Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Reading more online

In a post last week, I talked about the way the net can help you develop media literacy, can help you read much more widely and consume much more information. I mentioned a few tools that can help you with that - specifically Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, RSS feeds and Google Reader, Google News and Google Zeitgeist and Google Trends.

This week, we'll have a quick look at these to see how useful they are. I want you all to set up Google Reader. You use the user name and password you use for your Blogger blogs. Then you can add RSS feeds to your account.

I also want you to personalise Google News - you can reorganise the way the news is show, add new categories of news, use key words to get tailored categories of news and also get Google to find news based on what they know about you from your searches.

We'll do all this in class and share a few ideas on how useful you find them. Once you're set up with Google Reader and Google News, I want you to use them both 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. Again, post that on your classroom blogs.

My Guardian piece about older people and the net

I'll come clean. Three 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. 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).

I'm writing this before you've done the exercise, but I'm hoping that you will have been able to find more info and more interesting sources than I did. If you look at the piece, you can see that some of the links I found are now dead - the domains have been bought up by ad companies or are being used by different organisations.

Researching a feature online

Here's the brief. 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.

Today's session

Today we're going to look at using the net as a research tool. We've covered this already - in the Intro to Online unit. Today we're going to look at some specific research tools and see how useful they are. We're also going to research a feature to deadline to see how well you can use the net to find information and sources.