, and putting it all together to tell stories. Take a look, starting at the beginning:

• RGMP 1: Read blogs and use RSS

For the list of all 15, see the last episode:

• RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.
  

Guiding journalists into social networking

The Journalist's Guide to Facebook is the latest in a series of compilations about online social networking for journalists at the "Social Media Guide" website called http://mashable.com.

Among the others (also listed at the end of the Facebook article) are:

• 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
• How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom
• 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy
• The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School

Speaking of online journalism, congratulations to the Roanoke Times (http://roanoke.com) for being cited by the Associated Press Managing Editors Awards in the "convergence" category for its interactive tour of new $66 million Taubman Museum of Art. The announcement is here on page 2 of the award story. (Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant's name is at the top of that page because she was a judge in another category of the competition, listed on the previous page.)

Journalism needs pros, amateurs, devout agnostics

Ellen Hume, one of my favorite authors and thinkers on media-future issues for almost 15 years, is leaving the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

Coincidentally, there's a conference this week at MIT on "The future of news and civic media," and Hume's parting message is full of food for thought: The future of news?. A veteran of both the Wall Street Journal and PBS, Hume says major news organizations are still needed, even while many of today's fine journalists have never set foot inside any mainstream media organization.

Snippets:

• "Joshua Micah Marshall is I.F. Stone2.0 (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com)"
  
  
• "Twitter is dazzling, as a headline service and a conversation. But I need more than Twitter, YouTube and my Facebook social network to understand this complicated world."


• "My bottom line has always been: how can people understand their real choices for shaping their own lives and communities? How can the flow of news actually promote personal and community agency? This is why the future of journalism and civic media are important to me."
  


• "If the best and brightest young folks don’t value agnostic, professional journalism, even a dozen new business models won’t work for long."


• "I am waiting for a public relations campaign to argue the virtues of Kovach and Rosenstiel-style journalism (http://www.journalism.org/node/71), combined with a comprehensive news literacy curriculum at all levels, in all countries, that invites people to produce, consume and pay for public service news."


• "Fair, important, earth-shaking journalism is actually hard to do. It’s harder than simply repeating what anyone tells you, or selecting the facts that support your own biases. That is what all the fuss is about as newspapers around the country collapse and die."

Read the whole thing.

More about Ellen Hume.

More about the Future of news & civic media conference at MIT.

Where do you say the free speech stops?

Newspaper executives, journalists, bloggers and victims of "vitriolic and hateful comments" on newspaper Web sites got together in Knoxville recently for a face-to-face discussion of community voices, public discussions and the pros and cons of anonymity.

The News Sentinel's Jack Lail has a summary, video clips, and more. See:

Getting the mean out of comments: knoxnews.com

In a column about the event, the News Sentinel's editor, Jack McElroy, said the paper's Web site draws 50,000 comments a month: "Some of the comments are intelligent. Many are inane. A few are downright cruel."

The Associated Press Managing Editors and the News Sentinel put together the "Online Credibility Roundtable," supported in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

No cigars or green eyeshades in these new media newsrooms

From Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Nieman Journalism Lab, what sites, events or issues were worth Twittering about? More importantly, which of those did readers follow? See 40 most recent links from @niemanlab


I liked the "Inside five newsrooms that H.L. Mencken wouldn't recognize," but I wonder what newsrooms he would recognize today.

After all, Henry didn't even live to see the arrival of the IBM Selectric typewriter in the nation's newsrooms, much less the glowing green CRTs of the later 1970s, the PCs of the '80s or the departure of cigar-smoking as a workplace diversion.

(He died in 1956. His father owned a cigar company. The habit stuck. Amazing what you learn on the Web.)

Perhaps he would have recognized the BLOG. Browse these excerpts from his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

Anyhow, do check out those Nieman tweets, especially Zachary Stewart's multimedia piece on the newsrooms of Talking Points Memo, Gawker, The Daily Telegram and The Spokesman Review. (See Telegram video above.)

Very effective use of short video clips in Stewart's blog, among other things.

The State of the News Media 2009:
"Online Journalists Optimistic About Revenue and Technology, Concerned About Changing Values"

"Journalists who work online are more optimistic about the future of their profession than are news people tied to more traditional media platforms, but at best their optimism is an uneasy one, according a new survey of members of the Online News Association produced by the Association and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism."

New Ways to Read the Times

NYTimes.com has an experimental new interface intended to simulate Sunday Times tabletop browsing.

Says the FirstLook blog:

"Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

"With this in mind, we present an as-yet-unnamed article skimmer. Think of it as an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime. Of course, there are parts we can’t replicate: the satisfying crinkle of the paper; the circular stain of your coffee; the smell of newsprint."

The prototype ArticleSkimmer gives you 17 "section" pages, each a 5x4 display of story summaries in 19 boxes -- one double-size at the top. You browse from section to section with the space bar and can choose stories with the mouse or a keyboard shortcut.

Hold down the letter "a" for "article," and numbers appear in all the story boxes. Type the number to load a story. (I learned about the shortcuts by clicking a question mark at the top of the page.)

It's fast. It's easy. It's free, and no ads jump out at you until you go to a story page. Presumably "monetizing" this interface somehow will come along if the word "prototype" drops out of the address.

If the traditional newspaper section names (World, U.S., Politics, Technology, Sports etc.) aren't your style, try Dave Winer's "river of news" approach, the time-stamped latest items from Times RSS feeds, at nytimesriver.com

(Dave's blog, Scripting News, is where I heard about the Times article skimmer item.)

Related -- the Times also has expanded the ways that Web developers can make use of Times material. For an only slightly technical discussion, see this Poynter.com column on what the developers call the Times Article Search API.

New media tools Sprouting on Web

Thanks to a Facebook post by Paul Jones at UNC, I'm taking a first look at Sprout Builder, a Web2.0 tool for sharing multimedia content.

Paul pointed to some Sprouts by Howard Rheingold, whom I expect to be ahead of the curve and teaching about it. I also see that Sproutbuilder is already in use by Gannett newspapers, so here's my first attempt at embedding a Sprout in Blogger:

Cybergeeks Goosing the Gray Lady?

New York magazine has great fun with headlines... I borrowed a couple of key words for mine from its fascinating article about The New York Times online development team and what New York's Emily Nussbaum says may be "the only happy story in journalism."

The article discusses some new features I hadn't been paying attention to at http://nyt.com (or http://nytimes.com -- in this age of Internet journalism even "main stream media" can be flexible about its identity).

For Emily's full magazine story (a few thousands words, plus comments), see: The Renegades at the New York Times

Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

Speaking of change and evolution in the media, New York magazine traces its roots to the Sunday magazine of the old Herald Tribune. See my December item, Historic magazine archive via Google. The magazine kept going after the daily paper stopped publishing in 1967. (For more of its history, try its Wikipedia page.)

12.5 Tips from a year ago

A search of journalism-related sites at MediaGeeks.org led me to a vague comment I'd made on a page that eventually led to this January 2007 item, which I'd forgotten about.

It will be worth discussing and arguing about in my January 2008 classes if I post a reminder here... which is also a "stealth" way of point people to MediaGeeks.org

12 and a half rules to be a good journalist

Briefly, they are:
12. DO WHAT YOU LOVE
11. WAKE UP ANGRY, AMBITIOUS
10. DON’T BE THE LOYAL MEMBER OF ANY PARTY, GROUP, CLUB, NGO
9. BE CATHOLIC OF WRITERS AND WRITING
8. FIND YOURSELF A ROLE-MODEL/MENTOR
7. BE A THRIVER, NOT A SURVIVOR
6. NEVER WORK WITH SUCCESS/ REWARD IN MIND
5. WRITE, DRAW, SHOOT, CREATE EVERY DAY
4. KEEP LEARNING EVERY DAY
3. FEAR NOBODY, QUESTION EVERYTHING
2. NEVER BE EMBARRASSED TO ASK STUPID QUESTIONS
1. CHASE YOUR DREAM
1/2 If POSSIBLE MARRY OUTSIDE THE PROFESSION

Another bit of stealth-educational broaden-your-horizons linkage: The list's origin/inspiration link to the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media.

Reporter's notes on writing a profile

...and profile subject's response

Constance Loizos got interested in Halsey Minor when she read a Virginia newspaper story saying he was interested in running for governor. She wondered what part his Silicon Valley reputation might play.

Here's her interview about reporting the story...

And here's the story, CNET Founder Halsey Minor Profile - Executive Articles - Portfolio.com:
"The Baddest Boy in Silicon Valley"

C.E.O. Halsey Minor is a successful entrepreneur with a lovely family. So why do so many of his former tech-world colleagues revile him?"

Minor, who 15 years ago founded the tech-news company CNET, the first Web-content company to go public, was interviewed in Charlottesville, where he still has a home.

Bonus: After you read the article, don't miss the comments -- including a critique signed "Halsey Minor."

I ought to read "Portfolio" more often... Luckily, I got to this issue via Waldo Jaquith's blog after starting out with his RSS tips, which I got to from richmondsunlight.com while looking for sites about public information in Virginia. I'm always relieved when my hypertext-r-us linking around leads to something timely for one of my classes... and both public records and profile writing are on the agenda this month.