• 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

  • 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
  • burrelllac on Coming of age

• 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

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is out with a new study that found more people get their national and international news from the Internet than newspapers.

According to the study, the Internet has passed all other sources except television as the leading source for national and international news. The center said 40 percent of respondents said they got most of this type of news from the Internet as compared to 35 percent who said they relied on newspapers.

That percentage goes up when looking at just respondents under 30. According to the study, nearly 60 percent of younger Americans rely on the Internet for national and international news. A similar survey taken in 2007 placed that number at 34 percent, indicating that Web sites are consolidating their roles as definitive news sources.

The study doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but backs up these trends with some numbers. The survey was conducted Dec. 3-7 among 1,489 .

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. 

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.

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]

The convention season now upon us will not just result in the official naming of the presidential candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. If you read all the hype in the media, the conventions also will mark a milestone for political bloggers — legitimatizing them beyond any lingering doubts.

The articles stating this apparent truth are countless. Just today, readers on nytimes.com can read, “The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived.” Look back a few days and find this column on The Times of London’s Web site that states the Democratic National Convention (starting tomorrow in Denver) has been hit with “Obamedia frenzy.” The column by Richard Siklos contends that blogs such as Politico and The Huffington Post are as hot a commodity as the candidate himself.

In fact, bloggers are taking center stage at the DNC gathering — even warranting the construction of a two-story tent (sponsored by Google among others; see photo from Flickr) where credentialed bloggers will have free WiFi and other amenities. For a list of the accredited bloggers, see this page on the DNC Web site. It will be a good place to start if you want to sample some of the blogging that’s coming off of the convention floor.

If you’re wondering where the political heavyweights go for their political news, check out this link: www.google.com/powerreaders. Here, Google says it has collected the sites read by the two candidates, John McCain and Obama, as well as the sites followed by political journalists.

Save the date. On Oct. 28, the Baruch College Journalism Department will sponsor a panel discussion on the impact political blogging has had on this presidential election. More details to come.

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.

 

Next Page →