Online journalism
by Mark on Sep.10, 2006, under general
The other day, as I was brought around my new workplace, I was reminded of an idea I had in college, and my inability to bring it to fruition. The idea I had was to publish an online magazine called O. The first thing that prevented my idea from coming together was the relatively new idea of online journalism at the time. I was trying to do this at a time when only the geekiest of geeks were publishing online independently.
Most of my friends were in college, and had the internet in some form available to them. It wasn’t until our second or third years in college, however, that broadband and high-speed internet were must-have items for higher education, as well as in the home. Eight years after I first had the idea to create an online magazine, I now host my own blog, along with the blogs of six of my friends. Two of those friends are not in Chicagoland right now, yet are able to publish their blogs from where they are (one in Japan, the other in Virginia).
It amazes me how far we have come in the short time the internet has been widely available to the public, and how much the internet has helped push technology. I am currently reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, by Thomas Friedman. His book explains how technology is changing our world view in such a way as to make it truly global. So far it is an interesting read, and I would recommend it to ask-mark.com readers.
But that’s besides the point. The point is that online journalism is now to a point where it rivals, and sometimes scoops, print journalism. It is no longer something that can be ignored by big media as a passing fad, because it is here to stay. The other day I ran across a post at another random blog about how newspaper sites have to change. In that post, Adrian Holovaty states that newspaper sites need to add metadata to their news stories to make it easier to retrieve the important information from the stories:
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.
I agree that structured information is the next step in online journalism, and it can help other fields, too. For example, at work, we have an abundance of documents, but we have a difficult time finding what we need when we need it. If we had structured data to accompany those documents, we would be able to perform simple searches and retrieve the right documents right away. It’s one of those things we want to improve, but it will be a time-consuming task. I hope that the changes in online journalism will help to create a CMS that will help us better organize our business information.
I suppose I’ve rambled on for long enough. I think the food coma is starting to wear off, too. I’ll go join the others upstairs.
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