Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Homework - Review something else from YouTube

OK - what I want you to do for next week is write a review of a video from YouTube (or one of the other video sharing sites). You can pick something yourself. However, if you're stuck for ideas, you could try reviewing a YouTube phenomenon called LonelyGirl15. You might need a little bit of background to understand the whole thing - Wikipedia has a good run down.

Reviewing

In the last half of the session, time permitting, we're going to look at reviewing. I'll talk a bit about reviewing technique and then I want you to try to write a quick review in class. Nothing too long.

So what are we going to review? Well, I think it might be interesting to review some of the content on YouTube. It's accessible and short - we can watch it in class and talk about it. I think there might be some mileage in becoming a YouTube reviewer - someone who finds interesting things on YouTube, Revver, GoogleVideo etc... and then writes about them. It's like the modern version of a TV critic.

To start off, we're going to review a short video called YouTubers. What I want you to do is embed the video on your blogs and write a short 100 word review of it.  Here's the vid

Here's another YouTube video which is sort of similar - have a look at it and see what you think.

Planning your group blogs

Once you've analysed the Shiny Media blogs in more detail, we'll revisit the initial ideas and decide which ones might work the best. Then I'll split you up into groups. I think we'll set out to do two blogs - possibly three depending on your ideas and how you feel about it.

What you need to think about for next week is planning your group blogzine. Think about the name and the design. Think about your editorial approach and where you're going to get your material from. Think about how often you're going to update. Think about how to link to other blogs and how to market your blog. We'll go over these ideas in class next week and set up the blogs.

Analysing a Shiny blog

For the next part of the session, I'll split you up into twos. Then I want you to analyse a week's worth of posts on a particular Shiny Media blog.

Note down what sort of posts feature on the blog.

Are they news updates, new product reviews, reviews of other websites, opinion pieces, gossip? Try to categorise them.

How long are the posts? What kind of style are they written in? How do they use links?

Which posts draw the most comments? How do the writers interact with their readers. 

Post your notes on your class blogs and link to the sites/posts you're writing about.

Researching Shiny Media

Today, we're going to be developing ideas for a blog-zine. I asked you all last week to think of ideas. We'll go over those in class first and try to figure out which ones are likely to work.

We need to come up with two ideas that are going to work for a particular target market and be achievable for you. In other words, it wouldn't be wise to come up with an idea for a blog about gadgets that relies on you getting a steady stream of high tech toys to review... That obviously isn't going to happen. So we need  an idea that relies on material that isn't too hard to find.

The first step in honing our ideas might be to make the brief more specific. So let's imagine that we're trying to come up with a new blog for Shiny Media - we've already looked at several of their sites in past classes. So the first step is to research the company properly.

Look on their site and find out what kind of blogs they publish and what their approach to publishing online is in general. Find out how long they've been going, how they decide to set up a particular blog and how many contributors a blog needs.

See if you can find out which of their blogs are the most successful. Have they started blogs which they've stopped because they weren't reaching a target audience? Who writes their blogs? Can we get in touch with them? 

Post your notes on your class blogs.