Online Journalism 2: Features and Personal Web Sites

Online Features

If we get chance today, we're going to look at some online features - the idea is, again, to think about how they use the potential of the web. How are they developing the standard forms and practices of print? Are they adding anything new? Or are they just reproducing what works in print?

Here are a few features to look at:

• A Wired story about an IM infatuation that went very wrong
• A Time magazine package - various Top Ten lists for last year.
• Rebecca Blood's profile of Glen Reynolds, one of the big A List bloggers
• An old Salon piece - The Good, The Bad and The Fugly
• An Observer Magazine story about Grazia Magazine
• A more recent Salon story - a round-up/rundown of recent US comedy shows
• A Wired package on micromedia
• A piece from The Guardian Weekend supplement, about female pop/rock musicians as style icons
• A piece from The New Yorker Magazine, about a reality TV show about aspiring rock journalists
• A recent entertainment news piece, from Slate, about gossip blogger Perez Hilton doing a net TV show

Way New Journalism

When the web first appeared, some journalists got very excited about its potential. They thought it would offer all sorts of new possibilities to writers and individual journalists in particular. If you want to see how excited people got, read The Birth of Way New Journalism by Joshua Quittner.

This was written 12 years ago for Hot Wired, one of the first online magazines. It was launched by Wired Magazine, which, at the time, wanted to see itself as the Rolling Stone of the digital revolution, or something. Hence all the stuff about New Journalism.

We'll talk about this in class. How do you think the piece holds up? What did Quittner get right about the way journalism has developed online?

Site analysis

There's a lot of housekeeping stuff to get through today. Aside from that, I'm going to introduce some of the key concepts we'll be looking at this term. I'll also be trying to find out what you remember from the Introductory unit that Tina taught last year.

First up, I want us to analyse some news and magazine sites. I'll put you into pairs and get you to look at a couple of these sites.

• The Guardian
• BBC News
• Wired Magazine
• Handbag
• NME
• Dazed and Confused
• Salon
• Sport
• Monkey Magazine
• Plan B
• God is in the TV

Think about how each site differs from a conventional print newspaper or magazine. In what ways is each site using the potential of the net? Can you identify new types of story, new forms of journalism that people are developing online? Or are they just reproducing old forms and ideas?

Think about who the site is aimed at and how successful it is? How usable is it?

Welcome back!

Welcome to the new OJ unit. This term we're going to be looking at site design and feature and news writing online. I'll go through it all in more detail today when I hand out the unit handbook.

Over the course of the unit, I'll put useful info and links up here. But I'll also try to put it on Blackboard too - you can go there direct or access it via the College Student Portal.

Let me know how useful you find Blackboard compared to this blog.