READING: Introduction to Participatory Journalism

The most obvious difference between participatory journalism and traditional journalism is the different structure and organization that produce them. Bowman, Shayne and Willis, in his Introduction to We Media, pointed out the emerging of new media ecosystem.



For them, traditional media are created by hierarchical organizations that are built for commerce. Participatory journalism is created by networked communities that value conversation, collaboration and egalitarianism over profitability.


What do you think about this affirmation? Are we facing a new structure of news production?

Identity and Change in the Network Society

Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist who centers his research on information society and communications. He has developed a long-term study analyzing the role of new technologies in economic restructuring. During the 1990s the grouped his areas of interest within a massive study, Information Age, published as a trilogy between 1996 and 1998. Here you have an interview held in 2001 for the Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley. His argumentation will help us understand the impact of new technologies in current society and will guide our discussion about the role of new media.

Most journalists get story ideas from blogs

A survey by Brodeur and MarketWire, shows that 75% of journalists use blogs to get ideas for stories. 30% of journalists in the survey say the have their own blog.

Top Sites for Journalists

Political Journalists: Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos.
Tech Journalists: Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing
Lifestyle Journalists: TMZ, Perez HIlton and MSN Lifestyle, AOL Living.
Travel Journalists: Tripadvisor, Frommers
Healthcare Journalists: NIH, WebMed, Mayo Clinic, MSN Health

Still, some journalists ask Why Journalists should blog. Take a look to this post in Newsweek.

Interesting examples on Digital Journalism

Professor Howard Rheingold teaches Digital Journalism at Stanford. Here you can find some good examples of those students working in new media. One is a multimedia story at iStanford picked up by The New York Times. The other is a personal blog of a student focused on design and learning sicences.

The Online Journalism Awards 2008

The Online News Association celebrated its Awards ceremony on September 11-13. This year, the Spanish Newspaper El Pais won the Newest Online Journalism Award category.
Take a look at the Student Journalism Award: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill & Universidad de Los Andes, South of Here, and Taylor Hayden, Western Kentucky University, Closer to Home: A Daughter Becomes Caregiver.
We could discuss the possibility of enroll as members of the ONA.

Useful tools for Photo Sharing

Professor David Blumenkrantz shared with us his experience as a active user of Flickr. We discussed the current ways of photo sharing. We talked about forms of using some online published photos, the rights for their use and the ways we could get in contact with some authors. You could open a profile in Flickr or other similar photo sharing tools.

There is also another tool for photo sharing developed by Google and useful for bloggers: Picasa


Check some examples on photojournalism at Reuters website. There you can find some ways to link this production to your blogs.

You could also find some Reuters News RSS Feeds on this website.


Here you can find a tutorial on how to use Picasa



Here you can find a tutorial on how to use Flickr:

READING: Interactivity in Online Newspapers

Based on this recent essay, published in may 2008, we were analyzing the structural interactivity in Online Newspapers. We went from theory to practices, trying to define what is interactivity: "... a measure of a medium's potential ability to let the user exert and amount of influence on the content and/of form of the mediated communication", or "... the extent to which the communicator and the audience respond to each other's communication need".

Exercise: Compare print and online versions of some newspapers. What is the principal difference between the content and the relation with their audiences? Point out two examples on five categories of the content analysis: a) Complexity of choice available, b) Effort users must exert, c) Responsiveness to the user d) Facilitation of interpersonal communication, e) Ease of adding information.

Los Angeles Times
Sacramento Bee

The New York Times
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
The Independent
The Guardian
The Times

READING: About Audiences and news Consumption

This week we have been discussing about Online News Consumption. Based on the most recent findings of The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, we compared traditional and online sources, audiences segments and the changing news environment. An overview of the report resumes the general trends in current transformation of audiences. In depth information can be find in the complete report.