OJR’s Online Lessons From ‘07

Breaking news blogs, widgets, interaction, crowdsourcing and investigative reporting - the five features news sites should build on in 2008?

They are according to Online Journalism Review (OJR), which claims these are the key areas which online news providers should address when learning the lessons of 2007.

OJR states that events such as the wildfires in Los Angeles have illustrated the importance of a breaking news blog for a website as it enables staff to publish up-to-the-minute details and allows newspapers to compete with broadcast media.

Second on the agenda for 2008 according to OJR should be “get widget love”, which basically involves using online tools like photos, video, maps and hyperlinking to enliven reporting.

Third: It’s welcome news for the sports hacks as OJR asserts that other reporters should take inspiration from them when it comes to building online communities and encouraging interaction with users.

“Sports provides the best training ground for managing readers’ comments, its columnists transition well to blogging, and sports desks tend to have many writers and editors who are heavy Web users themselves, allowing them to bring all the pieces together in compelling and heavily read Web productions.”

OJR says the fourth lesson to be learned from 2007 is that getting users to produce content traditionally produced by journalists is simply not working.

Instead, it suggests crowdsourcing and other information-gathering techniques are the future of user-generated content and can provide the foundations for special reports and breaking news stories.

And finally, OJR issues a call to arms to all reporters to use the coming year as an opportunity to work towards the reinvention of investigative journalism, or as OJR puts it: “Call out the liars”.

“Readers today are drowning in lies … the news sites that prosper in 2008 and beyond will be the ones that do not leave their readers hanging with ‘he said, she said’ coverage, but that report aggressively to reveal to readers who’s lying and who is telling the truth.”