Writing for the Web

Clichés of Journalese

If you write for print or electronic media, some of these terms will make you wince, because you've probably used them: Journalese-English Dictionary (first edition).

Most are British, and a little unfamiliar to North Americans, but we have plenty. Our public figures don't just promise to do something: they vow to do it.

The cliché du jour (to use a cliché) in North America's blogosphere is "nuanced." Whether it's Obama, Clinton, or McCain, whatever they say is nuanced.

Way more news sites, way less news

Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt:

Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media.

This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is now funded by a private foundation based in Washington. The report is a summary of a comprehensive study of the kinds of news being disseminated by all American media sources, mainstream and marginal.

Its primary preoccupation, of course, recently at least, has been the effect on the news of the Internet and of "citizen" (that is to say, amateur) participation in the creation of America's informational landscape.

It always attempts to answer some big questions, particularly whether newsgathering is more reflective of reality when run by democratic principles or by elitist ones.

This year's report summarizes its conclusions as a few major trends. Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.

In fact, there may even be less.

The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media. In other words, reporters who are trained and paid to do the often dry work of gathering facts and interviewing people, or the dangerous work of visiting wars or disasters, provide the news stories, and the news sites gather them up and the bloggers comment on them.

But because of the commercial nature of news sites, the stories are often filtered by popularity. There is more and more technology available to enable editors to gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and to sort stories by their popularity.

This leads to a narrowing of the number of stories that are posted: The most popular ones get the most play.

Read the whole article, and follow the links.

Mediated Cultures

Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this very interesting site: mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university.

It's a showcase of the "Digital Ethnography Working Group" at Kansas State University, and it offers some dramatic examples of web communication...especially the "Explorations of Mediated Culture" video. The links on the main page are worth exploring.

Reading Obama

The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.