Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #638892 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 66 pages

Synopsis
Citizen journalism, blogging, community and user activity are today's buzzwords in the online news business. Publishers and editors see the potential windfall that the web can offer and are now investing heavily into this venture. With today's newspaper circulation, readership, and profit slipping, media outfits have no choice but to embrace a new reality: the Web is now the most powerful medium. This means a unique brand of journalism is needed to cater to the demands of the new generation of media consumers. This new brand is called multimedia journalism. How do we execute multimedia journalism online? What type of things do we have to do in order for our news site to succeed? What are the tools needed to be able to execute multimedia journalism, effectively? This book guides the reader as to how to create innovative multimedia reports and presentations. It explains the nature of today's media consumer and talks about ways to gain new users as well as sustain a high rate of return visits. The book also talks about other important factors of online journalism such as audience, design, promotion, ethics, job prospects, and future directions for online news.

Customer Reviews

Thin, superficial, irrelevant, dull. Have I left anything out?
The first thing you should know is: this is a very thin book. At barely 50 A5 pages, it's not going to cover the vast subject area that is online journalism.

The second thing is: it's very patchy indeed. I strongly suspect this is the week-by-week content matter for a module on a journalism course, and some of the choices for topics are strange. Chapter 4 is about designing websites, but unless the journalist is running the website themselves, this isn't a skill they're going to need - and anyway, other books cover web design in much more depth if that's what you want to do. Chapter 5 tells us what bloggers and citizen journalists are. That's nice, but a search on Wikipedia will tell you more. Most bizarre is chapter 9 on 'security and ethical challenges', which talks about phishing. Well yes, there's a faint chance someone might use it to hack into your site, but really, aren't there more important things for a journalist to learn? Like journalism? Likewise the chapters on marketing and selling ads.

In short, this is a book that reads like it was written in 1996, not 2006. The 'elements of online journalism' it chooses to cover are neither comprehensive, nor the most significant. It is written like a dictionary. It is superficial, and there is nothing here you won't find on the websites of any decent blogger. Dan Gillmor, Stuart Allan, Mindy McAdams, Mike Ward and Janet Kolodzy all cover the same material in much deeper and more readable books.