Blog-o-riffic!

So, after several weeks, The Orion now has a blog up and running. The posters are The Orion's editorial board.

Getting the blog put together was done at the encouragement of my managing editor. She went to a conference back East during the summer, and came back more jazzed about starting a blog than I was.

Like pretty much everything this semester, there were hiccups getting the blog put together, so the it didn't actually get connected to The Orion Online until the fifth week of the semester.

Encouraging traffic will start a little more this week, as our P.R. rep is working on constructing bulletin board flyers. One difficultly is, with the constrictions of The Orion Online's template, it takes a minimum of two clicks to reach the blog for The Orion's regular site, which is really one click too many.

While the M.E. was excited about the blog, and I was going to be involved with getting it running, the editorial board at The Orion is made up of nine people, not two. Not everybody was enthusiastic to jump on board. It's been over a week since the blog started at the time of this posting, and only four editors have posted. Three editors haven't even started their accounts yet.

Is it an anti-blog mentality causing this apathy among the editorial board? No. They just don't fully know what blogs are. Some thought that they would blog about their daily activities. One editor thought she couldn't blog because she thought giving your opinion was required in a blog and she would lose journalistic objectiveness.

I can try and encourage and explain things as much as I can, but there are times when I'm explaining things that I can see it's just not clicking. They're viewing blogs as too far away from traditional journalism as being not necessarily good. As the online editor, my position at The Orion has a lot more open-endedness to it than the other editors, so we're not looking at this blog with the same perspective of content.

It's hard to encourage a change of routine at The Orion. When editors are responsible for over half a dozen writers each, and are usually up until 2 or 3 a.m. on Monday nights getting the paper put together, I can understand why they might see blogging as unnecessary extra work for an already hectic schedule.

But, it's not my job to accept those reasons. It's my job as online editor to improve digital content and transform the Web site from being where the print stories get dumped eached Wednesday into being a daily version of The Orion. When as many people starting logging onto The Orion Online on Sunday as on Wednesday, the online editor position will be reaching its full potential. That's still at least a couple years away, but I see it as being possible.

Being a daily means there has to be constant updates of content, and a blog is one of the easiest methods a newspaper has of having new content available to readers. I mean, if The Portland Oregonian can have 48 blogs at OregonLive.com, how can we at The Orion say just one isn't possible?

The Internet and Rapid Turnaround

So, as The Orion editorial board settled in for the Wednesday night meeting, photo editor Brian Kennedy received a phone call. I'm not sure from who, but the news on the other end of the line was interesting: a JetBlue airliner was going to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles.

So, after the meeting, BK was able to find a live video feed. A few of us huddled around a computer screen as the plane touched down, made some pretty sparks, and (thankfully) landed without much incident.

After this, BK brought up the question if the wire had anything up already. Curious, I rushed to my usual site for getting information off the wire: Yahoo! News (yeah, an odd correlation between that and my Shi Tao post from two weeks ago, but going there is habit).

Now, this is no more than three minutes after the plane touched down. Already, there on the top of the Yahoo! News page, was a story proclaiming the safe landing of the JetBlue flight.

It was one sentence long.

After this, I went over to the LA Times, where there was also a top story on the safe landing. I clicked on that as well.

There was a full story. But only minutes after the plane landed?

So I started reading the story. Everything was talking about the anticipation of the plane landing. Near the top, there was a two-sentence mention of the plane landing safely set apart from the rest of the story. Let me remind you, the story was running with a headline talking about the safe landing. If you tried searching for the story on LA Times today, good luck. You aren't going to find it.

Here, we see two very different examples of how to handle a progressively breaking news event. Through Yahoo, we see a wire (I wish I had noted which one) putting out a separate, and short info update. The LA Times used a short information, but then placed it over a story that was written before the plane landed.

Which one is better? Each has it's advantages. With Yahoo, you getting the info you want right away and that's it. The LA Times might confuse people who are scanning over it on first glance (which happened to me), but it then provides more details on the events and concerns leading up to the emergency landing.

ultimately, I would choose to go with the LA Times' approach. There is no certainty that people have been following breaking news incidents from the beginning. Background information is important for readers.

Up in the sky!

This isn't my graded post for the week, but a (kind of) relevant cross-post from the House of Hamsters:

This is kind of a journalism ethics class meets Seinfeld thing.

Two great superhero characters--Superman and Spider-Man--have alteregos that are journalists.

Superman, also known as Clark Joseph Kent, is a reporter for the Daily Planet. He utilizes this position to find out about incidents that need his attention quicker.

Spider-Man, also known as Peter Benjamin Parker, is a freelance photographer, primarily working for the Daily Bugle. He makes money by selling J. Jonah Jamison photos of himself as Spider-Man fighting crime.

It's cool to have such famous superheroes be journalists. Yet, are their actions journalistically ethical?

I think I'm just up too late.

Katrina and the Internet

While taking a cruise around Romenesko, I came across a story in the Los Angeles Times discussing the Internet's benefit in covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast.

Not that I'm the biggest fan of the Los Angeles Times (my previous run-in), but this article made some interesting points.

Sure, the Internet has been a factor of major news stories in recent years. The Dan Rather memo incident comes to the top of my mind. But Dan Rather not fact checking enough doesn't cause large newspapers such as the Times-Picayune in New Orleans to switch over to online publishing only. That took one hell of a hurricane.

Since the entire city had been cleared out, most of the Times-Picayune's subscription based wouldn't be around to pick up their papers. So why print?

How about just moving over to web publishing through NOLA.com?

So despite the massive disaster going on in Louisiana, the Times-Picayune keeps publishing.

Technology has also allowed common people to become journalists. Digial cameras, cell phone cameras, voice recording, and regular blogging can (and has been) used by people in the hurricane zone to document their surroundings.

In other words, the gap between journalism and the public is reduced dramatically with situations like Katrina. It becomes less possible to distinguish between one or the other.

When Capitalism, Communism and Journalism collide...

...does journalism lose?

That's a question that should be asked with the jailing of a journalist in China.

While a visit to the Reporters Without Borders Web site will tell you the imprisonment of journalists in China is nothing new, the case of Shi Tao is grabbing attention because his prosecution was apparently helped, in part, to information provided by Yahoo.

This is an interesting story to look at, for a number of reasons:

1) China is a potential gold mine for technology companies. Actually, a country with a population as high as China is a potential gold mine for any industry.

2) Yahoo could be seen as essentially being an extension of the Chinese government in the prosecution of Shi Tao. Or, are they just a private company and nothing more?

3) Could this come back to bite Yahoo in the more democratic countries they do business in?

At the very least, know about Shi Tao for this reason: While journalism on the Internet is still new and exciting, the same old censorship problems, particularly in countries where press freedom is questionable or non-existent, can and do still exist.