Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Wikipedia as a research tool

Some academics are very suspicious of Wikipedia and ban its use in academic essays. You can understand why - it's not really an academic source. It sets out to be 'like an encyclopedia' but it's not really an encyclopedia either.

It's best to look at Wikipedia as a useful starting point for research. It can point you to lots of interesting material. But you shouldn't trust it absolutely. It may contain errors (you can say the same of many traditional media sources too).

But it can provide useful information and can get you moving on a subject. On some breaking news stories, Wikipedia is remarkably good - balanced, accurate and filled with links to other news sources. On some more controversial topics, it's less valuable.

In class, we're going to talk a bit about how Wikipedia is put together. It's true that anyone can contribute and anyone can edit. But Wikipedia has certain standards when it comes to writing an entry. It wants a Neutral Point of View. It wants writers to use verifiable sources. It wants no original research. The guidelines for contributing to Wikipedia also cover citing sources and basic style.

There's quite a lot to read before you  write. And there are groups of motivated editors who enforce these standards. So whilst it may be easy to put up a new entry or vandalise an older one, it's harder than you might think for those contributions to stay online for longer than a week.

It's interesting to get your hands dirty with Wikipedia. Try to find a mistake and correct it. Look at the edit trail on an entry and see the kinds of things people correct/argue over. Try to write your own entry (you'll need to register to do this).

The latter is particularly hard - an awful lot of things have already been covered. You need to find something new, that will stand the test of time. When you write, you need to follow the various guidelines linked to above...

Becoming an active user of Wikipedia, doing more than just the odd bit of research will, I think, help you think a bit about how best to use, about when and where to trust it. It might also help you think a little about knowledge in general - how do we establish that something is knowledge, can be trusted... Why do we trust other encyclopedias? Where does their authority come from?

Research tools online

The net makes it really easy to find and consume a wide range of media. I'm not just talking about pure news here. You can get access to and read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.

Via the net, you can find information (facts, stats etc) and people (interviewees, sources, voices, experts). You can access a wide range of current media and discover what's being talked about.

Here are some tools you could find useful:

Bloggers As we've discovered, they can help you find interesting stories online and place those stories in useful/illuminating contexts. How do we find those bloggers and keep track of them? One way is to use Technorati - this is a blog search engine. You can use it to see which subjects bloggers are talking about, then find individual bloggers who you could then contact as potential sources.

Conversations There are lots of conversations going on online, on social networking sites like Facebook and via services like Twitter, a microblogging service which allows users to publish short details of what they're doing right now. Searching these sites can give you some useful leads.

Use the site operator on Google so you can search specifically in Facebook - add the keywords you want to search on before the site operator. You can also search Twitter via its Advanced Search.

Social bookmarking The idea here is that you can bookmark sites online and share those bookmarks with others in ways that let you find more interesting stuff. Del.icio.us was the pioneer in this field. Some sites have adapted the social bookmarking idea for news and news editing - one of the best known is Digg. David Cohn wrote an interesting piece for the Columbia Journalism Review about how he uses Digg, its increasing influence and the ethical dilemmas he faces as a result.

Feeds Most sites now offer RSS feeds of their content. This is a simple tool which sends out their content to you (or to one place on the net) to save you the trouble of going to a bunch of different sites. You can use a specific program on your computer to subscribe to a site's RSS feed or you can use a web-based service. Google Reader is a good one to try out at first.

Google News We've looked at it before and some of you were unconvinced - but it can be useful. To give it its proper technical title, Google News is an automated news aggregator. It gives you access to a wide variety of perspectives on big news stories. We're going to look at how you might personalise it or use Google technology to get recommended news stories. We're also going to look at Google Zeitgeist. This looks at the search terms people are using most.
 

Online research

I'm assuming you all know how to use the net for research. You're young. You automatically know this stuff, right?  But perhaps we should just check what you know. So let's research a feature.

Imagine you've been asked by the editor of The Guardian to write a piece for their technology section on old people and the net. You need to deliver tomorrow - they need 1500 words to fill two pages. Someone's let them down.

First of all, you need to decide what you need for a piece of this length. Next - can you find what you need online? Then you need to find it.

Newspapers and blogs

Most big news media organisations now run several blogs. But are they any good? Is there any point to a big newspaper setting up several blogs?

A while back, Andrew Grant-Adamson wondered whether there was much point to many of the blogs newspapers were running back then. His post drew an interesting response from Shane Richmond, who blogs for the Daily Telegraph. He outlined all the things newspaper blogs could do...

Have a look at his post and see what you think of his list. He put it together a year and a half ago now. Are newspaper blogs doing all the things he suggests? Incidentally, two years ago, Richmond also put together a blogging style guide for Telegraph writers - it's definitely worth a look.

One last thing I'd like you to think about - how could newspapers use blogs to cover the news. Think about a big ongoing story like the environment. How could they use blogs to cover this in a different way - think about blogging as a form, what it does best. We'll talk about some of your ideas in class.

Are blogs good or bad for journalism?

Events like the cases we're looking at today have sparked a big debate about the effects blogs are having on the news. Some people are very positive - for example the technology journalist Dan Gillmor, whose book 'We The Media' develops the argument that the net is making journalism less like a lecture and more like a conversation and that can only be a good thing. He argues that blogs (and related personal media technologies) are bringing in a new form of public journalism, one in which the public is actively involved.

Some people disagree and see blogs as inaccurate, untrustworthy and biased, used by activists to spin the media their way. Some see blogs as a new form of alternative journalism, a kind of practical criticism of the problems and biases of big media. Others suggest blogs are just reproducing the excesses of establishment journalism and, anyway, have been incorporated and co-opted by the big companies.

Certainly, in the last two years or so, blogs have become an established part of the news media, both here and in the States. Some bloggers now wield real political influence. Two years ago now, The Guardian ran an interesting piece about some of the more popular UK blogs that cover politics. Bloggers over here haven't developed the same high profile (or quite had the same effects yet) as their US counterparts. But this piece is a way into some of the interesting discussions taking place online.

Some well know political pundits now host blogs for themselves and their Hollywood/media chums - the best known example is Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post blog is becoming more and more popular. It was the model for The Guardian's popular Comment is Free blog. When that site launched, the paper drafted Huffington in on the launch day to write a piece about why the 'blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America'. Have a look at that piece and think about what all this says about the current status of blogging and bloggers.

Is blogging still a tool for the little guy to talk back to the media? Or has it now become part of the media business as usual?

Blogs and the news media agenda

When blogs first became popular, it was clear that there were tensions between bloggers and mainstream journalists. Many bloggers were explicity critical of what they call the MSM - the mainstream media - and its biases and hidden agendas. Similarly, journalists were very suspicious of bloggers - and ofen very dismissive of what they wrote.

Over the last three- four years, there have been a number of celebrated cases in which bloggers have directly affected the news agenda and have, via their blogs, forced professional journalists to cover stories in a particular way. We're going to look at some of these cases today.

I'll split you up into groups and I want you to find out the story behind these four names

• Dan Rather
• Trent Lott
• Eason Jordan
• Dilpazier Aslam

Today's session

Today we're going to look at how blogs affect the news agenda. We'll look at some celebrated instances from recent history when bloggers have had a direct effect on big stories and new media organisations. We'll also look at how news media organisations use blogs and try to think about ways they might use them better.

There will also be time to work on your assessment blogs. I'm going to hand out some general notes about what we've covered on the unit that may help you when it comes to developing your blog. I'll also try to talk to all of you individually about how the blog is going.

Things to do for next week

I'd like you to do a couple of things for next week. First, if you haven't already done it, try to come up with an idea for your blog. You could perhaps think about the kind of approaches we've been looking at today.

Next, I'd like you to leave a comment on a blog you like or find interesting. I don't mean write a review on your blog. I mean write something in the comment area on the blog. Then write something about why you chose to comment in this blog on your class blog and link to your comment or the post you commented on - so I can look at what you've written.

Comments can be a great way of building interest in your blog. But you need to do it in the right way. You need to find a blog that perhaps has something in common with yours. You need to find a blog with a bigger audience than yours. You need to leave the kind of comment that will interest the blogger and cause them to come and look at your blog...

'Challenge journalism'

It's a clunky sounding label, I know. It refers to a strand of modern journalism in which writers set themselves a challenge of some sort, then document their progress in meeting that challenge.

There are connections here with the kind of new journalism and immersive journalism you're looking at with Rod. Writers doing 'challenge' pieces put themselves at the centre of their stories. They often try to place themselves in different worlds, with a view to revealing something new or important to the rest of us.

The most high profile example of this kind of thing is Morgan Spurlock's 'Supersize Me', in which he ate only McDonalds food for thirty days to see what effects it would have on his health. But newspapers and book shops are now full of this kind of thing - people who try to spend a year living according to the precepts of the Bible, or a year without shopping or a year without having sex or a month without looking in a mirror.

The idea is to do (or not do) something that we all do and take for granted with a view to revealing something about modern life. These stories often take modern consumerism as their focus.

As with new journalism, some critics have suggested that challenge journalism is a bit narcissistic and self-involved, that it's often a rather artificial and cheap way to get a story, that the journalist is often running a rigged experiment in which the conclusions are programmed in advance...

We can talk a bit about this today. What I want to you to think about is whether this kind of thing is well suited to blogs. Blogs are time-based. They're diaries, essentially. So they could work well as a tool for challenge journalism.

Some journalists who wrote challenge books used blogs to document their progress (and generate publicity) - for example, Neil Boorman, who wrote 'Bonfire of the Brands', a book about trying to live a brand-name free life, but kept a blog while he was doing it.

Others started off with a blog which then became successful and led to a book. For example the award-winning American blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which the writer sets out to cook all the recipes in a famous American cook book.

Another interesting example is The World in One City, a blog based project in which the authors set out to see if they could find people from every nation in the world living in London.

That blog is almost like a quest - it has a definite aim/end. And indeed, it's over now - on the way, the bloggers got a lot of media coverage which gives you an idea of what they were up to. Others adopt a tighter subject focus but a more open ended structure - for example, eggsbaconchipsandbeans, a blog reviewing greasy spoon cafes.

Have a look at some of these - they might give you ideas for your assessment blog.

Personal journalism and workplace blogs

Today we're going to look at 'personal journalism'. This does sound like a slightly odd term. I'm using it to refer to the kind of personal writing you often find on blogs, in which people document their ordinary (or not so ordinary) lives. These kinds of blogs often feel very close to diaries - but because they're made public via the net, some of them can end up feeling close to 'journalism' or having a kind of journalistic effect.

That's only some of them. Most remain purely personal, designed mainly for friends and family. But some seem to become 'journalistic' in their effects, as more people read them and as the media pays attention to them.

One of the best examples of this kind of thing is workplace blogging. Lots of ordinary people keep blogs about their day jobs. These blogs are usually anonymous, to protect the bloggers from their employers. People use their blogs to moan about their jobs, share funny stories and let off steam. Most don't see what they do as journalism. But can they have a journalistic effect? Can we read them as journalism?

James Richards, an academic from Heriot-Watt University, is researching workplace blogs. He's written a good definition of what this sort of blog is and also has collected a good list of reasons why workplace bloggers do what they do.

Visit one of these links - you'll see he's put together a huge list of links to different workplace bloggers. I'd like you to look at a couple of workbloggers. Try to find one you like.

Read through what they say. Think about whether they're telling you anything new and whether you could class this as 'journalism'. Write a quick review and link to the blog you're covering. We'll talk about the things you find in class