A book about online news production routines

The long-awaited moment has arrived for me! This morning I received the first copies of the book I have co-edited with Chris Paterson: Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. It is the first compilation of research into the working routines and values of online journalists. Chapters by 15 authors --including Thorsten Quandt, Jane Singer and Mark Deuze-- offer for the first time the insight of ethnography
into the newsrooms.

In a field where most books tend to deal with the theoretical possibilities of online news, we have tried
to offer a reality-check: researchers contributing to the book have lived with journalists in the online newsrooms to describe their real practices and the constraints they face. We hope that this perspective will be very useful for the teaching of online journalism and for professionals willing to have a deeper understanding of the evolution of their job.

It is, at the same time, an invitation for more ethnographic research, for the rich data it generates. Ethnography entails observing professionals at work until their routines and values are fully understood, but also in-depth interviews and work with on-site documents. It is time-consuming, but the results are worth the effort!

The book has two added attractive features: it has a multi-national dimension, showcasing examples from Argentina to Germany, from the USA to China. And also, it collects research from different moments in the evolution of online journalism, form late 1990s to 2007: it can be read in part as a history of online news.

We have set up a website, makingonlinenews.net to continue the task of the book. Our intention is to keep track of relevant and critical online journalism research. There you will also find info about the book chapters and authors. The book will be in stores on May and you can already pre-order it on Amazon --you will get a 5% discount!

Online Journalism Seminar, day 2

The morning starts with two insider views of participatory journalism in mainstream online media: Rosa Jiménez from ElPais.com and Nathalie Malinarich from BBC News. ElPais.com is one of the most daring online newspapers in Europe regarding participatory journalism. But Rosa is not completely satisfied with how they are doing everything. She feels they are still exploring.

She argues that quantity should not be the main criteria to evaluate success of participatory options. She does not feel that forums are useful. They have 3,000 daily users, but comments on news seems to her to be much more useful.

Managing the community of blogs is her main duty. There are 6,000 users and 200-300 daily new posts. They have a metablog that summarizes the takes of the bloggers on current issues, and this is linked in the news stories.

Yo, Periodista is the citizen journalism section of ElPaís.com. Rosa would like more visibility of their section, but they don't always have good stories to be shown in the main homepage. They stopped giving out monetary prizes to the best articles. They are thinking now about giving out tools for citizen journalism (a mobile phone...) or starting a point-based system so that everyone can have some reward in the end. Their challenge is keeping people interested, motivated.

Citizen media in Spain

In the second session, Pau Llop explained his citizen journalism project, Bottup.com, and Marta Torres and Laura Rahola presented their website mapping stories about Barcelona, Bdebarna.net.

Bottup.com was born January 2007. It is run by professional journalists who write stories and edit those contributed by citizens. They discuss editorial decisions collectively on a forum and have online materials to help citizens train themselves as journalists.

Bdebarna.net is a 7-year-old project. It is an open space for Barcelonians to contribute stories about specific places in the city (photos, narrations). It is like a geotagged collective blog that tries to reveal the subjective city, the voice of the citizens, the microhistory of the everyday life that is not covered by the media. They have a weekly program in a local radio where the stories of the web move to the mainstream media.