Participatory Journalism Webcast

For those interested in participatory journalism, Vin Crosbie notes on his blog that the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is hosting a panel on April 29 called "Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism." The free event will be Webcast online.

Panelists include:

Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance LLC media consulting firm

Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch

Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book Making the News.

Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media at The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington.

Bob Magnuson, lecturer at the graduate school and former CEO of InfoWorld, will moderate the panel.

Bloggers Invited to Cover Media Conferences

Frank Barnako reports the nation's broadcasters and newspaper editors this week drew extensive online coverage of their annual meetings from three independent reporters using Web logs and cell phones.

Could RSS Kill Press Releases?

If you’re using an RSS newsreader to read this blog, chances are I have just two sentences to get you interested in what I have to say. It's enough to make any prolific PR pro feel like Elmer Fudd at a SpeedDating event.

PR pros already have a hard time paring down press releases to their news essence. As RSS catches on, we may really be forced to be brief because the press release as we know it may be dead.

For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a common technical standard that news sites and blogs use to publish brief summaries of stories/posts through what's called XML news feeds. These feeds can be scanned either using a dedicated newsreader application, like FeedDemon, or on a Web site like Bloglines or even My Yahoo. RSS may sound very techie, but it's catching on fast and is starting to seep into the mainstream psyche. A good primer can be found here.

Let's just assume that two years from now most journalists are so fed up with spam that they demand that PR pros publish news via RSS. Does this mean that we will need to convey our news in pithy phrases instead of paragraphs? Does it mean that the press release we have come to know and love might become a dinosaur? I think it's possible.

Calacanis: Blogs are not journalism

Over on the The Nanopublishing Weblog, Jason Calacanis says he hopes that blogs are never viewed as journalism. To quote Jason:

Blogs are a truly unique form of communication and let’s not kill them by putting them in the journalism bucket. That is exactly what the traditional media companies want us to do. They want us to play on their court, and we do so at our peril. There is no need for bloggers to compete with the New York Times—we are different. We complement the traditional media and act as a reality check for it.

People love us because we are know who we are—warts and all. Don’t fight the difference, embrace it.

Bloggers Causing Shift In How The Public Gets News

MediaMap has a great article from B.L. Ochman on how bloggers are quicker to pick up on juicy stories than traditional media.