More Essays & Commentary

• Online Storytelling Forms: A look at online storytelling forms and structures, from interactives to slideshows.

• Searching for the Holy Grail: The online media industry has yet to come up with a business strategy that consistently produces profits, but here's something that might help you figure out what approach is right for your news operation: Poynter's Steve Outing and Consultant Rusty Coats break down eight business models being used for online news and analyze the pros and cons of each.

• What Readers Want: Ever wonder what would happen if journalists gave readers the power to select the top stories? The major news sites have a few pages that give you a glimpse of what reader-selected covers might look like.

• How the Web is Changing PhotoJournalism: The award-winning photography site The Digital Journalist published a wonderful package on how the Web is changing photojournalism. The series includes: "Reinventing Photojournalism," by washingtonpost.com's Tom Kennedy; An Interview with Travis Fox, multimedia photographer for washingtonpost.com; "Made for the Medium: Photojournalism at MSNBC.com," by Brian Storm; "The Internet and Online Publishing," by JournalE's Alan Dorow; "Bridging Art and Technology at ZoneZero" by Pedro Meyer; and The Digital Journalist: Looking Back and Looking Forward by the site's publisher, Dirck Halstead.

• Transitions in PhotoJournalism: Brian Storm answers the question, "Dude, why'd you leave MSNBC?"

• Why The Web Can Work So Well for Journalists: Dan Froomkin, editor of WashingtonPost.com, says online journalists should: Cleave to core newspaper values; be trustworthy; provide depth and context; exercise careful and responsible news judgment; don't pander or let trends sway your good sense; and evolve and change.

• How users read on the Web:  Jakob Nielsen says people rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.

• Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace: Nielsen argues for the adoption of the inverted pyramid by web writers. 

• News sites and user-generated content: Steve Yelvington, former executive editor of Cox Interactive Media, discusses how news sites are doing a poor job of fostering community and what they could be doing better.

• A Life Without Paper: Mike Wendland went six months reading news only online, but missed his newspaper. Here's why.

• The Web and the Future of Writing: Excerpt from "Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century" by Christopher Scanlan.

• New Media Timeline: A timeline looking at the history of new media journalism and the Internet, through 1998. Interesting, but would be great if it were updated.

• Inventing an Online Newspaper: This article recounts the debates and decisions involved in building The Washington Post's first online effort, Digital Ink. From a former staffer's perspective.

• It's still journalism: While the Web offers new tools, journalism basics should not be abandoned.

• Writing Online: It Rocks: Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute tells how online writing has given him back the printing press.

• Producing, Editing and Designing Online News: A 48-page digital, interactive package that resulted from a Poynter Institute seminar.

May 22, 2000 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK