Newsrooms must get active to survive the economic meltdown (OJR): Robert Niles writes: “Allow me to suggest that the U.S. news industry’s collective failure to accurately portray the world over the past decade has done as much, if not more, to drive readers to the Internet than any inherent attractiveness of this new medium.
“…The desires for fairness, balance and objectivity are worthy goals in newswriting. But not when they lead to news reports where truth is ‘balanced’ with lies, facts ‘balanced’ with spin and well-informed skepticism ‘balanced’ with mindless cheerleading.
“…Without [a unique voice], a news organization cannot stand out. It can’t inspire the public with leadership that it does not provide. Nor can it protect the public with clear direction that it refuses to offer. …The news industry must become far more active, learning from online colleagues like Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas, who are not afraid to make the connection between news reporting and civic activism.”
Winter Storm 2008 (Spokesman.com): A smart setup on the back-end CMS allowed the Spokesman Review to quickly pull together this thorough topic page. According to assistant managing editor, digital media Ryan Pitts: “The database has tagging enabled on all content assets, so we can use a common keyword and a page like this comes together automatically. You can toggle among the different content types: hit the ‘blog posts’ button, for example, and it pulls together what’s basically an aggregated blog from across all our blogs, consisting of any posts on the topic.
“This lets us highlight specific pieces of coverage on the cover page, and put a ‘complete coverage’ link to the tag page that’s made automatically. That way we can focus far more on actually gathering and producing the content, and don’t have to spend nearly as much on packaging it. Using a common tag also means that the ‘related content’ boxes on each individual story or video page get populated automatically.” (Thanks to Tidbits contributor Ken Sands for the tip.)
How does an online newspaper work? (Knight Pulse): Video interview with Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego on impact and online journalism:
.
