I suppose I couldn’t finish my blogs without mentioning one of the biggest revolutions to online news. Twitter, a new internet sensation, has become very popular with people from all walks of life, and can be described as ‘microblogging.’ It is essentially a blogging site – just like Facebook or Bebo, but you must describe what you are doing in 130 characters or less. It is almost like a news story – where you must condense what you are saying into only what is most neccassary.

A story in the BBC News online tells of anEnglish Magistrate who was seen posting messages on his twitter about what was happening in cases in the court. He claimed he had been making use of the latest technology to bring transperancy to the judiciary system. “The people who read the twitter read the same thing in the newspaper that evening,’he claimed.
Twitter could be significant for citizen journalism, as well as a threat to the traditional methods of news or even blogging.

Flash Journalism is a new way to tell the story, and allows journalists to put together audio, video, still pictures and text in a single format and display it as a single piece. It intergrates multiple media content and appeals to a wide audience.

It is being used by various online media including the New York Times. One example: ‘trouble-shooter for the city of light’ is a piece by one of their journalists who used a succession of various photographs and audio to create a story about the man who was responible for lighting 300 of the monuments, official building and boulevards of Paris.

An innovation for the web, but also online journalism.

In a post by Colin Whelan, he tells of a blogger in South Korea who was charged with “spreading false information with the intent of harming the public interest.” Park Dae-sung had predicted what direction the plummeting economy was headed, including the collapse of the US investment bank the Lehman Bros. Although some of his predictions turned out true, some also turned out false – he heavily criticised the Korean government and claimed they were banning banks in Korea from buying US dollars. His prosecutors argued this had a serious effect on the Korean currency, as after his post thousands were hoarding US dollars. Imprisonment does seem a little harsh for blogging, but I can concede that there are dangers arising from anyone being able spread information about anything they want. Who was this man who made such bold and knowing statements about such serious matters? He must have been a professor, an experienced market trader. No, in the end they found an unemployed 31-year old living with his father and picking up his financial know-how by surfing the web and reading mail-order text books… hmmm.

In a blog by Rory Bonass, he discusses the pros and cons of censoring wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which contains information from thousands of different sources, people from all over the world contribute to this ‘fountain’ of information. This offers us access to a range of information on everything and anything. But with unlimited interactivity and access to this database, what about editing? How do we know it is reliable? I think it is vital to sometimes edit information which is publicly distributed..is it useful to allow anyone in the world to write about whatever they want…! The website can push a biased point of view in articles such as Anthony M. Benis’s , – His was an article glorifying himself.

In a blog by Kay Kinsella, she talks about how transparency is affecting journalism, as more and more people are turning to alternative media to get their news. This is because some feel they can place their trust in citizen journalists or bloggers instead of the main stream media. This may be an indication of how the ‘trustworthy reputation’ that established news corporations held is now wanning. Ordinary people are speaking out and telling their own ‘truthful’ version of the news, when the mainstream media fail to. And a perfect example of that, as Kay’s blog pointed out, is the murdered man at the recent g20 protests.

In a video produced by Knight Citizen News Network, it shows the interviews with five online media figures including the founder of Wikipedia and chairman of the journalism department of New York university. They claim that the public are growing increasingly reliant on bloggers and ordinary citizens for their news – reliant on people who share their opinions and bias. Readers also want disclosure: “In journalism, transparent organisations open the processes by which facts, situations, events, and opinions are sorted, sifted, made sense of, and presented.”

If anyone can be a journalist, then what about the rules that are applied by most pre-existing ‘professional’ journalists? Will they be followed by everyone else?
Online journalism has made it easier for rules to be sometimes over stepped, as people want to deliver their readers something quickly. Citizen journalists can not always be reliable as trustworthy sources. The internet and the temptation to encourage people to visit your site might cause people to become unethical. One example is a story on a financial website, money.co.uk, about a teenager who stole his dad’s credit card to pay for prositutes. This story was completely fabricated just to link people onto the website. A bit unethical perhaps?

Since the beginning of blogging and online journalism, there has been an increase in the number of writers and journalists. What are the requirements to be a journalist? You certainly don’t have to work for a particular news company, you don’t need to have a degree or to have gone to journalism school, you don’t even need to be producing news stories on a regular basis. You just need to be writing in the public sphere and you can be recognised as a journalist. A blog can be considered a piece of journalism. When this is taken into consideration, the question is then posed: Can anybody become a journalist?

A combination of the web, portable technology and other media have contributed to the ever-growing practice of ‘citizen-journalism.’ This can be seen in the recent g20 strikes, where citizens took the news gathering into their own hands and revealed the truth when the main stream media failed to do so.

Really simple Syndication, RSS is an online service that was a pivotal innovation for online journalism as well as quite a handy tool for those too busy to surf the web. It is a service that filters the masses of information out there to suit the desires of the user; fetching the updated headlines and blogs from our favourite writers and news outlets and delivering them right to the doorsteps of our computers. (Wherever they may be).
This would mean no more browsing through various online news sites: our news comes to us.

Personlised news aso comes in the form of “News packages”. News sites such as Google news offer news packages so there’sno need for editors to decide which stories are the most important, we decide our own news. Online journalism reverses the norms, putting the reader in the driving seat. But is this personalisation of our news inhibiting our news intake? Although it seems to make sense and cuts through the vast amount of information out there, are we restricting the news we receive into a narrow-minded tunnel?

Taking journalism one step further, there are games now being designed as tools for disseminating news. Global conflicts is a company distributing games that are attempting to explain the economy through the politics of oil, educate users on disaster readiness in the context of Hurricane Katrina and, and perhaps more in line with traditional video games, some are exploring the various military operations implemented in the Iraq war. In a strange likeness to fantasy sports, one game allowed people to draft their own cabinet picks for Obama’s then-new administration.
Although I do agree with interactivity, and maybe games can offer a atmospheric impression of a story, but the concept of a journalistic game seems to wipe out the need of a journalist. Writing is completely ommited, and it seems to dumb down serious issues into something quite trivial. If this option is used by online news sites, I think they will have to tread quite carefully.

An example of developments in online journalism is news companies using movie-style trailers on you-tube to promote their paper’s special reporting projects. After the Dallas Morning News and the St. Petersburg Times debuted extensive investigative reporting projects on their websites last year, they went to YouTube to market them. The News recast existing video footage from the online features into gripping movie trailers,
“Unequal Justice” explores why 56 convicted murderers were sentenced to probation rather then jail.

This developent for online news merges the movie world with that of newspaper journalism. Journalism is no longer purely visual, audio or print – it has converged to create a model where we can watch our written stories in television-like trailers.