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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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I’m always interested when a piece of news-related multimedia grabs people’s attention and becomes a part of the story. This is happening with a segment of  Katie Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin. The clip that’s getting a lot of play is Palin’s rambling response to the CBS anchor’s gentle prodding about her foreign affairs experience. Here’s the clip:

This particular YouTube clip,posted by CBS, had gotten nearly 400,000 downloads when I viewed it four days after it was posted. How is it that this particular clip caught the collective eye? In an earlier era, this interview might have been seen by only the television audience watching on the night it was aired. We live in a time when what you say can stay with you for a long time.

An interesting posting by the Poynter Institute’s Ellyn Agnoletti gives us a peak into the future. Agnoletti attended the recent Online News Association conference and came back with a list of emerging technologies that could have an impact on how the news is delivered.

Take a look here and let me know if you find anything of interest. 

The business news this week has been staggering. The complexity and range of the stories make them difficult to understand, thereby making the need for explanatory reporting great. So I wondered, does the Web, with its complexity and range in story telling possibilities, lend itself to helping readers understand what is happening on Wall Street?
 My guess is that sometime soon, we will see a terrific interactive graphic that lays out the events, crunches numbers and gives us some perspective. So far, I haven’t found it. What I’m seeing in terms of multimedia coverage is not very compelling video of editors and experts giving interesting summaries and analysis. Take a look at this one from wsj.com. Maybe these type of features are better as audio podcasts because what they are saying is much more interesting that what we are seeing. 
I like that the nytimes.com is trying to maximize the Web’s ability to link people together quickly with its Q&A with experts. Readers send in questions and the experts give the answers. I also liked wsj.com’s photo gallery, which recorded reactions to the financial crisis around the world. A viewer was left with an impression that the gloom and worry was being  felt everywhere, not just on Wall Street.
Please send me links of interesting multimedia coverage of this story. 

Check out the winners of this year’s Online News Association’s annual awards. This will give you an idea of the best work being done out there by online journalists. Take the time to look at these links.  

On the day that Wall Street faces unprecedented challenges, a new business news Web site is born. The Big Money is a new venture by the owners of the online magazine Slate. Though you couldn’t ask for a better news day to launch a business news Web site, it makes you wonder how yet another site like this will find a audience in an already crowded field.If you read the editor’s note explaining the mission, the staff has set goals worth striving for: coverage that the cuts through jargon, interesting video and new multimedia features.  Time will tell whether the market can sustain another such site. 

This story came to my by way of Al Tompkins, the Poynter Institute’s resident expert on online and broadcast news. He points out that a six-year-old news story about United Airlines showed up online today and it caused the company’s stock to tank. Here is the story from the Chicago Tribune.It goes to show that people believe what they read online — so be careful what you post. 

Some major fallout from the frenzy that followed John McCain’s decision to pick Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate has landed in the lap of news organizations. In the past few days, McCain, Palin and their supporters have launched an all-out offensive against some media outlets — asserting that they unfairly went after Palin.From conservative commentators, such as this column written by radio host Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, to the more liberal-minded Huffington Post publishing a round-up of who’s saying what, everyone seems to have picked up this story line.The New York Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt looked at the question of an overzealous press in his column this week and came to this conclusion:  

The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin’s partisans. But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job, investigating a candidate who might one day be the leader of the Free World. 

 But perhaps Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s Daily Show had the best approach — a direct and humorous rebuttal.

  

 

 

I feel a bit paralyzed when faced with the prospect of writing about the Sarah Palin story. It seems to me a classic case of a story mushrooming out of control. I visualize a balloon losing its air, spinning around and around, until it is empty and falls to the ground. Where this story will end, we will have to watch as the campaign unfolds.

This weekend, the story just took off. It started with general shock over John McCain’s VP choice and then soon degenerated into rumors as bloggers, including a post on the liberal Daily Kos blog, raised questions over whether Palin delivered baby Trig, born in April, or whether her 17-year-old daughter Bristol was the actual mother.  These stories were soon dashed by the shock announcement by Palin that Bristol was currently pregnant and planned to keep the baby and marry the father.

This strand — pregnant, unwed teen daughter — is just one story line of many swirling around the Alaska governor. There’s also her “trooper-gate,” questions about her support of the “bridge to nowhere,” reports she was a member of an Alaskan secessionist party … and the list goes on.

Questions also are raised over how closely McCain’s campaign vetted Palin, a darling of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party. One thing is for sure, McCain and his people understimated their ability to “manage” Palin’s story. In this day and age, when information is bantered about with abandon on the Web — and everyone seems to be blogging — there is no stopping a story that appears to be more than meets the eye.

One interesting interview to watch is linked here. CNN’s Campbell Brown grills McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds:
[googlevideo]

New Orleans Times-Picayne, whose staff heroically covered Hurricane Katrina three years ago, was back at it yesterday as Gustav swept onto the Louisiana coast.   The newspaper’s Web site presented a textbook example of how to cover a big event happening under its nose. A red banner across the top, alerted readers of the main links of the coverage — news and hurricane tracker, a resident survival guide with nitty, gritty details about developments community by community and a place for readers to post their photos, videos and comments.  Photos were updated regularly and the site carried information that people affected by the storm could use.

One area of coverage that was slow to develop was user generated content. Usually in weather stories, photos and video uploaded by the reading public are plentiful. Around 7:30 p.m. yesterday, hours after the storm came ashore, very little of this content was available on line. Obviously, this was because most people had evacuated the area so very few people were on hand to witness the event. More of this type of material was available by Tuesday morning. Check out this interactive map on CNN’s iReport.

For more on how the news media tried to harness social media for reporting on Gustav read a column posted today by Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute. He interviewed NPR’s Andy Carvin about the “Voices of Gustav” Web site he helped create.  These efforts to build community around a news event represent the new ways news outlets are approaching a story.