Sunday, October 8, 2006

AEJMC Newspaper Division Website Update By giving up on reading a Sunday newspaper I finally found time for a long-overdue update of the AEJMC Newspaper Division website today, listing the new officers who took office Oct. 1, adding links to upcoming academic meetings and conferences (two of them in New Orleans), and putting in a belated link to the online newspaper from last August's convention in San Francisco. That AEJMC Reporter newspaper is worth a look... especially for my online journalism students. It was the online edition of a printed "show daily" produced by a volunteer staff for that one-week convention. The online version, complete with photo galleries  and other multimedia, used the system that publishes a student-run news site at San Francisco State during the school year, [X]Press Online, which is also worth a look. It includes a newspaper, magazine, weblogs and podcasts... and says it has 30,000 readers. And it's not entirely unlike a news site project that's picking up momentum here at UT, using the Django software system developed by the same Adrian Holovaty I mentioned earlier today in my main blog. (This item also appears in an AEJMC-only RSS feed.) As for the AEJMC Newspaper Division website, I'm taking a gradual approach to moving from my 1997-era HTML coding to more up-to-date techniques... but not much of that this weekend. Maybe when I get a graduate assistant... 7:47:19 PM     Toward a top-10 list of top-10 lists of what news sites should do Catching up with Doc Searls' lists yesterday reminded me of a Bivings Report on improving newspaper websites that came out back in August with a "top 9 plus 1 things..." list. It had more overlap with Doc's list (or vice versa) than I remembered, and sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post and the News Sentinel are already doing some of them (to various degrees). Bivings suggested newspaper sites: Use taxonomy tags to cut across traditional newspaper "section" names Use full-text RSS feeds (like blogs do) Work with "Social" websites Link stories to relevant blog entries ("who's blogging about this?" links) Eliminate registration Partner with bloggers for local news coverage Offer readers alternative organizational schemes (most read, most blogged, etc.) Modernize the visual design of news sites Learn from Craigslist's simplicity and efficiency Make sites work on PDAs and phones These blog sites all accept comments, so I checked back today to see how much discussion is going on (armed with a handy word-count function in my text editor). Conclusion: These lists aren't as popular as the top 10 lists from Moses and David Letterman, but they are getting read. The Bivings Report list prompted scores of responses, about 5,000 words, and more discussion on a follow-up page adding to the list, plus an extended response from journo-programmer Adrian Holovaty. Next level: Adrian focused on the philosophy of treating news information as "structured data" and generated another 7,000 words of feedback from readers. (Newcomers: For examples of what "news as data" can accomplish, see a couple of Adrian's projects: the mashup of Google maps and police reports at ChicagoCrime.org and The Washington Post Congressional Votes Database, another case of combining data sources and building something even more useful.) I'm tempted to go back and see what other Web-journalism watchers like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis have added to the list-making enterprise recently, but I don't have time. In fact, what I like most about these "what online news can do" discussions is how they home in on the role of 21st century journalists as warriors against information overload. Excuse me while I go read another 30 or 40 pages of good ideas for doing that, then catch up with last Sunday's New York Times Magazine and... damn, it's Sunday again. 7:20:58 PM

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