Awards To Honour Breaking News

The finalists for the Online Journalism Awards have been announced and a total of ten sites have been nominated for breaking news coverage.

Award nominees compete in categories with websites of a similar size and this year sees three titles up for the breaking news prize for a small site.

They are: The Daily Astorian for coverage of the Gearhart Plane Crash; The Desert Sun for the Desert Hot Springs Gang Sweep; Pressconnects.com/Press & Sun-Bulletin for the Massacre on Front Street.



In the medium site category, the shortlist of four includes LasVegasSun.com for coverage of a snowstorm and the Dallas Morning News for its breaking news reports on the collapse of an American football training stadium.



Finally, the nominees in the large site category for breaking news are: The BBC for the Mumbai terrorist attacks; the New York Times for the plane crash on the Hudson river; chron.com for Hurricane Ike.



Run by the Online News Association, the awards also honour investigative journalism, multimedia, blogging, video journalism and general excellence – the full shortlist is available to view in the press release.

“We were regularly awed, inspired and delighted by the quality and innovation evident online today,” said Anthony Moor, co-chair of the awards committee.

The winners will be announced in October at the 2009 ONA Conference.

Journalists Launch InvestigateWest

A group of journalists has gone it alone and set up a website dedicated to investigative journalism.

The team behind the nonprofit InvestigateWest previously worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which went online-only in March this year.

Now they are calling the shots at their own news organisation, which is focusing on issues affecting healthcare, social justice and the environment in the western US and Canada.

According to the press release announcing the launch, InvestigateWest will distribute its text, video and online content via a syndicate service and through partnership deals with other media groups.

“InvestigateWest is a new model of public service journalism that seeks to fill the void rapidly developing in investigative coverage,” said Rita Hibbard, executive director and editor.

“Our goal is to produce journalism that empowers citizens and changes institutions. We will measure our success by the impact of our stories.”

InvestigateWest is funded by a mix of individual donations, contributions from companies and a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The nonprofit group is also a founding member of the new Investigative News Network, which partners together more than 20 groups dedicated to investigative journalism.

How-To Videos On YouTube Channel

A YouTube channel dedicated to online journalism is building its stock of videos from industry experts and practitioners.

Launched in April, the YouTube Reporters' Center already holds more than 30 videos offering tips on key aspects of digital journalism.

Categories include Expert Videos, Interviews and Profiles, Investigative Reporting, and Ethics, Law & Fact-Checking.



Among the industry insiders offering the benefit of their experience are veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward, CBS news anchor Katie Couric, and HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington.

In addition to these general advice pieces, there are also technical instructional videos such as this one from Reuters.com about filming effective video interviews.



And this video from Bloomberg TV gives some valuable tips on how to tell a story with numbers.



YouTube says of the citizen reporting resource: “The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news.”

MPs' Scandal Adds 1m Users

Telegraph.co.uk’s exclusive coverage of MPs' expenses brought more than 1 million additional users to the site in May.

According to a report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the website boosted traffic by 1.4 million unique visitors compared to the previous month.



The expenses coverage also helped the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) improve its print circulation performance during May.

Plus, advertising revenue received a boost as a direct result of the newspaper’s expenses coverage, reports Forbes.

And it is likely that June’s figures will see impressive growth too with the publication of the unredacted data in a pullout special distributed with the Daily Telegraph.

A searchable database holding details of all the expenses claims then went live on Telegraph.co.uk towards the end of the month.

TMG’s digital editor, Edward Roussel, told the Guardian that the publisher’s exclusive and in-depth coverage of the scandal has been of interest to a global audience.

“Our MPs’ expenses coverage brought new audiences to our website, helping to extend the Telegraph brand in the UK and across the world.”

NPR Crowdsources Who’s Who Pic

The audience is helping American reporters identify political lobbyists from a series of photographs.

National Public Radio (NPR) decided to crowdsource the task after finding it hard to identify many of the people representing health lobby groups at a senate committee meeting.

Spokesperson Andrea Seabrook told Poynter Online that the photographs were taken with the original intention of enabling journalists to pick out faces.

However, when this only resulted in several identifications, the audience was called on to help.



“We’ve been watching various groups use crowdsourcing to mine and process data, and when it turned out to be harder than we’d originally thought to ID lobbyists ourselves, we thought we’d give it a shot,” said Seabrook.

She added: “We’re very glad we did. It seems to be making the story more interactive and engaging for our listeners, and we’ve already gotten quite a few great leads.”

The crowdsourcing effort forms part of NPR’s Dollar Politics series, which is looking at the impact of lobbying on US legislature with regards to healthcare, banking regulations and energy.

Paper Plans Investigative Radio Show

A morning radio show devoted to investigative journalism is to be launched by the Washington Times this spring.

The syndicated three-hour programme will be carried by Talk Radio Network and will feature investigations by the newspaper’s journalists and interviews with the key reporters.

“I think the goal here is to take what we’ve done so successfully in print and translate it to radio,” said John Solomon, executive editor at the Washington Times.

He added: “The concept is that when you tune in in the morning, it’s not going to be yesterday’s news.”

A spokesman for Talk Radio Network asserted that the new show could do for radio what 60 Minutes did for television.

More on this story on the Washington Times website.

[HT – Journalism.co.uk]

[Picture - Web Radio, by Alessandro Bonvini on Flickr]

Huff Post Launches Investigative Fund

A new investigative journalism project funded by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic Philanthropies is about to be launched.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund will use its £1.2m starting budget to pay a team of ten reporters and freelancers to get digging and produce a range of in-depth investigative reports concerning the American economy.

HuffPost founder Ariana Huffington says the project has been created in response to fears that industry cutbacks will affect the quality and quantity of investigative journalism

Writing on the HuffPost, she continues: “All who recognise the indispensable role good journalism plays in our democracy are looking for ways to preserve it during this transitional period for the media.

“For too long, whether it’s coverage of the war in Iraq or the economic meltdown, we’ve had too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.

“The HuffFund is our attempt to change this. It will also provide new opportunities for seasoned journalists who have been laid off or forced into early retirement.”

Huffington also announced that the resulting reports would be published on the HuffPost and would also be made freely available to any other publishers.

Among the partners working with the HuffPost on this project are the Columbia School of Journalism and Jay Rosen from New York University.

More about the fund can be found on Rosen’s Press Think blog and on guardian.co.uk.

Seattle P-I Becomes Online-Only

America’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer has converted to an online-only newspaper this week.

Owner Hearst Corporation says the Seattle P-I is the biggest American daily newspaper to cease print production and become a web-only operation after it printed its final edition on Tuesday.

The New York Times reports that the move will be closely watched by other titles operating “in an industry that is fast losing revenue and is casting around for a new economic model”.

It continues: “The move shows how some newspapers, in the future, may not vanish but move the battle from print to the digital arena.”

A minority of editorial staff will be kept on to produce content for the website, which is to become more like an opinion and news aggregation site rather than a traditional news website with investigative reports.

Some people are taking an optimistic view of the change and see it as a chance to be at the forefront of news experimentation in the digital age.

“We clearly believe we are in a period of innovation and experimentation, and that’s what this new SeattlePI.com represents,” said Steven Swartz, president of the newspaper division at Hearst.

However, some ex-staffers have expressed their concern at the lack of investigative reporting that will be carried out by the new online-only SeattlePI.com.

“The thing that’s always been closest to my heart is The P-I’s coverage of the underdog, people who are invisible,” said Ruth Teichroeb, an investigative reporter for almost 12 years with the newspaper.

She added: “Those people who have the least voice in society are losing access to another part of the mainstream media.”

To see more reactions from editorial staff to the print closure, see the below video which features interviews with columnists, reporters, editors and photographers.

The Most Valuable Blogs In The World?

A list of the 25 most valuable blogs has been put together by market analysts at 24/7 Wall Street.

Taking into account partially known factors such as traffic and estimating advertising revenue and operating costs, they have calculated a value for some of the world’s best known blogs on the basis of what they’re worth to potential buyers.

And it seems that news blogs are faring well in the blogosphere, with the Huffington Post placed at number two on the list with an estimated value in excess of $90 million (£63.1 million).

Despite noting that the American blog probably costs over $18m (£12.6m) a year to run, 24/7 Wall Street places such a high value on it since “owning Huffington would be a prize, especially for a major media company”.

Behind HuffPo at number three in the chart is another American news and opinion blog - The Drudge Report.

With high margins, it is awarded a potential value of $48m (£33.7m), which would be reduced to almost nothing if Drudge himself was not part of it.

Other news / political blogs making the grade include Daily Kos at 22 and Talking Points Memo at 23.

Visit 247wallstreet.com for the full list.

Study Suggests Future News Models

The future of the press and television in the digital age is the subject of an in-depth study from the University of Oxford.

“What’s happening to our news” paints a picture of the current trends in the news media as a result of the digital revolution – such as the impact of search engines and search engine optimization.

Author Dr Andrew Currah also predicts bad news ahead for the industry if newspapers continue along this route, chasing “clickstream” audiences online and reducing expenditure on original news-gathering.

To this end, Currah concludes his extensive study by proffering some possible solutions to ensure a positive future for newspapers.

He suggests that the government could introduce “targeted tax breaks for public interest news publishing” to ensure the funds are there to support investigative journalism.

In addition, the University of Oxford lecturer recommends the government should also look to widen the scope for charitable organisations to fund news providers which concentrate on original news-gathering and reporting.

Currah also contends that some form of voluntary kitemark could help restore public trust in media products.

The detailed report, produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, is available online as a pdf file .

An edited extract of the report from Dr Currah can be found at guardian.co.uk and an email interview with the author on the issue of kitemarks can be seen on the Online Journalism Blog.

HuffPost Crowdsources Senate Bill

In excess of 350 readers have helped the Huffington Post to plough through two versions of a bill designed to encourage economic recovery.

Due to the amount of material – a combined total of nearly 1,400 pages – HuffPost’s congressional correspondent decided to crowdsource the task of looking for noteworthy differences.

The volunteers were sent emails with instructions and a portion of the bill/s to look through, resulting in hundreds of tips sent to correspondent Ryan Grim via return emails and comments on the website.

Speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Grim said the HuffPost’s readership enables the execution of such strategies.

“We have readers who are highly intelligent, a lot of them are highly accomplished,” he stated.

Grim added that this form of crowdsourcing is in fact nothing new: “People have always called into newspapers or network news shows with tips - and that’s all this is.”

Visit CJR for the full article.

[HT – Editors Weblog]

How To: Plan Online Projects

A step-by-step guide to creating online journalism projects has been published by academic and blogger Ryan Thornburg.

On The Future of News blog, Thornburg has posted a six-point guide to producing an online news feature which takes journalists from the initial brainstorming stages through to execution and realisation of the project.

Here are his six stages:

*A product concept

In its simplest form, Thornburg believes this means starting “with a good question”.

But getting to this good question takes in finding out who your audience is and what they want to know.

*A storyboard

Thornburg writes that the storyboard’s “real power lies in its ability to get you thinking about non-linear storytelling - stories through which each consumer can choose his or her own path”.

He adds that when storyboarding “you’ll also want to note the medium you’ll use to tell that part of the story.”

*Asset management

Comprises several elements including file-naming conventions, version control and stylesheets.

*A clear workflow

Using a dedicated software package or Excel / Google spreadsheets, this helps organise who’s doing what tasks etc.

*A financial budget

“Even if you don’t have to worry about the financial costs of building something, it’s important to keep a constant eye on the opportunity costs.”

*A testing and quality assurance procedure


Visit Thornburg’s The Future of News blog for the full post, which contains links to some useful planning resources.

Obama Pledges Tested Online

Journalists at the St Petersburg Times are holding the new president to account with their all new topical Obameter.

Featured on The Times’s PolitiFact.com website, the Obameter will measure Barack Obama’s success in meeting some 500 of his pre-election promises.



To create the list of promises, reporters had to plough through transcripts from speeches, TV interviews and more during Obama’s campaign to find the things making up his future to-do list.

PolitiFact explains the process: “To make sure we selected promises that could be measured, we set some definitions.

“We said a promise ‘is not a position statement. It is a prospective statement of an action or outcome that is verifiable’.”

Journalists then track the progress of these promises putting them into categories: Promise Kept, Promise Broken, Compromise, Stalled, In The Works and No Action.



The site’s editor Bill Adair told Editor & Publisher: “Although we rely on the new technology of the Web to publish our work, our mission remains a simple and traditional one: to empower democracy.”

PolitiFact.com was set up by the St Petersburg Times to fact check the statements of politicians via its Truth-o-Meter checks.

Split Future For News?

Could the future of the press industry see online and print platforms offer two distinct types of news?

Mark Skipworth from the Telegraph Media Group believes this is likely to happen as the trend grows for people to consume news via the Internet during the week in short surfing sessions at the office.

According to the executive editor for sport, this then leaves readers with the weekend papers to catch up on the background to stories and the analysis of the week’s events.

Skipworth told attendees to his guest lecture at the University of Central Lancashire that he fully expects the weekend newspapers to keep going in the future.

He said their mix of analysis, background information and exclusives enable people to “sit down and digest it” and asserted that there will “always be a market for that kind of story”.

Skipworth, a former managing editor at the Sunday Times, noted that such “volume of content will never work online”, leaving websites free to concentrate on first, fast news.

During his talk as part of the Harris Lecture series, he also suggested that the future remit for journalists working online will widen out to include recommendation articles as well as news-based content.

For more information about the talk, see the live Twitter feed provided by Journalism.co.uk.

Citizen Journalism Site Stops Pay

The international version of Oh My News (OMNI) will no longer automatically pay volunteers for published work.

According to Journalism.co.uk, the citizen journalism website is changing its current cybercash payment system where contributors receive money for articles which make the website.

Instead, citizen journalists who get their pieces published will be eligible for one of three cash prizes available each month.

The head of business relations for OMNI hopes that the new system will be accepted by writers and suggests that it will result in more published articles as editors will no longer be limited by a payment cap on content.

“Prize money will also allow selected top three citizen reporters with greater financial rewards every month, though we don't believe their sole reason of writing for us is to earn money,” says Jean K Min.

The spokesperson adds: “We hope our citizen reporters will understand the merit of the changed system over time and even welcome this as they begin to see positive aspects of the new system.”

OMNI was created in 2004 as an English language spinout from the original Oh My News website in South Korea, which was the first site of its kind to collect, edit and publish news articles from citizen reporters.

Data Project Shows School Air Quality

USA Today finished the year with a large-scale data project showing impact rates of industrial pollution on the nation’s schools.

“The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools,” took eight months to put together and includes searchable databases of pollution statistics and a map showing schools with the highest levels of toxic air.

Visitors can search the results by school, by city or by state to see how the air quality at any given institution compares to others across the country.

In addition, the feature has video reports including interviews with industrial pollution experts.



USA Today says it has analysed data covering a total of 128,000 public schools across the United States.

Further details can be found at Editor & Publisher.

New Roles For Multimedia Newsrooms

The changing nature of information means that the role of the journalist must also change, according to academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw.

So he has come up with a set of six new roles which journalists could fulfill as part of his vision for A Model for the 21st Century Newsroom.

His six suggested roles are:

1 – THE AGGREGATOR SUB

“To collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.”

2 – THE MOBILE JOURNALIST

3 – THE DATA MINER

“The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics.”

4 – MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER

“An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.”

“They may not do all the work themselves ... but they can see the possibilities.”

5 – NETWORKED SPECIALIST

“Now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.”

6 – COMMUNITY EDITOR

“Building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.”



Check out the Online Journalism Blog for the full post.

Journalism Skills Study Published

The full results from a survey about the skills that journalists need in the 21st century have been released.

Carried out by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), the Journalism Skills Survey asked both employers and course providers about the skills they see as most important for trainees.

The study also reveals the skills that companies believe their new recruits working in print, TV and radio are lacking at present.

Among the traditional reporter skills needing improvement according to employers are the ability to find stories, knowledge of media law and language skills.

Employers were also questioned on new skills and responded that incoming journalists need to improve their video skills, writing for different platforms and knowledge of how to use the Freedom of Information Act.

NCTJ chairman Kim Fletcher writes in the report’s foreword: “What emerged strongly was that these were not areas for compromise.

“There was no question of old or new: employers were clear that they wanted both.”

The full study is available as a pdf file on the NCTJ website and more details can be found on holdthefrontpage.co.uk.

Nonprofit Future For Watchdog Journalism?

Could the future of investigative journalism be Web-only stories produced by nonprofit independent outfits?

That’s the issue discussed in a recent New York Times article that chronicles the rise of small not-for-profit news groups which are popping up in some of America’s big cities.

According to the NYT, these operations dedicate themselves to investigating local issues and are funded by grants, donations both big and small, and the odd bit of advertising.

The Times points out that these corporations resemble public service broadcasters in their financial structures but are usually managed and staffed by unemployed refugees from the print media world.

And it’s a perceived gap in investigative reporting from traditional news sources that is driving the growth of these nonprofit watchdog websites.

One such example cited by the NYT is the VoiceofSanDiego.org, which was part-founded by retired local entrepreneur Buzz Woolley when he became frustrated at the lack of coverage of corruption among the city’s public figures.

Woolley said: “Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity.”

“It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

And the online newspaper makes its position clear in its mission statement: “To consistently deliver ground-breaking investigative journalism for the San Diego region.

“To increase civic participation by giving citizens the knowledge and in-depth analysis necessary to become advocates for good government and social progress.”

Visit the NYT to see the full article.

Crowdfunding: Future Business Model?

Can crowdfunding become a viable way for mainstream media to support their services?

That’s the question posed by Mark Glaser in a recent MediaShift blog post, and as part of the discussion he looks at some examples of the crowdfunding theory being put into practice.

First up, a definition of crowdfunding from Glaser: “Getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture.”

He points to a couple of hyperlocal crowdfunding projects which are getting underway in the US.

Representative Journalism is the brainchild of academic Leonard Witt from the Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

The idea behind the initiative is to raise a series of donations from residents in a small town in order to pay for a journalist to be based there full time.

Witt told MediaShift: “So we have to work on three fronts: 1) we have to provide high quality journalism; 2) we have to get the community to know our journalist; and 3) the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support.”

Glaser also spoke to Spot.us founder Dave Cohn about the potential of crowdfunding as a source of funding for traditional media.

He said: “Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that’s worth sustaining with their own money.

“The second shift is with reporters who have to realise they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public.”

Based in the San Francisco Bay area, Spot.us encourages the public to offer tips for stories they want to see investigated and these projects are then funded by micro donations.

As well as these community crowdfunding efforts, Glaser looks at individual projects where bloggers have covered their costs through donations from readers.

For example, Chris Allbritton funded his Back to Iraq blog with public donations and satirical political blogger Ana Marie Cox was able to cover the second half of John McCain’s election campaign thanks to money given to her by readers.

Visit MediaShift for the full post.

[Picture - Jimmy McDonald on Flickr.]