With 19 years exploring the digital world, Mark Potts was a fountain of knowledge for our online journalism class.
Wikipedia is one digital source Potts opened with, explaining that, although it isn’t seen as your typical source for news, it is in fact a very reliable and informative source. He stressed that it may not be the best place to go for a primary source, but it is definitely something that shouldn’t be disregarded.
The Washington Post has used Facebook as a means of storytelling, annotating certain pages and people to create a unique look at a story.
Potts deemed Storify as a sort of ‘flavor of the month,’ and it may not be the most suitable platform for all types of stories journalists write.
One good way to get the readers to participate and help journalists build a story is by crowd-sourcing.
- Find out what’s happening on the ground
- Ask the audience to give you their perspective
- Enrich your story with visuals that incorporate info from the reader
The hyper-local news trend is really exploding, due to the ease of blogging and online news sharing. This is prevalent in sites like Patch and other hyper-local based news sites.
Patch is a very valuable experiment, but it probably won’t survive.
TBD news does a great job by aggregating all the blogs in the areas they cover and allowing them free reign, letting them know they’ll be linked to and attributed in TBD’s stories.
Many who blog within their community generally do so for respect from their community, and aren’t in it for the money. A good number of these can be incredibly valuable sources for news.
People care about the broken window around the corner.
Some online news sites get the majority of their traffic from the data they have, not necessarily the stories.
RSS has been the most useful online tool for Potts, more so than even Twitter, which he sees as unreliable and often just ‘noise.’ For journalists in general, the smart-phones have become the most vital tool, hands down.
Leave a Reply