New Tools for Reporting

RSS , an abbreviation for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, or ‘Rich Site Summary’, is a format used by news sites and weblogs for distributing content.

RSS feeds include headlines, abstracts and other information, allowing RSS readers to search the feeds you have chosen and pull in the latest information from them.

Nearly all weblogs publish RSS feeds and most news sites now publish them, meaning that you can get just about any type of online content via RSS.

As a self-confessed techno-phobe, the simple thought of experimenting with something new on the Web terrifies me!

With assisstance from John Dube, I suprisingly found RSS feeds easy to manage, not to mention extremely efficient and highly informative.

As I have discussed in a previous post, we are a time poor demographic and RSS feeds certainly enable a user to be exposed to an array of information in the most time efficient manner.

In 2004, the Communications Industry Forecast found that 10.04 hours of media was consumed every day and predicted that by 2009 we will all be consuming an additional hour of media a day.

As argued by JD Lassica, RSS feeds can be used to eliminate information overload.

“The explosion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a problem for any info-warrior: Who the heck has time to read all this stuff? Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN”.

As an impending journalist, however, it is my concern that my future career may be spent filtering through numerous RSS, not creatively investigating the next big story.

OhmyNews in South Korea

* Oh Yeon-ho introducing visitors to the OhmyNews forum

Oh Yeon-ho, the founder and CEO of OhmyNews, wanted to start a tradition free of newspaper company elitism and created OhmyNews to change society.

Oh launced a test version in December 1999, with a staff of four and had received 20 articles from citizen reporters.

By mid 2007, the number of Korean citizen reporters reached almost 60,000.

OhmyNews International was launched in May 2004 and by March 2007, had 3,000 citizen reporters from 100 countries, attracting more than 700,000 repeat visitors each day.

At a time where international news is rapidly losing ground, at rates greater than any other topic area, OhmyNews International enables an audience member to receive foreign news that they might not receive from a local or national paper in their location, by visiting the site to further enhance their knowledge.

An average of about 200 stories are submitted by citizen reporters each day and about a third of these are rejected for reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors or the lack of news value, ensuring the quality of journalism is not diminished.

Citizen reporters must sign a code of ethics and violation of this agreement can result in the membership being revoked, an important aspect in regards to accuracy, credibility and verification.

OhmyNews enables an audience to consume newsworthy articles that they may not normally be exposed to.

“OhmyNews strives to listen to the voices of no one but our readers and citizen reporters”. 

 In my opinion, OhmyNews has changed society by combining traditional journalism with citizen journalism, to create a unique website.

Make Money Around Free Content – Why $0.00 is the Future of Business

* Image courtesy of www.treehugger.com/us-money-photo.jpg

 Fred Wilson discusses the media business model in, ‘Make money around free content‘.

Wilson explains how both media and most online businesses are based on ‘software economics‘, where the cost of creating something of value is relatively high, but the marginal cost of distributing to each consumer is very low.

Generally, when people think of the ‘media business model‘ they usually just think of advertising, but Wilson explains how it goes far beyond that in his list of all the revenue models that can be found in the media industry, all based around a core of free or almost free content.   

Chris Anderson in ‘Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business‘ discusses how the rise of freeconomics is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web, such as the cheap price of bandwith and storage.

With more people turning to the Web as a news medium, broadcast commercials and print display ads have given way to a blizzard of new Web-based ad formats, such as Yahoo’s pay-per-pageview banners and Google’s pay-per-click text ads.

These approaches are based on the principle that free offerings build audiences with distinct interests and expressed needs that advertisers will pay to reach.

Advertisers are now more able to aim advertising at certain demographics, thus place more advertising on the websites of news organisations.

“The ability of technology to track readership of specific stories has given editors a powerful weapon in future financial battles, for the first time making an indisputable link between strong editorial content and the kind of higher readership that attracts advertisers”, (http://journalism.org/node/11977).

The Future of Media Report informs us that 37 per cent of consumers would rather pay for online content than be exposed to advertisements, I know that I certainly would.  

User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle

This week I read Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan’s, ‘User-generated content and the changing news cycle‘, in Australian Journalism Review, volume 28, number 1, Pp. 57-60, 2006. This paper describes the blog phenomenon and a range of emerging digital journalism forms which make up the ‘personal media’ revolution.

In June 2005, the Pew Center in the USA reported that eight million Americans had created blogs and 32 million read them.

Tom Curley, CEO of Associated Press, noted that in November 2004, bloggers were creating about 16,000 posts per hour – more than his organisation’s total content. (Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan, “User-generated content and the changing news cycle”, pg. 58).

Coverage of the London Bombings on July 7, 2005, was the catalyst for the emergence of a new form of reporting in the United Kingdom that is now known as ‘participatory‘ or ‘citizen‘ journalism.

The Boxing Day 2004 tsunami was a similar event in which citizens around the world contributed to a news website.

Every citizen can now be a reporter, as the emergence of blogs delivered via mobile phones (moblogs); video-based blogs (v-logs); newspapers’ use of podcasting to deliver content; and wikis, or peer-generated online content, enable anyone with access to these technologies to disseminate and share their information with a large audience.

A citizen reporter may be at the scene as an event is unfolding, therefore the raw emotion of the newsworthy situation may be captured as it is happens through technologies such as a mobile phone and then uploaded via moblogs or v-logs. 

A downside to this positive, however, is that Philips Electronics reconfigured the Nokia 3650 phones so picture resolution was of broadcast quality and members of the public may not have access to such technologically advanced equipment, therefore poor quality images may be taken. 

A further downside to citizen journalism, in my opinion, is citizens may not be aware of legal and ethical practices undertaken by professional journalists and this may result in not only the author of the content landing themselves into legal ramifications, but the quality and credibility of journalism may also be at risk.     

 

* Video courtesy of YouTube – London Bombings

* Video courtesy of YouTube – Boxing Day Tsunami