Took me some time to land there, but I’ve become a regular visitor now: De Nieuwe Reporter.
A group weblog they call it themselves, but as I even haven’t got a clue how to label my own digital playground – blog, photo blog, weblog, website, web2.0, (mini)portal? – I call website what’s got http before URL.
Like VillaMedia and De Journalist, and hundreds, thousands of websites in The United States and all over the web, dedicated to journalism, they offer non-journalist to have a peek backstage, behind front-page or screen. In Dutch at @ DutchCowboys Pre-Internet one had to take an expensive subscription on our union magazine, something done only by those who needed inside info, like for instance the police, politicians or sociologists.
De Nieuwe Reporter declares to have build an independent platform, serving the debate about the future of Dutch Journalism. I’d say it never hurts, with all the dangers threatening our job, our employment.
There’s a weekly newsletter fort those preferring the old fashion way of being kept up, en the smarter ones subscribe to one of the rss feeds, resulting in an automatic alert at the moment of publishing.
Two interesting affairs last week on the ‘group weblog’: how to handle published errors, and how GeenStijl practises journalism. GeenStijl isn’t my style at all.
I hardly ever come there, and when I do its for a quick check of something. To much barking, those who are interested in modern ethics can graduate summa cum laude over there.
I’d probably better not typed the two preceding sentences, because they will mean a lot of extra work moderating comments.
Its about the only boring part of my job: moderating and either validating of rejecting comment postings on the website of the newspaper, as well as on my own website. A number of regular visitors on both platforms can move forever to Geen Stijl, as far as I am concerned, and I’ll send them flowers, soapbox and megaphone.
How to handle errors published on a newspaper website? Nothing yet about it in our journalism handbooks, more about it next week.
p.s. I did Google ‘New Reporter‘; www.thenewreporter.com is there: ‘Stories and images from our correspondents around the world, The New Reporter is a collaborative project between independent journalists’. I’ve signed up for a registration, maybe more later.
Another one is www.newreporter.com, but that doesn’t look like journalism at all, maybe the domain is for sale.
Last but not least: The Internet Movie Database: The New Reporter (1910), directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, genre: comedy, color: black and white, sound mix: silent.