Topix Editor News

Living in Los Angeles, I've discovered that the biggest movie fans anywhere are the people who work in the film industry. (Okay, I've also heard many times the easy joke about them having plenty of time to see movies, 'cause so many of them are usually out of work.) But you can find the same affinity in many fields. My wife is a professional violinist, and her music industry friends have the largest CD and MP3 collections I've ever seen - and not just classical, but rock, pop, jazz, blues, funk and show tunes, too.

Put your site online, without much money or tech effort, using these blog and content management tools.

To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting and your storytelling. All of these applications are low-cost. Most are free, though some ask you to pay to access advanced functionality. All are free of spyware and adware, as far as we know (though it is always good to do an Internet search on anything you download and install to be sure). And each should make the work of creating great journalism online at least a little easier.

The biggest challenge facing the journalism industry today is not declining readership, the economy or even the Internet – it is the increased competition that the Internet has made possible.

People are reading, offline and on. People continue to demand information about the communities and their world. Despite the crashing housing market and turmoil in credit markets, billions of dollars are flowing through the American advertising and media industries. (See OJR's link last week to the latest Pew Report on the state of the news media for support for those statements.) Continue reading...

A Knight Digital Media Center conference brought together leading newspaper editorial writers to explore ways to make their opinion pages engaging and relevant again.

A generation ago, the local newspaper editorial page provided the highest-profile forum for discussions about community issues. Editorial writers would research opinion pieces, staff and guest columnists offered their thoughts and local residents would add their voices in the letters to the editor section.

Then the Internet arrived, and the civic discourse shifted, as readers turned to local discussion boards, political blogs and community e-mail lists to talk about the issues affecting them. The newspaper-sanctioned forum grew up, moved out, and became a true community conversation. Now, some newspaper editorial board leaders are responding, seeking Web-friendly ways to restore their opinion sections' relevance. Continue reading...

Hey, this 'readers as fact-checkers' thing is catching on. Even at J-schools. OJR spoke to David Spett about the media response to his 'big scoop' about the Medill dean's use of anonymous student quotes.

Medill senior David Spett, 22, has rocketed to the center of journalism ethics discussions at j-schools nationwide following his column on Medill Dean John Levine's use of three anonymous student quotes complimenting an advertising course in last Spring's Northwestern University alumni magazine. Spett, writing that "Nearly every guide to journalism ethics says anonymous quotes should be avoided," went ahead and did some digging. He called all 29 students in the 2007 course and asked if the quotation Levine attributed to an unnamed classmember was theirs. Despite being promised total privacy by Spett, none claimed the words as their own. Continue reading...

We test five services to find which one, if any, can produce an interactive photo gallery suitable for a news website.

Flash photo galleries have been delivering traffic to news websites for years. Colorful, dynamic, engaging -- the galleries can help enliven a Web page and keep readers lingering on a site.

But you don't need to have a Flash developer on staff to build a Flash photo gallery. Nor do you need to pay for a point-and-click photo gallery development tool. Several "Web 2.0" start-ups have developed easy-to-use free photo gallery development tools, primarily to help younger Web readers trick out their MySpace and Facebook profiles with personal slide shows.

Yeah. I know. You don't want your photo gallery to feature star wipes, a glitter background, some unsigned band's alt-rock clip for a soundtrack and enough image movement to make the whole thing look like a promotional trailer for "Cloverfield 2." But if you take some time to select non-deafult layout options, some of the free slideshow services allow you to create Flash photo galleries that would fit well on many news websites. Continue reading...

Late last year, I urged OJR readers not to forget the value of hyperlinking, to look for opportunities to link their stories to supporting information elsewhere on the Web. Today, I'd like to continue with that topic and write a bit about the thought process behind link content, that is, the decision about which text within an article to link, and to where. Continue reading...

One my student editors here at OJR forwarded to me at New York Times piece reporting the latest complaints about Facebook's policy toward its users who wish to cancel their memberships and delete their Continue reading...

As our newsrooms shrink, journalists working the education beat are often among the hardest hit. Not only are they working with fewer resources, but, due to newsroom restructuring, education writers often answer to editors who don’t fully understand the bureaucratic nuances of the school systems. To combat this problem, the Education Writers Association announced in December the creation of a new position, a Public Editor, to serve as an additional resource for education journalists. This week, the EWA announced the hiring of Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post education reporter and currently a freelance writer and book author (see her CJR essay about why she left the Post to write books, here), to fill the unique new role.

As public editor, Perlstein will coach individual reporters, offering guidance on sourcing and content knowledge, and coordinating with their editors to assure that her work complements what they are doing. She will also write a regular column—to be published on the EWA Web site—monitoring the state of education coverage in newsrooms across the country. Perlstein discussed the state of that coverage with CJR’s Megan Garber. Continue reading...

Google Reader is well-known for its keyboard shortcuts. When going through thousands of blog posts, news items, photos, etc. a day, it's important to do this as efficiently as possible. Many users find that using the keyboard is one way of accomplishing that goal.

The "j" key (which takes you to the next item) is perhaps the most well-known keyboard shortcut. However, there are many more keys to press, and I was curious to see just how much they were tapped in Google Reader. A quick analysis later, I came up with a simple top-10 list, and I thought it would be fun to share. The units here are "milli-Js", where 1,000 milli-Js are equivalent to all the presses "j" received. Continue reading...

Readers love information. Whether that's a police blotter, local bulletin board, school lunch schedule or gripping story in the local paper -- they don't care about the format. Readers just want it to be accurate, relevant and complete. Without anything misleading or extraneous, either.

Noted journalist/programmer/Web guru Adrian Holovaty just launched his latest project, the Knight News Challenge-funded EveryBlock. As the site's name implies, it strives to provide information about every block of the three cities it covers: New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Included data might include crime reports, civic inspections and filings, even geotagged Flickr photos. Continue reading...

Imagine a place where journalists could pitch stories as soon as they hit 'save.' Where editors could snap them up just as quickly for printing in tomorrow's paper. Imagine a reporting network built on trust, where both editors and journalists could accrete bodies of work tagged with endorsements and feedback. Is an eBay of news viable? And ultimately, will it deliver news to readers more quickly and more cheaply? Continue reading...

This is an interesting blog post from Google engineer Mihai Parparita on how RSS readers are very helpful. I was recently introduced to the Google Reader myself and have to admit-I love it!

As an engineer on Google Reader, it's always great to hear from users, especially when it's about how Reader has helped out. I was very happy when the team received this email from Gary Patino:

I was having a hard time finding the right job here in Houston. Days would go by without talking to a single recruiter. But then I started using Google Reader to subscribe to custom-made job search feeds for craigslist, and for oodle.com (which already aggregates feeds from thousands of other classified ad websites).
Soon I found myself flying all over the country interviewing for jobs. The employers always pay for the flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. My job hunt became like an exciting vacation! I've been to New York twice, Milwaukee, Austin, Los Angeles, and Miami. I just accepted an offer in Manhattan with a very competitive salary offer. Google Reader saved me a huge amount of time and effort with the job hunt. Thanks guys!

Gary's experience is a great reminder about the power of feeds. Feeds exist for all sort of information beyond blog and news sites and are a great way to receive timely updates. Here are some more examples of these atypical feed uses: Continue reading...

The best online newswriting differs from print newswriting; and journalism students can, and should, learn those differences. This week, I talked with my graduate online journalism class at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism about the differences in form and style between online and traditional print newswriting.

Since so much news on the Web is simply repurposed from print newspaper and magazines, one might question the need to teach online as a distinct writing skill. But just because too many news organizations fail to take full advantage of the medium's opportunities does not mean those opportunities do not exist. Online publishing offers at least four unique writing formats for journalism, and savvy online reporters ought to learn how to write in ways that enmesh their work within the robust context of the World Wide Web. And... to do so swiftly, to remain viable in the far more competitive online publishing market. To that end, I wrapped up the class with a competitive exercise that took my students by surprise.

I don't use textbooks in my classes (college students have enough expenses as it is), opting instead to direct students to readings available free online. To prepare for this week's class, I asked my students to read Mindy McAdams' guide to online newswriting, as well as OJR's wiki on the topic. I would recommend both resources to any journalist eager to improve his/her online writing skills.

Outside the traditional print-derived story format, online journalists write in blogs, wikis and discussion forums. They are also often called upon to write heads, decks and short article summaries that fuel RSS feeds and e-mail newsletters. Continue reading about Unique online writing formats...

If you are new to the site, or are new to blogging in general, you may not know a whole lot about RSS and Blogs. That’s Ok, truthfully just a couple years ago I did not either. It took a couple of things to happen to launch what we now know as the “blogosphere”.

First of all there was XML and RSS two technologies that made it easy to do a couple of things. Simply put XML made website code more uniform and more search friendly to search engines like Google. RSS or (Rich Site Summary aka. Real Simple syndication) made it possible for a web page content, especially blog content to be picked up and “read” by many other programs like Google’s blog reader and Microsoft Outlook to name a few (there are thousands). This allows people, not just web designers, to make websites, that people can easily subscribe to and read as new content is published. This sparked a revolution of how information is delivered to end users.

Editorial issues are always up for debate -- you can look at multiple style guides and get conflicting opinions.

Take a look at a good newspaper or magazine and just read the headlines. What draws you in -- what makes you want to read a particular story? What's the trick? Here are a couple of ideas: Use Action Verbs.