Easy Publishing Tools for Online Journalists

Easy Publishing Tools for Online Journalists is a useful overview of some technologies for would-be OlJs.

Remaining Assignments

There are four remaining submissions for the term listed in the course outline: Assignment #3; Quiz #2 (proposal); In-Class Presentation, and the Final Project. This sounds like a lot, but it should be manageable. Here's how it will work:

Assignment #3: This assignment will be a continuation of the previous two weblog assignments. You will be required to write at least two course-relevant entries (approximately 300 words total) per week on your existing weblog for the remaining weeks of the term. Some entries will require you to respond to a specific question I provide to you. In addition, there will be some specific technical assignments. Review date for the assignment will be 24 November;

Project Proposal (Quiz #2): Instead of a quiz, you will write a brief proposal for the final project (see below) and submit it to me via email. The due date for the proposal will be 1 pm Monday 13 November. The proposal should be no more than three paragraphs long and should describe what you would like to do for the final project, what product you would like to produce, and what topic you will address. The proposal should identify each student participating in the group and what each student's contribution to the project will be.

Final Project: The Final Project will be a group assignment with each student contributing an individual portion of the assignment. The product of the assignment, due Friday 8 December, may be a paper (3 to 4 pages double-spaced, plus references, per student) or it may be posted online as a linked series of weblogs, a group weblog (a few individuals posting to one weblog), or some other format you propose. Whatever format you choose, each individual student's contribution must be clearly identifiable.

Any topic of relevance to this course is acceptable. Some possibilities include:
--New Information Technologies in Kazakhstan/Central Asia
--Online Journalism
--Public Relations and Weblogs
--NITs and Citizen Journalism
--Useful Tools

Presentation: Each group will do an in-class presentation of their project during the last two weeks of class. Presentation dates will be determined in-class on Friday, 17 November.

We will discuss these further in class.

Bloglines Blogroll

Here is a link to my Bloglines list of feeds.

PR and Weblogs: Ethical Issues

Journalists aren't the only media professionals who have discovered that weblogs can be a useful tool. PR professionals have as well. In some cases, though, they are used deceptively, as in this case in which a PR firm representing Wal Mart created a supposedly independent weblog to promote the company, and even hired a Washington Post photographer to contribute to the site while posing as just an average person. It's an interesting case in ethics (or better put, lack of ethics).

Update, 30 October: In a follow-up to the Wal Mart PR weblog blunder, Mediashift asks what impact the scandal may have on weblogs and the PR industry.

OhMyNews! and Korean Nuclear Coverage

In Poynter Online's e-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran links to an OhMyNews! page focused on the issue of nuclear weapons in North Korea. She calls the page, which combines professional and amateur analysis, "a classic example of how traditional and citizen journalism can complement each other to round out a major story."

Also see Amy's post from the same day on collaboration between professional journalists and webloggers.

Wikiproject Central Asia

At Registan, Nathan Hamm reports that a group of people involved with Wikipedia are beginning a project to improve the site's coverage of Central Asia. According to its webpage, Wikiproject Central Asia "aims to expand, cleanup and wikify, better organize, and neutralize the point of view on articles related to Central Asia." There is an ambitious list of projected articles for the site. Take a look, and consider contributing something if you are so moved.

Tips for Good Blogging

From South Africa, Vincent Maher offers 11 Tips for Managing a Good Blog Entry. His focus is on weblogs as tools for community building. Although some people think this sets them apart from traditional news media, I tend to think that is an important part of what all news media ought to be doing. From Amy Gahran at Poynter Online.

See more tips in Seven Ways to Optimize Your Blog

Bloglines Subscription

Also for this week, please sign up to the web based RSS/site feed reader Bloglines and subscribe to some news feeds there. Also make sure that the site feed for your weblog is enabled. We will discuss how to do this in class.

Here's are some handy resources: tutorial from Better Days on setting up and using Bloglines (warning: lots of graphics make for a slow download); How to Set Up Bloglines as your Web Aggregator.

Required Reading for October 23 to 27; Quiz Style Guideline

Required readings for the week of October 23 to 27 are:

Dube, Jonathan (2005) "RSS for Journalists," Poynter Online, February 16. Available at: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=78383

Gillmor, Dan (2006) "What Ethics Should Bloggers Have?" in Reporters Without Borders (eds.) Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. Available at: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15003

Note that these two readings are presented in a formal style which you should use for your works cited list at the end of your quiz essay due later this week. The list at the end of your essay should include similar information for any work you used in your essay. Within the text of the essay, you should briefly identify each work as you use it as in this example:

As Dan Gillmor suggests, bloggers may not be professional journalists and may not need formal journalistic codes, but if they follow some of the ethical guidelines of journalism then they may gain the trust of their readers.

Using this style should allow your writing to flow while giving enough identifying information to ensure your readers can locate your sources, regardless of whether hyperlinks are working or not. We can discuss this more in class.

neweurasia on Kazakhstan Blogging and Media Law

Over at neweurasia Kazakhstan, Leila is wondering about what Kazakhstan's media law and a government promise to consider new policy on regulating the internet might mean for bloggers. She asks:

"What about blogs? A relatively new phenomenon in Kazakhstan ... There are about 16,000 Livejournals registered in Kazakhstan, 6,000 of them based in Almaty (the number of people actually maintaining diaries is not confirmed).* Only some blogs discuss politics and offer analysis of news and events. Could these diaries become subject to information and media laws? In my opinion, yes, and if so, this is not a good development for Kazakhstan."

The internet's greatest potential is also perhaps the most important cause of confusion about its legal status: it gives so many people the opportunity to act as their own publishers and to share their ideas widely with little oversight. This can create confusion in particular in a region without strong traditions of press freedom. Kazakstan's bloggers (and other internet users) would be well-advised to pay attention to concerns like those Leila raises. I recommend her post. (And note that her comments include some discussion of how realistic might be her estimate of the number of bloggers in the country.)

Feedback on Assignment Two

I have reviewed the weblogs for Assignment Two and will provide each of you with feedback and grades today in class. However, there are a few pieces of feedback I will also provide here to everyone.
In general I liked the range of topics in student's entries. Most of you included issues relevant to the field. Most of you also did a good job of meeting the technical requirements of the assignment. I especially liked some of the conversations that emerged among people in the course. There are a few areas that need attention, however. Please take these requirements into account for all future work for the course.

1. Acknowledging Sources: You must acknowledge all your sources clearly, and clearly indicate when you are quoting from another source.


2. Cutting and Pasting: Use the cut and paste feature sparingly. There are too many cases of entries made up entirely, or almost, of quoted text. From this point on, each of your entries must include a minimum of 75 percent of your own words and all quoted text must be clearly offset from your own words.


3. Writing for Other Courses: Treat material written for other courses as you would material written by other people. You may quote from it or refer to it, but you cannot simply post material written for another course on your weblog without acknowledging it as such.


4. Post Consistently: Too many people rushed to post entries just before the final due date of the assignment. Assignment two was designed so that you would post at least a couple of entries each week. I only reduced grades a bit for posting deluges this time, but that will change in the future. When I ask you to post a couple of entries per week, that's what I want to see.

We will talk more about these things in class. Please ask me if you have any questions.

Top Three Things a Journalism Student Should Know

At :journalistopia journalist-blogger Danny Sanchez is writing (and asking for professional advice) on the question:

"What are the top three things a freshman journalism student should do or know to be a competitive job candidate three years from now?"

Sanchez will be giving a talk on the subject at a Florida j-school, and he is asking for suggestions from readers. One response I liked:

"Treat everything you produce as a piece of professional public work, whether it’s text or photos or a video you post on YouTube. Your Web presence is an important part of your portfolio. You will be Googled."

There are more worthwhile suggestions in his comments section. Check them out.

Thanks to Mindy McAdams for the link.

Quiz #1

Due Date: Friday 27 October, 1 pm

As we have discussed in class, your first quiz for the term will be a formal essay which you should post as an entry on your weblog no later than 1 pm on Friday 27 October. The essay should be approximately 500 words in length. In your essay you must make use of material from the required course readings (all of which are listed on this site). You should also use other material linked through the course weblog, and you may use other sources as you wish. All ideas and words you borrow from any sources must be clearly cited in the text of your essay (and supplemented with an online link if possible).

Your assignment is to write an essay exploring some way that new information technologies are changing (or might possibly change) journalism. This assignment is intentionally broad to allow you to choose a specific issue that interests you.

Be sure that your final essay is fully developed, with a clear opening position, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. Feel free to discuss your ideas for essay topics with me.

Required Reading, 9 to 13 October

Reading for this week is:

"The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers" (PDF), a report by the Bivings Group (read this one for major ideas) and "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism" by Steve Outing. Read this report more closely, and follow at least a couple of links in each section of the paper to see examples.

Link Update

Please remember to update the link to Anel's site in your weblog. The old URL was:

http://sofico.blogspot.com/

Her new address is:

http://sofico17.blogspot.com/

You can copy and paste the new address in your template, or simply add the "17" to the existing URL (in the proper location) in your template.

New Links: Registan.net and Global Voices Online

Nathan Hamm, who runs Registan.net, visited our course weblog the other day. He wrote that he has found our sites and has loaded all of them into an online aggregator for potential use in his writing at Registan and at Global Voices Online. (We will be talking more about aggregators in coming classes.)

We have discussed Global Voices before in class, though this is the first time I have looked at Registan.net. The site seems like another very good resource on Central Asia. Nathan has an impressive list of links there in the sidebar. I'm adding both resources now to the sidebar on this site.