Skoeps, de eerste Nederlandse nieuwssite voor burgerjournalisten, houdt op te bestaan. Het samenwerkingsverband tussen PCM Uitgevers en de digitale tak van Talpa Media wordt per 5 mei a.s. ontbonden na ruim anderhalf jaar actief te zijn geweest. Beide partijen vinden, volgens een persbericht dat zojuist door PCM en Talpa verspreid is, ‘dat Skoeps niet langer past binnen de strategische focus van de afzonderlijke ondernemingen’. Skoeps had de ambitie om van elke Nederlander een verslaggever te maken. Op de website van Skoeps zijn alle foto’s en filmpjes dan ook afkomstig van amateurs die ooggetuige zijn geweest van een nieuwswaardig feit. De… >> Lees verder . . . >>

Of de eerste zin van bijgaand persbericht helemaal klopt is nog maar de vraag, maar het moge duidelijk zijn dat er wel het een ander gaande is in de digitale wereld. Dat uitgevers van alles wat ooit alleen maar op papier werd uitgegeven daar óf veel last van hebben, óf veel voordeel mee doen, en dat een en ander onvermijdelijk zijn invloed heeft op uitgevers van boeken. Het zou dus inderdaad kunnen kloppen dat ‘traditionele uitgevers in het nauw komen door veranderd consumentengedrag, opkomst online gemeenschappen en print-on-demand technologie’. Dat was de eerste zin van het persbericht van Blurb, de… >> Lees verder . . . >>

In Nederland worden ongeveer een miljoen weblogs gemaakt. Blogs over huisdieren en obscure punkbands, maar ook over internationale politiek, wetenschap en BN’ers. Die kakofonie aan online tekstjes veroorzaakt een ware mediarevolutie: iedereen kan journalist zijn en iedereen kan worden gelezen. De vraag is: hoe? Hoe worden blogs gelezen? Scannen lezers niet gewoon oppervlakkig door blogteksten heen? Nemen die lezers hun bloggende opinieleiders wel serieus? Wat lezen bloglezers naast die blogs, hebben ze nog behoefte aan een krant, kijken ze minder tv? Van blogs weten we vooral hoe ze gemaakt worden. Eindeloos is gedebatteerd over de status van bloggers, over de… >> Lees verder . . . >>

It’s 2008 and Kara Swisher has gone completely digital: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog Or: Goodbye Dead Trees! Besides saving all those trees, of course–which, let me start off the new year by being completely honest, never occurred to me until just this very second–it’s simple and obvious: The future of all media is digital going forward. As I always like to keep in mind about everything: Don’t fight the trend.

Steve Outing in Stop The Presses: What we’d like your magic wand to do, news industry people kept telling me, is change the culture at our company and in our newsroom, because it’s holding us back and ensuring our ultimate failure“.“We need to transform our business in a hurry,” wrote Jack Lail, managing editor/multimedia at the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee. “We have consultants working with us, but at the newsroom level, for one, there’s a reservoir of skepticism. Help us solve that one.”

Mindy McAdams at The University of Florida has developed a graduate course focused on multimedia storytelling. It’s a course that prepares students to work as a journalist in the newsrooms of today and/or the future where online and digital platforms are as important as traditional print or broadcast platforms.Mindy on her blog at mindymcadams.com/tojou/: This semester I had the opportunity to create and teach a new graduate course, focused on multimedia storytelling. I admitted 15 students, all of whom had some prior experience as reporters (for some, it was only a one-semester reporting class).The complete syllabus is online; the course… >> Lees verder . . . >>

According to Asher Moses from the Sydney Morning Herald video on mobile phones has become grown up, now that content providers and traditional media personalities sign on to create original shows exclusively for handhelds. Until now phone networks and mobile-focused digital media companies have relied heavily on content repurposed from regular TV shows, but they are fast learning the most effective mobile videos are those explicitly designed for ‘snacking’ while on the move.

Do you read, editors over here in Holland, where some are still hanging on to the idea that website are cannibalizing newspapers? Read: TechCrunch reports: Since the NYTimes.com tore down the last remaining boulder of its subscription pay wall (known as Times Select) in mid-September, its traffic has been going through the roof. According to comScore, it gained 7.5 million readers worldwide from the end of August through the end of October (November numbers are not out yet). That is a 64 percent jump (to a total of 19.4 million). Similarly worldwide monthly pageviews surged 52 percent in that time… >> Lees verder . . . >>

Apparently we’re not the only journo’s experimenting with the Nokia N95. Nine reporters on our newspaper are using the Nokia to shoot pictures and photos to accompany their news stories. I know some other newspapers and public broadcasters in Holland are ordering big batches of the Nokia. A Reuters reporter will this week embark on an experiment to report the arrival of Tesco in the US with little more than a Nokia N95 mobile phone. The news agency has been using the ‘mobile journalism toolkit’, developed through close partnership with Nokia, for a couple of months now, but mostly to… >> Lees verder . . . >>

According to various sources on the web News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group has bought Beliefnet, a website on spirituality and faith, as part of its internet expansion. As The Sydney Morning Herald tells it: Tabloid Page 3 girls may have helped build its original print empire, but Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is putting its faith in God online. If you, like me, are wondering now if Murdoch is a God botherer: the answer looks like ‘yes‘ . . . Red Herring apparently doesn’t bother about the real believing, but believes Murdoch believes in Beliefnet because the acquisition will help News… >> Lees verder . . . >>

Through CyberJournalist.Net: BBC News has reorganized its news division into a “multimedia newsroom” that combines radio, TV and online. Peter Horrocks, the head of the new integrated news operation, tells all about it on the BBC Blogs: As a consumer of BBC News on the web, do you expect it to cover the same stories as BBC News on TV and radio? I ask, because today is a very big day for BBC News which has now been re-organised in a fully multimedia fashion. As the head of the new multimedia newsroom that is responsible for our core output on… >> Lees verder . . . >>

Educational film from the Prelinger Archives, made in 1940, as an educational film for high school students.I like this phrase et the end of the film: ‘There’s no better way to get this experienthan on a small town newspaper’.And: ‘If you don’t like to write, you won’t be happy in journalism’.

Fascinating article in The Wall Street Journal: Where iPods are made. I don’t know if any of the Dutch newspapers are affiliated one way or another to the WSJ (maybe Het Financieel Dagblad?) because I’d like to see the story translated for the Dutch audience. Fat chance that any other reporter or press agency will get a chance to interview the president of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, as ik took The Wall Street Journal five years (!) of requests before Jason Dean was finally allowed to interview Terry Gou for three hours. In short: Hon Hai has a workforce… >> Lees verder . . . >>