Interview Voyeurism
Here's a Web site that enables you to basically sit in on interviews conducted by some of the best journalists in America and study their techniques.

Having Fun in Online Journalism
If traffic logs are an accurate measure of reader interest, then news sites should be giving high priority to humor and oddball news, writes Rusty Coats in NewsFuture. Among the examples he points out: AZCentral's the buzz and Cheap Seats, startribune.com's Out There, Sacbee's deceased Smile section, and Fark.com, which links to oddly humorous stories on other news sites. Know of other good collections? Send them in.

Great Work: 10 Years After Andrew
The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale built a wonderful interactive package to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew. The package combines narrative, photos, video and clickable maps and infographics to show the storm's impact. Particularly interesting is the "Then and Now" section where you can click on neighborhoods and see how they've changed in the past 10 years by looking at side-by-side photos of the destruction and the present day. The package even includes a clickable graphic showing what might happen to Florida's most populated areas if a hurricane as powerful as Andrew hit today.

Nando Times Adds Registration
Requiring users to register continues to become more common among news sites. WashingtonPost.com just began asking readers for information, and now the The Nando Times began asking users to complete a registration form Aug. 26. Interactive news director Tom Rouillard said in a note to readers that registering will enable readers to "personalize certain aspects of the site, continue to search our free 30-day archive and receive our information-packed e-mail newsletters." The announcement makes no mention of whether the site plans to use the information to better target ads and thus increase value to advertisers. But to those who hesitate to enter personal information online, he promises, "you have our word that the information you share with us will not be sold or given to other companies." It's a comforting policy and one all other sites that move toward registration should adopt.

New Convergence Award
The Associated Press Managing Editors has created a new Convergence Award to honor "effective interplay between a story in print and the same story online." The award, created in consultation with online editors meeting with APME the past two years, will recognize innovative projects where the print and online components complement and enhance each other. Entry deadline is Sept. 14 for work published between Sept. 1, 2001, and Aug. 31, 2002. More details can be found at http://www.apme.com/call_for_entries/convergence.shtml

Ford and Freedom of Speech Online
F***edCompany.com, a Web site known for publishing rumors and reports of dot-com layoffs and failures, got shut down by its Internet Service Provider for nearly two days after Ford Motor threatened to sue about alleged trademark infringements, CNET reports. Among Ford's complaints: That the site's headline "Ford, where finding a job is job 1" was "confusingly similar to Ford's advertising slogan 'Ford, where quality is job 1.'" Ford has previously sued an online auto news site and lost. The site, which was originally called FordWorldNews.com and then changed its name to BlueOvalNews.com after Ford pressured it, broke an article critical of Ford in July 1999 that was based on internal company documents. Ford asked for an injunction to prevent it from publishing internal papers, but a federal district court judge ruled in September 1999 that the site was protected by the First Amendment.  After the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported that "legal scholars say Judge (Nancy) Edmunds's order should be considered a precedent that underscores the fact that the First Amendment, which protects traditional media like print and television, also covers speech in cyberspace." Noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said he didn't know of a previous ruling that said "In such clear and definitive terms that the same First Amendment rules apply to Web sites as they do newspapers."

Tip: Terrorism Answers
Since Sept. 11, a thorough knowledge of terrorism and related issues has become essential for nearly all journalists. And as journalists prepare coverage for the Sept. 11 anniversary, new questions are sure to arise. Here are two great sites to help guide you.

A Golden Opportunity for News Sites
Do readers see big differences between online news sites? Not according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The latest results showed the top sites within just a few points of each other, while in the search engine category, Google scored about 30 percent better than competitors. This lack of differentiation between news sites offers a golden opportunity, says Larry Freed, CEO of Foresee Results. "The challenge for these sites is to extend the loyalty and retention they see in the offline world to their online capabilities — in other words, to carry over their personality and reporting style," Freed says in an analysis of the ACSI. "The Web has had a difficult time bringing that personality to news & information Web sites, and therefore these sites have had a difficult time in creating unique differentiators.... The site that can identify what has the biggest impact on customer satisfaction, make the appropriate improvements to their site to improve satisfaction, will be rewarded with higher customer loyalty and retention and this will yield financial success."

Tip: Covering Wildfires
If you don't know your Haines index from your Rh, check out Jim Moscou's Wildfire Primer. Moscou, who recently wrote about wildfires for The New York Times Magazine, includes everything from a glossary of wildfire terms to a list of all the equipment you need to fight -- or cover -- a wildfire. To get a good overview of all the wildfire news across the country, check out Firehouse.com's comprehensive Wildfire Central. But for the most up-to-date status and statistics on wildfires, go to the National Interagency Fire Center's National Fire News site. The center also has more great information here. Now you'll know your stuff and you won't get burned.

Devil in Details
Details magazine and writer Kurt Andersen have been the victim of an elaborate hoax. The magazine printed an essay with Andersen's byline entitled "Dudes Who Dish." Only problem was, he didn't write it. After someone posing as Anderson e-mailed the magazine, an assignment was made, the piece submitted and the copy fact-checked entirely through e-mail.  "This type of thing-unfortunately, given the frequency people use e-mail — is scary and can happen to everybody," Details editor in chief Daniel Peres said. Actually, only to those who aren't careful and rely too heavily on e-mail. As The New York Observer's Sridhar Pappu points out: "The irony of Details' plight is that in the end, his magazine could have avoided a lot of trouble by using an old, underrated device: the telephone."

CyberJournalist.net Partners With API
CyberJournalist.net has formed a publishing alliance with The Media Center at the American Press Institute to jointly encourage better online and multi-platform convergence journalism. The site will remain much the same, but you'll notice a few changes: a new banner, and a new resources section that now combines the jobs, books, education and other resources pages. CyberJournalist.net will become a service of The Media Center, incorporated with its other information and training services.  Read the announcement.

Web Pays Well
The average starting salary for 2001 journalism graduates with bachelor's degrees dropped to  $26,000 from $27,000 a year earlier, and for graduates with master's degrees dropped to $30,120 from $31,304, according to the University of Georgia's annual survey. But there was one exception: those going into online publishing. Fewer graduates found work in the field, but those who did find jobs got considerably higher salaries than did 2000 graduates: $33,500, versus $30,004 a year earlier.

Interesting Sept. 11 Archive
George Mason University researchers are creating a wonderful virtual library of the Sept. 11 attacks, having collected hundreds of e-mail and chat room messages, photos and online personal diaries from people nationwide relating to their Sept. 11 experiences. The September 11th Digital Archive "will serve as a new platform in which people can make their own history," said Jim Sparrow, one of the organizers of the project. This site is packed with powerful words and images and is a gold mine for story ideas. News sites might not be able to produce a project this massive, but they could certainly learn much from the great execution, and even do similar things on a local level.

Great Work: Elvis Extravaganza
Elvis is everywhere -- particularly online. In Memphis, The Commercial Appeal built a wonderful special site on the King to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death, pulling together almost 50 years of coverage -- a great use of the newspaper's archives. In addition to sections exploring his personal life, his artistic career and his impact on fans, GoElvis.com includes two photo gallery timelines, a discussion board and even a PDF version of a special section the newspaper published in 1977 after Elvis died. But the site had one other great idea and blew it. It created an "E-Notes for the King!" section where readers can leave personal messages about the King -- but charged readers $5.95 to leave them, and then an extra amount to have them published in the newspaper. Only about a dozen people anted up. For about $72 dollars was it really worth it for the site? Without the fee, GoElvis.com could have easily attracted thousands of comments, building a wonderful virtual scrapbook of memories that could have lived and continued to grow for years -- and, something that, from a business perspective, could have easily earned more than $72 from advertising.

Students Prefer Print Papers
The demise of print newspapers has been greatly exaggerated. College campuses are more wired than most of society, yet students still prefer to read the print editions of their college papers rather than the online versions. Why is this? The same reason many adults still prefer reading news on paper: portability. "It's easier to take a printed copy to class and read it when there is a lull," Schellene Clendenin, the summer editor at Oregon State University's Daily Barometer, told The New York Times. This continuing print preference is particularly significant because newspapers are desperately trying to woo younger readers and many fear the younger, more digitally-savvy generation would rather read online.

Reverse Convergence
WashingtonPost.com videojournalist Travis Fox spent four months with a sheet metal worker who is helping rebuild the Pentagon after his son was killed in the Sept. 11 attack there. The documentary he produced, "Rebuilding a Fortress, Rebuilding a Life," is first-rate, but what makes it so noteworthy is that ABC News aired his piece Aug. 16 on "Nightline UpClose." This is the first time a nationally broadcast television news program was based entirely on a documentary produced by a news Web site, according to Poynter's Al Tompkins. The video was also presented in five segments on WashingtonPost.com (which includes additional footage not seen on TV), where it can still be viewed. Fox, you may recall, has previously been lauded here for being named the White House News Photographers Association's 2002 Camera Person of the Year.

Tip: Say What?
Between war in Afghanistan, the fighting in the Middle East and the tensions between India and Pakistan, journalists are increasingly encountering foreign names and terms. For radio and television reporters, correct pronunciation is essential. And even for print reporters, it's important to know how to pronounce words correctly so you don't sound like an idiot when interviewing people. If you're ever unsure of how to pronounce a newsmaker's name, here's a great site.

Future of Newspapers is Online
Despite predictions that new technologies may bring newspapers' demise, W. Dean Singleton, the chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc., says newspapers can have a bright future as technology-driven information companies. Singleton admitted that at first the Internet blind-sided newspapers, and says publishers need to make sure that doesn't happen to the next wave of Internet advances. "Peer-to-peer computing, digital newspaper, new generations of mobile computing, all of these are part of the next wave. If we don't put them to work, someone else will and we'll be scrambling to catch up again.'' But perhaps the most important thing he said was to remind newspapers never to forget their primary mission: "to serve readers.''

Blogging on Boston.com?
On the heels of Salon's entry into the blogging business with Blogs.Salon.com, it looks like Boston.com may have similar plans. The site is advertising for a "Product Manager to supervise Boston.com's new initiative into all aspects of personal publishing (aka weblogging)." Based on the job description, the site plans to make money off the Weblogs by "integrating personal-publishing features throughout boston.com's content, advertising, etc." and creating a " profitable collection of personal-publishing products."

Tip: Monitoring the Drought
The U.S. drought has worsened, spreading to nearly half the contiguous United States. Here's a great drought monitor map from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Tribune Launches Print-Online Job Ads
Chicago's Tribune Co. introduced integrated print and online job listings called CareerBuilder FlexAds at the Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. Later this year the Tribune's nine other newspapers will roll out the new print ads, which include a Web ID code that, when entered in a Web browser, link to the online job posting, including a full job description on CareerBuilder. It will be interesting to see if many people go to the trouble, when simply searching the ads online could save them time anyway.

'The Model for Great Quality Content'
Christopher M. Schroeder, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, tells IWantMedia.com he thinks advertising -- not subscriptions -- "is the model for great quality content." Why? In part because Internet advertising reaches people in a way TV and print ads don't. "I truly think that next year the Internet story people will be talking about is the efficacy of online advertising. There are times of day when you can reach people with your ad information on a regular basis, i.e., at the desktop, which you couldn't do before. People are on-task when they're looking at their screens. They're not getting up and making a sandwich when the ads come on."

Merrill Brown Joins Rival
Merrill Brown, who left Microsoft Corp.'s MSNBC.com in June after six years as editor-in-chief, will become a senior vice president at Microsoft's cross-town rival RealNetworks. He'll oversee RealNetworks' impressive consumer subscription businesses, which offers exclusive news, sports, music and video games to customers paying a monthly fee -- including content from CNN, ABCNEWS and Major League Baseball.

New Blogging Publications
The uses of blogging continue to evolve. Now a group has organized the writings of about 100 bloggers, whose collective posts on "music, books and popular culture miscellanea" together form a new publication, BlogCritics.com. And separately, Pete Rojas, a free-lance technology journalist, and Nick Denton, the founder of Moreover, have launched a new commercial publication/Weblog called Gizmodo, which focuses on gadgets and not only posts links and comments on them, but includes "Buy" links for recommended items.

Cross-Training Journalists
The BBC and journalists' unions recently struck a deal to allow BBC staffers to take training as videojournalists. Kerry Northrup, executive director of Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations, tells the European Press Network's EPN World Reporter that this is a good move, adding that journalists who are unable or unwilling to adapt to media convergence risk being "phased out." "A lot of people who are journalists today simply cannot be journalists tomorrow," says Northrup, a leading convergence advocate. ". . .They won't adapt to thinking in terms of multiple media rather than being concerned only about their personal area of specialization. They are media bigots, for want of a better term, insisting past reason that print is print, broadcast is broadcast, Web is Web, and never will they mesh. The idea of blending formats to create a story greater than the sum of its parts remains foreign to them." Many journalists don't like the idea of needing cross-media training, believing that it will stretch them too thin, but the reality is that those who have convergence skills will be the ones who get ahead.

Content is Everywhere
Corporate America lost billions on the Internet, but that doesn't mean the medium has no value, just that the moguls remain clueless about where it lies, writes Salon's Scott Rosenberg. "How does the tradition of professionally created journalism and entertainment fit into the dynamics of a wide-open Web? No one has a definitive answer to that question, and that includes us here at Salon." Cnet's Charles Cooper, meanwhile, writes: "Sure, the era of free stuff on the Internet was grand fun while it lasted; it also was a four-alarm disaster--something that many entrepreneurs, silly enough to have gone along for that ride, can testify to. . . . There's no way this free content smorgasbord can last."

Tip: Explaining the West Nile Virus
The Web site for WDSU, TheNewOrleansChannel.com, has a nice interactive explaining how the West Nile virus is transmitted. If you want even more information, check out this wonderful mapping site from National Atlas that Poynter's Al Tompkins pointed out. It displays interactive maps of West Nile cases broken down by animal and state. The CDC also has great background information.

HBO teams with Salon
Here's an interesting pairing: HBO's film unit is teaming up with Salon.com to develop print and film projects. HBO will underwrite stories for Salon.com, with the option of adapting them for movies. Read more convergence headlines here.

Tip: Preparing for Sept. 11
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a year since Sept. 11, but it’s time for news organizations to start preparing coverage for the anniversary. When doing anniversary stories, it’s useful to take a fresh look at the original coverage, both as a reference and to help spark new ideas. Here are some quick links to Sept. 11-related coverage still available online.

Watch What You Write
In case anyone needs reminding that casually written e-mails can come back to haunt you: Los Angeles Times community sports reporter Brian Robin wrote an angry e-mail to Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) after reading about him blaming the corporate scandals on Bill Clinton. Robin, though, made the mistake of sending his letter from his newspaper's e-mail system. After Thomas' office complained to the newspaper, Robin was fired. "It was a stupid thing to do," the 37-year-old sportswriter told the LA Weekly. You can read the e-mail he sent here.

'Washington Star' To Return Online
The Washington Post Co., which acquired the 129 years of archives of The Washington Star after it ceased publication in 1981, has hired Cold North Wind Inc. to digitize the entire collection. The company will build an online database of full-page, searchable images of the Star dating back to 1852, include them on Cold North Wind's Paper of Record portal and possibly even use them on washingtonpost.com and the company's other Web sites. Coming after the announcement that the entire archives of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been archived electronically, this is yet another wonderful step toward preserving journalism digitally.

Iran's Reformers Skirt Press Bans with Web
With dozens of their newspapers banned, Iran's reformists are using the Internet in their struggle with the Islamic Republic's conservative establishment, launching at least five Iranian news sites by Khatami supporters in the past two weeks. "Technology always wins, and therefore the closure of reformist newspapers is useless when there is the Internet," a journalist who works for one of the sites told Reuters.

Register This
Increasingly, sites are moving toward asking users to register in an effort to get information that makes the sites more attractive to advertisers. The biggest switch of late was by the Tribune Co. papers, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, which recently began requiring registration. Now WashingtonPost.com is starting to ask users for more information -- gender, year of birth and zip code -- but the site will stop short of requiring full registration with a username and password, for fear of scaring some readers off. "I think this is a very user-friendly way to generate some information that's going to be valuable to us," Christopher Schroeder, CEO of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, told The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, the site will be able to better target ads and thus charge more. (The Globe and Mail, another newspaper publishing an electronic edition, also weighs in on the subject.)

Bye Bye Banjo
Steve Olafson, the Houston Chronicle reporter criticized here two weeks ago for anonymously penning a Weblog that blasted his own newspaper and offered opinions on news that he covered, has been fired.

The Art of Plugging the Web
On-air teases of Web sites can be a great traffic-driver, but they're most effective when they promote specific features available only online. Lost Remote's Cory Bergman wisely points out that generic teases like "For more information" tend to fall flat. "I've found the best teases come when the on-air and online stories are different pieces of the same pie, content-wise," said Julie Moos, executive producer of WRAL.com, an IBS affiliate in Raleigh, NC.

Teenage Abductions Spark Ethics Debate
Fast-paced, 24-hour news cycles make ethics decisions even more challenging. After the media plastered the names and faces of two abducted teenage girls all over the TV and the Web, most news organizations then backtracked and stopped using their names and images after they were revealed to have been raped. The quick flip seemed illogical, says Poynter ethics instructor Kelly McBride, because the girls' names and faces had already been seen so extensively. "Technology has taken us to the point where our goal of minimizing the harm is beyond our control in cases like this," she told The Associated Press. "And it's going to happen again and again." (The Los Angeles Times and Reuters also ran reports on the subject.) Since then, both girls have come forward and spoken publicly, and now the media is publishing their names and images again.

Digital Replica Editions Spread
More than 60 newspapers now offer digital replicas of their print editions that users can download and read for a fee. The Washington Post, with its new "Electronic Edition," now adds its name to that growing list,  which includes The Globe and Mail, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. The Times, one of the first to roll out such a service last fall, now has roughly 3,000 digital delivery subscribers, who pay $26.80 a month, The Times reports. Only a handful of magazines offer digital downloads, including PC Magazine and The Harvard Business Review, but others are starting to do so. MIT's Technology Review magazine just launched one, after a month of testing that attracted 3,000 subscribers.

Barbara's E-mails
Every Friday, Barbara Walters to the 57,000 people who've signed up since January for her weekly e-mail newsletter letter at ABCNews.com. And rather than just send a boring e-mail listed the program, the note really reads like a letter from Barbara, reflecting her personality. "Every week, we learn a tiny bit about '20/20' and a lot about . . . Barbara Walters," writes Paul Farhi in The Washington Post. "Every week, she shares. It's safe to say that no TV news star -- maybe no one on TV -- shares like Barbara Walters."

Flogged by Bloggers
Weblogs are providing a new check on the media. "Bloggers are busting chops, big time," says The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz. Bloggers now swarm over its news columns searching for errors and bias. The blogging revolution, says Andrew Sullivan, "undermines media tyrants." It's true -- never has the average person had so much opportunity to critique and comment on media reports -- and be heard.

Tracking News by Beat
Beat reporters know how hard and how important it is to stay on top of all the latest news on a particular subject. Here are some good sites for doing so, plus a new software program that can help track when Web sites publish new news.

Archiving Journalism Digitally
ProQuest Co. has scanned and made searchable every issue of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The company created special software to clean up the scans and to electronically "read" the older papers to make them searchable. This was a Herculean task: New York Times back issues from 1851 to 1999 consist of 3.4 million pages, and the The Wall Street Journal from 1889 to 1985 weighs in at 1 million pages! ProQuest is now in the process of scanning all the archives of The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. What a great way to use technology to preserve history.

Paying Up
Looks like Factiva's Clare Hart might not be so wrong: A new study from the Online Publishers Association says consumers are showing a new willingness to pay for content online. The study, though, found that only a handful of businesses benefit from these purchases -- mostly business and financial news sites. Content sales hit $300 million in the first quarter of this year — nearly half the total for all of last year. This could indicate a shift in the general resistance to paying for content online, which we've helped create by giving so much available for free. Perhaps now the realization that all their favorite dot-coms were dying because they couldn't make money has inspired users to ante up.

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