Introduction to Online Journalism

Analysing online writing

Writing online, especially on blogs, often involves responding to and critiquing pieces written elsewhere, often in the mainstream media. Recently, Jay Rosen, an American journalism professor, wrote a column for the LA Times, taking apart a comment piece the paper had run before, also written by a journalism professor, arguing that blogs weren't serious journalistic tools.

Rosen is a committed advocate of both blogs and online journalism in general - his piece is a well informed, well argued rebuttal of the first piece. Have a look at it and think about the way he uses links and the way he puts the piece together.

One of the most popular blogs in the world is Boing Boing - have a look at one or two posts there and think about the way the writers work with links and the blog form. You could also look at the blog put together by Clive Thompson - an American tech journalist who writes for The New York Times and Wired. Again, think about the way he writes and the way he uses links. You could also do the same with Dooce, another very popular blog.

Incidentally, if you're looking for some good basic advice about how to write well online, once again the Online Journalism Review has a good list of tips on its wiki.

Today's session

Today, we're going to look at online research and reporting and then go back and look at some of the things we didn't manage to fit in last week - in particular writing online. I hope that this week we'll get a chance to talk about what the Web 2.0 is. Last week, I asked you all to try to do a bit of research on this.

First up, though, we'll talk about research and reporting online. The Online Journalism Review has a good basic introduction to this. It covers some of the more interesting new approaches to research/reporting online - approaches influenced by the Open Source movement and sites like the Wikipedia.

We might look at these later on but first we're going to think a bit about how the net can be used as part of a more tradtional approach to reporting.