Bruce Clary's List: Online Journalism

• the journalist of the future is a reporter, a video journalist, a photo-journalist, audio journalist and interactive designer, all-in-one. They shoot and edit films, audio slideshows, podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, and longer articles.  They may have one specialism out of those, but can go somewhere and cover a story in a multitude of platforms.

   

  They may start off hiring the kit, but eventually will become a one-person news operation, with their own cameras, audio recorders and editing equipment.

   

  They don’t just do it because it potentially means more revenue; they do it because they love telling stories in different ways. And let’s get another thing straight: they still live and breathe the key qualities of journalism: curiosity, accuracy and a desire to root out good stories and tell the truth.

  • This is the reason MC has added two multimedia storytelling classes to its comm curriculum and requires Web design of all majors.
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• the journalist of the future should know several languages, two of which should be XHTML and CSS
• the journalist of the future knows there’s more money and more audiences in a niche. So they become more of a specialist in some areas, or use a current specialism to build an audience around what they do.
• The journalist of the future will be born out of this recession and the death of traditional journalism.
• They embrace new technologies, rather than view them as a threat

• most importantly they do the thing all journalists have ever done: tell stories. But they do it better than traditional journalists because they are not so constrained by time or house styles or formulas. They understand what makes a good story and aren’t afraid to break some rules.

   

  And they have the time to tell the stories properly: truthfully, accurately and responsibly.

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• crowdsourcing might, in the end, have more of an effect on all forms of journalism than anything else that's come out of the online journalism revolution
• Crowdsourcing, in journalism, is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or team of reporters, but through some automated agent, such as a website.

  Stripped to its core, though, it's still just another way of reporting, one that will stand along the traditional "big three" of interviews, observation and examining documents.
• Unlike more traditional notions of "citizen journalism," crowdsourcing does not ask readers to become anything more than what they've always been: eyewitnesses to their daily lives.

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• he world’s largest social networking site can be invaluable to journalists. Facebook gives reporters a means to connect with communities involved with stories, find sources, and generate leads.
• Facebook was useful in this case as a lead generation tool.
• reporters have begun using their Facebook friends to help hone questions for interview subjects, to discover sources for articles who they didn’t know existed, or to learn about issues or events that turn into full-blown stories.
• Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO) service that connects journalists to sources and is one of the most useful source finding tools in a reporter’s arsenal, was actually launched as a Facebook group in November 2007. The group allowed him to secure an initial base of members to whom he could push out queries. Reporters would email him with what they needed, and he would send messages to the group,

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• News videos fall into three categories: rebroadcasts of current material; original videos and distribution of news; and archive of older video footage.
• Tapping the Crowd to Create Original Content
• Running YouTube clips uploaded by individuals as part of a news story is a much more important and effective use of YouTube for news purposes than using the site as a distribution channel,

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• Based on variations in the above, we can identify five broad types of wiki journalism:

   
   
  • ‘Second draft’ wikis: a ‘second stage’ piece of journalism, during which readers can edit an article produced in-house (Wired article, Esquire, LA Times wikitorial)
   
  • Crowdsourcing wiki: a means of covering material which could not have been produced in-house (probably for logistical reasons), but which becomes possible through wiki technology (San Diego Tribune’s AmpliPedia; Wired How To Wiki)
   
  • Supplementary wiki: a supplement to a piece of original journalism, an ‘add-on’: “A tab to a story that says: Create a wiki for related stories” (Francisco, 2006) (CNET’s India Tech Wiki; parts of the Wired How To Wiki)
   
  • Open wiki: an open space, whose subject matter is decided by the user, and where material may be produced that would not otherwise have been commissioned (Wikinews)
   
  • Logistical wiki: a wiki limited to in-house contributors which enables multiple authorship, and may also facilitate transparency, and/or an ongoing nature (Dewey Answers; N&Opedia)