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Why Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle failed?

I have never paid attention to what Yahoo stands for since I opened an email account at the search engine’s server nearly 8 years ago. The recent media coverage on Microsoft’s bid to obtain Yahoo reminded me that the big name in the Internet business might undergo a fundamental change while I still have no idea of its origin. I searched for the meaning of Yahoo by typing ‘Yahoo & stand for’ into the Yahoo search box. It’s an abbreviation of quite complicating, long name - Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

Yahoo could have been called "David's and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" – so appropriate, but a bit boring and not exactly catchy. The co-founders used the dictionary to come up with “Yahoo!”, a term that anyone can remember and say with ease. More importantly, Jerry and David said they liked the definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." In the end, the word Yahoo! did roughly describe it as a web search directory. The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo! database was arranged in directory layers. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom". And "officious" described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo! database while surfing from work.

According to an analysis published by Financial Times, at least one of the reasons of its failure in competing against Google has been mentioned in its name – “hierarchical”. Here is a part of the FT article entitled How Yahoo got lost in rival’s shadow.

“Yahoo is a company that grew up when the concept of [the fast pace of development in] internet time came to prevalence,” said Scott Kessler, S&P analyst. “But they have lost their timepiece, because they have not acted or reacted in internet time for many years now.”

Yahoo began as a website in January 1994 called Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, started by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in the early days of the medium. Yahoo, as it was renamed in April that year, organised websites in a hierarchy of directories for different subjects. It was a method that was to become outdated with the advent of algorithmic search exemplified by Google. But Yahoo achieved tremendous popularity in those first few years and it was floated in April 1996, raising $34m.

The Silicon Valley company evolved by adding services such as web-based email and instant messaging, and by becoming a web portal. Yahoo has accrued half a billion monthly visitors worldwide from its conglomeration of services, but it has spread itself too thinly in the process.

In the famous “peanut butter manifesto” of November 2006, Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice-president, wrote an internal memo complaining that Yahoo had spread itself like peanut butter across emerging online opportunities. “The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

Yahoo’s lack of focus caused it to fall behind Google in search and in advertising revenues.
It has also missed the social networking wave – its own effort, called Yahoo 360, has been unsuccessful. The company is seen as having made some savvy internet acquisitions, such as the photo service Flickr, bookmark site Delicious and events website Upcoming. But it has been slow to integrate and exploit these as part of its services.

The delayed introduction of its Panama advertising technology contributed to a string of disappointing financial quarters and an ailing stock price. Mr Kessler said: “The company is perceived to have shrunk in the shadow of Google. Quarter after quarter, Yahoo has been disappointing us. It has just not lived up to expectations.”

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Still Read News? Experience Them!!!

The media industry has been undergoing a series of revolutionary changes for the past decade due to the advent of digital era. The changes centered on the hardware of news - how news are produced and distributed. We do not have to wait for prime time news programs or morning papers delivered. Whenever you go online, news are there waiting for you.

But what happened to the software - news stories. Compared to the changes in the way news are produced, delivered and consumed, news themselves are far from being revolutionized. Many online stories still have the traditional paper story format of “a text + a photo” even though such digital media as video, audio, 3D animation, computer graphics and etc are available. It seems that we have been using digital hardware with analogue software.

Digital storytelling or multimedia storytelling is what I think needs more attention from journalists. So, what is it? Here is an example of using diverse media for one story by a US news site, Recordnet.com. The news company based in Stockton, California, sent a reporter and photographer along as illegal immigrants from a village in southern Mexico returned home after picking tomatoes in the fields of San Joaquin County for two years. The five-part series, “And a song shall carry them home,” followed their journey with more than words and photos. A series of videos, photo galleries, an interactive map and a podcast help tell the story.

Not just read or watch, but experience the multimedia story of “And a song shall carry them home”.

And have a look at this annual report on American journalism, The State of the News Media 2007, to get a hint on how major news websites are evaluated in terms of multimedia storytelling.

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Address-based News Site “EveryBlock”

The Internet made the Earth “flat”, as Thomas Friedman maintained in his 2005 book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. If a New Yorker makes a phone call to order pizza, an operator at the pizza company’s Mumbai call center answers it through the fiber-optic cables that connect the two cities across the Pacific. The Internet shortened the distance between the two of the biggest economies, the US and India, into a click away, totally reforming the international supply chains. This is why Friedman described the highly globalized 21st century world as “flat”.

On the other hand, another trend totally different from globalization has been clearly witnessed since the Internet began to connect people across the world - hyper-localization or cyber-balkanization. While flattening the world, the Internet have also developed further people’s interest in their own city, town and even street and preference to get along with a small, like-minded group. As a response to this trend, hyper-local media informing readers of what is happening in their next doors flourished.

A new form of hyper-local news website, EveryBlock, has recently been launched in three US cities, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with a motto of “a news feed for your block”. EveryBlock is a kind of news search engine through which you can find local stories and information by address, postcode or neighborhood. The engine has algorithms developed to filter locations within free-form texts. If you type an address in the site’s search box, all information including photos and videos related to that location appears on screen.

I put Manhattan in the Search New York box on 25 January to test the process. Three photos uploaded on that day by Flickr users around Lenox Hill, Roosevelt Island and 25 business reviews including West Side Market and Nokia Theater Times Square were returned in addition to a long list of news items. If you click an item, the information is provided on a new window with a map of its location. On top of the screen appeared a list of nearby addresses such as Upper West Side, Yorkville, Queens and Precinct 19. News articles, blog entries, images and local authority information collected by the site can also be browsed by news topics.

The founder, Adrian Holovaty, is a journalist and Web developer who has worked for washingtonpost.com and developed in 2005 one of the original Google Maps mashups, chicagocrime.org. He could begin this EveryBlock project by winning $1.1 million in last year's Knight News Challenge competition. He said in an interview with Poynteronline: "We're interested in spreading the concept of 'geocoding' news - that is, classifying news articles by location. Currently, we do that by crawling news sites and applying algorithms and human editing efforts, but it'd be best for everybody if news organizations did this on their own."

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Can Every Citizen Be an Editor? Digg Awarded

The winners of the first-ever Crunchies Awards were announced in Herbst Theater in San Francisco last Friday. The Awards were organized by popular blogging firms GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch to pay homage to the best websites in 19 categories including Best Technology Innovation, Best User-generated Content Site, Best Design, Best Business Model and etc. The winners were chosen by online votes ordinary Web users cast. The awards are 14-inch-tall plastic statues of a cap-wearing monkey poised to smash television sets and other electronic devices with a bone in a reference to a scene from the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

While Best Overall award went to Facebook for its revolutionized idea of what social networking could be and Best Mobile Start-up to Twitter, a citizen journalism site, Digg, grabbed the Best User-generated Content Site award. Do you remember the story of Ohmynews targeting Europe posted in this blog on 26 December last year? I mentioned in the post the news site’s new experiment, named Ohmynews E, of inviting citizens to the editing field under the motto of “Every Citizen Is an Editor”. Digg is exactly the site that realized the concept of citizen editors far earlier than Ohmynews.

Digg, created at the end of 2004 to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, is a name that originated from the English word ‘dig’. Digging the best stories from the sea of information, the Internet, is what the site is said to be up to. Everything on Digg from news, videos, images to podcasts is submitted by its users. Readers can evaluate each story and give it diggs, or points. Once a story has enough diggs, it appears on the front page of Digg. Otherwise, it will stay in the “digg all” area and eventually be removed. Digg has grown large enough for the past three years that “being dugged”, or appearing on Digg’s main page, often leads to a sudden increase of traffic to the website from which the dugged story originally came. Digg users refer to this change as a “Digg Effect”. The contents submitted to Digg used to be mainly technology and science articles. But the range has kept broadening to politics and entertainment.

Wikipedia is called a collective wisdom site and Wikitorial experiment such as that of LA Times may be referred to as collective reporting. The creation of Digg was based on the idea that if collective wisdom and collective reporting realize, why not collective editing. Its founders introduced the phrase of Collective Lens. The website maintains that by looking at information through the lens of the collective community, the users will always find something interesting and unique. This is the very idea that Ohmynews copied expecting a slightly different effect. The news site hoped that the collective lens could let users find something IMPORTANT as well as interesting and unique.

Digg’s success has been achieved amid criticisms centered on the site’s form of user-moderation. It is argued that Digg allows its users too much control over the contents that sensationalism and misinformation thrive. The site has been denounced for being too vulnerable to attempts to manipulate information, especially by companies willing to pay for favorable stories. If similar vulnerability were exposed in Ohmynews’s copycat service, the consequences would be more serious because Ohmynews citizen editors decide whether a story is worth reporting rather than interesting.

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Want to Make Money from Journalism?

If so, pay attention to this newly built website, Journalism Enterprise.com. One of my regular visits for news about news is Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog that covers from citizen journalism, blogging, podcasts, interactive storytelling, publishing to User Generated Content. Paul, a senior lecturer in Online Journalism and Magazines at Birmingham City University’s School of Media, launched Journalism Enterprise.com on 14 January as a sister site of OJB.

The site is all about journalism and money. He introduced it as follows: “Journalism Enterprise.com reviews websites that are attempting to make money from journalism in the new media age. That may be a mainstream organisation launching a new media spin-off, an internet startup looking to make millions, a non-profit news venture, or an entrepreneur setting up a solo project. In short, if they’re trying to make money from journalism - or launching a journalism project - we’ll cover it.”

Journalism Enterprise.com is such a community blog written by volunteer contributors from all over the world as OJB. Anyone who knows how to make money from journalism can join a team of bloggers to write about it. Ten commercial websites and online businesses related to journalism have so far been reviewed. Let’s have a quick look at some of them.

# 20Palabras.com

This is the first Argentine website with news produced for and read in mobile devices. A team of journalists selected to collaborate in the project feeds the service from any place where the news is happening (through palms, cellular telephones or laptops). In a few seconds and with only 20 words (20 Palabras) every journalist publishes the information on the instant. The “scattered staff” has currently more than 20 members. It is designed for those who do not have time to look around for news they need. The service is divided into eight areas of information, where the essence of a news story is transmitted, delivering the most relevant information to the users. Its instant communication and use of informal, succinct language reminds me of Twitter.

How is it going to make money? Through advertising. There is contact information for those who want to advertise in the texts.

# NewsTin

It provides multilingual news search. You can search, browse or read news by topics and not just by keywords. While browsing through the topic structure you can switch languages and have foreign-language stories translated in real time. For each article, its search engine is able to tell you what it’s about, who was mentioned, where it happened, etc.

Making money? NewsTin is more of a B2B taxonomy business than a consumer-oriented service provider. Most of its revenues come from its professional clients.

# Gnooze

The site describes itself as: “The day’s news, with funny voices, in about two minutes. Featuring Marta Costello, produced by Amazing Cosbars”. It is a daily news show. Marta is a blonde, pretty, funny and opinionated woman. Her show tackles the big news stories of the past 24 hours. ‘Tackles’ being the best word there: Marta goes from a calm, factual narrative to shouting and screaming her opinions at the camera.

Money? Advertising. Actually Gnooze is screaming out to be picked up by a television network.

Except for NewsTin, most ideas introduced by Journalism Enterprise.com are trying to make money through advertising. They are following the traditional(?) strategy of creating a site, increasing traffic and inviting adverts. This reflects the reality that the online media are still struggling for a business model different from advertisement. I wish that an innovative, unique idea appear on this site some day. Until then, I will keep monitoring it.

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It’s Time for Journalists to Learn Twitter?

A blog post with the title of Why Journalists Should Use Twitter caught my eyes when I was surfing the web for new trends in the field of journalism on 18 January. The article was written by Nico Luchsinger, a freelance journalist who often writes for Swiss newspapers. I could not but feel that I lagged behind in following up cutting-edge technologies for journalists. It was only less than a month ago that I came to know from a Time magazine article exactly what Twitter is, but other journalists are already talking about applying it to reporting.

Twitter is usually called a micro-blogging service. Its users send very short texts, up to 140 characters, via mobile phone’s SMS or computer’s instant messaging services to the Twitter website. These texts are instantly delivered through SMS, RSS or email to their family, friends, or colleagues who have signed up to receive them. The brief messages are called “Updates” because they are the answers to the same question, What Are You Doing? The examples are “Eating soup” “Running late to a meeting” “Partying” and etc. Using Twitter, people can stay connected with others through the exchange of their current whereabouts.

How can such short messages become a journalistic medium? Nico said “if you play around a little bit with Twitter, you will very quickly realise that there is a huge potential for journalists and media companies.” His praise for Twitter focused on four characteristics of the new network service.

(1) Quickest way to break news
He said that Twitter is a great way of breaking news very quickly and easily. Twitter’s mobile notification service makes it perfect for this kind of service, and its open API guarantees that the information can be fed into the service at very low cost. CNN is already doing it. Have a look at http://twitter.com/cnnbrk for recent stories broken by CNN toward Twitter users. The stories consist of only a sentence with less than 140 characters, for example, Sen. Hillary Clinton will win the New Hampshire primary after a tight race with Sen. Barack Obama, Nico also picked San Diego’s TV station KBPS as a good example of breaking news through Twitter. The broadcaster brilliantly used Twitter to keep the population informed when its website crashed during the wildfires last October.

Twitter can be an effective tool for citizen journalism. When Iowa held its caucuses for the US presidential elections on January 3rd, political strategist Patrick Ruffini asked people participating in the caucuses to send him the results directly via Twitter. Ruffini in turn then aggregated the results and re-distributed them on a Twitter channel he had set up specifically for the Iowa caucuses. He commented on this experience: “This exercise in citizen journalism foretold the result far more quickly than dispatching two dozen stringers to caucus locations throughout Iowa.”

(2) Connecting with readers
On a more personal level, Twitter can be a great way for journalists to connect with their readers. A German blogger and reporter Thomas Knuewer’s experience is introduced in Nico’s article. Thomas said: “One day, when I was researching an article, I was looking for a specific piece of information, I just asked the question on Twitter - and had the answer I was looking for within minutes.” Knuewer then began asking his Twitter followers for questions before he did an interview. “For each interview, I got about 5 to 10 questions from people over Twitter. That’s actually quite an impressive number if you consider that I have about 300 people following me.”

(3) Aggregating data
Twitter can be used for a quick poll or census. Thanks to staying connected with people all the time, a user can ask anything to the others at any time. There are several sites that allow you to directly poll the Twitter userbase, for example Twittpoll and Twittercensus.

(4) It’s free
The great thing about Twitter is that it’s completely free. This has allowed the service to grow very quickly over the last year or so. It is now estimated to have 866,000 users.

Anyway, if Twitter firmly puts down roots in the media industry as one of journalistic platforms, we have to struggle again to develop a new news format that best fits the 140-character-long space.

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How much time is left for newspapers to make money?

The answers to this question have so far widely ranged from 5 years to forever. Arthur Sulzberger, the New York Times chairman who recently merged the paper’s print and online news desks, said last year: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.” The CEO does not care if the Times will be printed because he believes other sources of revenue such as the online version will be able to make as much money as the printed one does.

On the other hand, some people in the media industry still refuse to withdraw their belief in the future of the printed news market, even though having witnessed the continuous circulation reduction that almost every newspaper is experiencing these days. Two supporting evidences for such belief are presented. First, they argue that no medium in the human history was totally replaced by a newer one. From books, movies, radio, TV, newspapers to the Internet, all media invented so far are altogether around us instead of disappearing. Second, the newest medium, the online news sites, is still struggling to find such a sustainable business model as that of newspapers.

Another answer to this controversial question was presented at a meeting of the Lords’ committee on Media Ownership and the News on 16 January. The editor of The Sun newspaper, Rebekah Wade, told the committee that her newspaper’s internet edition cannot yet replicate the economic operations of the printed news. But she forecasted: “The Sun's revenue from the internet would become significant in 14 to 15 years time.” Staggering growth of online operations did not mean that much, she said, as growth was from a base of nil and. The pace will dramatically increase in the coming years as internet operations develop, she added. "We have a set of projections [for internet development] and sets of targets that we want to achieve, and so far we are achieving them." See journalism.co.uk

I think she gave us one of the most realistic predictions on the future of the print and the online news markets. In 15 years from now, those who spent their teenage years in the late 1990s and the early 2000s will reach the peak in their careers and play the role of opinion leaders both in a household and in a society. Because they grew up in an environment where the Internet kept penetrating deeper and deeper into people’s daily lives, they may have no objection to a news market dominated by the online stories.

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Top 10 Online Journalism Stories of 2007

What happened in the world of online journalism in 2007? CyberJournalist.net released its top 10 stories of the year. The news and resource site founded in 2000 in the US has focused on how the internet, convergence and new technologies are changing the media. It said that the trend of citizen journalism and user-generatied content stories overwhelmingly dominating the top 10 was not surprising.

Top 10 Stories of CyberJournalist.net in 2007

(1) New York Times launches user-generated features
The New York Times has launched its first regular user-generated content features. In March, The Times launched a Share and View Photo Gallery on its Collectible Cars site that allows members to post photos and personal stories of their collectible cars and rate and post comments to other members’ collectible car submissions. The Times announced that couples who submit announcements to the Weddings/Celebrations pages of The New York Times will be able to submit their own How We Met homemade videos to NYTimes.com/weddings.

(2) 2007 Online Journalism Awards
– Finalists New York, (September 11, 2007) – Finalists for the 8th annual Online Journalism Awards, honoring excellence in digital journalism, have been announced by the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A total of 70 finalists ranging from small independent sites to some of the biggest brands in online news were selected from more than 700 entries. The finalists were chosen by a team of distinguished journalists during a two-day event on the USC campus September 7 and 8. Winners in each of the 20 categories will be announced at the OJA Banquet during the 8th annual conference of the Online News Association (ONA), October 18 at the Sheraton Centre, Toronto. “The range of finalists this year demonstrates the remarkable diversity in online journalism and the ever-growing number of sites producing first-rate content,” said ONA President Kinsey Wilson. “From established brands, to small community start-ups, we’re seeing great work at every level.”

(3) Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog
Cambridge Community Television hosted a 3-month documentary production course that resulted in this short documentary on Citizen Journalism. The 15-minute documentary Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog is a guide to US citizen journalism through the ages - from Thomas Paine in the 18th century to the more modern hows and whys of being an anti-establishment news hound. The film features interviews with talking heads from the blogging world - including Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices - discussing, among other things, how newspapers have gone through major cost-cutting exercises as their revenues are leeched by sites like Craigslist.

(4) CNN to launch user-generated video show on-air
CNN will launch a new program built on user-generated video on Headline News on May 19. The BBC is among the other networks with similar programs. PRESS RELEASE — News To Me, the first cable news program comprised of user-generated video, will debut on Headline News on Saturday, May 19, at 12:30 p.m., it was announced today by Ken Jautz, executive vice president, CNN Worldwide. The program, hosted by award-winning actor/producer Eric Lanford, will showcase the most compelling videos, pictures and stories traversing the Internet. The program will air on Headline News each Saturday and Sunday at 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. (all times Eastern)…

(5) AP partners with citizen journalism site
The Associated Press has partnered with a citizen journalism site, NowPublic.com, to integrate user-generated content into the wires. AP bureaus will work with NowPublic communities in selected locations on ways to enhance regional news coverage, and national AP news desks also may tap the network in breaking news situations where citizen contributors may capture critical information and images. PRESS RELEASE AP and NowPublic.com announce a collaboration The Associated Press and NowPublic.com announced Friday that they have agreed to an innovative initiative designed to bring citizen content into AP newsgathering, and to explore ways to involve NowPublic’s on-the-ground network of news contributors in AP's breaking news coverage. NowPublic.com, based in Vancouver, is the world’s largest participatory news network with more than 60,000 contributors from 140 countries. The AP is the world’s largest newsgathering organization with a staff of more than 4,000 employees located in more than 240 bureaus in 97 countries.

(6) Guardian to become 24/7 Web-firtst newspaper
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent," according to Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis passes on, via Juan Antonio Giner, the Guardian's draft principles of working 24/7: DRAFT PRINCIPLES OF 24/7 WORKING The Guardian is increasingly becoming a global news provider with an international audience and reputation. Web users expect to read about news as it happens. If we don’t update our site continuously readers will go elsewhere...

(7) Eyewitness video of Virginia Tech shootings
CNN.com's I-Report posted video sent in of the shootings at Virginia Tech that killed at least 30 people. The site also posted user photos from the scene. Roanoke.com also posted video from Virginia Tech's campus, collected by Martin Arvebro and Carl Nordin, two Swedish students who were visiting Virginia Tech's campus. The site also has a guestbook for the victims.

(8) Sneak peaks at USAToday.com design
Here are previews of the radical new design USAToday.com is going to unveil this weekend. The new home page: Note the heavy emphasis on user comments, voting on stories and blogs. Users will have profiles that'll be highlighted in the top right; a readers comment will be featured in the masthead. Users can recommend stories Digg-style, and then sort the top headlines by what users vote on. On Deadline blog: USA Today is going to feature its successful On Deadline breaking news blog right on the home page. Feeds: The site incorporates feeds from other news sites -- including competitors -- right on its section pages. Sites like Yahoo have done this for a while, but it's rarer for news sites to do so with direct competitors. Personal Pages: The site will give users their own personal pages, where they can list interests, add their USATODAY.com buddies and display their activity on the site, such as comments they've posted and photos they've uploaded. Tags: Keywords in stories will be linked to topics pages with more stories on the subject.

(9) Sulzberger: “I don’t care if we’re printing Times in 5 years”
"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger said at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, last week. Some more interesting quotes/paraphrases from Sulzberger at Davos: Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It's a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn't see a black void ahead. The New York Times recently merged its print and online news desks. Did it go smoothly, or were there ruffled feathers? Which team is leading the way today? "You know what a newspaper's news desk is like? It's like the emergency room at a hospital, or an office in the military. Both organizations are very goal-oriented, and both are very hard to change," Sulzberger says. Once change begins, it happens quickly, so the transition was difficult, he says. "But once the journalists grasped the concept, they flipped and embraced it, and supported the move." That included veteran managers, too.

(10) Washington Post issues blog guidelines "A group led by Outlook Editor John Pomfret and involving editors and reporters from the newsroom and wpni has drafted guidelines for blogging on washingtonpost.com," says an internal memo obtained by FishbowlDC: This memo describes guidelines for our newsroom for creating, maintaining (and ending) blogs. Blogs, like all content on washingtonpost.com, are published under the supervision of editors at wpni. This primer aims to help reporters and editors at the newspaper decide when, how and whether to launch a blog. All blogs should draw on our principles for Washington Post journalism on the web, including meeting our standards of accuracy and fairness and rules for expressing personal opinions.

What works?
• A news column/opinion blog with two or a single contributor. Examples: Raw Fisher, White House Watch.
• A breaking news or event-driven blog that can accept many contributors but should generally be supervised by one editor. Example: The Trail.
• A blog oriented around a relatively defined issue with two or a single contributor. Example: soccerinsider.
• Blogs with voice, a consistently strong (even provocative) writing tone. Example: Achenblog.
• Blogs with active editors. Guidance is important and all blogs need editing and benefit from the back-and-forth between the author and an editor.

What doesn’t work?
• Group blogs that lack focus.
• Blogs that lack voice.
• Blogs that are not updated (several times a week AT LEAST).
• Grab-bag blogs that are a dumping ground for notes that will not mak

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"Ohmynews targets Europe"

Korea’s citizen journalism news site Ohmynews is planning to launch “Ohmynews Europe”, reported the Telegraph in its online edition on December 21. If the plan comes true, the European version will be Ohmynews’s third overseas branch following Ohmynews International, based in the US, and Ohmynews Japan.
The story entitled “South Korean news pioneer targets Europe” seems Telegraph’s exclusive. No Korean medium has reported about the company’s plan to enter the European market.

Telegraph quoted Mr. Oh: “I hope I can keep introducing our model to other countries including Europe, North America and hopefully North Korea in the future. Why not? Actually, we are in talks with a European partner to launch an OhmyNews site in Europe." (The Telegraph writer made a mistake by calling Oh Yeon Ho, the founder of Ohmynews, Mr. Ho instead of Mr. Oh. She must be unfamiliar with Korean family names that come first, not last.)

According to the story, Mr. Oh did not reveal any timetable for the launch in Europe nor the partner that he is talking with. The plan may be too premature to discuss openly. It can be one of the ideas he is playing with for a long-term strategy. However, it can be clearly said that he is not discouraged at all by the criticisms over the news site’s performance both in Korea and overseas.

Mr. Oh strongly refuted the criticism that Ohmynews Japan has failed in mobilizing Japanese citizens: “I believe OhmyNews Japan, with more than 4,000 active citizen reporters as of today, has succeeded in introducing the citizen journalism model to Japanese society." He also defended his company’s financial loss in 2006 saying that Korea's advertising market - which accounts for 60pc of the group's revenue - was wallowing in the doldrums and Ohmynews invested heavily in the site's redevelopment.

Actually, Ohmynews has vigorously invested in various projects, the two most prominent items of which are establishing the Citizen Journalism School, a institution for training citizen reporters, and opening the “Ohmynews E” site, one of Ohmynews Korea’s new services.

Citizen Journalism School that opened November 24 is located in a rural town about 90 minutes by car away from Seoul. Mr. Oh invested $400,000 in refurbishing an elementary school building having been abandoned for more than 10 years into a journalism education center. Facilities will include three classrooms large enough to accommodate 100 students simultaneously and in-school lodging and dining capacity for 50 guests, complete with broadband Internet access and blanket Wi-Fi coverage. It also has a mid-size recreation area and room for other outdoor sports activities.

The education program will include journalism 101 classes for citizen reporters, writing workshops for new citizen reporters, and digital camera class customized for photo journalism and video news gathering. The faculty will be composed of professional journalists from print, radio and television news and senior OhmyNews citizen reporters, with additional teaching staff with a variety of expertise and colorful professional backgrounds.

As of September 1, 2007, Ohmynews announced another motto of “Every citizen is an editor” and began an experiment of opening up news editing function to the users. It created a new page entitled “Ohmynews E” – “E” stands for “Editor” – which contains a list of stories, comments and photos contributed by the users. Those who are not a citizen reporter can also contribute to this page. The List is initially edited by the newsroom editors but keeps changing according to the points given by the readers to each piece. The higher points an article receives, the better place on the list it goes to.

It is clear that Ohmynews has lost much of its popularity among Korean netizens over the past five years. The news site could not play such a crucial role in the last week’s presidential election that the conservative candidate, Lee Myung Bak, won as it did five years ago. But, taking the recent active investments into consideration, it is too early to evaluate its performance both as a news organization and a business model.

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NUJ Called on Bloggers to join the Journalist Union

National Union of Journalists (NUJ) that granted a blogger its membership for the first time in November moved one step further to embrace blogging as a form of journalism. Jeremy Dear (in the photo), the General Secretary of NUJ, has called on bloggers to join the union, saying that medial landscape is changing.

It was unclear in November when the organization accepted a blogger as a member if it really includes blogging within the boundaries of journalism. (See the entry entitled Are Bloggers Journalists? NUJ Said "Yes" on November 16)

The 20-year-old first NUJ member with a job title of blogger, Conrad Quilty-Harper, is working for a website owned by a media company, AOL, covering IT news.

In other words, he is a full-time professional ‘news worker’, which fulfils the basic conditions for a membership of NUJ. So, the labor union seemed to approach the issue of his membership from a technical perspective without a serious consideration into what is journalism.

"Bloggers of the world, unite" said Jeremy Dear

But, everything becomes clear by Mr. Dear’s article for The Guardian's opinion website Comment is Free on 18 December.

Dear knew that NUJ’s welcoming a blogger as a member has caused a stir. He said: “A worry about professional standards is often the reasoning behind those who have questioned whether we should have admitted a blogger into the union.”

“But this question fails to recognize the changing media landscape. Whether they're freelance or employed, in broadcast or in print, hundreds of our members are already blogging on a regular basis.

“The nature of journalism is changing and, as a union, we have to reflect the industry in which our members work. Clearly, not all people who blog are journalists, but journalists who are bloggers should be encouraged to join”, he argued.

Dear wrote that the union would have to be active in whatever medium journalists find themselves working, in order to protect its members' rights at work and maintain journalistic quality.

Dear also rejected suggestions that the union is less relevant in the era of media convergence: "There are those who say that professional journalism won't survive the 'information revolution'. We've been hearing that refrain for a century. Every new technology - radio, television, the internet - was predicted to spell the death knell for the NUJ."

Lemann "As journalism moves to the Internet, move reporters there"

His view that the media landscape is changing is not arguable. We have witnessed how the new technologies are reshaping the world of journalism.

However, it cannot be a satisfactory answer for those who are worried about professional standards in journalism. Contrary to his argument, they are worried because the changes in media landscape threaten the standards in journalism.

Furthermore, the large number of J-bloggers, professional journalists who are blogging, does not support the argument that bloggers are journalists. They may be who Nicholas Lemann had in mind when arguing in the New Yorker article Amateur Hour: “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.”

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Top 10 Stories of 2007

At this time of the year, news organizations release their own version of Top 10 Stories of the Year. Browsing these lists reminds us of not only what happened for the past year but each newsroom’s distinctive angle for news selection.

The process of selecting top 10 stories varies. Some newsrooms ask readers what they think was the biggest story, others run a special team for the selection. In most cases, reporters vote.

Let’s have a look at a variety of lists!!

Virginia Tech massacre - the top story of the US

The US editors and news directors in the Associated Press’ annual vote chose Virginia Tech massacre of 32 people by a student gunman as the top story of 2007. The story received 82 first place votes out of 271 ballots cast for the top 10 stories. AP said: “It was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.” The war in Iraq, the top story of 2006, ranked third this year. No. 2 story is the mortgage crisis.
1. VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS
2. MORTGAGE CRISIS
3. IRAQ WAR
4. OIL PRICES
5. CHINESE EXPORTS
6. GLOBAL WARMING
7. MISSISSIPI RIVER BRIDGE COLLAPSE
8. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
9. IMMIGRATION DEBATE
10. IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Madleine McCann - the most searched story in the UK

One of the easiest ways to pick top 10 stories is just counting the online clicks for stories. The Times Online did so. “Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran” recorded the top story with approximately 650,000 views. Such an online version of top 10 tends to include more soft news than those based on reporters’ votes.

1. Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran (655,000 views)
2. Scientists hail frozen smoke as material that will change world (650,000 views)
3. Madeleine McCann: the key questions (535,000 views)
4. Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil (530,000 views)
5. Israelis blew apart Syrian nuclear cache (520,000 views)
6. Sex ban on the Airbus A380 (485,000 views)
7. An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change (480,000 views)
8. Rally champion Colin McRae dies with son in helicopter crash (475,000 views)
9. Could nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens sink Disneys billion-dollar franchise? (430,000 views)
10. Skydiver charged with murder after love rival fell 13000ft to her death (420,000 views)

Times Online also released the most wanted SEARCHE TERMS of 2007.

1. Madeleine McCann
2. Anna Nicole Smith
3. Airbus
4. American Idol
5. China
6. Spice Girls Reunion
7. Kate Middleton
8. Fopp
9. Global Warming
10. Afghanistan

Vladimir Putin - TIME's Person of the Year

The US magazine Time annually picks the Person of the Year. The magazine describes TIME's Person of the Year as this:

“It is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse.”

In 2006, Time chose “You” as the Person of the Year. “You” meant those who participated in the Web 2.0 Internet to make the online world more productive and innovative.

This year’s candidates included the Nobel laureate Al Gore, the Harry Porter writer J. K. Rolling and the Chinese President Hu Jintao. Time’s pick went to the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia receded from the American consciousness as we became mired in our own polarized politics. And it lost its place in the great game of geopolitics, its significance dwarfed not just by the U.S. but also by the rising giants of China and India.

"That view was always naive. Russia is central to our world—and the new world that is being born. It is the largest country on earth; it shares a 2,600-mile (4,200 km) border with China; it has a significant and restive Islamic population; it has the world's largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and a lethal nuclear arsenal; it is the world's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; and it is an indispensable player in whatever happens in the Middle East.

"For all these reasons, if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

Murdoch Buys Wall Street Journal - the top media story in the US

The Editor and Publisher, a US journal covering the newspaper industry, picks top 10 newspaper industry stories. This year’s No. 1 went to “Murdoch Buys Dow Jones”.

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Is This the Future of Newspapers?

The US journal Editor & Publisher posted on its website on December 1 an AP article with a title: New Device May 'Kindle' Interest in Reading E-Newspaper on Daily Commute.

It said: “Making a successful reader for electronic books is one of the toughest tasks in consumer electronics. Many have tried and all have failed. This week, Amazon.com Inc. released the Kindle, the best attempt yet at toppling the book.”

Details of Kindle

Kindle contains a cell-phone modem, through which it can download books, magazines, newspapers and blogs anywhere Sprint Nextel Corp.'s network has coverage.

Amazon has 90,000 e-books in its store. A full-length best seller takes less than a minute to arrive on the device, if you have a good signal. The text shows up on the Kindle's six-inch screen, which uses "electronic ink" technology.

Eleven newspapers are available, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News. If you subscribe to one, it arrives automatically on the Kindle in the morning, ready to read on your commute.

They're devoid of graphics and have very few photos, but it's much easier to handle than a broadsheet paper on a crowded subway.

Minority Report Realizes?

Stephen Spielberg’s science fiction film Minority Report illustrated so well how newspapers will look like in the future.

When Tom Cruise gets on an underground train, a passenger’s electronic USA Today downloads new articles including the story about Tom.

The newspaper is a plastic video screen thin, foldable, and wireless. People call the technology “e-paper”.

The Future of Newspaper?

Amazon’s Kindle must look primitive when compared to “the USA Today in 2054” depicted in the movie, but may be the first step toward the era of paper-free news.

The author of the AP article criticized the device in some technical perspectives such as short battery duration. He said: “If not, we'll have to wait for the next attempt at making a great e-book reader. Like a great white whale of the electronics world, it seems ever elusive.”

However, search with “Kindle” at Amazon.com. You will see a page illustrating a new wireless reading device named “Kindle”, but you cannot buy it at the moment because they are sold out despite its price of $399 and horrible design.

This shows that a huge demand on a replacement for “news in paper” exists, and means that journalists have another technology for which they have to devise a new news format.

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AFP invests in citizen journalism

Another news site based on citizen journalism accepted an investment offer from a global mainstream medium, AFP.

Scooplive relaunched on November 29 with a new name, Citizenside, and money from AFP.

What is Citizenside?

CitizenSide was created in 2006 in Paris, France, by three founders, Julien Robert, Philippe Checinski and Matthieu Stefani. Julien took responsibility for website creation in terms of technology and Philippe had specialty in finance and marketing.

It was Matthieu who had something to do with journalism. He was part of the team that has launched the successful free daily newspaper Metro in France and joined the HQ of Metro International in London.

CitizenSide is such a platform where anyone can participate with his or her own news contents as Ohmynews in Korea (Even its motto With Scooplive, we are all reporters! reminds me of that of Ohmynews Every citizen is a reports).

It introduces itself as “the first photo and video scoop marketplace on the Internet” and aims at creating the world's largest amateur and/or independent reporters community with a commercial goal.

How it works?

If citizens send in photos and videos, Citizenside offers them to journalists worldwide who have already signed up for the site. There are two ways of distributing the citizen contents.

If the content is a scoop, it is auctioned off on the website and sold to the highest-bidding media in each participating country, who benefits from a 30-day exclusivity.

If the content is an interesting current news document, it is on sale on the site’s image bank at a fixed rate, and is available to media all over the globe.

Each reporter or seller retains the copyright of his photos. He grants the buyers a license to use his material and grants Scooplive a license to market them. The seller earns up to 85% on the final sale price of his documents.

Why AFP invests in Citizenside?

According to the AFP statement, the French news agency bought a 30 percent stake in Citizenside and will not take part in its editorial decisions.


AFP hopes this investment will allow it to get closer to readers and to bring the contents produced by citizens to its news media customers.

Pierre Louette, President of AFP, said: “This is for us a purely commercial and technical experiment in the Web 2.0 field, to help our clients, mainly in the media field.”

Read more!!!

Women in Journalism

Press Gazette reported on November 28 that Women in Journalism (WIJ) relaunched its website.

Women in Journalism is a networking, campaigning, training and social organisation for women journalists who work across all the written media, from newspapers and magazines to the new media.

WIJ was established 12 years ago. It grew out of a demand for women to be more effectively represented at senior level in newspapers and magazines, and has since evolved into a forum for women in journalism at all levels.

The organization boasts its contribution to a significant increase in the number of women editors and deputy editors in national newspapers.

It also organizes bi-monthly seminars to give women journalists chances to think about 'How to ask for more money', 'What features editors want', 'Get your own column' and 'How to write a bestseller'.

10 years ago in Korea

I began working as a reporter in 1996 at the Kukmin Daily in Seoul. The Kukmin recruited 6 reporters in that year including myself, a half of whom were female. Such a ratio of men to women was unprecedented in the male-dominating industry.

The imbalance in gender was the problem of not only mains stream media but also new media that started to appear on the Internet in the early 2000s. The citizen reporters of Ohmynews were also a male-dominating group. According to the company’s 2003 statistics, 76.6% of them were male.

New Trend?

However, the trend has changed for the past decade. More and more women has applied for jobs in the media for the past years. Their competitiveness surpasses that of male applicants in most cases.

Therefore, Korean media have difficulty in recruiting male reporters because fewer of them defeat women competitors at examinations for recruiting journalists. Some companies give advantages to male applicants to strike a gender balance.

I remember that I was surprised by the dominant number of women at the first meeting of Sheffield University’s new MA journalism students in last September.

I told one of the female students how I was surprised but she replied “It’s natural. Whichever country or university you go to, journalism is a women’s subject.”

Why Women Love Journalism?

Elizabeth Day, a female reporter for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed an article to British Journalism Review in 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 21-25). Its title was Why Women Love Journalism?

I think she is the right person to answer this question. She was named Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March, 2004, thanks to both her hunger for exclusives and her stylish writing. Please read her article!

Two Realities

I agree to the argument that women are ill-represented in senior posts of media industry. But the new trends that I witnessed in Seoul and Sheffield are sure to reflect the reality.

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Are Bloggers Journalists? NUJ Said “Yes”

A 20-year-old blogger became a formal member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) this week.

The NUJ general secretary said that he is the Union’s first member with a job title of “blogger”.

Does this mean that the journalists’ organization formally recognizes blogging as an area of journalism?

Who is that blogger?

He is Conrad Quilty-Harper (in the photo) , a history and politics student at the University of Hull. But he is currently taking a year off to work for Mahalo, a website that defines itself “a human powered search engine”.

Mahalo, based in Santa Monica, California, hires people to select best links and produce spam-free search results for popular keywords. Conrad is one of those hired.

A blogger paid by AOL

He also writes for Engadget.com, which is a popular technology news blog. It consists of the works of several bloggers. Conrad is one of those bloggers who are paid by Engadget.com. T

The blog is a member of Weblogs Inc., a blog network purchased by AOL in 2005. So, technically Conrad is working for a MSM (main stream media) company.

“I was the first questioner at a Steve Jobs press conference”

He has previously blogged at Joystiq.com and TUAW.com, and has vigorously participated in a large number of Flickr groups.

Conrad boasts that he threw the first question to the Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a press conference in the last September where reporters from major media including BBC, FT, and the Guardian attended.

Apply – Rejected – Complain – Accepted

In the first place, his application for membership was rejected by NUJ in the last October. NUJ replied his email application saying:

“While you are studying full-time you will not be eligible for full or temporary membership, and as you are not doing a journalism/media course, you are therefore not eligible for NUJ student membership.”

Conrad complained to NUJ that he is currently not a student because he suspended his study for a year to work as but a “full-time” blogger. Then, NUJ invited him to its London Freelance branch meeting and decided to admit him as a member.

The first member who earns his living from blogging

The NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging”

He added in his blog: “Who says we're not attracting new media workers? Membership in new media was up almost 11% over the past year.”

Is blogging journalism?

When the NUJ rejected Conrad’s application for a membership, the issue was not his work, blogging, but his status as a student. The Union approved his application as soon as it confirmed that he is not a student at least technically.

It seems that the NUJ had no objection to the idea of including bloggers in the category of journalists, as long as they are “full-time professional” ones. This means that NUJ has already regarded a blog as a journalistic media where people can get news with quality.

In Conrad’s case, few reason can be found to reject his application. His specialty in technology and the quality of the information he provides have long been highly valued. Above all, he devotes his entire working hours and energy to news reporting.

A critic to citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann, wrote for the New Yorker on August 7, 2006 that good Internet journalism needs people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.

Even to his criteria, Conrad will hardly be excluded from the category of journalists. However, His case should not be generalized to put the entire world of blogging under the umbrella of journalism. A significant level of professionalism should be needed.

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Is Google Dangerous?

“Google is hugely dangerous. It now affects everything we do online.

“Google is the number one topic of conversation at News Corp.

“We absolutely can’t afford not to be brilliant on Google News.”

The editor-in-chief of Times Online, Ann Spackman, made these comments at the Society of Editors conference on November 6 in Manchester. She showed her concern about Google during a session entitled the Future Is Ours. She attended the session as a panel to discuss the future of newspapers and made these comments when asked her view on Google. She also said: “Google is the biggest influence on the news business. Its move into DNA is a massive threat.” Her remarks attracted attention from many journalism news sites such as journalism.co.uk, Press Gazette, and greenslade. Why is Ms. Spackman so worried about Google?

Is Google a News Brand?

Google itself produces no news. The search engine just provides its users with news produced by someone else - newspapers, broadcasters, or news sites. It is a platform through which people get access to various news contents. You can click hyperlinks to news stories on Google News pages or search news by key words. But, Google has a function of journalism – news selection!

Thousands of news producers pour countless stories onto Google every day, but its news pages are limited in space. Only a tiny portion of those articles can get a link on it. Especially, if a huge story breaks out, hundreds of different versions of same story rush in. Who choose which story or whose story to appear on the main page of Google News? Google does! Google News pages are designed to have an inverted pyramid structure just as a newspaper does. The more important is a story, the better positioned. Who decides top stories on Google News? Even though far from a news brand, Google does the same thing as the editor-in-chief of the Times does in his newsroom – deciding news value.

I typed “Pakistan” in Google news search window at 12:29 pm on November 9 to catch up with stories about its opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. On the top of my search results was Bhutto under house detention in Pakistan of an American newspaper, San Jose Mercury News. Why does this story of that newspaper come first? It is because of Google search engine’s algorithm.

The Power of Google Algorithm

Ms. Spackman elaborated on why Google is a threat to news business at an interview with Press Gazette after the session was over. She said that newspapers have to optimize their sites for Google not to lose enormous traffic coming from the search engine. News sites depend financially on the advertisement revenue that is hugely influenced by the size of such traffic. If the traffic is highly susceptible to Google, it means that Google has the power to financially control news sites. When Google tweaked its search algorithm last month, WashingtonPost.com was one of several major sites whose PageRank temporarily dropped, she noted. Google also controls a large amount of advertising online, particularly since its acquisition this year of online advertising firm DoubleClick.

Power without Responsibility

Ms. Spackman was asked her view on Google during the conference session by an attendant who described it as "a trusted brand for news", according to journalism.co.uk. If the person reflected the reality as it was, Google's news selection must be regareded by people as a form of journalism. People are getting addicted to it as they have been to a certain brand of newspaper. This means Google can weild influence upon public opinion just as news media do. But it is free from the responsibilities every news medium takes for granted, because it does not produce any news.

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