Awards deadline in two days

Just two days left to submit your great work for the 2008 Online Journalism Awards. To submit:

http://journalists.org/awards/

And don’t forget, if you want to have a say in the outcome of the awards and see some great work you might not otherwise see, sign up to be a screener of the awards.

As a thank you to screeners who step up and complete their assignments early, the ONA is offering an incentive. The first 20 who finish screening all their assigned sites will receive free registration to this year's ONA conference, Sept. 11-13, at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C., worth $399 for members and $699 for non members:

http://journalist.org/awards/archives/001112.php.

Learning Web 2.0 by doing it

I was lucky enough to go to Francis W. Parker school in Chicago, a private institution founded bydisciples ofJohn Dewey, who popularized "learning by doing" -- the educational philosophy that does what it says it does: gets kidslearning by doing.

That's the thrust of a post at the Knight Digital Media Center from the Newark Star-Ledger's John Hassell. Hassell explains how he learned so much more than he thought he knew once he started blogging. Says he:

...blogging is worth doing—even if you do it badly, even if it means having to find the odd pre-dawn hour to post something once or twice a week.

New York Times to create open API

NYT is pursuing its 'get our content anywhere' strategy in a new way --Cyberjournalist.net reports, New York Times to create open API.

Not to soundall I-told-you-so about it, but last week I was discussing how we need to leverage a taxonomy to make this easy to do. Then, we give developers a key that allows them to mash up our articles to create whatever they want. Maybe someone wants to display articles on a timeline or rank articles by emotional score (that they calculate, not us) or, heck, set our headlines to music (maybe headlines that match the top 40 song that was popular when the article published) who knows?

Here's a cool mashup, for instance. The Times Machine. Just announced, it's the Times' historical photographic archives. (The Times did this mashup on their own.)

Of great importance, monetizing this becomes interesting. We could collect a little fee for every API call.

Running an online community like a political campaign

Cyberjournalist Jon Dube discovered a good set of principles from Michelle Ferrer, of the Daytona Beach News-Journal for starting an online community, as published in Poynter.org. They're the kind of ideas any blogger should consider. And they're not that radical. For instance:

1. Wear out the shoe leather. Hit the streets with camera and notepad in hand and go where the people are. Be willing to accept speaking engagements on a wide range of local topics. Recruit others to help evangelize your site and its uses. Don’t underestimate the power of a few committed believers/users... and reward them when you can.

I recommend any beat blogger click through, read and follow the recommendations on the rest of the post.

Newstrain heads into Webland, Cajun style

I had the privilege of leading two days of Newstrain training for an engaged and motivated group of editors and reporters at the New Orleans Times-Picayune last week. About 75 folks from around the region and Montreal (hunh?) packed a dingy room at the paper and made it the most exciting place to be for a journalist intrested in heading into the future.

My co-leader, Michael Roberts of the Arizona Republic, and I divvied up a basket of seminars. Michael's the Republic's staff development DME, and that paper's a Gannett shop, so they've completely reorganized their newsroom top-to-bottom (they call them "information centers" now.) So he's a pro at teaching things like how to do video, slideshows and multimedia.

I spent the better part of the past two weekends developing three hour-and-a-half sessions from scratch. I put together a big picture overview; a look at the new digital technologies (widgets, blogs, social networks etc.) that reporters can use to gather the news, and Web producers can use to distribute news; and a presentation on data strategy, with a focus on metadata and taxonomy. I also taught a session on writing for online.

I worried that I was trying to cram too much into what I did, and maybe I did a bit, but the attendees kept me on my toes with excellent questions and provocative challenges to my assertions. Not only during the preparation, but also during the give-and-take, I feel as if I learned as much as I tried to impart.

My slides for all four online news presentations can be found here.

Our host, Peter Kovacs, the Times-Picayune ME, also provided stimulating lunch and dinner conversation, especially as he recounted the amazing story of how the paper got on its feet right after Katrina.

Newstrain's embrace of Web training is a terrific development. The program, run in part by my former ME in Orlando, Elaine Kramer, is a bargain for journalists hoping to transition to the new frontier.

OK here's a better live blogging platform

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld writes about ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform. Says he:

...it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button.

Sorting the Web's wheat from the chaff

You've probably seen that the much-anticipated second annual Knight News Challenge awards have been handed out.  And the big news has this headline: World Wide Web inventor gets Knight grant.

Tim Berners-Lee's grant aims to do something with tagging (yes, think metadata) that we've needed for a long time: Create a way to sort out credible news from the rest of the stuff. Here's how the plan is sketched out by Knight:

The public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

A dream come true: Flash + Google Maps

Danny Sanchez reports on something that our Web map expert Layne Smith will crow about: A dream come true: Flash + Google Maps.

I know that sounds dry as dust to some of you, but it is a major development. This way we can creating map-based graphics with the same utility as Google Maps, but in a look and feel that is much more dynamic and artful.

Thank you, Google. Go get 'em Layne!

YouTube Citizen News channel

YouTube has launched a "Citizen News" channel, to highlight some of the best news content on YouTube. Check it out: YouTube Citizen News channel

Once again, my perspective is that the amateurs aren't going to magically self-organize and document the world in a coherent manner like the pros, but I do expect they'll provide useful snippets of information that we can weave together in a pro-am way, similar to what we're doing with our beat blog on the Dallas school district.

Each individual citizen submission may just be a piece of a story, similar to a single statement from a conversation. Synthesized and reported out by a journalist, they're as invaluable as first-person quotes in a 'traditional' story.

Twitter as the canary in the news coal mine

Jeff Jarvis discusses my favorite obsession in Twitter as the canary in the news coalmine

Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake” and “evacuation”. They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news and second a way to find witness media – photos, videos, and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over – though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts....

Twittering China's quake -- pure crowdsourcing?

On U.K's The Online Journalism Blog, by prof Paul Bradshaw details how Twitter has helped get the word out about the quake.

Here is crowdsourcing without the editorial management. How quickly otherwise would a journalist have thought of using Twitterlocal with a Google translation? And how soon before someone improves it so it only pulls tweets with the word ‘earthquake’, or more specific to the region affected? (It also emphasises the need for newspapers and broadcasters to have programmers on the team who could do this quickly)

(I don't even know what Twitterlocal is yet!)

More on Twitter as a reporting tool

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo has a good roundup of how Twitter has made her a better reporter, (but she also notes that it is a time suck to.) Here are some of her examples of how it's worked for news:

Twitter users in Southern California during the wildfires used the tool to do local reporting for the benefit of neighbors. Even for people who were evacuated and didn’t have a computer, they could follow the updates on their cell phones. Twitter users were also able to broadcast live updates on the Minnesota bridge collapse just minutes after it happened and before many news outlets could get the details out to the public.

The Iowa Caucuses were also covered by citizen journalists via Twitter, filling in the gaps left by local and national coverage. It also proved to be a good way to keep up with the results on Super Tuesday. We’ve also seen mainstream media embrace Twitter and other new media tools for reporting on important, time-sensitive stories.

More recently, Twitter was at least partially responsible for the release of a young journalist jailed in Egypt, who used his cell phone to send a one word cry for help: “Arrested.”

My obsession with Twitter continues

Michael Arrington discovers a new service that lets you Use TwitterFone For Easy Voice-To-Text On Twitter.

Seems like a funny idea at first blush, but then think of how this can make a reporter become a very fast reporter. He or she simply dials up a number, speaks, "Rick Carlisle has been hired to become the new Dallas Mavericks head coach" and the message goes out as a text alert. I think we should try this out when it's out of beta.

Publish2 to launch digg variation as journalist resource

Michael Arrington explains Scott Karp's startup here: Publish2 To Launch Digg Variation As Journalist Resource:

Like Digg, anyone can submit a link to a news story. But the only people who can vote on stories are pre-approved journalists.

I'd love to take some time to unpack the site, and they've invited us to participate, but truth be told I'm just too busy to give it a test run.  If you have, let me know what you think.  These kinds of sites are known as 'collaborative filtering' sites, where the power of the crowd ranks and orders content.  They will be key to how you consume news in the Web 3.0 era.

More on journo-Twittering

Michael Merschel found this post on Read Write Web on how their journalists are using Twitter:

The scoffers can scoff all they want, but here at RWW our use of Twitter so far has included:

• the discovery of breaking stories,
• performing interviews,
• quality assurance
• and promotion of our work.

Journalist as ringmaster

Just saw this recap (URL: Maybe It's Time to Panic) of an AJR article by Carl Sessions Stepp on how reporters are morphing:

The journalist-in-the-middle is a ringmaster, a maker and a consumer, a grand impresario of a two-way information flow that has no beginning, end or fixed schedule.

A tech journalist wonders why so few colleagues use Twitter

My third post today on why journalists should use Twitter.  Click this link.

It's becoming an Anthony Moor rant.

UNDERSTAND TWITTER OR DIE.

;-)

The case for using Twitter

OMG, at The case for using Twitter, here are more testimonials, from actual reporters about why journalists should consider Twitter as a new tool for covering a beat.  If you are a reporter and you are reading this click the link, please.

If you work for me (and you know who you are) I suggest you start playing with Twitter now, because we need to be there.

Twitter as a reporting tool

OK so I hope everyone knows what Twitter, the microblogging platform, is now.  Jeff Jarvis says he's heard  of some interesting ways it could be an early warning tool -- like a police scanner -- for news organizations looking for breaking news:

I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine.

Online credibility survey

According to a new online credibility survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and APME the public and editors overwhelmingly agree thta local news content online is trustworthy.  But...

Disagreement was evident between editors and online local news users on whether anonymous postings should be allowed on news websites. The editors voiced a stronger desire than the public for readers to give their real identities in their posts.