The building block of journalism is no longer the article (Jeff Jarvis): “The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. …I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.”
Google News In Quotes: New election quote comparison service, which might be a good complement to Politifact’s index of candidate statements by issue. From the Google News blog: “Google News already extracts quotes from news articles. Even so, it was a pretty tedious process to compare what two people were saying about a particular topic. As you might have guessed, In Quotes allows you to do just that. You can easily read what, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama have already said about the economy, education or energy (that’s just the e’s!).” (Thanks to Justin Crawford for the tip.)
Online Ethics Wiki: “This Wiki began as a starting tool for the ethics panel at the Online News Association’s 2008 annual conference. The goal was never to just have a panel though and after attending the ‘Whose Rules’ Ethics Media Workshop at Kent State University, members of the three groups (ONA, KSU and Poynter) have agreed to form a partnership moving forward. For now, this partnership will involve discussing Ethical issues here on this wiki as they arise.” (Thanks to Steve J. Fox for the tip.)
Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online (Steve Outing): Newspapers “need to add the micro-personal to their news menu. …Redefine what ‘news’ is, and offer that to consumers who remain as news-hungry as ever. …What is ‘news’ to the modern, Internet-savvy consumer now includes information that newspapers and their Web sites have not touched in the past (except in a few isolated cases online). Many of today’s editors don’t even consider it to be ‘news.’ Yet people are demonstrating a desire for it every day, by the millions, as they receive ‘news’ from their friends, family, and colleagues.”
BBC appoints blogger-in-residence (Reportr.net): “Internet executive Steve Bowbrick will be blogging for BBC Future Media & Technology for six months. His brief is to work on ideas for a common and open technology platform. The questions at the BBC is how open can the corporation be, what should it share with outsiders and should it be be opening our banks of content and code to license fee payers, entrepreneurs and organizations?”
“White Label” and “Private Label” Social Networking and Community Platforms (Jeremiah Owyang): Great resource if you’re contemplating ways to expand your online presence but don’t want to be saddled with building tools from scratch. It’s a list of social networking platforms or application suites that you can take and rebrand.
