Content Management Matters ™

The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalism. They offer seminars geared towards print and online reporters, photojournalists, designers , educators and are dedicated to providing students with the necessary tools and ideas to handle the challenges of producing news, whether online or in print.

With seminars addressing issues of ethics & diversity, journalism education & training, leadership & management, online & multimedia, reporting, writing & editing, tv & radio, as well as visual journalism, students are bound to find many engaging classes from which to choose. Classes are available at their campus in St. Petersburg, Florida or through their e-learning site, News University.

NewsTools2008 takes place April 30-May 3 at the yahoo! Conference Center in Sunnyvale, California If you're a Drupal programmer, user-experience expert, social-network innovator, or web 2.0 entrepreneur, you're invited! The topic of the event is "Technology and the New Ecology of News: How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?" It's billed as an event in which journalism's ideals will meet Silicon Valley's tools in a three-day, conceptual mashup. Groovy.

It seems that the continuing writer's strike is making people anxious and nervous. With growing access to free online content, shouldn't all writers - from film to television to newspapers - be compensated fairly for their content accessed on the Internet?

Oh good. Newspapers and blogs are finally getting along. Or so says the LA Times.

Sure, newspapers still talk behind blogs' back, dismissing their whiny opinions and misinformation, but they know that they can drive in the revenue as well as anyone, so they're willing to post and plug them.

There may be nothing sacred left in the eyes of newspaper purists, but then again, this is online media, and nothing is truly sacred anymore. "Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.

I dig analyzing online media; the pressure on the industry combined with the multitude of studies conducted of late make it so darn interesting.

Consider the latest report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), for example, which compared a week's worth of news from three user-driven sites -- Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us -- and Yahoo News to 48 traditional news outlets. What the MSM are feeding versus what the foragers are gathering just ain't the same thing.

Agence France-Presse, the international news agency, has launched the AFP Foundation with the goal to train journalists in developing countries and help humanitarian groups and other enterprises with media training.

The foundation will work to promote higher standards of journalism around the world.

The Web journalism niche has seen a lot of pushback from traditional publications trying, understandably so, to protect their line of work. But the industry has changed, for better or worse, with the speed and ease of online publishing, so smart institutions are leveraging that understanding.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) is one such institution. Having long taken it upon itself to help journalists hither and yon find the training they need, its latest effort, JournalismTraining.org, is a treasure trove for journalists -- online and off -- seeking information about professional development opportunities.