Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Honing your information diet

Terrible headline, I know... OK - what we're going to start in class, and what I want you to finish off is:

I want you to sign up with Rojo, add some relevant feeds (your choice) and use it over the next week and also personalise Google News and use that as your news source over the next week. Then write something on your blog about how useful you found both tools, what you got out of them, whether they helped you find out more etc.

Next, I want you to write a blog post about a current news story. The choice is yours - whatever you want. But I want you to link to five different news sites that cover that story. Some of these sites should be foreign news operations. Use Google News to find different perspectives on the same news story. In the post, I want you to explore the different angles that different publications or the news media of different countries take on events.

Reading more 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 read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.

One of the key skills you need to develop as journalists (whatever medium you work in) is media literacy. Whatever your interest (music, sport, fashion), you need to read widely and really get a sense of what's going on in your field, what stories are being covered by who and why.

So we're going to look at some tools that will help you broaden the range of media you consume. We'll focus on:

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.

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 We've looked at news feeds in passing. We'll go into this a bit more today. You can use special news reader programs to subscribe to news feeds. It's a good way of scanning a lot of news/information in one go. You can also use web-based services to do something similar. We'll try out Rojo to see how useful it might be.

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.

My Guardian piece about older people and the net

I'll come clean. Two and a half years ago, I had to do something close to the task I just set you. I was asked by The Guardian's technology supplement to write a piece about older people and the net. They wanted to know if more people were getting online and what they were doing. The brief was to a general look at this area...

I didn't have much time so I did all the research online. I'll walk you through how I did it in class. The piece I ended up writing was a bit rushed but I was able to find everything I needed online (though I did benefit from some of the contacts I'd developed before).

Researching a feature online

I'm assuming you all know how to use the net for research. You're young. You automatically know that stuff, right?  But perhaps we should just check what you know. So one thing we're going to do today is use the net to research a feature.

So - 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.

Blogs as research tools

Today's session is going to focus on the net as a research tool. A few years ago, the SF writer and digital activist Cory Doctorow wrote an influential article about blogging called 'My Blog, My Outboard Brain'. It's a useful starting point for thinking about how to use blogs as research tools, so I'd like you to read it and think a little about Doctorow's approach and whether it would be useful for you.