Saturday, February 3, 2007

Online journalism tools and things to make you go 'Hoooo-Baby!!!' We've looked at http://chicagocrime.org in most of my classes, but some university news sites are already doing more than looking... The Independent Florida Alligator mapped churches that were vandalized in its area and did a map of a murder case. The latter was done with Google maps; the churches were mapped with a service called Atlas, which I mentioned a while ago concerning Baristanet's maps of "teardowns" of neighborhood buildings. Innovation in College Media -- which has also given Atlas a try -- points to another local crime map in Muncie, Ind., created by the Ball State Daily News. (Incidentally, I think the "Snap" link previews drag down the otherwise informative ICM site, a problem Jack, Nick and Dave have noticed elsewhere. And what's with the big, slow image map entry page? Yes, a few of us do still have dial-up connections. More nostalgia than innovation there.) In other online news news... Several citizen journalism or "placeblogging" sites that I've mentioned here use the Drupal content management system, including http://knoxviews.com, http://h2otown.info and http://placeblogger.org Here's another: Mark Hamilton reports on a local Drupal site covering a serial-homicide case, considerably more "hard news" than you might expect on a community site. Right here in Knoxville, the multi-blogger KnoxViews coverage of the County Commission is impressive, too... enough to prompt one local professional journalist to comment "Hoooo-Baby!!!" Back to classroom (or student weblog) discussion topics: The Apple vs. online reporters court case settlement may be $700,000 worth of good news for independent online journalists. Here's another set of guidelines for my online journalism students to discuss in their weblogs: The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles And here's a North Carolina newspaper editor's reaction to a journalism-education discussion on several blogs, which he links to: What a journalist needs to know OK, so that's a sneaky way to get students to go back and look at things I've linked to before. Anyone in need of more links to keep themselves inside on a nice day should see my recent bookmarks for "online journalism": http://del.icio.us/bstepno/onlinejournalism For a bit of historical perspective, students should know what that last link has in common with Vannevar Bush's "memex" idea from 62 years ago. 5:55:44 PM    comment []

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