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  OnlineNewsWatch is a blog that follows developments in the ever-changing landscape of online journalism. It is edited by Vera Haller, an assistant professor of journalism at Baruch College.

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Blogs are good for many things, among them giving journalists a forum to focus on a particular subject. This blog is an example. It gives me the opportunity to write about changes in the news business.

Blogs also allow journalists to tell the story behind the story, to go into detail or to shoot off on a tangent in ways traditional news stories wouldn’t allow. The Iraq story has spawned many a journalist blog – most of them offering up painful stories of life behind the headlines. The New York Times is the latest to launch such a blog, Baghdad Bureau. The item I read, about a platoon of U.S. soldiers about to go home, provided vivid reporting with photos and audio clips from individual soldiers.

In another such blog, Baghdad Observer, McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel recently posted a poignant item about the isolation felt by the 13-year-old son of an Iraqi  colleague. The NBC News bureau also blogs at Blogging Baghdad.

The war also has inspired non-journalists to write. Take a look here at a directory of blogs and diaries from Iraq compiled by Yahoo.

The opportunity that the Web allows newsrooms to communicate directly with their audiences is being used by The New York Times in response to the controversy about a recent front-page article about Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

The article, which raises questions about McCain’s judgement in some potential conflict-of-interest situations, was widely criticized. As of this writing, more than 2,400 readers had posted comments on the Times’ Web site — many of them questioning the motives and journalistic integrity of the reporters and editors. Other news organizations wrote stories about the story, such as this column by The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz.

In response to the controversy, the Times opened up a line of communication with its readers, setting up a “Talk to the Newsroom” link that allows editors to respond directly to readers’ questions on this specific topic.

While the Web facilited the dissemination of all the criticism of the article, it also provided the forum for the Times’ defense.

It’s always good to keep track of new Web sites that are coming out of the news industry. The newest that I’ve found is miami.com, a companion site to miamiherald.com.

A big banner ad across the top of the Herald site promotes Miami.com, which bills itself as THE place to go for information about going out and other leisure activities in southern Florida.

The new venture is rather breathlessly introduced in a video hosted by J.R. Biersmith and Toni Gonzalez, who apparently run the site and who try to convey that the site is cool and in-the-know.

The site has compiled searchable databases of restaurants , clubs and events and has any number of guides, such as one compiled from Miami Herald reports about beaches in South Florida. Stories, reviews and video tours round out the content on the site.

The site also heavily promotes user involvement, soliciting reviews, comments and photos from the general public.

I find it interesting that newspapers are spinning off sites like this. In the Herald’s case, a local entertainment site such as miami.com would likely generate more local advertising. For other examples, check out metromix.com, which was a creation of the old Tribune Co. (before being sold to Sam Zell) of a network of local entertainment sites in markets where the company had newspaper outlets. The idea of metromix was to generate interest among national advertisers who might want to place ads over several markets.

 

What is sometimes lost in discussions about the current state of the news industry is how the shift to the Web has created opportunities for powerful storytelling. The ability to report using words, images, video and audio means news organizations can draw people into a story like never before.

To find compelling coverage on the Web, take the story in Kenya. For many people in the United States, a news story from Africa may seem remote and, perhaps, not of the highest interest. But spend time on the YouTube channel created by NTVKenya, a television news station, and the importance of the story will be driven home. There are heartbreaking reports such as this one about children being separated from their families because of the violence.

Other interesting Web coverage is being done by a young photographer/blogger, Lameck Nyagudi, whose photos are featured on the BBC’s Web site.  Nyagudi also has a blog and supplies photos to africanews.com.

While discussing coverage of the presidential campaign with students in my journalistic writing course today, the question came up: Are news media outlets showing bias in favor of one candidate over the other?

 

This is a perennial question, one that comes up any time there is a big election. However, the question seems more pressing this year than in years past because of the intense interest in the race – and the immediacy of online coverage. I think it would be safe to say that there is much more coverage on news Web sites this election than four or eight years ago.

 

In the newspaper world, instead of writing one main headline a day for the political story (allowing editors to keep track of which candidate they have been focusing on), Web editors are now updating the political stories several times a day. I imagine it is difficult to keep track of whether stories and headlines are balanced among the candidates.

 

As a totally unscientific exercise, I scrolled through several news Web sites that have a national reach and took a survey of their top political headlines. As you can see, they were all over the place – none were the same. While this exercise provided only a snapshot of the huge amount of political coverage out there, it was heartening to see so many angles covered.

 

 Here were some of the headlines at 1:30 p.m. today:

Poll: Obama edges past Clinton – USA TODAY

 

Clinton holds narrow delegate lead — CNN

 

Virginia Is Next Key Battleground For Dems – CBS NEWS 

 

Clinton tries to halt Obama momentum – MSNBC

 

For McCain, Losses Signal Challenges – New York Times

With The New York Times leading its business section today with a big story about gloom, doom and the newspaper industry, it seems more pressing than ever to figure out how to make news Web sites more profitable.

The bottom line is clear. The key to improving profits is the ability to charge higher advertising rates which, in the case of Web sites, are linked to the amount of traffic.

This is where it gets murky. Tracking Web traffic seems to me to be a very imperfect science. I don’t pretend to be an expert here so I was happy to find an interview in Editor & Publisher with the head of Nielsen’s online unit that attempts to explain how tracking is done.

A lot of news is happening in the city today. People are voting in the presidential primary, helping the Giants celebrate their Super Bowl victory at a ticker tape parade downtown and maybe even taking in a show at Fashion Week at the tents in Bryant Park.

In this day and age, there is no reason for anyone to be just a consumer of news. News Web sites in the area are providing plenty of opportunities for readers to be part of these stories.

The Daily News has a cool feature in its fashion coverage called “Hot or Not.” Readers click to a page with photos from the catwalks and they are able to vote on which outfits they like and which outfits they don’t.

For Super Tuesday, The New York Times rolled out its ongoing “Polling Place Photo Project,” with a link off the homepage. Readers are asked to upload photos of their polling places and provide a little bit of information such as how crowded a polling place was at the time of the photo. These photos are hardly scintillating, but people seem to be getting into the project

A little more raucous were the videos of Super Bowl celebrations posted by readers on NJ.com. The site, which gets its news from a group of New Jersey newspapers including The Star Ledger in Newark and The Times of Trenton, had a pretty good selection of reader-posted videos. The site was soliciting photos and video from today’s parade so it may be worth a look this evening when people have had a chance to get home and upload their coverage.

 When I used to work night rewrite at the New York bureau of The Associated Press, I remember having to write running leads on developing stories such as political debates and award ceremonies.The idea was to watch, take notes and then write a lead while the event was still going on so that newspapers would get an early version of the story before their deadlines. It was a nerve-wracking and tricky task.

So it is with sympathy that I read the efforts of live bloggers, who now write blow-by-blow accounts of political, entertainment and sporting events. Obviously, the style of writing is different from what I used to do. Bloggers can be more casual and opinionated. The reasons for writing in real time have changed, too.

From what I can gather, live blogs allow Web sites to stay on top of the news as it happens and they act as a platform to engage users in real-time discussions. These are valid reasons to run live blogs, but I’m struck by how fleeting the posts are. Barely is the debate or game over and the entries seem obsolete.

This doesn’t seem to discourage news organizations from pursuing the practice. With public interest running high in the current presidential race, it seems like everyone is live blogging the debates. Take a look here at recent posts by usatoday.com and nytimes.com.

The live blogs are intense work. The “On Politics” blog on usatoday.com covered the 90-minute Republican debate in Florida with posts at 9:15 p.m., 9:25 p.m., 9:40 p.m., 9:58 p.m., 10:02 p.m., 10:17 p.m., 10: 30 p.m. and 10:47 p.m. I’m sure it wasn’t too much past 10:47 p.m. that the blog was replaced as the main link about the debate.

Politics is not the only area where live blogging occurs. Hollywood award ceremonies are another inspiration for live blogging. The recent SAG awards had any number of bloggers giving running accounts of who looked fabulous and who didn’t.  I’m also sure we can expect some sports writers to be opining and observing during this weekend’s Super Bowl.