By Mindy McAdams

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Teaching Online Journalism

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Notes from the classroom and observations about today’s practice of journalism online

Archive for January 2007

Editing for online journalism

Sunday, January 28, 2007

EditTeach.org is a large and well-organized online resource site devoted to training and helping news editors.
There’s a small but growing section for online journalism. An excellent resource there is Preparing for Online News, an article bundled with a video of a lecture by Janice Castro (professor at Medill; former editorial director, Britannica.com; former managing editor, [...]

Is the LA Times doing anything right?

Friday, January 26, 2007

From the LA Times story published Wednesday about the newspaper’s new focus on the Web (story by staff writer James Rainey) — some key points that perhaps some others newspapers ought to heed:
Los Angeles Times editor James E. O’Shea “urge[d] The Times’ roughly 940 journalists to throw off a ‘bunker mentality’ and to begin viewing [...]

Is video the best use of your resources?

Friday, January 26, 2007

Will Sullivan of Journerdism is back! I have missed his posts. He has lost none of his needle-sharp perceptiveness. In summing up recent conversations about newspapers shooting video for the Web, he writes:
One issue on this topic that I haven’t seen discussed much is if this is the right step for all of online journalism [...]

Great video — but maybe not the best player

Friday, January 26, 2007

I found this video by Angela Grant of the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News to be exceptional in its intimacy and focus.
I had a somewhat unpleasant technical experience with it, though, and I hope Grant will leave a comment and tell us why.
When I clicked to launch the video (on Windows XP Pro, using Firefox 1.5), [...]

Newspapers: Fix your RSS feed(s), please

Thursday, January 25, 2007

I’m about to dump — bigtime — on my local daily newspaper, The Gainesville Sun (owned by The New York Times company, by the way). So all you colleagues over there, put on your weatherproof attire and listen up.
An RSS feed is really useful to people — if it provides what they are looking for. [...]

Some real interactivity (for a change)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Very interesting package from MSNBC.com on the U.S. president’s State of the Union Address.
Note that this is actually INTERACTIVE. Wow! And the interactivity is meaningful too!
Unfortunately, it does the annoying page-reload thing I blasted in my earlier post about Amazon today. (You might be able to stand it. I could not.)
While the video player on [...]

Be more like Amazon

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Amazon.com is one of the most successful Web sites ever. Did you ever pause and ask yourself why? Many of the techniques that allowed Amazon to rise to the top and stay there are techniques that news Web sites and others could adopt — and adapt to fit their own businesses.
At Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold [...]