The coming launch of the political news web site Politico has drawn much attention from those who wonder about its longevity (see the latest New York Times article about it; and an earlier one). I have no idea about how long it will last -- though, being a political news junkie, I hope it will be for a long time -- but I am fascinated by the ideas that its founders have about how it should be structured and how it should operate. More (Posted Jan. 9, 2007)

Photos you can use. Finding usable photographs --

Web polls. A web poll can be a quick and handy way of getting readers more involved with your web site. The polls are certainly popular given the number of people who respond to them. Fortunately, it doesn't take much time or money to generate such a web poll if you use one of the free services that is available. In this short article, we describe one of those services and how to integrate it into your web site.
More (Posted April 7, 2006)

The art of linking. Linking is one of the most powerful tools the web offers to journalists. With relatively little effort, journalists can use links to expand their stories and enhance the experience of the readers. Yet very few journalists or news web sites take advantage of this opportunity. Here are a few thoughts about this tool and how to use it.
More (Posted Feb. 21, 2006)

De-exiling the web site. We may be getting past the days when the newspaper's web site was a small group of techies exiled to a different floor -- or even a different building -- of the news organization. USA Today announced today that it is bringing its web site staff in from the cold and will be intergrating it with the paper's newsroom. The announcement makes the point that story planning will include the web site now. The paper's press release attributes executives as saying "the move to combine the newsrooms is a response to the growing importance of the Internet as a vehicle for news delivery. The new structure will allow both operations to begin working together to make the transition from a world of stand-alone news products to one in which news is available where, when and how consumers desire." Other news organizations should "recognize the growing importance of the Internet." They should have done it years ago, of course. (Posted Dec. 13, 2005)

Truthdig.com -- taking advantage of the web. Too many good quality web sites still have the look and feel of the newspaper from which they sprang, or the newspapers that the editors and producers used to work for. They often do not take advantage of their medium -- its immediacy, capacity, flexbility, permanence and interactivity. They ignore even the simplest and most powerful tools of the web, such as linking. Some sites, however, are trying to break that mold. One such site is Truthdig.com, an investigative reporting site begun by Robert Sheer, a columnist who was recently bounced by the Los Angeles Times in an ill-conceived cost-cutting move. Sheer and Truthdig.com are profiled in a recent Online Journalism Review article, in which Sheer is quoted as saying, "We're not pitted against old media. What we are pitted against the model old media is trapped in. We wanted to stand as an alternative model to what's going on on the Internet." It's that "old model" that many journalists today can't get away from. (Posted Dec. 7, 2005)

The New York Times charges for the wrong thing. Many of us would gladly pay for the New York Times. Now, with the installation of Times Select, we're getting that chance. The Times is charging for access to its columnists, and with the subscription comes open access to its archives (a good deal). But the Times leaves its most valuable product open and free to anyone who wants to register. More (Posted September 25, 2005)

The Digital Divide still lives. Going rural more than likely means going dial-up. That's what Steven Levy, technology columnist for Newsweek magazine, found this summer when he took some time off in the Berkshires. (I found the same thing when I retreated to the farm in East Tennessee.) High speed Internet access was not available, and that's a problem -- not just for us geeks. More (Posted Aug. 16, 2005)

Permanence and the web. Permanence is one of the five most important characteristics of the web (the other four being capacity, immediacy, flexibility, and interactivity), as explained in chapter 1 of Web Journalism. Until now. it has not been the subject of much discussion. But a high-level conference on blogging and journalism at Harvard University last week has spurred thinking about one part of the idea of permanence – archiving.

Many major news organizations, beginning with the New York Times, charge for accessing files that are more than a week or two old. Placing these files behind a tollgate has some important implications for the web and the activities that it has engendered. (More on this.) (Posted Jan. 30, 2005)
Update: Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review has just posted an article on this topic that gives a more in-depth explanation of the view of newspapers that charge for their archieves. One of the article's conclusions is that while the revenue gained from archive sales and afer-market database sales (such as LexisNexis) is not huge, it is significant, and most news organizations do not want to give that up. (Posted Feb. 3, 2005)
Update: A few weeks ago, we posted a short piece on the permanence of the web, commenting that this is one of the great strengths of the web. Information does not deterioate. If we lose information (and we've certainly lost a lot), it's deliberate or through operator error. News web sites need to do a better job of keeping up with their information, and one of the great debates in online journalism now is how (or if) the files of a news web site should be open free of charge to the public. Now there's another problem: losing data because our systems for retrieval go out of date. Victoria McCargar, a senior editor for the Los Angeles Times, has written about this for the Seybold Report.

Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly clear that information stored digitally is terribly fragile. Newspapers periodically run stories about this phenomenon and give good coverage to heroic data rescue efforts, such as the British project to salvage the Digital Domesday Book, or conundrums, like the difficulties museums are having curating digital works of art. But there appears to be a mysterious disconnect when it comes to another group with an important cultural stake in long-term preservation: newspaper archives.

More (Posted April 4, 2005)

Put your news on the pod. Podcasting is one of the new terms in online journalism. It simply means putting news and information into an audio MP3 format and making it available to folks who own MP3 players – millions of them. News web sites, particularly broadcast sites where this is a natural, are beginning to use this method to reach those who want to do more than just listen to music on their MP3 players, according to Jonathan Dube, Cyberjournalist.net. (In addition to the MP3 players, there are lots of cellphones that have MP3 capability.) Dube cites an article in Digital-Lifestyles.info that says the BBC used this method for extending one of its programs late last year, and the file got 100,000 downloads. The technology and technique are not confined to broadcasters, of course. Any news outlet can create these files and offer them to an audience that might not otherwise be exposed to its content. (The term "podcasting" comes from Apple’s iPod, which dominates the world of MP3 players.) (Posted Jan. 25, 2005)
Update: Cyberjournalist has posted more information on the growing phenomenon of podcasting. As a result of the success of podcasting for the radio show On the Media, WNYC is going to start making another of its shows available as an MP3 download. The WNYC news release announcing this plan says the podcasting of On the Media has added significantly to the show's audience:

“Podcasting is a remarkable boon for local radio broadcasts,” added Phil Redo, VP of Station Operations and Strategy. “This easy-to-access, easy-to-use technology allows local programming to transcend the limitations of both traditional radio and online streaming, by allowing users to plug into great programming from far-flung places, anytime, anywhere.”

WNYC launched the first podcast of an NPR program in January 2005 to great success. NPR’s On the Media, the station’s nationally-broadcast media analysis show, has doubled the amount of listeners it reaches online in just four weeks. OTM's podcast audience now rivals the number of individuals that would enjoy the program in a mid-sized media market like St. Louis or Kansas City.

(That is an interesting way to describe the growth int he audience. It would have been nice had the writer of the press release also used some real numbers.) (Posted Feb. 12, 2005)

A new approach to copyright. Most people understand one of the ideas beyond copyright laws, but they do not get the other one. The first idea is to give some protection to the creator or owner of a copyrightable work and to make sure that person has some control over its use and, possibly, value. The second idea is to limit that protection so that eventually the creative work – whatever it is – would go into the public domain. The U.S. Constitution gives to Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8)

For limited times, the Constitution says, not forever.

But over the last four decades, Congress has extended the time an owner can hold a copyright 11 times, so that now if a copyright is held by an individual, it lasts for that individual’s life plus 70 years, and in some cases corporations may hang onto copyrights even longer. In the age of the Internet, that approach to protecting copyrighted works is becoming less and less workable.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, has been arguing against these lengthy copyrights for many years. (He led an unsuccessful challenge to the current copyright law and argued his point, unsuccessfully, before the U.S. Supreme Court.) He wants to bring back more of a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the general that having works in the public domain does. To that end, he and others at Stanford have formed Creative Commons, a web site that allows writers, photographers, illustrations, etc., to post their works and to specify how much copyright protection they would like. For instance, a photographer may post a picture and say that anyone can use it as long as the photographer is credited.

Creative Commons is the subject of an article in the Online Journalism Review by Linda Seebach. The article explains in more detail how this works and the thinking behind it. For publishers and editors of high school and college media, this site could provide material that can be used without fear of conscience or law. (Posted Jan. 23, 2005)

Goings-on in Greensboro. Someone once described change in the newspaper industry as occurring at two speeds: slow and stop. Change seems to be occurring in Greensboro, N.C., with the News-Record giving some serious consideration to re-capturing readers with a web site that it wants to become the town's electronic "public square." (See note below.) What the editors are doing has become the talk of the online journalism world and is described in two articles, one by Poynter.org and the other in the Business Journal of the Triad. In the Poynter article, N-R editor John Robineson describes how his thinking evolved toward using weblogs to gain readership:

I had seen the readership data about our paper that show that we dominate with readers over 45, but that we are weak with readers under 30. I'd been thinking about that for months. Meanwhile, I've been reading bloggers for a couple years. We have an active blogging community in Greensboro and many bloggers write about civic affairs. We've mined their sites for news items to put into the paper. That taught me about the potential and opportunities of the medium. I started blogging about the newspaper about five months ago and discovered that, not only was it not difficult, but that it connected with an audience that I just wasn't reaching in the newspaper.

The newspaper has promised to roll out a new web site design in February that will allow some of the idea's the editors are considering to take shape. We will be taking a look at what they come up with. (Posted Jan. 20, 2005)

The news web site as 'public square.' Lex Alexander of the Greensboro News and Record has made a persuasive case and presented his editors with some innovative ideas about how to make the N&R's web site more transparent and more of a "public square." Alexander cites a number of significant instances where bloggers changed the news media's agenda recently, among them: Trent Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond, which eventually got Lott bounced as Senate majority leader; the Swift Boat Veterans criticism of John Kerry's service record and then their ties to the Bush campaign; and most famously the CBS's 60 Minutes story on memos concerning George W. Bush's National Guard service. Alexander argues that these and other instances mean that the nature of news is changing and people at the newspaper would do well to understand what is happening and what the audiences is coming to expect.

Particularly with the growing popularity of blogs, online audiences expect to have a say -- not total control, but a say -- in what we cover, and how, and why. There will still be a place for the serendipitous story and the involved investigative report. But we need to reflect on the year just past to see where we need to head.

Alexander's entire memo -- along with the comments he has received about it -- has been posted on the News and Record web site and is well worth reading. (Posted Jan. 19, 2005)

Accelerated news. The chapter begins with the example of the capture of Saddam Hussein (right) in December 2003. The news came early on Sunday morning, after most newspapers in America had been printed. There would not be another newspaper for 24 hours. The example shows how newspapers, bound by their printing schedules, can be far behind the news. What other examples since Saddam's capture can you think of that leave newspapers behind? How have they responded?

State of online news media. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced an extensive report on the state of the news media in 2004. One section deals with the online news media and begins this way:

Although the economics are still evolving, the Internet has now become a major source of news in America.

In September 2003, over half of the people in the United States - 150 million - went online, a record for Web use. (1) And half to two-thirds of those who go online use it at least some of the time to get news.

Whether the new medium is replacing the old, however, at this point is less clear. . . . (More)

Keeping up. If you are interested in keeping up with the latest developments of the web as a news medium, you should subscribe to the daily email newsletter E-Media Tidbits. The newsletter is edited by Steve Outing, and you can subscribe to it at the Poynter Institute web site (http://www.poynter.org). Many new ideas about the web will occur even during the time you are reading this book. E-Media Tidbits is a great way of staying current with those ideas.