Resources

Writing summaries (short article)

News and notes

Audio slide shows. Web journalism students should learn how to produce an audio slide show. These things are not easy to do in that they require students to select pictures for a slide sequence and write a script that will be recorded for that sequence. But they are certainly well within a student's grasp. This article on JPROF lays out some of the principles to following in producing an audio slide show.

There is also a practice assignment that students can use to learn how to select and sequence photos and how to write a script. The assignment includes pictures and information for a script.

More (Posted Feb. 28, 2007)

Discussion notes: Editing for the web. Do you need to talk with your editing students about the special considerations of editing for the web? Do you need to get your online journalism students up to speed as editors? JPROF.com has put together some discussion notes that you can use to introduce your editors to some of the things they will need to thing about in editing for the web, things such as linking, wordiness, chunking, pull quotes and other devices. More. (Posted Feb. 7, 2007)

Editing for the web. The web is a different medium. Then why do we keep seeing so much shovelware -- articles that were written for print -- on news web sites. One reason, of course, is that news organizations (particularly newspapers) do not invest in enough people who can change print stories into web-friendly packages. Another is that editors do not understand the needs or possibilities of the web. To get my students shifted from print to the web, I have developed this example of how a print story can be turned into a web story. (Posted Sept. 14, 2006)

Sometimes photos don't help. If you know what you are after online, images don't make much difference. That's the implication of some of the research on how users use the web that has been reported this week. Laura Ruel, writing for E-Media Tidbits, Poynter's weblog about online journalism, has several helpful reports about research presented by Neilson-Norman Group (Jakob Neilson). Users tend to look at images that are
• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain "approachable" people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women -- really!)
• Items a user may want to buy.
(Posted June 25, 2006)

Learning HTML. Instructors of web journalism classes face a dilemma in how much HTML they should teach or require that their students should know, especially since many of us use web editors (Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc.) or content management systems to produce web sites. There are occasions, of course, when some use of HTML is required even when you are using these tools. My approach is that students should be comfortable with the basics of HTML so they can begin to figure out the tags if it is necessary. To that end, I have developed a couple of exercises (exercise 1, exercise 2) designed to help student get inside HTML and understand what is going on with tags. Anyone teaching web journalism is welcome to use them. Let me know how they work. (Posted Jan. 17, 2006)

GoogleMaps mania. The ability of web site developers to put a customized GoogleMap on their web sites is creating quiet a stir these days, including a story this week on National Public Radio that includes an interview with Mike Pegg, creator of a GoogleMapsMania, weblog that tracks the use of GoogleMaps. The implications and possibilities of using GoogleMaps for web journalism are enormous. (Check out a GoogleMap of all the murders in Rochester, N.Y., in 2005 that was built by the folks at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.) Still, at present, GoogleMaps is intimidating because a knowledge of javascript is require. A beacon of hope has begun to shine, however. Mapbuilder.net, developed by Andriy Bidochko, gives us javascript-challenged users an easier way to get our custom-built maps onto our web sites.
More (Posted Jan. 14, 2006)

Another aspect of immediacy. One of the five characteristics of the web -- identified and explained in Web Journalism -- is immediacy, the ability to post information quickly. With the growth of the blogosphere, this charactertistic has taken on another aspect: the ability of people to pass information around quickly, even if it isn't true and doesn't make sense. Frank Ahrens, in his Washington Post Web Watch column, has a good example. He cites the case of what happened to Wal-Mart last week.
More (Posted Jan. 9, 2006)

Truthdig.com -- taking advantage of the web. Too many quality news 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)

Newspaper of the future. The New York Times devoted a great deal of space in its business section last month to a profile of the newspaper in Lawrence, Kan. The paper is devoting many resources to building an innovative set of web sites -- innovation that is a part of the newspaper's history and tradition. The Times article provoked online media guru and newspaper critic Vin Crosbie to identify six trends that newspapers should use in planning their future: multimedia, unlimited depth, depackaging, on-demand content, individualization, mobility and ubiquity.
More (Posted July 26, 2005)

Communities of interest. The ideal sounds great: a group of people who share an interest in a topic are able to exchange information and ideas about it over the internet. Time and geography are overcome. Such communities of interest would be informative, respectful and self-regulating. That was what I described in Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium several years ago. But Michael Kinsley's recent experience (described in his weekly column "Cybercreeps run amok") has had a very different experience. So have I.
More (Posted July 25, 2005)

Is AP writing its own obit? The Associated Press has announced that it will start charging news organizations for placing its content on their web sites in 2006. The AP -- a cooperative owned by its members -- has softened the financial blow to its customers by promising that it will adjust its rates downward at the same time. This move, apparently, is to establish the principle that AP can lay on an extra charge for the use of its content in online venues. Because AP has no peer in the newsgathering world -- no organization comes close to the coverage that AP can provide -- this is an important and farreaching move, but it has drawn relatively little comment so far. No one seems to know exactly what the implications are. An exception is an Online Journalism Review article by Bob Benz and Mike Phillips of the Scripps corportation, who say AP is "planting the seeds of its own demise." Benz and Phillips go on to propose an alternative to the way AP is viewing news and news distribution. (Posted May 1, 2005)

Another take on permanence. 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)

Ten years later. Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, has written a sweeping and perceptive critique of the way the web is being used by journalists for the Online Journalism review. Her method has been to take the promises (and hopes) that many people expressed for the web as a news medium some 10 years ago at the New News seminar hosted by the Poynter Institute and compare those with the realities of news presentation on the web now. She deals with the web's capacity, its ability to link to other information, the potential for new story forms, and a number of other issues. In most cases, she finds that web journalism has not lived up to its promises, and she explores some of the reasons for these shortcomings. But one of the striking things about the article is that the potential for many of these promises still exists -- if only we had publishers, editors and reporters willing to reach for them. (Posted March 31, 2005)

The web 'aweaving. The Pew Research Center has produced a number of reports about the internet in our lives, and a summary of that topic is now available on Pew's web site (and also on this site as a PDF file). It is part of a larger report called "Trends 2005" that combines and analyzes many of the studies the Pew Center has conducted. The information and conclusions it draws about how the web has woven itself into the fabric of our lives and behavior are fascinating and worth a closer here. Here's a wrap-up (with a few personal interpretations). (Posted Feb. 15, 2005)

Journalists and bloggers. Some bloggers are journalists. Some journalists are bloggers. By and large, however, the groups don’t overlap that much. Yet each group is doing much the same thing – disseminating information, ideas, opinions, etc. Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor and Publisher and the editor of E-Media Tidbits for Poynter.org, has written a pair of articles on the Poynter web site on what each group can learn from each other. They are titled just that:

• What Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers

• What Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists

Here’s a summary of what he says: (Posted Jan. 17, 2005)

Sources for web journalism. Three of the best sources for keeping up with the rapidly changing world of web journalism are Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Cyberjournalist.net and Online Journalism Review. E-Media Tidbits is a weblog with about two dozen contributors and is edited by Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor and Publisher magazine and a true expert in online journalism. Cyberjournalist.net is the work of Jonathan Dube, the managing producer at MSNBC.com, and is distributed by the American Press Institute’s Media Center. Dube has fantastic understanding of the web and a wide range of sourses. Online Journalism Review has an excellent stable of writers who go into depth about relevant issues surrounding web journalism. Each of these sites offers an email newsletter.

Growth in blogging. Three years ago, the vast majority of Internet users didn't know what a web log was or what blogging meant. That has changed -- dramatically, according to a study by the Pew Internet Project. Most of the nation's 120 million Internet users (62 percent) still don't know what a blog is, but among those who do, it's becoming increasingly important. The study says that 7 percent of all Internet users have created a web log (which translates to about 8 million people), and 27 percent of all users say they read blogs. Web logs grew in importance during the 2004 election campaign, but they were growing in numbers before that as people has discovered that they are a good way to share information. The Pew report is available on this site as a PDF file. (It's four pages long.) (Posted Jan. 13, 2004)

Teaching online journalism resources. Mindy McAdams, who is quickly reaching the status of a guru of online journalism, has put together an exceptional list of teaching resources for those who want to conduct courses or units on online journalism. She did this for the Online Journalism Review.

Writing summaries. One of the forms of writing that has emerged with the development of the web as a news medium is the summary. A summary is not a lead paragraph. It tries to do more -- to give the reader an abbreviated but more complete idea of an article than the lead paragraph, which simply emphasizes the most important information. Good summaries help the reader decide whether or not to delve into an article. Summaries can be divided into three categories, as this short article explains.

---

About JPROF.com | Who is JPROF? | Contact us
All of the words and images on this site are copyrighted and may not be used without the permission.
Copyright © Jim Stovall 2005
FreeFind.com provides search technology for this website.