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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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As I trolled through various Web pages looking for an item for this blog, I clicked into “iReport,” off of CNN’s main home page on the Web. The headline was too tempting to resist, “YOU take control of the news.”

I went to the site where I was as greeted with more strong words, “Unedited. Unfiltered. News.”

After a bit of Internet research, I found that iReport is a special Web site being developed by CNN to promote citizen journalism – that meaning reporting done by non-professional journalists.

 A recent article on Information Week’s Web site gives a good summary of what  CNN is looking to develop. According to the article, anybody who registers can upload video, photos and stories to iReport where it is posted “unfiltered.” Then the best reports are linked to CNN’s Web site.

 When I checked, the iReport site had video and many good photos up from the Olympic torch protest in Paris.

 Not a bad way to encourage the public’s involvement in the newsgathering process, but still keep some editorial control over what appears on a news organization’s Web site.

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.

 

 

Each year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism releases a report that analyzes the status of journalism in the U.S.  So obviously, I clicked straight through to the section abut news on the Web.The findings aren’t surprising. More people are going online for news, more people are watching video online and no one has figured out yet how to make a lot of money off of news Web sites. News about foreign events (particularly the war in Iraq) filled a larger news hole on major news Web sites than in other news outlets.

The editorial part of  news organizations were credited with being innovative in finding ways to use new technology. The report criticized Madison Avenue for not moving more quickly to find ways to make advertising pay on news Web sites.

The section on the major trends  identified by the study is important reading for all who work - or those of you looking to work - in the news business.

A new poll shows that younger people (those under 30) are increasing turning to the Internet for their news. No big surprise, but this survey on the state of the news industry by Zogby International really drives home the point.

 Anyone who has followed the news on television knows that decisions can be influenced by the type and quality of video that reporters bring back to the newsroom. For example, dramatic footage of a car accident or a police chase might make the air even if there is not much of a story to back up the video.The Web is no different. Yesterday, any number of news sites with a national reach had links on their homepages to video that an amateur videographer took of a near plane crash at Germany’s Hamburg airport.

Fox News and The New York Times in its blog, “The Lede,” were among those with stories and links to the video. When I looked on Google News for the story today, I found 247 links.

While the video is dramatic (it shows the plane wobbling and almost crashing right near the runway and then swooping up again), the incident would never have made news if that person with the video camera hadn’t been taping the landing.

The plane ultimately landed safely. No one was injured. So was it news? This story illustrates how – in the digital age — a good video clip can make news, not just on a local TV news station but on news outlets around the world.

I wanted to note in a quick post just how powerful the Web can be when someone powerful uses it. Oprah Winfrey, who already has conquered television and publishing, is launching a new online endeavor - a free, 10-weekly Web seminar with herself and self-help author Eckhart Tolle. His book “A New Earth” is Oprah’s pick for her influential book club.

She says 700,000 people have signed up for the weekly Web seminar. Anyone would agree those are pretty impressive numbers. According to Oprah.com, participants will watch live classroom Web casts and have the opportunity to ask questions and connect with other like-thinking people around the world.

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.

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

Network news shows seem well positioned for the future of online journalism, if only for their output of high-quality video. In an effort to play off this strength, NBC’s Brian Williams launched a new homepage for his “Nightly News” show on Jan. 9. 

The whole top of the page is now devoted exclusively to video clips. An embedded video player sits to the right and a selection of videos to choose from runs down a column to the left. The video is not just repurposed clips from the traditional broadcast.  On the first day of the redesign, the clips included a longer version of Williams’ interview with Barak Obama than appeared on television and some original “video blogs” done by the anchor.

One such blog had Williams doing a report from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on the unveiling of a 150-inch plasma TV screen.  I thought he did a good job of setting a more informal tone on the video blog than he would during a regular newscast.  Check out what his competitors, ABC and CBS, are doing.

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. 

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