Comm361-Amanda Lee

Podcasts used to be an unknown feature on iTunes, but has now escalated into one of the most powerful tools an online journalist can use. Briggs explains how you can create full-featured segments that imitate radio episodes and post them on your blog for your followers.

• Audio Journalism is the next big thing for journalism because it lets you add layers to any story . The editing can be as complicated as you want it to be. Audio can help you build a multidimensional  story by:

1. Presence: The reporter can bring the reader to the scene, and the simple fact of being there boosts credibility.
2. Emotions: The tone of your voice, along with your pauses and intonations, can enhance the story.
3. Atmosphere: The natural sound from the scene pulls the reader in closer.

• Podcasts are pre-recorded audio program that is posted to a website. While they are time consuming, as you should update regularly, it’s great for building an audience on a particular subject.

• NPR or National Public Radio is the biggest online audio journalism site today, and its success comes from the reporters. They bring familiarity and engage their listeners.

*Lots of major news sites are jumping on the audio clip bandwagon: CNN, BBC, Fox News and The New York Times.

*Want tips on starting a podcast? Click HERE.

Now you can imagine why there is a whole chapter in “Journalism Next” dedicated to collaborative power, because that is exactly what the Internet lives on. Without the constant help of the online community, places like forums, blogs and most of the websites out there that have comment boxes would be useless.

• “Crowdsourcing” is harnessing the sustained power of a community to improve a service or information base. This term distributes reporting to everyday citizens who can log onto their computer. In some cases, crowdsourcing works amazingly, but when your news blog gets spammed with ads for cat food or you get a million comments from religious extremists saying your going to hell, it doesn’t seem to work so well. Opening up the reporting to the community is an on-going experiment, but this helps with open-source reporting, which is a form of transparency.

*Examples of crowdsourcing, or collaborative publishing, are: YouTube, Facebook, and Photobucket.

• Links power the Internet. That is the appeal of the Internet isn’t it? You can click things that take you to a totally different Web page, wherever and whenever you want to. The mentality that people used to use that “if you use links, you’re going to send your readers away and they might never come back,” is the exact opposite of how you should feel. Take Google, Bing or Yahoo for example. All they do is send people away to different Web sites and people can’t stop coming back.

*Link journalism: using editorial judgment to provide links to other sources of information and news, based on the needs and interests of a particular audience. It enriches the story by giving the reader videos, background information and places to learn more about the subject. So go put some links in your blog/forum. Right now.

• PRO-AM Journalism: otherwise known as participatory journalism. Probably the best idea ever for news companies, they give the chance to thousands of people to be a reporter anytime they want, and they don’t have to PAY them. Best example would be CNN’s iReporter.

My media pyramid- This shows what media outlets I use the most, and which ones I use the least. I usually log onto Facebook, check CNN or flip through TIME magazine to get the latest news.