All Wired Up » blog http://blog301.edublogs.org Journalism in the 21st century Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:55:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Bloggers get a Global Voice http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/10/26/bloggers-get-a-global-voice/ http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/10/26/bloggers-get-a-global-voice/#comments Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:51:25 +0000 alchemi http://blog301.edublogs.org/?p=36 Global Voices is another site that operates under a Creative Commons licence.

It describes itself as “a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society,” which “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”

Global Voices works not only as a news source in its own right, but as a wire from the blogosphere (a blogwire?).

It works with traditional media rather than against it, transcending the online vs traditional journalism debate by encouraging both sides to work together.

It’s For Media section is a comprehensive resource for editors and journalists and encourages mainstream media to use the site to generate story ideas.

This spirit of cooperation is refreshing -a perfect example of how the quality of journalism (in all its forms) can be enhanced by combining new and old reporting methods.

Navigating the site is incredibly easy and I found it’s search by country method (accessed in the top-right of the homepage) a fantastic feature. For example when I chose Australia I found this blog post from John Kennedy about the reaction in China to Kevin Rudd’s election victory.

The post compiles translated Chinese blog posts praising the victory. It’s effectively a blog within a blog within a blog within… you get the picture and shows just how good GV is at bringing the global blogosphere together.

Trawling the internet to find this sort of material could take days without an innovative site like Global Voices to do it for us.

In case you can’t tell from my glowing praise above, I found Global Voices to be the best blog I came across during ALJ301 and will now be a frequent visitor.

]]> http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/10/26/bloggers-get-a-global-voice/feed/ 0 The Picasa Experiment http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/09/19/the-picasa-experiment/ http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/09/19/the-picasa-experiment/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:20:06 +0000 alchemi http://blog301.edublogs.org/?p=28 Since this week’s reading by Robert Niles is all about photo albums and integrating them into a blog, I thought I should give this a go.

I decided to go with the winner, Picasa. Since I use a Mac, I’m a bit skeptical, but Niles assures us the Safari problem has been fixed.

So I go to the Picasa site and realise there is no version yet for Mac, not a good start. Curse this PC dominated world.

Not to worry, they have a special ‘exporter’ for Mac which allows me to export pictures directly from iPhoto to a Picasa album… Cool, that’s even better.

So uploading the photos proved easy, but when I went to view the album I discover that my pictures have been put in reverse order.

So I click Edit>Organise and reorder>Sort by date and there is my picture sequence in all its kick-flipping glory. Now to embed the thing:

Success. Well that was pretty easy.

As for how slideshows fit into the realm of online journalism. Look at any news website, for example this one, this one or this one. When a big story breaks (especially a highly pictorial one) they usually incorporate a slideshow.

On a smaller scale, they are great ways for a small-time blogger or CJ to share pictures to go with their story.

NB: The photos in my slideshow are taken by my friend, Jon Scoble. He’s a professional photographer and I have his permission to use these photos (just wanted to clear that up).

]]> http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/09/19/the-picasa-experiment/feed/ 0 UGC: The death of the newspaper or the start of democratic journalism? http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/08/13/ugc-the-death-of-the-newspaper-or-the-start-of-democratic-journalism-2/ http://blog301.edublogs.org/2008/08/13/ugc-the-death-of-the-newspaper-or-the-start-of-democratic-journalism-2/#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:08:06 +0000 alchemi http://blog301.edublogs.org/?p=23 Two-thirds the number of newspaper readers now read blogs. Does this pose a threat to the future of Journalism? Well, only for advertisers and marketing dinosaurs who can’t adapt to the changing face of the media.

All this talk of the death of the newspaper reminds me of when the record industry went all Chicken Little, screaming the sky was falling in a thunder-storm of free music all over their profits. Napster and Kazaa (now replaced by Bittorrent) were letting people get music for free-a problem for sure. But what did the record industry do? Sweet F.A. They wasted all their time suing people and crying over ever-decreasing album sales. This made room for ITunes. Apple saw oppurtunity in the change instead of doom and well, the rest is a fruity piece of history.

A similar thing is happening to Journalism, except it’s not illegal to download free news (yet). Blogs and online news are filling the role that newspaper no longer can… providing instant news and opinion. Basically, the role of newspapers has changed to one of analysis, rather than breaking the story.

‘Citizen Journalism‘ though, is an entirely new thing. There are two-types of CJ’s -the eyewitness with a camera or mobile who gets that one-in-a-million shot of something huge, and the professional, one-man newsroom.

Check this out: Steve Garfield from The Uptake (a video-journalist website) beats CNN to a scoop about 2008 Presidential candidate, Duncan Hunter and explains how he streams news live from his mobile phone…

Steve Garfield – Citizen Journalist, beats CNN to their scoop

and just for fun:

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