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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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That the younger generation seeks out its news from different sources is hardly new, but The New York Times today takes it a step further. An article states that young consumers are spreaders of news, especially in the realm of politics. Here’s an excerpt:

“According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.”

The article underscores the fact that the ease with which the Internet allows the transfer of information is leading people to get to their news in non-traditional ways.

An area I haven’t touched upon yet in this blog is the ability of the Web to aggregate news by subject matter. This may seem very obvious to some of you, but I wanted to draw attention to the way it affects traditional news Web sites.

 

More and more people are using searches such as Google and Yahoo news, which organize the news by topic and then list links to stories written by different news organizations. When you can see the top news stories from a selection of outlets, why go to just one site for your news?

 

This means that people are entering news Web sites through larger search engines, not by going to the home page and seeing what the editors have posted and chosen as the top stories. It also means people might not have the same attachment and loyalty to “their” news Web site like they used to have to the local newspaper. Just another example of how news consumption is changing.

 

Another type of news aggregator to watch are sites such as digg.com, which post stories, photos, videos and podcasts based on the number of times they are recommended by readers. I find these lists interesting but often skewed heavily with stories about technology, politics and the weird and whacky.

 

 

Under a headline “Obama speech on race gives Web a workout,” USA Today took a look at how the candidate’s take on race relations in America played out on the Internet.The article includes statistics on the number of hits and stories and blog entries out there about Obama’s Philadelphia speech. It’s interesting that how a story plays out on the Web has become the story itself.  

News that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was implicated in a prostitution ring hit the Internet right around 2 p.m. today when The New York Times broke the story.  It took no time at all for the news to spread throughout the Web.

This was a big story. The quickness with which it was disseminated was in direct proportion to the magnitude of the story. Readers surely will be clamoring for details and the Web will oblige as a platform that permits immediate updates and room for unlimited copy.

Because of how quickly the story developed, Spitzer was out there in front of the television cameras only a short time after the story broke to apologize to his family and constituents for his involvement in a “private matter.”

 

Here are a few links to check out. A Google News search on Eliot Spitzer shows how far and wide this story went. Also, The New York Observer wrote up an item about how the Times metro staff broke the story.

 

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.

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

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.

The importance of the video clip in delivering the news was never so apparent as when Hillary Clinton got “emotional” on the day of the New Hampshire primary. Written descriptions of how she teared up while telling a group of women about the difficulties of campaigning hit the Web almost immediately and the all-important video clip soon followed.Just about every major news outlet had its own clip up that afternoon. On YouTube, more than a dozen clips were posted by the next day, including this one from abcnews.com:

Who can say whether the widespread dissemination of that show of emotion helped Clinton beat Barak Obama and the other Democratic candidates that night? It certainly got good play. 

The role of political blogs in the presidential campaign crystallized for me while watching television coverage of Iowa caucus results on Jan. 3.  Flipping through the channels, I paused at an MSNBC interview with Ed Rollins, GOP candidate Mike Huckabee’s national campaign chairman. Rollins was being questioned about an item on the conservative political blog, townhall.com, describing what its writer, Amanda Carpenter, “overheard” of his conversation at lunch earlier in the day.

For the purpose of this blog entry, what Rollins supposedly said (and ate) isn’t what interests me. What I found striking was that a major news outlet was basing an interview question on something that had been overheard and reported by a blogger. Obviously, the competition in the political blogosphere will be intense during the campaign. Bloggers will be aggressive in their posts in an effort to stay ahead of  the competition. Once an item is “out there,” it will be fair game to be raised by all other media.