Online Journalism 2: Features and Personal Web Sites

Online interviews

How do people write and present interviews in online publications. Here are some links to different sorts of online interviews/profiles. Have a look at them and think about the general approach.

• Two interviews - one with the American author Bret Easton Ellis and one with the web designer Daniel Brown - both ran in the online magazine KultureFlash.
• An interview with with Baltimore band Animal Collective that ran in the online zine God is in the TV.
• Kruger Magazine's interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem.
• An interview with the well known blogger Tiffany Brown, done by another well known blogger - Rebecca Blood.
• A fairly out there interview with the well known physicist Freeman Dyson.

Online reporting

The Online Journalism Review has a good introduction to online reporting on a wiki that it runs. As they point out, a lot of the time, when you're reporting a story online, you're going to use traditional methods - interviews, observation, document searches. You'll just do these in a slightly different way.

As the OJR point out, there are more radical approaches to reporting online that aim to take advantage of the collaborative aspect of the net - things like Open Source Reporting or Distributed reporting. We'll talk about this in class.

But if you want an example of a journalist writing about this kind of thing and attempting to put it into practice, try The See Through CEO, a story written by American tech journalist Clive Thompson for Wired Magazine. Before the story, he used his blog to talk about the story he was doing and ask for tips and afterwards he talked about how the experiment had gone.

Today's session

Today we're going to be looking at online research and reporting. More particularly, we're going to focus on email interviews. I've tapped some old contacts who've kindly agreed to do email interviews. I assign one subject to each one of you. Then you'll need to research them and develop an angle and an approach for the piece. Then we'll need to develop a list of possible questions.

The aim is get enough material from your interviews to write a short 600 word profile/interview. We'll then use that for layout practice and, if we can develop a theme, we could then use the interviews to build up a larger site.