Campaign radar
September 30, 2004
BlogPulse Campaign Radar “delivers daily analysis on politics, candidates and campaign-specific issues discussed on blogs commenting on the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election. All statistics in these trend charts represent the percentage of all blog postings relevant to the election/campaign.” (Via Dan Gillmor)
Top news sites for September
September 30, 2004
Here are the Top 20 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations for September from Nielsen//NetRatings.
Debate questions by the people, for the people
September 30, 2004
If you could ask President Bush and Sen. John Kerry any question at the debates, what would it be?
Two sites did something very clever and asked readers to send in their questions.
Both MediaChannel.org and NiemanWatchdog.org not only used the Web to collect and publish the ideas, but then forwarded the ideas to the moderators. It’ll be interesting to see if the moderators ask any of the questions.
Here’s MediaChannel.org’s list and here’s NiemanWatchdog.org’s list.
Blogging the debates
September 30, 2004
Brian Reich blogged the conventions and is heading to Miami and the Cleveland to blog the debates. Talk about a dedicated blogger!
He’s wondering if any other bloggers (journalists or independent ones) will be there. If you’re going or know of any who are, please post the names and blogs here.
APME Convergence Awards winners
September 29, 2004
The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina and The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., won first place in the 2004 Associated Press Managing Editors association’s APMEOnline Convergence Awards.
In the 100,000 circulation and above category, a News Journal five-day series, “Cancer: Dying in Delaware,” linked Delaware’s high cancer death rate to late diagnosis and inadequate treatment, moving the stage government to take action.
In the under 100,000 circulation category, the Winston-Salem Journal won for the amazing eight-part series, “Murder, Race, Justice: The State vs. Darryl Hunt.” (See related CyberJournalist.net entry about the series)
The (Fargo, N.D.) Forum received an honorable mention for its “Dying Tongues” series examining the decline in native languages spoken on reservations. (See related CyberJournalist.net entry on the series)
The awards will be presented during APME’s annual conference, which will be held Oct. 13-16 in Louisville, Ky.
Related:
• Great work on dying tribal tongues
• 2003 APME Convergence Award winners
• Crime story covered right
USAToday.com: Planning key to award-winning ‘Sing my Song’ project
September 29, 2004
At the first Mid-Atlantic regional session of the Online News Association, representatives from USATODAY.com showed what can be done by two guys with a digital camera and a digital audio recorder.
As recounted by API’s Chad Capellman:
“Sing My Song” was a project conceived, storyboarded and produced by Senior Designer Ron Coddington and Photo Editor Denny Gainer. The two spent 48 hours at West Virginia’s New Song Festival near Charles Town, W.Va., talking to entrants and gathering all the audio and still pictures they could get their hands on.
The project, which received a Special Distinction Award at the 2004 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, became a multi-faceted documentary which included about 60 minutes of audio, song lyrics, an in-depth look into the creation of the music, and even an interactive “you pick the winner” feature which, according to Coddington and Gainer, did not exactly please the competition’s official judges, when a different winner was frequently chosen online.
“They still link to us on their Web site, though,” Coddington said. “So that’s a good sign.”
The project ended up in the print product as a full-page feature and was praised by the Batten judges as “an exciting template for interactive entertainment news.”Coddington and Gainer showcased some other templates they have developed for covering breaking news and scheduled news events, including the Democratic and Republican conventions. The coverage featured numerous photo galleries and audio from inside and outside the convention halls. The templated nature of these packages is key, said Gainer.
“I can’t emphasize enough the planning time that is required,” Gainer said. “In the case of the conventions, we had maybe four or five get-togethers to look at PhotoShop mock-ups and then take that into a working flash model and then getting comments from all the people that were going to get involved in gathering information and producing it whether they were going to be out in the field or in the office. [It's important] to talk through all the pieces [and try] to ask the smart questions so we didn’t have those surprises. The worst-case scenario is you have a deadline and you’re scrambling to make major changes to your template.”
New Yahoo embraces RSS
September 28, 2004
Yahoo! unveiled a new home page design and My Yahoo! page today, which looks a lot sharper, but the real news is how much Yahoo! is embracing RSS and Atom feeds. (Here’s a tour of the changes.)
The site has been letting users add RSS feeds to My Yahoo! for a year or so as part of a Beta test, but today marks the big rollout.
Yahoo! has made it really easy to search and find feeds. This simple page lets you search for feeds by topic or provider, anything from blogs to news sites to services on Yahoo! The company says it’s created a database of more than 150,000 choices. And once you find the sources you want, you simply click on the Add button and it’s added to your My Yahoo! page. Very simple and well done.
Users can now also create custom modules based on a topic of interest, by leveraging Yahoo! Search technology and the thousands of sources available via Yahoo! News. For example, you can add a Yahoo! News search for election coverage to My Yahoo! to easily track the latest headlines.
The site is also encouraging the adoption of RSS by offering “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons to sites, which are now found on hundreds of pages across the Web, on sites as diverse as BoingBoing, The New York Times, and, yes, CyberJournalist.net (see left column or click here).
The company also launched a new page today (http://rss.yahoo.com) designed to help educate consumers about the benefits of RSS and related technologies. The page also provides Web publishers with information on how to distribute their content via RSS.
“We believe Yahoo! is in a unique position to help bring the benefits of technologies like RSS to mainstream consumers,” said Geoff Ralston, chief product officer, Yahoo! Inc.
Indeed, Yahoo!’s move really does take RSS into the mainstream and sets the stage for much wider adoption.
Blogger helps newspaper cover storm
September 28, 2004
Special report: Florida’s Pensacola News Journal took an innovative approach to its news coverage of Hurricane Ivan, using Blogger to produce much of its coverage. Meanwhile, traffic soared and thousands of people e-mailed the newspaper asking it to check on their homes. In this report for CyberJournalist.net, Juan Ortega, a copy editor for FLORIDA TODAY, describes why the news site turned to Blogger and how it helped save the day.
Pioneer editor drops blog
September 28, 2004
Doug Clifton, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the first major metropolitan newspaper editor to start blogging, is dropping his blog after eight months because it took too much time and got little traffic. “The audience isn?t anywhere big enough and I have too many other things that stand in the way,” he told E&P.
At first he blogged nearly every day, but eventually he slowed and, after a June vacation, never got back in the groove. He wrote about everything from how the paper writes headlines to how his own Vietnam service affected his view of the current Kerry and Bush Vietnam controversies.
“My goal was to write at least several times a week,” Clifton said. “Take what would be an editor?s column and explain things to the bloggers, and it worked reasonably well.”
“I think it was worthwhile because it gave me some insight into what the medium was.” But because each entry only got a few hundred page views, he said he “began to question the utility of it. I had done it as an experiment and there was some initial interest, but for me it wasn’t effective.”
Editor stops blog after paper’s edict
September 27, 2004
Doug Harper, a News Desk Editor at the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, stopped his personal blog because of a new newspaper policy, Steve Rubel reports.
Harper writes that he made his decision after the newspaper issued a memo saying, “It is especially important that editorial staffers do not express personal opinions – on their Web sites or in their blogs or chat rooms – on news subjects or issues that they cover. Such publication of personal opinion casts doubt on their impartiality, ultimately calling into question the newspaper’s commitment to fairness.”
Harper said “that’s the end of the line for me. Since I often sit at the wire desk and make decisions about which national and international news stories get published in the next day’s edition of the —— ——, the line about ‘may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover’ precludes me from writing about current events in any form.”
Last year CyberJournalist.net published dueling columns on columnists right to blog.
The Hartford Courant’s move ordering a reporter to shut down his independent Weblog stirred up a heated debate over how much control a media organization should have over its employees’ outside activities (Read all about the controversy here). In a pair of point-counterpoint essays for CyberJournalist.net, blogger and online journalism columnist J.D. Lasica argued that The Courant’s decision was unfair, while University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer defended The Courant’s actions. Read both sides and then post your own opinions.
