Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Scooped Again! Those Pesky Citizen Journalists Despite a downpour outside, the UT School of Journalism & Electronic Media's JEM Week "online journalism" panel discussion had a standing-room, sitting-on-the-floor-room audience today, including plenty of journalism faculty and students. Read all about it here. (I was even asked for autographs... but quickly realized the students needed someone's signature to prove they'd been at the panel discussion. Amazing what the words "extra credit..." do for attendance at special events a couple of weeks before finals.) My only complaint is that, as a panelist, I was sitting out of the line of sight for the room's projection screen during a couple of presentations, including Jack Lail's review of readership statistics for KnoxNews.com. Luckily, RNeal, publisher of KnoxViews.com, was there with a notebook. Alas, he couldn't stick around for lunch, but he promptly posted a full story about our little event, linked above... more than 1,750 words! Now I'm afraid some students will be using his notes instead of their own. I did get out of my chair and slip through the crowd to see Katie Allison Granju's demo of the online editing system for http://wbir.com and for a peek into the station's amazing online 50-year archive of Knoxville news video. Things I meant to mention or ask about, but didn't have time: Scripps' recent decision to phase-in the jazzy online news site management system (Django + Ellington) behind some of the Web wizardry at http://www.chicagocrime.org, http://ljworld, http://lawrence.com, http://naplesnews.com and related sites. A newspaper-meets-blogger item I haven't had a chance to mention here: Nashville blogger Bill Hobbs' decision to suspend his blog and quit his day job after an "alternative news weekly" brought a controversial blog item into public attention... a situation with at least a slight similarity to a certain Knoxville blogger's run-in with the publisher of the alt-weekly last year. (He suspended his blog, but returned to create the aforementioned KnoxViews.) The prominent appearance of the words "and online" in this year's Pulitzer Prize citations. (But at least I did get that onto the blog yesterday). 7:44:23 PM    comment []

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