Cleaning up comments

Any news organization that really believes in serving the public has to listen to its audience. In the old days, that meant taking phone calls and letters. More recently, it has meant providing email addresses and actually reading the stuff people send in. Now, it means allowing for comments online. But [...]

A multimedia bag of tricks

USA Today has been in the multimedia game for a long time. At a recent conference, senior designer Juan Thomassie shared his top tips for producing interactive stories online. Among his key points:
The content often suggests the best ways to tell a story online–if you know all of the options in your [...]

New jobs in a restructured newsroom

The recent reorganization of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave online news a new prominence.  In the latest Nieman Reports, Shawn McIntosh, director of culture and change at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ajc.com, says the system is now much leaner:
Two new content departments, News & Information and Enterprise, focus on producing unique local content for print [...]

Multimedia journalists unite!

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the “online space” is that so many people are so willing to share their expertise.  And that’s the idea behind a relatively new site called Wired Journalists.  Here’s the mission statement:
WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind. Our goal is to [...]

Who’s watching what online

According to a new study by Burst Media, Web users would rather watch professional video than user-generated content.  And the most popular type of online video is news.  The study found that almost 60% of users view online video at least once a week, and almost half of them (44%) cite news clips as their [...]

Web jobs open at TV stations

Broadcasting & Cable has a compelling article about TV stations and station owners re-thinking their Web strategies. The article points to multiple examples of news organizations shifting resources to the Web through new hires and job restructuring.
To find ample resources for the Web, some managers are converting broadcast positions to Web ones. When [...]

Managing user-generated content

How much attention should a news organization pay to the comments on its Web site? Should comments from users ever drive coverage? Is it ever appropriate to shut off comments altogether? BBC news manager Peter Horrocks raises these questions in a thoughtful examination of the issues surrounding user-generated content. Horrocks [...]

Advice for online news sites

Get a breaking news blog and learn to love widgets. OJR editor Robert Niles offers those two suggestions and more in his summary of lessons learned in 2007. Niles says coverage of the Southern California wildfires made the case for blogs:
Blogs are the ideal format for breaking news, as they allow newsrooms to [...]

Layering the news

Slide shows, videos, flash animations–there are lots of different ways to tell a visual story online. Now you can add one more: the photostory collage. A new service from VuVox allows journalists to build multimedia stories in layers. Watch Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Mercury News demonstrate and explain how he [...]

Convergence in the trenches

Convergence is a reality in local TV newsrooms, but what does it look like? A new research study finds that in most cases what stations call convergence is just repurposing, not truly reporting across media.
The researchers surveyed producers and reporters at [...]