• About this Blog

  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.

• This weblog was developed and is supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY

  

  
  
  

• Recent Posts

  • How far we've come
  • The cost of reporting
  • Gloom and doom
  • Times’ front-page ad causes stir
  • Web beats print, study finds

• Recent Comments

  • Shirlene Martineze on The Times and the McCain controversy
  • Bujji on The art of online news
  • arlennabra on The art of online news
  • aikinbourg on A look into the future
  • evalinewat on The art of online news
  • honbriared on The art of online news
  • charlyshaf on A look into the future
  • mercysingl on A look into the future
  • colbystraw on A look into the future
  • katelinnfo on The art of online news

• Media blogs

  • Behind the Lens
  • BuzzMachine
  • Cyberjournalist
  • Editor & Publisher
  • Gawker
  • Media Blog on The National Review
  • MediaShift
  • PressThink
  • Romenesko on Poynter Online
  • The Changing Media Landscape

• News sites

  • 1010wins
  • abcnews
  • amny
  • bbc
  • boston
  • businessweek
  • cbsnews
  • chicagotribune
  • cnn
  • curbed
  • digg
  • dollars&$ense
  • espn
  • forbes
  • gothamist
  • latimes
  • miamiherald
  • msnbc
  • newsday
  • ny.metro
  • nydailynews
  • nymag
  • nypost
  • nytimes
  • pagesix
  • people
  • slate
  • sportsillustrated
  • thestreet
  • theticker
  • tmz
  • usatoday
  • villagevoice
  • wabc
  • washingtonpost
  • wcbs880
  • wcbstv
  • wnbc
  • wsj

• Categories

  • blogs
  • business
  • community journalism
  • economy
  • foreign news
  • journalism education
  • multimedia
  • newspapers
  • online news
  • politics
  • social networking
  • sports
  • television
  • Uncategorized
  • video

• Admininstration Panel

  • Login
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

An interactive map about the New York Marathon on nytimes.com pulled together a lot of different elements under one umbrella. There were photos and audio clips at different points along the race route, and just boxes of text with snippets of information about the marathon. It might have been nice to see video clips, too. Maybe I looked at it too early in the day and they will be added later.

As news organizations fall over themselves to post the best and most intricate interactive elections maps, I thought it would be useful to pull some of them together in one place to make comparison easier.Election results and Web sites seem like a match made in heaven — lots of data combined with a visual background that allows you to link information to geographical location.
 You can even allow users to customize their results based on the races they are most interested in following.The ultimate in this genre has been CNN’s on-air, big board election map that calls up the most detailed data with just a tap of the finger by its political reporter John King. The danger with these types of reporting tools is often reporters and designers try to squish too much information into one format.
 The end result can lead to information overload and confusion.I offer you a few examples that cross the spectrum from simple to sophisticated:  

• Scientific American has a very simple map that highlights just the battleground states. 
•  The Daily Kos map may lead to information overload. I feel you need a lot of time to figure out this map and then get something out of it.
• Here is CNN’s online election tracker.
• The LATimes.com’s interactive electoral calculator allows readers to predict which state will go red or blue and then will give you an updated count of electoral votes.
• The BBC’s election poll tracker is more like an interactive timeline that follows developments across the life of the campaign.
• On the Fox News interactive map, users will be able to customize the election data they follow by entering their zip code or state. 

The New York Times’ Bits blog has an interesting post today about online video. It addresses a question about how long Web site users will spend watching video on their computers. The answer seems to be that they are committing more and more time to this Internet activity.When I first started doing video for the Web, as early as 2001, the conventional wisdom was to keep these news reports short — in part to keep the file sizes at a manageable weight so people could access them. Now, just about everyone has high speed Internet access and Web phenomena such as YouTube have made using computers to watch videos as common place as checking e-mails. I guess it would make sense that Web users would have more patience to stick with longer news videos as well.

The current issue of American Journalism Review has an article titled “Charticle Fever,” which examines a type of storytelling gaining prominence in newspapers. A charticle mixes text, photos and graphics to tell a story. It is visual and allows a reader to drop in and take only the information that he or she may be interested in. According to the article, some editors and reporters aren’t crazy about this type of storytelling because they see it as undermining traditional, narrative-style reporting.
 Without commenting on the pros or cons of charticles, it strikes me that the fact that these types of stories are becoming more prominent in print could be a reflection of how stories are told online. Web versions of stories also meld text with photos and other media such as video, audio, flash files and interactive features. Maybe what’s happening online is influencing what’s happening in print.  
I’ll include here a couple of examples of Web journalism that are taking this melding of different media to new places.  The first is Flyp Media, an online-only magazine, and the washingtonpost.com’s Video Haiku, which brings together text, photos and video in a linear format.   

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. 

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. 

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.

Next Page →