Links for Today | Links para hoje

• When Journalists Blog: How It Changes What They Do, NiemanReports

By Paul Bradshaw

From journalistic pariah to savior of the news industry, blogs have undergone an enormous transformation in recent years. As a journalist and a blogger, I was curious to see how this transformation from blogophobia to blogophilia was affecting journalism. Was the hype surrounding the potential of blogs to transform our craft being realized—or were journalists simply treating their blogs as another “channel” into which to plough content?

• Personalised newspapers: industry saviour or just another novelty?, Editor’s Weblog

Personal News

In a world where customisation is key (our clothes, our cars, our TV channels…), why can’t we customise our newspapers?  In fact we can, Mary Lou Fulton explains.  Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian, and has discovered a Swiss-German innovation called Personal News, collaboration between SwissPost and Syntops GmbH.

Personal News is currently in its pilot stage, and available in a limited area in Switzerland.  However the idea is this; after registering online you select up to seven newspaper sections that interest you (at the moment, available publications include The Washington Post and Austria’s The Standard).  After that, the relevant newspapers send their PDFs to Syntops, who assimilate the PDF into personalised publications and pass them on to Swiss Post, who has them on your doorstep by 11am.  You can even change your newspaper selection up to 7pm the previous night.

• LET’S BUY A NEWSPAPER

The title says it all | O título diz tudo

• “We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”: Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism, Henry Jenkins

(Part One) (Part Two)

Driscoll recently published a book, Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism, which shares some of his experiences and offers sage advice about how and why community journalism may become an important part of the contemporary newscape. What I love about the book is its emphasis on journalism as a practice and a process rather than simply a product, since it is clear that working on these publications is empowering to those who become involved, changing the ways they think about themselves and their communities.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to pick Jack’s brain about community journalism and to be able to share his perspectives with you here. As you read this, you have to picture this ruddy faced man with gray hair, a sparkle in his eye, and a broad toothy smile. Jack represents what was best about the old style journalism and he represents a bridge to what may be most vital about the future of civic media.

• Improving the web with web analytics, Journalism.co.uk

  (part one) (part two) (part three)

Why most of the web is junk
The truth is that the vast majority of the web contains poor quality content. Even for those sites that do have great content, often they are difficult to find (via a search engine) and the user experience, once you visit it, is so poor, you simply wish to leave.

Despite nearly 15 years of web development, most of us still waste dozens of hours a month trawling the web, weeding out sites that either have irrelevant content to our search query or where the user experience is just too frustrating.

Unfortunately – similar to weeding – those sites don’t really go away. A search engine query the next day can bring up the same poor results and the process starts all over again.