Saturday, September 24, 2005

Horde of bloggers at News-Sentinel & one has additional destination I was just telling students how some newspaper websites have been reluctant to link outside their own pages for fear of losing viewers for their stories (and ads). That's not true at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, at least not in its staff blogging section, where Michael Silence now has his "Valley of the blogs" page online. His directory of East Tennessee weblogs has collected more then 90 names and links since he asked for volunteers last week. Now he's inviting bloggers to add their own descriptions and locations as comments on the blog list, so I've just pasted my blog heading there... He also points to Johnny Dobbins' somewhat similar idea of sorting the RockyTopBrigade.org membership by region. The home page he whipped up last month for the brigade already offers links and contents from more than 140 Tennessee blogs. If his database-backed site allows him to automagically generate regional "samplers" from the blogs' RSS feeds, it would save local-information junkies (including journalists) a lot of surfing... (It also might save Michael or some KNS interns the drudgery of cutting and pasting blog comments into a searchable, updateable database.) Additional destination: For skb... and jfm... Speaking of the Rocky Top Brigade, Michael has links to two out of three new incarnations of its organizer, "the blogger formerly known as South Knox Bubba," who is now writing as "R.Neal" at Facing South, as well as hunting birds, butterflies and bears for his photoblog. Neal's new third location isn't exactly a blog... He is contributing his twist on Tennessee myths to the first issue of Red State Reader, an online zine launched from New York by former Knoxville alt-weekly editor Jesse Fox Mayshark. Other contributors include Joe Tarr, formerly with that same weekly. 7:39:52 PM    comment [] Advice (and anonymity) for controversial online journalists, bloggers Bloggers are doing some serious -- and dangerous -- journalism in some places around the world. This downloadable 87-page booklet offers help with some blogging basics  (in your choice of five languages), including ways to spread the word about a weblog and "establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles." But it goes farther, with  more "who," "what" and "why" to go with the "how-to": Reporters Without Borders' Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents "Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest. "Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation..." RSF (the group's untranslated name is Reporters Sans Frontières) offers the booklet in French, English, Chinese, Persian or Arabic. I learned about the booklet from Wired; its article also mentions another online booklet I talked about here a few months ago, "For Freedom's Sake: Legal Guide for Bloggers" from the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, with information for government workers and others who might wonder just what they should feel comfortable about saying in a personal blog, such as its  How to blog safely (about work or anything else) page. More Law for Journalists The EFF page just reminded me of another online resource, a  Court and Legal Handbook for Journalists, especially those who cover trials and legal issues. While it's a Massachusetts Bar Association publication with plenty of in-state information, reporters anywhere can use a lot of its information, including a guide to federal courts, a glossary of legal jargon, a summary of libel law, and an essay explaining why reporters should not use "innocent" as a synonym for "not guilty." That last point came up in class recently. Some older editions of the Associated Press Stylebook -- and journalism textbooks based on it -- suggest using "innocent" in court results, to avoid publication errors made by accidentally dropping the "not." However, AP has updated its advice and now suggests "acquitted" to editors worried about convicting someone with a dropped "not." 11:16:21 AM    comment []

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