Credibility, terrorism, inclusiveness are themes at 2nd ONA conference

This column appeared Nov. 1, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

The Online News Association’s second annual conference in Berkeley, Calif., last weekend showed an organization with the talent and pluck to tackle the considerable challenges facing the online news industry, though growing pains were still very much in evidence.

The ONA folks unveiled the preliminary findings of its wide-ranging Digital Journalism Credibility Project, based on nationwide surveys of the online public and media professionals conducted in July. Time will tell if the events of Sept. 11 made those results moot.

The report’s key finding, the study’s authors suggest, was that online consumers have not yet made up their minds about the credibility of online news. But an even more telling finding, in my view, was this: The public has a higher opinion of online news sites’ credibility than our Old Media colleagues do.

That’s criminal. But hardly surprising. [Read more…] about Online news on a tightrope

Weblogs, community news, self-publishing and more

Following is a partial transcript of the panel on “Journalism’s New Life Forms,” held Oct. 27, 2001, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, at the second annual conference of the Online News Association. The panel was organized and moderated by J.D. Lasica. Panelists were Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, Rita Henley Jensen, editor in chief of Women’s Enews, Rusty Foster, founder of Kuro5hin, and Weblog pioneer Meg Hourihan.

JD Lasica: We have a distinguished group of panelists here today to discuss what we’re calling journalism’s new life forms. What I think they have in common is the propensity for interactivity; for personal, passion-based advocacy journalism; for alternative points of view that are often filtered out by the mainstream media. Yesterday we heard from ONA President Rich Jaroslovsky, who recounted an episode in the early 1990s when the major television networks were looking on CNN as this upstart bad-boy. He suggested that today’s news media look upon online news sites in much the same way — as bastard stepchildren who may or may not share the same values as traditional journalism. [Read more…] about UC Berkeley panel: New forms of journalism

Nonprofit launches journalism operation to cover women’s issues

This column appeared Sept. 4, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

Rita Henley Jensen, editor-in-chief of Women’s Enews, makes no apologies for her news service’s tilt on the news. “We do have an agenda,” she says. “It’s a pro-woman agenda.”

Still not widely known, Women’s Enews is one of those fascinating experiments made possible only because of the Web. Launched in June 2000 by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, the news service (at www.womensenews.com) is run by a small staff of professional journalists. [Read more…] about A news service with a women’s agenda

Publishers and database vendors consider their next steps

This article appeared July 15, 2001, in the Newspaper Association of America’s Digital Edge publication. The original article is below. Here’s the edited version on the NAA site.

Database vendors have begun pursuing different paths in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Tasini v. New York Times ruling June 25, with some purging their databases of unlicensed freelance material at the behest of their newspaper partners and others taking a stance of watchful waiting.

Jonathan Tasini, meanwhile, said newspaper publishers are making a mistake if they rush ahead with plans to delete freelance articles. “I’m sincerely hopeful that reasonable publishers will sit down and negotiate with us,” he said. “From day one our position has been to put out an olive branch to the industry and say, ‘Let’s sit down and cooperate.’ There are two ways to look at this. One way is to wind up in an all-out war of litigation. The second way is to look at the notion of partnership as a reality.”

[Read more…] about After Tasini: An online bonfire of the vanities?