Giving blogs a liveline

Just as the internet has evolved, so too has blogging. I set up my first blog in 2005, and as was the norm I updated it every now and then and that was about it. That still has its place of course, but liveblogging has injected a whole new life into blogging.

With traditional blogs, you can check in whenever suits. With a liveblog, the temptation's there to furiously hit the refresh button so that you don't miss a beat.

The most common type I've seen is the 'matchtracker', which RTÉ.ie use most weekends. Heineken.ie (pictured, bottom-left) have taken on a DCU student to liveblog during Heineken Cup matches.

Gerry Ryan: Ethics in the age of Twitter

A debate has started online, following the manner in which the news of Gerry Ryan's death became public.

Twitter user @adrianweckler (Sunday Business Post tech editor) was, it seems, the first to tweet the news. At 2:16pm, he wrote 'Gerry Ryan...? What?' before adding that there was a 'rumour mill' five minutes later. At 2:31pm, he wrote that a source claimed he had died. About 10 minutes later, Miriam O'Callaghan confirmed the news. She has since deleted her tweet (pictured).

The 'traditional' media then followed. Today FM tweeted the news at 2:47pm, and at the same time here on-campus, DCUfm tweeted a message of condolence. Today FM included it in their 3:02pm radio bulletin. RTÉ 2fm broke into their regular programming with a breaking news bulletin at 3:30pm. DJ Larry Gogan, his voice trembling, played songs in memory of his "dear friend".

News video on Irish broadcasters' websites

None of the websites of Irish broadcasters offer much in the way of web-specific video that accompanies articles. The focus is very much on offering a catch-up service and linking these to the articles. Here's a look at the journalistic video on offer from Irish broadcasters on their websites.

RTÉ

A huge back-catalogue of news bulletins, dating back to 1998 (an early example is here). Many of the earlier files are of poor quality however. In recent years, more and more news programmes have become available, including current affairs programmes such as Prime Time, and niche news bulletins like RTÉ News on Two, and breaking news programmes. RTÉ News Now (the top-right screengrab in the picture) launched in 2008. Since 2009, programmes are available in higher-quality Flash format via the RTÉ Player, but for a limited time only. Bulletins can be watched live.

Online realm is a new way of telling The Story

Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan are chiefly responsible for The Story, a website "dedicated to combining data and promoting transparency" in Irish public life. The blog is updated several times a day most days and mixes reports and information from other sources with its on FOI requests.

The site follows through on its promise to "promote" transparency. Not only do its operators send Freedom of Information requests, last December Mark Coughlan offered to fund requests that DCU students wanted to send for publication on the website. It does this through donations it receives, and it has so far received over €2,600 from donors. As the price of FOI requests can run into the hundreds, this is particularly useful.

Huge variation in news sites' use of embedded hyperlinks

Hyperlinking is one of the web's ways of showing you around the place. It's useful at finding out more about a story - for instance, if a piece refers to a report from the Central Statistics Office, it would be handy to be able to refer to the document itself.

Glancing at them can be a little distracting, however, and I find that they can disrupt your eye's flow.

There is a big difference among news websites' use of embedded hyperlinks. The results of a sample of 12 websites are as follows:

The Telegraph, recreated in wiki

As a part of our online journalism class, we've each taken a news website and recreated it in wiki form. Denis McEvoy, Ciara Ní Ghabhann and myself recreated the Daily Telegraph's website. The image here compares our attempt with the Telegraph's site.

Visit our Telegraph homepage

An example of an article page

Note: access to the CM265 course page on the DCU Moodle network is required.

Storyful beginning to take shape

Mark Little's new online journalism project has found its online home. Storyful has launched on storyful.com, and although it has a placeholder homepage at the moment (pictured right), it has an active blog. David Clinch, formerly of CNN, has joined the project and is a regular contributor to the blog.

Storyful's most recent post details the repsonse on Twitter to the volcanic ash crisis in Europe. David Clinch had a busy few days, and writes that apart from listening to RTÉ Radio's Morning Ireland, "Twitter was my mobile lifeline for information about the latest developments in what quickly became known as #ashtag.'

Contact the journalist

Some websites like to give out their journalists' email addresses while others don't. Some websites (like the San Francisco Chronicle) make it easy for its readers to contact its staff, and put the address either alongside the byline or at the bottom of articles.

How contactable should a journalist be? In some local newsrooms (like the Carlow Nationalist and the Roscommon Herald), the email addresses of all staff journalists are available. This is understandable, as given their small workforce they would be highly likely to read anything which came into a generic 'news' address anyway. With a comparatively small franchise area, the amount of unnecessary email would also be comparatively small. But the norm in local newsrooms, it seems, is to just give out that generic address (and, perhaps, the editors'). See examples here, here, here and here.

Stateside: New York Times vs San Francisco Chronicle

The two sites assessed on different criteria, to see which is making the most of its internet potential.

Hyperlinking

The New York Times uses this to good effect, linking to topics which it covers in other articles. The San Francisco Chronicle sometimes links to related articles, but doesn't use hyperlinks within the actual copy. Verdict: New York Times.

Video and audio

Other than live views of the Bay Area, there appear to be no video on SFgate.com. The New York Times offers both audio (as in this article) and video, which is embedded into the article and made available via its specific video section. The videos in this example come from Reuters. Verdict: New York Times

Sydney Morning Herald's strong emphasis on video

The multimedia content of the Sydney Morning Herald's website is understated on its homepage. The emphasis is very much on text and photos - the video section only becomes prominent once you hit the page down button twice (on a 1280x800 screen resolution) and the only graphic is beside the business section, a further 'page down' press away.

But with a little bit of digging, the multimedia content certainly is there. The video section is quite comprehensive, and features content from Reuters as well as its own content produced in-house. As we learned this semester, users are up to 20 times more likely to watch a video if it is embedded into the article as opposed to be linked to from it (Thurman and Lupton 2008). The SMH have the right idea by embedding their videos, like they have in this article.

What is The Huffington Post?

The Huffington Post - in its website header - says it's 'The internet newspaper: news blogs video community'. There are all sorts of oxymorons going on there, a newspaper is surely something which exists on paper? And how can a newspaper contain video? Is there really such a thing as an 'internet newspaper'?

Its tagline promises multimedia and it delivers. Not only does it have video attached to stories (as well as an entire video section), there are photos and graphics everywhere.

While there aren't any hyperlinks within the copy, articles like this one feature external links at the end. There is also an extensive external link section at the bottom of the section pages, subdivided into news websites and blogs and by category (e.g. politics, media, business etc.).

UK election: Guardian.co.uk vs Telegraph.co.uk

Just as RTÉ showed in 2007, there's nothing like a general election to get online news sources to try out new things. Here, I'll compare the use of multimedia election coverage of the Guardian and Telegraph websites. Multimedia isn't the be all and end all, of course, but it's a start in assessing which website is embracing online capabilities more.

What they've got

Both websites have a graphic-heavy constituency map and swingometer. The Guardian offers more ways of viewing these, including bar charts and geographical maps. Their swingometer allows you to swing across all three main parties at once, which The Telegraph doesn't (you can only do two at a time). The Guardian published the itinerary of the three main leaders, and linked these to an interactive Google Map. They also have a graphed tracker of reactions to the ITV debate. The Telegraph has a 'how I should vote' feature, and a comprehensive Flash-based poll tracker. The Guardian's Flash poll tracker is several weeks out-of-date, but goes back to the 1980s.

Local Irish papers embracing multimedia

Local newspapers are turning to multimedia on an increasingly regular basis in an attempt to entice consumers.

The Limerick Leader, the Galway Independent, and the Mayo News all use their Facebook pages to remind people that they exist. The Mayo News’s page is particularly impressive as it has almost 1,500 followers and frequently updates the page with competition details.

The Carlow Nationalist revamped its website in 2009. It has two Facebook pages – one for news and one for sport. The sport page is regularly updated (along with its Twitter page) and has almost 2,000 fans. This represents about 1 in every 25 people in County Carlow.

The sport section of the website has exclusive content. Their blog features contributions from staff and freelance writers, as well as a selection of photographs which didn’t appear in the paper.

Internet is the opportunity for journalism's 'golden age' - Little

ONLINE journalism advocate Mark Little says that blogs are increasingly unimportant in the age of Twitter.

Little told members of DCU’s Journalism Society that blogging is “at the wrong end of the technological shift.” He added that politicians are beginning to use Twitter to communicate their message and they are trying influence conversations.

He told students that it is “wrong and dangerous” to assume that the only good journalism is to be found in newspapers. He said that the medium is not the message, and that people don’t necessarily care where they get their information from.

Twitter and justice

Without question, the trial of Eamonn Lillis for the murder of his wife Celine Cawley (Lillis was convicted of manslaughter) was the most attention-grabbing Irish court case since the Joe O’Reilly trial. There were a number of new toys for the Courts Service to play with in the Criminal Courts of Justice, but journalists had their new toys too, namely Twitter.

Every day during the Lillis trial, freelance journalist Abigail Rieley was among those who regularly tweeted updates. These were quickly retweeted, and word about Rieley’s messages spread. For anyone who wanted to hear from the courts immediately and regularly, Twitter was the place to go. It broke the news of the verdict first (citation). The Lillis Trial even had its own hashtag.

Press ombudsman warns that online interactivity needs careful moderation

PRESS Ombudsman Professor John Horgan says he expects more integration between print and web editions of newspapers over the coming years.

Prof Horgan told Dublin City University’s Journalism Society that although he expects newspapers will survive, they will look different in five years time.

More information: Press Ombudsman website.

Watch the speech in full.

He said: “They won’t have so many pages because it’s all very expensive, and they will have bigger web presences.” He warned however that interaction from the public needs to be carefully moderated, as publishers are as liable for defamation on their website as they are in their print edition.