March 26, 2005, 1.25pm • 21 comments » • 2,213 Views

Good weekend journalism links

• OJR: How to succeed as a citizen media editor
  Online Journalism Review takes a very interesting look at the skills required of the emerging skill of the CME.
• Two Timeses add and drop tech sections
  The UK’s Times Online has added a Tech & Net section. Meanwhile, the New York Times will fold its Circuits section into its general business coverage.
• Fact-checking the UK General Election
  CNN has done a great job of fact-checking the last couple of US Presidential elections. And, of course, bloggers now play their part. But, if you thought only the country on the western side of the Atlantic could do it, watch out for Channel 4’s upcoming FactCheck website, which “will offer unbiased scrutiny of speeches, interviews and manifesto pledges - informing public debate by creating a popular resource for an information-hungry electorate”. Journalism.co.uk reports C4 has recruited an experienced politcs news team for the project.
• BBC News site to be cut, editor writes
  Pete Clifton told site readers how Mark Thompson’s plan to cut around 2,000 jobs (including 420 from News and 58 from New Media) will affect the website - “or us it means a proposal to close about 12 journalism posts” … “areas on the site where effort is expected to be reduced to varying extents in the coming year include On This Day, Programmes, Business and Entertainment” … “it will mean reducing the amount of work produced in those areas, and our focus across the department will be fast, well-written news, background and analysis, and original journalism”.
• OJR: Is online news reaching its potential?
  Nora Paul has an overdue think piece on the state of online news. The lo-down?
  1. The promise of the limitless newshole hasn’t been met because online news operations largely shovel existing content from old media products.
  2. Rather than people flocking to get the extra context that the bottomless newshole also allows, users actually just want quick news hits (however, people are interested in getting transcripts).
  3. Hyperlinking out to other sources never took off because we can’t vouch for the veracity of the destination page (actually, sites to link out but only conservatively).
  4. News has not become the two-way conversation that was promised (true, but it’s only now we can see what that promise could really look like).

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